by Peter Høeg
"We've put forward a series of possible explanations. Tomorrow evening I'm going on television to summarize them. This is what I'll say: Like Iceland, Denmark is headed southeast in a conditional geologic system. But we can go no farther; Africa is headed north and is pressing on Eurasia. The alpine collision zone is about to shift toward the north. This has created an explosion in the crystalline crust. About two miles beneath Copenhagen. The area where the explosion occurred is surrounded by a layer of heavy rock, similar to the Silkeborg anomaly. That prevented the pressure wave from spreading. Which is why the earthquake wasn't registered anywhere else. The only harm that occurred is the superficial collapse. We have reason to believe that there will be no further quakes. It's difficult to predict earthquakes. We have no guaranteed methods. We can't measure stress accumulations at great depths. We don't know what the earth's surface can withstand. Nevertheless, we're confident. We remain vigilant. But we see nothing to indicate that it should be necessary to evacuate. We don't think there will be further real earthquakes. That's what I'll say tomorrow evening."
"That will be reassuring," he said.
She leaned toward him. Under different circumstances he would have enjoyed every inch. But not now.
"Yes," she said quietly. "And that's the intention. But there's just one thing wrong. And that is: It's a lie."
For a moment Kasper's peripheral hearing had failed; during his lack of attention, the young man from the platform had reached them.
"He is to be deported," the man said to Stina. "He was supposed to have been flown out of the country."
Kasper now recognized him; it was Moerk's page.
"Lieutenant Colonel Brejning," said Stina, "is responsible for our security."
The officer stepped in front of Kasper.
"There's a warrant out for his arrest," he said. "He's violent."
They did not look at Kasper. That was careless. You should not take your eyes off great clowns. He still had the dinner plate. From a tray under one of the white boards he took a wooden pointer, spun the plate in the air, caught it with a nail delay, centered it on the pointer, set the pointer on the desk, and moved the wheelchair forward. The young people and the African watched the whirling gyroscope as if hypnotized.
He wheeled himself in front of Stina.
"We'll take him with us now," said the officer.
Behind Stina and the officer, the lively kitchen exploded; the plate wasn't earthenware--it was real porcelain and you could hear that the moment it broke into a cloud of ceramic splinters.
The instant the officer and Stina turned around, Kasper opened the top drawer of her desk. She had never locked anything, not then, and not now; she had a blind trust in the world. Unfortunately, such trust is not always well founded.
On top lay some kroner bills, under the bills a small pile of handkerchiefs that smelled like lavender. Under the lavender lay an old acquaintance. From a three-inch-square black-and-white photograph in a plastic pocket KlaraMaria stared up at him. He stuck it inside his bandage and closed the drawer.
They turned around and looked at him. The young people looked at him. The African looked at him. Nobody thinks that a man in a wheelchair, wrapped up like a sausage, has any vigor. The situation dissociated into unreality. In this limbo the clown functions well. "Could we be alone, please?" he said to Stina.
The officer shook his head.
"There are things," said Kasper, "a man can do for a woman only in private."
Behind Stina was something that looked like a sluice door. She pushed it up and stepped inside. The African lifted Kasper and the wheelchair over the doorsill; it was twelve inches high. She came in too. Closed the massive door as if it were cardboard.
"Brejning is from the Intelligence Service," said Stina.
"That's why I'm so nice to him," said Kasper. "We must try to help talented young people in the next generation have an easier time growing up and maturing than we did."
The space around them was like a huge broom closet with an industrial sink, water vacuums, shelves of cleaning materials, and narrow metal tables bolted along the wall. The walls were light-colored granite, as in a luxurious bathroom.
"This is the beginning of the basement," said Stina, "under the National Bank."
He took out the plastic pocket, removed the photograph, and laid it on a table.
"There was no earthquake," she said. "Not at any time."
