by Peter Høeg
There is something baffling about a child’s being able to keep a secret for so long. It is possible that Amalie did in fact confide in someone, but that is neither here nor there because here we are writing the story of dreams. Amalie would look back on her childhood as a time when she was utterly and absolutely alone, until the day when she discovered an ally in her father. Until then, silent and aloof, she had circulated, on the streets and at school, among people and surroundings that she hardly seemed to notice—and that is neither normal nor good for any child. She spent the long afternoons at home, endlessly wandering in search of glimpses of the orange animals and purple forests, and sometimes she lost her way and had to walk for days before chance, sooner or later, brought her into a clerks’ room or a corridor that she knew.
During these years she makes some important discoveries. She soaks up the atmosphere of this Victorian home. Everywhere, in the diversity of these innumerable rooms, she encounters the same lopsided heaviness as that of tropical palms thrown off balance, and of immovable chairs floating on tasseled clouds, and of the libraries and studies where it seems that only the weight of the books prevents the bookcases and heavy desks from toppling over. Everywhere silence reigns. Even the sound of the gas lamps is absorbed by the shimmering drapes and the stiff portieres that keep out all the light and are too heavy for Amalie to pull back. Which is why, in all her wanderings, she never can tell whether the rooms she passes through face onto the street or onto the narrow, unechoing yard, or are situated in some inexplicable spot in the center of this bewildering edifice.
Sometimes Amalie would meet her grandmother, but on these occasions the Old Lady rarely noticed her granddaughter. Her sight was going, but still she bustled through the rooms, guided by some instinctive spatial recall, tightly swathed in wool like her furniture, on her way to her office—the location of which was known only to her and her secretary. There, every day, regardless of everything else, regardless of her increasing blindness and her impaired hearing and her isolation, she shouted out the paper’s renowned editorial, which predicted any shifts in the political affiliations of its subscribers and adjusted its slant accordingly, with the result that the paper was regarded as being uncompromising and changeless when, in fact, from being conservative, and patriotic, and loyal to Estrup’s dictatorship it had switched to being first critical and rebellious, then radical and revolutionary, only, later, to slip back to its original standpoint, in a smooth action that partly followed, partly anticipated that of its readers—who continually, therefore, found themselves, and only themselves, in its pages.
Amalie had, of course, always known her father. And yet it makes sense to say that she was about nine years old before she got through to him, and this expression “to get through to” was one she herself was later to use to explain her experiences.
It so happened, one evening, that she heard a sound somewhere in the house and followed it and discovered that it was nothing but the distant clattering of the servants and of Gumma’s tricycle, so she went on and heard a second sound and followed that until she recognized her mother’s tubercular cough, and heard a third sound and followed that, and then something happened. She entered a large, lit room that rang with the sound of raised voices. In this room something quite unique was taking place. In this room her grandmother, who normally fought shy of appearing in public except when it was absolutely necessary, was celebrating her company’s anniversary, and at the moment that Amalie stepped into the room, her father, Christoffer Ludwig Teander Rabow, stood up to make a speech. Amalie rarely looked straight at her father, but now she stared at him and noticed a slight but disturbing resemblance between him and the portraits of his father that Gumma had once shown her. This resemblance lay in the fact that her father’s, Christoffer Ludwig’s, contours were so blurred and his form so elusive that it was possible to catch glimpses, straight through him, of the pictures on the wall behind.
