The Quiet Girl (35 page)

Franz Fieber wrote something on a small tablet under the icon, without taking his eyes off the road. He reached back and handed the piece of paper to Kasper.

Kasper tried to dial the number, but wasn't able to; his hands were haking. He pointed to the number and the African dialed for him. He had to push the bandages aside to get the telephone to his ear. It took an eternity before the phone got answered. By a large person.

"This is Fieber's big brother," said Kasper. "Fieber says you have a boat you can have ready in fifteen minutes."

The man gurgled into the receiver.

"Get a doctor! It's the middle of the night!"

The motive for our actions doesn't lie ahead of us. It's something behind us that we're trying to escape. The voice on the telephone had memories of disappointment and abandonment. It had protected itself against those memories with material things. The words came from a fleshy body in a huge house.

"It pains me," said Kasper, "to think that you could have kept your job. And been ten thousand kroner richer."

They were driving along the Bispebuen highway. The telephone receiver was silent. Perhaps it was all just imagination. And the man was about to hang up.

"In cash?"

Kasper took the Institute money out of his bathrobe pocket and held the bills up in the light from the highway. He counted twenty bills. With a picture of Niels Bohr on them. The quantum mechanic had large bags under his eyes. It must have been hard on him. To live with a saint's heart and intelligence. And yet have lent a hand to the bomb.

"In slightly used five-hundred-kroner bills," he said.

He heard a lamp get turned on, the bed groaned, something heavy growled. His wife or the Rottweiler.

"The harbor is closed at night," said the man.

"Have they really managed to convince a true sailor that the Sound closes at sunset?"

They entered Øboulevard Avenue.

"The Kalvebod pier," said the voice. "Diagonally across from the sluiceway."

* * *

They drove past the central railway station and the main post office. Then turned south along the harbor and past the new fish market. When Kasper was a child there had been coal storehouses, houseboats, and manufacturing industries here; now there were shopping centers and nightclubs.

They passed the H. C. Ørsted power plant and Belvedere Wharf. He hadn't been here for ten years. When he was a child 250 cutters had been moored here, and there had been community gardens where people lived year-round. Now there were bowling alleys, mixed-use housing, and porn-film studios. A number of the small and medium-size circuses had stayed here; he remembered several winter seasons in South Harbor. At that time, the city had ended here, and southeast of the Zealand Bridge it was all tundra. Now there were golf courses, a soccer stadium, gas stations. Three houses he remembered from those days had been designated as historic landmarks and now stood inside a fence on the golf course grounds. What is one to think, that in half a generation we have gone from the jungle to the zoo?

"When I was a child," he said, "this area was the seedy side of the city. Now it's all respectable. I don't understand it."

It's always nice to have an audience. But he was speaking to himself. He had not expected an answer.

"The seedy side is intact," said the African. "As much as in those days. Or more. It has simply put on makeup."

He was seized by anger he did not understand.

"How," he said, "has an underage nun who grew up in the bush acquired such wisdom about the shadowy sides of life?"

She leaned over, kicked away Franz Fieber's leg, and jammed on the brake. Kasper was almost jolted out of the wheelchair and thrown through the front window. Franz Fieber was white as a ghost.

She pulled the medallion over her head, handed it to Kasper, and turned on the overhead light. Kasper saw a photograph of two children and a man on a green lawn. The children were arms and legs and wild, white smiles. The man had a gentle mouth and a look that salted the gentleness.

"I'm thirty-five," she said. "I have a husband and two children."

The silver medallion was warm against his hand. It had her fragrance. He knew that somewhere in the tropics there must be a plant that exuded precisely this aroma in the midday sun.

He turned over the flat piece of metal. On the reverse side were engraved two Zulu shields, two crossed Asagai fauna, and the words FIRST PAN-AFRICAN AIKIDO CHAMPIONSHIP.

"I'm becoming more and more attracted to the life of a nun," he said. "Can one aspire to that?"

