by Peter Høeg
He drew a last card. It was a receipt for "various effects" marked MINISTRY OF JUSTICE, KIF, HORSENS.
He looked at his watch. It was Sunday morning. Not yet seven o'clock. He dialed Sonja's cell phone number.
It took a long time before she answered. Wherever she was, she wasn't at home; the acoustics were different, fewer surfaces to dampen the sound. She was in bed; he could hear the friction of textiles. There was a man beside her. She had alcohol in her voice, warm alcohol; it must be glogg, so close to Christmas.
He thought about what it must be like to be Sonja's husband, sitting there at home with the children. While she worked through the night and far into Sunday.
He thought about the tiny burst capillaries in her cheeks. The first small sign that one can get too much even of all the good things. Too many men, too much money, too much success. Too much Brunello wine.
He had never before used her cell phone number this way. She didn't ask any questions; she felt the seriousness immediately.
"I have five fingerprints," he said. "Unusually broad. Marked NATIONAL POLICE CFI. I have some numbers and letters of the alphabet from the crime lab. And a receipt from the Ministry of Justice marked kif and horsens. What am I getting into?"
"I need a little time. Can I call you back?"
He gave her Stina's number.
Sonja planned tours for large circuses and big rock concerts.
Each circus visited an average of eighty cities during a summer season, using logistics that were deeply rooted in tradition and based on trust and personal acquaintance. There wasn't a police chief in the country that she did not know well.
He sat on the windowseat. Stina and he had sat opposite each other here, naked. The curved window looked across outer Østerbro and out over the Sound. It was the only place in Nørrebro from which one could see the water. He knew that must have been the reason she chose the apartment. From down in the street he heard the taxi's horn.
The telephone rang.
"CFI," said Sonja, "is the Central Bureau for Identification. Its headquarters are at the main police station. The fingerprints look broad because they are what's called 'rolled off.' A detective has pressed the person's ringer on an ink pad and then rolled it across a piece of paper. CFI uses nine points per hand when they identify on the basis of a print; it's supposed to be almost as precise as DNA. And a DNA profile is most likely what you have from the crime lab. Both items can be returned when a person, after imprisonment, for example, is deleted from the Criminal Registry, which is the National Police's central database, the database from which one gets criminal records. The KIF receipt is from Criminal Care in Freedom, a system of thirty-two very open prisons. Among the five closed state prisons, Horsens is the only one with high-security detention, if we don't count the rock-musician units. So what you're dealing with is a person who has served a long sentence, has spent the last part of that sentence in an open prison after good behavior, and subsequently, in accordance with police regulations, has gotten the fingerprint records back as proof that he or she is no longer listed in the Criminal Registry."
Kasper listened to the apartment. It had a new sound. Perhaps Sonja heard it too.
"It's the woman," she said. "You've discovered that she was in prison."
Fie did not say anything.
"It may have been for something relatively harmless," she said. "You and I, like most people, would be arrested if we laid all our cards on the table for the authorities."
She had always been able to comfort him, or anybody, even when they were very young. This time it didn't work.
"Is it glogg?" he asked.
"Sake."
"Take care," he said.
He hung up.
3
The taxi had dropped him off on Strand Road, and he had entered the trailer quietly. Stina was asleep; he sat in a chair listening to her sleep. Her body was completely relaxed; he wasn't able to hear her dreams.
He sat there perhaps a quarter of an hour. Then she sat up in bed. She woke up like a cat, one moment deep unconsciousness, the next total presence.
"There's something I want to tell you," he said. "And to ask you. It will take some time."
She reached for the telephone and reported that she wasn't coming to work. No clever excuse that could have made life easier for the person at the other end, just a laconic report, and then she hung up.
They drove south; at Bellevue he turned off the road and parked by the train station. Without saying a word they walked north, skirting Bakken amusement park, through Ulve Glen in Deer Park, across Eremitage Plain toward Hjorte Pool, past the castle. At the top of the hill they sat down on a bench.
Eremitage Plain didn't have Nature's usual dry tone, perhaps because of the trees, perhaps due to the Sound's shining surface; a quiet body of water is as hard as stone. The acoustics were like those in a concert hall, all the surfaces hard and reflecting.
Somewhere Martinus had said or written that Eremitage Plain was an earthly reflection of a spiritual fact in a better world. At this moment Kasper understood him; from the place where they now sat it was possible to live with the sound of the Charlottenlund and Hellerup suburbs as well as the central city behind them.
"When I was twelve I broke my back," he said. "I was part of a classic barrel act. You hop blindfolded with your legs tied together up a stack of three-foot barrels to a height of about twenty-six feet, receive applause, turn around, hop down again, and finish with forward somersaults and a twist. At a height of twenty feet I jumped incorrectly, grazed the barrel, hit the next one. The stack fell over and tumbled down on top of me. They were sixtv-six-pound beer kegs from Carlsberg brewery. I broke my back and hip. At Rigshospital they said I would never walk again, and that I would have to be spoon-fed the rest of my life, and the rest of my life might be very short. They closed two doors before they said that, but 1 heard them anyway."