* * *
From the moment he was born, Christoffer, Amalie’s father, had been treated like a doll—left in the paralyzing care of the housemaids by parents too taken up with their work of writing and editing and printing and distributing the paper and doing accounts and investing and buying up property and mixing with those townsfolk who at that time could still remember buying peat from Frederik Ludwig and treated the family with a contempt that was gradually quelled as the balance sheets expanded to the point where it was necessary to take on office staff. When Christoffer’s mother (later to become the Old Lady) looked up from the figures she controlled with all the poise of a juggler—notwithstanding her inability to read—and caught sight of her son, who was then just one year old, her first thought was: I wonder if he’s old enough to deliver papers. So she had his long white dress pulled off, only to find that his chubby legs, which had been kissed raw by the housemaids and smelled of scented talcum powder, could not even support him because he was only one year old. After that she forgot all about him again until he was four years old, and then, seeing that he could now keep his balance, she had a suit of clothes made for him, complete with waistcoat, jacket, high collar, and detachable cuffs. Every day the maids had to take him from the nursery, along the corridors, to a private office next door to his father’s. There they left the boy, on a raised chair, in a solitude broken only by sudden bursts of music from the musical cigar box on his desk, which was supposed to play whenever Christoffer offered his business contacts one of the Havana cigars, specially imported for the family, with which his mother had provided him, just as she had remembered to open an expense account for him—and all because she had not an ounce of understanding of children and their ways. This was also demonstrated by the way in which she and her husband took Christoffer with them to the grand dinners to which they were invited because the town’s mayor and doctors and pastors and lawyers and consuls and industrialists and merchants feared these two parvenus, this odd couple, who still carried the smell of peat and cow barns with them wherever they went, accompanied by their son—that performing monkey, folk called him, that dandified dwarf, that tarted-up tot—Christoffer Teander. Thus he had learned, from a very early age, to conceal his disquiet behind a mask of courteous indifference until no one, no one at all, paid any more heed to him. Until the day when his father raised his head from years of hard work and realized that they must have made a mistake because his son’s desk was covered, not by balance sheets or articles or charts, but by a forest of storybook creatures cut out of the pages of the newspaper. Frederik Ludwig would have demanded an explanation of his son, but by that time his contours were already starting to dissolve and his voice wavered as he asked Christoffer why he was not writing. From his son’s hesitant replies he grasped the fact that he could neither read nor write but was, like himself, illiterate. And when, speechless with grief, he pointed at all the cut-up sheets of Christoffer’s childhood lying scattered around the room in a layer three feet deep, the child answered, “You see, Father, it comes apart so easily, because the pages aren’t glued in!”
Frederik Ludwig would have warned his wife, but his voice let him down. Not long after this she had the family’s German doctor, Dr. Mahler, admit Christoffer to the nearest sanatorium, where he underwent Dr. Kneipp’s water cure and contracted a dreadful bout of double pneumonia from the morning walks—barefoot, across the dewy autumn meadows—prescribed as part of this cure. This bout of pneumonia lodged itself in his skinny body in the form of a malignant fever that refused to release its grip on him, even after he had returned to his childhood home, where his father, Frederik Ludwig, was now no more than a vague shadow against the tapestries and high paneling. At this point, Christoffer lost his hair, even though he was not yet twenty, and thereby acquired a staggering resemblance to his father. And the fact that Christoffer was now the spitting image of his father may have accounted for Frederik Ludwig’s dissolution’s going almost unnoticed.
One morning, Christoffer woke up to discover that the fever had left him. Driven by an impul
se to make his dreams come true in some way other than by cutting them out of paper, he decided to leave home. He hunted in vain for clothes, which were kept he knew not where—there always having been women around to help him get dressed—and all he found was a necktie that he could not tie. Dressed in slippers and pajamas, he left his childhood home, dismissing his worries with a wave of the hand. What was a tie compared to freedom of the individual. And it was late in the day before he gave up, having lost his way and wandered around the streets, being laughed at by people who pointed at him and knew that there went the editor’s son, who couldn’t even tie his own shoelaces. It was night by the time he found his way home, to a door that his mother had locked, and when he was let in the next morning a new and chilly calm had settled over his movements, previously so febrile and aimless. It was as though he had left his impatience behind, out there in the cold of the night through which he had sat on the doorstep, contemplating the twinkling stars. The next day, for the first time, he wore the Swiss fob watch he had had since his confirmation without ever learning to tell the time, and his mother—whom people were starting to call the Old Lady—felt convinced that he had sorted himself out. When, a week later, she asked him what the time was and he answered correctly, her eyes filled with a triumph reminiscent of what the rest of us would understand by happiness.
When she and her husband began publishing their broadside, she—who had only ever been familiar with the seasons and the difference between night and day—became obsessed with the passage of time, with the inexorable march of minutes and seconds. It may have been thanks to her visionary talents and the business sense with which these were inextricably linked that she realized, before anyone else, the significance of the relationship between time and financial calculations. She wrote away for Swiss-made precision chronometers and had them set up in all of the offices and, later, in all the corridors and communicating rooms of the house and, as time went on, in the bedrooms and the boudoirs and the water closets; and every morning—when she was always up before anyone else—she synchronized all the clocks. Hundreds of them were fitted with striking mechanisms that made the building vibrate every quarter hour with their crisp and utterly, perfectly synchronous chimes. When she first started to withdraw, she carved up the day for her employees. Everywhere—in the offices and the printshop and the editorial offices and the stockrooms—charts were discovered that seemed to have appeared out of the blue and laid down the time at which work should begin, the course of the working day, the brief lunch break, and the time to go home.