* * *

They parked opposite two shallow basins between two piers; at the end of one pier they saw some movement; otherwise everything was quiet. Sister Gloria wheeled him onto the lift and set him down on the ground. She pushed him slowly, calmly, across the road, and toward the pier. There was no traffic. He loved the night. When he was a little boy his mother had read to him--not often, because there hadn't been time or extra energy, but sometimes. She had read Palle Alone in the World. He had heard the silence in the book. Behind the drawings, behind the words, behind the book's apparent loneliness, he had heard the refreshing silence in a city where everything is at rest.

He had the same feeling now: that the city around him was completely quiet. And that a capable female presence moved him forward.

On the farthest cement bollard sat a man wrapped in a horse blanket. Already halfway out the pier Kasper knew he had seen him before, seen him or heard him.

The Beet stood up, but his turquoise eyes gave no sign that he recognized the figure in the wheelchair. It would have been strange if he had; Kasper was bandaged like a mummy. The man was the person who had operated Stina's boat outside the National Bank art eternity of fourteen days ago.

"If we're going inside the barricaded area," he said, "it will be five thousand extra."

Bohr looked even more debilitated under the sodium lights. Stina had once told Kasper about Einstein's opposition to the quantum mechanic's theories of probability. Like all great poker players, Einstein had a sense of the limits of random chance. To meet the Beet here in South Harbor was outside those limits. Kasper shuddered a little. For a moment he had a sense that SheAlmighty was playing with a marked deck.

He opened the Cognac, the African handed him two eyecups; he managed to pour despite his trembling hands.

"Sister Gloria and I," he said, "live at the same convent. Monks and nuns are separated by a grill. For a whole year we've looked at each other through that grill. We can get out only for tonight, which is her eighteenth birthday. So we'd like to celebrate alone."

The man looked at the bandages. At the plaster cast. At the wheelchair.

"That's five thousand extra. As a deposit. I'll return it when you get back."

Kasper put on his glasses. Counted out half the amount. Not without difficulty.

"We'll leave the boat in there," he said. "Nyhavn Canal. No risk for you in that. And I'm sure you remember how it was to be eighteen and in love."

The man stared at Kasper. Kasper raised his glass for a toast.

"To the Savior," he said. "The first toast is always to the Savior."

Sister Gloria laid two aluminum planks from the pier to the gunwale, and wheeled Kasper onto the boat.

"It's a Yanmar," said the man. "How are you going to get it started?"

The nun opened the engine compartment, set the choke, opened the compression release, turned on the ignition; the engine started. She released the clutch, put it in gear, gave it gas, and the boat slowly glided past the man on the pier.

Kasper raised his glass.

"She took the boiler-attendant exam," he said. "Before she studied to be a doctor. But after she had recanted her eternal promises. And graduated to black belt."

* * *

The boat glided out of the sluiceway; the harbor channel widened.

"We trained back there," said Kasper, "when I was a child. The smaller circuses that couldn't afford real winter quarters, they camped here or in North Harbor. When spring came, at lunchtime we would go down and sit on the pier by the spice warehouses. I had a dream, a daydream, then and for many years afterward. An image that came by itself. I imagined I'd have children, I'd show them where I had lived and worked. It was always this harbor I saw in my mind. And one day I'd stand with them in the stern of a sailing ship gazing in toward South Harbor, and we'd be on our way to some distant place. And there would be a feeling of great freedom."

"Was there a woman too," asked the African, "in the dream?"

He thought about that.

"No," he said. "It was, in fact, just the children and me."

They passed Teglholmen and Tømmergraven appeared to port; they neared the barricaded area. A nylon net hanging from a cable attached to orange buoys had been stretched across the channel, interrupted only by a boom beside a platform with a small shack on it.

He recalled the other barriers he had encountered in his search for KlaraMaria. He thought about the Blue Lady. He knew he was seeing something projected from his own mind. The knowledge gave him a brief feeling of deep serenity.

He thought about the man whose boat he had now rented, another instance of something that was both a hindrance and a help on his way toward the quiet girl. He looked at the African opposite him, who was yet another manifestation of feminine nature. He could feel the repetitions; he was trapped in tonal repetition, a form of erasing the tape. But for the first time in his life, he knew it. Freedom would come through this knowledge; he could hear that.

