The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (8 page)

Do not expect me to know what happened to Rudkøbing on that night and in the time that followed. The best I can do is to say that time apparently lost its significance. It is possible that at that very moment, and purely by chance, Rudkøbing passed through one of those points in the universe where time stands still. It is also possible that this confusion arises because I have to rely upon Amalie’s and Christoffer’s memories of what happened. Because in one sense they were, of course, obedient; in one sense they were the Old Lady’s son and grandchild; but they were also rebels, and it is quite likely that their greatest wish had been to see the Old Lady’s laboriously maintained timing fall apart. If so, then Rudkøbing’s chaotic time was actually Christoffer’s and Amalie’s dream. But if that is the case, then it was a discreet, almost covert dream, since, initially, time administered a severe shock to Christoffer. He was the first to arrive at work, the first to see that something was wrong. He noticed that the journalists had not shown up, and when he opened the morning paper he discovered that it bore a date from a lifetime ago and was filled with articles on people from a bygone age who had died long ago in places that no longer existed. He had risen from his chair to walk over to the printshop when a sudden impulse made him pull back the curtain to see the morning sun coloring the roof of the white house on the other side of the dark courtyard. Instead he saw the stars, and as he walked through the building on his way to the printshop he passed through rooms facing onto the square, where dust particles danced in the winter morning sunlight—yes, we all heard it right, winter
morning
sunlight. And when nighttime and daytime are present simultaneously, then something is really wrong. Then anyone less well schooled than Christoffer, or less odd, would have quit the place. But not he. He went on to the printshop, which he found deserted apart from four printer’s apprentices, who had suffered no ill effects from this crazy merger of night and day other than some slight headaches.

The gap between these four men and Christoffer was very wide, one might almost say colossal. It had been part of the Old Lady’s lifework to create the gulf across which her employees and her son, Christoffer Ludwig, now regarded one another. Furthermore, there had never been any need for them to speak to one another, since the Old Lady’s commands rang in all their ears. And so Christoffer circulated among his workers like some solitary sleepwalker, trying to recall whether these unexpected difficulties had been predicted in his mother’s will. Finally he leaned up against a big printing press, looked into the expectant faces, and said, “Gentlemen, you will have to write the newspaper.”

The Old Lady had always made sure that everyone employed by the family could read and write, for the very reason that she herself had never mastered these skills. But, faced by the white sheets of paper, all that the printer’s apprentices could call to mind was the fragmentary schooling from the distant days of their childhood. When the journalists awoke from their sleep to a light belonging neither to day nor to night, in which the bells of the town’s churches were ringing for morning or evening prayer, they awoke to a paper full of hymn stanzas and quotations from Luther’s catechism and the dates of Danish military victories and the announcement that the great violinist and virtuous member of the royal orchard Fine Henriksen—as the printer’s apprentices put it—would be paying a visit to the town. Here was a mystery that the journalists wanted to have cleared up. On their way to the square they bumped into one another in streets filled with people who were rubbing sleep out of their eyes, or on their way home to bed, or who had just finished eating dinner. Outside the taverns, drinking cronies fought over what time it was, and they had to jump clear of the cobbled roadway so as not to be run down by a coach whose driver had collapsed in a heap on the box, weary with confusion, or trampled by horses whose riders had left them to go in search of some anchor to cling to in their lives. Wherever they went, they were pursued by the echo of the church bells, chiming at one and the same time for all the holy days and religious festivals of the year. This clamor pursued them all the way to the square, which, though it had been morning when they left their homes, lay bathed in moonlight. Beneath the stars, in the chill blue light, the stall holders were selling vegetables that were not in season, and here they met Christoffer Ludwig. He was sitting on the box of the newspaper’s big four-wheeled cart, his eyes were bloodshot with weariness, and the clothes that he had been wearing for a space of time as indeterminate as everything else were covered with a layer of lead dust from the printshop. But his eyes were shining as he—who had never learned to drive a cart—left the horse to find its own way around to the newspaper’s subscribers, delivering the morning’s paper, which he had written and corrected and typeset and made up and printed, folded, and glued all by himself, and if his eyes were shining it was because he was now sure that this was exactly what the will had predicted. He had, in fact, been reminded of the wording once the printers had fallen asleep at the presses after working nonstop through a night that would never come to an end and during which, after having written and printed the paper, they then had to deliver it because all the paperboys, bar one, had joined the frantic commotion on the streets. As he stood alone in the printshop with the sleeping workers, who looked like victims of a fire—slumped, arms poised to lunge, covered with lead dust, scraps of paper, and printing-ink stains—Christoffer’s gloom and doubt were dispersed by a dazzling light and he heard his mother’s voice reading aloud the section of the will which declared that the responsibility now rested on his shoulders.

