The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (50 page)

Dinner was served in the new conservatory extension, which boasted sixteen green marble pillars and doors of Brazilian rosewood with ivory door handles—all purchased with the money Carsten had earned during his university years in the belief that, by so doing, he was saving his mother from a life of prostitution. Amalie had given Maria Professor Rubow as her dinner partner, and the great scholar talked and talked, leaving Maria, who knew no one except Carsten, isolated amid a sea of French quotations and blasé witticisms, until Amalie presented her. With a wave of her hand she reduced everyone to silence, even the Baroness, and in this charged hush she introduced Maria and forced her to address this gathering of
beaux esprits,
thus revealing that she spoke the language of the Christianshavn tenements mixed with a bit of Zealand dialect from Annebjerg and that she was, in fact, a little rambling rose, a lily from the gutter. She was then permitted to sit, until Amalie asked for her comments on the food—how was the
saumon,
would you care for some more saddle of veal, what do you think of this Sauternes?—until Maria’s stammer became so pronounced that she could not get a reply out.

Carsten held his tongue throughout the meal. Naturally, he wished he could have done something, he wished he could have risen to his feet and pounded on the table, but it was this very table—with its Royal Copenhagen Flora Danica service and crystal glasses and the invisible barbed-wire fences erected by table manners and an age-old dread—that kept him firmly in his seat, while the Baroness told him of a story she was working on, about a dinner that raised its guests up into a new sphere of freedom.

Over coffee and brandy, Amalie stood up and said to Maria, “I understand from my son that you sing, so I have persuaded my friend, the great writer Jacob Paludan, who is a connoisseur and lover of music, to accompany you.” And it seemed now as though Amalie had indeed crushed Maria, because she stood up and walked stiff-legged past the guests and over to the grand piano, to Paludan and the prospect of the vast room. Maria had turned up at this party as a young girl, a nice little shrinking violet, prepared to make a good impression, but now something happened to her; it was as though her eyes swam out of focus, and then she stared in Amalie’s direction and said, hoarsely, but with her stammer more or less under control, “I’ve heard about y-y-you, Amalie, they t-t-talk about y-y-you at Latichinsky and Son’s when they’re wrapping the perfumed soaps, and they say you’re the biggest whore in C-C-Copenhagen.” And with this, Maria stalked out of the room, although she did turn back just for a moment, in the doorway, to meet Carsten’s gaze. He had risen half out of his chair and for a moment he stayed suspended in midair, in a sort of no-man’s-land, or as though he were a piece of scrap iron caught between two magnets. But then, with a jerk, he is on his feet, strides over to Maria, and fulfills all our expectations of how, if things are to turn out as they should, sooner or later a boy has to leave his father and mother and follow his love.

*   *   *

Where did the two young people go after they left Amalie’s? They went to an apartment on the fourth floor of a villa by the Lakes in Copenhagen. It has never been easy finding an apartment in Copenhagen, nor was it any easier in those days. Then, as now, you had to have contacts, and the lease on this apartment was also in the nature of a bribe from one of the numerous law firms who were at this time angling for Carsten. The building was big, grand, and ramshackle and will turn out to be a fateful spot in Maria and Carsten’s life. It was not situated in poverty-stricken Nørrebro, nor yet in the elegant confines of Frederiksberg, but somewhere between the two, and it had not been built in the last century, nor yet in this one, but somewhere at the turn, by a family that was neither aristocratic nor common, well-to-do without being really wealthy. It had been built on a piece of ground with an uncertain future, and it was still standing there, surrounded by tall linden trees and dog shit and a faded three-quarters grandeur. It had a large, neglected garden, thickets of plaster on the ceilings, rot-riddled floors that sagged like hammocks, water pipes that emitted a ghostly hiss, interconnecting rooms, and tall windows—and in the light that pours through these sit Carsten and Maria. The apartment is empty of furniture; they sit in an echo of emptiness and nebulous hopes—well, what happens next? Sunlight streams through the window and for a moment the universe is put on hold: they have not actually moved in yet. They have slept together; they have known each other for several years and they really ought to have been married by now, but they have just not got around to that yet. Carsten has completed his studies and really ought to have found a job, but as yet he has not done so. Maria can clean and cook and generally keep house, even such a bogus spook-ridden box of tricks as this, but she has not made a proper start yet. With respect to this situation, I would choose to say that Carsten and Maria are waiting. They are not waiting for anything in particular—neither for life nor for the future nor for each other—they simply seem to have suspended all progression momentarily; and this waiting time, brief as it may be, is characteristic of this place and this time, in the late 1940s in Copenhagen. Both Carsten and Maria have been aware of this feeling before, but it has never been as strong as now, and this has to do with the fact that something is afoot and that something is, of course, the Welfare State and a freedom that is, at any rate to some degree, greater than ever before in the history of the world. And then there is something else that is hard to explain. Of course Carsten and Maria will marry and have children and work and assume their place on the beaten path—it is still a natural law of sorts—but it is as though, before all this gets under way, they are struck by a certain hesitance. And in the sunlight in the house by the Lakes the reluctant air of these days induces the giddy sensation of falling in love and a faint, faraway, tentative realization that all the old values are disintegrating.