"We'll be stopped," said the African.

He listened. There was no one in the shack.

"We're on a nonviolent mission for SheAlmighty" he said. "We have the cosmos with us."

She helped him out of the wheelchair and into the bottom of the boat; she lay down on a thwart. The boat glided under the boom. There was no one to be seen on the platform; they were in Gasværk Harbor.

"Why didn't you have any children?" she asked.

To his amazement he heard himself telling the truth. Or the tiny bit of the truth that can be expressed.

"Maybe I never believed I'd have enough stability to be able to offer to a child. I knew I could do something for children for half an hour or forty-five minutes. In the ring. Under the lights. But maybe I wasn't really suited to anything more than that."

"Was there ever a woman?"

"Only once that was serious. And that was very brief."

One must be careful about being honest. Suddenly he heard the loneliness close in around him. He felt her listening. He could tell that at this moment she heard and understood his system.

"Even with children one is often alone," she said. "Even in a family. Children change very quickly. There's no stability. One is constantly reminded that in a little while they will be gone. I've been away for a month this time. When I come home in three weeks, they will have changed; it will be as though I'm seeing them for the first time. As if they are strangers. In everyday life too. Perhaps it's true that love is eternal. But its appearance changes all the time."

Just ahead of the boat was a fog bank; they sailed into it.

Lange Bridge emerged from the fog. It was closed. But a car was parked by the HK building. When your driver's license has been revoked in two European countries you instinctively keep an eye out for the man with a camera. Kasper found him on the bridge, on the walkway next to the control tower. The African saw him too.

"They've seen us," she said. "We'll be picked up; the whole area is patrolled by the navy."

Kasper pointed; the boat turned into Christianshavn's canals. Most of the neighborhood had been evacuated, the office buildings were dark, the vacant apartments were dark, the streets were empty. The boat glided under the arch of the bridge below Torve Street. The arch concentrated all sound, since concave surfaces focus sound at a central point; bridge arches are acoustic crystal balls, condensing all the surrounding sounds. Kasper heard the echo from the empty apartments. He heard the sound of water being soaked up through the masonry. The sound of incipient collapse. And some distance away: an incomprehensible sound of the tropics.

On the top floor of the last house on Overgaden Neden Vandet Street, narrow strips of light sifted through the heavily curtained windows.

2

The rain-forest birds did not sing; they laughed, they screeched, they gurgled. Behind it all one could just make out the towering blue shadow of Kilimanjaro swimming in the mist. At the foot of the mountain, the succulent greenness of the Serengeti. In front of the savanna, the rain forest and the birds. In front of the rain forest, a woman sitting in an easy chair by a table with two bottles of liquor and one glass.

Perhaps she was 95, perhaps 295. At some point in prehistoric times she had merged with the chair; you could no longer tell where the person stopped and the massive piece of furniture began.

Kasper rolled his wheelchair over to the table. He still didn't dare to breathe. The smell was too strong, the smell of death and liquor.

The African remained standing by the door.

"It's mealworms," said the woman in the chair. "For the birds. They crawl under the carpet, where they lie and rot. There's nothing to do about it. Have a drink, dear friend. How did you find your way here? Who's the little black sweetie?"

The room could have been light, the air could have been fresh; there were six windows facing the canal. But they were covered with shades and curtains.

"I'm the son of Maximillian Krone."

"Can you prove that, dear friend?"

The skin on her face was as lifeless as that of a wax doll. One mottled gray eye stared blindly into the jungle; the other was black and intensely alive. It examined Kasper's passport.

The room was vast, but inaccessible. The jungle was contained in large ceramic pots placed on synthetic felt carpet before a photocopy of the African scene. In front of the plants were the table, the chair, and a stand for grow lights. Flitting around the plants were at least a hundred birds. The remaining two-thirds of the room was filled with a dense mass of paper and cardboard. Rows of books, photograph albums, bundles of letters, newspapers, postcards, file boxes, catalogs, oil paintings, and posters were stacked and stuffed from floor to ceiling.