The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

by Peter Høeg

  They looked into a flawless deep-green world. The conduit was completely round, the inside lined with green material that gave off a muted reflected light, like soft-tone recessed lighting.

  "Polyvinyl chloride," she said. "From Aarsleff pipe technologies. They've given the sewage system a life-extension treatment so it will last a little longer. They've pulled a PVC stocking inside the pipes."

  It felt as if you could see infinitely far in and down.

  "It's like looking into your own birth canal," he said. "It's very beautiful. Are the surveillance cameras turned off?"

  She nodded.

  "How about," he said, "using this unseen moment for a little kiss?"

  She tried to get away from him. But she was standing on a narrow step.

  "I know," he said, "that maybe you would say God sees us. But God is on our side. And Kierkegaard. Don't you remember what he says in Works of Love? Every love relationship is a shameless triangle. You, me, and Our Lord."

  She twisted her head away.

  "Goethe," he said. "And Jung. And Grof. And Bach. They're all in complete agreement. Before the great breakthrough, one stands mouth to mouth with the beloved facing one's own birth."

  She freed herself from his hypnotic effect.

  "Pure pop," she said. "You were never anything but pop culture!"

  The sound of her anger was condensed, like acid, perhaps due to the alembic of the pump case around them. It functioned like an acoustic concave mirror, increased and concentrated the tone. She had a melodious voice. Enhanced in the Zahle School girls' chorus. Conducted by Hess-Theissen. But at the same time it could be a whiplash. He had seen her quick-freeze an entire super-elliptical conference table of chief engineers.

  "I'm thirsting for you," he said.

  "Your source, please," she said. "That's borrowed. Stolen. Patchwork!"

  She gripped the arm of his coveralls.

  "Your feelings have no depth. You run, Kasper. You run away. One day it will catch up with you. The depth, I mean. Those declarations of love. You live and talk as if you're performing in the ring all the time."

  He began to hum. The acoustics in the steel conduit were fantastic. The sound crept around along the wall and came back, as in a whispering gallery. He hummed eight bars, charmingly, irresistibly, fantastically.

  "Paris Symphony," he said. "The development of the first movement. Where the main theme modulates into a crescendo. And in the final movement. At the end of the exposition. He simulates a fugue. Without developing it. That's pop music. He knows it himself. Writes from Paris to his father: I want you to know, Father, that I'm doing thus and so, in this and that measure; the audience will weep snot--they will love it. Pop music. But it works. It goes right to the heart. Technically it isn't anything special. No professional depth. But it's charming. It works. It works absolutely perfectly."

  He leaned toward her.

  "The heart. And the intensity. Those two things are why I went into the ring."

  Their faces were right next to each other. He did not move an inch.

  She climbed into the pipe's opening.

  "Two people at a time," she said to those behind her. "This is the roller-coaster ride of your life. It goes down to almost two hundred feet below sea level. You brake by pressing your feet and elbows against the sides."

  He got up beside her. They let go.

  9

  At first it was like free fall. There was almost no friction in the PVC; it was like riding on a pillow of air. He gave up tensing against it, leaned back, felt her body pressed against his. The only sound was a very faint echo of the fabric rubbing against the plastic pipe. And a distant, just barely audible sense of something waiting ahead.

  The curve straightened out.

  "A few more minutes," she said. "It's Northern Europe's longest roller coaster. Aarsleff invited the section leaders to try it when it was completed. They had us slide down holding a glass of champagne. It's a high-pressure pipe. No valves. No joints."

  The air around them got colder.

  "You visited my mother and father at home," she said.

  * * *

  It was when she had been gone for three weeks. He thought he was going crazy. He had circled around the address he had taken from her apartment, like a sick animal. Then he had driven out there.

  The house lay on the outskirts of Holte, close to the lake, at the edge of fields and forest, far back in a yard filled with old fruit trees. Her mother invited him in and made tea. She resembled Stina somehow, which nearly knocked him off his feet. Her father remained standing throughout the visit, leaning against the bookshelves, as if to prop himself up. He did not say anything.