Christoffer thought he had better check this. That he succeeded in finding his way back to the room in which the echo of the lawyer’s reading still hung in the air, and the will lay, undisturbed, on the desk, seemed to him like some sort of confirmation, as though his mother had reached out a hand to him. Christoffer wanted, first of all, to count the number of sheets of rice paper, but he never succeeded. As he lifted the white bundle, the paper crumbled into dust between his fingers. He left the room not knowing that he would never find it again and without noticing that there was something very wrong with the furnishings. The tapestries and the rough wooden furniture and the torches on the walls and the chessboard-patterned marble floor belonged not to his own time but to another. For the first time, on his way through the house, he did not look at the clocks, and so he did not notice, either, that they had come to a standstill. Just as he did not hear the housemaids panting as they ran from room to room winding up the precious timepieces to keep them going, while their dinner was sticking to the bottom of the pots in the kitchens, and rooms and windows and doors appeared in the wrong places only to vanish immediately once more.

Christoffer headed straight for his office, where, all on his own, he copied out the next edition of the newspaper, in accordance with the dictates of the will, as far as his excellent memory had retained them. He did not allow anything to interrupt him, not even the shrieks of the kitchen maids who, turning to look at one another after trying to stir the food in the pots in the soot-blackened kitchens, found that they had all, suddenly, grown terrifyingly old. Now they were tearing along the corridors, colliding with footmen and housemaids whose teeth chattered in their heads because they no longer recognized a house that was now in a constant state of flux. This was demonstrated by the way they ascended spiral staircases and walked through rooms they had never seen before, decorated in styles they had never come across, only to find that the water closets and some of the offices, not to mention their own rooms, had disappeared.

Naturally, they then left the house. Passing through boudoirs and living rooms and along the corridors outside Christoffer’s office, they snatched everything that could be stuffed into their pockets or bags, because they knew they would never get what was owed them from this intolerable house where poltergeists ran amok. With trembling hands they cut the pictures out of their frames, rolled up the carpets, and attempted to haul away paperweights and epergnes and silver paper knives because, they reasoned, that lunatic Christoffer Ludwig, who just sits there writing and writing in the midst of this mixed-up time, is never going to need any of it anyway. When Christoffer got to his feet, clutching his completed draft, he crossed rooms that were deserted and empty and bathed in a light that was neither one thing nor the other. In the printshop, all by himself, he printed the newspaper that he was later to throw to the journalists in the square. In the rays of the emerging sun, shivering in the wintry chill, they read a newspaper that contained something of everything the Old Lady would never have countenanced: an apology for, and disclaimer of, the previous edition of the paper, followed by a résumé of the year’s great international discoveries and sensitive political situations and an article reporting that the country’s Minister of Justice, our very own Mr. Alberti, had been arrested for fraud and that this man, wrote Christoffer, this archetypal modern-day careerist, had never wanted anything for himself except as much as possible in his own capacious pocket, as much as possible on his lapel, and as much as possible on himself in the Official State Yearbook. None of the journalists recognized Christoffer’s voice in the cool, concise language of the newspaper; Christoffer the milksop, the cowed lad who had, apparently, said here, for the first time, exactly what he thought, and about a government minister at that, a good friend of his mother’s. And that is what turns this action into a dream, our dream, Christoffer’s dream—a revolt against those who dictate.

