by Peter Høeg
Maria and Carsten never really understood what he was talking about. To them events on the international political scene were nothing more than a faint hum from the electronic equipment in the apartment below, and as far as they were concerned, the future of Denmark was safe in the hands of such a sensitive man as Colonel Lunding. Then Maria gave birth.
* * *
She gives birth in an expensive private maternity home, and because it happens to be New Year’s Eve, only she and the midwife and a nurse are present. “I’m afraid both the consultant and the doctor on duty have been called out to an emergency,” the nurse apologizes—this emergency being, of course, that they are dead drunk, and not only that, but dead drunk at the home of Amalie Mahogany, who is holding a big New Year’s party. “But don’t you worry, madame,” says the midwife, “we have all the most up-to-date equipment on hand”—as Maria can see for herself, from where she lies in state surrounded by gleaming tiles and glaring spotlights and glittering steel and buzzing autoclaves. As further reassurance, they also have access to countless X rays, since, with Maria’s stomach being so inordinately huge and her pregnancy having lasted for six years, the consultant has taken somewhere between fifteen and twenty good X rays of the fetus, just to be on the safe side, and because he regards the fears held by certain of his colleagues regarding radiation as unscientific old wives’ tales.
And so the midwife knows in advance what is about to happen, which is that Maria gives birth to twins, a dark girl and a fair boy, and—bearing in mind the bombardment of X rays to which the babies have been subjected and also how long she has been pregnant—it is not without some relief that I can report that both babies have the right number of fingers and toes and appear to be healthy and normal.
Maria refuses to be anesthetized; even when she is cut and stitched, the only sound that escapes her is a faint moan, and when the nurse moves in with the mask Maria wags a menacing finger at her and hisses, “Beat it and take that thing with you!” And so all is quiet in the maternity home; the only sounds are Maria’s moans and the faint hum of the apparatus and the gentle rustle of the midwife’s starched gown and, at one point, the wails of the two babies, which subside when they are laid to the breast and a bright-eyed, triumphant Maria gazes into space and thinks: I’ve done it, I’ve given birth.
Then another sound starts to swell, faint but nevertheless quite distinct, the soundproofed door notwithstanding. It sounds like an animal screaming, but it is, in fact, Amalie Mahogany. She has abandoned her guests, having all at once been struck by the feeling that her grandchildren were being born at that very moment. She has not even taken the time to kick the consultant into life, she has simply taken a taxi, and now she is standing outside, and wanting in.
But she does not get in. Maria has said, “I want to be alone, absolutely alone, my husband has to see the babies before anybody else,” saying this in the same voice with which she had waved the ether mask away—a voice that will not take no for an answer. Nevertheless the nurse tells her, “Those noises you can hear, madame, it’s your mother-in-law, she’s very upset, should we let her in?” But Maria shakes her head and hisses, “There must be some mistake, my mother-in-law is not even in Copenhagen, not even in this country, she’s stationed on Greenland, she’s far away, and she would never carry on like that. That woman out there is someone who sometimes shouts at me in the street. Will you please have her removed.”
So Amalie is taken away by the police. After all, this is a private maternity home and they are paying through the nose for Maria’s confinement; besides which, Amalie definitely does not seem normal, and so—regardless of her evening dress and her pearl-embroidered shawl and her furs and her hat and her jewelry—three porters and two police officers shepherd her out onto the street, where she screeches, “Those are my son’s children in there, they’re my grandchildren.” Then, when one of the officers grabs hold of her arm to lead her away, she takes a swipe at him, yelling, “Let go of me, boy, piss off and polish your cuff links before you lay a finger on a real lady!”; after which she is handcuffed and taken to Store Kongens Street police station to spend a wrathful New Year’s Eve in custody.
While all this is going on, Carsten is at work. At this point, holidays no longer exist for him, and today he is working particularly hard, to avoid the thought of blood and slime and pain and all the mystery of womanhood. But he arrives later, some time after midnight, when the birth is over and the twins have been washed and fed and Amalie put behind bars and Maria wheeled away from the abattoir-like delivery room and into a lovely private room. Then they put a call through to him and he turns up, utterly confused, wearing a green loden coat and carrying flowers. He kisses the children and he kisses the children’s mother—his wife, that is—and then he starts to cry, and at that moment the little family has no problems.
But I have. For while the Mahogany family is stronger and more collected than ever before, its history is more confused than ever. Hitherto I have endeavored to make my account exhaustive and keep it simple, and although it has never been easy, it is now more difficult than ever because, at this moment, in and around this maternity home, an overwhelming, bewildering number of pictures of these newborn infants now present themselves.
