Tales of the night, p.1
Tales of the Night, page 1
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Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
JOURNEY INTO A DARK HEART
HOMMAGE À BOURNONVILLE
THE VERDICT ON THE RIGHT HONORABLE IGNATIO LANDSTAD RASKER, LORD CHIEF JUSTICE
AN EXPERIMENT ON THE CONSTANCY OF LOVE
PORTRAIT OF THE AVANT-GARDE
PITY FOR THE CHILDREN OF VADEN TOWN
STORY OF A MARRIAGE
REFLECTION OF A YOUNG MAN IN BALANCE
ALSO BY PETER HØEG
COPYRIGHT
TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER
KAREN AND ERIK HØEG
These eight stories are linked by a date and a motif.
All of them have to do with love. Love and its conditions on the night of March 19, 1929.
Copenhagen, March 1990
JOURNEY INTO A DARK HEART
A book is a deed … the writing of it is an enterprise as much as the conquest of a colony.
—JOSEPH CONRAD, “Last Essays”
Mathematics is the shadow of the real world projected onto the screen of the intellect.
—Attributed to ARCHIMEDES
ON MARCH 18, 1929, a young Dane, David Rehn, was in attendance when the railway line from Cabinda, near the mouth of the Congo, to Katanga in Central Africa was dedicated to integrity.
Also present were the king and queen of Belgium; Prime Minister Smuts of the Union of South Africa; and Lord Delamere of Kenya, all of whom gave speeches, their words, like champagne, making David’s blood sing. Later, at the dinner in the governor’s palace, he mingled with black servants and white guests, deliciously giddy without having touched a drop of alcohol. Although he could not remember with any certainty who had said what, he would never forget their words: had it not been the king himself who, pointing, had said, “See, ladies and gentlemen, the ocean is as blue as the Aegean, the white sun hangs above us, and soft sea breezes waft around us, and isn’t it clear that we are in the presence of ancient Greece? The Greeks, too, sailed along the African coastline; they were the first to colonize this continent, and have we not, in truth, fulfilled the ideals to which the ancients aspired? Integrity of thought, integrity in the wielding of power, integrity in trade and commerce were their goals, in the pursuit of which no sacrifice was deemed too great. And in dedicating this railway, possibly the longest in Africa, do we not turn our thoughts to the Colossus of Rhodes, is it not the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, is it not the Seven Wonders of the World that spring to mind and is this railway not the eighth? Are not these two shining rails of steel the pure lines of thought and commerce that, as the arteries of civilization, shall carry clean, revitalized blood three thousand kilometers through the jungle, deep into the heart of the dark continent?”
Never in his life had David found himself in such close proximity to heads of state and the aristocracy of international finance and it seemed to him that their enthusiasm and forthrightness on this day helped him to see clearly for the first time in a long, long while.
One year earlier a sudden nauseating instance of life’s unpredictability had thrown him off the track he had been following since childhood and cast him into a wilderness of uncertainty. Influential and well-meaning relatives had tried to set him back on the right path by placing him with a trading company, a global concern of Danish origin, where they had procured for him the only guaranteed key to mobility in this life, a good, secure position, and where one of the directors had promised to act as his guide. At the company’s headquarters in Copenhagen, David had endeavored to work his way back to that vantage point from which the world acquires some semblance of coherence and order, but so far all he had gained was the sympathy of his fellowmen. People liked David for his pleasant manners, his diligence, his very open and trusting face, and his physical awkwardness and for something else which they could not quite put their fingers on. Even the company director had been unable fully to explain his motives for suggesting that David accompany him to the Belgian Congo for the dedication of the Katanga railway, in which the company had a certain interest.
Until a year previously and for as long as he could remember, David had been a mathematician. Not the sort who studies this discipline because he believes he has a quicker grasp of it than of any other, or because one must make a career of something, or out of curiosity. No, he became a mathematician out of a deep, burning passion for that crystal-clear, purifying algebraic science from which all earthly uncertainty has been distilled. By the time he moved up to the middle school he had a better understanding of infinitesimal calculus than any of his teachers and when, at the age of eighteen, he was interviewed about an article on Abelian groups he had published in a German journal, he explained—blushing because the proximity of the female journalist disturbed his concentration—that “calm mathematical reasoning is my greatest joy.”
