Tales of the Night, page 22
Ever since its founding in the eighteenth century, the school had attached particular importance to fencing and had always made a point of recruiting the best international teachers in this discipline. On first seeing Kristoffer test the weight of a foil in his hand and later, on giving him his first lesson, the school’s French fencing master discerned in his new pupil the combination of psychophysical balance and lightning-quick, stinging menace that is the essence of fencing. For this sport Kristoffer seemed to conceive an abiding passion. After three years of training, the school had allowed him to take a week’s break from his studies and, at the end of those seven days of intensive preparation, under the supervision of his French teacher he had won the Danish national championship, beating army captains fifteen years his senior, men with curling moustachios and ten years of tournament experience under their belts.
This was just around the time when the twentieth century’s wave of interest in sport was reaching new heights in Denmark, and in the boy from Vaden the country spied a new hope for the next great Olympiad. Kristoffer’s training was now geared toward this challenge and it was in the midst of this training program, with his championship win only a few weeks behind him, that he found himself overcome by despair. During a match against the only other pupil at the school capable of standing up to him, Kristoffer found himself looking inward for the first time in his life.
Up to that point he had always viewed himself through the eyes of others. In the surrounding world’s upturned, trusting, and admiring faces he had caught his own reflection and understood that he was indeed that Kristoffer who was destined to set off on a journey and discover for himself and for others some hitherto unknown part of the world. This was something of which his teachers and his schoolmates had assured him, something he had also seen in his father’s eyes. But on the fencing piste, behind the wire-mesh mask, one’s opponent’s face is hidden from view, and all at once it occurred to Kristoffer that he was actually fighting himself. And from there his gaze slid backward, into himself. He knew what he ought to have been able to see. He ought to have seen a boy bursting with resolute self-confidence, a fine sportsman, a wealthy young man in the midst of the most splendid formative process, an ever-so-slightly awkward and, for that very reason, irresistible lady-killer and lover, and an eminent businessman in the making. He found nothing of all this, only an echoing black void surrounded by the frail shell that people erroneously imagined formed the exterior of Kristoffer Holmer’s flawless character. So he lowered his foil and turned his back, thereby exposing the white point denoting the target, and did not notice his opponent’s thrust and hit. He strode off, passing between the raised arms of the corner judges, unmindful of the stunned faces—knowing as he did that all these sentiments applied to a mask. Of the real Kristoffer Holmer, if he were to be found anywhere in that void, the world had never so much as caught a glimpse.
It is a terrible thing for a person to see their own life or that of others threatened by extinction. But it is a far worse thing to know that one is most likely already dead and may possibly never have been alive, while one’s fellowmen carry on as if one were still moving among them. This was how things stood for Kristoffer when, in March 1929, he came home to Vaden and heard the gate slam behind him that he might be protected from a threat from outside, a threat that he was bound to consider far less harmful than the death he carried inside himself.
His father’s telegram had reached him while he was still benumbed. Back in Vaden, during the first weeks of the quarantine, he had the chance to reflect on his situation, and his thoughts turned first to suicide, revolving around this tempting option until eventually he abandoned it. Suicide presupposes some unbearable emotional stress from which it is hoped that death will bring release. Kristoffer had been stricken by something quite different. He had been seized, he felt, by a sense of despair so profound that it went beyond death. He was not religious but he was convinced that, were he to do away with himself, all he would leave behind him would be his worthless mask, while that inner emptiness would follow him and laugh at him and shroud him in its terror on the other side of the grave.
He had once tried to explain how he felt to his father. Nikolaj had listened attentively and then he had nodded. “I know just what you mean,” he said. “It has crossed my mind, too, when faced with some sure-fire deal, to get up and leave because I felt the time wasn’t right to rake in the chips. What matters, Kristoffer, is not to win every time. What matters is to know that, any time you liked, you could have won.”
After this conversation Kristoffer had roamed the streets in a state of utter hopelessness and it was then that he had come past the square and had seen Monsieur Andress’s performance, a performance that had moved him deeply. Not that it made him happy—it had not offered him any hope—but it reached into his heart of hearts and told him that he was not alone, that on this earth, not to mention in this town, there was someone who knew the same pain as he, someone capable of giving it expression.
Kristoffer’s first impulse, when the show came to an end, was to fight his way through the crowd, to clasp that little hand, perhaps even to kiss it, and, if nothing else, to assure the clown that he, Kristoffer, had grasped perfectly and absolutely—had been the only one in town to grasp—the bewilderment of a child in an unfathomable world that the old man had been conveying. But he stayed where he was, restrained by the air of respect surrounding the artist. No one apart from the mayor and a handful of town councillors ventured any closer to the old man than the gap between the edge of the ring and the front seats, everyone feeling that the warmth that existed between themselves and the dwarf during the show must not be pursued, that it represented the manifestation of a greater truth for which the dwarf acted as some kind of medium. When the performance was over they watched him walk away without daring to follow him, and if they happened to bump into the diminutive, neatly attired figure on the street they would make way for him, the women automatically curtsying with the respect instinctively accorded a high priest. And yet Kristoffer felt certain that he could have broken through this circle—all his life he had gotten away with doing things no one else was allowed to do. When he now turned away from the square anyway and made his way home it was because he had been struck by the thought that he had nothing to offer. How could he walk up to someone in possession of such inner riches when he himself did not actually exist?
