The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (46 page)

At no time do they touch, and in the end they have also stopped talking. When Carsten rows the boat in to the bank the faintest hint of dawn can be seen in the east.

Neither of them has anything remotely resembling an appreciation of their situation—and so they do nothing to ensure that they will meet again. They part without knowing each other’s first name.

*   *   *

A year later, Carsten graduated from the academy, and being thus finished with Sorø he should have left for home. That was what everyone else did, and hence, only a few days after commencement with all its speeches and prizes for diligence and songs, the academy was empty of pupils. But Carsten stayed behind. He said nothing to the watchmaker’s family, even though they were obviously expecting him to leave any day now. He stayed on for a week, strolling every day around Sorø—and the academy in particular—with clouded eyes. He wore the suit that he, like everyone else, had had made for commencement, but only because he was no longer entitled to wear the school uniform. Because naturally he would have preferred his uniform. Carsten was a creature of habit, he thought of himself as a
member of the academy
; it was impossible for him to picture himself naked, or in a dinner jacket, or in anything other than the shirt and waistcoat and jacket bearing the academy’s Phoenix buttons.

He stayed on at Sorø in an effort to combat the process of dissolution. He stayed on because he hated—more, feared—the thought of things falling apart and proving to be incoherent. He stayed on because he could not absorb the fact that he no longer belonged here—at the school and in its grounds and in the assembly hall and in the big, sunken bath where, once a week, there had been compulsory communal bathing. If there had been anyone in whom he could have confided, he would have said that at Sorø he had learned about Eternal Values and the Significance of the Individual and Human Fellowship—and here he was, discovering that even the fellowship of the academy could be dissolved, from one day to the next, and all the familiar faces fade from view. Next year it would start all over again, with the message being imparted to new faces, and he, Carsten, would be forgotten, even though he had received an A-plus in every subject and the collected works of Voltaire as a prize for diligence. But he did not feel as though there was anyone to whom he could talk; despite being surrounded by crowds of people he felt totally alone. So instead he had to talk to himself, muttering his muddled thoughts under his breath as he strode around, imagining that he had, as a listener, a girl with fair hair and blue eyes who was far, far out of reach.

He gave no thought to the future, he just could not believe that his Schooldays were over—and his Youth—and that, somewhere, Life and Responsibility were lying, slavering, in wait for him; he knew that he wanted to stay here, in these secure surroundings where he was familiar with the faces and the truths, and where he was close to the Spirit of the People and Culture and that reedy islet on Sorø Lake. When, after five days, the big car that had, in a distant past, driven him to the school arrived, he hid in the academy grounds and watched from a distance as Gladys hunted for him. He heard her call, like an echo from his childhood, but kept well out of the way until she drove off late that night.

The next day, the Girl from Sorø Lake made him leave for Copenhagen. Not that she spoke to him; nor could it be said that she appeared to him—it was more as though she were some sort of siren in reverse and that the memory of her told him that if he wanted to see her again, he would have to make a move, get away from this place, and, in the first instance, go home.

*   *   *

Carsten took the train to Copenhagen, then crossed the city by streetcar. He noted with dismay and absentminded wonder that the streets were swarming with German soldiers and that several city monuments had been walled in to protect them from explosions. Amalie met him in the grounds of the villa, where she had said goodbye to him, and shook his hand as she had done then. And with this handshake she was trying to say, “I know what we two share, my pet. The years have passed and you have grown tall and broad-shouldered, and you wear a suit now, but everything is the same as it has always been, and that is how it will stay.” Then she left him to his own devices. Not because she had nothing more to say—quite the contrary: more than anything she would have liked to lead him straight to her bedroom, lay him down on the bed, draw him to her, and pull him across the years and the events that lay between them at this very moment. But she controlled herself, she refrained, because her maternal instinct and foresight told her that by leaving him alone now she would stand a better chance, later, of getting through to him and of attaining that goal around which everything had always revolved: their shared dream of the future.

During the following days it was brought home to Carsten that he had grown older. On lingering exploratory tours of his childhood home—where everything was coated with a thick but transparent layer of memories—he discovered that it looked just as it had always done, and yet it had changed irrevocably. The villa was still large—it was huge—but still it was much smaller than he remembered; it was still pervaded by the scent of strange flowers, but that scent was no longer the same, because now it reminded him of wood shavings and coal-tar soap in the academy’s frothy communal bath.

What Carsten became aware of during these days was that phenomenon he had already sensed at Sorø, the same phenomenon that had kept him there for an extra week: the relentlessness of time. Anyone else might have seen the white villa in a different light, but Carsten was as he was, and what now confronted him—sighing and wailing, and yet silent and uneasy—was the traces of a bygone time and the pain of knowing that it will never come again, that it had gone, taking with it his childhood. And then and there he began to picture this childhood as a gentle, undulating boat ride across a sea of unconcern. This longing for an imaginary past was to remain with Carsten all his days, transforming, as time went on, into a pale, faint melancholy. The actual, searing pain lasted only for those first few days after his return from Sorø. Thereafter it was replaced by something else: by an odd sense of weightlessness. Although he did not know it, this sense was something Carsten shared with his classmates and with thousands of graduates throughout Denmark. During these very days they were making the discovery that they weighed nothing. They woke up on the morning after their commencement parties convinced that they were dying. They had tombstone hangovers and felt embalmed for eternity by alcohol, and yet they got out of bed, stood upright, their feet planted on the floor, and then it happened: they discovered that they were spry and nimble, not merely in good shape for mummies but alive and kicking and sort of—how shall I put it—free? It was as though there were no responsibilities and no one above them and nothing they had to do; it was as though, all of a sudden, they had grown up, just as one dreams of growing up—reaching out beyond all boundaries, out to freedom—and they were seized by a sense of freedom that pulled upward, in the opposite direction from gravity and parents.

