The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

by Peter Høeg

  Her earlier confusion reappeared in her system. Still under control.

  For the first time, Kasper caught her eye. He nodded toward Moerk, toward the functionaries, toward the two young men.

  "Can they leave the room for a minute?"

  "They're here, among other reasons, to guarantee the legal rights of the accused."

  Her voice was flat.

  "It's about you and me, Asta."

  She did not move.

  "You shouldn't have said that about my clothes. It's only banks, businesses, and certain accounts that are required to report debt and interest. Now these people know."

  Everyone in the room was quiet.

  "It's hypocritical," said Kasper. "All these humiliating meetings.

  Without our being able to touch each other. I can't stand it. I'm not as strong anymore."

  "This is utterly absurd," she said.

  "You must ask to be taken off the case, Asta."

  She looked at Moerk.

  "I had him followed," she said. "You'll get a report. I couldn't understand why you didn't arrest him. I couldn't understand why information was being withheld from us. Someone is protecting him."

  Her voice was no longer controlled.

  "That's how we knew about the clothes. But I've never met him privately. Never."

  Kasper imagined her fragrance. The aroma of life on the steppes. Blended with wild Tajik herbs.

  "I've come to a decision," he announced. "You resign your position. We work up an act. You lose thirty pounds. And appear in tulle."

  He placed his hand on hers.

  "We'll get married," he continued. "In the circus ring. Like Diana and Marek."

  She sat paralyzed for a moment. Then she jerked her hand away. As if from an enormous spider.

  She rose from her chair, walked around the desk, and headed toward him. With the physical sureness of an athlete, but with no clear motive. Perhaps she wanted to throw him out. Perhaps she wanted to silence him. Perhaps she only wanted to vent her anger.

  She should have stayed seated. From the moment she stood up, she didn't have a chance.

  Just as she reached his chair, it tipped over backward. To the others in the room it looked as though she knocked him over. Only he and she knew that she didn't manage even to touch him.

  He rolled onto the floor.

  "Asta!" he pleaded. "No violence!"

  She was in motion; she tried to avoid him, without success. His body was flung across the floor. To those watching it appeared that she had kicked him. He rolled into the bicycle; it fell on top of him. She grabbed for the bike, and what they saw was her lift him off the floor and sling him against the door frame.

  She tore open the door. Maybe she wanted to leave, maybe she wanted to call for help, but now it looked as though she threw him into the front office. She went after him. Grabbed for his arm. He determined the doors' position by dead reckoning, and crashed into first one and then another.

  The doors opened. Two men came out. More people emerged from other offices. Little Jack Horner was on his way too.

  Kasper got to his feet. Straightened his suit. He took his keys out of his pocket, loosened one from the ring, and dropped it on the floor in front of the woman.

  "Here," he said, "is the key to your apartment."

  She felt the eyes of her colleagues on her. Then she lunged toward him.

  She didn't reach him. The senior monk had gripped one of her arms, Moerk had the other.

  Kasper retreated backward toward the door to the landing.

  "In spite of everything, Asta," he said, "you can't pawn my body."

  * * *

  Access to the staircase was through a dividing wall of reinforced glass with one door, next to the booth. Little Jack had left the door open. He followed Kasper out to the landing.

  Kasper felt in his pocket for a piece of paper; he found a one-hundred-kroner bill. He held it against the glass and wrote: "I got an unlisted number. I had my locks changed. I'll return the ring. Leave me in peace. --Kasper."

  "This is for Asta," he said. "I'm breaking up with her. What's the name of this setup here?"

  "Department H."

  There was no sign on the door. He handed the bill to the young man. He was in his late twenties. Kasper thought sadly about the pain that lay ahead for such a young person. And you couldn't prepare him. Couldn't spare him a thing. At most, you could cautiously try to let him suspect your own bitter experiences.

  "Nothing lasts forever," he said. "Not even a department head's love.

