The Quiet Girl (47 page)

The man looked up. He had tears in his eyes.

"There's nothing I can do," he said.

Kasper had then driven out to see his own father. Maximillian had moved back to the large house in Skodsborg. One should be careful about moving back to places where one has suffered great losses; the house was filled with echoes of Helene Krone.

They sat in a living room that faced the water; around them were all the right pieces of furniture, the right pictures, the right
view. Unfortunately, material things are not enough; something needs to breathe life into them, someone needs to blow into the instrument.

"You've always kept many things secret," said Kasper. "I applaud that wholeheartedly. I have a closed side too; but there's something about Stina--I could always hear that. You know something or other. And you must tell me now."

Maximillian looked around without finding what he was looking for, a way out. That's one of the disadvantages when you set yourself up expensively but simply; the surroundings no longer offer pretexts and hiding places.

"The police have a central database, and I looked her up. She spent two years in the women's prison in Horsens. For manslaughter. I couldn't get the details."

* * *

He accompanied Kasper to the door.

"My problem," said Kasper, "is that even if she had killed and devoured a whole family, I'd still love her."

Maximillian opened the door.

"I would too," he said.

Father and son looked out over the snow-covered lawns. Their sounds were related. Very often a particular aspect of loneliness is transmitted from one generation to the next.

"Nevertheless, we have to live," said Kasper. "I'm about to set my mind to meeting a woman who is more a nurse type. It would be fine if she was a member of the Ethical Council. And did volunteer work in a church congregation."

"When you find her," said Maximillian, "if she has a mother or older sister, will you give your father a call?"

* * *

The baroness from Strand Road brought him out of the psychosis. Back to a reality that was not much better than where he came from. She took his pulse. Lifted his eyelids and shone a light into his eyes. All the same, it reassured him, in a sense. It was obviously important to them to keep him alive.

At one point, near the end--although at the time he didn't know that--they left the room. Vivian the Terrible came in. At first he couldn't see her; his sight was poor and his memory too. But he recognized her A-flat major. The depth of the musical key. Its compassion. He remembered how Mozart had often composed for the theater. How he had tuned into the singers. And then written in their specific musical key. For this woman he would have written an aria about a broken heart. In A-flat major.

He did not understand how she had gained admittance. But if there was anyone who could do that, it was she.

He knew that he couldn't ask about anything. They were being monitored, as if for a studio recording. He did it anyway.

"The children and Stina?"

"They are safe."

She tried to maintain her mask. But he could dimly see his mirror image in her eyes. He must look like a ghost.

"Kain and the woman?"

"Disappeared."

She had a portable radio with her, which she placed on the table and turned on. Tom Waits sang "Cold Water" from Mule Variations, deep loneliness and deep compassion and deep spiritual longing that hasn't found its way home and probably never will in this life, at 140 decibels in a bunker from World War II. The sound would paralyze all their small condenser microphones.

She leaned down to him.

"I've seen the state medical examiner's certificate. Cause of death: heart attack. Shall I get it revised?"

He shook his head.

"What will the official story be?" she asked.

"A compromise. Children kidnapped. A combination of sexual and economic motives. The kidnappers did not succeed."

"Reality is created by compromises," she said. "That's what human beings can tolerate. Many of my patients prefer to die with the television turned on. Your father and I. We were beyond that. We were headed into unknown territory."

* * *

She was gone. The interrogation team was back. They asked something, he answered; he understood neither their questions nor his answers. Moerk entered the room. With a small knife in his hand. He cut the handcuffs; Kasper gratefully rubbed his swollen hands.

"Kain and the woman?" he asked. "They got away. Was that part of the deal?"

Moerk shook his head. Kasper could hear he was telling the truth.

"The Avedøre embankment is closed. They've started pumping out the water. The inner city will be reopened in seven months. In eighteen months Copenhagen will look like itself again. Scarred. But otherwise as if nothing had happened."

