The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

by Peter Høeg

  A feeling of no escape is in D-minor. It was Mozart who discovered that. And developed it. In Don Giovanni. Around the statue. Before Mozart, there had always been a way out. One could always pray to God for help. Doubt about the Divine begins with Mozart.

  Kasper got into the Jaguar.

  "We're going out to Tippen," he said. "Through the inner city. Where we'll change cars."

  Franz Fieber shook his head.

  "I've got orders. To take you away."

  Kasper folded his hands. He prayed. For forgiveness for what he would be forced to do. If the car didn't start in ten seconds.

  Kierkegaard writes somewhere that there is something disturbing about praying for forgiveness. It's as though one doesn't really believe that God has already granted forgiveness. But what shall we do?

  The Jaguar started up and moved into the flow of traffic.

  "I can sense my passengers," said Franz Fieber. "Through the seats. You would have slugged me. If I hadn't cooperated."

  The Jaguar drove down Studie Street. In the side streets adjacent to the barricaded area, homeland-security cars were parked with dark windows and their headlights turned off.

  "There are two," said Franz Fieber.

  "Two what?"

  "Two children. They've disappeared."

  If one listens into the truly big shocks one can hear what effort it takes to hold the world together. When for a moment we let ourselves feel deep, sudden joy or sudden sorrow, reality begins to disintegrate.

  "How long ago?"

  "Simultaneously--they disappeared simultaneously."

  "Why hasn't this been in the media?"

  "That was a police decision. Probably to protect the investigation."

  Kasper listened backward, toward the place in his heart and mind that prayer came from. Slowly, reality returned.

  "Tell me about the city," said Franz Fieber. "What it really sounds like."

  Kasper heard himself speaking, perhaps to reassure the young man ahead of him, perhaps to reassure himself.

  "It sounds like the way people treat their children."

  Perhaps that was true. Perhaps it was part of the truth. The area was as full of motorcycle cops as during a state visit. The police's small Dutch armored cars, built to drive straight into a war zone, were parked at every other corner. To help prevent plundering in apartments and stores.

  In the northern suburbs there is a tendency toward discipline without empathy. Coddling instead of love. Closer in, there is inferiority and bewilderment. The volume increases according to the population density. From Park Cinema on into the city center, Copenhagen sounds like an acetylene torch.

  The yellow eyes regarded him in the rearview mirror.

  Rasper kept his face expressionless. Generalizations have an inhuman touch. But without them it is difficult, or perhaps impossible, for great clowns to create energy. The Savior also painted with broad brushstrokes and plenty of tar on the palette.

  "I earn two hundred fifty thousand a month," said Franz Fieber. "On the city. Is that a sin?"

  "Before or after taxes?"

  "After."

  "It would be a sin not to earn it."

  The mobile phone rang; Franz Fieber lifted the receiver, listened, hung up.

  "They're searching for this vehicle," he said.

  Kasper pointed; the Jaguar turned across Ny Adel Street and drove through an open gate. The two hearses still stood there. The back door of one was open.

  "I'm borrowing a friend's van," said Kasper. "Still, I'm not sure the key is in the ignition. If not, could you help me?"

  The Jaguar stopped. Franz Fieber took out a small toolbox from a space between the seats.

  "I outshine every auto mechanic," he said. "Every auto electrician."

  A young man in a cook's uniform came out from what had to be the kitchen's delivery entrance. He took a tray from the open van. It held puff-pastry canapes. Hunger hit Kasper like a blow.

  "We've got perhaps a couple of minutes," he said. "I can take out the motor and do major repairs in that time."

  They got out of the Jaguar; Kasper was just a little ahead of Franz Fieber. It was like watching the sorcerer's apprentice, as crutches and prostheses fell into place of their own accord. Kasper was about to get behind the wheel; the young man put his hand on the door handle.

  "I'll drive."

  They looked at each other. Then Kasper heard the sound. It's not just that people themselves can be identified by their tone. The feelings they awaken in others also create a watermark of sound. Kasper had always been able to hear Bach's love for Maria Barbara in works from 1710 and on. And in the "Chaconne," Bach's wild and yet transfigured sorrow over her death. Now in the system in front of him he heard the quiet girl. He let go of the door. Franz Fieber swung himself into the driver's seat. Kasper walked around the vehicle and got in the other side. The key was in the ignition. The van glided out through the gate.

  A cell phone lay on the dashboard. Kasper leaned out the window and read the restaurant's telephone number on the side of the van. He dialed the number and was transferred to Leisemeer.

  "This is Kasper. I had to borrow one of your delivery vans from the yard."

  The chef breathed heavily into the receiver.

  "It is," he said slowly, "a long way down the list from you to the customer who pissed next-most on me."

  "It's also a long way down the list to the customer who comes next closest to loving your crisp fried vegetables as much as I do. And that's one reason you will wait an hour before reporting the van stolen."

  "And the other reason?"

  "When I get over these temporary difficulties, I'll attract customers. In droves. You can recognize a trendsetter when you see one."

  "You won't get over them," said Leisemeer. "This isn't temporary. I can recognize a big loser when I see one."