  * * *

  Kampmann Street was grayish white with frost. But bright sunlight fell on him when he stepped onto the sidewalk. The world smiled at him. He had dripped clear water into the poisonous well of mistrust, and thereby transformed it into a healing spring. As Maxim Gorky so aptly said about the great animal trainer and clown Anatoly Anatolievich Durov.

  He wanted to start running, but was about to collapse. He hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. At the corner of Farimag Street was a newsstand that also sold lottery tickets; he escaped into it.

  Through the fan of porn magazines on the shelves he could keep an eye on the street. It was deserted.

  A clerk leaned toward him. He still had a hundred-kroner bill in his pocket; he should have bought a sandwich and a Coke, but he knew he wouldn't be able to eat, not right now. Instead he bought a lottery ticket, the cheapest kind, for the Danish Class Lottery.

  The monks emerged onto the sidewalk. They were running, but their bodies were still stiff, and they were still confused by the way things had gone. They looked up and down the street. The older one was talking on a cell phone, perhaps to his mother. Then they got into a big Renault and drove away.

  Kasper waited until a bus stopped at the railroad underpass. Then he crossed Farimag Street.

  * * *

  The bus was almost full, but he found a place in the back and sank down in the corner.

  He knew he didn't have a real head start. He missed music, something definitive. So he began to hum. The woman sitting beside him edged away. You couldn't blame her. It was the rugged beginning of Bach's Toccata in D-Minor. Not the Doric, but the youthful work. He fingered the lottery ticket. The Danish Class Lottery was sophisticated. The prizes were big. Chance of winning, one to five. Percentage of return, sixty-five. It was one of the world's best lotteries. The ticket was a comfort. A tiny concentrated sphere of possibilities. A small challenge to the universe. With this ticket he dared She-Almighty. To reveal Her existence. To manifest Herself as winnings. In the midst of April's drab, statistical improbability.

  3

  To people with ordinary hearing and consciousness, Copenhagen and its suburbs stretch out horizontally from the center. To Kasper it had always seemed that the city lay inside a funnel.

  Up at the edge, with light and air and sea breezes rustling in the treetops, lay Klampenborg, Søllerød, and, just barely, Holte and Virum. The downward spiral began already near Bagsværd and Gladsaxe, and far, far down lay Glostrup. A claustrophobic echo reverberated across its deserts of meager plots; Glostrup and Hvidovre preempted Amager, as if singing directly down into the drainpipe.

  The great Polish nun Faustina Kowalska once said that if you pray fervently enough you can adapt yourself comfortably in hell. Earlier Kasper had thought that was because the saint had never been in Glostrup. Now he had lived here for six months. And he had grown to love it.

  He loved the bar-and-grills. The jitterbug joints. The Hells Angels clubs. The coffin warehouses. The Cumberland sausages in the butcher shops. The discount stores. The special light over the gardens. The existential hunger in the faces he met on the street, a hunger for meaning in life, which he felt himself. And once in a while this recognition made him unnaturally happy. Even now, at the edge of the abyss. He got off the bus at Glostrup Main Street, unreasonably happy, but very hungry. It was impossible to keep walking. Even Buddha and Jesus had fasted for only thirty or forty days. And afterward said
it was no fun. He stopped at the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Siesta Street and cast a discreet glance inside. The eldest daughter was working behind the counter. He went in.

  "I've come to say goodbye," he said. "I've gotten an offer. From Belgium. Circus Carre. Varieté Seebrügge. After that, American television."

  He leaned across the counter.

  "Next spring I'll come and get you. I'll buy an island. In the Ryukyu chain. I'll build you a temple pavilion. By a murmuring spring. Moss-covered rocks. No more standing by deep-fat fryers. As we gaze at the sun setting over the sea, I'll improvise."

  He leaned in over her and sang softly:

  The April moon glows

  on drops of dew

  her dress is damp

  she pays no mind

  she -plays and plays

  her silver lute

  alone at home

  she fears the night

  Two truck drivers had stopped eating. The young woman gave him a serious look behind soft, curly coal-black eyelashes.

