The History of Danish Dreams

by Peter Høeg

  These parties worked because, of course, Amalie was the perfect hostess. These days she was never distant, as she had been in Carl Laurids’s day. On the contrary, she exerted such a presence in the room that every single guest felt that he or she had been particularly favored. Not one of the men suspected for a moment that he was not the only man in Amalie’s life. Such was the treatment Amalie accorded her clients—so individual and so sincere—that not one of them ever realized how, no matter what else went into their relationship with her, it all came down to business; it was a matter of survival. Moreover, whether there is anyone else in Amalie’s life, and why she does what she does, are questions to which they give little if any thought during these dinner parties. This is owing to the extent of what we agreed, a little earlier, to call reticence. So all-embracing is this reticence that, on these occasions, the other truth about Amalie—the truth about the bedroom and the professor with his trousers around his ankles, and the stockbroker crying like a baby, and H. N. Andersen’s brothel stories—does not exist; it is in no way whatsoever the truth. As far as the wives are concerned, the manner in which Amalie conducts herself and the good food and the carefully observed protocol make every one of them feel as though she were Amalie’s bosom friend. It never occurs to them that, in any number of ways, Amalie knows more about their marriages than they do themselves. Indeed, on these evenings, it never occurs to Amalie either; she even deceives herself; even to her, on these evenings, her guests are just very good friends.

  I would like to suggest a single word to epitomize Amalie’s dinner parties. I know how dangerous such a word can be, that it is an oversimplification; but I have noticed that it is my way of remembering. It is a word that can be used as a sort of heading, a pointer to a more precise explanation. The word I would like to suggest is “consistent.” The way in which her guests and she herself are polite, in which they observe all the many rules of social intercourse, and in which they avoid striking any note other than the right one is just that: consistent. I would like to add that this is a social convention, a way of life, that requires a great deal of energy, since one is constantly having to combat any tendency toward inconsistency—and life is full of such tendencies, even in those days.

  So in a certain sense, Amalie is a consistent person. With her uncompromising discretion and her will to get on in the world, she is very, very persistent. But it now appears that she did have certain soft spots, a few weaknesses, and it is precisely these that make her story so interesting. If, all along, she had been as strong and intransigent as the people she wants to imitate, then she might have left fewer traces of herself, or at least different traces. But she found it hard to maintain absolute reticence. Somewhere within herself she must have been shaken by the deceit and the struggle to act as if everything were idyllic. And so, now and again, she confided in Carsten.

  She did not tell him the truth, or at least not the truth as I see it; she did not present her situation in quite the way that I have done, that is, by admitting that she was a kind of high priestess tending a ritualized hypocrisy that was not actually hypocritical. Instead, she tells Carsten about her lovers as though there were only one. This must have been because she was ashamed; on those quiet evenings with her son the proprieties were there in the bed beside her. She—who bound her clients to her with an invisible rubber band that would, sooner or later, bring them catapulting back to her precisely because she would do anything whatsoever and never feel shame—felt ashamed when faced with her son. When she was confronted by him, her strength deserted her and she told him, not the truth, but her dream of the truth, which was that there was only one man and that he was not her client but her lover.

  She undressed herself and Carsten almost completely, and lit candles; then they snuggled together in the big bed and she lowered her voice and told him about a man so generous and cultivated, the handsomest man in town, who had a most particular smell about him, a smell of Russian leather, which she tried to describe to Carsten. And every detail she had gleaned from her host of clients. Because she took such pleasure in her own dream, and because it was important to her that Carsten believed her, she embellished her portrait with insignificant minutiae until it seemed frightfully improbable, even to Carsten. Of course he knew she was lying; he is an astute boy and, in any case, he has seen everything—right from her meeting with her first customer, the stockbroker. He had witnessed his sobbing through one of the peepholes in the bedroom wall which Carl Laurids bored, once upon a time, and which Carsten had even seen his father using. That he had never forgotten. So although he listens entranced, he does know the truth, perhaps even better than Amalie herself, as she talks herself into her own hopes and invents a lover with none of her clients’ neuroses, a lover who is terribly reminiscent of Carl Laurids.

  Again I have this urge to shout at Amalie, across the expanse of history, “What the hell do you mean by treating a little boy like that, making him your confidant, using him the way your customers use you—like someone you can pound away at and exact relief from? After all, he’s only a small boy who, while all this is going on, has only one thought in mind: how to earn his mother’s love and take his place at her side, replacing the real Friends of the Family and her make-believe lover!” But I restrain myself. It is too late anyway; there is nothing to do but shut up, clench one’s teeth, and stick to the facts, which are that sometimes, while Amalie was describing her ideal husband, she would burst into tears and pull Carsten even closer to her and say, “You are the only man in my life, you are all I have, all my hopes are pinned on you, and one day you are going to make a new life for yourself and for me and boo-hoo-hoo”—she would bathe him in a flood of tears while he lies there, at the age of six or seven or eight or nine years old, wondering how on earth he is going to manage to carry the whole world on his shoulders.

