by Peter Høeg
Keld Keldsen has had a little think. He’s had a fag, or half of one. His nerves have settled. He leans across in front of me and opens the door.
‘Out!’
‘I’ve got two kids in deep shit,’ I tell him. ‘The boy and I nearly got killed.’
He turns to face me. The cheerful mood of before, with all its promise of lemon half-moon cake, is gone. In its place is something else: the threat of physical violence. Any second now I’ll be scrabbling on the ground outside.
‘If you’d only allow me to sit on your knee,’ I say, and slip immediately onto his lap.
It takes him by surprise. Me, too.
I throw the car into reverse and hit the accelerator.
We’re less than twenty metres from the wall and doing thirty kilometres an hour at the most when we hit it. Nonetheless, the impact is considerable. The rear window shatters into a cloud of tiny shards, the boot springs open and we’re at a halt.
The girl in the yacht club kiosk stiffens mid-movement, her little brush applicator suspended halfway between the nail varnish bottle and her extended fingernail. The fisherman on the boat freezes like the water around the jetty. Normal reality is momentarily suspended.
‘What was the Future Commission?’
He grabs me by the throat. I press him back into the seat, thrust the car into gear and put my foot down hard. The tyres squeal and the Jaguar leaps forward.
Acute peril is a litmus test of how deep a person’s outward composure actually runs. As we plunge down the steps, Keld Keldsen starts to scream. We hit the jetty, the hard English suspension making the car bound like a kangaroo. I slam the accelerator down, then move my foot swiftly to the brake.
The jetty is made of smoothly planed planks. They’re as slippery as soap. We skid to a halt, the Jag’s front end jutting out over the iced-up slush of the waters below.
Beneath me, Keld Keldsen is a knotted muscle. I swivel in his lap so I can see him.
‘Keld,’ I tell him. ‘Look at me.’
He’s only partially in touch with the real world. I lower my head in front of his face and point two fingers at my eyes.
‘Keld,’ I say again. ‘What do you see here?’
He stares at me blankly.
‘“The Story of a Mother”,’ I say, helping him along. ‘Hans Christian Andersen. You know it, Keld, don’t you? The mother who’ll give up anything to bring back her child. Her hair, her eyes, her tax-deductible pension plan. That’s half of what you see. The other half is the mad scientist. Frankenstein. Mabuse. Dr Strangelove. I’m a cross between them all. And do you know what? That makes me one mean son of a bitch, as they say. Do you get my drift, Keld? We’re talking one step away from a straitjacket.’
He nods.
‘I need to know what that commission was all about. And if you’re not going to tell me now, I’m going to put my foot down on the accelerator and we’re going to take a nosedive through the ice. The water’s at least seven metres deep here. With the door open we’ll go straight to the bottom. Which is fine by me, I’m a winter bather. Ten minutes every morning, splashing about in the freezing-cold sea at the open-air baths in Charlottenlund. I love it. But you probably won’t survive, Keld. Do you understand me?’
He nods again.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘So talk.’
He has to clear his throat several times. I remain seated in his lap. It shouldn’t stop him from breathing properly: I’m well under sixty kilos. Anyway, it means I’ve still got the wheel and the accelerator.
‘Seventy-two,’ he whispers. ‘It was set up in nineteen seventy-two.’
‘Go on – and speak so I can hear you!’
‘No one took it seriously. There were six of us, straight out of college. Later we brought in six more.’
‘Why seventy-two?’
His mind is wandering. I need to keep him focused.
‘It was the fashion then, all of a sudden, to listen to what young people had to say. It’s all gone by the board now. But back then it was the order of the day. The kids were everywhere. Students in the governing bodies. A children’s council. Student councils in the schools. A children’s parliament in the Folketing. A UN plenary assembly for youth. Think tanks were popping up all over. Someone got the idea the government should have a young people’s think tank. Everything was in flux. The landslide election of seventy-three, when half of parliament got voted out, was only a matter of months off. So they got us together. Six young people, with Magrethe taking the chair. Shortly after, there were twelve of us. We met several times a year for two years. That’s all there is. There’s nothing more to it.’
‘Keld,’ I say reproachfully, ‘there’s a lot more to it.’
I sense the pre-tension of muscle. He’s preparing a desperate counter.
I swivel back, throw the car into reverse and put my foot down hard. The wheels spin before finding purchase and the Jag tears off backwards. We’re already doing a fair lick when we hit the steps. Immediately, the rear hatch is lost, the windscreen cracks and showers down on us, the thud of the wheels against each stone step clutches at our insides, and then we’re back on the quayside, slamming into the wall and finally coming to a halt.
The fisherman and the girl watch us. Only their eyes move.
‘What made you all so special, Keld?’
He clears his throat. Twice as many times as before. He’s beginning to understand how serious I am.
‘To begin with, no one took much notice. Not even us. We met and talked about the future. Gave talks for each other. Every six months we’d write a report. No one ever read them except us. Or if anyone in the Folketing ever did, they never let on. After two years, someone got the idea of drawing up an overview. By that time they had five reports to go on. The overview listed all our predictions and held them up against reality. It named twenty-four key events, domestic and foreign. Not only had we predicted them all, we’d done so with an accuracy of within three weeks!’
