Tales of the Night, page 26
It seemed, therefore, only obvious and right that Georg and Margrethe van Austen should go on living on Kongens Nytorv. They could, of course, have moved to the north of the city, like so many other wealthy individuals. But those who looked up from the tree-wreathed center of the square at the tall windows flanked by columns knew in their hearts that this had never been considered. Ordinary people can move about as they please, and even popular public figures enjoy a certain amount of leeway. But for a symbol there is no freedom. Just as two celestial bodies are able to stay each in their own orbits only because of the pull they exert on one another, so exalted beings need their votaries. Like another splendid figure of those days—King Christian X, riding on horseback unescorted through Copenhagen every morning—Margrethe and Georg van Austen were no longer in a position to bow out. Had they done so they would have broken faith, they would have sucked all the power out of the symbol, and from then on it would have become more difficult, much more difficult for the Danish people to believe it possible for two people to love each other until death did them part and perhaps even beyond.
There was never any thought of such a defection. Fully aware of their responsibility, the couple moved into the Royal Theater residence and, as the theater’s director said with such felicity and sincerity on presenting the couple with the keys to the mansion, the square was now perfectly balanced. With the equestrian statue of Christian V at its center acting as its linchpin, this fine square had attained equilibrium. On one side it had the theater where, after many years’ deliberation, Strindberg’s and Ibsen’s profound distrust of the wedded state was now being acted out, and on the other Mr. and Mrs. van Austen, who put this distrust to shame.
The gentlemen of the press also attended the presentation ceremony and in his speech Georg van Austen announced that this was to be the couple’s last public appearance. “From now on,” he said, “for whatever time we have left to us, my wife and I wish to devote our lives to each other and to our children.”
Their wish was respected. With a deep bow, the world withdrew. And in return the couple kept up one public ritual. Every Tuesday evening the long white curtains of the grand dining room on the first floor were pulled back and passersby on the square below would stop in their tracks to watch those two stately figures take their seats at either end of the long dining table. The curtains were then drawn. Two hours later, just as theatergoers came pouring out of the Royal Theater, the curtains were once more pulled back and by then the meal was at an end, by then the couple were always standing at one end of the table, side by side, and slowly, without a trace of self-consciousness, Georg van Austen took his wife in his arms and danced her, gently and lingeringly, out of sight. Thereafter, the curtains slid to, leaving everyone who had observed this sight deeply moved. What they had witnessed was a ritual devoid of affectation; all those two people up there had done was to put the strength of their feelings at the service of a higher cause.
* * *
From an early age, children in the van Austen family had been taught that the supreme goal in this life is complete sincerity. An endeavor which, in the persons of Georg and Margrethe van Austen, seemed to have been brought to perfection. When the foundation set up by the family immediately after the Great War granted a large sum of money to the Dana expedition’s research into the reproductive process of the freshwater eel, it came under attack from ecclesiastical circles for supporting what was in essence a blasphemous attempt to coax an explanation for the wonder of creation out of the Lord. On that occasion Georg van Austen had coolly replied that “God has no secrets. Anyone who finds it necessary to keep something hidden cannot be God.”
And then, with typical consistency he had added thoughtfully: “The same goes, of course … for the devil.”
Although the van Austens would never have made so bold as to say it, the same could also have been said of them. Margrethe’s performances had the ring of utter sincerity and each year—in line with a tradition established on the family’s own initiative long before the Companies Act of 1919—the shipping line published accounts that stood above all suspicion. The same was true of the van Austens’ private life. Thanks to innumerable photographs, paintings, and newspaper articles, the general public knew all there was to know about the couple’s home, their children, and the circles in which they moved. Their marriage was crystal clear and transparent, and that very fact enhanced it and lent it its power. Symbols are never inscrutable or cryptic. They sparkle simply because they are so easily seen through, because they are purer than the world around them.
For this reason Jason Toft found it impossible to accept the thought that for two hundred years the family history had held a mystery that was being repeated in Georg and Margrethe’s life and that apparently eluded solution. It was a mystery that the world at large had remarked on and been magnanimous enough to forget, since people will happily forgive paragons the odd faux pas, but that Jason—obsessed as he was with reality—saw as an inexplicable and fascinating flaw in an otherwise perfect diamond. This mystery concerned the family’s attitude to foreign lands, to what lay beyond the shores of Europe.
