The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (13 page)

The warden was a brutal and gloomy disciplinarian who firmly believed that his sermons, the strict isolation, and the prison diet of bread, water, and potatoes would direct the prisoner’s gaze inward, toward his own brutality and debasement, and elicit repentance, despair, and a change of heart. He dabbled secretly in the occult, and his sermons were always based on the Book of Revelation, which he considered to be a talismanic text. He was convinced that, as he spoke, his words were converted into magnetic rays that penetrated the prisoners’ cerebral cortices and induced chemical changes in their criminal physiology. So he had acquired the habit during his sermons, when he had said something particularly important, of opening his mouth wide in order to direct his magnetism toward the prisoner.

Ramses spent his year in prison digging a tunnel from his cell to freedom, and recalling all the crimes he had ever committed. To help him endure the loneliness of the vast prison, he reviewed every one of his burglaries, ridding them of creaking doors and toppled furniture and tricky locks and alert guard dogs, and all the mistakes he had made. Within himself he discovered unexpected powers of recall, and so, once he had perfected all his own crimes, he went on to review those of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, right down to the last detail. He kept this up through all the long nights, when he could hear the wind outside tearing at the heather. He kept it up during all the sermons, with the warden referring to the creatures from Revelation as symbols of punishment and justice until Ramses reached the point where he was no longer sure what was more real, the great assembly hall filled with delirious visions of the Apocalypse—in the midst of which the warden’s mouth opened and closed like a landed fish gulping for air—or his own dream locks and fantasy rooms, which he negotiated as effortlessly as a dancer before departing, leaving no trace of himself other than his urine. He maintained his forefathers’ practice of emptying his bladder at the scene of the crime, this being the most infallible means of evading detection.

At the end of a year his tunnel was finished. Unlike those prisoners later to be accommodated in the prison, who would eventually leave it staggering or crawling or feet first, Ramses Jensen strolled to freedom with a back as straight as when he arrived. All that was visible on his bold features was the pallor of his prolonged imprisonment, pride at the skill he had acquired through his imaginary burglaries, and the wrinkles on his forehead, the consequence of so much time spent deep in thought.

In addition to this, he had had confirmed the distrust of the outside world he had harbored ever since being arrested at the age of twelve, while burglarizing a mill not far from Copenhagen, together with his father. The twelve policemen who had been lying in wait for him had carried him off, bleeding like a stuck pig, while his father stood by, a passive and indifferent onlooker. Then Ramses heard him laugh his unrestrained rogue’s laugh and understood, in his child’s heart, that his father must have informed on him.

During his lifetime, Ramses’ father, Caesar Jensen, stole the credit for so many crimes and charitable acts that he can no longer be discerned behind the thirty-five crimes against King and Crown, the seventeen violations of other people’s liberty, the one hundred and forty-four instances of slander, the seventeen murders, the five hundred charges of breach of the peace, and the one thousand and forty-four cases of theft and looting and robbery and threatening behavior of which he was convicted. This sentence was not passed until he was an extremely old man, when he had allowed himself to be caught, after having learned to read and write, so that he could, like the great thief and murderer Ole Kolleroød, with whom he had once shared a cell, scratch the grossly exaggerated story of his life on the walls of his cell. These walls were later taken down and produced in court as admissions of guilt, although this was, in fact, unnecessary. All his life, Caesar Jensen had longed to be in a position where he could confess to this incredible multitude of crimes, which led to his execution’s being postponed for five years—that being the time it took the court to form an overall picture of the offenses to which he had confessed and for which, as one of the judges said, we could have him executed five hundred times over. His execution was witnessed by one thousand of his fellow prisoners. As the iron rings were placed around his neck, he broke out into peals of uncontrollable laughter, and only Ramses (and perhaps you and I) understands that Caesar Jensen’s dying with such arrogance was due, not to that courage ascribed to him by the world, but to his having succeeded in fooling everyone.