Even here inside the car, with the wind from the Øresund blowing in through the empty space left by the windscreen, he’s proud of himself.
‘By then, the first American surveys had come in about think tanks and their prognostic accuracy. Ours left the rest for dead! The summary said no other instance came anywhere near. We could tell the future. Like looking it up in a table.’
‘You must have known.’
‘Of course we knew! But we were hardly out of our twenties. We thought we were champions of the world. But there’s always a nagging doubt. At that age. Somewhere deep down, in the murky depths, there’s a part of you that’s never quite sure. So the overview was what we needed in order to see it was true. And even then it wasn’t enough.’
He stops. I put my hands on the wheel to remind him of how easily we can take off again.
‘We read it and planned our next meeting as usual. It was always just circumstances that decided where. Sometimes we’d borrow a room at Christiansborg, sometimes at the university. Often it was at someone’s flat. Once, when we all happened to be going away on the same day, we met in a restaurant in the departure lounge at the airport. Anyway, this next meeting was scheduled for mid-week, the report having come out on the Friday. Only we couldn’t find anywhere to have it. It was the middle of February, Hartling’s government had stepped down the day before, so Christiansborg was fully booked. In the end we borrowed a loft at Gammel Dok. It was my turn to make the tea and coffee, so I got there early. When I opened the door there were four men and two women sitting there. It turns out they’re intelligence, PET and FET, police and military. Along with a government minister. So there’s not going to be any meeting. When the rest of them get there we’re told that from now on we’re to convene only within the confines of Slotsholmen. There’s going to be two observers, security on the door, everything’s going down on tape and would we please write down our full names, addresses and telephone numbers on this list? When they’re finished, it all goes quiet. We exchange glances. And t
hen we tell them where to stuff it. Their faces turn grey, but what are they supposed to do? They go away again. We decide to forget about the day’s agenda and adjourn to Rabes Have where we order fancy smørrebrød with beer and aquavit and make plans. Later that afternoon, on behalf of the commission, I write to the Folketing and tell them we don’t care, no one’s going to tell us what to do, so we’re resigning to carry on as private citizens whose discussions won’t be any concern of theirs. Less than twenty-four hours after the letter is sent, Magrethe and I get picked up. We were the only ones whose identities they were certain about. I was at the Geodetic Institute’s map shop, but they found me nonetheless, drove me round the corner to Slotsholmen and took me upstairs to a room at the top where they’d got Magrethe waiting. So now it’s a different game altogether. No police, no demands, just one man.’
‘Thorkild Hegn?’
He nods.
‘He apologises for the day before, our freedom was inviolable, of course, and was never in question, blah blah blah. Anyway, he’d like us to stay on. Only no longer under the auspices of the Folketing. He thinks it best our work be accorded complete freedom and discretion, so they’re going to make a little umbrella for us. A small office, that’s all, with a secretary so we won’t have the bother of typing and filing our reports. What would we say to that? At that point we’d had the lunch at Rabes Have to cement a mood, so we say up to a point, only we want to be self-elective, we won’t be giving up any names, we won’t be accountable to anyone apart from drawing up the semi-annual report. And besides that, we want some money. He gives us everything we ask for. And that’s when we begin to realise what we’ve got going on. Because even though we’ve never seen Hegn before, we sense very strongly that this is a man who, if he wants something done, can be sure people are going to get their behinds into gear.’
I pick up the remnant of his cigarette, place it between his lips, strike a match and light it for him. I have to cup my hands against the wind. From somewhere behind the city’s tall buildings, sunlight slants down, spilling over the narrow belt of ice and leaving a twinkling ribbon on the water.
All of a sudden, I sense why he became a surveyor. He loves well-defined boundaries. And now the world is coming apart all around him.
‘Keld,’ I tell him, ‘you’ve got an erection.’
His face sets. He blushes, a crimson bloom that becomes him. It takes away some of his paleness.
‘Not that I take it personally,’ I say. ‘Most likely it’s due to the series of little shocks you’ve just had to your system. It’s a well-known physiological regularity that men in mortal dread often get erections. But it does mean I’m unable to accept your offer of a lift back to the Eksperimentarium. A stiff cock can be so intimidating to a woman.’
I climb out of the car. The fisherman and the girl in the kiosk stare at me. I’d like to do something for them. Those of us with the gift of starting a situation have a certain responsibility to stop it again. I raise my voice.
‘Keld,’ I say, ‘I don’t think I need any more driving lessons. I think I’m ready to take my test.’
I turn and walk off.
24
I BIKE IT to Hellerup Station. A little short cut takes me down past the bridge over the railway cutting and the entrance to the Defence College’s First and Second Sections.
Across the tracks I can see the car park in front of the college and it’s as good as empty. The excavation has been filled in.
I cross the road.
Andrea Fink’s field theory accords an important role to the principle of verified intuition.
