The Quiet Girl (11 page)

As he fell asleep, KlaraMaria sat there. Just as she had the second time he saw her.
 
 

PART TWO

1

It had been night, the dark night of the soul. C. F. Rich Road was empty and deserted. Behind drawn curtains untroubled parents and red-cheeked children were asleep, his public, unaware that out here in the cold, Kasper Krone walked his via dolorosa, freezing, with no money for a taxi after having lost in poker for the first time in ten years.

Poker was Rasper's game, and had always been. Poker had depth and complexity like Bach's music; a sure bet and a rhythmically played hand lasted about as long as one of his small choral arrangements. Bach would have been a great poker player, if he hadn't been so busy. More than fifteen hundred works, many of them under constant revision up until his death.

Kasper had played in all the major capitals, but for him poker belonged in the Frederiksberg section of Copenhagen on C. F. Rich Road. Where the doorman wasn't a foreign legionnaire and serial killer, but a former boxer with fists like sugar beets. Where there was mutual familiarity, as in a community-garden club. And concentration, like musicians auditioning for the Radio Symphony Orchestra, each man and woman bent over his or her sheet music.

But tonight he had lost, even the Saab at the end; when he handed over the car keys he'd felt like he was turned to stone. He hadn't had enough humility to borrow money for a taxi. As the bus drove through the woods, he went through the night's games in his mind; he found no mistakes--he could not understand it.

When he crossed Strand Road he saw there was light in the trailer. He approached in a half circle; the light flickered like a fire. As he was getting out the lead pipe he identified the sound. It was E-flat major, happy, playful, uninhibited, like the first movement of Trio Sonata in E-Flat Major. He put the pipe back in place and walked in.

KlaraMaria stood with her back to him. She must have been lighting the stove, and then come to a standstill before the undulating world of the live coals. The light of the small flames flickered over her face; she did not turn around.

"You found me," she said. "Tell me how you did it."

"I drew a circle," he said.

* * *

He had awakened in the trailer the morning after their first meeting, after she had disappeared by Bagsværd Lake.

He had slept only a couple of hours. He took out one of the four-centimeter-scale maps. Stina's compass. Using as the center the spot where he let the little girl off, he had drawn a circle with a radius of three miles. Maybe she had been driven away in a car. But she had been ready to walk--he could tell that.

No ordinary child walks three miles at two a.m. from somewhere on the outskirts of Bagsværd when the temperature is around freezing. She had not been an ordinary child.

The circle enclosed Bagsværd, Lyngby some of Vangede, a corner of Gentofte, the southern part of Virum, Fure Lake, and Hareskovby, some of Gladsaxe. It was seven in the morning; he took out his violin and played the beginning of Beethoven's Opus 131. It begins in darkness as a fugue, but then climbs upward and into Paradise. When the sky grew light and office hours had begun, he picked up the telephone.

He had planned to call the Ministry for Social Affairs, but with the receiver in his hand, before dialing the number, he could suddenly hear how he would sound to an outsider. A middle-aged single man is looking for little girls, without being able to explain why, even to himself. He held a weak hand and had tough opponents. He put down the receiver and took two copies of his last CD, the solo partitas and sonatas, recorded in St. Mary's Church outside Lübeck. Then he got into his car and drove to Grøndal Parkway. To Circus Blaff. To Sonja.

* * *

Sonja had started at the bottom. Kasper had met her when they were very young, in the Sans Souci variety theater in Kolding and then the Damhus Inn owned by the Stefansen dynasty. From the very beginning, he could hear that she was driven by something. Her system had a sound like a motor that can't stop and just keeps running until it burns out, the sound by which life's desperadoes recognize each other. Her desperation was directed toward wealth. She had left the ring, studied economics, and then returned to the circus. The building on Grøndal Parkway had three floors, four hundred employees, administration offices for four circuses, several music halls and theaters, a booking agency, an advertising company that had followed in the footsteps of Erik Stockmarr, the famed circus poster artist of the fifties, when nobody else could. And an accounting office. She owned all of it.

