The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (21 page)

Granted, Anna’s disintegration lasted only momentarily. It may be that all the four corners of the earth did not require her presence and her compassion for more than a few minutes, but for Maria the length of time was not important. What mattered to her was the experience itself, the child’s sudden certainty that she had been deserted. She faced the loneliness in silence, staring, without crying, but with an obstinacy totally alien to Anna’s gentleness and Adonis’s acquiescence: a quality that neither of her parents ever truly understood. And thus Maria’s destiny comes to resemble the lot of several others of the children in this tale. Their parents did not understand them either. And perhaps that tells us something about the twentieth century, where things change so rapidly that parents’ experiences are totally and uselessly outdated by the time their children have need of them.

As time went on, Adonis was the one who grew to understand Maria best, because he treated her with the same absentminded cheeriness that he displayed toward everyone else. He showed his tenderness for her in special, gently comic rituals—imitating birdcalls, for instance, while she watched him shaving. After which he would say, “Maria, scoot down and check whether the dogs are peeing on my bike,” at which Maria would walk down the back stairs (where the homeless were, by this time, starting to pitch their tents on the landings) to Adonis’s black bicycle. More often than not, there would be a little clutch of women waiting for Adonis who had seen him on the box of his cart or had sold him something or who had simply, from several streets away and above the noise of the traffic, heard the echo of his laughter. Thereafter they had been drawn along because in Adonis’s slipstream there came an enticing call, as of a distant promise of love and luck and a meaning to existence. And now they were waiting for him—pleading, desperate, eyes heavy with sleep—and Maria had to walk at her father’s side, accompany him outside, to show that he had a family to keep and had to be protected, not least against his own tendency to give in to these pallid faces and red lips. Holding Adonis’s hand, Maria could look so small and so pathetic that the women made way for them without a word and refrained from pursuing him. Which is why, on such mornings, there was a touch of ceremony about his departures, something reminiscent of a funeral. And now and again they were even accompanied by the chimes of Our Saviour’s Church, which would start up when least expected. They were ringing, too, that morning, when the women had left by the time Adonis came down because Maria had walked straight up to them and said, “Scram! Beat it! Get out!” and they had gone. There had been a brutal air of menace about the little girl which even Adonis, that morning, could sense, but which he had immediately shrugged off. After all, why burden oneself with such worries?

That was the morning on which fortune failed him for the first time. It was not a serious failure, not a real example of misfortune, but it was a hint that good fortune can run out, or at least that whirlpools can occur in the current of luck. He turned up for work to find his place of employment closed down. At that time Adonis was a driver for a coal merchant, in which capacity—among workers who looked like Africans, their skin covered by a fine layer of coal dust—he succeeded in keeping his cravat utterly and perfectly white. It was his job to deliver coal and coke to Tivoli, the last place of amusement to be exempted from fuel rationing because it is just in such dark times that national symbols need to be seen shining brightly. But on this morning, when Adonis had only just had time enough to forget the brutality shown by Maria, the coal merchant’s windows were boarded up, the sign bearing the company’s name had already faded, and unemployment and the generally prevailing poverty were closing in on Adonis.

He asked around among the residents of the narrow street only to discover that the city’s amnesia had already spread to cover the coal merchant’s. Although it had been there just the day before, only a handful of people could remember it. Anyone else would have despaired, but Adonis was not for one moment daunted. So used was he to propping himself up on his destiny that the only thing that smarted was being told by an old man that the coal and gas for Tivoli had now been rationed, which meant that the enchanted gardens would have to close as early as 11 p.m. On hearing this news, Adonis slumps against the coal merchant’s locked door, and it might be imagined that he is thinking, but he is not. He is waiting for fortune. He is waiting for life to come to him, and at this moment he makes me think of a Trobriand Islander or an Aztec or a Kikuyu waiting for rain. On this morning, as on previous occasions, there is something outlandish about Adonis’s trust.

