The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (22 page)

And although Anna sounded plausible and convincing, it was a mania. Because she now borrowed the doctor’s magnifying glass, which enabled her to peer down into a fresh hell. One day, when Maria came up from the courtyard for a bite to eat, she found the door locked and sealed with gummed paper. Anna was fumigating the apartment, using gas pest-control cartridges. The place was barely aired before she sealed it again and burned some yellow powder on a plate on the kitchen floor. This filled the rooms with a smoke that defied every airing, hung beneath the disinfected ceilings for weeks, and forced the family to sleep with the squatters on the landings, and even there it stung the throat dreadfully.

After seventeen days they were able to move back into the apartment—seventeen being the precise number Anna had been able to predict, because she had started taking omens. In so doing, she punctures the myth that the city of Copenhagen, now a good way over the threshold of our enlightened century, is a place where religion and superstition have been exorcised, and where the only temple that exists is raised to progress. Because Anna was not alone in her superstition. While she was arriving at the number seventeen by surveying the movements of the birds in the blue sky above the courtyard, Privy Counselor H. N. Andersen was taking omens from how long it took his staff to turn their faces toward the wall when they met him in the corridors of the Danish East Asia Company. Meldahl, too, had taken the omens; and in Christianshavn, Stauning was determining certain areas of government policy by the progress of his cigar smoke toward the blackened ceilings. So Anna was not alone, but she felt as though she were, and therefore said nothing. Which is why it was only to herself that she predicted the seventeen days they lived on the stairway landing and the poverty that was closing in on the family, now that Adonis was finding it increasingly difficult to dispose of his cookies.

Adonis registered Anna’s new anxiety as an increased attentiveness to daily trivia. He noticed how in the mornings she woke early and lay quite still with her anxious eyes wide open, waiting to hear what the very first sound from the menacing courtyard would be; and how in the midst of making a meal she would stiffen and just stand there, watching the dust that persisted in dancing in the sunbeams, despite all her cleaning. Once, when he asked her if she was afraid of something, she looked at him with eyes that were pitying, sorrowful, and triumphant, all at once.

“We’re sliding into the mud,” she said.

After that, Adonis leaves her in peace, does not press her. He would do anything to keep the shadows away from those beautiful eyes. Instead he pats her cheek, the portion of her anatomy that seems to suit the occasion; a pat of the housewife’s cheek turning the whole thing into a bee in Anna’s bonnet, the odd notion of a woman weighed down by poverty and work.

To me it is like a photograph: Adonis patting Anna on the cheek. But in that same moment he draws his hand back and his smile stiffens. Although, strictly speaking, it may not be in that same moment but a week or a month or six months later. But from where I am standing, it looks as though he draws his hand back in that same moment and, for an instant, turns solemn, realizing as he does that the building in which he lives, his child’s home, the frame around his love and those long afternoons of fluid lovemaking, is sinking.

This dawned on him when he discovered that the dance hall, which was situated under the family’s apartment, had disappeared. The place was called Cape Horn, a name selected by its proprietor, former heavyweight wrestling champion of the world Søren M. Jensen, because it reminded him of the pictures of palm-fringed lagoons that had adorned the walls of a dressing room from his youth. It was there that the great Bech Olsen had predicted that he would one day open a tavern, because wrestling and bars went hand in hand. Later, when he learned the truth from sailors who had sailed around the real Cape Horn and who still, a lifetime later, remembered that rocky coastline as an iron-gray skull, battered by gales and set amid a boiling sea, he kept the name anyway because he felt the very sound of it contained a bitter longing well suited to the place. During the day it was a bar and wine cellar, with gambling in the dimly lit premises to the rear, where well-groomed men from distant parts of town accepted bets. On Fridays and Saturdays, Søren M. Jensen cleaned the place up and opened his doors for workingmen’s club dances, and on those evenings the place had, to all appearances, undergone a transformation. Then violins, flutes, and pianos replaced the sailors’ crude songs because, even in this poor district and even within the workingmen’s own organizations, there existed a strict moral code which demanded that parents accompany their daughters to the Cape Horn and come to fetch them—all because they sensed something that we, at a later date, can clearly see: that virtue was a sort of shell around these young people, and that it could crack and burst open, with the result that Adonis, on those increasingly more frequent evenings when he came home late, was in danger of tripping over couples lying on the stairways or on the ground itself. Later, when these lovers were married to each other, or to someone else, or found themselves alone, this moral code would be reconstituted among most of them until the shell re-formed and could be passed on to the next generation. To me, all of this is downright incomprehensible, but right now, on these summer nights when Maria is running to meet Adonis, the Cape Horn possesses an atmosphere akin to that of a Roman orgy or a Renaissance ball. Adonis and Maria stand together in front of this radiant palace, reveling in the chandeliers and the red plush and the unbridled laughter, which Maria will never forget. And then there is the seductive music, which also rises to the apartment above, to Anna, who is smiling sweetly but abstractedly, because by now she no longer knows what kind of a place she has beneath her feet.