Algebra seemed to offer an obvious, exhilarating, and in every respect satisfying career for David until, while studying at the University of Vienna, he met a boy a couple of years his junior, a boy who ran into David in a fog of abstraction and optimism. The boy’s name was Kurt Gödel. He was a sickly individual with a thirst for knowledge that took nothing for granted and had earned him the nickname Herr Warum. When they met he was pursuing a line of thought that would result just a few years later in a proposition destined to shake the world of mathematics to its very foundations, and even though it had not as yet been perfected it shook David to his on the day, sitting in a café, the boy had made him privy to his cogently formulated doubts. Later David walked the streets of Vienna in a state of shock, knowing full well that after what he had heard that day nothing would ever be the same again. He had long since learned to use mathematics as both medicine and stimulant. If he felt downhearted he could console himself with the scintillating logic of Bertrand Russell, if he was feeling cocky he would read one of the unsuccessful attempts at a geometric trisectioning of the angle, and if his mind was in turmoil he found tranquillity and stringency in Euclid’s Elements. But on this particular day, in seeking some salve for his despair, he made a wrong move.
On his desk lay a beautifully bound facsimile of the notes of the French mathematician Galois and, as he had done so often before, David read the young man’s hastily scrawled summary of his momentous work on the solving of irreducible equations and his burning faith in the future. At the end Galois, all of twenty-one years of age, had written: “I have run out of time. I am off to fight a duel.” Then he had risen from his papers and gone to his death. And suddenly it occurred to David that he was reading of his own undoing.
He left Vienna that same evening, firmly resolved never again to have anything to do with mathematics, and those who later laughed behind his back at his despair were people who had never understood that so all-embracing is love that to a person in love the very nature of life may be revealed in the smallest details and the verity of life stand or fall on the minutest grain of truth, even that contained within a mathematical proof.
* * *
In order, nevertheless, to survive, David had withdrawn into a state of assiduous insensibility, out of which he was jolted only upon encountering the tropics. At first he felt that he had merely been awakened to fresh and unbearable confusion, their ship the Earnest, one of the company’s own passenger and cargo ships, having sailed, a fortnight after setting out, into a heat that rose into the air like an invisible wall. Then came landfall in Africa and, with it, the blazing sun over David’s head, unfamiliar vegetables and spices to assail his digestive system, and dark, inscrutable faces all around him to weigh on his mind. It took a month for his initial bewilderment to yield to a feeling, if not of security, then at least of stability, and the dedication of the railway brought him the first joyful sense of seeing with a clarity he had never thought to experience again.
On the day itself a sudden coolness in the air had eased the almost palpable pressure; the thoughts of all the people gathered outside the governor’s palace ascended freely into the blue sky. The sea breeze carried the voices of the speech makers to the audience and David saw that these speakers were happy, that on this day these sovereigns and statesmen of the civilized world blushed with pleasure, their hands shook with profound inner emotion, their eyes shone, and their voices faltered. To David it seemed obvious and fitting that the future of the world should rest in the hands of these particular men and for the first time he realized that, with leaders such as these, ordinary people need have no grasp of politics; with leaders such as these, he thought, we might never need to concern ourselves with politics at all, since not only are these men possessed of an insight deeper than the rest of us could ever hope to plumb, they can also—on a day such as this—render politics as lucid and transparent as the blue ocean out there beyond the breakers of Cabinda.
For David, absolute truth had always taken the form of numbers, and this day had abounded in numbers. With reckless courage and sincerity the managing director of the railway, Sir Robert Wilson, had detailed the numerical aspects of its construction. “We have,” he said, “set 7,000 men to lay 2,707 kilometers of track through country where the temperature fluctuates between 14 and 120 degrees
“Opening up and penetrating,” David thought later, bewildered and blissful, and heard himself telling the wife of the Belgian colonial minister how the great Kronecker, one of those on whom he had modeled his own life, had once said that “God created the natural numbers—the rest is the work of man.” “And what a work,” he declared rapturously to the minister’s lady.
For the occasion a number of partitioning walls in the palace had been removed to create a reception room running the entire length of the building and here, at a table that seemed to stretch into infinity, down the length of which a miniature model of the railway had been erected, a place had been set for everyone. The dinner service was Crown Derby, the wine was Chambertin–Clos de Bèze, and the saddle of venison tasted to David just like the red deer at home. For once the sudden tropical nightfall did not seem to him an assault, for the chandeliers had been lit and only the white tropical suits, the suntanned men, and the black servants in their livery and white gloves betrayed the fact that this was not Europe.
A powerful air of kinship pervaded that dinner. All the guests were filled with the sense of a tough job well done. Their limbs ached slightly, as though they personally had shoveled earth and hauled sleepers into place, their concerted efforts had eradicated all differences in rank; everybody was forthright, everyone was talking at the tops of their voices. The minister’s wife playfully teased David, who, for his part, felt that being in such sterling company increased the worth of every single person present, himself included. “Here,” he thought, “we all have our natural place and a part to play in the scheme of things. None of us need languish in a corner like some indefinable quantity.”