It was impossible for Ramses (just as it is hopeless for us) to uncover the truth behind the extravagant boasts that Caesar Jensen wove around his family history, which—like his dress, which consisted of tight white trousers, boots, a fur-trimmed scarlet, fitted jacket, and a broad-brimmed hat—appeared to have been borrowed from cheap broadsides describing the master criminals of history. Throughout Ramses’ life a gulf was to exist between the man he encountered in the capricious fantasies of the storytellers—a man represented as being his father—and the Caesar Jensen he knew from his childhood, with his petty pilfering and spur-of-the-moment, panic-stricken burglarizing of elderly folk on isolated farms.

The truth, as the rest of the world saw it, was that Caesar Jensen personified the romantic dream of a criminal; that his career represented the culmination of a long line of arch-rogues who had, down through the generations, spit on the executioner and egged on the six horses that were still not powerful enough to tear them limb from limb; and who, after their funerals, continued to throw the soil off their graves until at last they succeeded in creating someone like Caesar Jensen. Throughout his life, on his interminable travels, Ramses came across his father in legends of the poor man’s protector, the intrepid adversary of the rich Caesar Jensen, the cosmopolitan, who had known the Italian Meomartino and the gallant Ròsza. At one point it dawned on him that even the rolls of all the penal judgments in the land hailed Caesar Jensen as a thievish and theatrical messiah, and that he, Ramses, was the only one to see through all the contradictory tales of the seducer, the solitary and fiercely religious avenger—a man who washed his bloody hands in the stream of his own pious tears every Sunday in church, and taught in several Sunday schools—and see his father as he had actually been: a cynical little thief who confessed to everyone else’s murders, real or invented, but never to his own sexual offenses; a man whose only grand crime lay in the sum total and quality of all the lies he told in court in order to go down in history as the most infamous criminal of the century.

Late in his life, Ramses visited Copenhagen one last time. One night, in the light from the gas lamps that had, in his old age, made his housebreaking a more and more risky business—he caught sight of his father’s name calling out to him from a poster hanging right next to
WANTED
posters offering prodigious sums for information leading to his own apprehension. The poster carrying Caesar Jensen’s name was an advertisement for a play. So, for the first and only time, Ramses attended a performance at the Royal Theater, dressed in an evening suit he had stolen from a house just a few hours earlier, along with a cane and money for the cab that drove him to the theater. There he saw his father’s life staged as a ballet. The King and Queen were also present for this performance, in which Caesar Jensen’s seventeen false murders and one hundred and forty-four undeserved instances of slander and one thousand and forty-four phony thefts had undergone a metamorphosis: one whereby they were resurrected in a tragic tale of unrequited love and unfortunate—and fatal—misunderstandings, acted out against a backdrop of dewy forests and ancient burial mounds; all of this lit by a stage moon beneath which a hollow-eyed, effeminate boy danced the part of Caesar Jensen. Even though Ramses found the theater and the crowds repellent, that evening he understood that this was what his father had always dreamed of. History had come around in a semicircle, transforming those crimes about which Caesar Jensen had so painstakingly lied into deeds of national renown, their fame transmitted by word of mouth across the length and breadth of the country. They were reenacted before full houses in the finest theater in the land, bathed in the light which Ramses had shunned all his life and surrounded by the sartorial elegance of which Caesar Jensen had always been so fond.

There was one other thing that Ramses noted, prior to his disappearance into the darkness, just before the interval: in the gilded tableaux on the stage and in the tears of the weeping violins he recognized the same sentimental faith he had detected in his father, at their last meeting. This did not take place until some years after the burglary at the mill, Ramses’ arrest, and the ensuing court case, during which he had been accused of several of his own break-ins plus a good number of his father’s, as well as those for which his father was by then starting to take credit, and those of his dead forefathers. Ramses kept his mouth shut, because he had never been to school and did not understand the language of the court. His silence was therefore taken as an admission of guilt, and he was sentenced to eight years’ hard labor, since no one believed that he was only twelve years old. The eight policemen who had arrested him had displayed in court the cracked skulls and broken arms and smashed kneecaps he had inflicted upon them with his left hand while with his right keeping a tight grip on the two-hundred-pound flour sack with which he had been about to make his getaway.