From one day to the next, the place vanished. One morning Adonis said hello as usual to the heavyweight wrestler. The latter was sitting on a low stool in the sunshine, and the tavern’s bow windows and faded sunshades and the peeling yellow frontage and the sign with the palm trees all still looked as they always did, more or less as they always did—with the possible exception of the entrance, which Adonis later remembered was in fact sitting remarkably low. The next day no trace remained of the heavyweight wrestler or the dimly lit premises or the bookmakers or the palms. They had all completely disappeared.

At first Adonis thought that the frontage had been redone, that during the night the Cape Horn had undergone one of those panic-stricken alterations attributable to poverty and competition, but then he realized this could not be the case because it was not just the Cape Horn that had gone but the other wine cellars, too—the Palermo and the Cape of Good Hope and the Barony Café—leaving nothing behind but the sign that had hung over the brothel, bearing the name Batam Grande in yellow letters on a green ground, and the marble rollers from electric mangles that had been rescued from the laundry and set up on the sidewalk.

There Adonis stands, surveying all this, and I have a feeling that I am expecting something of him. It is as though the time has come to recognize that his luck has all but run out and that it is not possible to survive in the Copenhagen of the 1920s on the conviction that everything comes to him who waits, because the only thing that will come, automatically and without fail, is dismal wretchedness. At the same time, I know very well why I am thinking such thoughts. My own sentimentality is running away with me, making me cry out across the endless number of years and across all the barriers that separate me from Adonis, not least the barrier between life and death, “Dammit, man! Pull yourself together. Try to remember that you have a wife who’s being swallowed up by a mania that makes her clean and clean as though she were an attendant in a bathhouse, and a daughter who has developed a brutal nature unlike that of any of the lawbreakers in your family. It’s time for you to listen to Anna’s predictions now, because this is the last call, the final act, because your home is sinking straight into the earth!”

But it’s no use. And anyway, I have no idea of how to set about building a bridge back into history, but one thing is certain: emotion won’t do it. I will have to relate, quietly and calmly, the state of affairs as it stands: that Adonis was as shaken as I am to this day by this mysterious fatality. After all—even if it is just one huge, jerry-built monument to the pursuit of profit—a whole house does not just start to sink into the ground. That sort of thing happens only abroad and usually in the southern latitudes, as, for example, in Venice, where the boy Adonis made a halfhearted attempt to empty the pockets of gondola-riding tourists in an effort to please his father. But Venice was far away, a city built on pilings and sand, while Christianshavn rested upon something more solid, namely, shit and rubbish from the days of Christian IV.

We cannot help but wonder, along with Adonis, at the staying power of the residents whose apartments had just, within the last twenty-four hours, been swallowed up by the earth and who have already moved, with their belongings, into the buildings in the rear courtyard or onto the back stairs to join the squatters. In spite of everything, these people preserved exceptional reserves of patience, which enabled them to accept that they were now homeless. So much so that they already appeared to be forgetting they had ever been anything else, as they settled down on the landing to cook over open fires—an arrangement that assured that every day this firetrap of a building continued to exist constituted a miracle.

For a while the racket made by the squatters drew Anna back to reality. Filled with compassion, she left her cleaning and Adonis and, sadly, Maria, too, to accompany strange men and women and children around Copenhagen as they wandered through the wilderness, begging their way around the unemployment benefit offices and welfare offices and Copenhagen’s Benevolent Society. The supervisors of all these bodies refused them help because it struck them that these supposed paupers asked for money with an obstinacy that seemed alarming; and that this, along with their ragged clothing, appeared to camouflage a secret prosperity and bohemian lifestyle, when the truth was that several of them were close to dying of starvation. And so they had to keep going, on to the Salvation Army and the Women’s Aid Coffee Carts, who fed this strange band with the unnaturally pale girl at their head with coffee and five Danish pastries. The only stone Anna left unturned was that of the Evangelical Mission, because she could not bear the thought of being recognized, but even so the expedition bore no fruit. All they brought home with them were admonitions and more admonitions. That night Anna cried for so long and so inconsolably in Adonis’s arms that she was unable to answer his question about what most surprised him: something which struck him once night had fallen and which prompted him to get out of bed and cross to the window. From there he could see the mirror image of the moon in the canal. Its light, cast on the building walls in the form of restless reflections, revealed that his eyes were not deceiving him, that their apartment was still on the second floor even though the whole building had sunk by one story.

