The Quiet Girl (29 page)

She had told him essentially nothing about her past. And he had not asked. They had danced around each other, after an unspoken agreement to avoid those places where the past was archived. And where the future is planned.

It had been a beautiful dance, moving, respectful. The flip side of respect is unnecessary distance. He slid down from the windowseat and opened one of the flat drawers; it was filled with letters.

* * *

One time, they had taken a shower together, here in the apartment; he had gotten out first. She had turned off the water. The drops from the walls and the shower curtain had played Chopin's Prelude in A-Major, drops of passion, oxygen-filled heart blood falling on black marble. She had lathered her palms, thinned the lather with water, and blown a soap bubble from her hands, as large as a coconut.

She put lather on one forearm and held it tight against her body under her left breast, outside her heart. She began to blow. He had never seen anything like it; the bubble was large, twelve inches in diameter, and floated like the sea lions' ball in the circus.

It did not pop. She captured it with the other arm, and now it formed a tube straight across her body. She stretched the tube; its sides curved inward, as if it wanted to expand and deflate simultaneously.

"Dirichlet's theorem," she said, "of minimal surfaces. A very nice proof. When we increase a surface, at the same time it gives way it will try to stretch over the least possible area."

She had come toward him. With the long, concave, shining bubble.

"Everything alive," she said. "And everything dead. Tries simultaneously to expand and hold back. Including love. It's a mystery. How does one go into free fall? And at the same time keep one's hand on the emergency brake?"

She was right next to him. It was as if there were an invisible layer of clear oil on her skin. Water could not stay on it; the film of water contracted and divided into drops, like on a dolphin.

"Is there a solution?" he said.

"Even if there were, you wouldn't want it."

The bubble touched him.

"And you've never wanted it. Even when you were very close to it."

The bubble burst.

It had been just a small mistake. But it had been enough. For a moment her sound had been different. Full of knowledge. He had sensed that she knew something about him. That she must have been inside a space in his system that he hadn't given her permission to enter. And that she must have taken something out of it. It was that memory this night had activated.

* * *

A person with good upbringing doesn't read other people's letters; he hadn't even read Bach's letters that were reprinted in the Groce edition. And he read Kierkegaard's only for academic reasons. But if one is to gain insights into feminine nature one must take advantage of every opportunity.

He lifted out the letters in piles and riffled through them. Someone who has shuffled and dealt cards with a lucky hand throughout a long life can quickly orient himself in a stack of papers.

The first pile was technical letters, Seismic Studies, Lund University, Lund, Sweden; British Geological Survey, Edinburgh. Stacks of letters from the European Mediterranean Seismological Center, EMSC, in Bruyà res-le-Chàtel. UCLA Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. On cheap copy paper. He came to the private letters; there weren't many. Or she kept them somewhere else. Or she didn't keep them. There was a thin bundle of handwritten letters on heavy off-white stationery. They were signed "Mother" or "Your Mother." There was no return address, but "Holte" was written next to the date. He found one envelope with a return address and stuck it in his pocket.

He continued looking. The sound in the room shifted. He knew he was getting close. He listened into several piles organized with large paper clips. There were letters from previous lovers; he shut his hearing hurriedly. Deep down, isn't it totally unacceptable for any woman to have had any lover but you?

Two pages touched his fingers and his hearing like a thorn. They were stapled together; the tiny pieces of metal had stuck him. He separated the pages. They were photocopies. Lie recognized the handwriting. It was his own. Carefully written more than twenty years ago. By a person that in some sense must have been him.

He had known he would find them. That was what he had heard in her voice that day in the shower. It was the sound of these letters.

A third letter was attached. Also handwritten. It was a photocopy of the reply he had received back then. The handwriting of the answer was uneven, slightly wavy. Like the handwriting in Mozart's musical scores had been. When you played Mozart you absolutely had to have a copy of the original; his scores were full of information. The same was true of the handwriting in front of him now.

He should have stopped at that point. But he continued. His fingers found a thicker shape. On a thin piece of paper were what looked like fingerprints, in purple ink. Five fingers, but broader than fingers' normal thickness. The print was protected with a clear adhesive coating and marked national police, cfi. Directly under it lay another printed sheet with numbers and combinations of letters marked crime laboratory. The address was Slotsherrens Road.