The journalists gazed hopelessly after him as he drove away. Before going their separate ways they met the mayor and Dr. Mahler and the lawyer and the Reverend Mr. Cornelius, all of whom were in the act of erecting a sundial in the square in the hope of seizing hold of time with a flash through the drifting clouds. Together they kicked open the post office door—which had been so firmly shut that it seemed as though it would never open again—and woke the telegraph operator, who was asleep on a bed of blank forms scattered about the floor, and forced him to telegraph Copenhagen. The reply they received seemed never-ending and its content was lost in the crackle of static—all but the last part, which stated that Christoffer’s last article was nothing but a pack of lies, since the Minister of Justice could be found—supported by the trust of the people and the judicial system and the government—in the Ministry of Justice and in Parliament and in and out of the meetings of the countless boards chaired by him. And always, since the Old Lady’s death, dressed in black. And with that they had to content themselves. On their way home they met Christoffer and the horse, although Christoffer did not see a thing because his thoughts had run on far beyond their own time, preoccupied as he was with carrying out what he believed to be his mother’s last wish. Later, while the journalists and the mayor and the doctor and the lawyer and even the Reverend Mr. Cornelius drank themselves into apathy in a café full of weeping adults and silent children who had given up asking for explanations, Christoffer woke his daughters and took them, oblivious to his wife’s gurgling protests, to the printshop. Once there, he had them proofread his articles and then work the big printing presses. In the meantime, he wrote to the family’s other printing plants and ordered the expansion and the new acquisitions, predicted in the will, which he considered would be necessary in order to fulfill the stream of orders that was, at this moment, during these weird days, pouring into his office. And strange orders they were: for the printing of books by authors as yet unborn, from countries that were not yet nation-states, in languages that as yet boasted no alphabet, and dealing with events several future generations removed. In his letters Christoffer also described where the printers were to set up the big rotary presses which he had ordered from abroad and which were to meet the demand for newspapers described in the will, the contents of which had also been determined. While Amalie, with shining eyes, was making fair copies of her father’s letters and recognizing in them her own dreams of a world in which she and now her father, too, were the celebrated focal points, Christoffer was at the station collecting the photoengraving machine he had ordered from Copenhagen. This arrived with a railroad car full of liquids and bowls and all the equipment necessary for the etching of printing blocks, and Christoffer was able to illustrate that very day’s edition of the newspaper—or was it the next day’s?—with his own drawings, which resembled the creatures he had, once upon a time, cut out of paper. No one except Amalie, who did the proofreading, ever saw these last issues of the paper.

When Christoffer drove out to deliver them he saw for the first time, with bemused wonder, all the people hanging around in the café doorways and those who were sitting on the doorsteps and those who were lying on the sidewalks and nearly freezing to death, as though they had always hung about and sat and lain there, and all of them seeing the town ripple before their eyes. The houses outside which the horse stopped so that Christoffer could deliver the paper metamorphosed into thatch-roofed, mud-walled hovels, then wooden shanties—if, that is, they were not burned-out sites turning into churchyards or the overgrown backyards of buildings from the future. Onlookers saw Christoffer’s cart transformed into one of the Old Lady’s automobiles, then to a handcart, and, finally, back to its original form. And all the while Christoffer was throwing the paper—which, according to all accounts, contained nothing but illustrated ditties and nursery rhymes of his own invention because that was what the will had foretold—into mailboxes from which they were never collected because people had taken refuge indoors. There they could watch, through their windows, as their surroundings liquefied and the streets turned to rutted, churned-up tracks, and then to mud-filled mires, and then into a river that forced its way up their steps and over their thresholds before disappearing and leaving instead a path bordered by winter-brown blackberry bushes that grew up beneath the bubbling mailboxes in which Christoffer’s newspaper lay untouched. Night fell just as the sound of the church bells was starting to fade away, since the churches would soon be transformed into cathedrals, which would be replaced by wooden huts, which would dwindle into nothingness. And when everyone was sleeping, except Christoffer and his daughters—who were busily engaged in producing the next edition—the snow came, gently falling straight to earth. The snowflakes were flat and so big that they piled up one atop another, layer upon layer, but at the same time they were so light that they rose like a cloud around Christoffer and the horse and the three girls as they drove off to deliver the paper to the sleeping town. The snow heralded the end.