by Peter Høeg
His eyes were dark, with experience perhaps. There hadn't been a day in the last twenty years--with the possible exception of the three months with Stina--when Kasper hadn't wanted to give up at some point. Withdraw his savings. Take off for the Fiji Islands. Develop an opium habit. Listen to cello sonatas on the stereo, and fade out on the beach.
It was eyes like those in front of him now that made him keep going. They had always been there. In the audience, in himself. Stina's eyes had sometimes been like that.
He felt in his pockets; there was no money, just his fountain pen. He handed it over the gate.
* * *
Back in the car, he spread out the two photocopies on the dashboard. The map covered Bagsværd Lake, Lyngby Lake, and the southern end of Pure Lake. The other page had more than forty addresses. Only one of them was in the map's postal district, and it was just a fragment: "Track 3, 2800 Lyngby," along with a telephone number. No institution name, street name, or house number. He called Information from his cell phone; the number was unlisted. He looked at his own Krak map. "Track 3" had a set of geographic coordinates, but no street name. At first he couldn't see anything on the map, but then he faintly saw three needle-thin lines. He opened the car door and held the book in direct sunlight. Every day that passes after one turns forty, the old folks' home and the lighted magnifying glass draw closer. Tracks 1 to 3 were three parallel paths in the wooded area between Bagsværd Lake and Pure Lake.
* * *
He had taken the last pieces of firewood out of KlaraMaria's hands and closed the potbellied stove. She had seated herself on the sofa. He had told her about Sonja and his visit to Slotsholm Island. About the policewoman from the Intelligence Service. She had listened without moving, absorbed in what he was saying.
"And the nuns?" she asked.
"I drove straight out there," he said. "I went according to the map."
3
He had parked by the Nybrogård psychiatric residence, taken Sonja's binoculars and the wrapped CD, and walked along Bagsværd Lake. The signs numbering the boat race lanes were newly painted. He had been here before, in the good years, twice. He had opened an exhibition of circus paintings at Sophienholm, together with the queen. And he had fired the opening pistol shot for an international regatta.
Track 3 was a gravel road north of Sophienholm, a fire lane cut into a hillside to reduce the incline for fire engines. The roadsides were steep; an oncoming car would have seen him. So he went into the woods and found an animal track above the road. He knew from the map that there were three peninsulas. Buildings had been constructed on all three, but they were hidden behind the vegetation. As he neared the third peninsula he found a spot above a sharp drop on the hillside, laid his jacket on the ground, and crawled forward to the edge.
His mouth was dry from anxiety. The sound picture was unreal, but he couldn't have explained why. He let his hearing expand; he heard nothing that could cause his anxiety. Toward the east lay the prime minister's official residence, out in the open like a large summer house. Behind him were Fure Lake and the North Zealand forest preserves with their wild stock of corn-fed, ring-marked ducks waddling around on mowed grounds. In front of him lay Bagsværd Lake and small suburban houses. Beyond them, the low, bearable city. Everything was peaceful. Around him, within a radius of three miles, at this moment twenty thousand people lived and breathed who thought Bagsværd and Denmark were cozy little corners of the world and it was not they who would die, but other people.
He pulled himself to the edge of the drop-off.
The original building was a large house, perhaps a hundred years old. More recently, low white rectangular structures had been added to it. He heard the faint hum of a small transformer station and felt from somewhere underground the vibrations of a large natural-gas furnace. A small machine building had a chimney tall enough for a diesel-driven emergency generator, which suggested this was a hospital.
His anxiety had intensified. It would last a little while longer. The idyll was about to be compressed; soon it would leap an octave, and disintegrate.
To the right he could see a group of children playing. It would happen around them.
His hair was standing on end. He couldn't identify the individual children; he could only hear their collective sound. It was completely harmonious.
The children had established a family of sorts, or maybe a tribal solidarity. They had placed small bowls, made of clay perhaps, on a plank resting on two trestles. In another spot, where the ground was sandy, they had dug a hole. All eleven children were active. There was no adult in sight. The play was spontaneous, without any rules; it was improvised before his eyes.
He looked down at the impossible. No other person would have understood that, except maybe Stina. And it wasn't certain that even she would have understood.
Play is an interference phenomenon. Two children playing together create a balanced binary opposition. Three children is a more fluid, but also more dynamic, harmony. Four children polarize again in two doubled units, more stable than the triangle. Five is again fluid; six is normally the largest number of children that can play an improvised game that isn't organized by a dominant leader among them. Only once had Kasper seen seven children play together in a fair and balanced way. That had been artists' children who had traveled with the circus a whole summer; it had been at the end of the season, they had known they would be leaving each other, and it had lasted less than an hour. Games for more than seven children required rules set and supervised by adults, like ball games, for example.
There were no adults in the scene before him, and no dominant sound. There were eleven children. And they played in perfect harmony.