  Kasper did not say anything either. It was the atmosphere in the room that spoke.

  The house was unassuming in a way. Both the man and the woman had an unpretentious tone.

  But it was the particular kind of unpretentiousness that comes when your family has surfed on a wave of bourgeois culture and financial capital for 250 years. Kasper had encountered the sound before, but not so close at hand. There was something limitless about it; the two older people before him were completely open--they had nothing to prove. For eight generations their background had variously been stockbrokers and pianists and Skagen painters and doctors of philosophy, and it was only about 125 years since Hans Christian Andersen had risen from the family's dinner table, and what shall we do with the Golden Age paintings with greetings on the back from the artists to Great-great-great-grandmother, because we have so many there is no room for them on the walls?

  Kasper had listened for the costs. What was the price for refinement, for the height of the ceiling? The last time Charlie Rivel performed in Copenhagen, Kasper had shared the dressing room with him in the Circus Building, the green dressing room. Rivel had stayed in the ring too long; Kasper could hear it, Rivel could hear it himself. The old clown had tears in his eyes when he came out. He had looked at Kasper.

  "I've lost my timing," he said. "Twenty years ago they wouldn't let me leave. Now they humiliate me. With their boredom. Everything has a cost."

  * * *

  A girl had come into the room. Younger than Stina. Like a small fairy. With a wide mouth and a thin face. With some of Stina's sound. And beauty.

  He pulled himself together after the shock. Tuned in. The connection between the intellectual and imaginative aspects of the girl's mind was disrupted. Her tonal unity was amorphous. But she had an open spirit, directed outward without reservation. He had heard it before, at charity performances. This must be Williams syndrome. A chromosomal defect.

  "I'm a friend of Stina's," he said.

  "You're her lover," said the mother.

  "She's left me," he said. "I don't know where she is."

  The woman poured the tea.

  "When Stina was a child," she said, "she refused to be fed. Under any circumstances whatsoever. I ended up putting her on the floor with her plate. She wouldn't hold my hand either. When we went shopping. I had no idea what to do."

  She reached out and touched her husband. Kasper heard the sexual vitality between them. Alive and healthy. After so many years.

  "She's gone away," said the mother. "We don't know where. We get letters. But there's no return address."

  "Could I see an envelope?" said Kasper. "I could track her down. I have limitless resources."

  They looked at him. He knew they understood his desperation. He felt their sympathy.

  "She would need to give her permission for that," said the father. "And we can't ask her."

  Kasper could have committed murder. Choked them. Burned the house down on top of them. He just stood there.

  The mother accompanied him to the door. Her resemblance to Stina was overwhelming. The words that were spoken came from Kasper's mouth. But he didn't know who articulated them.

  "When you touch people. Do your hands get very warm?"

  She looked at him in surprise.

  "Yes," she said. "That's w
hat people say. After about a minute my hands get very warm."

  * * *

  He had wandered the streets blindly, not knowing where he was going. When finally he could see clearly, he had lost his bearings, somewhere in the Vaserne bird sanctuary. By the time he found his way back to his car, night had come.

  * * *

  Behind them in the tube he heard the muted swish of the three others. And a sporadic thud when a crutch hit the wall.

  "You missed me," she said.

  She said it with amazement, candidly, as if it was only now that she really understood it.

  The descent became steeper.

  "We're almost at the end," she said.

  The slope of the pipe flattened out and they came to a standstill. They lit their headlamps; the tube ended at their feet.

  They came out into a square space, about sixteen by sixteen feet. It was crisscrossed by cement and plastic pipes; Stina placed her hand on the largest one.

  "The central cable line. From Copenhagen to Amager."

  There was a steel panel on the wall. She touched the panel with her fingertips. It slid to the side.

  "Escape routes are mandated by law," she said. "I was involved when the Building and Technology office in Copenhagen granted permission to create the landfill beyond Tippen. We mandated this emergency exit elevator. We'll come up directly under Konon."