He drew a last card. It was a receipt for "various effects" marked MINISTRY OF JUSTICE, KIF, HORSENS.

He looked at his watch. It was Sunday morning. Not yet seven o'clock. He dialed Sonja's cell phone number.

It took a long time before she answered. Wherever she was, she wasn't at home; the acoustics were different, fewer surfaces to dampen the sound. She was in bed; he could hear the friction of textiles. There was a man beside her. She had alcohol in her voice, warm alcohol; it must be glogg, so close to Christmas.

He thought about what it must be like to be Sonja's husband, sitting there at home with the children. While she worked through the night and far into Sunday.

He thought about the tiny burst capillaries in her cheeks. The first small sign that one can get too much even of all the good things. Too many men, too much money, too much success. Too much Brunello wine.

He had never before used her cell phone number this way. She didn't ask any questions; she felt the seriousness immediately.

"I have five fingerprints," he said. "Unusually broad. Marked NATIONAL POLICE CFI. I have some numbers and letters of the alphabet from the crime lab. And a receipt from the Ministry of Justice marked kif and horsens. What am I getting into?"

"I need a little time. Can I call you back?"

He gave her Stina's number.

Sonja planned tours for large circuses and big rock concerts.

Each circus visited an average of eighty cities during a summer season, using logistics that were deeply rooted in tradition and based on trust and personal acquaintance. There wasn't a police chief in the country that she did not know well.

He sat on the windowseat. Stina and he had sat opposite each other here, naked. The curved window looked across outer Østerbro and out over the Sound. It was the only place in Nørrebro from which one could see the water. He knew that must have been the reason she chose the apartment. From down in the street he heard the taxi's horn.

The telephone rang.

"CFI," said Sonja, "is the Central Bureau for Identification. Its headquarters are at the main police station. The fingerprints look broad because they are what's called 'rolled off.' A detective has pressed the person's ringer on an ink pad and then rolled it across a piece of paper. CFI uses nine points per hand when they identify on the basis of a print; it's supposed to be almost as precise as DNA. And a DNA profile is most likely what you have from the crime lab. Both items can be returned when a person, after imprisonment, for example, is deleted from the Criminal Registry, which is the National Police's central database, the database from which one gets criminal records. The KIF receipt is from Criminal Care in Freedom, a system of thirty-two very open prisons. Among the five closed state prisons, Horsens is the only one with high-security detention, if we don't count the rock-musician units. So what you're dealing with is a person who has served a long sentence, has spent the last part of that sentence in an open prison after good behavior, and subsequently, in accordance with police regulations, has gotten the fingerprint records back as proof that he or she is no longer listed in the Criminal Registry."

Kasper listened to the apartment. It had a new sound. Perhaps Sonja heard it too.

"It's the woman," she said. "You've discovered that she was in prison."

Fie did not say anything.

"It may have been for something relatively harmless," she said. "You and I, like most people, would be arrested if we laid all our cards on the table for the authorities."

She had always been able to comfort him, or anybody, even when they were very young. This time it didn't work.

"Is it glogg?" he asked.

"Sake."

"Take care," he said.

He hung up.
 

3

The taxi had dropped him off on Strand Road, and he had entered the trailer quietly. Stina was asleep; he sat in a chair listening to her sleep. Her body was completely relaxed; he wasn't able to hear her dreams.

He sat there perhaps a quarter of an hour. Then she sat up in bed. She woke up like a cat, one moment deep unconsciousness, the next total presence.

"There's something I want to tell you," he said. "And to ask you. It will take some time."

She reached for the telephone and reported that she wasn't coming to work. No clever excuse that could have made life easier for the person at the other end, just a laconic report, and then she hung up.

They drove south; at Bellevue he turned off the road and parked by the train station. Without saying a word they walked north, skirting Bakken amusement park, through Ulve Glen in Deer Park, across Eremitage Plain toward Hjorte Pool, past the castle. At the top of the hill they sat down on a bench.

Eremitage Plain didn't have Nature's usual dry tone, perhaps because of the trees, perhaps due to the Sound's shining surface; a quiet body of water is as hard as stone. The acoustics were like those in a concert hall, all the surfaces hard and reflecting.