"The desert fathers," said Kasper. "And Hegel. And Karl Marx. And the authors of the Old Testament. They discovered that if a person or a city was warned. By the Divine Being. And did not listen. Then history repeated itself. First as warnings. And later as catastrophes."

Beneath the other man's fatigue Kasper heard the anger. But the point is to make people wake up. And it's quite all right that sometimes it's hate that awakens first.

"I was never interested in religions," said the official. "And I'm especially not interested in Karl Marx and the desert fathers."

"It's never too late to become wiser," said Kasper. "Not even at the point where you are. Three-fourths in the grave."

Moerk drew back. Without training in the ring, without five thousand nights with two thousand people who don't give up at the
doors, it's hard to have the last word with a clown.

The door slammed. Kasper put his head on the table and fell asleep.
 

2

He awoke to daylight coming through the bars at the windows and managed to get to his feet. From his second-floor room he looked out toward Fælled Park and the outdoor swimming pool. He was in Section A of Rigshospital, a locked ward.

He was wearing hospital underwear. A T-shirt and pajama bottoms. On the table lay the lottery ticket, his fountain pen, and four
kroner, seventy-five øre, in change. They had taken away his shoes. He lay down, absolutely still. Tried to connect with his nervous system.

From the loudspeakers at the outdoor cafe in the park he heard a saxophonist tackle the hopeless task of repaying some of our communal debt to Coltrane.

On the radio of a parked car Chet Baker was singing in a recording from the days when he still had his Dean Martin looks, with teeth in his mouth and hair on his head. It was swing music, the likes of which, Kasper imagined, could otherwise only be heard from the heavenly hosts as they circled around God's throne.

From the paddleboat lake came the sounds of children's voices and laughter; they merged into snatches of Brandenburg Concerto Number 2. Bach's music could swing too.

He listened out through the wall. To the sound of two men who had not yet had deeper contact with the feminine spirit; it was the
two monks.

The door opened. The Blue Lady walked into the room, followed by the monks. She held her arms out to the side; they frisked her and left the room, shutting the door behind them.

He sat down on the bed, and she pulled a chair over next to him. For a while they sat there like that. The silence thickened around them.

"The children are safe," she said. "Stina is safe. They were questioned, which was no fun, but now that's over. Now they have peace and quiet."

He nodded.

"Benneweis Circus has announced its fall program; you're on it--posters are already printed. It appears that you've had a selfappointed impresario, a woman; she said on television that she's gotten a binding commitment from the Interior Ministry that your Danish citizenship will be restored. I've spoken with the patriarchate of Paris, and they have approached the Spanish king regarding the question of a pardon. We'll see how that goes."

The woman rose.

"I want to get out of here," said Kasper. "I want to see Stina and KlaraMaria."

"They want to put you through the extensive psychiatric examination ordered by the court. The Intelligence Service isn't finished with you either. Nor is Department H. They say it will take three months. You'll be out in August."

He clutched her nun's habit. She gently removed his hands.

"The time comes," she said, "when feelings between the student
and the teacher have reached a depth that indicates there will be help and contact whenever needed. But we always have to be careful not to let it slip into mollycoddling."

Anger rose in him like a jack-in-the-box.

"Surely you can give me more than that?" he said. "Look at my situation. I need information. I need comforting and blessing."

"I can give you a bus card."

"They've taken my shoes," he said. "That's more effective than chains and handcuffs. Without shoes I won't get any farther than Nørre Boulevard."

"Before I came in here," she said, "I went to the restroom. In the hall just outside here. The ladies' room. In there, I somehow forgot the shoes I was wearing when I arrived. By divine coincidence, they were jogging shoes. Much too big for me. Size ten. They felt like clown shoes. Fortunately, I had these in my pocket."

She stretched out her foot. She was wearing a pair of white gymnast shoes.

She stood up.

"I'm not the one who told you that Stina and KlaraMaria are at the Institute. But only for twenty-four more hours at the most."

She was gone.