  During these years, the contradictions amid which he grows up are typical of the Danish upper class. His life is conducted in a dark tunnel with a white dot of light both ahead of him and behind. The light behind him is the days before Carl Laurids disappeared, and the light ahead is the future that Amalie sketches for him on an almost daily basis in the big bed, once her client has been dismissed and she has brought Carsten in beside her. In her vision of the future he will become a great lawyer and earn a fortune, and will, in some unspecified way, raise her above her present circumstances. The picture of Carsten’s becoming a lawyer is very clear to her, so clear that often, in Carsten’s presence, she will practice saying to her mirror, “My son is a lawyer,” or, “My son is a trial lawyer, or a judge, or Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.” This has its effect on Carsten. Before his sixth birthday he knows what he is going to be, and this knowledge forms that patch of light ahead of him in the tunnel. The tunnel itself is this house in which he has grown up, supposedly a good home and a sheltered nest for a child. That is how Amalie refers to it—“our cozy nest,” she says of this monstrosity which, during these years, gives the impression of being deserted, having been built for a large family and lots of servants and a vast household; not for one son with a mother who has kept on only Gladys and a kitchen maid and a part-time gardener, and to whose dinner parties only six married couples are ever consistently invited.

  The house is a monument to a particular picture of child rearing which is very widespread in Denmark at this time and in earlier days and which is based on the concept that it is possible to protect a child totally during its sensitive formative years; to keep it untouched by any and all influences while at the same time rearing it to face the big, bad world and all its temptations. It is to protect Carsten that Amalie has had the windows barred and the drapes hung; and even when either she or Gladys takes him out for a walk—since she believes fresh air is important—she insists that he carry a parasol to protect him from the sun. And, still for his own good, they keep him inside, or at least inside the grounds, and stop him from playing with the other children, who are, of course, the same upper-class children
in lace collars, Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits, and sailor suits whom Carsten had always played with before. Now, however, Amalie imagines that they might harm him or somehow lead him astray or have a bad influence on him. So Carsten grows up in the dim rooms of the cozy nest, and during these years he becomes remarkably good at playing on his own, or with his nice, safe wooden blocks and his blunted tin soldiers and scissors with rounded tips, because he has no choice. He has no one else to play with because, since Carl Laurids’s disappearance, the world, according to Amalie, is full of bad people and evil characters. And that is why Carsten can now only wave through the balcony grilles to his former playmates—P. Carl Petersen’s masseuse’s daughter and the little princesses who swim outside the Queen Mother’s house and whose nakedness under their floppy bathing costumes he now has to content himself with imagining. Or, rather, he almost only waves from the balcony, because it so happens that now and again he manages to slip out. Now and again he is let out—always by Gladys or the gardener or the kitchen maid, because they had always done this sort of thing before, and because Carsten was on such close terms with the invisible inhabitants of the house, and, of course, because they loved him. So now and again they let him out into the grounds or into a neighboring garden or onto the street, but only ever when Amalie is not at home. It cannot have happened all that often; Carsten himself denied it later, and the only reason that I know anything at all about this is that the servants remember it.

  Here it might be enlightening to point out that it is just around this same time that Maria, in Christianshavn, is defying her mother’s ban against playing in the courtyard. It is interesting that the desire to protect children from other children exists both in Charlottenlund and in the tenements of Christianshavn. But one must beware of confusing the reactions of the two children. Maria’s is a true rebellion, she does what she likes; by this time she has all but stopped depending on her parents. But Carsten’s situation is somewhat different. At this point the most important person in his life, bar none, is his mother, against whom he would never dream of rebelling; he merely emits a few little cheeps and tugs ever so slightly at his leash.

  The way Amalie sees it, all of the hazards in Carsten’s life are outside: the sunshine, the other children, ditches just lying in wait, and the rolling countryside. Inside, it is safe. And so Carsten’s childhood becomes a wide plain of endless afternoons on which he knew that one of the Friends of the Family was paying Amalie a visit. During these afternoons he would wander restlessly around the house beneath the bristling bayonet chandelier and etchings of bloody hunting motifs and toys—with the vast rooms shrouded in silence, apart from the distant sounds from Amalie’s bedroom and the echo of that menacing reticence.