The van Austens’ first million rigsdaler were earned during the eighteenth century in the Royal Chartered Danish Asiatic Company’s trade in ivory, indigo, and ebony from the Danish colony of Tarengampadi in the Bay of Bengal. It was with this money that the shipping line set itself up as the largest Danish trading fleet in the East. For Denmark during the Enlightenment, the van Austen line constituted the country’s long and stalwart arm stretching all the way to China, outwardly retaining an iron grip on its tropical colony but inwardly representing a cultivated, loyal, patriotic, and benevolent handshake, while at the same time acting as a source of information on the Orient’s blend of barbarity and beauty. It was the van Austen family that, in 1770, equipped a neat little mercenary army at its own expense, shipped it out, and countenanced its defending—with a brutality extraordinary even for those days—the company’s interests along the Indian coastline. And yet it was also the van Austen family that, sparing no expense, brought home the rarest of Chinese and Indian porcelain and persuaded the Royal Copenhagen porcelain factory to institute production of dinner services bearing the stylized Oriental motifs that the whole of Europe had come to regard as symbolic of the Danish appreciation of the art treasures of the East.
Early in the nineteenth century, without explanation, the van Austen line discontinued all trading operations in India and initiated a restructuring program that, as far as the outside world was concerned, was to remain forever unexplained. Out of this restructuring there emerged a shipping and trading company that retained a number of interests in the West Indies and North America but that was at pains to point out that it was, for all intents and purposes, exclusively Danish. The sole comment on these moves was made by Georg van Austen’s great-great-grandfather at a meeting of the Merchants’ Guild. At this meeting the king himself, greatly concerned, had asked whether this withdrawal from the rich shores of India could truly be reconciled with the shipping line’s policy of enlightened trade. At this, van Austen’s face had grown shuttered and he had half turned his head away.
“Believe me, Your Majesty,” he said softly, “the light that emanates from those shores is naught but a Bengal light.”
From that day forth the family had turned its face inward, anchoring itself in Danish culture as if it had discovered that its high ideals were only viable when its back was turned on the exotic. All trace of the East was expunged from the family home. Its members furnished their surroundings with the understated classicism of the eighteenth century, but from then on, Greece became their ultima mundi.
In Denmark, the van Austens were to some extent successful in checking the wave of enthusiasm for the Orient that swept across Europe during the nineteenth century. They opposed a translation of the Thousand and One Nights, and in so doing delayed it for a hundred years. Family members were conspicuous by their absence at the staging of Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin and the Casino Theater’s lavish production of The Caliph’s Adventures. It prevented the conservative press from reviewing the French author Gustave Flaubert’s exotic novel Salammbô and Mozart’s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio and dismissed a sobbing Hans Christian Andersen from a family gathering when, on having been asked to give a reading, he had launched into his fairy tale “The Emperor’s Nightingale.” Never did the company foundation sponsor any exhibitions of artifacts from the Orient or books about it or trips to it, and no daughter or wife of the family ever appeared at any function in any guise that could in any way have been associated with a foreign civilization.
As time went on, everyone forgot that things had ever been any different, and the van Austen family’s nationalistic bent was accepted as a virtue. One of the rare occasions on which a member of the family spoke out publicly on a political matter came in the year 1900, when Georg’s father addressed the immigrant problem in a newspaper article. On that occasion he wrote that his family looked to Denmark not out of chauvinism but with fixity of purpose and for that very reason he warned against allowing the previous century’s influx of Jews, Poles, and Gypsies to continue and against the exodus to America. “Danish culture,” he wrote, “is a fluid that it has taken thousands of years of alchemy to purify. Whether we go on incessantly admitting infusions and suspensions of foreign matter or ourselves have to relinquish powerful salts, this fluid will never achieve the balance necessary to enable us to cast a light through it and truly comprehend what it means to be Danish.”
* * *
When asked, during his last interview with a journalist prior to the move to Kongens Nytorv, whether in the twentieth century the van Austen line was likely to adopt a more open approach to the rest of the world, Georg van Austen had blandly replied: “We have never closed ourselves off from it. We have no fear of foreign lands. We are Europeans and citizens of the world. But above all we are Danish.”
Jason had read this reply immediately after meeting Helene and it had struck him as a lucid and forthright assertion. What did surprise him was something else: a quite inexplicable staffing policy.
For as long as anyone could remember, the van Austens had always had one Indian attached to their household, apparently occupying the post of personal attendant and confidant, and amid the family’s purified Danishness, this figure seemed as enigmatically exotic as would a palm tree in P. C. Skovgaard’s paintings of Danish beech forests, of which the family had quite a collection.
