by Peter Høeg
He heard the sound of Little Jack Horner at the tax office. The angel in the booth at the barricaded area. The Bad Mother at Lona Bohrfeldt's clinic. The entrance to Taarbæk Sanatorium. Women who guarded telephones. Who guarded the Map and Land Registry. He heard the officer behind the counter at Slotsholm Island. The man in the glass booth at Konon.
His anxiety became concrete, became fear. Panic-stricken fear, panic-stricken and deaf. Fear of being shut in.
"It was like that only for those two days," he said. "Otherwise my life has been as varied as a painter's palette."
He heard his voice from outside. It belonged to a person he didn't know.
"I've done five hundred performances," he said.
"But they were all quite similar, weren't they?"
He looked her in the face. He had never seen such a look. It was absolutely calm. And absolutely alert.
"That's all right," she said. "We all try to camouflage the monotony. But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we're so much like one another anyway. Our triumphs are the same. Our pain. Try for a moment to feel what relief there is in the ordinary."
He looked at her. She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created.
He heard how few themes there were in his life. How few strings there had always been to play on. He let them go.
It was silent around him. Within him. More silent than it had ever been before.
The door began to open. The door to the great music. He knew she could hear it as well.
"That door too," she said, "even that will become monotonous in the long run."
He let go. He was behind the concert stage. In the wings with SheAlmighty. There was a hole. In the sound wall. Silence flowed through the hole. For the first time ever, his hearing had peace.
* * *
He did not know how long it had lasted; there was no extent to the moment. Extent in time requires that a metronome ticks, a pendulum swings. The moment had been silent.
"What did you do?" he said.
He couldn't make himself look straight at her.
"In a way, nothing," she said. "Played the silence game."
He looked at her after all. She smiled. Her smile sounded the way Ella Fitzgerald sang. The sound of a playful child, but also of timeless maturity. Was she an old woman or a very little girl?
"Mother Rabia," she said, "my predecessor and teacher, often said she experienced people as being trapped inside bubbles. One or two tiny little holes were pricked in the bubbles. And only through those holes could the bubbles connect to one another, only through them could people communicate and experience reality. Those holes ensure that we always experience the same few basic situations. Each of us carries around our own reality. But we have very little contact with other people's reality. Now what was the reason you never answered her letter?"
He did not say anything.
"The desire to be something special," she said, "is very strong. In all of us. It doesn't matter that life is painful. If only it's a special kind of pain. But when you meet someone who is wiser. Who listens more deeply. Then you risk having to put your specialness into perspective. Was that it?"
"That was part of it," he said. "But I was also afraid. That it would . . . weaken my hearing."
He could tell that she understood him.
It had gotten light outside, though he hadn't noticed the daylight come. He heard children's voices, children and young people. He got goose bumps.
"They aren't ordinary children," he said. "I've seen them stop time."
The voices came nearer; they were below the window. He recognized two of them, which couldn't be true. All the same, he put on his glasses and rolled the wheelchair over to the window. Beneath it were permanent tables and benches; the children were eating breakfast outdoors.
The closest child was the boy from Slotsholm Island. With water on his brain. One year older. But the same boy. In the child's shirt pocket Kasper saw the predecessor of his fountain pen.
His fear returned. He could feel sweat running from his armpits and down his sides. The other sound came from a group of children farther away. A big boy was serving them--hardly a boy, a young man.
His voice was husky, deep-throated like those of the boys in the St. Annas choir. It was the boy from the Rungsted Hotel.
"I know two of them," he said.
"That must be a coincidence."
"I'm a card player. I know the odds of coincidence. This is outside those odds."
She sat where she had been sitting the whole time.
"Simon," she said. "He goes to the daycare center where you picked him up."
He shook his head to ward off her words.
"He was waiting for you," she said. "Not that moment. But sooner or later. All of us were waiting for you. Among the things I learned from Mother Rabia was that the tenacious people, those who lead, will come to us sooner or later. One can just wait for them."
"And the other youngster. The tall one. He served me at a hotel."
She shrugged her shoulders. Stood up.
He felt furious that she wanted to leave him. At this moment.
"We've just started," he said.
She shook her head.
"What we were looking at was a glimpse of the silence. Not a lexicon about the mysteries of life."
If he could have risen he would have grabbed her.
"You're a great egotist," she said. "In my opinion, that's positive. A great egotist is a great sinner. Great sinners have the opportunity for great remorse. Remorse is a springboard."
She drew down one shoulder of her smock. He stared at a piece of lacy black material, probably silk.
"I grew up accustomed to a degree of affluence," she said. "I could never live with wool next to my skin."
He managed to preserve his centeredness.
"And what about everyday life?" he said. "Two children have disappeared."
AH humor drained from her face.
"That," she said, "is even worse than you imagine."
* * *
The African brought some soup and sat with him while he ate. "Most things," he said, "are outside our control and in the hands of SheAlmighty. If a child disappears, or comes back again. Whether it lives or dies. Perhaps in the end we can do nothing either for or against it. But if we're going to be able to endure looking at our own powerlessness, there's one thing we must have done. We must have done our utmost."
