by Peter Høeg
Fifteen minutes later I’m sitting in the car. At six, as the arsenic hour draws to a close, I pull up outside Bagsværd Church.
A fence has been erected around the church and the little park surrounding it. It looks all wrong. Not because I’m particularly familiar with Bagsværd Church, but because in this country we’re unused to seeing churches fenced off as private property. The gate is a superior example of TIG welding in stainless steel. The mailbox likewise. I know instinctively the work is Kirsten Klaussen’s own.
I get a fright when I see the dog, the Dobermann pinscher, a male, motionlessly alert just inside the gate. It glares at me with all the insensitivity of a reptile.
There’s a camera installed above the intercom system. I step forward and press the button.
Minutes pass.
‘Do you realise what time it is?’
Quantum physics has a theory that reality is forever completing itself and making itself whole. The theory is confirmed here. The rust lacking on the gate and the mailbox is on her larynx instead.
I hold Magrethe Spliid’s list of names up in front of the camera.
Barely a minute passes before she appears at the door. Still in her nightdress, her hair looking like she’s had her hands on a van de Graaff generator.
She calls the dog. It obeys immediately. Its eyes are still fixed on me. It may well be that it only eats on command, but I’d give ten to one it’s been hoping for an order to devour me.
The gate opens.
People grab all sorts of things when tumbling out of bed in the early morning. Some reach for their dentures, others a toothbrush, while others will make a beeline for something alcoholic. Kirsten Klaussen has chosen a Havana cigar. It juts from her mouth, and she peers at me along its length.
She looks at me as if trying to establish what kind of alloy I am.
Then she steps aside and I enter the church.
Removal boxes line the walls. Everything seems to have been packed except for the odd piece of furniture and what would appear to be in the region of ten thousand DVDs, a flat-screen TV measuring two by three metres, and a sound system that takes up most of the end wall and wouldn’t be out of place in a concert venue.
A narrow channel of water runs in from outside and passes underneath a pair of double doors made of heavy oak. A couple of metres further on, the channel widens, opening out into a large, shallow, asymmetric basin clad in blue tile and illuminated from below. The surface of the water is unnaturally still, invisible almost, the way water only ever is indoors.
Protruding out towards the centre of this pool is a wooden platform on which a complete kitchen has been installed. Here, presumably, she sits in the mornings, tossing toast crusts to her Dobermann.
If, that is, she is at all willing to share. Kirsten Klaussen weighs upwards of 100 kilos. The ankles bared by her night-dress are about the same diameter as Grecian columns.
‘I don’t suppose you saw a Dobermann on your way? A bitch. She doesn’t normally go off on her own, so I’m a bit worried.’
She hasn’t managed to ruin the space entirely. It’s still incredibly arresting. Perhaps even more so because it’s almost been cleared. The organ is the only remaining indication of it ever having been a church. The walls, too, are bare. Apart from something resembling a sewage pipe of bluish aluminium.
‘I always wanted to own a building designed by Utzon. By the time I could afford it he was already dead. I know you. You’re Susan something-or-other. One of Andrea Fink’s little protegées. What became of you?’
She must have a memory akin to Harald’s. Or better. It’s fifteen years since she saw me last. At the honorary residence, and from a distance.
‘I went into administration.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘To earn a living.’
She nods.
‘There’s never been any money in science. Not even in metallurgy.’
She lifts the sewage pipe off the wall as if it were made of cardboard. Now I can see it’s got a trigger mechanism, a telescopic sight and a muzzle.
‘People think of technology as applied science. They think physics precedes technology, when in actual fact it’s the opposite. Physics developed as an attempt to provide solutions to problems identified and formulated by technicians like me. Because we’re more in touch with the real world. Who gave you those names?’
‘Magrethe Spliid. Just before she was murdered.’
‘And why did she give them to you?’
‘Maybe so the rest of you could be warned. Kornelius is dead. Keldsen too.’
She fondles the weapon.