To all appearances, Carsten and Maria are alone with their children; to all appearances, there is no one else in the world but them, but that in itself is complicated enough. Because, without realizing it, they both have their own ideas about the children. They may, at this moment, be smiling at each other and hugging each other, but Maria feels that, strictly speaking and deep down and at heart, they are her children—wasn’t she the one who threw away her diaphragm that day and hasn’t she carried this sweet burden for six years? Not that Carsten would disagree with her on that point: in a certain, physical sense they are her children; as far as everything to do with the metabolism and the nurturing and the screaming is concerned, they are Maria’s, their mother’s; but in another, deeper sense he feels that they are his children—isn’t it primarily he who has to put clothes on their backs and Maria’s, and food in their mouths, and isn’t he the husband? And, he thinks, in a wider, legal sense these two creatures are citizens, responsible adults of the future, and thus, to some extent, they belong to society.
These, therefore, are the divergent dreams of two parents, and if that had been all there was to it, then it would not have been so bad. But in the room next door the midwife is talking to the consultant, who has now put in an appearance; and even though his surroundings still look rather greenish and curved to him, as if viewed through an empty champagne bottle, yet he is in no doubt the twins were born amid examination tables and gas cylinders and respirators and autoclaves and disinfectants; thanks to the X rays and his (and the midwife’s) training; in the secure, white-tile surroundings of the maternity home—and so, naturally, modern medicine can lay claim to their future. And somewhere in Store Kongens Street, the previous generation—Amalie that is—is banging on her cell bars, yelling, “They’re my son’s children and mine, and if you knew what I’ve suffered and sacrificed for that boy, and every one of you will be fired tomorrow, I’m a good friend of the chief of police, you know!”
And that’s no lie. Back at Amalie’s house on Strand Drive at that very moment, the chief of police is singing a song with a “Parlez-vous” refrain and toasting the newborn children whom his hostess has taken herself off to visit. He, too, has his ideas about the children’s future, as do the other guests; and as does Colonel Lunding, who calls the next day with a bunch of flowers and a card inscribed “To two little soldiers from Uncle Lunne”; and Ramses and the Princess and Adonis—wherever they may be—would have had their own hopes; and Carl Laurids perhaps could not have cared less; and Fitz, counsel to the Supreme Court, will be happy just so long as no one ever reads modern literature aloud to them; and Progress and the Welfare State and the 1960s—which are just in the offing—provide no solution; they do not point toward anything other than fre
edom of choice.
Thus, gathered around the twins’ cribs, we find all the hopes of the poor and the rich and the middle class and those on the nethermost rung. There are hopes pointing backward and hopes pointing forward, all mixed up into such a clamorous chorus of contradictory expectations that I hardly have a moment’s peace in which to say that, at this point in time, in Denmark, so many dreams are making themselves heard that it may no longer be possible to present them through the two-dimensional medium of paper; and that is my problem.
Nevertheless, I will carry on, I will turn a deaf ear to my doubts—well, what else would you have me do? Instead, let me tell you about the success of Carsten’s career, which took off in earnest just before the twins were born, when Fitz called him into his office. The old lawyer’s face gleamed, weary and opalescent, among the brown paneling and brown leather furniture and brown wash drawings, as he announced to Carsten that he was going to retire and that he felt certain that Carsten was now capable of assuming his burden when he relinquished it. Carsten had no idea that Fitz had any sort of life outside of his chambers and the law courts, and so he did not understand what he would retire to, but he did not ask, just as he had no comment to make on being ordered to take over the firm; he simply nodded and obeyed as he had obeyed Carl Laurids and his mother and Raaschou-Nielsen and the professors of law and the army officers.
He was on his way out, and had opened the innermost of the office’s double doors, when Fitz called to him. This time the old man gave his successor a somewhat speculative look before saying, “Carsten, I would like to bequeath my spiritual legacy to you,” and Carsten felt himself start because, for the first time ever, Fitz had used his first name.
The old lawyer held a long and well-considered pause and then he said, “I have summed up my experience of life, and what it amounts to is a dreadful truth, known only to very few, that being that our legal system is the Monte Carlo of justice!”
Carsten stared at him dumbly; then he gave a little bow and left the office. He had not understood his employer’s cryptic farewell remark but had not had the necessary courage to ask him to elaborate upon it. Several times, during the period that followed, he almost brought himself to ask, but still did not dare to; and then, one day, Fitz died in his office, sitting in his office chair, and suddenly it was too late.
That same year Carsten was made a counsel to the Supreme Court, the last occasion on which this ostentatious title was conferred. Carsten had applied for this only because he knew it was what Fitz had wanted; for his own part he was not greatly interested in this or in any other title, and if you were to ask me, “So what was he interested in, then?” the only answer I can safely give is “Work.”
He was the perfect counsel—well, of course he was perfect, since the courtroom proceedings, then as now, constituted a dance; a strict and unvarying sequence of steps that his whole life had been geared toward learning. He was the consummate trial lawyer. With manic and unfailing energy he could prepare his prosecutions and defenses in minutest detail and then wait, with infinite patience, for his turn to come. When it did, he would stand up and start to speak in beautiful, faultless Danish while pacing back and forth across the floor, knowing that he was following this theater’s predetermined plot and making use of whatever modest room for improvisation it afforded—to which end he employed his good looks and his charm and his courtesy and the weight of that civilization which he felt backed him up and gave him cause to hold his head high.
