The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (37 page)

Nevertheless, they all dreamed of Amalie—inconsistent, confusing dreams, only a few of which have been preserved for posterity, and which I will not waste time on here, especially since we have the eyewitness reports of the invisible servants, who put off leaving the house, and Carsten, who spent the whole night sitting on the sofa opposite his mother. Amalie said not one word in the course of that night, and during those first hours—as the sun went down and it grew dark, as she relived her crazy love for Carl Laurids and her longing for him—she resembled everyone else’s picture of her: a frail young woman who calls to mind the dewy Madonnas from the paintings on their walls, and who might at any minute fall apart and dissolve into a pool of tears. Then she would admit to herself that a woman in Denmark in the 1920s is nothing without her man—especially not a fey dreamer like Amalie, whose father has squandered everything, virtually everything, so that she does not even have a fortune to compensate her for the fact that she has been dishonored.

Then one of the expensive, mortgaged clocks struck midnight, and the first despairing Danish dream of the abandoned wife was supplanted by a new dream, with Amalie’s face turning into a white mask of bitterness as she saw her life as being wasted, her youth misspent, her marriage futile, and Carl Laurids a fiend. In this state she could, right there and then, have killed, and if she had become fixed in this wrath her life could have become the tale of the avenging wife and mother—which might also have been interesting, but that is not what happened; we must stick to the truth. Which is that as the night progressed, Amalie’s face grew increasingly calm and increasingly determined. With the first faint light of dawn she caught sight of Carsten, who had fallen asleep on the sofa across from her; then she drew her legs up underneath her and a strange light came into her eyes. As the first rays of sunshine struck the tops of the trees in the grounds, Dodo the greyhound began to growl menacingly. It had been sleeping on the rug in front of the fireplace and now, having been woken by the sun, it lifted its head and saw Amalie. She was still sitting in the armchair with her legs folded beneath her, looking both alert and relaxed as she stared straight ahead, without blinking. At that moment she looked so much like a big cat that the greyhound did not recognize her, and when she shifted one paw lazily, the dog slunk out of the room. Then Amalie got to her feet, lifted Carsten, and carried him up to his room. As she covered him with the quilt she said, matter-of-factly, “What I am about to do I do for you.”

That same afternoon she rang the stockbroker at his office and asked him to call on her that evening. She knew he would come, and for the last half hour before the appointed time she watched from the windows of Carl Laurids’s deserted office on the third floor as he paced back and forth, a little way down Strand Drive, referring at brief intervals to his watch, so that he could knock on her door with a punctuality of the kind which her grandmother in Rudkøbing had taught herself and tried to teach her children, but which was, for this man and his family, a two-hundred-year-old matter of course.

He was a member of a Jewish family that had resided in Copenhagen for several hundred years and that had built up in that city a banking and stockbroking business with the most spotless reputation. Once, shortly after he arrived in Copenhagen, Carl Laurids had visited the tall, narrow building on Gammel Strand to suggest, with his patent assurance, a collaboration. He had been turned down flat by the very man who was now waiting outside his house on Strand Drive, the man who had at that time just assumed leadership of the stockbroking company after twenty years with the Ministry of Finance. At the ministry he had developed an allergy, a dry cough, that would start up whenever he found himself in the same room as an unsound business. Just at the sight of Carl Laurids’s hat coming over the Marble Bridge he started gasping for breath; and when Carl Laurids was standing in his private office his whole body broke out in an itch so unpleasant that—once Carl Laurids had left—he had to loosen all his clothes in order to scratch, an unheard-of act for such a tightly buttoned-up lawyer. Not being one to give up hope, Carl Laurids had invited the stockbroker to his balloon ascent. He had come, quite without knowing why he did so, and it was there that he first laid eyes on Amalie. After that, Carl Laurids kept on issuing invitations to him, presumably to borrow a little luster from his respectability, and the stockbroker had kept on attending the parties on Strand Drive—still without knowing why. He always turned up somberly attired, never danced, drank nothing, ate modestly, and spent the evening sidling from room to room along the walls without any hope of meeting anyone he knew, and making no human contact other than a casual handshake from Carl Laurids.