‘A mere five kilograms. Twelve hundred needle rounds a minute and enough muzzle velocity for an adult torso to be torn open by the mere thrust of a single projectile passing by at twenty centimetres. Not only did I design and construct it, I can also hit thirty out of thirty-five moving targets in a minute and a half, at a range of eight hundred and fifty metres.’
‘You’re not going to get a minute and a half. And you won’t see them at eight hundred and fifty metres.’
She doesn’t hear me.
‘Practical metallurgy begins with copper jewellery. Alloying and soldering skills are developed with the setting of precious stones. Welding and the forging of complex forms begins with Greek statuettes and ritual vessels of the Shang dynasty. Ceramics comes of trial and error with the firing of small fertility goddesses in clay. Glass stems from attempts to embellish beads of quartz and steatite. Most minerals and organic combinations were discovered by painters in search of a pigment. We are artists, Susan. And society has yet to realise the fact.’
She turns, graceful as a hippopotamus, all one hundred and something kilos utterly under control. Her weapon points, as if by accident, at my abdomen.
She smiles. It’s a smile that ought to open all doors for her. All the way to a padded cell.
‘We members of the commission were paid a pittance. Three hundred and fifty thousand kroner a year by the time it came to an end. A fraction of what any mediocre solicitor would be given for a single annual meeting of one of the major boards. Is it so strange that we eventually decided to make some money on our own? We could have won the country fifteen hundred times the acclaim of Bohr and his sons put together. Not to mention money. Money like water! We foresaw Halk’s discoveries. We predicted the mineral finds of molybdenum and uranium in the subsoil of Greenland. As well as the huge oil deposits. But they kept us down. As Hegn, that little shit, used to say: “The public isn’t ready to understand this yet. It would be too overwhelming by far. You’d be dismissed as shamans. It would reflect badly on the government and adversely affect your careers.” So it all got hushed up. Hegn and his people filtered the information so only a fraction ever got out, in over forty years. Eventually, we’d had enough. Who was that man, the one who was writing a cantata for the Folketing? And those pretty children?’
‘Laban is my husband. The children are mine. We found your capsule in the National Archives.’
‘So what did you conclude?’
‘You were amazingly precise.’
She smacks her lips contentedly.
‘We foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nixon’s emergency suspension. Vietnam. The Gulf War. The war in Iraq. We could have given NATO a colossal military advantage. We saw the unrest in the Soviet system years before it came to the surface. But they shut us up. Magrethe did, too. A bloody communist is what she was. A pacifist. A Gandhi disciple. Ahimsa, if you don’t mind. She considered the liquidations of collaborators during the war to be murder. The way she saw things, the Danish resistance were on a par with Hells Angels. She thought Reagan’s advisers, Perle and Cheney, ought to have been tried for crimes against humanity. She was forever harping on about collective ethics. Do you believe in that sort of thing, Susan?’
She has stepped closer. The muzzle of her weapon jabs at my stomach. My hand grips the crowbar in my bag. But the Dobermann will turn any physical initiative
into suicide.
‘Physics has no definition of ethics. But I’m a mother of two. I want my children to survive. The prognoses aren’t good. Someone tried to kill us. Hegn kept us banged up for four months. He’s operating with a security firm far outside the boundaries of the law. Yesterday we escaped. You were predicting a major civilisational collapse. Would you have a date on that?’
She returns the gun to its place on the wall, then lowers her hand to the dog, holding out her cigar. The Dobermann slices off the end with a snap of its jaw, like a guillotine. She returns the Havana to her mouth, lighting it with a table lighter made from the shell of a hand grenade.
Once it’s lit, she places a fleshy hand on my shoulder. We’re friends. Two women in a man’s world. She leads me along the water’s edge.
