The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (11 page)

This future and the change they had wished for were presented to them by the shoemaker’s deathbed, when they saw the vicar’s daughter, Anna Bak, sit down next to the dying man’s head while still standing at her father’s side. Faced by this miraculous duplication, they closed their eyes and shook their heads, remembering, from the days before they were saved, the unreliable illusions induced by bingeing on kerosene, which they now feared had returned. But while they stood there with their eyes closed, every one of them had the feeling that the little girl was standing next to them, like some multiple expression of maternal comfort. They also noticed that odd metallic taste in their mouths, and when the light of utter purity emanating from the child seared through their eyelids, they understood that she had been chosen to bear the new Messiah, in their midst, as a reward for their self-restraint. Lavnœs would be the new Bethlehem and they would be the new disciples.

When the shoemaker’s heart stopped, they were all so filled with the Holy Spirit that they lifted Anna up onto a wagon and placed her on an improvised throne. Then, driven by the ardent faith that enabled them to see through the houses of Lavnœs, and through the blue-gray clouds that had hung over the village for weeks, and through the hills to far-off regions where the heathen languished, they pulled the wagon through the muddy streets and over the impassable drifts of shifting sand and over the heath to bring religion to the godless. At their head danced Thorvald Bak, preaching as he went, seized by mighty forces (as on the day when his mother’s portrait fell off the wall). With them, in their procession, they had brought pots and buckets, which they beat with wooden spoons in a spontaneous, insistent rhythm. “The world awaits us!” cried Thorvald Bak. But when, in the middle of the night, they reached the nearest farms, they found them deserted. Long before this, the farmers had heard a muffled racket that had been taken for the raging of a storm until the procession hove into sight. With all the dark-cowled heads and the light from the child on her weird vehicle and with the pallid faces covered with scabs from the saltwater sores forming pale, disembodied patches in the gray mist, it looked like some ghostly procession. So the farmers had packed up their belongings and fled into the hills.

As the missionaries were returning to Lavnœs through the darkness of a night into which the rain lashed white streaks of foam, they noticed how the storm yielded to Anna, so that she seemed to sit on the wagon surrounded by a protective film. Flower petals fluttered down upon those who pulled the wagon, and as they neared the sea, the clouds—which were so dense that it was almost impossible to breathe—parted, and the light from Anna’s form beamed across the sea and was sighted by a big ketch that had disregarded the dark patches on the sea chart and then been caught in the storm. The sailors saw the light and confused it with that of the lighthouse on the hill above Rudkøbing. They turned the ship around, intoxicated by the thought of their imminent deliverance, and ran straight onto the wicked sandbars lying in wait off Lavnœs, there to be smashed to smithereens. For a long time afterward driftwood and pieces of rigging were regularly washed up on the shore, along with the occasional yellow bone from which the tears of joy the seamen were shedding as they went aground still ran in a clear liquid, thick as resin. And even though these events do seem a bit farfetched—even for me; just bordering on where I would have to say, “That’s damn hard to believe”—nevertheless, that is just how those who were there at the time remember it.

At the service for the dead seamen, Thorvald Bak said that they had perished in the light of God. But, referring to the missionary work, spreading the word of God and taking the news of the new Messiah to all the corners of the earth, he said, “The world is not yet ready. We will quietly await our reward.”

It is quite likely that Anna never really understood her own significance. She moved with a natural innocence through a world of prayers and silence, amid her own miracles and the expectations of others, and she does not seem to have noticed the crowds of people who followed her wherever she went, to protect her and stand guard over her every step and read omens in the way that she scratched her nose. All she did was smile when, in Sunday school, she was placed on a tall throne next to the Sunday-school teacher’s desk, and the other children shied away from her, dazzled by the light surrounding her and shocked at the thought of the weight that lay on her shoulders. In church, during Thorvald Bak’s services, her voice, soaring like a paradisiacal silver flute above the congregation’s chorus, sent a number of the faithful into fits. Then, as the victims were carried out—with hymnals wedged between their straining jaws to keep them from biting off their worshipful tongues—she would artlessly turn her shining eyes toward the pulpit. She seems to have been what I would call divinely naïve. When Thorvald exempted her from physical labor she spent the endless run of foul-weather days in her room, playing by herself. The wealth of gifts and toys delivered to her every day, for which the brethren had to sacrifice what little they had and once again appease their hunger with seaweed soup or by sucking on the shells washed up on the beach, do not appear to have interested her. Instead she played with a Christmas crib built out of matchsticks and raw potatoes which Thorvald Bak’s housekeeper had made for her and which was evidently sufficient for her in her solitary state. For many years Thorvald Bak noted only one predilection in his daughter, and that was her love of the sea. Now and again she would leave her room, and usually he would find her on the beach—watched over by a crowd of the faithful—gazing out to sea, playing with the bleached driftwood from the sunken ketch, or digging in the sand for fragments of the drowned sailors’ bones.

