The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (41 page)

She spent an hour at the watchmaker’s house, making an indelible impression. She introduced herself and presented the letter of recommendation the headmaster had given her; then she described how sensitive Carsten was and how his stomach tolerated only the best-quality produce and his skin only the cleanest of sheets and his lungs only the freshest of air and his good looks only whole nights of unbroken sleep and his health only the finest treatment imaginable—until she had given the watchmaker’s family the impression that this prospective lodger was some superior being who might at any moment die on their hands. While Amalie was speaking, her eyes were scanning the house, noting the neatness of it, with the pictures of the King and the Crown Prince on the wall; noting the provincial seemliness that she knew from Rudkøbing, and the humility with which the watchmaker and his wife showed that they would consider it an honor to have a student of Sorø Academy in their home. Later, in Copenhagen, Amalie explained to her women friends and to the Friends of the Family that it was this air of scrubbed subservience that had made her decide in favor of the Curre family, but in actuality other factors had been at work here. What she had ascertained, during that hour in which she had spoken nonstop, was, first and foremost, that the family’s only daughter was just seven years old and that Mrs. Curre was a workhorse—small and thin, with large red hands and all the steadiness of the works in her husband’s clocks, but totally lacking in that feminine menace from which Amalie would do anything to protect Carsten. Because there were to be no women in his life except her—at any rate, not right now; at any rate, not for the next three or four or five or six or seven years; there’s time enough for that sort of thing, she thought. Then suddenly, after having seen every inch of the house and every member of the family and talking nonstop and terrifying everyone, she softened. With a startling change of mood, she turned the brilliance of her smile—which was by this time becoming famous in certain circles in Copenhagen—on the watchmaker’s family, whom she had just flattened completely. Then she raised Carsten’s rent from 75 kroner to 150 kroner per month—of the stockbroker’s money—and shamelessly complimented the watchmaker on his wit, the watchmaker’s wife on her charm, and their daughter (who had not uttered a single word) on her intelligence. Thereafter she slapped the watchmaker on the back and said, “Damn, I’m glad the little darling’s going to be living with you,” before sweeping out of the door and into the car. The Hudson roared to life, and she drove off, back to Copenhagen. So lost was she in her own thoughts on this journey that she arrived home still none the wiser as to where in the world Sorø might be. All she knew was that the place was in order—in every respect in order.

And now she is saying farewell to Carsten. She had picked up his uniform herself, the day before, from the tailor recommended by the headmaster. In his suitcase he also has a winter uniform, again with pocket-less trousers—a style that by this time is already outdated, even at Sorø. Nonetheless, Amalie has opted for these, having been told by the headmaster, “Here we teach young people to get to grips with things; here we teach them that one cannot walk through life with one’s hands in one’s pockets.”

At the last moment Amalie decides that Gladys shall accompany Carsten. “Gladys is coming with you,” she says, “and that’s all there is to it. She’ll drive down with you now and come back with the car in the evening”—the reason for this being that she can then make Carsten’s new bed just the way he likes it, and unpack his suitcase and put his clothes away in his closet and hang up his shirts. The main reason, however, is that Amalie wants, somehow, to prolong this parting and give her boy some substitute for the embrace she can no longer give him, afraid, as she is, of losing all her self-control.

And so Carsten drives out into the world, and, seen from our point of view, it is both too early and too late.

At one point, as they were driving along Roskilde Road, they overtook a green Buick, one of the Copenhagen Police Department’s paddy wagons. Just as the two vehicles drew level, a pale face could be seen behind the bars of one of the tiny windows. It was the face of a girl, at one and the same time calm and wary, and for a few seconds she and Carsten gazed into each other’s eyes. Then the big Hudson had left the police van far behind, and the girl was gone.

It was Maria Jensen. At that point, sitting in the paddy wagon, heading along Roskilde Road, she was fifteen years old, and two years had elapsed since her mother disappeared and the tenement in Christianshavn sank into the ground.

