The Quiet Girl (16 page)

He heard the sounds harmonize. Transpose into the same key. He was witness to some form of orchestration.

He could no longer hear the woman's keynote. He looked at her. She had become colorless. He knew they were standing upright and were both on the same journey, in through all the sound boxes and wind instrument bells, toward where he had always wanted to go, toward silence.

Longing and terror hit him simultaneously, like a single beat on a kettledrum. He nearly let out a scream. At that instant, the phenomenon ended.

He leaned against the wall. It took a while before he was able to speak.

"A year is a long time," he said. "You might forget the agreement."

"We may also remember it," she said.

"You may also be mistaken. Maybe no one is after the children. In that case, I will have ruined my life."

"What has characterized great men and women," she said, "is that when it came down to it, they were willing to put everything on one number on the roulette wheel. Our Savior's number. And with no guarantee that it would win."

The room spun around before Kasper's eyes, like a carousel, a cloister carousel.

"It will be a long year," he said. "And not the easiest one in my life. Do you have any advice?"

She looked at him.

"Have you ever tried to pray?"

"I've asked for things. Most of my life."

"That's why you haven't gotten farther."

Anger took away his breath again.

Her sound was now like the aria from the Goldberg Variations. Familial. He could tell that she liked him. As few, perhaps very few, people could. It was what he had noticed with KlaraMaria. With Stina. A person who could tolerate the noise from his system. And more than tolerate it.

Love makes people equal. For a moment he and she were completely on the same level.

"To whom shall I pray?" he asked. "Who says there's someone out there? Who says the universe isn't just one big hurdy-gurdy?"

"Maybe it's not necessary to pray to anyone. The early desert mothers said that God is without form, color, or content. Perhaps prayer isn't a matter of praying to anyone. Perhaps it's an active way of giving up. Maybe that's precisely what you need: to give up, without going under."

She opened the door.

"The words could be anything whatsoever," she said, "as long as they speak to the heart. For example, they could be from Bach's cantatas."

He noticed a movement; the African stood behind him.

* * *

She accompanied him to the gate and opened it for him. He turned and looked at the building.

"The guest wing," said the African.

The building had three stories; he counted seven windows on each floor, each with its small balcony.

"Very hospitable," he said.

"Philoxenia. In love for the stranger one finds love for Christ."

He began walking toward Frederiksdal Road. She stood watching him through the open gate.

He experienced her tone, her reaction to him. What she saw made her sound like a person standing at the roulette table, after
Rien ne va plus
, calculating the odds, and knowing that since it's roulette, the odds are less than 50 percent in any case.

Or perhaps it was his imagination; on cold moonlit nights especially, the world easily becomes a screen on which each of us plays our own home video. He got into his car; he had always regarded his automobile as a separate, but utterly safe, part of his living room, with two easy chairs and a sofa.

* * *

Even when he had reached Klampenborg and the Elise was warm and there were other night owls on the road, he continued to hear, from the seats and motor and body of the car and from the traffic and the suburbs around him, the utterly simple and yet incredibly complex theme of the Goldberg Variations. As it begins to sound when you have gotten well into the variations and begin to notice that now you cannot leave, now Bach has hold of you, now you must go on, regardless of where it leads you.
 

PART 3

1

Copenhagen Dolce Vita was located on the ground floor of a building that faced what had been Kongens Nytorv, the city's most elegant square.

Kasper had never doubted that spiritual longing and food belonged together, and that in principle there were two approaches: One could either starve or eat oneself toward Paradise.

Great religious traditions had perfected both extremes. The early desert fathers and mothers had sometimes looked as if their skeletons were outside their clothing; the Taoists had said, "Empty the mind and fill the belly," and a series of smart Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra stars had looked like managers of the Gluttons Club. Buddha had proposed a path between the two extremes, and that was what Kasper was looking for, this evening and many times before, as he sat at Bobech Leisemeer's restaurant, where the food was like the circus in the old days--thoroughly spiritualized, shocking, and on the border between equilibristic and unconscionable.

