The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (34 page)

When Amalie came back to him, it was always without warning, like some sudden, passionate explosion that could carry them anywhere; it could make Carl Laurids forgive her and forget everything, and fill him with a fierce happiness that was, more often than not, replaced by a certain arrogance, a sense of once again being independent, of having the upper hand. In this state he sometimes fantasized, as in the days before the wedding, of leaving her, and such fantasies could last for several days, until she rejected him again, and again sent him crashing down into his own abysmal dependence upon her.

*   *   *

It is important that we present a picture of Carl Laurids not only as a private individual but also as a businessman—and that is not easy because, throughout his life, he was very, very reticent when the talk turned to business matters. Anything he eventually did say has, of course, been remembered as a stroke of wit, a
bon mot,
which has then been passed on. But to me these utterances seem as obscure as the replies of any oracle. Take, for example, the time when Madsen-Mygdahl, then Minister of Agriculture, and the writer Johannes V. Jensen—both regular visitors to Carl Laurids’s home —were extolling, as so often before, the virtues of free enterprise and the Good Old Days; assuring one another that the reason Danish agriculture is doing so well is that it has never had any help from the state and has had to learn to fight, and lash out to right and left, and stand on its own two feet; feet solidly planted in the Good Old Days that are now all but gone. There then followed a short break in the conversation while the two men’s glasses were topped up with champagne, and during this break Carl Laurids places his hands on their shoulders and says, “Gentlemen, you need have no fears for the Good Old Days; we’ll start turning them out again just as soon as demand is great enough.” This sentence, like so many of Carl Laurids’s other remarks, was committed to memory and was to crop up several times in Johannes V. Jensen’s works, along with other pearls of wisdom regarding science and finance. But it is not clear, and this I feel I have to point out; it offers no clue to Carl Laurids’s thoughts on business.

The doors of his offices in Rosengården, where he started his first company, were fitted with opaque glass. These panes blurred all contours and made it impossible for anyone outside to see what was going on—just as they block our view. Nevertheless, I am able to lift the veil and allow some details to filter out, to shine through—thanks, no doubt, to my persistence; although I should not perhaps mention that here, since it has nothing to do with this account, except inasmuch as I could not have written what follows if I had not felt that these smoke screens must not be allowed to stifle my urge to get at the truth. Carl Laurids is not going to get away with remaining an enigma. Since history shows that we are all only human—at any rate, the majority of us—I have not contented myself with anecdotes from his private life but have also picked up the tracks, all but erased, and thoroughly covered, of Carl Laurids Mahogany’s business ventures.

As far as I can see, none of these enterprises are in any way connected. Carl Laurids would appear to have operated within one field for a certain length of time, after which he would leave it, completely and utterly, leaving no trace—only to pop up, a while later, in some new area. I cannot be absolutely certain, but I believe that Carl Laurids’s first firm was some sort of consultancy business. As with so much else in his life, it has no antecedents. Unannounced, and without any visible preamble, he opened his premises in Rosengården. The sign on the opaque glass plate read:
CARL LAURIDS MAHOGANY. IMPORT—EXPORT
. In the front office sat a secretary; in the next, Adolf Hanemand, a Danish lawyer—that is to say, he held no law degree but had merely completed a short course of study culminating in an examination. Hanemand’s presence was yet another instance of Carl Laurids’ never attaching much importance to the formalities. He had seen at once that Hanemand was full of legal guile and unhampered by all the usual concepts of right and wrong. Everything I know about what happened during the first years in the Rosengården offices was learned from Hanemand; and his willingness to talk can be attributed to the way it all ended.