  Amalie really struggled to raise Carsten in line with these secrets, which are an integral part of the bourgeois soul and which at this point, in the early 1930s, crop up in all walks of life—with a particularly refined variety flourishing in the families of civil servants. Now, of course these secrets had their purpose, though what this purpose might be, it was up to the children of the day to try to guess. The children have to feel their way to table manners, and where one may play and where one may not play and, most especially, what games one may not play; then they have to sense why the servants and the corridors and the toilets and the bathrooms are invisible and why naked walls are a threat; and why one never talks about money and never swears. Thus—by leaving the children to guess, instead of just telling them, straight out—one creates a tension and ensures that one’s children will grow up imbued with a vibrant vigilance. This schooling in vigilance should guarantee that the young people may well relax, but never to the extent that they become lax and forget themselves and grow inconsistent. Part of the truth behind this reticence is that it creates an abiding state of tension. I find it hard to come up with any better explanation than this, nor do I think anyone should expect me to; who am I to explain this phenomenon that extends far beyond the Story of Danish Dreams and into the entire structure of Western culture? What I can do here is to say that Amalie was only partially successful in rearing Carsten in this fashion because she is not strict enough, not consistent enough; although she does try, something inside her always yields; there is something porous about the whole of this life that she has constructed for herself and Carsten. She tells him much more than she ought to, because she cannot bite her tongue; and since she cannot control her temper, she rants and raves at him, and throws china at him, instead of freezing him out, giving him the cold shoulder. She tells him about her fantasy lover, including physical details which he should not know the first thing about at this point, but which he is supposed to learn through guesswork several years from now. Even those things of which, once he had learned to walk, he ought not to have had the faintest inkling—her nakedness, and her body, vivacious in bed—even those she could not keep to herself.

  To a certain extent, she keeps him cooped up, and he actually does have to spend the major part of his childhood in these dim rooms. When he reaches school age, she hires private tutors for him, so that she need not release him; she takes the first crystal set he builds away from him, to prevent him from hearing the shocking news reports, and she sends him to bed when her guests start talking about the world at large. Yet she cannot keep her own interest in politics hidden from him, and in sudden attacks of eager weakness she confides to him that the Dane Svend Olsen, whom she once met at a party, and who told her he loved her, had taken second place in weightlifting at the Olympic Games, and that a Social Democrat government minister, a Friend of the Family, has made a splendid impression at a meeting in South Jutland, and that she has recognized Carl Laurids in a photograph of influential Nazis grouped around Hitler. She lets him see the photograph, and he can sense that even while she thinks Carl Laurids’s new status and elevated rank among these braggarts is all wrong and quite scandalous, still she finds it quite, quite fascinating.

  So Carsten has a very mixed upbringing. In a way, the big villa is a kind of dank, moldy cellar that never sees the light of day, and there is something rather deformed about Carsten—slightly reminiscent, in his paleness, of a sucker shoot, he has the same look of well-bred distinction as a stalk of asparagus. But at the same time he has, of course, swallowed some good mouthfuls of fresh air, especially as a small child. He has felt his way through the world in a different way from that of his upper-class contemporaries, and hence there is a sureness to his movements that only the child who has been able to explore without constantly being stopped can acquire. All things considered, we should all be grateful that this is not a novel, since Carsten is far too complex a character to figure in a novel. It is a hard enough job portraying him as a historical character. He is a quiet boy; everyone who has met him says so, even Amalie. Carsten is a nice, polite boy, they say—by which they mean that one hardly ever notices him, and if one does, whatever one sees is just as it should be. But he is also someone who absorbs things; there is something absorbent about him as a person, and particularly about the large, dark eyes. He ingests every piece of information: the expensive lessons from private tutors, the dinner party conversations, and what, in bed, Amalie tells him he is going to achieve—with an urge to devour knowledge that must have something to do with his having grown up among adults. Although I cannot know for sure, I would imagine that growing children have need of other children; but around Carsten, the void created by interminable afternoons in that big house was only ever broken by adults. When he is very young he plays with building blocks, then with tin soldiers—and then he starts to read. It so happens that the big house contains quite a number of books. In all probability, Carl Laurids bought them to go with the furniture, and these books provide Carsten with yet another huge straw to dip into the adult world. What he reads, in fact, is gilt-edged Danish literature, in which grownup men describe the same loneliness as that which surrounds him. In a vague way, he recognizes his own situation in these books, although he never succeeds in doing wha
t writers from the Golden Age onward have recommended: taking a masochistic pleasure in this loneliness. Throughout his childhood Carsten missed having playmates, and neither Amalie nor the books nor the visitors to the house was able to convince him positively that the outside world is something to be avoided, or at least approached with caution, and in any case to be guarded against.