  "And what," she asked, "must I do in return?"

  He lowered his head so his lips almost touched her ear. A white ear. Like a limestone cliff. Curved like a cockleshell found on Gili Trawangan.

  "A plate of sautéed vegetables," he whispered. "With rice and tamari. And my mail."

  * * *

  She set the food on the table, glided away like a temple dancer at the court in Jakarta. Returned with a letter opener, laid a bundle of envelopes beside him.

  There were no personal letters. He opened nothing. But he sat for a moment with each letter in his hand before he let it drop. He listened to its freedom, its mobility, its travels.

  There was a postcard inviting him to an exhibit of modern Italian furniture, where even the spumante couldn't disguise how uncomfortable the pieces would be; a chiropractor would have to escort you home. There were somber-looking envelopes from collection agencies with return addresses in the Northwest. And tickets to a Doko E premiere. Discount offers from American airline companies. A letter from an English reference work, Great Personalities in 20th Century Comedy. He dropped them all on the table.

  A telephone rang. The young woman appeared with the telephone on a small gold-lacquered tray.

  They exchanged glances. He used a P.O. box at a mail service on Gasværk Street. Any letters and packages that arrived were brought here to the restaurant twice a week. His address in the national register was c/o Circus Blaff on Grøndal Parkway. He picked up letters from government authorities there every two weeks. The mail service was required to maintain confidentiality. Sonja on Grøndal Parkway would burn at the stake for him. Nobody should have been able to find him. Even Customs and Taxes had been forced to give up. Now someone had found him anyway. He lifted the receiver.

  "Would it be okay if we came in fifteen minutes?"

  It was the blond woman from the day before.

  "That would be fine," he said.

  She hung up. He sat with the humming receiver in his hand.

  He called the information desk at Bispebjerg Hospital and was transferred to the children's psychiatric ward. Along with the government's School Psychology Office, the ward handled essentially all referrals of children from the Copenhagen area.

  The receptionist transferred him in turn to von Hessen.

  She was a professor in child psychiatry--he had worked with her on some of the more difficult children he'd had as patients. For the children, the process had been healing. For her, it had been complicated.

  "It's Kasper. I had a visit from a man, a woman, and a child. A ten-year-old girl named KlaraMaria. They say you referred them."

  She was too surprised to ask anything.

  "We haven't had a child by that name. Not while I've been here. And we would never refer anyone. Without a previous arrangement."

  She began to sum up. Painful aspects of the past.

  "In any case," she said, "we would try to avoid referring anyone to you. Even if we had a previous arrangement."

  Somewhere behind her Schubert's Piano Trio in E-Flat Major was playing. In the foreground a computer hummed.

  "Elizabeth," he said. "Are you sitting there writing a personal ad?"

  Her breathing stopped abruptly.

  "Ads are a far too limited channel," he said. "Love demands that you open yourself. It needs a broader form of contact than the Internet. What would be good for you is body therapy. And something with your voice. I could give you singing lessons."

  There was no response. In the silence he heard that it was Isaac Stern playing the violin. The soft very soft. The hard very hard. The technique seemingly effortless. And sorrow that was almost more than one could bear.

  Somebody stood beside him; it was the young woman. She put a piece of paper in front of him. It was blank.

  "The song," she said, "the poem. Write it down."

  4

  Darf Blünow's Stables and Ateliers consisted of four buildings that enclosed a large courtyard: an administration building with three small offices, two dressing rooms, and a large practice room. A rehearsal ring built as an eight-sided tower. A low riding house, behind which were stables and exercise and longeing pens. A warehouse containing workshops, sewing rooms, and storage lofts.

  The cement surface of the courtyard was covered with a thin layer of quiet, clear rainwater. Kasper stood inside the entrance. The sun came out, there was a pause between gusts of wind. The water's surface hardened to a mirror. Where the mirror ended, the black Volvo stopped.

