Tales of the Night, page 21
Although during these years Nikolaj Holmer saw his wife every day, he lived in a different world from her, a world of inventories, shipping lists, and calculations. And from the solitude to which her husband had abandoned her she began to hear voices. A vague echo of these voices filtered through to the merchant when he began to detect a new, hunted look on her face. He realized that in some way she had need of him, and with his practiced eye for future prospects he reckoned that in five years at most he would have made his family secure, in five years he would be able to make time for love. But the voices could not wait that long and one spring day they talked her into slashing her wrists. It was Nikolaj himself who found her in her bedroom. In a last attempt to show consideration for those she was leaving behind she had ordered things in such a way that the blood ran down into one of the huge porcelain vases he had had one of his ships bring her from the Far East, and not a drop had been spilled.
Confronted by his wife’s body Nikolaj saw that she truly had been an angel, inasmuch as she had succeeded in taking her beauty with her to the other side of the dividing line between life and death. Then it occurred to him that he must have made some mistake, since he had been deprived of all reason for living. He had no idea what this mistake might have been but he responded to his grief with the only answer known to him: work. Even though Kristoffer was only seven years old at the time, he changed the name of the company to Holmer and Son, and ten years later, when the town of Vaden shut its gates, it was one of the largest commercial enterprises in Denmark and he was the possessor of one of the biggest private fortunes in Denmark.
* * *
It seems unlikely that any other town in Denmark could have done what Vaden Town did. No other place would have been allowed to get away with cutting itself off from the main body of society. But week after week went by and the town remained hermetically sealed.
This could be put down partly to the town’s powerful influence, the respect that wealth and position engender, and partly to the fact that thirty members of the upper and lower houses and four government ministers had been born in the town. But most of all it had to do with the reaction of the rest of Denmark to the news of an unknown and fatal disease.
When the University Hospital made the news public, the country was left stunned and for week after week it languished in a state of numb desperation. It was as if the very thought of the disease, the dreadful notion of what those two hundred cases might develop into, was in itself infectious. As if every bit of the country’s splendid instrument for the promotion of physical health—the doctors, hospitals, maternity clinics, and disinfecting plants—had become a failing in itself. As if the nation could no longer live with the knowledge that it had not succeeded in conquering death.
Under the circumstances, how could anyone criticize the town of Vaden? There was not a single member of the government, there was hardly a soul in all Denmark, who could honestly say he had not entertained the thought that Vaden’s lofty isolation represented the only sensible response to the anarchy of this ominous disease.
* * *
Only once during the time the town was closed off did it admit outsiders. On the fourteenth day of the blockade, Kristoffer watched from his lookout post as the big galleass anchored outside the town and signaled for a pilot to be sent on board. None appeared. Instead the blue and white signal flag for “No” was run up the harbor flagstaff, after which the town of Vaden slowly and unmistakably spelled out its refusal. At that, a launch was lowered into the water from the galleass, a small lustrous barque of polished mahogany with a canopied cuddy at the prow and a steam engine of burnished copper and brass in the stern. At the outermost breakwater this vessel was met by the harbor master, Nikolaj Holmer, and four armed soldiers, and even Kristoffer was surprised when the tiny boat was not sent packing then and there. Instead it turned about only after lengthy debate, following which one of the Vaden pilot boats put out from the harbor and towed the galleass in to the quayside, thus committing an incomprehensible breach of the town’s isolation.
Her pennant notwithstanding, the ship did not belong to the Danish royal family. Her name was the Alanda Gleim and on board she carried the animals, artists, artisans, and management of the Circus Gleim, the most magnificent circus Europe had ever seen. At the end of the previous century, at a special performance given in Fredensborg Palace for Christian IX and the whole of the Danish royal house’s extended European family, the king had given permission for this circus, which traveled around Europe by sea, to fly the royal family’s own flag, in recognition of the fact that the circus itself was a seafaring kingdom of sorts, a Noah’s ark for the only art form beloved by all walks of life.
The manager of this circus, Mr. Gleim himself, was one of the launch’s two passengers. The other was an old man with a gray moustache and sensitive features. He was a dwarf only four feet tall, but according to the circus poster—and the Circus Gleim posters were not given to exaggeration—his reputation ranged from the Cape of Good Hope to the very north of the Gulf of Bothnia. This was that clown adored by all the world, Monsieur Andress.
