Smilla's Sense of Snow (23 page)
Read Smilla's Sense of Snow Online
Authors: Peter Høeg
Benja lifts her head. Even she has heard of that name.
“I didn't know he was still alive.”
“I'm not sure he is, either.”
He hands me the envelope. I hold it up to my nose. The spots are red wine. Moritz sticks a finger inside his turtleneck collar and moves it around.
“It wasn't pleasant. He's not the man he used to be. At one point he slammed down the receiver. While I was in the middle of a sentence. But he did write, after all.”
It's a rare experience to see Moritz uncomfortable. Not until I'm out in the car do I understand why.
He catches up with me at the door. “You forgot this.”
It's the second envelope.
“A single clipping about Tørk Hviid. From the Danish Press Service.”
A clipping service he subscribes to. They collect any mention in the press about him.
He wants to touch me. He doesn't dare. He wants to say something. He doesn't manage it.
In the car I read the letter out loud. The handwriting is almost illegible.
Dear Jørgen, you cheap little barber's assistant.
The mechanic looks disoriented.
“My father's first name is Jørgen,” I say. “And Victor has always been temperamental.”
It must be fifteen years since I saw him last. The opera had given him an honorary residence on Store Kannike Lane. He was sitting in an armchair positioned next to the piano. He was wearing a dressing gown; I had never seen him in anything else. His legs were naked and swollen. I don't know whether he could stand up anymore. He must have weighed over 300 pounds. Everything sagged on him. He was looking at me, not Moritz. Those weren't bags under his eyes, they were hammocks.
“I don't like women,” he said. “Move farther away.”
I moved away.
“You were cute when you were little,” he said. “That time is past.”
He signed an album cover and handed it to Moritz.
“I know what you're thinking,” he said. “You're thinking now that old idiot has recorded another album.”
It was
Gurrelieder
. I still have the record. It's still an unforgettable recording. I've sometimes thought that the body, our very physical existence, puts a limit on how much pain a mind can bear. And that Victor Halkenhvad, on that record, reaches that limit. So that afterward the rest of us can listen and make that journey without going there ourselves.
Gurrelieder
. I still have the record. It's still an unforgettable recording. I've sometimes thought that the body, our very physical existence, puts a limit on how much pain a mind can bear. And that Victor Halkenhvad, on that record, reaches that limit. So that afterward the rest of us can listen and make that journey without going there ourselves.
Even if, like me, you know nothing about European cultural history, you can still hear a world collapsing in that music, on that record. The question is whether anything has taken its place. Victor didn't think so.
I've looked it up in my journal. That's all I have left of my memory. It's ten years ago that you last visited me. Let me tell you that I have Alzheimer's. Even a money doctor like you must know what that means. Every new day a piece of my brain peels away. Soon, thank God, I won't even be able to remember all of you who betrayed me and yourselves.
It was his indifference that did it. At the same time as he sang, trembling, ready to burst, unbearably full of romanticism and its feelings, there was a sense of distance, a place inside him that didn't give a damn.
Jonathan Hviid and I went to the Conservatory together. We started in 1933. The year that Schönberg converted to Judaism. The same year as the Reichstag fire. Jonathan was just like that. The most awful timing. He composed a piece for eight flutes and called it “Silver Polyps.” In the midst of the flatulent postwar Danish narrow-mindedness which even regarded Carl Nielsen as too controversial. He wrote a brilliant concerto for piano and orchestra. The piano was supposed to have old-fashioned iron hot plates placed on top of the strings because they produced a very special sound. He never got it performed. Never, not once. He married a woman about whom even I have a difficult time finding anything negative to say. She was in her early twenties when they had the boy. They lived in Brønshøj, in a neighborhood that doesn't exist anymore. Garden sheds with tin roofs. I visited them there. Jonathan wasn't making a dime. The boy was totally neglected. Holes in his clothes, red-eyed, never had a bicycle, was beaten at the local proletarian school because he was too weak from hunger to defend himself. Because Jonathan was supposed to be a great artist. You've all betrayed your children. And it takes an old queen like me to tell you.
The mechanic has pulled over in order to listen.
“The sheds in Brønshøj,” he says. “I remember them. They were behind the movie theater.”