One morning—after two years, and without any prior notification—Hanemand arrived at the office to find it closed. Since Carl Laurids objected to being contacted at his house, Hanemand went home. The next morning he was again confronted by locked doors. So he sent Carl Laurids a letter in which he demanded the salary owed to him plus compensation. Receiving no response, he sent another letter. To this he received a curt reply. On the reverse of one of his calling cards, Carl Laurids had written: “I regard all contact between us to be at an end.” Hanemand then paid Carl Laurids a visit. He took the streetcar out to Charlottenlund, walked up to the house, and rang the bell. Carl Laurids himself opened the door, and, standing on the marble steps, Hanemand came straight to the point. While smiling pleasantly at Carl Laurids, he told him he had various documents tucked away that would have to be termed damning; what he, as a lawyer, would call extremely damning. And the only thing that would stop him from handing them over to the police was an explanation from Carl Laurids, along with his outstanding salary and some compensation to boot—and it had better be right now, this instant. Carl Laurids stood there with his hands behind his back, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet and absently watching the goldfish in the pond. Then he said, “Are you threatening me?” and as Hanemand started to reply, Carl Laurids hammered a large set of brass knuckles into his open mouth. The blow sent Hanemand flying down the steps and into a lifelong dread of Carl Laurids. This dread prevented him from going to the police, and when I was interviewing him—when he was sitting opposite me, telling me about Carl Laurids—it seemed in no way diminished by the fifty years that had elapsed since that afternoon on Strand Drive when he saw his employer for the last time. But, as with so many others who have known Carl Laurids, the Danish lawyer’s dread was mingled with admiration; his voice held what was almost a note of awe as he told me how Carl Laurids looked his clients
in the eye:
these clients were inventors; in fact, it would appear that Carl Laurids’s company had acted as a link between inventors and investors. In those days, according to Hanemand, Copenhagen was home to many an ardent soul obsessed with the idea of technological progress. Carl Laurids put these people in touch with well-to-do civil servants and merchants keen to invest in the future, and the appropriate contracts for these alliances were drawn up at the offices in Rosengården. During these years, Carl Laurids’s offices provided a gathering point for the most extravagant dreams of the future, and one could be forgiven for thinking that this is the very crux of his business; it is hard not to think that he must have derived a certain satisfaction from being confronted on a daily basis with people such as these, who took as gospel that what is to come is better, much better, and at any rate more profitable, than what has gone before.

But if that is how Carl Laurids felt, then he has kept it well hidden, since Hanemand certainly cannot recall Carl Laurids ever making any comment about his work. According to Hanemand, his employer never exhibited anything other than remarkably dispassionate powers of concentration; and what he remembers best of all is that Carl Laurids always looked his clients in the eye. “Damned if he ever looked at the
article,
” said Hanemand to me; “he never looked at the
inventions.
”

There is reason for believing that Carl Laurids possessed not so much as an iota of the technical knowledge one would assume to be an essential requirement in running a business such as his. On innumerable occasions he has sat opposite proud and nervous eccentrics while they demonstrated their life’s work to him; and only very occasionally, in the course of the conversation, has he lowered his gaze to the jumbled mass of springs and ball bearings and steel and ebonite and wood and spools and wires deposited on the newspapers spread across his desk. Instead he has used the time to study the individual before him. And so these interviews never lasted long, since a few minutes was all Carl Laurids needed in which to learn enough either to send this inventor away or to ally him to one of the growing number of investors who contacted him with increasing regularity. After that he would draw up one of the contracts on which, during those years, his income must have depended.

During those years, a fair number of the early twentieth century’s dreams of technological omnipotence passed through Carl Laurids’s offices. Harebrained idealists presented their plans for floating cities, and bombs that could avail themselves of the need of every atom to free itself of the past, and a printing machine so sensitive that it could print the Lord’s Prayer on the yolk of a fried egg. These ideas Carl Laurids rejected: not necessarily because they had no future but because he felt this future lay too far off. Instead, with his sure sense for what the present day and the immediate future could handle, he backed projects from inventors in whom he detected the right blend of madness and realism; hence, in Rosengården, a great many contracts were drawn up for projects involving the improvement and production of rapid-fire machine guns and coal-fired refrigerators and artificial fertilizer and internal-combustion engines and more machine guns and phonographs and bicycles and pressure cookers and cosmetics and more machine guns—in fact, arms production appeared to be turning into quite an industry for Carl Laurids, until the day Hanemand found the office door closed.