He had put down the binoculars. Without them he could not see faces, but he wanted to sense the children as directly as possible. Most of them were between nine and twelve years old. Two were African, three or four were Asian, two or three might have come from the Middle East. He heard a few English words, also something that could have been Arabic; the children did not speak the same language.
Their sound was as soft as a baby's, completely uninhibited, like the sounds from a playpen in a nursery. And at the same time it was much too intense, blew around him like a strong wind; it would have reached the spectators in the back row of a soccer stadium. He was sure it was the same phenomenon as the quiet girl. And he had no idea what it was.
Nature usually has a dry sound because of a lack of perpendicular surfaces. In nature there is no lateral fraction, no sound energy from the horizontal plane. The scene before him was an exception. Perhaps due to the trees, perhaps due to the buildings, he heard everything very clearly. And what he heard made his hair stand on end.
Usually the sound we hear is a direct signal from the source of the sound plus innumerable reflections from the surroundings. But not the sound from the children below him.
There was a wooden porch facing the lawn where the children were playing; a woman in a blue nurse's uniform came out onto the porch. The children saw her coming and stopped playing.
On the alert. Simultaneously. Without losing their mutual interference. He had never seen children stop playing that way. He noticed how their tone changed. The woman raised one hand and opened her mouth to call to them.
Then the silence began.
The woman on the porch kept standing there with her hand raised and her mouth slightly open, completely motionless.
Kasper had never seen immobility like that before. She did not stand like a wax doll. Nor like a French mime. She stood as if in a film where the projector suddenly broke and a single image remained on the screen.
Below the steps leading to the lawn a rambler rose climbed upward; it would take still another season to reach the porch. But its leaves should have been moving in the breeze. They were motionless.
Behind the children, the spring-green foliage of the beech trees was motionless too.
Then the children moved. At first he thought this would change the situatio
n; it didn't. It intensified the sense of unreality. They turned around simultaneously and, like strictly choreographed dancers, resumed their play as if it had never been interrupted. But their movement did not release the woman; she kept standing there. The leaves did not move. On the roof above the porch one could see the exhaust pipe for the gas furnace, a stainless-steel chimney with a thin stream of vapor above it. The vapor was at a standstill; it had lost its direction and was suspended, motionless, above the building.
A large clock hung on the wall of the porch. It was very visible, like a clock at a railroad station, with black numbers on a white background and a red second hand; it did not move.
Kasper shifted his focus toward the lake. He saw a fine interference system of small ripples out on the water's surface. So the phenomenon before him was localized; farther out the water was moving.
He tried to move his arm to look at his watch. Movement was possible but painfully slow; the relationship between his mind and body had changed. Above and ahead of him was an area in which the foliage had become rigid. The area was shaped like a ball.
He tried to tune in to the sound. His hearing switched off. He tried again. It switched off. There was nothing to hear. Everything was silent.
The children made ordinary sounds, physical sounds, like all children, like all people. But behind these sounds another level had opened. A level that extended into the silence. The children's systems interacted in this silence, Kasper could hear.
Their interference was a type of friendliness. But not the friendliness of advertisements for Jehovah's Witnesses, where the lion grazes with the lamb in a place that looks like Frederiksberg Garden. They were interacting in a medium of powerful intensity.
Ordinary physical sound does not have much energy; it causes only a minimal increase in the general atmospheric pressure. Even a hundred-person symphony orchestra that goes wild in one of Wagner's greatly inflated passages does not produce enough sound energyin an hour to warm a cup of coffee.
It was different with these children. They had spread the strange silence in a spherical area of perhaps fifty yards in diameter. Within this space, Kasper knew, the acoustic organization of reality in time and space did not exist.
* * *
The children's games ended. With no warning, they all suddenly straightened up and walked out of their roles in an unspoken synchronous realization that now it was over. The woman on the porch opened her mouth and shouted, kindly. The rosebush leaves stirred, the beech foliage trembled, above the roof white vapor floated up toward the sky.
Rasper's body was tingling, like when anesthesia wears off, and he was terrified that he'd gone crazy. He discovered he'd pissed in his pants from fright.
The children moved toward the porch; everything was as usual. He had heard incorrectly; he had been imagining things. One child was still standing there, a girl. She was looking at something, at the clock on the wall.
As she and Rasper watched, the red second hand began to move, intermittently at first, then faster. And after that, the minute hand.
The girl caught up with the others. Rasper put the palms of his hands against his closed eyes. He lay there until his breathing calmed down.
Under more private circumstances he would have taken off his trousers but, considering the situation, it would not be a suitable way to present himself, so he tied his jacket in front of him like a maid's apron.
* * *
Then he walked down to the gate.
It was locked. There was an intercom and a buzzer; he leaned against the button.
After a minute, she came. It was the woman from the porch. At close range he could hear she was not an ordinary nurse. She had a young sound, perhaps in her mid-twenties. But tense.
He handed the CD through the gate.
"I think it says KlaraMaria," he said.
She was not older than she seemed after all. She took the CD.