Right from the start he acted for the big companies. It was he who won Faxe Limestone Quarries’ creditable case against the state, and the big trademark suits brought by the American Coca-Cola Company, prior to and during its infiltration of the Danish market. He was also lawyer to the Wealthy—with his schooled discretion and politeness and personal modesty he was better qualified than anyone else to take care of the Really Rich Danes who, their enormous fortunes notwithstanding, were the most delicate of plants where money was concerned, willingly pursuing a lawsuit for years to force some little retailer to take back a pair of shoes and then, after losing their case, needing a diplomat as charming as Carsten to dissolve the glue that kept their small change stuck to the linings of their pockets.
Like Fitz, Carsten was family lawyer to the old aristocracy. For the money and—more often—for the prestige and, not infrequently, out of sympathy, he administered the dwindling revenues derived from exploitation in a distant past for old people who had been born and brought up like the Count’s children at Mørkhøj and hence had never learned to look after themselves. Now they sat in empty, debt-ridden, unheated manor houses the length and breadth of Denmark, staring at telephones that they could not figure out how to use because the operators had been replaced by automatic switchboards and the thought of dialing six numbers left them baffled.
The world showered honors on Carsten. He was given the most prestigious cases, was elected to the last of those boards to which he did not already belong, and was mentioned in the press. He was still only in his thirties, and seemed to harbor no doubts, and there was something totally natural about his social acceleration. He was well dressed without having to work at it, athletic without training, suntanned without ever seeing the light of day, relaxed although he never took a vacation now, and always, always in command of the situation.
And of course, once again, he became a symbol. His manner was proof that old-fashioned integrity and industry and rectitude could be combined with modern business techniques and modern-day society. In the courtroom the judges were hard put to it to conceal their emotions, and at board meetings hardened company directors and business executives and éminences grises and Scrooges regarded him with brimming eyes, and now and again a tear was shed. When Carsten really went to town, when he actually stood up and unfurled his eloquence like a garland and started pacing back and forth across the floor, the old money men would suddenly feel their crusts starting to crack, as the young lawyer unraveled the most complex situation for them, or devised a plan of action that would give one of the labor unions a bloody nose. Then, all at once, they would feel their emotions running away with them, because, they thought, this kid’s a golden boy, he’s a boy wonder, just the kind of young lion that is needed; he’s the guiding star, our insurance policy, he’s the plug in the hole, they thought and blew their emotions into their handkerchiefs. Then Carsten sat down and the meeting could continue in all serenity, now that all doubt had been erased. When the twins were a couple of years old he bought the piece of ground next to Amalie’s villa on Strand Drive and had a big house built of yellow brick. And, with this, the road to the future should have been clear.
Maria falls into line with these developments quite admirably. She has to stop working because she refuses to let anyone else look after the twins; obviously, they could have had four or five nannies looking after them, or been placed in a luxury-level nursery school, but that is quite out of the question. Maria wants to keep the children with her at all times, and since no employer is going to accept that, she has to give up working and stay at home. Although the fact that she never really comes to look upon Strand Drive as “home” proves to be one of the family’s little problems, and she refuses to acquire a driver’s license for the little Mercedes two-seater that Carsten has bought for her, and she will not have servants, she intends to look after this house—which she does not particularly like—herself. Carsten tries to convince her, to no avail—and this obviously has something to do with Maria’s upbringing; she is very, very reluctant to take orders; somewhere in the house, on the back of a door, her police helmet still hangs, and even though Maria never puts it on now, it still acts as a reminder of something.
Nor does anyone ever succeed in making her truly socially acceptable. Amalie did try, but after her first attempt, many years before, she had resigned herself to an I’m-lying-in-wait-armed-to-the-teeth attitude toward her daughter-in-law, an attitude that caved in on only a handful of occasions—as, for example, with the
birth of the twins. But other people also try to turn Maria into Mrs. Mahogany, wife of the counsel to the Supreme Court, Carsten among them—or at least he makes a few feeble attempts, and on one single, solitary occasion he does manage to coax her into attending a society function, for the first and last time. It is a dinner with roast pheasant and gateau from La Glâce and everyone talking about this wonderful game of golf until Maria, clutching at a fragile straw, leans toward her dinner partner and asks, with a glint in her eye, “And do you play golf, too?” Unfortunately, the man seated next to her is Kristian Mogensen, later to become such a celebrated lawyer. At this point he is young and up-and-coming and he says, “No, my dear lady, not yet.” And so Maria stands up, with a twin on each arm, and then she starts to cry and screams across the table at Carsten, “Why the hell did I have to come here and who are all these boneheads, they talk just like machines, well, we’re off, the twins and I are leaving, and you can stay here and enjoy yourself with your floozies and your gateau and on the way home I’m gonna tramp right across that bloody golf course, so there!” And Maria makes her exit.