There he stands and waits, possibly for an hour, possibly for two, but nothing happens. For a moment the illusion bursts and a hole appears in the dream of Aladdin. Adonis has to cycle home on his black bicycle, and now he is not riding so high as he usually does. Just at this moment he is about to come down to earth among the rest of us. But it is not very long before a new wave lifts him up. Only a quarter of an hour later he is president and co-owner of a bakery that one of his acquaintances and admirers has set up in one of the buildings in the rear courtyard. Here, from now on, he and Adonis turn out genuine Amsterdam spice cookies—
speculaas
—which they then cart around the markets and sell. In no time, Adonis is flying high once more—and still keeping his hands clean, since it is his partner who makes the cakes. It is Adonis’s job to drive the cart and flash the customers his lucky, golden smiles, just like the one he gave Maria as he drove through the gateway on his new cart the next morning. It was a smile that had forgotten everything and learned nothing.

It was not long after this that Anna started to clean. This is a historical fact and, no matter what I do, history is history. Nor do I need to excuse anything over which I have no influence, but I do have to say, beware of this “not long after” because it reminds me that time—while establishing a context in an account such as this—seems so unreliable, especially because, when this happened, it was viewed in quite a different light—not least by Anna, who would have maintained that she had always had this need for order. And so it is Maria’s, her daughter’s, time that we relate to, in our belief that not long after this, Anna was seized by her cleaning mania. Although this last word isn’t right either, since there is no reason to believe that Maria ever used it about her mother, or that she so much as knew the word, and it may not even be particularly indicative. Nevertheless, it is the closest I can get. It is the word that best describes how, through year upon year of her childhood, Maria was to see her mother: as a person seized by a mania that forced her to make everything fantastically, spotlessly, totally clean.

There is no doubt that Anna had always been a tidy person. It had upset her, as a child in Lavnœs, that she was not even allowed to clean her own cage. But her love of order had been nothing out of the ordinary; she had accepted the world as a whole, dirt and all. In order, therefore, to explain how she changed, we must take a look at the day when this transformation took place, that day—again a Sunday, with Adonis somewhere in North Zealand selling his spice cookies—when Anna became aware of a heavy, soggy smell that cut like a knife through the walls and floors of the big tenement, to the second floor, where Anna and Adonis’s apartment was situated. She followed the smell to the ground floor, which housed a dance hall, and then farther down, to the basement rooms occupied by homeless waifs and strays, and still farther down, to the subbasement. This was so deep down that not even the cats ventured into it, and there Anna found dense darkness and a monotonous bubbling sound. By the light of a match she saw that the floor was covered by a layer of pale mud. She assumed that this must have penetrated from the canal outside, until she sensed the floor moving—as only someone of her exceptional sensitivity could have registered it—and realized that the floor had sunk; that this entire enormous tenement was ever so gently descending into the earth and that, in fact, this house was not about to sail off across the sea. Instead, it was in the process of sinking straight down into the mire.

That very same Sunday she tried to warn the residents. Pale and solemn-faced, with Maria in her arms, she made her rounds to tell them all: to tell the whores and the shopkeepers and Mr. Stauning, Minister of Supply and Control, and all of those who had no vote because they were on the dole. But it was no use; no one believed her. They listened politely to the child-mother with the great dark eyes, but did not take her seriously. After all, who is going to believe a young girl who tells them they are living in a sinking Atlantis, when everyone knows their home is a tenement, a beggars’ stronghold, a workhouse in Christianshavn. The only place where Anna found herself understood was among the sailors in the taverns. They believed her, because they themselves lived right next to the basement and had noticed the fatal freshwater smell of the mud, and because they had lived long in the company of superstition and lies more blatant, considerably more blatant, than the yarn served up to them by this sweet girl, and had thereby got into the habit of believing everyone, including this Madonna.