The next instant this feeling has gone and they have moved in and bought furniture and Carsten has found a job.

*   *   *

Once Carsten graduated, everyone was after him. Of course, they had heard of him long before this, even the professors of law had heard of him, and now everyone wanted to employ him. The Ministry of Justice wanted to employ him, the Foreign Ministry wanted to employ him, as well as all the big law firms, and at the Citadel he met the head of Army Intelligence, that deep-frozen Cold War warrior and later colonel, Lunding—and he, too, wanted to employ him. All of them were, of course, attracted by his astronomically high marks and his incredible diligence and his winning nature—all the
promise
of a meteoric career that hung around Carsten like a radiant aura. But there was something else, too, something they could never quite put their fingers on—not even wily old Lunding—and that was Carsten’s innocence. There was not one of these individuals or bodies who did not, deep down, feel the earth giving way beneath his feet or sense that a new age was dawning—even for the Danish state system, which had otherwise managed to maintain its dignity and remain well preserved since the days of the absolute monarchy. And so they all dreamed—at night, at any rate, and on the sly—of a phenomenon such as Carsten; of a new generation of civil servants whose belief in the middle-class worldview remained intact.

Carsten turned down all of them. He shook his head and said no, thank you, and politely shook the outstretched hands before immediately releasing them again; he enjoyed his popularity and the strange waiting period, and then he made his move and accepted a position with Big Fitz.

There are several conceivable reasons for Carsten’s choosing this particular law firm, one of them being that Fitz was one of Amalie’s friends from the time she was beginning to refer to as the Good Old Days. But the most important reason lies, I believe, elsewhere: in the fact that Fitz’s chambers were like a lighthouse, a bastion, in the current of time. These chambers were situated in a mansion on Sankt Annœ Square, close to the Amalienborg Palace and the royal family, and indeed Fitz was lawyer to the royal family. He was a very old man, the sixth-generation senior partner of a firm weighed down and glossy with distinction and solid tradition. The firm acted as State Counsel, Fitz and his colleagues being the government’s legal advisers and, in their opinion, having conducted every big case of any significance during this century and the end of the previous one. They had administered Lady Danner’s estate and had been instrumental in winning that glorious case,
The State
vs.
Herman Bang,
that writer from the gutter—and homosexual to boot—who had on that occasion been convicted of pornography for his novel
Generations without Hope.
They had conducted the Count at Mørkhøj’s probate case and the celebrated case in which the Burmeister & Wain shipyard tried to get out of paying the engineer who had improved and installed the diesel engine in the world’s first diesel-powered ship, the
Selandia.
They had seen to the small print in the sale of the Danish West Indies colonies to the United States, and Fitz had personally addressed the court in the open-and-shut case against Norway concerning Denmark’s rights to Greenland, in which it was eventually established at the international level that of course Denmark owns Greenland. The firm took care of legal matters not only for the royal family but also for the proud old Danish aristocracy, added to which Fitz himself sat on the board of Burmeister & Wain, Otto Mønsted Margarine, the Margarine Company, Hirschsprung and Sons Tobacco Company, the Private Insurance Association, and the Trifolium Dairies; and, for his day and age and for Carsten, he represented a happy blend of the best of the old traditions with modern-day big business. The existence of Fitz and his firm, its customers’ titles, its marble mansion and polished brass nameplate, all amounted to one huge affirmation that everything was perfectly in order.