If one day you should find yourself fancying baked anglerfish in a cockle and clam sauce and you get on your bike and pedal over to the quay at Taarbæk Havn, and at the very moment you get there the good ship Betty is putting in and Finn the Fish just happens to have with him a bucket of five anglerfish, and another full of cockles and clams, and you get the lot for two hundred kroner on account of Finn always having been a ladies’ man and because he can appreciate there must be something in the coincidence of it, even if he hasn’t read quantum physics – if all this happens, or something like it, then what you’ve got is very possibly a rudimentary instance of verified intuition.
Most people would call it an idea that just happened to get lucky. But one of the first things Andrea Fink discovered, she told me, was that when it comes to certain groupings of people, the frequency of instances of verified intuition starts to increase as a function of time – first linearly, then exponentially – until before long, singularities begin to occur, events that go beyond known models of description.
It was my own frequency of such instances that made her force me to sign, in the presence of witnesses at the premises of the Police Licensing Unit, a document to the effect that I would never engage in gambling.
Crossing Hellerupvejen, as I do now, turns out to be yet another of those instances.
The same young man as before is sitting in the security cabin at the barrier. Seeing me park my bike, he blushes and comes out.
‘There was something I wanted to ask you,’ I say. ‘Do you keep a list of vehicles going in and out?’
He shakes his head.
‘Only names. And it’s not complete.’
‘The day before yesterday, when I was here. Do you remember a dark-coloured van? It must have come just after me.’
‘It was the next one through. From a building contractor who’s doing the digging for the council.’
‘Did he show you any ID?’
He shakes his head again.
‘We’re only here so people can see there’s no access. There’s no real checks. He did come back, though. Later in the day.’
I’m wearing an anorak and a scarf, woolly hat and gloves, and I’m sweating from the bike ride. Nevertheless, I feel a sudden chill.
‘He asked about you. And the boy. I told him I let you in.’
We look at each other. It’s a dizzying moment.
‘But I never said I saw you leave.’
‘Why not?’
He shakes his head for the third time. Like the majority of us, he’s essentially unable to explain his actions.
‘There was something about him. The guy next to him, too. I didn’t think … I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?’
‘You did exactly right. More than you’ll ever know,’ I reply. ‘Were they in a truck with a loading crane?’
He nods.
The remains of the Passat would have been on the flatbed. Naturally, they were decent enough to tidy up after themselves.
To be on the safe side, they enquired about me. And thanks to an almost unbelievable instance of verified intuition, this young god has denied to them my existence. Thereby perhaps affording us a little more sand for our hourglass.
‘My name’s Lars. What you said, about putting me on your dance card. Does that still apply?’
‘I’m in the middle of a divorce.’
‘I can wait till you’re finished.’
I’ve got a soft spot for men who, in the face of rejection, still find the means within them to hang around and wait.
‘In quantum physics we say that divorcing from a profound romantic relationship takes seven years on average.’
Wistfully, his eyes follow an S-train as it rattles past.
‘So even if a person waited seven years, he couldn’t be sure?’
‘I’m afraid not. It’s called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The best quantum physics can offer is a statistical probability.’
I glance to my right, then to my left. Then I lean forward and kiss him on the mouth.
As I cross Ryvangs Allé, he’s still standing there, rooted to the spot.
Stories abound – in art, religion and other such unreliable sources – of people who, during or after some particular experience, find themselves transformed into one or another phenomenon of solid-state physics. If one were to sift through the empirical evidence, one would most probabl
y discover that the reality behind such exaggeration is that the persons in question were given a kiss. A kiss of the most unexpected and paralysing kind.
25
THE FIRST SET of traffic lights on Nørre Allé after the H.C. Ørsted Institute is the one directly outside the Faculty Library of Natural and Health Sciences, and that’s where I finally managed to get rid of Laban twenty-four years ago on that cold Wednesday in April.
Or at least that’s what I thought.
I ask him to hold my bike while I go in to pick up a book I’ve reserved. I walk past the statue of Niels Steensen in his wizard’s hat and his blustering pose before the naked corpse of a woman on whom he’s about to perform an autopsy, then proceed inside into the foyer, lifting the flap in the counter and continuing into those most hallowed of vaults.
I’ve never been on this side of the counter before and I’m not supposed to be, either, but if a person exudes enough confidence, most doors will open of their own accord. So that’s what I do, and what I’ve decided is that I’m not going to end up like the woman on that plinth outside, the poor victim of some all-powerful male, and although Laban Svendsen at this point in time is still in his very early twenties and a simple conservatory student of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, I have long been aware of his wizard’s hat and his scalpel.
So I stride through the lending area, and on through the imposing depots of books and magazines, before opening an emergency exit and emerging into a garden somewhere behind the Department of Exercise and Sports, from where I slip out onto Tagensvej and walk on up to Jagtvej, hop on a bus going to Frederiksberg, and twenty minutes later I’m sitting in front of Andrea Fink in the honorary residence, convinced that Laban will surely grasp the implications of being so unequivocally stood up.
To bring him to such realisation has cost me a second-hand Raleigh with a floral-patterned saddle, purchased at a police auction.