He did not reach her; her mind was closed. She gathered up his dishes. In the doorway she paused.
"I'll get a car," she said. "Tonight."
"How about a bottle of Cognac? A couple of glasses. Some painkiller, a little morphine for when I have to perform?"
PART SIX
1
It was all over in three hours.
She arrived just after midnight, helped him into the wheelchair. The elevator took them down into a parking garage. He counted twelve parked vehicles: two four-wheel drives, the ambulance he had come in, another ambulance, a trailer truck, two pickups, a station wagon, three Volkswagen Polos, perhaps for the nuns' power shopping, and a delivery van.
Sister Gloria lowered the delivery van's lift, pushed him onto the platform, hoisted it, wheeled him into the van, and secured the wheelchair. Franz Fieber sat behind the steering wheel.
The garage door must have had a sensor or a remote control; it glided up by itself. Outside, the night was like a wall. The wrought-iron gate in the fence opened, the vehicle's headlights caught wisps of fog.
"We have three hours," said the African. "After that, somebody will begin to wonder about us."
* * *
"You said you had a driver," said Kasper, "who had a boat."
Franz Fieber wrote something on a small tablet under the icon, without taking his eyes off the road. He reached back and handed the piece of paper to Kasper.
Kasper tried to dial the number, but wasn't able to;
his hands were haking. He pointed to the number and the African dialed for him. He had to push the bandages aside to get the telephone to his ear. It took an eternity before the phone got answered. By a large person.
"This is Fieber's big brother," said Kasper. "Fieber says you have a boat you can have ready in fifteen minutes."
The man gurgled into the receiver.
"Get a doctor! It's the middle of the night!"
The motive for our actions doesn't lie ahead of us. It's something behind us that we're trying to escape. The voice on the telephone had memories of disappointment and abandonment. It had protected itself against those memories with material things. The words came from a fleshy body in a huge house.
"It pains me," said Kasper, "to think that you could have kept your job. And been ten thousand kroner richer."
They were driving along the Bispebuen highway. The telephone receiver was silent. Perhaps it was all just imagination. And the man was about to hang up.
"In cash?"
Kasper took the Institute money out of his bathrobe pocket and held the bills up in the light from the highway. He counted twenty bills. With a picture of Niels Bohr on them. The quantum mechanic had large bags under his eyes. It must have been hard on him. To live with a saint's heart and intelligence. And yet have lent a hand to the bomb.
"In slightly used five-hundred-kroner bills," he said.
He heard a lamp get turned on, the bed groaned, something heavy growled. His wife or the Rottweiler.
"The harbor is closed at night," said the man.
"Have they really managed to convince a true sailor that the Sound closes at sunset?"
They entered Øboulevard Avenue.
"The Kalvebod pier," said the voice. "Diagonally across from the sluiceway."
* * *
They drove past the central railway station and the main post office. Then turned south along the harbor and past the new fish market. When Kasper was a child there had been coal storehouses, houseboats, and manufacturing industries here; now there were shopping centers and nightclubs.
They passed the H. C. Ørsted power plant and Belvedere Wharf. He hadn't been here for ten years. When he was a child 250 cutters had been moored here, and there had been community gardens where people lived year-round. Now there were bowling alleys, mixed-use housing, and porn-film studios. A number of the small and medium-size circuses had stayed here; he remembered several winter seasons in South Harbor. At that time, the city had ended here, and southeast of the Zealand Bridge it was all tundra. Now there were golf courses, a soccer stadium, gas stations. Three houses he remembered from those days had been designated as historic landmarks and now stood inside a fence on the golf course grounds. What is one to think, that in half a generation we have gone from the jungle to the zoo?
"When I was a child," he said, "this area was the seedy side of the city. Now it's all respectable. I don't understand it."
It's always nice to have an audience. But he was speaking to himself. He had not expected an answer.
"The seedy side is intact," said the African. "As much as in those days. Or more. It has simply put on makeup."
He was seized by anger he did not understand.
"How," he said, "has an underage nun who grew up in the bush acquired such wisdom about the shadowy sides of life?"
She leaned over, kicked away Franz Fieber's leg, and jammed on the brake. Kasper was almost jolted out of the wheelchair and thrown through the front window. Franz Fieber was white as a ghost.
She pulled the medallion over her head, handed it to Kasper, and turned on the overhead light. Kasper saw a photograph of two children and a man on a green lawn. The children were arms and legs and wild, white smiles. The man had a gentle mouth and a look that salted the gentleness.
"I'm thirty-five," she said. "I have a husband and two children."
The silver medallion was warm against his hand. It had her fragrance. He knew that somewhere in the tropics there must be a plant that exuded precisely this aroma in the midday sun.
He turned over the flat piece of metal. On the reverse side were engraved two Zulu shields, two crossed Asagai fauna, and the words FIRST PAN-AFRICAN AIKIDO CHAMPIONSHIP.