  He walked to the middle of the courtyard and stood there, in water up to his ankles. His shoes and socks absorbed it like a sponge. It was like wading out into the fjord opposite the tent grounds at Rørvig Harbor on the first of May.

  The car door opened, the little girl pattered along the side of the building. She was wearing sunglasses. Behind her, the blond woman. He reached the building and opened the door for them.

  He walked into the rehearsal ring; the little lamp on the piano was lit. He turned on the overhead light. Took his shoes and socks off.

  There was a fourth person in the room, a man. Daffy must have let him in. He sat six rows back, bolt upright against the emergency exit. The fire department wouldn't have liked that. He had something by one ear; the light was poor--maybe it was a hearing aid.

  Kasper opened a folding chair, took the woman by the arm, and led her to the edge of the ring.

  "I have to stand very close," she said.

  He smiled at her, at the child, at the man by the fire exit.

  "You will sit here," he said quietly. "Or else all of you will have to leave."

  She stood there for a moment. Then she sat down.

  He went back to the piano, sat down, and wrung the water out of his socks. The little girl stood next to him. He lifted the fall board. The atmosphere was a little tense. The important thing was to spread sweetness and light. He chose the aria from Bach's Goldberg Variations. Written to soothe sleepless nights.

  "I've been kidnapped," said the girl.

  She stood very close to the piano. Her face was extremely pale. The theme modulated to a type of fugue, rhythmic as a guanaco's gait, charming as a cradle song.

  "I'll take you away," he said.

  "Then they'll do something to my mother."

  "You don't have a mother."

  His voice sounded to him as if it belonged to someone else. "You just didn't know," she said.

  "Do they have her too?"

  "They can find her. They can find everyone."

  "The police?"

  She shook her head. The woman straightened up. The little CD player he used for morning practice stood on the piano. He chose a disc, turned the machine so the sound waves were in line with the man and woman. He led the girl into the shadow of the sound, and knelt in front of her. Behind him Sviatoslav Richter struck the first chords as if he wanted to pave the grand piano.

  "How did you get them to bring you here?"

  "I wouldn't do som
ething for them otherwise."

  "What?"

  She didn't reply. He started from below. The tension in her legs, thighs, buttocks, hips, and abdomen was elevated. But not forcibly. No indication of sexual assault or anything like that. That would have caused stasis or a resigned lack of tension, even in her. But she was completely tight from just above the solar plexus, where the diaphragm attached to the stomach wall. The double sacrospinalis was as taut as two steel wires.

  Her right hand, which the onlookers couldn't see, found his left hand. Against his palm he felt a tightly folded piece of paper.

  "Find my mother. And then both of you come back for me."

  The music faded.

  "Lie down," he said. "It's going to hurt where my fingers are touching. Go into the pain, and listen to it. Then it will go away."

  The sound came again. Richter played as if he wanted to pound the keys through the piano's iron frame. The man and woman had risen.

  "Where are they keeping you?" he asked. "Where do you sleep?"

  "Don't ask any more questions."

  His fingers found a knotted muscle, double-sided, under the scapula. He listened to it; he heard pain of a magnitude a child should not know. A white, dangerous fury began to rise in him. The woman and the man walked into the ring. The girl straightened up and looked him in the eye.

  "Do as I say," she said quietly. "Or else you'll never see me again."

  He lifted his hands to her face and removed the sunglasses. The blow had struck the edge of her eyebrow; the blood had run down under her skin and collected above her jawbone. Her eye appeared to be unharmed.

  She met his gaze. Without blinking. She took the sunglasses from his hands. Put them on.

  He walked to the car with them, opened the door.

  "Continuity is important in the beginning," he said. "It would be nice if she could come tomorrow."

  "She goes to school."

  "One works best within a context," he said. "I wonder what her situation is. Are her parents divorced, are there problems? A little information would help."