So Carsten started work at Fitz’s chambers, and at just around the same time the new decade—the fifties, that is—also started. Of this time Carsten and Maria have both said, independently, that it seemed to consist of nothing but Sundays. Now, obviously that cannot be true, but it says something about how this period was peaceful in a way even I can sense, and it makes me think that if I had been living then, I could have said: Come, dear reader, take my hand and let me lead you along the lakes and in through the riotously overgrown, romantic garden and into the grand entranceway with its ground-glass panes etched with elaborate floral designs, and up to the second floor to a Sunday afternoon idyll. The apartment has been beautifully done up because Fitz knows the president of Lysberg, Hansen and Terp. It has been painted, at Carsten’s request, in the same pastel green and terracotta as old Pompeii, with white woodwork, veneered rosewood furniture, pictures on the walls, and books on the shelves—an apartment that breathes like some great beast. Slowly and comfortably it fills its lungs, expanding and contracting and expanding around Carsten where he sits working, enveloped in a cloud of smoke and the delicate aroma of latakia tobacco; and around Maria, who is sitting embroidering—yes, just so: she is sitting embroidering, since that is what she does with her time during these years, when she is not keeping house and cooking and, in every conceivable way,
being
there for Carsten. She embroiders and he works and only rarely do they look up, they are concentrating deeply, but they each
know
that the other is there. On some of these Sundays they take the streetcar or the train out to see Amalie, who seems to have forgiven everything and who, during these years, is growing to look more and more like a big black panther—although, despite dyeing her hair and despite the expertly applied makeup she now has something rather moth-eaten about her. This only serves to reassure Maria, who now feels more relaxed in her mother-in-law’s home than ever before and can sink back into the sofa and enjoy the little chocolate “Sarah Bernhardts” from Rubow’s patisserie. The next day Carsten has to go to work, and when he comes home his dinner is waiting for him, good Danish dishes which, despite whatever else may come along, he still prefers; dishes such as meat balls and pork sausages and chitterlings as only Maria can make them, with just the right little touch of wine vinegar. Afterward they drink coffee and listen to the radio and Carsten has a bit of work to do and, outside, it is summer or winter or something in between but always, in some way, pleasant weather; and, to me, these two young people—who love each other and who have just recently been married at the registry office in Copenhagen Town Hall—seem to combine with their comfortably breathing surroundings to create a unified whole that is apparently very, very harmonious.

Although one could perhaps have looked at it in a different light. We could perhaps have latched on to certain details that shatter the idyll. As, for instance, the fact that, in the entranceway, on the way up the stairs, we pass the door of the ground-floor apartment, which bears a sign that says:
THE DANISH STANDARDIZATION BOARD SUBCOMMITTEE FOR THE STANDARDIZATION OF WINDOW ENVELOPES AND PRINTED FORMS
—which is in fact a cover for one of Colonel Lunding and Army Intelligence’s electronic surveillance stations. Or we could, in Carsten and Maria’s apartment, have latched on to the disquieting hiss in the water pipes and the muffled sound of distant telex machines and the rotten floorboards that have been known to give way and crash down into the apartment below, thus affording Carsten and Maria baffling glimpses of electronic consoles bristling with large lightbulbs and radio valves, until the army workmen patched up the hole—sealing it off until the building gave way in some fresh spot. One could also point to Carsten and Maria’s wall, on which hung a very large reproduction of Picasso’s
Guernica.
Not that it is any business of ours what people hang on their walls, and it may be that the young couple have been given this picture as a wedding present and feel that it is interesting and modern, but when all’s said and done, it
is
a picture of war—with severed limbs and bombs and dead horses and suffering. And that it should be hanging here, in the living room, indicates an odd kind of disregard. But then again, this may be no more than a stray thought, which I cannot back up; and life in the early fifties, here by the Lakes in Copenhagen, was no doubt above all idyllic. And it flows out into a bicycle trip.