The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (7 page)

The third time this happened, Katarina committed a crime—for the first and the last time in her life. While paying a visit to her childhood home she stole an old, rusty revolver from her father’s closet, one that she remembered from her childhood but that her father had long forgotten about. After such an exertion she had to wait months before she was strong enough to assure herself that it was loaded, and not until just before she gave birth to Amalie did she release the safety catch and tuck the gun under her pillow, firmly determined, in the future, to shoot at anything that opened her bedroom door after she had retired for the night, even if it should be her mother-in-law’s ghost.

This precaution proved to be unnecessary. Christoffer Teander heard his mother’s voice only once more after Amalie’s birth, and then it was almost unrecognizable.

It happened at the celebration held for the Old Lady’s business anniversary. Word of this event had not been announced in advance. Instead it manifested itself in the minds of the fifty-two guests, all of them men, as fifty-two simultaneous and identical feelings of conviction that they had been invited and that all they had to do was to turn up. They gathered, on time, at the Rabow family home in a large oval dining room lit solely by candles. The room’s large oval table was spread with a black velvet cloth edged with Valenciennes lace. This interplay of black and white was echoed by the identical white-tie-and-tails outfits worn by the fifty-two guests. Once they were there, the thought struck all of them, simultaneously, that they did not know which anniversary they were celebrating today—because the dates of all the Rabow family triumphs had been forgotten—and that this oval room filled with candles appeared to be decked out for a wake. Only then did they notice the Old Lady. She was sitting at the head of the table with her body, which was bigger and more shapeless than they remembered, squeezed into a dark, carved oak armchair. It looked for all the world as though she were sitting in her own upright coffin, awaiting her burial—an impression reinforced by her having placed, against one wall, her own tombstone on display. This ceiling-high slab of Swedish granite bore as yet—in all modesty—nothing but her name, a detailed list of all the personal and official victories of her life, a salute in verse from a famous Copenhagen poet, and three crosses and a dove inlaid in marble—all burnished to a gleaming, preternaturally dazzling sheen.

Not a single word was spoken during the serving of refreshments, which followed, with unerring accuracy, the program with which all the guests were somehow familiar and which made every word superfluous. These refreshments consisted of a sweet, heavy vintage Madeira and small slices of dry cake.

Nothing was said until the moment for the judging of the competition arrived. This competition had been the only public intimation of the Old Lady’s anniversary. It had been announced on the front page of the newspaper along with two lines of verse:

This newspaper’s praises are easily sung,

But if fault with it we must find

and all the guests had known beforehand that they were supposed to bring with them a suggestion for the completion of this poem. The entries were now read out one by one by Christoffer’s father-in-law, who kept going until all fifty-two had been read. Then it became clear to everyone, at one and the same time, that Dr. Mahler’s suggestion was splendid, the best, the winner, and the two golden lines were recited in chorus:

It has to be said, when all’s said and done,

That nothing springs to mind.

After this, everyone fell silent as the room shook with the simultaneous striking of all the clocks in the house. A last round of refreshments was then offered, and the fifty-two guests all looked, as one, at the Old Lady—who had not uttered one word, nor would, according to the program—and everyone knew that this would be the last time they would ever see her. For a brief moment, of previously determined length, their thoughts left the room and they recalled how they had known her in their capacities as judges and department heads and doctors and lawyers and chartered surveyors and town councilors and pastors and magistrates and company directors and landowners and captains, and then they reached for their glasses to toast the woman who had, like some great clockmaker, set in motion a mechanism which did not need to be wound up but which could continue to run for all time.

Then two things occurred that one can never completely guard against. The first was that Amalie opened the door. The second was that Christoffer got to his feet and, as one, the other fifty-one guests put down their glasses. Each in his own way, they understood that, for the first time since his wedding-day “Yes” in the church, Christoffer Ludwig was going to say something in company and that, for the first time ever, he was himself going to make a speech. This had not been foreseen in the Old Lady’s schedule.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” says Christoffer—and everyone remarks upon how surprisingly clear his voice is—”I would like to submit another possible solution, outside of the competition. My poem goes like this:

“This newspaper’s praises are easily sung,

But if fault with it we must find,

Then of all that is writ in the Danish tongue

Know that ne’er was a rag so lacking in spine—

Please, glue it and bind.”

After which he sits down and the party’s schedule vanishes in a fog of chatter and murmuring and voicing of opinions. Just at that moment the house clocks start to chime, far too early and all slightly out of step with one another, as though Christoffer’s breach of time in the oval room has spread to the rest of the building. Everyone talks even louder to drown out the grating dissonance of all these timepieces, and, amid this din, only the Old Lady and Amalie were silent: Amalie because, for the first time ever, she was thinking that perhaps, at heart, her father was not, after all, constructed out of weights and pulleys and springs and soulless machinery, as the mechanical chess player she had seen demonstrated in one of the markets of her childhood had been; the Old Lady because she was in danger of bursting with indignation. Not until much later, when the last of the Madeira had been drunk and the guests had taken themselves off, singing (because the Old Lady had been so confident about the way in which the evening would be conducted that she had not hired the bouncers), and after the last candle had burned down in its holder and the room lay in darkness apart from the faint glow of the tombstone—which the Old Lady did not notice because she had long since gone blind—did she say, out into the emptiness inhabited now only by herself and Amalie, “That abominable racket, it sounded like Christoffer!”

The next morning the housemaids found her in the room, dead. Her body was stiff and cold, but about the cracked but still full lips there hung a contented smile that made the servants think that she had, at the hour of her death, made a particularly advantageous deal with the Devil himself. That smile was kept in place by the rigor mortis that also made it impossible to pull her body free of the chair. Which is why they had a cover of oak made for it, and buried her sitting up.

