The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (44 page)

In one corner stands the grand piano and at the keys sits the music teacher. He and his piano, complete with the Danish songbook—which contains a number of songs written by or set to music by former academy students—symbolize the third dream mentioned by the headmaster in his speech, which is fostered here: the dream of the lovely and beloved Danish countryside.

Most of the things I have mentioned here are my own observations, not Carsten’s. I am basing them on my conversations with former pupils and, indeed, with Carsten, but the pictures of how everything fits together are my own. Of course Carsten saw how the teachers were lined up, he saw their vacant stares and all their tics and twitches and trembling hands and their odd habit of muttering to themselves and moving their lips during the singing, to hide their fear of uttering a sound anywhere but from their own, elevated lecterns—of course he saw all of this. But it did not arouse any particular feeling in him; nor did he hear a single word of the headmaster’s speech, and afterward he was unable to recall which songs he had sung, because he had been so busy bringing all his well-meaning energy to bear on one single thing: trying to do more or less what he had been doing for as long as he could remember—his duty. He focused all his concentration on looking as though he were listening attentively, and on not looking conspicuous or forward, and on glowing with expectation at the thought that for three years, here, at the best of all possible schools, he would be given the chance to do exactly what the headmaster and the teachers and the students and—first and foremost, behind them—his mother expected of him. So immersed was he in these efforts that he received no clear impression of anything until, suddenly, a wiry little boy from a class senior to his hissed something under his breath. Shocked by this show of disrespect, Carsten turned to look at the boy. He is met by a pair of dark eyes, and then the boy says, coolly and without noticeably lowering his voice—while nodding his head in the direction of the headmaster, Mr. Raaschou-Nielsen, the Shuffler, on his raised lectern, “Can’t you just hear the spiritual snot clogging his mustache?”

This seemingly meaningless, throwaway, chance remark sticks in Carsten’s mind like a burr. And it embodies a fourth dream from Sorø Academy: the dream of rebellion.

It might be supposed that it is the students who dream of revolting, that they are the source of rebellion, but that is not the case—or at least it is not that simple. On the whole, the students are of the same mind as the teachers. Despite the spiteful nicknames, despite the secret, forbidden rituals, and despite that unseverable bond between academy boys, past and present, to which the headmaster is at this very moment referring—still, the teachers and the students form a united front. In actuality, the solidarity of the boys and their traditions and rituals are an expression of their delight at being chosen, of being among the best in the country,
primi inter pares,
thanks to their attendance at this delightful school set amid countryside which, it is quite true to say, they will grow to love with an ardor that will, in forty years’ time, readily bring tears to the eyes; this school, whose teachers they do, at heart, respect, because, at heart, they believe them to be ministering to values at which one might well poke good-humored fun but which are, in reality, sacrosanct. And that the pupils hold such a view has something to do with Sorø Academy’s still being at this time—despite all the rhetoric that a man’s a man for a’ that, blah, blah, blah—a school for the upper and upper-middle classes. So the rebellion stems, not from the general run of pupils, but from certain boys, such as the boy standing behind Carsten in the assembly hall.

Boys such as these are described, in the parlance of their day, as black sheep, rotten apples, and bad characters, and I can see that they do exert a powerful fascination. I would like to be able to say that Carsten became such a rebel, and that this transformation began on that very first day in the assembly hall and went on and on. But it would be a lie; the dream of the insubordinate student belongs to a later day and age; almost twenty years will have to elapse before Danish writers begin, smugly, to depict themselves as long-legged delinquents who can rock back and forth on the balls of their feet and have the last laugh and run rings around the teachers. In 1939, at Sorø Academy, such boys were regarded as undesirable elements, a blight on youth and on the academy’s hearty, scoutmaster ethic.

Carsten is the very opposite. He is obedient and conscientious, and even on that very first day in the assembly hall he turns away from the boy behind him in vexation, and tries to forget him.