What none of the guests knew, and what the stockbroker himself did not realize—what, in all probability, Carl Laurids did not even grasp—Amalie recognized immediately. With his stiff collars and his stiff gaze and his stiff movements, this powerful, prosperous citizen and civil servant was trying to keep at least some sort of grip on himself, to stop himself from breaking down into his basic components—these involving, first and foremost, a powerful craving for Amalie. She knew that this craving was the sole reason for his turning up, year after year, at the hedonistic parties on Strand Drive and, once there, enduring the loneliness and the dreadful itching and the coughing fits that assailed him when confronted with so many unsavory businesses assembled in one spot. And when he sidled from room to room with his back to the dance floor it was, Amalie knew, solely in order to follow her every move in the wall mirrors. Up till then she had never paid him any attention. She had noted him and added him to her mental list of admirers, but he and she moved in different worlds. Now she raised him up into her reality.

She let him in and showed him around the villa, chatting to him all the while about religious matters: opening maneuvers which, however, lasted only for as long as Amalie deemed necessary. In the bedroom, she disrobed him so gently that his garments seemed, to him, to fall off unaided. With the unfastening of the last buttons he fell apart, and Amalie picked him up and took him in her arms. He cried inconsolably while they made love and continued to cry like a child throughout the night. When morning came, he sat in Amalie’s lap in knee-length silk underpants, sucking on a white cloth while she gently rocked him. At that point she could have asked for anything whatsoever; he would have given her everything, but the only thing she asked of him was to be her confidant and financial adviser during these difficult times. Thereafter, she helped him to dress and knew, when he left, that he would always come back.

Without a moment’s hesitation she then picked up the telephone and told the professor to come. The professor belonged to a noble family whose members had been generals and admirals since the time of Christian IV—and still were. He himself had been a colonel in the Army before opting for a professorship in architecture, and he girded himself with learning and medals and a hoarse bark and boasts about his family’s wealth, along with various other signs of unassailable virility—all of which Amalie had seen right through, despite having met him on only a handful of occasions, at parties given by Carl Laurids to which he lured this coxcomb, this Knight-of-the-Dannebrog-at-such-an-early-age, by pandering to his vanity—by no means a difficult undertaking. On these occasions Amalie had seen past his decorations to the mistreated and hard-pressed mongrel hiding behind the stiff fabric of his uniform and the gold braid. She knew he had noticed her, and she knew that he would come because he remembered her and because, when she spoke to him on the telephone, she had not invited him but given him an order. He arrived as punctually as the stockbroker had done the day before, in full court dress. Without wasting any time on the formalities, Amalie led him to the bedroom, ordered him to take off his uniform, and when he hesitated, slapped his face, hard, several times. At this he broke down; then she made him pull down his trousers and she spanked him. He cried when, after a little while of this, she stopped—“But that’s all you’re getting,” she said, “a few small slaps on that white army bottom,” and then he had to button up. In the drawing room she allowed him to drink half a cup of tea, to help him pull himself together, while she sat opposite him, her face hard and inscrutable. Then she ordered him to leave. She did not get up to show him out, but as he was leaving she told him coldly that his only chance of being allowed to come again lay in taking care of certain urgent expenses for her. From the hallway, through the closed drawing room door, he begged her to let him write her a check, and once he had done so she had the footmen throw him out.

On the next evening she was visited by an influential government minister and on the next by H. N. Andersen; and since these two men are well-known figures whose memories are protected I will refrain from mentioning here a lot of things that could be divulged, or what Amalie demanded of them. All I will say is that her demands were modest. And so it continued: she made demands, but they were never high.

On the fifth day—which was the last, this time around—she received the Copenhagen inspector of schools, and from him exacted the promise that when the time came—in other words, in over ten years’ time—he would procure a scholarship for Carsten to one of the most prestigious prep schools in the country.

Then she went to bed and slept for the first time in five days.