Nevertheless, a point between the heart and the solar plexus would not relax, and never would relax in this life. A point which knows that in an environment like this, surrounded by gold and white and damask and annual incomes never below a million kroner, if one has been born a Gypsy, one must have come to the wrong place.

But still he had kept coming back. Because the food was the way it was, because one who seeks the highest must not leave any path untried. And because Kasper had always been able to hear himself in the chef: a proletarian boy born to play the buffoon at fairs who had to spend the rest of his life trying to understand why fate had dressed  him in a white uniform and chef's hat, made him the darling of the upper class, and set him up as some sort of high priest before an altar to food.

Kasper looked out over the water.

* * *

He had awakened two hours earlier; it was pitch-dark around him.  He climbed down from the loft and went over to the trailer. No one was inside. He tried to let himself in, but there was steel wire on the door handle; he struck a match, and saw the wire had a lead seal marked Copenhagen police.

He broke the seal. Inside the trailer he struck another match.

They had cleaned up after themselves. The way a corpse looks nice on the outside after embalming, but there's no longer anything inside. His violin was gone, the strongbox had been opened, his papers were gone.
Klavierbüchlein
was no longer on the shelf.

But his clothes were still there. He gathered up his suit, shoes, towel, and toiletries. Next he tore a little piece of cardboard from the cover of Carl Nielsen's memoir about his childhood on Funen Island. He turned out the light, walked outside, pressed the piece of cardboard firmly in the door at knee height. Connected the two halves of the seal as well as he could.

In the lavatory building he took a shower and shaved, first with an electric shaver and then with a safety razor. The face that looked out at him from the mirror was affected by aging and by five to seven thousand complete makeup jobs over thirty years.

Once Stina had stood behind him. Put her hands around his face. Looked at him in the mirror.

"A little of the Savior," she said. "A little of Holberg's
The Pawned Farmer's Heifer.
A little of Grev Danilo in
The Merry Widow
."

He would have liked to have said goodbye to Daffy, but the risk was too great. If the police were waiting for him, they would wait by the door. He went into the stable.

The lightbulb was burning in the ceiling; he took a couple of apples from the crate and stood outside Roselil's stall. The horse took a small leap toward him, like a little girl who wants to play. He placed his hands on the animal's neck. In fourteen days it would be killed.

Somewhere outside the light something moved that wasn't a horse.

He released the stall's double bolt. He would kick the door open, buzz like a Vespa crabro hornet, and they would get Roselil in the head like a thirteen-hundred-pound projectile.

Daffy emerged from the darkness. He must have stood very quietly.

He came over to the stall. Shoved the bolt into place. Laid the violin, the documents, and
Klavierbüchlein
in front of Kasper.

"I put on a big coat. And went into the trailer with them. This is what I had time to rescue."

One of the watchman's hands left the lath board. Disappeared out of sight. Reappeared with an apple.

"Your sentence back then," said Kasper. "What was it for?"

"For three million, at Nydahl's. During business hours."

Kasper had tried to give Stina a ring from Markus Nydahl, but she had refused; it had been difficult or impossible to get her to accept gifts. But the visit to the store had been spectacular. It was located on Ny Øster Street. There were two guards at the door. Jewelry and watches lay in bulletproof glass cases that were ready to sink into fireproof vaults under the floor if anyone so much as rustled a bag of candy.

"And the profession?" asked Kasper. "That you had to leave? What was that?"

"I was an apprentice to Boras."

Boras had been the Johann Sebastian Bach of gentlemen thieves. He'd had one student, an apostle, a dharma heir. Something stirred in Kasper's memory. The heir had begun to help himself to the inheritance. And then he had suddenly disappeared.

He opened the case; the violin was intact.

"Why run this risk?" he asked.

The watchman had paused in the doorway. He stood looking around the stable.