And so he enters academia. Two years go by, and during these two years Carsten is awarded two prizes for diligence and two prizes for proficiency, and he becomes something of a legend at the school. This is not to say that he was
talked
about; a great deal more
talking
was done about the boy who was standing behind him in the assembly hall. During these two years, he has arranged for as many minor scandals as there are weeks in the year and more large ones than Carsten has had prizes, until finally his parents are asked to remove him from the school—which is a nice way of saying that he was kicked out. He, too, became something of a legend and
he
was talked about, but Carsten’s fame was of a different sort. It stemmed from his doing his duty to an absolutely unheard-of degree, from his fulfilling his obligations to such an extent that he realized Sorø Academy’s false pictures of diligence and studiousness in the previous century. In the course of these first two years at the school, Carsten turned up on time every single day, and not only on time but
early,
not to prepare his work—that he had, naturally, done the day before, or even before that, during the free-study periods—but to have that day’s lesson absolutely fresh in his mind and to be able to come out with his answers smartly and without hesitation. He chose to read the classics, since, despite the academy’s democratic spirit and its respect for the sciences and the useful modern languages, Latin and Greek were nevertheless still, somehow, better. But it was not only in the classical languages that he excelled; he was also brilliant when it came to other subjects and to PE classes—when he took his winter dips without flinching and pulled his white shirt straight over his wet body without drying it first, because Møller, the PE teacher, considered using a towel unmanly and sissified. And then there were the Sundays in the watchmaker’s house, when he ate a roast and dessert with the watchmaker and his family in the front room (from which the echo of Amalie’s visit had never truly faded), politely recounting what he had learned at the academy. All in all, wherever he may be, he is a model pupil, his behavior immaculate. There is nothing one can point a finger at, not even in his free time, when of course he is an active member of the academy’s voluntary study groups. These concern themselves with the strength of Denmark’s claim to South Jutland, and with readings from that essential work
Study of Denmark’s Southern Boundaries,
which traces the root of South Jutland’s severance from the mother country to Knud Lavard, around 1129. Carsten attends these study group meetings as well prepared as for the obligatory classes.

His behavior was exceptionally well suited to the academy’s teaching style, which was based on learning incontrovertible truths by heart; a system modeled on the conjugation of the Latin verbs—which, thank heaven, are incapable of change, that language having died out long ago. Attempts were made to apply this model to all aspects of school life, not least to Danish lessons, where it was held to be an incontrovertible truth that no literature of any merit had been written in the Danish language since the year 1900—and certainly nothing worth studying in senior secondary. Here lessons involved getting pupils to memorize the brilliant social history notes of the eminent literary scholar and former member of the academy Vilhelm Andersen, in such a way that they could (as Carsten did at his final exam) be tested on one of Grundtvig’s poems and would, like Vilhelm Andersen, be able to say of the passage “And with wealth we can say it is progress indeed, when few have too much and still fewer are in need” that
here,
precisely
here,
Grundtvig is presenting an economic program with far-reaching consequences.

Obviously another kind of reality existed beyond the walls of Sorø Academy, but this was of no great interest to the academy boys or the teachers or the headmaster. Naturally, they knew of its existence, and naturally, the school subscribed to certain newspapers—which, now and again, someone might read—but there was something unreal about the outside world; it was as though the news reports from outside were just vague, fanciful rumors. Carsten had been at the school for a year when the Germans occupied Denmark, and if one asks, as I have done, what effect this had on the day-to-day routine of the school, the answer is: Virtually none. On April 10 a detachment of German soldiers set up machine guns in Sorø town square and a German military band played, and the boy who had been behind Carsten in the assembly hall went over and spoke to the German soldiers. A few days later, at morning prayers, Carsten was presented with a prize for diligence, and the headmaster said, “You have applied yourself in a manner the like of which has not been seen in this century, and I predict that when you fly out into life you will perform great and wonderful deeds in Denmark’s name, gladdening your mother’s heart”—here the headmaster paused briefly—“and bringing honor to the school. And now I would like to ask all of you”—here the headmaster reluctantly looked up from Carsten’s brown eyes—“as far as is possible to save on toilet paper, which has, because of the current situation, been rationed.”