Christoffer Ludwig took to these straight roads of time so diligently and meticulously that his fondness for storybook creatures made of paper might in fact always have been a hankering after order of the kind he now discovered in the lists of accounts, the yellow filing cabinets, and the growing piles of orders, all of which he went through only in order to draw up the endless number of charts that appeared—without anyone’s being able to clarify where the order came from—to be his one great and weighty responsibility. They were timetables, these charts, in which it was possible to look up any hour of the clock and see, in the first instance, what he himself would be doing. The first chart was a checklist of his own time, from that point in the morning, in his bedroom, when he was dressed by the maids—those intermediaries in Christoffer Ludwig’s never-ending battle with items of clothing with which he never came to terms—until, back in the same place, he was helped into bed after a day spent in the big office or on his long walks along the maze of corridors that always left him baffled, and through which he found his way only because he was accompanied by one of the housemaids. The maids, for their part, always kept to the corridors with which they were positively familiar, and never went anywhere in the house without experiencing a pang of fear at the thought of getting lost.
First of all, Christoffer mapped out his own time—so precisely that there was an entry for every half second of the day (an onerous task for a man so averse to being in close proximity to women, since this involved three housemaids keeping watch at his bedside for several months, in order that he might map out his normal sleeping pattern). Then he turned his attention upon the other office employees—not because he had reached the end of the road as far as analyzing his own time was concerned but because his mother was urging him to get a move on.
Then, one day, the Old Lady disappeared. One morning she was seen by a few employees, who came in particularly early to clean their offices, following her son at a distance as he was escorted through the house, which had now become like one great smoothly running timepiece. Wherever he went, Christoffer’s movements were synchronized with the innumerable clocks that he passed on his way to his office; and, for the employees, it was as though all the delivery dates, deadlines, and bill-of-exchange expiry dates hung around them in an atmosphere so concentrated that they could reach out and touch it. The Old Lady stood for a while at the double doors into her son’s office, gazing intensely upon his hunched back. That was the last anyone saw of her. As she turns away and disappears into the labyrinth, all of those who see her go are struck, at the same moment, by the thought that under the straining satin dress and the stays that two of the brawniest kitchen maids have drawn tight every morning with the aid of a broom handle, her plump body moves with a waggish youthfulness that, in itself, blasphemes dreadfully against time. This thought, however, strikes them as being so unwonted that they all avoid one another’s eyes and push it away.
The gap left by the Old Lady was filled by the way in which the business automatically continued to flourish. To begin with, the journalists were shocked when the necessary, but unwritten, articles seemed to materialize in the wicker baskets on their desks. Every morning the printers were astonished to find that deliveries of paper had turned up, inexplicably, all by themselves, and the office managers tried to conceal their amazement at the ever-swelling stream of orders pouring in, all unaided, from every part of the country and, as time went on, from distant continents with unpronounceable delivery addresses or postal codes written in exotic characters. After a while, however, their minds were set at ease by the thought that the Old Lady had merely withdrawn, like some Egyptian pharaoh, into a distant tomb or one of her luxurious privies, from where—from a gilded sarcophagus roomy enough for a body that was bound still to be as big and as agile as a rhinoceros’s—she could keep an eye on them all. And they saw that it was possible for her to act in such a fashion because everything had been set into perpetual motion—in short, because she had succeeded in realizing the dream of the nouveau riche, the upstart, the parvenu, the tyrant, and the company president: that of having a total, one hundred percent firm grip on time.
Her quiescence must also, I think, have been reinforced because Christoffer Teander sat there, every day, bent over his columns, only straightening up to flick away a speck of dust that had fallen onto a lapel as immaculate as his unnaturally white collars, or onto his shirtfronts, which were stiff as the armor in the banqueting hall (fitted out to the Old Lady’s specifications). Such small gestures, which would in others have indicated a lively interest in their outward appearance, made Christoffer look more like a puppet or a jumping jack than ever before, more than when he had, as a little boy, been the mute observer of his parents’ social calls. And since he never spoke to his employees, it never occurred to anyone—not even the housemaids who surveyed his nakedness, without any curiosity, every morning and evening—that behind the lackluster forehead, the unseeing eyes, and the wavering contours there hid a human being. The announcement of his engagement did nothing to alter this impression.