  The telephone hummed. The line was dead.

  4

  Night is not a time of day, night is not an intensity of light; night is a sound. The clock on the dashboard showed 9:30. Although a scrap of daylight still hung in the sky, it was no longer evening; night had fallen.

  Kasper heard children fall asleep, dogs go to sleep, machines get turned off. He heard the strain on the electricity grid decrease, the water usage diminish. He heard television sets get turned on, and adults prepare to end a long working day.

  He rolled down the window. The city sounded like a single organism. It had been up early, and now it was weary. Now it sank down into the furniture, heavy as a moving man. And under the weight he heard the uneasiness that is always there, because yet another day is over, and what was accomplished, where are we headed?

  Or else it was his imagination. Do we ever hear anything other than our own monstrous ego and the immense filter of our personality? They stopped at Frihavn Harbor. Beyond the Oslo boat quay and UNICEF warehouses they could see the landfill. And behind the container ship harbor, the gray contours of Konon.

  Around them and behind them rose the harbor's new construction. Stacks of apartments for seventy thousand kroner a month, designed like space stations on Mars.

  The van was high enough that they could look into the first-floor apartments. Wherever there was light, people sat on sofas watching television. Kasper let his hearing sweep over the buildings like radar; there were hundreds of apartments. But the human sounds, of bodies, of personal contact, were very weak, barely audible behind the TV programs.

  He heard the fabulous wealth. From the apartments, the auction houses, the offices. Right here was the greatest concentration of temporal liquidity anywhere in the country. It was a sound that made the affluent suburbs of Søllerød and Nærum sound like the Klondyke nightclub.

  "Before I was born," he said, "my father left the circus to get out of poverty. He studied law and had a career; he opened his own law office. We had money, we were flush. It was the mid-sixties. My mother forced him to drive her and me on tour; we had a Vanguard Estate with a trailer and those yel
low-and-black commercial plates. I can remember when we got a refrigerator--at that time the highway went only the first thirty miles toward Holbæk. Now that's all standard for welfare clients. And what do we do with our wealth? We watch television. One thing I've never understood: How do you go from the TV to the bed; how can you get something going with your beloved after staring into the electron cannon'?"

  Kasper heard the other man's system contract with this sudden intimacy. Heard it expand in an attempt to relax.

  "I've never had a TV set," said Franz Fieber. "I've never lived with a woman either. Not really."

  Kasper could hear him blush, the sound of blood pricking the skin's surface. He leaned forward, to respect the other man's modesty. The intimacy between them was a realm in F-major; it expanded into the night.

  "You work for the sisters," said Kasper.

  "I drive for them. As much as I can. What are we waiting for?"

  "I can hear the little girl. Sometimes I can hear people in ways beyond the physical sounds. I'm waiting for the right timing."

  Kasper closed his eyes.

  "Let us pray," he said. "Just for a couple of minutes."

  Franz Fieber set the icon of Mary in front of the gearshift; he must have taken it from the Jaguar. He lit a votive candle by it. They closed their eyes.

  The words that came were, "Grant me a -pure heart." That had been the favorite prayer of Saint Catherine of Siena; she lived to be only thirty-three, like the Savior. Kasper had already outlived them both by nine years. How much can one expect?

  The prayer brought a memory. Kasper remembered how as a child he had fallen asleep in the Vanguard between his mother and father. On the days they moved the tent site they never left until after midnight. He had awakened just as his father carried him into the cool night air to go to the trailer. He looked up into Maximillian's face and saw a weariness that had been accumulating for ten years. A weariness caused first by working full-time and taking his final university exams, then by completing his law studies with top grades, then by being unable to persuade his wife to leave the circus, and then by always being stretched between two worlds, the artisan's and the bourgeoisie.

  "I can walk myself," Kasper said.

  Maximillian laid him carefully on the bed; it was summer. The trailer had the brittle sound of glass that's cooled and crackles; it was the sound of veneer on the wood panels giving way. His father tucked the duvet around him, and sat down on the bed.

  "When I was a child," he said, "we had horse-drawn carriages and the work was very hard. I remember being seven or eight, as you are now, and being awakened at midnight to be carried inside. You know the fairy tales about people who promise the fairies something or other if only they can have a child. I promised myself something then. I promised that if I had a child who fell asleep in the carriage, I would always carry the child inside."

  Maximillian had gotten up from the bed then. Kasper could feel him as if he stood beside him; it wasn't thirty-five years ago, but now. This was what Bach had meant with Actus Tragicus; it was in both the music and the text: "SheAlmighty's time is the best time"; there is no past, only the present.

  He listened. It was as if the universe hesitated. There was nothing to do; one can't press SheAlmighty for a solution.

  "Stina," said the young man. "How do you know her?"

  He could have replied dismissively; he could have replied negatively; he could have not replied at all. Now, to his surprise, he heard himself answering with the truth. With one of the possible versions of the truth.

  "She rose out of the sea," he said.