Late that night, Anna attempted to warn Adonis. Her worries had at first been forgotten, because he had come home bubbling over with glee from his cookie-selling—an occupation that presented him with the opportunity to perform before an audience again. He had lifted her onto the bed, and wafted the quilt as a reminder of his days as a wave boy, and then they had forgotten everything, absolutely everything, even the child. They had had eyes only for each other, and had stayed awake until dawn. Then Anna had grown grave again and had told Adonis about the building and how it was sinking. But what was he supposed to say to her? The future was not the time for Adonis, who was now, at this very moment, in the Monday sunshine, wallowing in the smell of almonds and
speculaas
spices and Anna’s nakedness and Maria. So he swept her worries aside with his gaiety. “Don’t worry, little miss,” he said; “today the skies are blue.”

That was the morning Anna began her cleaning. She started by washing the varnished floor, one floorboard at a time, until it had acquired a deep, reflective sheen. And she carried on from there, quite calmly. Anna never grew frantic; her mania did not lie in hustling and bustling but in keeping at it, cleaning on and on and on, with tenacious thoroughness, until the windows were so gleamingly clear that pigeons flew into them, thinking that there were openings running right through the building, and were killed. And the corners of the rooms sparkled, so white that it seemed as though she had succeeded in polishing away the dark shadows of light itself. But still she cleaned on, with quiet perseverance, on the trail of grime that only her eyes could discern. She followed it out of the apartment and down the stairs, where, gently but firmly, she requested the homeless squatters to move their cardboard boxes and straw pallets while she swept underneath them. Maria and Adonis found themselves, because of her, moving ever more carefully around the small apartment, with its three rooms solemnly marking time, like a hospital waiting to perform some vital operation that required just this obdurately gleaming floor and just this metallic sheen from the shining kitchen walls. Adonis and Maria grew ever more silent, fearing as they did that too much talk or laughter would cause particles to come adrift from the polished surfaces. Anna never scolded them—her cleanliness never took an aggressive turn—but once having put Maria to bed, she would then painstakingly erase every trace of the evening meal and the day’s activity and pack everything away. And all the while Adonis would watch her, unable to fathom this quiet zeal which, in his opinion, made their home look like a family tomb.

So Maria is the only one who, as time goes by, conceives some notion of what is happening to her mother. Everyone else is filled with admiration for Anna on those afternoons when she is stooped over the big copper kettle in the rear courtyard, wringing out the sheets with such concentrated, no-nonsense strength that they could be put straight into the linen drawer, without drying, if it were not for their having to bleach in the sun. On such afternoons, the tenement residents hang out of their windows to watch Anna. Her sheets, hung in the sun to bleach, are a symbol, because what is to be bleached is something as intimate as bed linen, an expression of this lovely girl’s managing to realize the dream of the Danish Housewife, who can combine passionate lovemaking with the smell of brown soap. Her apartment forms the frame around a picture representing honesty and passion and neatness, and that despite her youth and the fact that this apartment, this Garden of Eden, is situated in this area, in this infested tenement, just above a dance hall, next to the whores’ corridors, and facing directly onto this courtyard.

Only Maria noticed that Anna’s calm tenacity did not derive from her having found her place in the scheme of things; that she had, on the contrary, set herself in motion. The only time Maria said anything to her mother was on that previously mentioned occasion when Anna was down on her hands and knees, methodically cleaning the wall paneling with alcohol. Seen through Maria’s eyes, she was like a scientist, an ardent zoologist, and even to me it is obvious that she is not a woman who has resigned herself to anything but she has set herself a goal. This goal is the lamentable petit-bourgeois dream, doomed in advance, of getting to the bottom of things and exterminating the last, the very last, microbe. At this point, Maria was five years old, but already, her stammer notwithstanding, she possessed a command of language to which neither Anna nor Adonis would ever aspire. And so, when she had asked about the g-g-glass, Anna had paused, once she had given her feeble reply, and tried to remember what this exchange of words reminded her of—to no avail. This was the last time Maria broached the subject, feeling as she did that there was no point. And she was probably right, because, from then on, Anna grew more and more grim. Even though she told Adonis that she was simply changing her tactics, that she was now going to roll up her sleeves so this can be a nice home and we’ll be able to say we may be poor, but we are honest and we keep a very, very clean house.