*   *   *

Often, in my conversations with Maria, I have returned to the question of what her life was like during these two years, but she has never been able to give me a coherent answer. Nonetheless I have been able to figure out that after she turned her back on the vanished tenement, and on her father, and walked into the Copenhagen autumn, her life took roughly the following form: to begin with, she slept in railroad cars and in parks and on stairways, while winter was setting in. She was very close to perishing when she met Sofie, a girl of her own age, who looked like a sylph or a fairy-tale princess until she opened her mouth and gave vent to a voice as raucous as the sound of trains being switched. She introduced Maria into a club life which, until then, Maria had only ever viewed from the outside, while holding her father’s hand. The club meetings at which the two girls stepped out were held in Vesterbro. Cloaked in the anonymity of the legislation governing private clubs and tax dodges, these men-only societies met in some of the scores of cow barns still standing in this part of town. For these meetings, the cows were shooed into adjoining premises or into the barnyard, so that the empty stalls could be pressed into service as the wings for shows performed by young girls—girls like Maria and Sofie, who danced and sang, without a stitch on, to the music of a concertina played by the society chairman, a young man who smelled of Esprit de Valdemar and who, in the intermissions, was wont to fiddle absentmindedly with a blackjack. After the show, a dance was held in a closed-off coach house. The chairman played and the young girl performers accepted invitations to dance until daybreak, or until the police arrived, or until they had found a gentleman who would see them home. Maria and Sofie performed a song that Maria had learned from the whores in Christianshavn as a little girl. It went like this: “Tahiti is paradise on earth, hm hm,” and the girls made the “hm hm” sound by blowing through their noses in imitation of Polynesian wind instruments. They performed in grass skirts and nothing but grass skirts, looking so innocent that even the society members—who had come only because their lust was so hopelessly bound up with a taste for young meat—had tears in their eyes and felt contrite and thought: These two sweet little girls shouldn’t be here, they should be at home with their mother.

After the show they both danced with great and genuine joy, before allowing some gentleman—who had to be both elderly and well off—to escort them home. They had rented a room together on the outskirts of Vesterbro—lying at the very heart of a series of increasingly murky courtyards, at the end of a black passage—and it was to this that they led their prince for the night. Usually the victim did not notice where they were going, because he was so busy ogling the two little girls, whose innocence seemed to him to shine in the darkness, and trying to figure out whether they realized what all this was about and where it was leading. “How does a sweet little girl like you come to have such a rough voice?” he would ask Sofie as they were leading him through the last of the courtyards. “All the better to tell you how pleased I am that you walked us home,” Sofie would reply as they walked up the stairs. “How does a little flower like you come to have such a firm grip?” he would ask Maria as they were walking along the passage. “All the b-b-better to hold y-y-your hand,” Maria would reply. Then she would close the door behind them, take her police helmet from the chair where it lay, and put it on. Usually it was at this point that she let go of the man’s hand and butted him in the face with the police helmet, snuffing him out like a candle in a draft. But sometimes Sofie would hold her back, because she had become what is termed, in the police reports, physically aroused. In that case, she would let the gentleman undress her, after which she would undress him and take advantage of him while Maria sat silently in the dark, playing with the wallet she had fished from his clothes, waiting for the sign from Sofie to tell her that she could now bend over the stripped man, feel around in the dark for his head, and bash him in the face. Then they would pull off his underclothes, roll him down the stairs, pile him onto a handcart, wheel him out, and dump him in the nearest ditch.

They stopped going to the private-club dances when they realized that they could pick up better-off victims in the city dance halls. So they started to frequent Figaro’s and the Marble Café in Store Kongens Street; started to wear high heels and evening dresses and makeup and learned to steer clear of overzealous officers from the vice squad. Other than that, the drill remained the same: they would lure some elderly gentleman into seeing them back to their room—where they went on living, even though it was like a black hole in the darkness. Once there, they usually knocked him out without any further ado, and took his wallet. In the summer they would also take his clothes and his shoes, then wheel him off on the handcart and throw him into a ditch on the outskirts of town. Only rarely did a victim ever recognize them later, and if such a situation did arise, they could soon shut him up, with Sofie saying, in her gravelly voice, “You do know we’re under age, don’t you?” and Maria stammering softly, “Y-you know what they do with old pigs like you who pester little girls, don’t you? They ch-chop it off, so you’d better piss off.”