He spent two years in Christianshavn prison, making wood chips for textile dyeing and lending substance to our picture of the innocent but pensive child by gazing through his barred window, wondering at his fate. Until one of the women held in the female section of the prison—who were hoisted up into the cell, every night, through a gap in the loose floorboards—let Ramses see that she had a revolver. Up until then he had only ever regarded women with the elusive curiosity of a child, and the sound of prison lovemaking had never previously disturbed his slumber, but that night he lay awake, and stole for the first time in two years. The next day, just around midday, he rose from the wood-chip table, shoved the barrel of the revolver into the mouth of the guard on duty, and slipped from our picture of the innocent child into our vision—and that of all fairy tales—of a mettlesome youth as he forced the guard to let him out into a little yard behind the prison, from which, after a hazardous climb, he escaped into the crowded streets. For two months he searched for Caesar Jensen. The latter’s notoriety, which had doubled and redoubled, kept leading Ramses on wild-goose chases. That he did, nevertheless, track him down was thanks to his habit of always following up the least fanciful of all the tall stories until, one night—all the significant events in the story of Ramses’ life take place at night—in an inn near Holbœk, he kicked down the door of his father’s room.

Caesar Jensen recognized his son without surprise, and when Ramses pointed the revolver at him he looked fearlessly down its barrel. Ramses had never been much of a talker and in prison he had grown practically dumb, but his question was written all over a face now covered by an incipient beard like a cloud of dark memories.

“I had to teach you to be on your guard,” said his father and turned back wearily to the table, where the picklocks and skeleton keys and lead strips were arrayed on a piece of cloth. He picked up a stolen fob watch and said, “That’s the only way to survive. Don’t trust anyone, not even your father.”

Ramses cocked the revolver. His father adjusted his stock, wanting to die looking his best, and added, “Oh, by the way, there’s a price on your head, of fifty rigsdalers.”

Ramses lowered the revolver, foiled by this argument, and because he realized that he would have done the same thing. Besides, he could not stand the thought that he might be the one to dispatch Caesar Jensen to the immortality of which he dreamed. He turned on his heel, having laid eyes on his father for the last time, and disappeared into another of our pictures—that of the lone fugitive —and into a world which from then on he regarded as a prison. In this world he viewed everyone as either a judge, a guard, a policeman, or, at the very least, an informer; and he was always on the move while still, in every sound, seeming to hear the cell door slamming behind him.

In the years that followed, Ramses traveled and worked alone, supporting himself in his forlorn state with his pictures of his forebears. His father he dismissed as an aberration, while himself conscientiously avoiding every form of excess, to the extent that the entries in the court records from those occasions when charges were brought against him—if they had contained the facts—would have amounted to infinitely lengthy but nonetheless humble lists of cheese, cheap linen, used brushes, plain tobacco pouches, pawned shoes, old iron, new-laid eggs, and cows milked in the fields, because these, and only these, were the things that Ramses stole.

Now and again, in Copenhagen or one of the larger provincial towns, he would break into some large villa or manor farm. Then, however, he was not after the silver drinking vessels or the West Indian coffee sets or the pear-shaped earrings given to a young girl in the family, once upon a time, by one of the Emperor Napoleon’s exiled generals. Ramses skirted all of these and, instead, lit a stump of candle. In its light he would hunker down in front of the massive escritoire and dream. The drop leaf of the escritoire was decorated with a motif, inlaid in wood, depicting the view through a door, which led to a garden, which ran up to a house, which lay bathed in a moonlight such as Ramses believed he remembered from his childhood. This light fell through the fine curtains of a villa that was almost transparent with domestic bliss. And it was this bliss that Ramses sought during these break-ins, when he took nothing, stealing only the opportunity to linger close to people living within his and their own and our picture of domestic bliss. On nights such as these, Ramses could spend hours in a darkened room, listening to the laughter from the adjoining rooms without being any more certain than we are whether what he was hearing was only what he longed to hear, or whether there really were young girls accompanying themselves on their little pianos as they sang of the lonesome young men of the windswept highways. By the light of a candle or a match, Ramses was also able to admire the paintings on the walls. It was as though he saw himself there, in a cloak he had never laid eyes on before, wearing a tall hat he had never owned, staring out across a plain that ended in a forest that opened onto a lake whose farthest shore was lost in a mist of promises. And these paintings represented the middle-class picture of just the sort of life that Ramses led.