One morning all the family’s social and business acquaintances received a white card announcing the glad tidings of the engagement between Christoffer Ludwig Teander Rabow and Katarina Cornelius Bak, the dean’s daughter. Everyone thought it was a joke. They all knew for a fact that Christoffer Ludwig and the dean’s daughter had never met. For one thing, throughout his childhood and adolescence, Christoffer had
only ever left his oversized office on a very few occasions. And for another, he had always been duly escorted by the servants or his parents. And lastly, Katarina had, at these times, been away, visiting the German spas, in vain attempts to cure a cough which, even then, sounded bad. Nevertheless, this card planted a nagging doubt in most minds, since, even though it bore no signature, it was printed in Venus Extra Bold. This typeface, together with the heavy, bittersweet scent of dried Australian carnations, reminded most recipients of Christoffer’s mother and her grip on the future. The Reverend Mr. Cornelius himself was at first taken aback, then angry, then furious. Finally he calmed down and entered, instead, a mood of silent reflection in which, for some days, his thoughts revolved around his daughter, whose silence was broken only by bouts of coughing. At last he sought out Christoffer Teander, unearthing him in his office. Wordlessly, the dean places the invitation in front of him. Christoffer peruses it carefully; then he studiously compares the date set for the engagement with his timetables, and only after having done this does he look at the dean. “It is quite impossible for this engagement to have taken place, unless it occurred in less than half a second,” he says without the trace of a smile.
Cornelius leaves him, convinced that the whole thing is nothing but a bad joke. In his opinion, Christoffer is an idiot, a complete and utter idiot. Amen.
A few months later the wedding invitation arrived. It had been delivered during the night, without anyone’s seeing how this was achieved; it was tasteless and ostentatious; printed in gold on sheets of stiff deckle-edged paper embossed with the Old Lady’s monogram—a silk scarf entwined around a miter; ornamented with cupids carrying champagne bottles in their chubby fists; the Rudkøbing coat of arms running all the way around the edge. It detailed every stage in the course of the great day, from the wedding itself—which was to take place at half-past five in the morning so that all the servants and office managers and printers, who worked on Sundays, could be back in time to start work—through the wedding reception, which would be held in the long courtyard, right up to the dinner in the evening, the schedule for which had been worked out right down to the very last second. It listed the names of the townspeople who would make speeches at this dinner and how long these speeches would be, along with a brief summary of their content and directions as to the length of time allowed for the applause before proceeding with the consumption of a menu—also specified—which presented a monstrous combination of the Old Lady’s partiality for the dishes of her impoverished upbringing and her fascination with wealth. Barley gruel was to be served with the champagne, then a bacon omelette with syrup and crème de menthe, and wine jelly made with Château Margaux and marzipan preserved in duck fat. Coffee, cognac, and the refined potato aquavit that the Old Lady had persisted in preferring to liqueurs and fortified wines would be accompanied by indoor fireworks set off at the stucco ceilings. An eighteen-piece orchestra dressed in firemen’s uniforms would provide music for the dancing. Pralines, whole coffee beans, white bread, pats of butter, and cold griddle cakes with blackcurrant jam would also be served, along with draft lager. With a mind to the close of the evening, four strong and rough characters, four real toughs from a remote village, had been hired and paid to stay sober until daybreak, at which point they would assist the last of the guests to leave the premises; said guests being mentioned by name, both those who stepped willingly into the gray dawn, carrying the last barrel of lager between them, and those who would offer resistance and refuse to go home, thus hindering the tidying up that would allow Monday to start on time. These last would have their bottom teeth knocked out by the toughs, who would then bash their heads against the white beech parquet floor before throwing them out into the street, where they would lie in the gutter in their own blood and snot until a specified time at which they would crawl away. Thus the big house at the end of the square would greet the rays of the morning sun with gleaming windows and an air of industry implying that nothing had occurred, apart from the happy event. That is all, and very best wishes, wrote the Old Lady, particularly to those who have been invited to the dinner—of whom there now followed a list, at the foot of which she had signed her name.