During these years they see so much of society’s underside that they begin to doubt whether it has a topside. Thanks to their cunning and hardihood, they succeed in evading the police and the vengeance of their victims and pimps and other prostitutes and the owners of the establishments where they picked up their customers, while still retaining a sort of innocence. When they are alone, or with children of their own age, they behave as what they in fact are: two little girls who would much rather jump rope or play hopscotch or take the streetcar out to Charlottenlund or the train to Hornbœk, to watch the well-to-do and dream about what it must be like to toss a ball about with the rich children in their gardens, or play with them on the beach. And no matter how strange it may seem, Maria remains sexually innocent. Even though she witnesses everything, or almost everything, that Copenhagen has to offer in the way of fornication, still she remains every bit as untouched and virginal as the day she was born, and this she achieves, quite simply, by keeping her distance. When Sofie yields to temptation and makes love with a victim on the bed in which, every night, the girls sleep arm in arm, curled up like puppies, Maria sits on the floor staring vacantly into the darkness, the sounds of copulation arousing no feelings whatsoever in her. And it is the same story if Sofie brings home one of her beaux—an errand boy or a wrestler or a baker or a schoolboy; Maria vacates the bed and goes down to the courtyard to play hide-and-seek with the other children. She does not appear to have been shocked, not even when Sofie takes her with her to the rooms above the circus building and has intercourse, or something that passes for it, with all twenty-three stableboys one after the other. And while all this is going on, Maria sits in a corner playing with a little puppy, letting it pee on her police helmet while she babbles baby talk to it.

Eventually they also stop going to dance halls. There came a day when they were seen home by a man of property—what the French would call a
rentier
—who, having seen through their baby talk to precisely what they were, offered to let them live in his apartment, “with room and board and an allowance in return for your sleeping with me,” he told Sofie, “but we’ll have it put in writing—everything has to be in order.” The girls spent four months in this apartment, which was as big as a barn and dirty as a pigsty, and at the end of that time Sofie was so overwrought that a breakdown looked likely at any minute. It happened in the kitchen where, after having subjected her to certain particularly degrading variations on intercourse, their landlord had demanded that she eat with him. Now he is insisting that she sit before him, naked, while he eats, fully clothed. He is eating white bread; first he spreads it with a thick layer of butter, then he licks the knife; next he spreads it with liver pâté and licks the knife, then he adds a layer of vegetable salad and licks the knife—and then Sofie lunges at him. In the same moment, he has in his hand a little pistol, one he always carries because he has never trusted the girls for a second—or anyone else for that matter. Sofie opens her mouth and screams and, terror-stricken, he shoots her in the throat. Then he just stands there, not moving a muscle, as though he is working something out. He does not try to defend himself when Maria grabs hold of his collar and beats his head against the yellow kitchen tiles: once, and his nose breaks; twice, and his lip splits and several teeth shatter; three times, and his jaw cracks; and four times, and a good many more. Then Maria stammers something at Sofie and takes her in her arms and realizes that she is dead, that yet another person is gone from her, in a life that seems to her to consist of a long line of losses, one after another. Then she empties the cigar box in which the
rentier
keeps his money and clears out.

The police found her at the Marble Café, where she had been sitting for three days in a row, from morning till night, waiting for them to show up. Those three days had seen a change in her. Her stammer had become so bad that it was almost impossible for them to question her. They took her to the police station and sent for a policewoman. She had a long talk with Maria, after which she said that the girl seemed normal enough, but such a little slip of a thing that she could not possibly be fifteen, as she claimed. Once Maria had stammered out her name, they had unearthed all the vague reports in their files in which the Stutterer was mentioned, but the policewoman—who was regarded as an expert on children, and especially girls—rejected this material with a wave of her hand, saying, “There’s no way this puny girl could be that notorious gang leader—look at her, she couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag.” And so it was concluded that she could not have beaten up the
rentier,
who had brought the charges that led to her arrest.