‘Look at the shape of this pool. Can you see it’s the trace of a Eulerian path? Königsberg’s famous Seven Bridges. That was the first thing I wanted: a swimming pool. I grew up in a brown-coalfield, a place called Vonge. My mother killed herself when I was three. At fourteen I ran away from home. I emigrated to the States when I was nineteen. Fought my way up. So I’d lost my mother. My childhood home. My native tongue. My social class. My country of birth. Do you know how I managed? By not clinging. I’m a master of letting go.’
‘Except when it comes to money,’ I say. ‘You stick to money like glue.’
She pauses, surveying what opportunities might be open to her. She could get the gun. She could feed me to the dog. Or hold me down in the shallow water until I drown.
But then she roars with laughter.
‘Damned right I do! I’m a scrooge, always have been!’
She indicates the ten thousand DVDs on the far wall.
‘I love film. Look what they gave Dreyer. Three shorts in twenty-one years. And a three-room flat on Dalgas Boulevard. Even though his desk drawer was full of scripts. Denmark is such a petty little place. I’ve been involved in the biggest arms projects of the last forty years. I’ve played a part in winning the Cold War. Now I want some spoils.’
‘I want you to come with us to the papers. Tell them about the commission. About Hegn. Your predictions.’
She considers me pensively.
‘Susan, I find you attractive.’
‘I’m allergic to dog hair.’
She nods. Disappointed, yet composed. The allergy decides it for her. She can accommodate a lot of things, but the dogs are her true companions. Superficial erotic opportunities must yield.
We’re standing at the door. She turns and points upwards, at Utzon’s arching ceiling where light seems to enter from another dimension. Within the curve of white hangs a large mobile, a kinetic sculptural installation comprising at least three by three metres of coloured metal elements.
‘It’s made of parts from an F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter. I worked with William Perry when he was part of the Carter administration. I developed the coating. The beep it gives on a radar is no greater than a sparrow’s. During the Gulf War we reduced human losses by factor ten. From one per cent to one per thousand. Only one dead American for every thousand Iraqis. Once you’ve been in on improving nuclear weapons, you do start to think. Look at Oppenheimer. Szilard. Bohr. They were tormented by conscience. I read an interview with Tibbets once, the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He said, “It was completely impersonal.” Do you believe that, Susan?’
I think back. On the thousands of people I’ve met. The thousands of times I’ve felt the Effect. And I know I’m not going to win her over.
‘Between people, nothing can ever be completely impersonal.’
She won’t let me go. She’s in her seventies and a multimillionaire. She can do anything, and knows everything. She’s got a whole life’s work behind her. And yet she’s so miserably alone.
‘The problem of having to look after oneself at too early an age, Susan, is that one learns never to trust. The others in the commission became a kind of family for me. Even the men. We didn’t see each other much, but when we did I felt alive.’
She grips my arm. Not in any patronising way, not as a threat or a challenge. Disconsolately.
‘I was in love with Magrethe, of course. We all were. Through all those years. Do you know what unrequited love feels like, Susan?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘Not for forty years. What do you say to forty years of despair?’
‘I can accept a single year of grief in exceptional circumstances, an all-consuming love never reciprocated. But the other thirty-nine seems like pushing it a bit.’
For a moment her eyes fill with madness. Then she laughs again, like a blast furnace sucking in air.
‘I don’t give tuppence for the papers. And I never trusted politicians. We must all take care of ourselves. I’ve kept myself indoors ever since Magrethe’s death. I get my groceries online, always the same delivery man so I know who I’m dealing with. I’ve got CCTV all along the perimeter. In a fortnight I’ll be gone. I hope they come before then, the people who killed Magrethe. I hope they come.’
I go down the steps.
‘You’re like a dog, Susan. I saw that straight away. One of those small, ferocious varieties. A dachshund or a pit bull, whose basic instincts have been left intact, despite all attempts to eradicate them through breeding. They wriggle into a hole and come out backwards dragging a fox in their jaws. Maybe you’ll find them first. If you do, make sure to come and fetch me.’