From the quadrangle formed by the four wings of his father’s property he climbed to the top floor of the tall warehouse and, once there, opened the hatch overlooking the yard, sat himself down on a sack, and looked down on his boyhood home and beyond that, out over the town. Over the past few weeks he had gotten into the habit of sitting up here, because this was the one place where he could be alone with his emptiness and because he had played here as a child. Now the view and the unique atmosphere of the loft seemed redolent of a very faint whisper from the past, telling him that his life had, nonetheless, had its meaningful moments.
During the previous century this loft had been used as a storeroom—until, that is, the development of modern cranes and the trade in perishable goods had rendered it obsolete. In ranging so far afield, the nerve endings of the big mercantile concern, so sensitively attuned to the slightest fluctuation in the stock markets of Great Britain and the United States, had lost touch with those things closest to home. The company had quite simply forgotten this loft. Coming upon it as a small boy, Kristoffer had instinctively sensed that, unlike other secrets, which had a tendency to grow big and bright when shared with others, this one would fade away were he to mention it, and by dint of the sort of thoroughgoing discretion with which adults never credit children, he had succeeded in keeping this place to himself. In those days he had kept the hatch shut for fear of being discovered but now, having opened it every day, he realized that no one in Vaden Town, not even his own father, ever looked up, that everyone’s thoughts were channeled horizontally and, in his father’s case, spanned every one of the seven seas, but were at no time directed upward, at a point right above his head.
The loft still held the carefully packed remains of a forgotten past, from the days when Vaden was still establishing its reputation as a shipping town. Sacks containing a pungent spice from Sumatra that no one had a name for either in English or in Danish and that, it transpired, induced hallucinations and had therefore proved impossible to sell and so, for want of a better solution, had been stowed away up here, well out of the way. Finely worked wooden boxes containing sextants from the days when compass roses, ornately decorated though they were, gave no more accurate a reading than of the four corners of the world. Metal caskets filled with charts of parts of the world whose coastlines offered little in the way of harbor and on which the interior of continents were illustrated with pictures of mythical beasts. From this room Kristoffer now watched the sun setting and a fierce storm brewing.
It started over land as a dull, pulsating glow that seemed to have nothing to do with the evening sky. Then every ounce of color drained from the sunset, the sky grew quite dark, and a coal-black veil drifted in over Vaden like the shadow of an as-yet-unseen and unimaginably enormous body descending on the town from outer space. At first this shadow looked to be a long way off, then it gathered speed and in one great swoop it was on the town. One minute the houses and the sea at their feet were lying in the last narrow band of daylight, the next Vaden was enveloped in darkness, as though an inky mantle had been cast over it. A mantle that was then riven by the first bolt of lightning. For an instant an elongated, snaking streak of white light rent the night, chiseled out of the blackness, then it was gone, taking with it the electric lighting and plunging the town into deepest darkness, as if the rest of the world were of a mind to avenge itself on Vaden and pay it back for its defiance.
The dying of the light left the yard beneath Kristoffer black as pitch. Next this blackness was torn apart by a different sort of lightning, lightning unlike anything Kristoffer had ever seen before, a long, drawn-out, agonizing discharge of white energy. And then came the rain, as yet no more than a foretaste of what was to come, an exultant rapid drumming of water, culminating in a distant clap of thunder.
At this Kristoffer was filled with an irresistible urge to pray to the black heavens above for help.
As a small boy he had made slingshots. Down on the shore he and the other boys had tried to see who could shoot a pebble highest. He had always viewed other people’s prayers to heaven as just such slingshots at heaven. If there was one thing of which you could be sure in this world it was that pebble and words always found their way back to you—his own pebble some time after the others’—having had no effect on the universe other than to confirm once again what everyone already knew: that Kristoffer Holmer could shoot the highest. Even so, he was conscious now of how, without moving a muscle, he tucked a smooth, round pebble into his sling, and knowing full well that this action contained no small amount of madness, he catapulted his words into the void, in the form of a wish that for him, too, life must hold some meaning, that there had to be a grain of humanity lodged within Kristoffer Holmer’s shell. And he strained all of his senses, listening for the sound of an answer or of the echo that would betray that the pebble had merely fallen back to earth.
His wait was cut short by a clap of thunder. When the next flash of lightning lit up the yard below him, a figure stood in the gateway. And in the volley of lightning that followed, in one long, continuous run of flashes, Kristoffer recognized the figure. It was the dwarf, the great Monsieur Andress. He was standing out of the rain but in such a way that his form was dramatically lit by the bursts of lightning. He was looking around like an actor who has just made his entrance, and the darkness between the flashes made him appear to be moving his head in a series of rapid jerks. It seemed inconceivable to Kristoffer that the little man could have seen anything at all against a sky that alternated between inky blackness and dazzling brightness, and yet for a moment he had the notion that the dwarf was staring straight at him. Then everything went dark and an ear-splitting crash made the room around him vibrate.