  Franz Fieber emerged from the pipe. After him, the African. She had strapped Maximillian to her with a harness. His father held a telephone in his hand.

  "They've landed the helicopter," he said. "Despite the gale."

  A distant whistling came from the tube they had just left. Stina's face went blank.

  "Water," she said. "They've connected us to the main line from Tingbjerg. They want to drown us."

  She shook her head.

  "Who?" she said.

  Maximillian laughed quietly.

  "No matter who pushes the button," he said, "there's a system behind them that maintains reality."

  They all crowded into the small elevator. An inner door with glass windows glided open. The outer door began to close. A stream of water shot out of the vinyl tube. It became a huge torrent; the water hit the wall overhead with a sound like thunder. The elevator was lifted upward.

  "Let us all pray," said Kasper, "just for a moment."

  They stared at him.

  "Prayer," he said, "is the real Jacob's ladder where God's angels ascend and descend--it's the really big elevator. Besides, we need it."

  They all closed their eyes for a moment.

  It was a high-speed elevator. They felt pressure in their knees and after thirty seconds experienced a moment of actual weightlessness.

  They came out into a room of polished granite. Kasper recognized the structure of the stone surfaces. They must be in Konon's basement. Opposite them, double doors to the building's elevator opened. They entered it. The elevator car was big enough to hold a party in.

  Stina hesitated. With her finger on the button.

  Kasper heard her relinquish her authority. They were nearing other people now. The clown's bailiwick.

  "Let's take off the coveralls," he said. "They look like uniforms."

  * * *

  He counted twenty floors, plus a few unnumbered ones; finally, the elevator stopped.

  The door opened to one of the most tasteful rooms he had ever seen. In front of him was an oval wall decorated with pieces of driftwood. Seawater had smoothed their shapes on the beach and given the wood a silver-gray patina; the impression created was both rough and incredibly refined. The floor was marble. Under other circumstances he would have just stood there quietly. To enjoy the scene. And the very unusual sound of the room.

  But not now. Outside the elevator stood a man in a green uniform. Holding a machine gun. It was Aske Brodersen.

  Kasper had never cared for weapons. He refused to have so much as a prop pistol in his performances. Not even the kind where a flag pops out of the barrel with the word bang!

  He recognized the weapon in front of him as an automatic Bushmaster only because he had seen them in marketplaces when he toured the eastern-frontier provinces with the Russian state circus. Piles of machine guns and piles of opium had lain side by side in the markets; he would never forget the aroma of fresh curry leaves and raw opium and acid-free gun oil.

  He let the blue nun's smock swing around his hips. Adjusted his voice to a high pitch.

  "Where's the ladies' room?" he said.

  The man in front of him stopped short. Courtesy is deeply rooted in Danes; it's karmic, and goes back to the feudal structures of an absolute monarchy. Kasper glided across the floor.

  "Follow me," he whispered.

  Then he gave the man a head butt.

  Aske Brodersen sank to his knees, as if to pray. The African took the weapon out of his hands. She held the barrel with the stock down.

  In the wall ahead of them was a door made out of monkey-puzzle wood. Curved like the wall. Six feet wide. It was fitted with a pneumatic hinge and opened without sound or resistance. They walked into a room flooded with light.

  The walls were glass. The roof was glass. The floor was glass. Supported by narrow, chrome-plated steel beams. The space was shaped like a flying saucer. Beneath them was a drop of perhaps 250 feet down to the sea. Beyond the curved windows lay Copenhagen. The room was so high up you could see the city's weather laid out before you. They were above the clouds that covered Frederiksberg. Above something that could be thunder toward the south. And the inner city glowing in the setting sun.

  The silhouette of a gigantic wheel floated through the room. It was the shadow of the helicopter's propeller. The chopper was directly above them; the landing pad was on the glass roof. Beside a grand piano stood Josef Kain.