He broke off ties with me. At some point I heard that they had gone to Greenland. She had taken a job as a teacher. Provided for the family while Jonathan composed for the polar bears. After
they came back I visited them only once. The son was there, too. Handsome as a god. Some sort of scientist. Cold. We talked about music. He asked about money the whole time. Permanently scarred. Like you are, Moritz. You haven't visited me for ten years. I hope your fortune suffocates you. There was a certain stubbornness about the boy, too. Like Schönberg. Twelve-tone music. Pure stubbornness. But Schönberg wasn't cold. The boy was ice. I'm tired. I've started peeing in my bed. Can you stand to hear that, Moritz? It'll happen to you someday, too.
they came back I visited them only once. The son was there, too. Handsome as a god. Some sort of scientist. Cold. We talked about music. He asked about money the whole time. Permanently scarred. Like you are, Moritz. You haven't visited me for ten years. I hope your fortune suffocates you. There was a certain stubbornness about the boy, too. Like Schönberg. Twelve-tone music. Pure stubbornness. But Schönberg wasn't cold. The boy was ice. I'm tired. I've started peeing in my bed. Can you stand to hear that, Moritz? It'll happen to you someday, too.
He hadn't signed it.
The clipping in the other envelope is a single paragraph: “On October 7, 1991, the police in Singapore arrested Tørk Hviid, a Danish citizen. The Consulate, on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, has lodged a protest.” It doesn't mean anything to me. But it reminds me that Loyen was once in Singapore, too. To photograph mummies.
We drive out to the North Harbor. Outside the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark he slows down, and we look at each other.
We leave the car near the Svanemølle power plant and stroll toward the harbor, along Sundkrogs Street.
There is a dry wind with barely visible, blowing ice crystals that sting your face.
Now and then we hold hands. Now and then we stop to kiss with cold lips and warm mouths, now and then we walk on separately. We're wearing boots. Snowdrifts have piled up on the sidewalk. And yet we feel like two dancers, gliding in and out of an embrace, a swoop into a lift. He doesn't hold me back. He doesn't weigh me down to the ground, he doesn't urge me forward. One moment he's at my side, the next he's a little behind me.
There's something honest about an industrial harbor. There are no royal yacht clubs here, no promenades, no energy wasted on façades. There are silos for raw materials, warehouses, container cranes.
Inside an open doorway there is a steel hull. We go up a wooden ladder and reach the deck. We sit on the bridge and look out across
the white deck. I lay my head on his shoulder. We're sailing. It's summer. We're sailing north. Maybe north along the coast of Norway. Not very far from shore, because I'm afraid of the open sea. Past the mouths of the great fjords. The sun is shining. The sea is blue and clear and deep, as if we had a huge mass of fluid crystal beneath the keel. There's a midnight sun, a reddish, almost leaping disk of light. A faint song of the wind in the guy wires.
the white deck. I lay my head on his shoulder. We're sailing. It's summer. We're sailing north. Maybe north along the coast of Norway. Not very far from shore, because I'm afraid of the open sea. Past the mouths of the great fjords. The sun is shining. The sea is blue and clear and deep, as if we had a huge mass of fluid crystal beneath the keel. There's a midnight sun, a reddish, almost leaping disk of light. A faint song of the wind in the guy wires.
We walk out to the marina. Men in smocks ride past on bicycles, turning around to stare at us, and we laugh at them, knowing that we are radiant.
We wander along the quiet docks until we're frozen stiff. We eat in a little café that's built onto a smokehouse. Outside, the clouds bow for a brief moment to an extraordinary red sunset that makes the colors on the hulls of the fishing vessels shift from blue-white to rose to purple.
He tells me about his parents. About his father, who never says anything, who is a carpenter and one of the last people in Denmark who knows how to make a winding staircase that twists up toward the sky in a perfect wooden spiral. About his mother, who test bakes cakes for the food pages of women's magazines, cakes that she can't even taste because she's diabetic.
When I ask him how he came to know Birgo Lander, he shakes his head and falls silent. Across the table I caress the side of his jaw, marveling at the way life can suddenly allow us to experience happiness and ecstasy with someone who is a complete stranger.
Outside, night has fallen.