Word had it that this strange state of affairs dated back 150 years and that these servants were always the sons of successive generations of the same Indian family from some unspecified part of India whom generation after generation of van Austens had kept on bringing to Denmark. It was said that these foreigners were invariably young men who had not yet turned twenty and that they remained in the country for seven years, after which they returned home and another young man took their place. Whether this was true had never been confirmed. What the outside world had seen was that these dark-skinned boys with the finely chiseled features and soft lips soon picked up a perfect, unaccented Danish and then—at all times dressed in tails and white tie, as if they were both butler and guest in the house—placed themselves between the outside world and the van Austen family. And this they did with such authority that one forgot and forgave the fact that their skin was, when all was said and done, the wrong color. When Jason wrote to van Austen requesting an interview and received a courteous reply signed with an unpronounceable name, he realized that, like everyone else who had, over the past hundred years, gone cap in hand to this most Danish of all families, he too would first have to negotiate with a foreigner.
The negotiations gave him no cause for complaint, but simply because the letters he received were at one and the same time formal, pleasant, and faultless, they excited his curiosity. Eager as he was to arrive at a full understanding of the woman he loved before her return some weeks later, every unanswered question concerning her and her family became a weight on his mind—To learn why she never visited her parents; what it was like to be a daughter from a perfect family; why, as doorman of the Amalienborg Palace of their love, Margrethe and Georg van Austen kept a wog who had more business outside some heathen pagoda—the need to obtain answers to these and other riddles had become an obsession with him. So eaten up by his own curiosity was the Jason Toft wandering through the Copenhagen night on the nineteenth of March that his thoughts ran on ahead of him, and this they were able to do because he had no worries in all the world to hold them back, because there was no traffic in the streets, and because he did not need to concentrate on walking, seeing that he was, in fact, floating.
What was running through Jason’s head was the term narrative. Soon, he thought, a few hours from now, I will have the answers. With these answers I can meet Helene. And together, after that meeting, we can face the future, in which we will love each other more and more and in which I will write more and more books and become more and more famous, and all of this I will lay at her feet. And he breathed in deeply at the prospect of this self-augmenting cycle in which their feelings for each other, his art, and his income would spiral upward into infinity, up to heaven, out into space.
In high school Jason had been drawn to the great realists because of their passion for the real world. With the ecstatic sensation that it was in fact his own life they were describing, he had read Zola and Proust and Pontoppidan. And, deeply disappointed, he had turned his back on them on discovering that in the end they always betrayed reality. It was then that he himself began to write, driven by his urge to tell the world that literary narrative is an illusion. With relish, he had identified as a boy with those works of European literature that dealt with real people and it had struck him that, unlike the hazy symbolism of Romanticism or the obscure stereotypes of religious literature, the realists’ discovery that the world amounted to a handshake, a pearl of sweat, rumbling bellies, and a brick facade was the stuff of perfect wisdom.
Until that is, at the age of twenty, he hit upon the fatal weakness of these writers: that they let themselves be seduced into bringing their reality to a conclusion, that they introduced a narrative.
In the real world, Jason had found, there was no such thing as a narrative. Reality was made up of never-ending cycles of the kind that he was now about to start. Out of obscure beginnings life went on growing into infinity; conclusions, essential as they are to all narratives, are an invention.
Both verbally and in writing he had asserted that the misfortunes of modern literature had begun when Flaubert—who, as it happens, had turned over a new leaf after the excesses of his youth—elected to lead Madame Bovary to an improbably heroic death.
It was such insight, Jason knew, that had now gained him admittance to Mr. van Austen. Helene’s name had not been mentioned in his letter—he had not wanted her parents to know that he was their intended son-in-law; he wanted to be received as a writer, not as an acquaintance. He had been asked what he intended to write and he had answered that he wanted to write a book about the three basic reasons for the existence and future of the Danish nation in what were otherwise such troubled times. He wanted to write about prosperity and love and intellectual freedom, and this he intended to do by delineating certain figures in the foreground to represent these three factors. “And if I now approach you before anyone else, it is because—permit me to be blunt—the two of you embody all three.” He had received a reply in which he was asked what sort of fictional style he had in mind for this work and Jason had replied that if there was one thing he knew about himself it was that he had altered the meaning of the word fictional. “I do not write fiction,” he wrote, “in the sense of inventing. I observe, and in the case of yourselves what I observe are eternal values. I do not intend to construct a narrative. To depict the eternal quality of language as it is—which is to say, with no beginning and no end—in that lies my art.”