"They will be put out to pasture," he said. "I bought them this morning. For what the slaughterhouse and the riding school would have paid, minus the veterinarian's bill. Boras and I had some conversations before he died. I felt he gave me an unwritten will. I started  buying the animals' freedom then. It didn't fit with an apprentice's salary. He said, 'You'll pull yourself together, Daffy. Life is no prayer meeting.'"

"That's nice," said Kasper. "You've acted compassionately. But I was hurt in my childhood, so I have a hard time accepting anything; there's always just one little thing. What can it be in this case?"

He spoke to an empty doorway, and a horse. Daffy was gone.

* * *

He looked out across the water. It was an unbroken surface, from the National Bank to where the Krinsen garden had been.

The statue of Christian V on horseback had been taken away. On the sidewalk leading to the barricade, a chamber orchestra was playing appetizing morsels from the Brandenburg Concertos to begin Copenhagen's municipal spring and summer entertainment. People streamed past the musicians into the city's night, as if they had a mission and direction in life.

He closed his eyes and listened inside the music. Inside the space around him. Under the surface there was enough fear to open a psych ward.

He opened his eyes and looked out across the water. It did not appear like the end of the world, Pompeii, Santorini, the Deluge. It could have been a natural lake. Or major water damage.

The city's anxiety had existed before the earthquakes too. He had heard it from the time he was a child, since the accident, since his hearing became more acute; it was an old acquaintance. From deaths, from serious accidents in the ring, from himself. It wasn't so much fear of the catastrophes themselves as for what they led to. The tragic events were doors that opened to understanding that we all are living on borrowed time and the things that are important to hold on to--life, happiness, death, love, inspiration--are completely out of control.

He felt a sudden anger at SheAlmighty. People around him could have been happy. He could have been happy himself. At Leisemeer's restaurant they could all have felt like absolute kings. Or better yet, like gods, for after eating and drinking and receiving royal service, the tableware disappeared, the footmen disappeared, the whole feudal  illusion disappeared, and one was out in the carefree Copenhagen night.

Instead, one found natural catastrophes. Children mistreated. Kidnappings. Loneliness. Separation of people who love each other. His anger increased. The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain.

He turned his chair and tried to escape both the place and the view. That only made the situation worse. Across the zinc counter dividing the kitchen from the restaurant he caught sight of Leisemeer. When Kasper left Denmark the previous time, believing it was for forever, he had left behind, partly by accident, a huge unpaid bill here at Leisemeer's. He had been sure the debt must have been rescheduled. Because Leisemeer had risen beyond the restaurant work itself, into a white shirt and tie and the managing director's chair. Instead, here he was, bent over the convection oven, strong and coarse as a herdsman. Like circus owner Eli Benneweis, who had never learned to stay in his office either, but had continued to hang around the stables.

Kasper heard a sound he remembered, but couldn't identify. At the farthest end of the restaurant sat a woman and a man; the woman's back was to him; he zoomed in. It was the aristocrat from Strand Road. But now Our Lord or fate or the cosmetic industry had given her long black hair and a stylish suit. The man across from her was ten years younger than she and had shoulders nearly five feet across; his sound was awkward, as if he wasn't used to dining in a place where it cost five hundred kroner or more to eat one's fill.

Two-hundred-pound footsteps approached Kasper. A couple of champagne glasses were placed in front of him, and something was poured into one; he listened to the polyphony of the bubbles; it was Krug champagne.

He looked up at the completely bald head and waxed mustache, the same as Gurdjieff. It was Leisemeer.

"I've come to pay for everything," said Kasper.

The chef let the large drop-shaped bottle glide down into the wine bucket. Then he turned around.

Kasper reached him in a single movement. The chef would have walked away, but his left foot got stuck in a crook; the crook was  Kasper’s left foot. Leisemeer began to fall. In order to stop falling he tried to move his right foot. That too was stuck, in a crook created by Kasper’s right foot.