  Every clown has broad experience with expressions of surprise. Kain's was something quite special. Kasper had seen the look a few times before. On some of the truly great figures in show business. Once you accept the premise that only the Lord Himself can take you unaware, you have somehow made yourself vulnerable.

  KlaraMaria sat on a sofa; beside her was a dark-haired boy. She got up and ran over to Stina. Hugged her tightly around the waist.

  "Mother!" she said.

  She pressed her head against Stina's stomach. And repeated the word. The scene was beautiful. But bordered on sentimentality, perhaps. The girl's face turned toward Kasper. It was angelic, until it broke into a wide grin. The cosmos doesn't suffer sentimentality for very long.

  "Father!" she said.

  Kasper looked around. To see whom she was speaking to behind him. There was nobody.

  "I was pregnant," said Stina. "When I left. She's your daughter."

  There must have been an entry in the ceiling that Kasper had overlooked. And for a moment, his hearing had failed him. The man who landed on the floor must have jumped from a height of about twelve feet. Nevertheless, he landed like a cat. It was Ernst. His bandages were gone. The bruises appeared to have healed very nicely. With just a little powder he could have posed for a health club ad. His tone was soft and alert. His lips moved as if he were talking to himself. Kasper suddenly understood that what looked like a hearing aid was a headset. The man held a weapon in his hand. The instant he touched the floor he shot the African.

  A series of shots rang out, so close together they sounded like a cough. The force of the bullets lifted the woman and threw her against the wall. For an instant it seemed her body would hang there; then she fell to the floor facedown.

  The man turned the weapon toward Kasper. For a moment the woman's clothing confused him. Kasper tensed against the impact. He felt a particular sweetness at the realization that his prayer had never stopped. He would die in a petition to the great spirit of love. Following the best examples. Jesus. Gandhi. Princess Pemasal.

  Maximillian threw down his crutches and stepped in front of Kasper. The bullets came in an upward curve, striking him in the hip and across his chest; he seemed
to float backward. The exit path of the bullets opened his back like a zipper, blood and tissue bursting out over Kasper. Then his father fell against him, and they both toppled to the floor.

  The stocky man looked around the room. To be sure everything was calm before he finished his project. Kasper felt a wave of admiration. Every great improviser can recognize another. By the ability to remember the whole picture in the midst of a fortunate flow of actions. The machine gun was aimed at Kasper.

  At that moment he realized the African was alive.

  When he saw her get hit and fall he had been sure she must be dead, so his hearing had shut her out of the sound picture. It's this kind of matter-of-factness that limits us human beings and restricts our receptivity to the truly miraculous.

  In Morocco, with the Cirque du Maroc, at the edge of the Sahara, he had seen two circus lions mate. It happened on the way from the gangway into the cage. Everyone had scrambled out of the way, including the animal trainer; all the doors were closed and locked. Kasper got into a circus Land Rover with a technician. In the rush the technician dropped his cap; he opened the car door and leaned out to pick it up. The vehicle was 250 feet from the lions. In the time it took him to lean over two and a half feet, the male lion reached the Land Rover. As Kasper pulled the man back into the vehicle and slammed the door, the lion's claws hit the water can above the running board.

  The sound Kasper had heard from the lion was one he never wanted to experience again.

  But he did now. And from a woman.

  The African sprang directly from a prone position. And she reached Ernst in one movement.

  She hit him in the head with an outstretched arm, as if with a connecting rod. Then she grabbed him around the neck and slammed his head into the grand piano. It made a sound like a Chinese temple gong. The man's body grew slack; he sank down in a cross-legged position.

  The African's smock seemed to divide into two pieces, sliding down on each side of her. It was her carrying harness, slashed as if with plate shears. The leather-and-steel insert must have functioned like a bulletproof vest.

  Her hands clenched.

  "Thou shalt not kill," said Kasper. "We must try to hold evil in check. It will haunt you the rest of your life. Eckehart says somewhere ..."