In the ensuing hush he caught the sound of footsteps. The measured stride of someone small. Someone had obviously lit a paraffin lamp, which the dwarf must have picked up on his way up, because now its light came flickering up the stairs and spread into the loft.
Then Monsieur Andress was there in the room.
Kristoffer had been brought up to be polite and to anticipate the unexpected. So, as the clown’s steps drew nearer, in his head he was planning a fitting reception. He saw himself taking a couple of paces forward, sinking to his knees—an act that would bring his head level with that of the new arrival—speaking his name, then going on to improvise some sort of welcome.
Instead, what happened was that he sat where he was, stock-still. In one hand the clown was carrying a violin case, in the other a lamp, but the wavering light that now illuminated the loft emanated, to Kristoffer’s mind, from the clown’s face. This appeared to be lit from within; through the fine network of wrinkles and the bushy moustache there radiated a light that seemed to come from some brightly burning, incandescent source of warmth and humanity that shattered Kristoffer’s plans, turning them to naught. Moving slowly and with dignity, the clown set the lamp down and divested himself of his cloak, beneath which he still wore his costume of loose-fitting white material. This done, he stepped across to the hatch and looked out.
A fresh burst of lightning blazed over the darkened streets, momentarily throwing up an image of the shining, rain-drenched roofs as rows of tombstones sitting on black earth, and Kristoffer remembered that the town lay entrenched against death.
When the dwarf spoke, his voice was like threadbare velvet, overlaid with the delicate patina of all the linguistic regions through which his long life had taken him.
“When you’re my height,” he said, “it can be quite pleasant to look upon the world von oben like this.”
It struck Kristoffer that not only must the clown’s stature have, since birth, kept him below the eye level of others but it might even have consigned him to another world altogether, that the pain he had recognized in Monsieur Andress’s act might have something to do with an experience not unlike his own, inasmuch as both of them, by dint of a definite flaw in their makeup, stood outside the world that surrounded them.
“From up here it would be very easy to imagine,” the clown went on mildly, “that the countryside and the town down there were mortes, that we were the last people alive in the whole world.”
This observation slotted in neatly with Kristoffer’s innermost dreams and it was from there that he replied.
“Yes,” he said, “that would be awful. But there is something even worse than being alone in the world, and that is not to have existed at all.”
The dwarf did not reply, nor, as far as Kristoffer was concerned, was any reply necessary. For at that moment he was experiencing a sense of having been understood. Filled with equal measures of profound gratitude and unease in the face of the unaccountable, he felt that the universe had answered his prayer, that he was here confronted with a higher being capable of seeing right through what the outside world had, until then, taken for Kristoffer Holmer. Monsieur Andress is also convinced that he does not really exist among other people, he thought, and he pictured the show’s finale, when the clown collected all of the audience’s jewelry, put it on, then strutted around the square like a child begging to be loved because it sparkles. Only the next day, to return these valuables with unfailing accuracy to their rightful owners, this time as if craving their attention for bringing back something that had been lost. Kristoffer felt his eyes fill with tears.
“I don’t know whether you noticed me,” he said, “but I was down there in the square during your act. It was…”—for a second his voice failed him—“it was quite splendid.”
Reluctantly almost, the old man tore his eyes from the darkness hanging over the town and distractedly regarded Kristoffer.
“When I give a performance,” he said, “I am never less than fantastic.”
Brought up, as he had been, to aim as high as he could but never to blow his own trumpet, this matter-of-fact self-assessment took Kristoffer’s breath away. Only a saint, he thought, could talk like that. Only one who has risen above all other human beings, above the never-ending struggle to make oneself worthy of a place in the world.
“I’ve often seen you sitting up here,” the dwarf remarked.
It was a far cry from Kristoffer’s feelings of unworthiness, to the fact that the man standing opposite him had noticed before. His mind reeled, as it were, in the ray of merciful light that had now rendered him visible. But once again he replied from the core of his being, to which the clown seemed to speak directly.
“I have discovered,” he said, “that I don’t seem to exist.”
“And where,” asked the clown, “did you discover that?”
“At school,” answered Kristoffer.
A wince of pain passed over Monsieur Andress’s face. “All you gain from school,” he said, “is nasty—” He broke off, then completed the sentence. “Is a dreadful headache.”
This simple assertion brought tears to Kristoffer’s eyes once more. Again he was aware of the little man’s making contact with him across the lifetimes of years and experience that lay between them. Of Monsieur Andress, the world at large knew that he had spent twenty years of his life in convent schools, Jesuit colleges, and the strictest conservatories in the world. Out of his fund of learning and his experience of educational institutions—experience far greater than Kristoffer’s—he had dredged up this observation, which was now beaming down on Kristoffer as a crystallization of his own chaotic emotions.