3
IT’S STILL NO more than seven a.m. most of Kongens Nytorv lies dark. There must have been clashes here between police and protesters. Crowd-control barriers have been put up along the pavements, ground-floor windows have been smashed in their dozens, and makeshift repairs carried out with tarps and duct tape. The burnt-out shells of two overturned cars deface the Krinsen, from which the equestrian statue of Christian V has been removed. The statues in front of the Royal Theatre are encased in plywood.
But the brass nameplate by the door of the building I enter is polished and shiny. The first four floors are taken up by various arms of Fabius’s fashion design company. The names at the top are his and my mother’s. She has taken his surname, which is Magnus.
It’s Fabius who comes to the door.
Once or twice in a lifetime, one may be fortunate enough to find oneself standing before a man so gorgeous as to pain one’s heart. Not pain in the metaphorical sense, but real physical hurt.
Fabius is such a man. His beauty isn’t the flashy kind. It’s dark, introverted and mysterious, and exerts the most violent pull on a woman, an urge to step forward and touch, comfort, or whatever else might be required to make it known to him that his refined and complicated soul is understood fully and without condition.
‘Fabius,’ I say, ‘I am compelled, on behalf of my gender, to express my deepest sorrow at your homosexuality.’
He smiles, like a Chinese mandarin.
‘We were told you’d be away at least a year.’
‘And yet here I am.’
‘Your mum’s got a migraine.’
My mother’s migraines aren’t the same as those borne by frail, cultivated ladies in the manner of a fine hat on Derby Day. Rather, they are a lethal curse that strikes like a sudden fracture of the skull, irregularly and without warning, turning her face the colour of a corpse and making her eyes bloodshot, sucking the very life out of her and driving her into the bedroom, where she will lie for three days and nights with the blinds down and the curtains drawn, without so much as a morsel or a drop of water passing her lips.
And when that time has passed she will appear, weak and staggering, yet resurrected, albeit with an expression on her face to suggest she has been all the way to the kingdom of death and back again.
I have never before disturbed her during such an attack. But this time I’ve got no choice. What’s more, Fabius senses as much. He steps aside.
I haven’t entered my mother’s bedroom in twenty years. Everyone has a line drawn somewhere, t
o be crossed by others only at their peril. Everyone, perhaps, except Dorthea. My mother’s is located at the door of her bedroom.
I go in without knocking.
The room is dark, its air pervaded with the scent of fresh apples, puffed-up pillows and perfume. I step up to the window, draw the curtain slightly to one side and open the blind just enough to let in a chink of light to stop me falling over the furniture.
The floor space is dominated by the bed. It’s antique, resting on claw feet, and has all the stateliness of a grand ocean liner, varnished and gilded, topped by a pink spray of pillows and eiderdowns.
Somewhere within it is my mother. All I can see are her eyes, glaring hatefully at me in the dim light.
‘Mum,’ I say, ‘why did Dad go away?’
Just as we as individuals construct personal narratives to stop us from falling apart, the stories that keep families together are designed to give the impression that these social units are vectors that proceed along the scale of time, to be permeated with both tragic meaning and tearful warmth. The narrative concerning my father has always held that he was a great nomad whose natural wanderlust could not be contained in such a meagre country and a family as minuscule as ours.
I’ve always known it was a lie.
‘I remember him saying goodbye,’ I say. ‘He didn’t go of his own accord.’
Fabius is in the room now, too. He has flowed in, like a precious liquid. My mother gestures to him. From the bedside table he hands her a small bottle of medicine with a plastic straw sticking out of the top. She takes a suck while looking me straight in the eye.
‘It’s morphine, Susan. The only thing that helps.’
Her voice is a rattle. She was ill when I entered, but now she seems worse.
‘I don’t know about politics, Susan.’
I wait, merciless.
‘He owned a munitions factory. At Raadvad. It was inherited from his father. He invented a new kind of projectile made of some kind of ceramic material. There’s always been opposition to arms manufacturing in Denmark. It turned out he’d been supplying countries that were under UN embargo.’