"I'm becoming more and more attracted to the life of a nun," he said. "Can one aspire to that?"
* * *
They parked opposite two shallow basins between two piers; at the end of one pier they saw some movement; otherwise everything was quiet. Sister Gloria wheeled him onto the lift and set him down on the ground. She pushed him slowly, calmly, across the road, and toward the pier. There was no traffic. He loved the night. When he was a little boy his mother had read to him--not often, because there hadn't been time or extra energy, but sometimes. She had read Palle Alone in the World. He had heard the silence in the book. Behind the drawings, behind the words, behind the book's apparent loneliness, he had heard the refreshing silence in a city where everything is at rest.
He had the same feeling now: that the city around him was completely quiet. And that a capable female presence moved him forward.
On the farthest cement bollard sat a man wrapped in a horse blanket. Already halfway out the pier Kasper knew he had seen him before, seen him or heard him.
The Beet stood up, but his turquoise eyes gave no sign that he recognized the figure in the wheelchair. It would have been strange if he had; Kasper was bandaged like a mummy. The man was the person who had operated Stina's boat outside the National Bank art eternity of fourteen days ago.
"If we're going inside the barricaded area," he said, "it will be five thousand extra."
Bohr looked even more debilitated under the sodium lights. Stina had once told Kasper about Einstein's opposition to the quantum mechanic's theories of probability. Like all great poker players, Einstein had a sense of the limits of random chance. To meet the Beet here in South Harbor was outside those limits. Kasper shuddered a little. For a moment he had a sense that SheAlmighty was playing with a marked deck.
He opened the Cognac, the African handed him two eyecups; he managed to pour despite his trembling hands.
"Sister Gloria and I," he said, "live at the same convent. Monks and nuns are separated by a grill. For a whole year we've looked at each other through that grill. We can get out only for tonight, which is her eighteenth birthday. So we'd like to celebrate alone."
The man looked at the bandages. At the plaster cast. At the wheelchair.
"That's five thousand extra. As a deposit. I'll return it when you get back."
Kasper put on his glasses. Counted out half the amount. Not without difficulty.
"We'll leave the boat in there," he said. "Nyhavn Canal. No risk for you in that. And I'm sure you remember how it was to be eighteen and in love."
The man stared at Kasper. Kasper raised his glass for a toast.
"To the Savior," he said. "The first toast is always to the Savior."
Sister Gloria laid two aluminum planks from the pier to the gunwale, and wheeled Kasper onto the boat.
"It's a Yanmar," said the man. "How are you going to get it started?"
The nun opened the engine compartment, set the choke, opened the compression release, turned on the ignition; the engine started. She released the clutch, put it in gear, gave it gas, and the boat slowly glided past the man on the pier.
Kasper raised his glass.
"She took the boiler-attendant exam," he said. "Before she studied to be a doctor. But after she had recanted her eternal promises. And graduated to black belt."
* * *
The boat glided out of the sluiceway; the harbor channel widened.
"We trained back there," said Kasper, "when I was a child. The smaller circuses that couldn't afford real winter quarters, they camped here or in North Harbor. When spring came, at lunchtime we would go down and sit on the pier by the spice warehouses. I had a dream, a daydream, then and for many years afterward. An image that came by itself. I imagined I'd have children, I'd show them where I had liv
ed and worked. It was always this harbor I saw in my mind. And one day I'd stand with them in the stern of a sailing ship gazing in toward South Harbor, and we'd be on our way to some distant place. And there would be a feeling of great freedom."
"Was there a woman too," asked the African, "in the dream?"
He thought about that.
"No," he said. "It was, in fact, just the children and me."
They passed Teglholmen and Tømmergraven appeared to port; they neared the barricaded area. A nylon net hanging from a cable attached to orange buoys had been stretched across the channel, interrupted only by a boom beside a platform with a small shack on it.
He recalled the other barriers he had encountered in his search for KlaraMaria. He thought about the Blue Lady. He knew he was seeing something projected from his own mind. The knowledge gave him a brief feeling of deep serenity.
He thought about the man whose boat he had now rented, another instance of something that was both a hindrance and a help on his way toward the quiet girl. He looked at the African opposite him, who was yet another manifestation of feminine nature. He could feel the repetitions; he was trapped in tonal repetition, a form of erasing the tape. But for the first time in his life, he knew it. Freedom would come through this knowledge; he could hear that.
"We'll be stopped," said the African.
He listened. There was no one in the shack.
"We're on a nonviolent mission for SheAlmighty" he said. "We have the cosmos with us."
She helped him out of the wheelchair and into the bottom of the boat; she lay down on a thwart. The boat glided under the boom. There was no one to be seen on the platform; they were in Gasværk Harbor.
"Why didn't you have any children?" she asked.
To his amazement he heard himself telling the truth. Or the tiny bit of the truth that can be expressed.
"Maybe I never believed I'd have enough stability to be able to offer to a child. I knew I could do something for children for half an hour or forty-five minutes. In the ring. Under the lights. But maybe I wasn't really suited to anything more than that."