Somewhere Martinus had said or written that Eremitage Plain was an earthly reflection of a spiritual fact in a better world. At this moment Kasper understood him; from the place where they now sat it was possible to live with the sound of the Charlottenlund and Hellerup suburbs as well as the central city behind them.

"When I was twelve I broke my back," he said. "I was part of a classic barrel act. You hop blindfolded with your legs tied together up a stack of three-foot barrels to a height of about twenty-six feet, receive applause, turn around, hop down again, and finish with forward somersaults and a twist. At a height of twenty feet I jumped incorrectly, grazed the barrel, hit the next one. The stack fell over and tumbled down on top of me. They were sixtv-six-pound beer kegs from Carlsberg brewery. I broke my back and hip. At Rigshospital they said I would never walk again, and that I would have to be spoon-fed the rest of my life, and the rest of my life might be very short. They closed two doors before they said that, but 1 heard them anyway."

He heard her empathy.

"It wasn't so bad," he said, "ft was like starting to fall--a weight was taken off me, the weight of being an ordinary twelve-year-old boy in the mid-seventies. An interlude had begun, and in that interlude I heard for the first time. I heard the hospital, the trip home, the car, the winter quarters, as id never heard before. It wasn't just the physical sounds; it was their context. Usually we never hear the world as it is. We hear an edited production. The sounds we like, we draw forward. 7 he ringing in the ticket booth when they balance the cash. The fanfare that announces the little circus princess we're in love with. "The bubbling sound of eight hundred people in a full tent. Whereas the sounds we don't like, we push away. The sound of leather reinforcements on deteriorated canvas. The sound of frightened horses. The sound of the toilets. Of the gusty wind in August that tells us summer is soon over. And the rest of the sounds are irrelevant--we tone them down--the traffic, the city, the mundane. That's how we listen. Because we've got things to do, because we're on our way somewhere, even a twelve-year-old boy. But suddenly I no longer had any projects; they were taken away from me. And for the first time I heard some of the world alive, unfiltered, unmuted."

He saw that Stina's eyes were gray now. But at other times they had been different. Turquoise, greenish. Sometimes flecked. "When you really listen, all sounds begin to organize themselves into themes. They aren't haphazard. We don't live in chaos. Someone is trying to play something. Trying to create a piece of music. SheAlmighty. That's the name I gave to the composer. The one who creates the music. I lay in bed for three months; then they realized I was getting better and started to give me physical therapy. But I have only vague memories of the healing process. The joy was felt mostly by the others. What I was preoccupied with was the other thing. Being in my body and the world without muted sound--again and again, briefly, always briefly, always just for a moment. It sets an agenda. Even if you're only twelve years old, even if you don't have words for it, still you know that what will really matter for the rest of your life is to be able to really listen. To have a picture of the world that's true to nature. To hear it as it actually is. And with this longing comes the fear of not succeeding. That was twenty years ago. Half a lifetime is gone. And I haven't come much closer."

"So what keeps us from hearing?" she asked.

It took him a long time to reply. Only once before had he spoken about this to another person.

"In order to live in this world we need to keep an orchestra playing. Way in the foreground. It's a small dance orchestra. It always plays its own melody. It plays the golden oldie 'Kasper Krone.' Which has a series of refrains that are repeated over and over. Again and again it plays our bank account numbers, our childhood memories, our PIN numbers, the sound of our mother's and father's voices. The pale-green strophes we hope will be the future. The black noise we have good reason to suppose will be our actual reality. It plays continuously, like a heartbeat. But when the other sound begins to come through, you discover that you've been standing with your back to the true concert hall the whole time. We live in a sort of lobby. Where we can faintly hear the great orchestra. And that sound, just the embouchure to a sound from the real concert hall, makes the Mass in B-Minor disappear. Like a whisper in windy weather. It's a sound that sweeps away the din of war. It drowns the music of the spheres. It takes away all the sounds of reality. And at the same time as you vaguely hear the great orchestra, you vaguely sense the price of the ticket. When the door to the real concert hall begins to open you discover that perhaps you were mistaken. That Kasper Krone exists only because your ears continue to isolate the same little refrain from the collected mass of sound. That in order to preserve Kasper and Stina we've turned down the input from other channels to pianissimo. But that's about to change. And you can feel it. II you want to go inside, it will be the most expensive concert ticket anyone has ever bought. It will cost you the sound of your own self."