He heard her empathy.
"It wasn't so bad," he said, "ft was like starting to fall--a weight was taken off me, the weight of being an ordinary twelve-year-old boy in the mid-seventies. An interlude had begun, and in that interlude I heard for the first time. I heard the hospital, the trip home, the car, the winter quarters, as id never heard before. It wasn't just the physical sounds; it was their context. Usually we never hear the world as it is. We hear an edited production. The sounds we like, we draw forward. 7 he ringing in the ticket booth when they balance the cash. The fanfare that announces the little circus princess we're in love with. "The bubbling sound of eight hundred people in a full tent. Whereas the sounds we don't like, we push away. The sound of leather reinforcements on deteriorated canvas. The sound of frightened horses. The sound of the toilets. Of the gusty wind in August that tells us summer is soon over. And the rest of the sounds are irrelevant--we tone them down--the traffic, the city, the mundane. That's how we listen. Because we've got things to do, because we're on our way somewhere, even a twelve-year-old boy. But suddenly I no longer had any projects; they were taken away from me. And for the first time I heard some of the world alive, unfiltered, unmuted."
He saw that Stina's eyes were gray now. But at other times they had been different. Turquoise, greenish. Sometimes flecked. "When you really listen, all sounds begin to organize themselves into themes. They aren't haphazard. We don't live in chaos. Someone is trying to play something. Trying to create a piece of music. SheAlmighty. That's the name I gave to the composer. The one who creates the music. I lay in bed for three months; then they realized I was getting better and started to give me physical therapy. But I have only vague memories of the healing process. The joy was felt mostly by the others. What I was preoccupied with was the other thing. Being in my body and the world without muted sound--again and again, briefly, always briefly, always just for a moment. It sets an agenda. Even if you're only twelve years old, even if you don't have words for it, still you know that what will really matter for the rest of your life is to be able to really listen. To have a pict
ure of the world that's true to nature. To hear it as it actually is. And with this longing comes the fear of not succeeding. That was twenty years ago. Half a lifetime is gone. And I haven't come much closer."
"So what keeps us from hearing?" she asked.
It took him a long time to reply. Only once before had he spoken about this to another person.
"In order to live in this world we need to keep an orchestra playing. Way in the foreground. It's a small dance orchestra. It always plays its own melody. It plays the golden oldie 'Kasper Krone.' Which has a series of refrains that are repeated over and over. Again and again it plays our bank account numbers, our childhood memories, our PIN numbers, the sound of our mother's and father's voices. The pale-green strophes we hope will be the future. The black noise we have good reason to suppose will be our actual reality. It plays continuously, like a heartbeat. But when the other sound begins to come through, you discover that you've been standing with your back to the true concert hall the whole time. We live in a sort of lobby. Where we can faintly hear the great orchestra. And that sound, just the embouchure to a sound from the real concert hall, makes the Mass in B-Minor disappear. Like a whisper in windy weather. It's a sound that sweeps away the din of war. It drowns the music of the spheres. It takes away all the sounds of reality. And at the same time as you vaguely hear the great orchestra, you vaguely sense the price of the ticket. When the door to the real concert hall begins to open you discover that perhaps you were mistaken. That Kasper Krone exists only because your ears continue to isolate the same little refrain from the collected mass of sound. That in order to preserve Kasper and Stina we've turned down the input from other channels to pianissimo. But that's about to change. And you can feel it. II you want to go inside, it will be the most expensive concert ticket anyone has ever bought. It will cost you the sound of your own self."
She stroked his arm. He had never been able to create a picture of her body in his mind. Sometimes she seemed as frail as a bird, sometimes as solid as a freestyle wrestler. But always when she touched him he could hear the earth, the earth and the sea.
"Where are we in all this?" she said. "You and I?"
"With you," he said, "the volume controls are lost. And I want to run away."
She was quiet. The woods were quiet. The wind had stopped blowing. The concept of an artistic pause is not unknown to SheAlmighty. "I'm afraid too," she said. "Couldn't we run away together?"
He waited. She had her first chance to be candid; the possibility was there, and then it passed.
"To be twelve years old," he said, "or sixteen, or nineteen, and to have experienced that we live in an illusion, that in reality the world doesn't consist of material but of sound--that's not easy. Where do you go? In the mid-seventies. Having experienced something that no one else in the surrounding two thousand miles has heard. It makes you lonely. It creates a combination of loneliness and megalomania. You know you won't be understood. Not by your family. Not by your artist friends. Not by pastors. Not by physicians. Not by wise people. By no one. Nevertheless, you keep looking."
She had become absolutely quiet. Perhaps she sensed it was getting close. Her second chance came--he could hear it; she muffed that chance too. The moment was open, and then it closed again.