She should not have done that; one should not take anything from a stranger, especially not from the great clowns. That, plus her hesitation, told him what he wanted to know. KlaraMaria was, or had been, somewhere behind the gate.
"We have a post box," she said. "We pick up the mail ourselves."
"I'm parcel post," he said. "We bring packages right to the house and put them in the customer's lap."
He turned and began to walk away. After the first turn he ran straight up the hill and back to where he had been lying; he threw himself on his stomach and crawled forward to the edge.
She was headed toward the building, walking as if she were drugged. The door opened and another woman came out, also wearing a uniform. A tall African. They exchanged words; he could not hear what was said because his heart was hammering so loudly. The African took the CD.
He had wrapped it solidly; the tape was the kind the post office used, and could have supported a man's weight. The African took hold of the paper and peeled the flat package the way one peels a banana. She looked at the cover. Turned her face in the direction where he had disappeared. She stood like a totem pole. He could not detect any uneasiness in her system.
4
It had taken three weeks before they came.
That spring he was with Benneweis in the Circus Building. He was taking off his makeup in the green dressing room when she arrived. The green dressing room had been Rivel's. It had been Crock's.
And Buster Larsen's, when he performed as an Auguste clown. Tardi had used that dressing room. Callas. Birgit Nilsson. Irene Papas. If Castaneda had understood opera, he would have called the room a musical power spot. Even the Copenhagen municipality had needed to watch its step when it renovated the building after taking it over in the eighties.
The room also had preserved Stina's vibration.
She had often gone along to the performances; she must have seen more than twenty during the three months. Afterward she would come down into the dressing room. She would stand behind him in the dark, not saying a word, while he took off his makeup. And sometimes, without any special reason or warning, she had gone over to his chair, put her hands over his eyes, and drawn him close.
The first few times he had thought, Now she'll get makeup and nose putty on her pashmina and it won't come out in the wash, but later he stopped thinking. It was part of what he had begun to learn from her, to stop thinking and let himself go; he had been on the verge of understanding how to do that. And then she had left.
She stood there again now. For a tone memory like his, there was no difference between past and present. That's what was painful-- he could never turn off the sound of loss. It was tragic, but it was also wonderfully sentimental; the day he died it would be just as bad as now, or worse.
Above her tone he heard a pentatonic scale. Exotic, like drums from a tropical jungle, and also deep breathing, like a blacksmith's bellows in the Friland Museum in Ørhus. It wasn't Stina; he was not alone.
He swiveled his chair around; it was the African. She stood where Stina had always stood, in the darkness just inside the door.
She was graceful like a photographer's model. Big like a rower. Dressed in expensive businesslike attire, like the head of a corporate board.
Someone burst open the door without knocking; it was Madsen, who was in a panic. The woman withdrew farther into the darkness.
Madsen was six feet, six inches tall and broad as an upright piano; he had been in charge of security in the Circus Building for twenty years without any outsiders ever getting in. If Macbeth had gotten hold of Madsen, it's not certain that Banquo's ghost would have slipped through.
Now he was as pale as a Pierrot; the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand stuck straight out, as if he were about to propose a champagne toast.
"They're broken," he said. "By a black woman. Wanted to talk with you. I told her she could leave a message. I tried to get her to leave. She's in the building somewhere."
"I'll lock the door," said Kasper.
The door closed. He locked it. He and the woman look
ed at each other.
"We have tape recordings," she said. "Of your telephone calls to us, as well as the two calls to the Intelligence Service. We've got witnesses to your visit on Slotsholm Island. We have good lawyers. At the very least, the police will arrest you. We'll leak the recordings to the press. They will make an impression. On the nine-tenths of your public who are children and their parents."
"She came looking for me," he said.
The woman did not hear him. That was the problem with the totem pole; communication went just one way.
"You will write a message," she said. "Now, right this minute. To KlaraMaria. You will tell her that you've gotten a job; you have to leave the country; you will be away for a long time, maybe a year. But you will try to keep in touch. After this you will stay away. Forever. And everyone will be happy."
He took the envelope from a large congratulations card from the dressing table, and on the back wrote with a lipstick what she had demanded. He handed the envelope to the woman.
"In the movies," he said, "women put perfumed notes like this into their bosom. Could I help you do that?"
It was an attempt to open her system so he could listen to her. It did not succeed. She merely gave him a thoughtful look. The kind of look with which men with chain saws determine what trees are going to be cut down.
He held the dressing-room door for her, and accompanied her to the exit.
She walked like a sea horse swimming in an eighty-five-degree ocean, in time to a mambo beat that only she could hear.
"What is it about the children?" he asked. "What is it they're able to do?"
She did not reply. He opened the fire-exit door leading to Studie Street.
"Why tell me this here?" he asked. "Why not at my home?"
She made a sweeping gesture that included the restaurants, the palace, the traffic on H. C. Andersen Boulevard. The people streaming into the city's nightlife.
"Right here," she said, "you can tell how it would feel to be on the front page of the morning papers with a pedophile charge against you."