For a moment Adonis remained standing by the window, looking out at the night and the moonlight while Anna wept softly and despairingly behind him. Then he went back to bed and lay down beside her without asking any questions—questions which it is not even certain that Anna could have answered.

Through the time that followed, the little apartment would appear to have remained suspended at second-floor level, with Anna never for a minute seeming to be disconcerted by the upper floors sliding past her, although this meant she could never be sure, when she opened the door in the morning to clean under the doormat, whether it would open onto the stairway or the squatters or the whores’ quarters, or onto a corridor she could not remember ever having seen before. She never commented on this, and even if she had she might not have been able to give as much of an explanation as I would offer: that her love of order and her profound and desperate desire to hold her family and her home together kept the apartment hovering like some spotless celestial sphere while everything else sank. Not, of course, that that explains it; that won’t make anyone any the wiser.

And yet, though Adonis could have asked her, he did not, in part because he was preoccupied with his work. He had started performing again. Compelled by circumstances—it was becoming increasingly difficult to sell anything at all, never mind spice cookies—and driven by his old urge to perform, he left his partner and the cake stall in favor of performing in the marketplaces, just as he had done as a child, on the road with his grandfather. He constructed a small collapsible platform that could sit behind his bicycle seat, and made himself an instrument consisting solely of a tin can across which he had stretched a piece of piano wire. There were pictures on the tin can of ships sailing across silken-smooth seas under blue moons, pictures strangely akin to the songs Adonis sang. He had no idea how he came to recollect these songs. Often they would not spring to mind until he started to sing them. They were songs about desert nomads and jungles and coral islands and love that cannot be but on the other hand might just make it. And they all had melodies capable of moving audiences to tears, so much so that there were times when they had to beg the handsome, dark-haired man—Adonis, that is—to cease his singing, because it is so sad and so beautiful, they wept. Adonis accompanied these images on his instrument, which produced a fine and tremulously wistful tone that detained his listeners (most especially the women) in the square long after Adonis had cycled off, in the hope of finding him and comforting him. They thought he shared the longing that filled their hearts when in actuality it so happened that this melancholy bore not the faintest resemblance to Adonis’s own life, the keynote of which was contentment. And yet there was no hypocrisy in his singing. He took great pleasure in treading the boards once more, and he himself could be brought close to tears when he performed, although these tears arose from his gratitude at having an audience and from the women’s tears of emotion, and not from some private and secret sorrow—although that is what more or less everyone believed. He would never have had the heart to cheat them. Like Ramses, his father, Adonis was uncompromisingly honest, and this sense of right and wrong was what kept him clear of bad company in marketplaces that had altered beyond recognition from when he was a boy. Faced with an increasingly blasé public, the traveling showmen had lost all faith in the possibility of giving pleasure. All that remained of the quick-change artist’s magic was the shock effect. This had now become the sole means of surprise, practiced by confidence tricksters who stood behind little tables spread with green baize and dice and leather cups, awaiting their public with the same studied innocence that the caged Bengal tigers had shown on these same churned-up squares a century before. And yet Adonis never looked back. As far as he was concerned, hindsight barely existed; life, audiences, family—all these lie ahead of you. But it did occur to him that the difference between then and now was that the public had become the enemy, not just of the confidence tricksters but of those showmen who netted more than anyone else because they had grasped that the biggest shock could be derived from the modern age and its technology. So they rode motorcycles around the inside of a big wire-mesh globe decked with brightly colored illustrations of countries and continents. Round and round they would go, vaulting and looping the loop, while reading newspapers or smoking Turkish cigarettes or taunting the spectators. And the audiences wished for nothing more than the liberating crash that would give them their revenge, release the tension, and check this rush around a wall of death that bore such an alarming resemblance to life, inasmuch as once you have started, you have to keep going and can never slacken speed.