*   *   *

The simplest thing now would be to say that evidently Amalie must have decided to become a prostitute; naturally, that would be simplest, since we all believe we know what that word entails. But in her case this would not be correct; it would be a gross simplification of Amalie’s activities in the years ahead. Beginning with the stockbroker and the professor-colonel, these amounted to a series of moves—let us say business transactions, or let us say amorous transactions—that were a great deal more subtle and complex and difficult to comprehend than ordinary prostitution. Amalie
understood
her customers, that much can be said here and now; she understood that the stockbroker had to be handled like a frightened child and that the professor had to be denied precisely what he thought he had come for and that the government minister should be allowed to talk, just talk, and that H. N. Andersen wanted her to recount for him fictitious incidents from his youth among the brothels of the East Indies—incidents he could now relive only in this way, with a strange woman and the sough of the Sound in the background. And she gave these men exactly what they needed, without losing one vestige of her own dignity.

In the course of that one night on which she had said farewell to Carl Laurids, she lost any resemblance to the Madonnas on the walls and slipped away from our dream—and the dream of her own day and age—of a delicate, symbolic woman. In a sense, she continued to look as she had always done; she corresponds in every respect to the ideal of her day, her customers’ ideal and ours, of a beautiful woman: an ideal that calls for shapely hands, soft lips, and regular, delicate features, and so on and so forth. But there is no longer anything the least bit delicate about this woman as a whole, and we must differentiate between Amalie before and Amalie after Carl Laurids’s disappearance. Previously, in her dress, she had followed the daring fashions of the day; she had mastered the art of being both distant and absolutely up to the minute with her bobbed hair, loose-fitting, low-waisted dresses, and boyishly flat chest. But from the night on which Carl Laurids disappeared she altered her appearance. She tied a turban around her hair until it grew long enough to be piled up in elaborate coils; and from then on, she wore only black dresses—not to show that she was in mourning, not to look like a widow, but because black represents solidity and, during these years, it was solidity for which Amalie was reaching out. Her dresses were tight-fitting, clearly delineating her figure and emphasizing to anyone and everyone—including us, whose knowledge of her appearance is gleaned mainly from photographs—that she grew to look more and more like a big, beautiful cat. That was how she received her first customers and, later, the long ranks of those who succeeded them.

It was to be the case with all of Amalie’s business relationships that her demands were moderate. With most of her clients, she could have asked for anything at all, but did not. She now practiced in her business affairs the same restraint that had become an ideal for her since she decided, after Carl Laurids’s disappearance, to bid farewell to her extravagant ways. Do not expect me to explain this. I am only reporting the truth—even if, as here, it does consist of riddles: riddles such as how Amalie managed to take these steps into reality and, in just five days, ensure that she and her child could stay on Strand Drive and in stylish society, and in comfortable circumstances, when everyone, even I, would have expected her to drop out of the villa and into some humble public office and into another district and out of this tale.

On the seventh day after Carl Laurids’s disappearance the workmen arrived, and for the week during which they were at work Amalie received no one, absolutely no one. During that period she left her five first clients—who had safeguarded her future—to yearn for her; left her and Carl Laurids’s acquaintances to speculate over just when she would be forced to move out. These workmen were the same foreigners who had, at the beginning of the century, installed her grandmother’s water closet. They were much older now, and spoke with less and less exuberance, but they worked with the same impressive dexterity. It has not been possible to discover where they came from or how Amalie found them; when they were finished she paid them in cash—with H. N. Andersen’s money—and then they vanished.

Anyone less strong than Amalie would undoubtedly have been tempted to have all traces of Carl Laurids removed. There were other women—who do not come into this story, but whom I mention here because they, like Amalie, felt that they had been abandoned by Carl Laurids—who continued to wallow in the despair out of which Amalie pulled herself. They burned every picture of Carl Laurids and every present he had given them; they even burned their sheets and made all sorts of excuses to their husbands for cleaning their homes from top to bottom. They did not, however, succeed in cleaning the vanished cynic’s ghostly charm from their hearts, and in the end they went as far as to burn the rugs and the drapes and had the furniture recovered, to get at least a bit of peace. Amalie did not need to do any of this. She put all the photographs of him in a drawer, gave away most of the things he had left behind in his wardrobe to the Salvation Army, and locked up his office, which still held traces of his burning of the last of his papers. Then she set the workmen to work on the task for which she had really engaged them: to make the house into a barred incubator for Carsten.