She was a little older than he. A little taller, a little heavier. She had three children. A splendid husband, deep and vigorous and in C-major, like Mozart's last symphony. And besides the husband, lovers too.

Twenty years ago Sonja and Kasper had been lovers; they had not lost contact since then, and never would as long as they lived. SheAlmighty awards lifetime partners to some people. Brahms got Clara Schumann, Mozart got the clarinetist Anton Stadler as a lifelong partner in pin billiards. Maybe it has something to do with the thing called love.

Sonja's office resembled the Defense Command in Vedbæk, where Kasper had performed several times; the military love clowns-- Crock met Hitler personally twice. Everything was in its proper place here, and orders were not to be questioned. A large pair of binoculars lay on the window ledge; the Bellahøj circus grounds were just opposite the office, and Sonja liked to keep up with things. On her desk were four telephones and the remainder of an Italian lunch, including a whole bottle of Brunello. He laid the four-centimeter-scale map and the CD in front of her, and explained the situation.

She turned the CD over in her hands.

"You never went for little girls," she said. "You went for grown-up women. So what can she do? Is it talent? Does it have something to do with money?"

* * *

It wasn't he who had left Sonja, and it wasn't she who had left him. They had known it simultaneously.

She'd had an apartment in Frederiksberg, on King George Road.

The last night he had been awakened about two o'clock in the morning by the city's atmosphere; it had felt like a blister on his brain and heart. He'd had to sit up and hum the arpeggio from BWV 4, "Christ Lay in the Bonds of Death." The Danish philosopher Martinus once said that to endure living in Frederiksberg he needed to pray constantly.

Sonja had already been awake. They were both in their early twenties. He hadn't had a word for it, but he had known, they both had known, that they were in the path of a storm it would be hard to ride out.

"We can't cope with it," she had said. "Soon I'll want to have children, and a dog, a female dog, and a fire in the fireplace, and will need to turn off the hearing aid and say the sound won't get better now."

He had gotten up and put on his clothes. She had followed him to the door; she moved in a free and easy manner, when she was naked, when she was clothed, through life as a whole.

"Since you believe in something," she had said, "can't you pray for help for us?"

"One can't pray for something," he had said. "At least not for different musical notes. One can only ask to play as well as possible the notes one is given."

It had been a dignified exit line and departure. He had gone out into the night with eyes dim with tears; it had felt like singing Wotan's farewell scene with Brynhild from Wagner's Ring. Then dawn came, and he had discovered that when there first is love, it does not go away when the sun comes up and the curtain goes down. It remains. Now twenty years had passed, and somehow both his happiness that she existed, and his sorrow that it couldn't be more, were not diminished.

* * *

He had laid his hands on the city map in front of him.

"I've always been searching for something," he said.

"Does she have it?"

He shook his head.

"She's nine years old. But she knows something. About where one can find it."

Sonja did not ask any more questions. She drew a telephone over to her and gave him headphones to listen in. Then she took a stack of green books out of a drawer.

"Mostrup's municipal directories," she explained. "We need to look at all of Copenhagen County."

She looked up and wrote down while she talked. There were two children's homes within the circle on the map.

"We can't call them directly--it's sensitive personal information. We'll get a flat refusal. We have to go via the county's Health and Social Welfare Administration. What's our story?"

He listened outward; necessary lies come from the same place as the ideas in the ring, from outer space.

"We found a small purse after the show. A brocade purse. With feathers on it. The kind little girls love. It was a benefit performance. For institutions. The name inside the purse is KlaraMaria. We'd like to send it to her. May we have the address?"

She made the call. The woman at the other end was cooperative. Kasper could hear her sympathy, for both children and adults. As so often before, he felt a longing to live in a world administered to a greater extent by women. It was a warm day; the woman on the phone had a window open.

"I'm sorry," she said. "We have forty-seven children on our list. No KlaraMaria. Could she be with a foster family?"