  5

  He had been sitting outside the trailer; it was three o'clock in the afternoon. A warm September day. He had tried to repair a couple of Cro-Magnon-like hangovers with Haydn's symphonies. They had a more powerful detoxifying effect than Mozart's, perhaps because of the surgical horns, perhaps because of the shock effects, perhaps because of Haydn's ability to create interferences that made the instruments sound like something unknown, Divinely sent, from another, better, less alcoholic world.

  There had been a seal out in the water.

  The seal had risen out of the sea; it was a diver. He waded toward the shore backward, removed his flippers in shallow water, turned around, and walked onto the beach. He took off his Aqua-Lung and air tanks, unzipped his wet suit. It was a woman. She looked around; she had lost her bearings.

  Kasper got up and walked toward her. Somewhere Eckehart had written that even if we are transported to seventh heaven, if a traveler is lost we must be there immediately.

  "The current," she said. "It's strong along the coast. The dive boat is outside Rungsted Harbor."

  "You've drifted more than a mile north," he said. "Your fiance in the boat must be in tears now. But with my car, we'll be there in a minute."

  She looked at him. As if she wanted to determine his molecular weight.

  "I'll take the bus," she said.

  He gathered up the gas tanks and the harness backpack; she gave up trying to get the equipment from him. They walked up toward the road.

  "It's Sunday," he said. "The buses run only every two hours. One just left."

  She didn't say anything; he was sure she would give up. There's no woman alive who would ride six stops along Strand Road in dive socks and a neoprene suit, carrying two five-gallon cylinders and a mask and a snorkel.

  The bus came after five minutes.

  "I don't have money for the bus ticket," she said.

  He gave her a five-hundred-kroner bill. And a bus card.

  "This threatens my household budget," he said. "I need to get the money back. Perhaps you could write your address on the envelope."

  The bus door slammed; he began to run back to his car.

  The bus had been out of sight less than three minutes when he caught up to it. But then he fell behind a semi truck. No one got out at Rungsted Harbor. He began to worry. At the last stop in Klampenborg he got on the bus and walked through it. She was gone. He found where she must have sat; the seat was still wet, the floor too. He put a drop on his finger and tasted salt water; it must have touched her skin. The bus driver stared at him.

  * * *

  He telephoned the Rungsted Harbor office, but it was closed on Sunday. He telephoned the harbormaster at home; he told Kasper that they did not keep a record of diving outside the harbor basin. He didn't sleep that night. Monday morning he checked with the Danish Sport Diving Association. They had no record of diving outside the harbor in the last two weeks.

  He evoked her image, her sound. The core of her being was E-major. Behind that, the deeper tone of her instincts; people's instincts normally were less nuanced, not yet formed into musical keys, but hers were. He heard A-major, a professional key. She wasn't a sport diver. She had been at work. On a Sunday.

  He telephoned the Danish Maritime Authority. He got a trained mermaid on the line. Accommodating, but chilly and smooth. "We keep records of all commercial diving," she said. "But we don't give out that information. To anyone except the proper authorities." "I'm going to have a mole built," he said. "For my swan. Outside my villa on the coast. I want that firm to do it. I saw them working.

  They were marvelous. So could you give me the name of the company?"

  "It wasn't a company," she said. "It was divers from an institution. And how did you see them working? In Denmark one can't see more than three yards underwater in any direction because of the mire."

  "I was inspired that day," he said.

  She hung up.

  * * *

  He had gone out to the road and picked up his mail. There was a letter with no return address; the envelope contained a five-hundredkroner bill. Nothing else. He had driven in to see Sonja.

  * * *

  Sonja had brewed tea for him, slowly and carefully, then she stood beside his chair and stirred until all the honey was dissolved. He sank into her loving care. He knew it had a price. A lesson would soon be forthcoming.

  "You'
ve seen her only once," she said. "Five minutes at the most. Have we lost our senses?"

  "It's her sound," he said.

  She stroked his hair; somewhere within him he felt an inkling of tranquillity.

  "You reacted to my sound too, after all," she said. "Back then. And you were damn lucky in that. But we can't deny there have been other times when you've made a mistake."

  He sipped his tea; it was first-flush, made in a Japanese cast-iron pot. It stood on a hot plate on the table in front of her. Even with milk and honey, it was something entirely different from what he could get out of tea bags at home.

  She turned over the envelope that had contained the kroner bills. "It's stamped," she said.

  He didn't understand what she meant. She handed him a headset for monitoring phone conversations.

  "The franking machines," she said, "leave an identification number."

  She telephoned the postal service. Got transferred to the frankingmachines team in Fredericia.

  "I'm calling from the law firm of Krone and Krone," she said. "We received our postage machine from you. We think we got someone else's machine. May I give you the number?"

  She gave the number.

  "Yes, that's a mistake," said the woman's voice at the other end. "That machine should have been one of four. For the Map and Land Registry office. Where did you say you were calling from?"

  "I spoke incorrectly," said Sonja. "I'm calling from the Registry."

  She hung up.

  * * *

  She had accompanied him down the stairs. Out on the sidewalk she took his arm. She still had a dancer's posture. She led him into a flower shop across from the fire station, where she chose sprays of peonies that hadn't yet burst into full bloom. Large, round, perfect flowers.