And I am tempted to say that it also pulled in the opposite direction from reality, because this sense of freedom was, of course, nothing but a vacuum—a void, an air pocket, giving a short-lived illusion of floating. For Carsten this illusion was even shorter-lived—shorter than for most of his contemporaries. He seemed almost to be jumping on the spot, straight into the air—taking off, rising, hanging there for a moment, with elevation, and then falling. With so many different forces at work in Denmark in the 1940s, it would be absurd to refer to freedom as anything other than a tiny jump.

He landed in the conservatory, which had been built onto the villa during his absence, and as he entered this glass-walled room filled with flowers, the thought struck him that his mother had had to abase herself and submit to a fate worse than death for this room, and, just in the nick of time, he managed to fend off this thought before reliving, in his mind’s eye, the scenes he had witnessed as a child by peeping into Amalie’s bedroom through Carl Laurids’s spyholes.

Now, it may be that this was precisely why Amalie had arranged to meet him here—to call forth these memories; it may be that she wanted to get him into the right mood by reminding him of the past, since what she wanted to speak to him about was, of course, the future. This set in like some law of gravity that has, just for a moment, been suspended, because that is what Carsten’s future was like, like a law of nature, with room for the odd, minor deviation, but not for anything that could really alter its course. To be sure, it was presented as a choice. Amalie said, “I’m so happy to have my big boy home, it hasn’t been easy, being a woman on her own in the big city”—and here she gestured vaguely in the direction of the conservatory and Carsten’s images of what a woman alone in Copenhagen, Amalie, that is, must have to put up with. “But now it will be easier, just knowing you’re here, just being able to see you every day”—and here she stole a glance at him to see whether he had been entertaining any dreadful ideas of leaving home—“I feel so much easier, just knowing that there will be someone here—Mother’s own boy—to look after me if I should fall ill
again,
” she says. Carsten remains silent, acquiescent—and then it comes, what all of this has really been leading up to, when Amalie says, “Now, my dear, of course you know that, for centuries, there have always been three choices open to a boy from a good family wanting to make his way in the world: the Army, the Church, and the Civil Service.” Then she looks questioningly at Carsten, but there is no question, he
has
landed, he has come back down to earth.

He is going to study law, well, of course he is going to study law—and he
will
start, in a moment, but first there is just one other thing: even now, in July, now he has just left school, one thought has begun to gnaw at him—that he might risk wasting time.

There is something strange and disturbing about this idea of time being as tangible as the real coffee that Carsten could drink, the occupation notwithstanding, because Amalie numbered among her acquaintances a man who had access to everything. But not even that coffee could be wasted—no spills on the white embroidered tablecloth, thank you—but that is hardly as strange as the idea that time should not be wasted. It startles me, this idea—partly because, well, time isn’t a concrete entity, is it?—but mostly because this passionate interest in Carsten’s future does not really appear to be necessary. It does not seem possible to pinpoint any
compelling
reason for Amalie pushing Carsten and Carsten pushing himself—to study, and complete his studies, and become a great lawyer. It seems to me that Amalie had long since proved she could take care of herself. The villa had a new conservatory, and there were sacks of coffee in the attic, and smoked hams and racks of wine in the cellar, and no sign that she was likely to run short. Nor was there any
ethical
reason for Carsten to run like a horse at the racetrack. Without anyone but herself being aware of it, Amalie’s status has in fact been altered. She had maintained her coterie of Friends of the Family and had even expanded it. But she never went to bed with her clients now, or at least almost never. Slowly and imperceptibly she had used her power over men to make the path to her bedroom less and less accessible to them, until finally she closed it off altogether. But she had retained her influence; she had become a wise counselor and interlocutor and healing spirit and friend and philosopher—everything except what she had originally been, a shrewd whore.

She had kept up with her old friends—she still saw the stockbroker and the professor—and she had widened her circle by the addition of such celebrities as that controversial and thus risky acquaintance, the architect and journalist Poul Henningsen. And up until his death in 1942, Prime Minister Stauning would visit Amalie Mahogany to have a rest and to beg for one thing and another, and she denied him nothing apart from the one thing that she never, or almost never, gave to anyone at all now.

But all of this she kept from Carsten. She quite simply did not tell him. Instead she depicted her life as a journey through a vale of tears, and that is what is so strange. Because she is not the only one; at this point in time, Denmark is full of petits bourgeois brandishing whips and frantically chasing their children into the future so that they can have an education and
amount to
something, to something more than their parents.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I can understand some people having this dream and I think it makes good sense, where the parents are janitors or shoemakers or shipyard workers and can remember hunger and the thirties and the Old Days and stories of the cholera epidemics of the last century, and hence fear the coming of a new Depression; fear that the country and they themselves and their children will sink down into the kind of poverty that Adonis and Anna once knew in Christianshavn. But not everyone, not even the majority, is in that position; most of those who are wielding the whips are people who, in a sense, are comfortably off and have no trouble making ends meet, people whose minds ought to be so pleasantly free from worries about where the next meal is coming from that there should be room to think beyond a career in the Army or the Church or the Civil Service. But no—they do what Amalie does, more or less what Amalie does, and this I cannot quite understand.

Amalie knew, as only a mother can, how to appeal to Carsten, and this she did by speaking to his guilty conscience and his love for her and his fear of wasting time—and he was all ears. He applied for a student job with the Department of Statistics and was given it on the spot because, statistically, and in every other way, his marks in his final examination had been so exceptionally high, and because he made the sort of confidence-inspiring, orthodox, and at the same time personal impression that can be made only by someone who has from a very early age inhaled the Culture of the Danish Civil Servant.