"Artists are believers," he said. "Deeply religious, like Gypsies and sailors. Perhaps because they live close to death. Perhaps because they travel light. Perhaps because they work with illusions. Each evening, while music plays, you unfold reality and exhibit it in the ring, and fold it up again, and carry it outside. When you've done this five thousand times, you begin to sense that the world around us is a mirage. That no matter how much one loves another person, a woman, a child, sooner or later that person must be carried out of the ring to rot away. And if one is completely honest, one realizes that all of us already stink a little. So one turns to some sort of God. In the heart of every artist is a longing, an empty space, something like SheAlmighty.
"And the Danish State Church didn't really help with that; the only ones who took religious experience seriously were the fundamentalists in the Indre Mission Church, and they didn't like the circus. So some artists developed their own religion, like my father; he's a believing atheist and proud of it. Others used one of two shops, the Catholic Church on Bred Street or the Eastern Orthodox Church. My mother took me along to the church on Nevsky Street. We spoke with a woman. The woman was wearing a habit. My mother told her that my father had left the circus and wanted her to leave too. What should she do? I wasn't more than eight years old--still I knew what the woman should have answered. She didn't do that. She spoke only one sentence: 'I like the circus very much myself.' We sat there perhaps ten more minutes, in complete silence. Then we left. When I was nineteen, and things weren't going well, I wrote to her."
He stopped speaking; the silence was Stina's final chance. In the fairy tales and in this so-called reality, there are always three chances.
She missed this one as well.
He took out the folded letter and laid it on the bench.
"Her name was Mother Rabia," he said. "I did some investigating and found out that she was a deaconess and head of a convent. I wrote to her. In that letter I revealed for the first time to any human being what I've told you today. Will you read it out loud, please?"
She did not move. He stood up.
"I've forgotten my glasses," he said, "but I still remember it by heart. It begins like this: 'SheAlmighty has tuned each person in a musical key, and I--Kasper Krone, the clown--am in the difficult position of being able to hear that.' It's twelve years since I wrote that letter; I didn't save a copy. This morning I saw it again. In your apartment. I thought I'd find it. That's why I went there."
"She answered you," said Stina. "Mother Rabia answered you. Why didn't you respond to her answer?"
He had circled around her; now he stood next to her. His hands closed around her forearms.
"I'm the one who's asking the questions," he whispered. "How did you get that letter?"
"Will you please let go of me?"
Her voice was husky, amicable, pleading.
He put weight behind the pressure; she was forced to her knees. "You'll find out," she said. "But not now."
"Now," he said.
"I've had some experiences in the past," she said. "With men and violence. Bad experiences. I get very frightened."
Her face had turned gray. Fatigued.
He squeezed harder. Something--he didn't know what--had seized and possessed him.
"Let's hear about the letter," he said.
He had underestimated her physical strength, now as in the past. From her kneeling position she kicked his shin with an outstretched instep. The blow was so hard that at first there was no pain, just paralysis. His legs buckled under him. As a child she had climbed trees and played with boys--he could hear that. She locked his wrists as he fell, so he couldn't cushion the fall. Fie hit the ground with his shoulder, like cyclists and artists, to protect his head. He heard his collarbone break with a sound like a dry branch cracking off an ash tree.
She was on her feet, but he threw himself forward from a prone position. He got hold of her ankle and pulled, then crawled after her until they lay beside each other.
"When you found me on the beach," he said. "That wasn't accidental. I'm part of something very big. You want something from me." He took hold of her jaw. His fingers pressed the nerve centers behind the jaw muscles.
"My basic psychological problem," he said, "is that I can't trust women. Women always want something besides love. A man's body, maybe. His fame. His money."
She twisted her head free.
"I'm glad I don't have to hide it any longer now," she said. "That it's your body I want."
He shut her jaw again.
"There's something more than that," he said. "You've gone very far. Given a performance that's lasted three months now. Tell me what it's all about."
He squeezed.
"Yo
u've ruined everything," she said.
Then she head-butted him.
That was the one thing he hadn't expected. She hit perfectly. Not on the nose, which causes heavy bleeding. Not too high up, where the skull is thick. But right above the ridge of the nose.
He went out like a light. Only for a few minutes, but when he began to hear and see again, she was gone. There were people around him, but at a distance. Respectable citizens who were walking their dogs and staring at him. He could hear their thoughts. They thought: "There lies another addict who picked psilocybin mushrooms on fertile lawns and has drifted off to dreamland now."
He would need to adjust his self-image yet again. He had always imagined that in Deer Park he would ride in a carriage with a princess.
* * *
He had driven home with one arm. He had parked beside the trailer and sat in the car for a while. Nature had played the last part of Die Kunst der Fuge. And he had understood that he would never see her again.
4
He could remember the telephone number for Rigshospital. He wanted to say goodbye. He dialed the number. Maximillian answered the phone himself.
"It's me," said Kasper. "I'm calling from the airport."
"So we're both about to leave on a somewhat bigger trip," said Maximillian.
They were quiet for a while.
"Can you remember," said Kasper, "when we children were small. When we ate lunch after morning rehearsals. There were always children visiting, and the children didn't have to sit down for lunch; we ran back and forth from the table. Took bites. We didn't have to stop playing. And when we rehearsed, you never pressured us, neither you nor Mother. Never. I never said thank you for that."