Love has something to do with recognition. We can be fascinated by the unknown, we can be attracted by it, but love is something that grows, slowly, in an atmosphere of trust. From the first time he saw Stina, on the beach, he had heard it repeatedly, confidence and trust; it was there now too. But there was something else, now as then, which was strange, insurmountable, like an unexplored continent. It hadn't diminished with time.
"We felt the earthquake ourselves," he said. "At the restaurant."
"We felt a vibration in the earth's surface. Locally."
"But the big earthquakes. Eight on the Richter scale. I read about them in the newspaper."
"The Richter scale is a measurement of the combined energy discharge. The sum of a series of locally variable constants, plus the logarithm multiplied by the oscillation amplitude measured on the seismogram divided by the number of oscillations. But there was no amplitude. No oscillation in the earth's crust. The two huge events were not earthquakes."
"Collapses, perhaps?"
"A collapse is uneven. It starts at one point and spreads exponentially. These were absolutely even movements."
She took hold of his lapels.
"The so-called fault zone. It's a rectangle. Five thousand feet by over two thousand feet, plus a depression through the whole Nyhavn area. Straight. Horizontal."
Her face was right in front of him. She had a tone he had never heard before. An amalgam of wonder and desperation.
"An earthquake is a sudden shift in the earth's crust, plus the consequences of the shift. Primary waves followed by ring-shaped secondary waves that cause the damage. In these instances, there was no explosive displacement. One moment everything is normal. The next, a seven-hundred-by-five-hundred-yard rectangle sinks ten feet. And is covered with water. And stands still."
"Holes in the lime?"
"Cave-ins are uneven. They don't go off according to a bricklayer's line. They don't end horizontally."
Someone pounded on the door. He laid the postal receipt in front of her on the table, on top of the photograph. Addressed to her. And signed with a ten-year-old girl's surprisingly steady hand. He wasn't sure she had seen it.
"Even so, we could perhaps explain ourselves out of it," she said. "That's how natural science works. We predict events backward. I'm sure we would have succeeded. If it hadn't been for the number of victims."
"No one was injured."
"True. No one was injured. What do you make of that?"
"It was a great blessing. One feels the hand of God."
She stopped short.
"That's new," she said. "In your vocabulary. About the hand of God."
"I'm growing. Developing rapidly."
He could hear the concentration in the next room. Someone was getting ready to do something vicious to the door. He thought about the Blue Lady. He could hear that one of his life's refrains was about to repeat itself: Just when one is establishing deep contact with feminine nature, the collective unconscious outside the door prepares itself with an angle grinder and a large diamond blade.
"Too great," she said. "The blessing, that is. Too fortunate. We asked the police, Civil Defense, and the Accident Investigation Board under the Council for Greater Traffic Security what the predicted consequences would be. We asked them to calculate the expected loss. Based on material from UCLA, which has experience with earthquakes in large cities. The estimate we got: at least ten thousand dead. Three times as many injured. Damage to the cable system, one billion kroner. To the sewer system, one billion. Ten billion in damage to buildings, primar
ily from fire and collapse. The first depression caused a ten-foot pressure wave. It cleared away sidewalks and streets along the canals. Dragged with it eight hundred fifty vehicles. More than a hundred fifty feet of roadway on Knippel Bridge. It glided along eight hundred buildings. With more than thirty thousand people in them. And nobody was hurt. Not a single baby drowned. Not one person had a car accident. Not even one old woman's corns got trampled."
The door began to vibrate. Powerful forces that wanted to prevent the prince from getting the princess had begun cutting.
Stina picked up the plastic pocket from the table; on the back of the photograph was a child's drawing.
"I got it two days before the first tremors. In a letter. Registered mail.
The drawing was colored very carefully. Kasper saw a castle. With three towers. Fish in the moat. Houses and cars. A baronial castle. A drawbridge.
"It's the new Foreign Ministry," Stina said.