On Sonja's piece of paper Kasper wrote: "Matron."

"I believe there was a matron."

"She might be living with other children in some sort of family arrangement. I'll give you the telephone numbers for the foster home associations."

Through the telephone Kasper recognized the sound from the open window. It was the sound of Glostrup. He stood up and looked over Sonja's shoulder at what she had written. The Health and Social Welfare Administration address was Amstgården County Courthouse in Glostrup.

"Ten numbers!" said Sonja. "Fourteen thousand children are placed outside their parental homes. I'll get you the numbers for boarding schools too. It's hard to find them in one place; institutions are listed under each community."

* * *

For a quarter of an hour Sonja looked up numbers, telephoned, wrote. Kasper sat absolutely quiet. She hung up the receiver. Pushed the telephone away.

"Eight hundred children. Divided among two children's homes, eighteen foster families, three boarding schools, and one children's hospital. No KlaraMaria."

"Could there be some type of institution we don't know about? An institution that's registered some other way?"

She telephoned the county courthouse again. Spoke with the woman. Hung up.

"All the private institutions get a county subsidy, or at least fall under county supervision. So they are listed with the county. The one exception is institutions that--especially after September eleventh-- are designated as possible terrorist targets. Their telephone numbers and addresses are released only by the police. But she doesn't think any of them are in our area."

Kasper stood up. They had reached the end of the road. Then he sat down again.

"Try the police."

* * *

Sonja telephoned police headquarters. She was transferred three times. Then she got a woman who was the same age as her. The woman's voice had a secret. Don't we all? She was sorry, but the police did not have any institutions listed in that area. She too had a window open; she hung up.

* * *

Sonja accompanied him to the door; the office was so large that the distance was a hike. She gave him his mail. One letter had a window envelope. He opened it with a feeling of distaste; the unknown often arrives by mail and frequently in a window envelope. It was from Maximillian, a sheet of letter paper with a woman's name and an address printed on it. At first he did not understand anything. He looked at the envelope. It was postmarked with that day's date, by the central post office on Bernstorff Street. Then he understood. Maximillian had been to the main office of the Department of Motor Vehicles. He got out his glasses. The printout was from the database of a large insurance company; they too had access to the records now, along with Customs and Taxes. As access to large databases grows more liberal, Danish national feeling becomes more intimate. Soon we will all know everything about one another.

Maximillian must have gone to the main post office to try to reach him immediately. He read the name.

"Andrea Fink," he said. "Does that name mean anything to us?"

Sonja's face grew blank.

"It's the name of the woman," she said, "from police headquarters. The woman we just talked to."

* * *

He had gone back to the desk, sat down, and put on the headphones.

"Our story now," he said, "is that we're married. The world doesn't feel safe with single people."

Sonja dialed the number.

"It's me again. I have my husband on the line. There's no Klara-Maria anywhere."

"And what do you want me to do about it?"

The secret was a tragedy in C-minor; it had something to do with children. She was childless; A-major perfectionism had not been softened. With increasing age a person integrates the next higher musical key in the circle of fifths, the acoustical equivalent of what we call maturation. Something in her had impeded that process.

"My wife and I met her," said Kasper. "After the performance. She made a deep impression on both of us. Also on our three children."

Sonja had closed her eyes. There are few women among the great poker players. No woman would care to bluff, as he was doing now, a royal straight flush in hearts. Against an opponent who was acting in good faith. On a hand that was as thin as bouillon.

"All five of us in the family," he said, "had the--perhaps completely crazy--feeling that we could give her a new home."

At first there was no response at the other end of the line. He tuned in to the traffic noise from her open window. She had a body of water outside, closer than police headquarters did. He heard traffic crossing a bridge, crossing two bridges. A siren howled past; the shift in sound-wave frequency known as the Doppler effect gave him a sense of the nearest bridge's length. It could be Knippel Bridge. The woman cleared her throat.