* * *

Fie opened the door.

"I need to use the toilet," he said.

The monks walked on either side of him, holding him under the arms.

"Would one of you please go in with me?" he said. "The past few days have been hard on my nerves; I don't like to have to sit and take a crap all by myself."

They edged away from him a little, which was what he had counted on. When he went into the restroom they remained outside
the outer door.

He knew the restrooms. He had been on the locked ward several times during the good years, with students who had borderline diagnoses and schizophrenics who had scored 1.0 on the Thought Disorder Index. In those days he had gone along with everything if the parents had money. And sometimes also, already then, out of compassion. It was nice to think that this compassion came back to him now like a gentle karmic wind.

Both Francis of Assisi and Ramana Maharshi had said that, for the enlightened person, the world is a madhouse, while locked wards can seem refreshingly normal. Both men had called themselves "God's clown."

He went into the women's restroom. The shoes were behind the toilet bowl. They were his shoes. She must have found them in his suitcase.

They had a celestial tone. He reached inside them and felt the kroner bills. There were five thousand kroner, in five-hundred-kroner bills. Bohr looked healthier than before.

The mirrors above the sink were plates of polished stainless steel. One of Rasper's students from those earlier days had escaped from a restroom, through the ceiling; she was never found. What clients can manage must also be possible for the therapist. He climbed onto the water tank and then up onto the hand dryer. The panels in the ceiling were rock-wool slabs; many psychiatric disturbances cause increased sensitivity to sound. Like his own now, for example. He pushed up a panel and pulled himself into a ventilation duct.

He crawled out of the duct and found himself in front of an empty office facing Henrik Harpestreng Road. He jumped from a window onto the green lawn by the hospital laundry, reached through an open window, and fished out a pair of blue work pants from a pile of uniforms.

Spurred by a happy impulse, he went back to the main entrance.

He gave Lona Bohrfeldt's name at the reception desk, was told a floor, a section, and a room number, and took the elevator up.

* * *

The room was on a surgical ward and had several beds in it. In the bed by the window lay a man with a bandaged head, but the sound and general atmosphere around him were full of vitality. Above the bandages his black hair bristled like a clothes brush.

Lona Bohrfeldt sat on a chair beside the bed. She was in the last trimester of pregnancy, where both body and sound seem ready to burst.

"I came on duty now," said Kasper, "here at my second job as the medical director, in order to check up on your health. May I?"

He put his ear to the woman's abdomen; a spasm went through the man in the bed.

"Everything sounds stable," said Kasper. "He's had some shocks, that little fellow. But he's recovering. Children can stand an incredible amount. He'll be a fully developed troublemaker. How are things going with the gums?"

"He still needs to be careful about speaking," said the woman.

"Enjoy it," said Kasper. "As long as it lasts. We all talk too much."

"What about the children?"

"They're back. With their parents."

Tears came to her eyes.

"Kain has disappeared," he said. "Do you have any idea where I could find him? Just to have a polite exchange of opinions about what's happened."

She shook her head.

"The only thing he kept saying," she said, "was that there had to be a sauna nearby."

Kasper moved toward the door.

"We want to thank you," she said.

"Remember Beethoven," said Kasper. "When the audience blubbered too much, he said: 'The artist doesn't want tears. He wants applause.'"

"We want to invite you to the christening."

The patients in the other beds were following the exchange.

"A person like me," said Kasper, "must usually protect his private life from his overwhelming popularity. But in this case, I could make an exception. So I'll come. Like the fairy godmother. And as a baby gift I'll bring the little juvenile delinquent the best hearing. And the best manners."

"In return," said Lona Bohrfeldt, with a glance at his work pants and T-shirt, "perhaps we could help you with some nicer clothes."

* * *

He walked down Blegdam Road; when he heard the sirens he ducked into Fælled Park. He found the place within himself where the prayer went like this: "May SheAlmighty's will be done, even if it means I get nabbed. But I still pray to have just one hour."