*   *   *

It has not been possible for me to reconstruct the events immediately succeeding the Old Lady’s funeral. Once they were over, the people of the town forgot them in the same way that they forgot the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, and what occurred left no traces other than two extraordinary editions of the newspaper and a series of evasive answers. All we can be sure of is the beginning and the end. The Old Lady’s will was read aloud to Christoffer, Katarina, Amalie, and her sisters in a room that would be used on only one further occasion, after which it apparently ceased to exist. At the instant that the lawyer opened the big brown manila envelope that had been lying in his safe for three years—although he had not the faintest idea how it came to be there—he recognized, to his astonishment, his own handwriting and the Old Lady’s impatient dictation style. And at that same instant all of those present, and the rest of the town, were given a glimpse of eternity. The will was written on fine, almost transparent sheets of rice paper, and as the lawyer read out the date it became evident that this was the final, the definitive list, because this date contained no numbers. Instead, in the lawyer’s neat hand, it said: “From this day and for all time.” From the opening words of the will—which the lawyer read with quavering voice because he both recognized his own handwriting and yet felt sure that he had never written the document before him—both he and the family knew that this was the Old Lady’s most inconsiderate, most arrogant masterpiece: a complete record of the Teander Rabow family history for all time.

The Old Lady began by stating the date, the hour, and the place for the reading of her will to her vapid son and his ailing wife and her two grandchildren and Amalie, the willful one, and how the townspeople would realize that these precise moments had been predetermined. The lawyer looked up because the thought had suddenly occurred to him that he was reading to a group of waxwork dummies, and only the quick glance Amalie shot at her father made him go on, although he did not understand that this particular glance had not been predicted in the will before him, which otherwise contained detailed notes for every moment of the reading of it.

There followed a description of the Old Lady’s funeral; a description more deafly earsplitting, more impatient, and more detailed than ever before, and everything was as she said it would be, right down to her despotic and arrogant indications of where, in her funeral sermon, Christoffer’s father-in-law, the dean, would pause, distracted by the memory of the previous night, in the chapel, when he had wanted to unscrew the lid of the coffin in the futile hope that that disagreeable smile would have forsaken her face, never again to haunt his memory. After this came an account of the future of the newspaper, the printing plants, the offices, and the accounts and expansion projects and new acquisitions and investments—being particularly mindful of a new and promising world war—there you are; and here the will was as gracious as though this war were a gift to the bereaved, in their sorrow. Next came a month-by-month recital of the front-line positions, so that, when the time came, the newspaper could be first with the news. This will was a true catalogue of eternity. The Old Lady had not even considered it necessary to exhort her audience to listen and take all her words to heart. Nor was it necessary, since, during the reading, the terse sentences had retained all of her effrontery, to such an extent that now, before her family, she loomed large in the room, a solid specter that made them all sit even more improbably still than usual. Even Amalie stopped glancing at her father as the will set out the family’s private conditions and decreed which parts of the house they could frequent and specified their bedtimes and departures from these and when they might take sleeping drafts and where, under the bed, they could place their chamber pots and how Christoffer was to dress and the way in which his cuffs would fray: a never-ending number of details that were then discussed in greater depth in the footnotes. After having unfolded the course of Katarina’s illness and given a precise description of the last stages of her tuberculosis—during which Christoffer was to carry his wife’s bloody sputum to the public sewer twelve times a day, to prevent the children from being infected—this part of the will closed by predicting that the lawyer would pause at just this point because Katarina would have collapsed in a tearful coughing fit and because the reading could just as well continue another day, since it involved a catalogue of eternity, after all, and eternity does not change from one day to the next. So we can continue, the Old Lady snarled from the rice paper, we can carry on after the twenty-one days of mourning, which will be conducted as previously stated, and that’s that!

To begin with, everything went as it should. For one week the newspaper was published with blank white sheets, meant, along with the broad black border that edged them, to remind everyone of the Old Lady—which they did.

The following week the newspaper printed all the obituaries and poems and blessings and condolences written by important personages in Copenhagen. These letters gave the first clear indication of what a powerful influence the Old Lady had exerted, even over people who had never met her: there were letters from bishops and professors and landowners and company directors and famous surgeons, and a violin sonata composed for the Old Lady by the great violinist and virtuoso member of the Royal Theater orchestra Fini Henriques, and a poem in hexameter stanzas, filling four closely written pages and hailing the Old Lady as the Odysseus of the turbulent waters of politics, written by the country’s Minister of Justice, former counsel to the Supreme Court Peter Alberti, whose political career the Old Lady had at all times supported.

During the third week the newspaper published the tribute from the town, and for this it expanded to include two extra sections in which everyone who could read and write wept publicly for the town’s patroness, our dear mother and grandmother and mother-in-law, benefactress of the hospitals, protector of the poor, patron saint of the chamber of commerce, angel of the dairies, fairy godmother of the banks, lady bountiful of the fire brigade, good Samaritan of the sanitation department, and among all these tears, besides the sorrow, there was an element of fearful trust, inasmuch as many of these people still found it hard to believe that the Old Lady, remembered by them as a wise woman, was dead. Especially when they heard how warmly and teasingly she had smiled, from her coffin, upon those who came to pay their respects.

On the following Monday the newspaper was to be published as normal. On that Sunday the journalists got on with their work, suspecting nothing and unaware of the electricity in the air. They wrote their articles, all of which still dealt with the way the town grieved for its lost daughter and mother, and how it would take a while for it to recover from its loss—as predicted in the will, which was also mentioned—and then they went home. And from that moment things started to go wrong: that night they slept a sleep filled with oppressive dreams, and this sleep ran on and on into an endless night that was morning for others in the town. With the result that the journalists did not turn up for work at the time that was, for some, the next day.