As time went on, the distance between her and other people grew wider and wider and she stopped talking altogether. Before this she had greeted people on her way down to the sea, but, after her duplication, respect placed a circle of emptiness around her and she walked in silence through the village followed by people who rolled on the ground where she had trodden or tried to come past her on the lee side and catch a whiff of the scent that hung around her or spied on her as she shit, then collected her excrement and took it home to keep as a relic.

For a while, therefore, Anna talked to the sea gulls instead. She spent her days on the beach and taught herself to imitate their cries to perfection. Eventually, however, she became tired of calling across the gray sea. She grew silent and shut herself away in her room, shrinking from all those who dogged her footsteps. Thorvald Bak finally came to the conclusion that his daughter was slow-witted. It was a source of wonder to him that God should have chosen to bestow his great blessing on such an unassuming instrument, but he took comfort in telling himself that it is, after all, the poor in spirit who shall inherit, and so on and so forth.

Anna was heard to pray for the first time when she was twelve years old. It happened at a mission meeting. By that time the only sound anyone could ever remember hearing her utter had been during the hymn singing that Thorvald Bak had had to forbid, because it induced too much in the way of hemorrhaging and swooning among the congregation. Nevertheless, she now stood up at the mission meeting and prayed. Speechless with amazement, they heard how moving and fluent her prayers were; how they put them in mind of cloudless skies long forgotten, and awoke memories of the funerals and weddings of their past until the hair on their heads stood on end. From then on, Thorvald Bak took her with him on his missionary expeditions to the villages closest to Lavnœs, and during church services he permitted her to pray. She always spoke standing on a tall white-painted stool. Her words flowed like music, and in her almond-shaped eyes the congregation saw tears glinting like pearls in the light from her face. They gurgled, every one of them, with the taste of metal in their mouths before, overcome by tears, face-to-face with this white-clad girl, the scales fell from their eyes and they saw their former lives as a quagmire of iniquity. Then they collapsed, racked by sobs, and beat their heads against the church floor and created scenes of mass hysteria that I would have refused to believe could ever occur in Denmark—in Danish country churches at the beginning of this century—if it were not, however, that evidence does exist: eyewitness accounts and written records and photographs, forcing me to admit that this is precisely what happened. And all the while, Anna Bak surveyed these scenes of pandemonium, though I doubt whether she realized that the screams and the conversions that accompanied them were engendered by her presence.

In Lavnœs she no longer left her room at all. The congregation had built a round tower for her, from which she could see the sea. It had tall windows and could be seen from every house in the village, so they could all keep her in sight at all times. Thorvald Bak was convinced that his daughter sat in her tower waiting for the Divine Conception. When he took her with him to the mission meetings, even he kept his distance from her, overwhelmed by the thought of what lay in store for her and anxious because, more and more often in recent years, she had made him think of his time in Copenhagen and of his wife’s soul as it winged its way up to the ceiling.

He received his first warning one evening as he returned from a meeting with other like-minded pastors—one of the meetings that saw the start of that powerful national movement the Danish Evangelical Mission. Anna was sitting opposite him in the boat as they sailed over the flaming carpet of the sunset. Then, with his eyes on his daughter, he becomes aware of something outside of the boat. He turns his head and sees Anna walking beside the boat on the slivers of burnished gold with which the sun has coated the sea. When he calls out to her, she does not come back but walks off toward the sun, continuing until it seems that the darkness will drag her down with it into the sea. Trembling with fear, Thorvald has to grasp the hands of the daughter before him, to convince himself that she is still there and that he has been left with at least one copy of her.

Terrified rather than delighted by this miracle, he had a fine gold chain forged for Anna’s neck, and when she left her tower—which he had had fitted with locks—the other end of this chain was always fastened around his wrist. Now, to us this may seem barbaric, but as he himself said when explaining it to Anna, “It’s for your own good.” Where, hitherto, he had taken pleasure in his daughter’s refined silence, now it struck him that perhaps this was, in fact, a bad thing. He tried to get her to give testimony at the mission meetings, to confess her sins. But this proved impossible. Anna’s shining eyes gazed kindlily and guiltlessly upon the faithful, but not a word escaped her lips, and Thorvald Bak eventually came to the conclusion that she was so pure and innocent that she was incapable of even speaking about sin. Nevertheless, she followed the testimonies of the others with interest. Thorvald Bak had divided the faithful into two groups, men and women, whom he had confess separately so that nothing should be concealed but everything brought out in the open. He and Anna were the only ones who listened to both the men and the women as they related how and when they had indulged in one thing and another. Sometimes God’s Spirit would descend into the midst of the faithful, and then men and women would flock together and pour out of the church, led by Thorvald Bak, to continue their meeting in the open air, at the edge of a wood, where they prayed and gave testimony and sang hymns under the gathering storm clouds which, more often than not, attended the inhabitants of Lavnœs. Then, while the rain poured down, they would continue their interminable confessions, by means of which they endeavored to drown out the rain and one another. Finally they would stand thigh-high in mud singing and singing until, humble nonetheless, they sank to their knees as Thorvald Bak or Anna prayed in their behalf.