* * *
Monsieur Andress had succeeded in combining the popular appeal of the circus clown with the utmost European refinement. Born to wealthy Hungarian exiles and raised in southern Europe, he had grown into a true cosmopolite. Having received a classical education, he had decided early on to become a priest and had by all accounts almost completed his studies at the Jesuit college when an irresistible attraction to music had led him to some of Italy’s most celebrated conservatories. Despite his short stature he proved to have a stupendous voice. A number of composers wrote pieces especially for the dwarf’s countertenor—until, that is, he left the opera to take up conducting and it became apparent that from this small but perfectly formed body there emanated a musical magnetism which moved the Vienna Opera to offer him the position of musical director, which had become available on the death of Gustav Mahler. But Monsieur Andress said no. From what was—to the rest of the world and to his family in particular—some unfathomable corner of the universe, the certainty had come to him that he should be a circus clown. And when he appeared in the ring for the first time it was plain for all to see that this idea must have come both from the good Lord himself and from his own generous heart. Until then it had never occurred to anyone that this musical dwarf could be funny, believing instead that he had been born for the concert hall, born to stand in a diminutive dress suit and a child’s patent leather shoes and receive the applause of the audience. But from the moment he set foot in the ring for the first time it was clear that this was the way—in shoes that were several sizes too large, and enveloped in the reek of stables while the world laughed and cried by turns—the universe fulfilled its purpose with Monsieur Andress. Without losing any of the clown’s touching simplicity he took up its mask, refined it, amplified its innocent quality, and dispelled its traditional malevolence until he was entering and leaving the ring a study in irresistible childlike gaucheness.
It was with such a past and such fame behind him that Monsieur Andress—looking down the barrels of the soldiers’ rifles—now directed an appeal to Nikolaj Holmer from the tiny boat.
For three months, the clown told him, the circus had been touring the Baltic coastline. Sailing down the Baltic they had run into a fierce winter storm; rolling heavily, the flat-bottomed ship had been forced to heave to and thereafter try to ride out the storm. In winds that were continually shifting direction they had drifted now south, now back to where they had started; their horses screaming in terror, they had been swept along at twelve knots with all sails furled. They had lost their bearings in the poor visibility, and when the first rays of sun appeared and land was sighted off the port bow, it turned out to be Ærø, one of the islands in an archipelago so hazardous that only skippers extremely familiar with the area were capable of navigating it. The ship had in fact been bound for Kiel, but for the sake of the animals and, more particularly, the children—who were terrified and weak from having been unable to eat anything for such a long time—the decision had been taken to run before the wind toward Vaden Town.
Faced with the prospect of having to turn away sick children and confronted by this old man—the very heart and soul of the European circus tradition, whom any head of state would have welcomed with gratitude—Nikolaj Holmer decided to relent, to make an exception and bid them welcome. For, like us, he thought to himself, they too have been cut off, they too seek protection for their weakest members, for the women and children.
* * *
In the Circus Gleim the emotions that had been unleashed in the town of Vaden found the focal point they needed.
Among the members of the town council there were those who feared that the unusual state of affairs, the town’s unilateral withdrawal from the rest of Denmark, would lead to individual lawlessness. Their thoughts turned to tales of medieval towns that had closed their gates against the plague, only to have their inhabitants begin to burn their candles at both ends, and later to burn themselves out in a blazing inferno of debauchery, as they endeavored to squeeze an entire lifetime into the short span they had left to live.
In Vaden things took a different course.
On the surface, life carried on as if nothing had happened. Each morning the adults rose and went about their business and the children attended their schools, and yet nothing was as it had been. Because, unlike the madness that had caused those medieval burghers, faced by the plague, to dance until they dropped, the adults and children of Vaden had been visited by a new and boundless patience, which sprang from their feeling that they were going to live forever. The reason they found it possible to go on taking part day in, day out, in a daily round whose premises had altered completely was that all at once this life had been shot through by a fresh clarity. From various points around the town it had been possible to survey the lush surrounding countryside, to survey Denmark. With the closing of the gates this outlook seemed to vanish. The people of the town quite simply stopped looking down a street and over the town wall toward the farms in the south. Simultaneously with the nonarrival of the newspapers, thoughts winging their way toward the larger towns and cities or across the sea quite spontaneously came to a halt. Although there was no way of telling who had made the decision, there came a day when the telegraph counter at the post office was closed, and from that day on it was as if the rest of Denmark ceased to exist. To children, only those things that are near at hand have any existence; things remote tend to fade into obscurity. This was how the adults in Vaden now began to view the world. Not that they ever said anything to one another, but they did wonder why they had not isolated themselves long before this, why it should have taken an epidemic for them to understand that the essence of security lies in raising barriers.
So powerful was this new sense of immortality that it led people to gather every day in the town square on the spot where they had, so to speak, democratically voted themselves into eternity, and it was here, outside the town hall, that Nikolaj Holmer and the other tradesmen of the town arranged for the daily distribution of food. And the Circus Gleim, and above all Monsieur Andress, became the new spirit of these gatherings.
It began with a performance to be held in the town hall’s main assembly room. But so overwhelming was the turnout, since everyone in Vaden wished to attend, and the spring breeze blowing over the town so surprisingly warm that the venue for the performance was moved to the square, in the open air, under a bright afternoon sky that, as the program progressed, paled, turned blue, and grew dark.