The “current situation” was the term used at the academy when referring to the German occupation, about which very few knew what to think until the Boy from the Assembly Hall wrote in the school magazine that this occupation was an insult to democracy, thus prompting the headmaster to confiscate every single copy, thereby making it clear to those who did not know what to think that it was best not to think anything at all. This moved the boy to retaliate in a little leaflet that he produced and duplicated himself, using a typewriter, one finger, and carbon paper. In this he wrote that it came as no surprise to him that the school did not call attention openly to the criminally violent nature of this Fascist occupation of Denmark, since he for one had always been very well aware that the academy’s blithering brand of nationalism had no time for modern history but would rather dwell dolefully on the Spirit of 1848 and the Defeat of 1864 and the Reunion of 1920. Furthermore, he would like his fellow members of the academy and schoolmates to know how rife was sympathy among the school’s teachers for Aryan notions that the ancient peoples actually stemmed from Nordic tribes who had migrated south—the very notion put forward by that trashy novelist Johannes V. Jensen. In his opinion, wrote the Boy from the Assembly Hall, this notion was stupid, unsubstantiated, and arrogant. Naturally, this leaflet, too, was confiscated, to be used, not long afterward, as an argument for asking its author’s parents to remove him from the school. It is mentioned here because it made a deep impression on Carsten, so deep that when I spoke to him, almost fifty years after reading it, he still knew its contents by heart.

It is tempting to ask whether Carsten and his schoolmates were happy at the academy, and it is a question I have in fact put on several occasions to former students who attended the school at the same time as Carsten. Most of them have answered, “Those certainly were grand days,” or, “We were treated in a civilized fashion, treated like adults”—and clichés such as these caution me against addressing the past with a concept of happiness from our own day and age. So I will let that question pass and try instead to give an objective account of what life at this time was like for Carsten. For Carsten, life at the academy came as a natural continuation of his life with Amalie after Carl Laurids’s disappearance. Here, too, there were adults who expected—and rewarded—a particular mode of behavior, adults who paid homage to the same ideals as Amalie, namely, Cultivation and Good Taste and Order and Diligence. Because the academy was closed off, set apart—constituting a kind of cultural and historical island—it was possible to preserve the notion that even if life does go on outside the walls, everything that really matters is going on here, on the inside; and what goes on is pretty much the same as what was going on in the previous century. Carsten had grown up amid human relationships as unpredictable as the weather: with Amalie’s capricious temperament continually sweeping through the house like a sort of indoor thunderstorm bringing sunshine in its wake; and with the love affair between her and Carl Laurids having its own unreliable meteorology. As far as he was concerned, it was, in many ways, deeply satisfying to come to Sorø, where the time was spent teaching students about those things which are completely and utterly stable and immutable. The idea of the Spirit of the People was immensely appealing to him: the idea of a kind of lineage, a thread running from the men of the runes and Absalon right up to the present day, a tangible thread that glowed on those two occasions every year when the great Vilhelm Andersen gave a lecture at the school. He always began—amid breathless silence—by placing his silver-topped cane on the lectern as though it were some great treasure, some significant archaeological find. Then he would hold the entire student body spellbound, listening for two hours, while he revealed that the world was not, as they thought, incalculable and unreasonable and awkward and difficult, but, on the contrary, clear-cut and coherent and sound as the Spirit of the People itself—especially if one belonged to the Flower of Danish Youth. This idea of belonging to the Danish elite appealed to Carsten. Despite his modesty, despite there being, for most of the time, something self-effacing about him, something that appealed both to his schoolmates and to the teachers—for modesty was one of most prized virtues at Sorø—despite this, he feels his heart beat fast at the thought of belonging to the flower of something, even a phenomenon as hazy as Danish Youth.