In the ensuing years, Carl Laurids became a factory owner and company director. We know that he bought up, on the cheap, a plot of land on Christianshavn, right opposite the tenement where Anna and Adonis Jensen lived. And we know that on this plot of land he erected factories for the production of ersatz substances. Somehow or other he had managed to acquire formulas and inventions and rights to the manufacture of chemicals for—in the first instance—substitutes for tobacco and phonograph needles; although we know this only because all of it came out during the investigations into the collapse of the Copenhagen Merchant Bank in what was—in all senses—the chilly month of January 1922. No charges were brought against Carl Laurids; naturally, nothing could be proved, and by then he had disposed of the factories and his hands were clean. Thereafter, he had embarked upon the ambitious project of producing ersatz coffee from shredded peat—which I have only been able to unearth because it was disclosed when the Farmers’ Bank crashed and Carl Laurids was mentioned as being a personal friend of the bank’s president, the financial wizard Emil Glückstadt. Very soon thereafter Carl Laurids was only a former friend of the bank president, when the latter was arrested and accused Carl Laurids of being party to a number of fraudulent activities. It turned out, however, that Carl Laurids had already quit the ersatz-coffee business and, furthermore, that nothing could be proved. And it is the same story in the following years, with the failure of a number of financial institutions revealing that Carl Laurids has been producing synthetic bicycle oil and aromatic substances, and running a nationwide marriage bureau, while at all times inhabiting a gray area between the dubious and the downright illegal. Until, finally, a sentence is passed on him: a mild sentence, a judgment so tentative that it might almost be termed a friendly warning. It is passed on him because in his old building in Christianshavn—which he has reacquired—he has manufactured a large consignment of shampoo from a caustic soda base. This he has then sold cheaply and, in the opinion of the court, in good faith—such good faith that he escaped with a modest fine. And this although there were people walking around Copenhagen, and especially its poorer districts, wearing hats and woollen caps in an effort to hide the fact that they were, thanks to Carl Laurids’s shampoo, Complete Hair Formula, bald, totally bald.

After this conviction, he left the manufacturing industry and entered the entertainment business. A week after sentence was passed on him, he sent a letter to the Dyrehavsbakken Stallholders’ Association, suggesting that he be permitted to set up an establishment for the staging of an exhibit of dwarfs. He must have been working on the idea for some time, since the letter was accompanied by detailed sketches of the two-story wooden building intended to house this unique attraction. The ground floor of this building was to contain a stage on which the dwarfs would dance and sing, while on the second floor there would be smaller rooms fitted out with scaled-down furniture. A miniature boxing ring was also to be constructed. It is not known where Carl Laurids had come by this idea, but he had timed it to perfection. While it was creating a stir and being mentioned in the newspapers and brought to the attention of the authorities and becoming a matter of public debate, he signed contracts with forty dwarfs. He traveled a great deal during these months, locating dwarfs in Denmark and northern Germany—whence he conveyed them to Strand Drive in one of the big limousines and installed them in empty rooms in the gardeners’ and chauffeur’s quarters and in the pavilions on the grounds. There, every day, Amalie could see them strolling across the smooth lawns.

Carl Laurids had selected his employees with care. Some of the dwarfs were freaks of nature, with tiny bodies, short legs, and great balloon-like heads; others were, in every respect, well proportioned, but only three feet tall; and still others looked like insane scientific experiments. But they were all gifted and exquisitely polite people who spent their days paying impeccably correct calls on one another, or in reading Euclid’s
Elements
or teaching themselves to dance or to play chamber music on the diminutive instruments Carl Laurids had purchased for them, to help them prepare for their show business debut.

All the indications are that this debut was a success. By the time the Danish authorities and the stallholders’ association and the newspapers and the rest of the Danish public turned on Carl Laurids’s project, it had attracted attention worldwide, and pictures of the dwarfs with the chivalrous manners had circulated in the international press. Shortly after the Copenhagen city fathers definitively rejected the proposal, Carl Laurids was visited by two men representing a major film company. They came from Hollywood and gave the lie to every one of the widespread 1920s preconceptions of America’s barbarous Western ways. Even in the summer heat they were smartly dressed in jackets and waistcoats, and they spoke in quiet, cultured voices. They spent a whole day in the conservatory, watching the dwarfs through binoculars, and then they left. They must, beyond a shadow of a doubt, have made a deal with Carl Laurids, because, only a week later, he shipped the dwarfs off on the liner
Frederik den Ottende,
bound for America. Carl Laurids himself accompanied his cargo to the boat—with the black limousine and the dwarfs attracting a fair amount of attention on the wharf; and there were many who cast curious glances after the tall figure in the dark coat who stood alone gazing after the ship. This figure is Carl Laurids, and he is standing on the very spot where Anna and Adonis once stood, dreaming their way to foreign lands. But whether Carl Laurids dreamed there is no way of telling. It may be that he came to the quayside only to make sure that this shipment went without a hitch, and even then he must have been hatching plans for the next consignment.