The whole program was not presented—the town’s intensely portentous air of solemnity would not have lent itself to the Circus Gleim’s grand, international gala performances. Just three acts—that was what the inhabitants of Vaden saw, were captivated by, and went on to demand every evening: a tall Mongol in white presenting, without the aid of whip, six Lippizaner stallions in a freestyle dressage program; a strong and pliant girl performing serene, introspective acrobatics while suspended from a rope; and finally Monsieur Andress, the big little clown.
Everyone felt that with him a king had entered the town, that with him the universe had sent the people of Vaden a sign that what they were doing was right, because what this dwarf had done was to unearth the child inside the adult and turn it into God. He always made his entrance in the same fashion, without makeup, in a velvet costume just a little on the big side. He was accompanied, to begin with, by a twelve-year-old boy with whom he commenced to play, and during this game the ancient vanished, during it the years evaporated and out of the old man’s body sprouted the boy inside all of them, puer aeternus, a radiant symbol of that for which every member of the audience had been willing to give his or her life: the love of childhood.
During his first two weeks in the town Monsieur Andress simplified his act a little with each day that passed, until finally he dispensed with his assistant and entered the arena alone. He was always introduced by the manager of the Circus Gleim, who had grasped before anyone else the professional potential inherent in this audience’s blend of warmheartedness and selflessness and who made his point early on by introducing the great clown in a manner that no outsider would have understood. Each evening, ringmaster Gleim flung wide his arm and said: “Ladies and gentlemen. I give you the musical clown, Monsieur Andress, in Vaden Town. A heart within a heart within a heart!”
Every one of these performances constituted a religious service, from which people made their way home moved, dazed, with shining eyes and the clown’s voice still ringing in their ears, a voice that apparently spoke all languages, including a beautiful, soft Danish.
And just as deeply moved was Kristoffer Holmer, on leaving that spot after having passed by, quite by chance one day and having somewhat reluctantly witnessed a performance.
* * *
The terms in which the town of Vaden perceived its day-to-day life were those which pertain to trade, craftsmanship, and shipping. Even the religion that was preached every Sunday in the town churches was geared to their industrious daily life. No one in Vaden was in any doubt that what the Savior had preached was that those who seek shall find—provided they have risen at half past five six days a week and gone to work. Everything else, everything that smacked of philosophy or recreation, was considered by and large to be superfluous. When the people of Vaden wanted to look through everyday life at the golden kingdoms beyond it, they looked at their children. Even so, most of them would have had a ready answer if asked how a prince would look. They would have replied that a prince would look like Nikolaj Holmer’s son.
Kristoffer Holmer had always been a strapping youth, the fastest runner and the best ballplayer of all the boys his age. Not only that but there was a gravely dignified side to his nature that, even before he turned seven, made adults listen to him. He could play the piano from the minute he was first set down at the instrument, he could draw as soon as a pencil was put in his hand, and yet he shrank from displaying his accomplishments, seeming to gloss over them, as if wishing to apologize to life for everything that had come so easily to him. He had dark gray deep-set eyes that endowed his whole face with a somewhat reticent quality. The women of Vaden thought Kristoffer had the look of a saint and they wreathed him in a halo of pity at the thought of his having lost his mother at such a tender age.
People had always agreed that there could be no more worthy crown prince of the firm of Holmer and Son, and Kristoffer’s formative years lived up fully to the trust the world had put in him. Even his grief at the death of his mother appeared to have been transformed in the small boy into an early maturity. Without doubting his son for a second, Nikolaj Holmer sent him to one of the country’s finest boarding schools when the boy was fourteen years old. During the years Kristoffer spent there, father and son saw each other only during the holidays and each time they were reunited it seemed to Nikolaj Holmer that his son had grown still closer to the outside world’s and his own dreams of the perfect son and heir.
When Kristoffer was summoned home by his father’s telegram and the two saw each other for the first time in six months, the merchant could tell that something was wrong, for Kristoffer showed up looking more distant, of a more withdrawn cast of mind and with a more deep-seated, scrutinizing gaze than his father had ever remarked in him before.
Nikolaj Holmer was no great judge of character. To be sure, no one knew better than he how to expose a rake-off or a falsified account or how to break an embargo. But that part of the human heart not taken up with buying and selling remained, as far as the great merchant was concerned, a closed book. At the counter and across the negotiating table his competence and authority were beyond question. Now, evening after evening, he sat at the dinner table across from the one person in the world whom he loved but with whom all of a sudden it had become impossible for him to exchange the simplest pleasantries, and this left him feeling confused, humiliated, and angry. They ate in total silence, after which Kristoffer stood up and left the room; the merchant usually did not see him again until breakfast the next day.
What had in fact happened was that, just before he had been called home, Kristoffer had made the discovery that in all probability he did not exist. This truth had been brought home to him in the gymnasium of his school during a fencing lesson, striking him out of the blue.