He could see that. The steps. The bridge. It wasn't a bridge across a moat. It was Knippel Bridge. The castle wasn't a castle. It was the large white building on Amager Island that people called the Desert Fort. The city wasn't a city, it was part of a city; the area around Bremerholmen Harbor. She must have had a model, perhaps a map of Copenhagen. In the right-hand corner she had signed it KlaraMarà¬a. Ten years old. And a date. September 24. That was unusual. He had seen thousands of children's drawings. Sometimes they had the year. But never the specific date.
The preciseness of the drawing was unusual too. There had been the same preciseness in the depiction of Lona Bohrfeldt's clinic. "It's a map," said Stina. "It's exact. When you examine it closely. There's the National Bank. The Svitzer maritime services headquarters in Nyhavn. The Admiral Hotel. The rigging sheers. The dry docks.
She brought her face close to his.
"It's a map of the first depression," she said. "Exact, in every detail. And mailed forty-eight hours before the event occurred."
A new sound came through the door, the hiss of a compressed-gas cylinder. The angle grinder now had the company of a cutting torch.
"We're going to leave now," said the African.
She opened a door that led to a smaller room with yet another door, and opened that too; a stairway seemed to fall forward into bottomless darkness.
Kasper tried to pull himself together, to listen, but his hearing was out of order. He felt like a child, an infant in swaddling clothes. He chose a prayer to the Virgin Mary, leaned into the prayer, and left the practical things to Mother.
The African picked up a telephone on the table and called someone. Kasper heard Franz Fieber answer on the other end.
"And then pick us up on the surface," she said.
"The photograph," said Kasper. "In your drawer. We don't have a scientific explanation of that."
She had always hated to be asked for explanations. To be asked for appointments. She hated everything that seemed to threaten her freedom.
"She came to see me."
"Where?" he said. "I--your counterpart, your soul mate--haven't been able to find you. How would a ten-year-old girl be able to do it?"
The African hung up the telephone. Stina walked over to the door by the stairway.
"This leads down to the metro," she said. "Via a sewer system and the main cable conduit from Havne Street to Holmen."
* * *
They carried him down the stairs, pushed him along an underground canal, lowered him down a skid. He had put an arm around each woman, well aware that yet another existential monotony was about to set in. But an unbroken stream of healing vitality emanates from femininity. Precisely in his situation, during a period of convalescence, this healing quality was crucial. Bach would have done the same.
They came out into the metro tunnel. It was illuminated by emergency lights, the rails covered with water. Stina knelt in front of the wheelchair.
"This is the last time," she said, "that the two of us will see each other."
She ran her fingertips gently over his wounds and stitches. Over the swollen parts of his face. The touch was so careful that there was no pain. Already back then, before she disappeared, when she touched him he had felt that the greatest performances were not those on a podium or in the ring. The greatest performances were when fingertips took away a very thin veil between people and uncovered the universe in its entirety.
"It's usual," he whispered, "for severe illness and injury to precede a great breakthrough in love."
"It's usual," she whispered, "that a person who can't learn has to feel."
7
For most of us, our relationship to our beloved is expressed in a particular piece of music. Mahler used one of the adagios when he proposed to Alma; for Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov it was the "Moonlight Sonata"; for Kasper it was the "Chaconne." He heard it now, in the water dripping from the walls, in the echo in the tunnel, in the African's breathing. She took his pulse without slowing down and without saying anything, but he could hear her concern. He drifted in and out of consciousness.
They went through an unlighted area, she pushed him up a skid, opened a door, and wheeled him out into the dawn. They were at Nørreport Station. There were people around them, a growing number. He had always avoided crowds of people; a crowd has too many sounds, which was one of the reasons he had stayed with the circus. Had stayed in the ring. Had stayed with music. A performer tries to synchronize everyone else's sound with his own system. When his performance as a silver clown won at the circus festival in Monte Carlo the first time, after the award ceremony he had walked slowly from the Grand Palais next to the big state casino down to the ocean. Nine out of ten people he passed had recognized him. He had wondered if this might be another way to solve the problem. If only you are famous enough, if only you are the king, if only your signal is strong enough, then you drown out all the others.