Even in the dark, even in the winter, the wealthy suburb of Hellerup belongs to another dimension than Copenhagen. We've parked the car on a quiet, hushed road. The snow gleams white along the curb and along the high walls surrounding the villas. In the gardens evergreen trees and shrubs form dense black surfaces, like the edge of a forest or the side of a mountain, above a white carpet of snow.
There are no streetlights. And yet we can see the house. A tall white villa standing where the road on which we've parked dwindles down to a lane.
There is no hedge or fence around the house. From the sidewalk
you can step directly onto the lawn. Upstairs, on the third floor, there's a light in a window. Everything seems well kept, newly painted, expensive, and discreet.
you can step directly onto the lawn. Upstairs, on the third floor, there's a light in a window. Everything seems well kept, newly painted, expensive, and discreet.
A few steps from the sidewalk there's a sign on the lawn lit by a lamp. The sign says GEOINFORM.
We were just going to drive by to look at the building. We've been here for an hour now.
It has nothing to do with the house. We could have parked anywhere. And for any length of time.
A police car stops alongside us. It has passed us twice before. Now they've gotten curious.
The officer addresses the mechanic across me.
“What's going on here, buddy?”
I stick my head out the window toward the patrol car.
“We live in a one-room apartment, Mr. Commissioner. A basement apartment on Jægersborg Street. We have three children and a dog. Sometimes we just need a little private life. And it can't cost anything. So we drive out here.”
“All right, ma'am,” he says. “But drive somewhere else for your private life. This is the embassy district.”
They're gone. The mechanic starts the car and puts it into gear.
Then the light goes out in the house in front of us. He slows down. We creep down toward the lane with our headlights off. Three figures come out onto the stairway. Two of them are merely dark spots in the night. But the third instinctively seeks out the light. A fur coat and a white face catch the light. It's the woman I saw talking to Andreas Licht at Isaiah's funeral. She tosses her head, and the dark hair flows into the night. Now that I see this gesture repeated, I realize that it's an expression not of vanity but of self-confidence. A garage door goes up. The car comes out in a flood of light. Its headlights sweep over us and then it's gone. Behind it the door slowly closes.
We're following the car. Not close, because the lane is deserted, but not far behind either.
If you drive through Copenhagen in the dark and allow the surroundings to slip out of focus and blur, a new pattern appears that
is not visible to the focused eye. The city as a moving field of light, as a spiderweb of red and white pulled over your retina.
is not visible to the focused eye. The city as a moving field of light, as a spiderweb of red and white pulled over your retina.
The mechanic is relaxed when he drives, almost introspective, as if he were about to fall asleep. He makes no sudden movements, and there is no sudden braking, no real acceleration; we simply float through the streets and the traffic. And the whole time, somewhere ahead, like a wide, low silhouette, is the car that is leading us.
The traffic grows more sporadic and finally vanishes altogether. We're on our way out toward Kalvebod Wharf.
We drive out to the wharf very slowly, our headlights off. Several hundred yards ahead, on the dock itself, a pair of red taillights wink off. The mechanic parks along a dark wooden fence.
The relative warmth of the sea has created a mist that swallows up the light. Visibility is about a hundred yards. The opposite side of the harbor has vanished in the darkness. The waves are languidly slapping against the wharf.
And something is moving. No sound, but a black crystallization of a point in the night. A field of blackness systematically moving between the parked cars. Twenty-five yards away from us the movement stops. A person is standing next to a light-colored refrigerated trailer. Above the figure there is a lighter spot, as if from a white hat or a halo. He doesn't move for a long time. The mist grows a little thicker. When it disperses, the figure is gone.
“He was feeling the c-car hoods. To see if they were warm.”
He's whispering, as if his voice could be heard in the night.
“A c-cautious man.”
We sit quietly, letting time pass through us. In spite of this place, in spite of the unknown we're waiting for, it feels like a flood of happiness to me.
By his watch about half an hour passes.
We don't hear the car. It appears out of the fog, its headlights turned off, and passes us with an engine sound that is merely a whistle. Its windows are dark.
We get out of the car and walk along the dock. The two dark contours that we could barely make out are ships. The closest one is a sailing ship. The gangway has been removed, and the ship is
dark. A white plaque on the superstructure says, in German, that it's a Polish training ship.
dark. A white plaque on the superstructure says, in German, that it's a Polish training ship.
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