After one such meeting, Thorvald Bak and Anna found themselves alone together, for once, after the rejoicing throng had departed, and Anna looked into her father’s face, streaked as it was with rain and mud and strain, and asked, “Why do they confess?”

Thorvald Bak looked quizzically at his daughter. Hardly ever did she ask him a question.

“To be cleansed of their sins,” he replied.

“But behind every sin there’s another one,” said Anna. “It never stops.”

Thorvald Bak could find no good answer to this crazy notion, but he ordered a silver-plated cage from a goldsmith in Copenhagen—where he would never normally have bought anything—and kept Anna locked up inside it, in an attempt to stifle the elusive element in her nature. Anna put up with this new arrangement without comment. Now she undertook the long sails along the coast on the decks of fishing boats in her shining cage, peering through its bars—although there is no way of determining what she herself was thinking, or whether she had any thoughts at all about a pastor in Denmark in this enlightened age keeping his own child locked up in a cage.

One night Thorvald Bak’s dead wife, Anna’s mother, came to him in a dream. She appeared in the shape of nothing less than the Angel of the Lord, bathed in the roseate glow of dawn and hovering on white bat wings. Through the taut skin of the wings green veins could be discerned. She scattered the storm clouds that hung around Lavnœs, along with the smell of fish that had returned in the dream, and showed him a town floating on an enormous, luminous crystal of yellow sulfur. Thorvald could see the signs above the taverns and the anonymous doors of the brothels. With Anna at his side he walked into the town. Behind them the song of the angels rose above the chink of bottles, a cross was reflected in the pools of beer on the floors, and the women’s nakedness was draped in white muslin.

Thorvald awoke from this dream seized by a restlessness he could barely contain until the following Sunday, at which time he told the congregation of his vision.

“The world is ready,” he said, in a voice that brought flakes of damp plaster tumbling off the walls. Once again he gave them a vivid description of the godlessness of the towns. Surprising himself with his own assurance, he recalled incredible details of his youth in Rudkøbing and in Copenhagen; he described how people lived by stealing from one another; how the nation’s leaders got drunk on government premises and painted blasphemous pictures on the walls with fingers they had dipped in their own excrement; and how the servants of the church kept domestic animals in God’s house and in the churchyard and always wore short boots into which they could shove the hind legs of the sheep and the pigs while having their lustful way with these defenseless creatures. After this sermon, the congregation fetched rakes and axes and scythes, and flintlocks that had belonged to their forefathers and were so eaten away by rust that they fell apart when taken down from the wall. Then they gathered outside the church and insisted that Thorvald Bak, with Anna at his side, should lead a new crusade, with Rudkøbing as its target. That same night they set sail from the small, unprotected harbor at Lavnœs: not, however, before Thorvald Bak had, on the quay, grown uneasy at the sight of their hate and the bloodthirsty note in their voices. Unaccustomed to anything other than prayer, they had now, at the hour of departure, grown brayingly loquacious as they yelled to outdo the wind that had risen at sunset. Thorvald Bak appealed to their compassion and spoke of abused and enfeebled heathen mothers and of their fatherless children who, with the towns so ravaged by the demons of hunger, could never be sure that they would not one day find themselves being boiled up in a pot with onions and devoured. Eventually the faithful were reduced to tears. They threw away their weapons; then they all climbed aboard their boats, the very sails of which were black. Anna’s silver-plated cage was lashed to the deck of the little bark carrying Thorvald Bak. They sailed out of the harbor and the wind howled, louder and louder, seeming to come directly from hell. And the sea swelled up into shifting inky-black mountains of water that towered over the little boats, then broke and crashed down onto the pale upturned faces, sweeping overboard everything that was not lashed down. Then Thorvald Bak woke Anna, who had been sleeping, miraculously sheltered from the icy cascades, with her face tranquil in slumber. As she got to her feet, the turbulent waters subsided, thereby making the dream that faith can remove mountains come true. All through the night—until the moment when the distant city of sin rose out of the sea, just as Thorvald had seen it in his dreams—Bak kept his daughter awake. The strange light around her face lit up the little boats and the dark cowls of their passengers, with their restless eyes and fierce obstinacy.