The next twenty years had pared down that position, especially the last five years. He had realized that in a large gathering neither the virtuoso nor the king is safe. It's only if you are anonymous. As he was now. Nobody looked at him, and if anyone did, it was to understand why a princess like the African had taken the stable boy out in a wheelchair.
Somebody whistled three notes, a pure, broken C-major chord; he was the one whistling. That's the drawback for those of us who are victims of our own charisma. He was wheeled forward onto a lift, hoisted up, rolled into place in the delivery van. Franz Fieber sat in the driver's seat.
"I, who am childless," said Kasper, "was about to develop a love for you that could be compared to what a father feels for a son. Until a little while ago, when I got some information that makes me think I've caught you in still another lie. The man whose gondola Sister Gloria and I borrowed, the man with turquoise eyes and a complexion like a tournedos, isn't one of your drivers. He's a naval officer. Who is connected to all this."
Franz Fieber hesitated. Kasper drew his wheelchair closer to the front seat. The young man edged away.
"Gert Suenson," said Fieber. "He's from the Navigation and Hydrography Administration. He's connected to the lay order. He's responsible for all the traffic in and out of the barricaded area. He has helped the police. In the hunt for Kain."
Kasper closed his eyes. It's terrible to be shut in, regardless of whether the cell is called a circus ring or the generally accepted version of reality.
"We haven't had breakfast," he said. "Is there any espresso left? And a drop of Armagnac?"
His consciousness phased out on its own; he tried to tune into the sound of his absence, and then he was gone.
PART SEVEN
1
He woke up in the hospital bed in his cell. The Blue Lady was sitting on a chair by the head of the bed.
He had a headache that made the combined hangovers of his entire life mere hypochondria.
Something tugged at him from deep down; he was dragged beneath the border of alert consciousness. He could hear someone singing; it was Stina.
All the
women in his life had sung: his mother, Stina, Klara-Maria, the nuns, Sonja, the Police Women's Chorus; there was no end to the delights. All he needed was the Blue Lady. To make the cast complete.
Stina laughed toward him. He realized it was a dream founded on actual events, and chose to remain in the dream; he was not yet in shape to confront reality.
She sang as she had sung back then, spontaneously, with no announcement. She had gently drawn him backward and laid his head in her lap. Then she had touched him. Had stroked his skin, and sung. It had been the classics, pop singers like Kim Larsen and Shu-Bi-Dua, the great operas. Her voice was husky, lingering; he wished Rachmaninoff, and brain researchers Larsen and Bundesen, could have heard her. They would have felt completely understood. She glided over into the "Jewel Song" from Gounod's Faust, "Am I awake, or is my head whirling in a marvelous dream?" She hummed Rachmaninoff's "Vocalise." She sang like Renée Fleming. With only a semitone span. But just as effortlessly, she adapted the melody on the spot.
Her fingers against his skin had followed the music. He had begun to understand what the Savior meant by saying that God's kingdom is here and now; her touch and her voice created a Paradise on earth all around him.
He flowed into the feeling of being a child. He heard his own tonal space, it was 90 percent feminine; he felt like a woman, utterly receptive.
He heard the momentary relief of not having to be only a man. Not having to persevere. To keep things going.
He felt the love in her fingers. Right now, for a brief moment, he was accepted. For the sake of his honest face. For the sake of his clear blue eyes. For no reason at all. Just because he existed.
Perhaps love begins when it is all right, both for another person and for yourself, to be the way you are. Even if you are named Kasper. And have told women, including the one touching you right now, so many untrue stories that you no longer know where SheAlmighty's reality begins and your own fabrications end. And even if you have crossed so many boundaries that you no longer know if you can find the way home.
His legs had itched. To run away. From the unbearable knowledge that there was almost a 100 percent probability that a moment like this would never come again.