During the dessert a message was delivered to the banquet, a message that erased the last stiff traces of formality. At one point the king of Belgium was called away, and when, minutes later, he returned, his face was so pale that no one had wits enough to get to their feet as he positioned himself behind his chair. He struck his glass and raised his voice slightly. “I have just received some good news,” he said, “from an English journalist who arrived here on the steamer from Sankuru twenty minutes ago, a man who, as a guest of the Belgian government, is to represent the world’s press on the maiden run along our railway line tomorrow. He brings us word, ladies and gentlemen, that yesterday at Kamina a joint Belgian, British, and Portugese force led by General Machado defeated the native rebel bands that have posed the greatest problem to construction work in recent years. The Ugandan rebel leader, Lueni, was killed in the fighting. His body is to be brought downriver to Cabinda.” The king clicked his heels together. “Ladies and gentlemen, a toast to our gallant armed forces!”
For a second not a breath stirred. Then everyone stood up and gravely raised their glasses, there being times when a happy event may be so overwhelming that it can only be comprehended gradually and in silence. To new arrivals like David the name Lueni had an exotic ring to it, as menacing as the dense jungle that surrounded the town. But to the permanent residents it constituted the essence of fear, it represented death as precipitate as cerebral malaria, it meant cut supply lines and hunger, burnt-out steamships drifting downriver with no trace of their crew. A name from the innermost chamber of Africa’s dark hell.
Fleetingly and amid total silence, as in a vision, they all saw the body, black as polished wood, laid out on a canvas stretcher. Then joy swelled like a river, the cry went up for champagne, the king lost his composure and hugged Sir Robert to his chest, and tears could be seen glistening in the monarch’s eyes. Old Lord Delamere, who, as everyone knew, had trekked across the Rift Valley from Mombasa with an oxcart and more than once had fought, rifle in hand, for the lives of his wife and children, sat slumped in his chair with his hands resting on the edge of the table, muttering, “Can it be, can it be?” A few voices broke into the Belgian national anthem, “La Brabançonne,” people were slapping one another on the back, and at one point David discovered to his consternation that he was holding the wife of the colonial minister by the hand. He gazed happily on the flushed faces, the glinting medals, the shimmering gowns, and the servants’ livery; he sensed a mood of unrestrained camaraderie flowing through the room, buoyed up by these mighty feats of engineering and military prowess, and with the lady’s hand in his, he realized, suddenly sensitive to symbols, that this was like a celebration in a barracks, a gay carnival behind which lay the most perfect form of justice.
Later, wanting to be alone for a moment, he went out into the garden. He felt that the tropics, like a young Negress, were laughing at him. Strange and enticing sounds and scents swirled around him, the gramophone music carried to his ears through the open doors—inside they were dancing to Strauss waltzes. With its white pillars the governor’s palace looked for all the world like a floodlit Greek temple and above its ridgepole rose the constellation of Libra, that great celestial square. “Perhaps,” thought David, “as a sign and a call not to give up where Galois did.”
* * *
The following afternoon, when, with the first train ever from Cabinda to Katanga, the railway was officially declared open, when the rejoicing of the previous day had been reinforced by the prospect of the journey, when the military band had played, when the king had shaken the travelers by the hand in farewell, when everyone’s thoughts were quite plainly following the railway tracks all the way up to the distant blue mountains, on the platform, unnoticed by anyone other than a handful of servants and stewards, in the gray area between the shade of the platform canopy and the dazzling sunlight, there arose a moment’s doubt. The previous day the colonial minister, carried away by the atmosphere of elation and the news of the rebels’ defeat, had announced that he, too, intended to make the trip. About this man, his wife had confided to David that for every new position of authority he had attained he had gained two pounds in weight, and once this colossal figure had eased his way into the front Pullman, which was to have carried all the invited guests, it became immediately apparent that the coach was full.
At that moment came the hiss of the train’s pressure valves being checked, and in the cloud of steam that enveloped the platform four remaining figures gravitated toward one another, as though springing straight out of the ground. While round about them arrangements were being made for yet another carriage to be coupled to the train, they stared at one another, eye to eye. Over the past few days David’s attention had been caught by a good number of faces but he was certain that he had never seen these three before. They appeared, standing there before him, to have crystallized around this distressing little breach in the otherwise faultless arrangements, so silent and strange that it seemed they would never make contact, that they shared nothing other than just this: that they were on the outside.
Directly opposite David stood a soldier, a short, stiff-necked, thickset, and forbidding individual with a black eye patch over one eye and a uniform bedecked with so many tokens of imperishable military glory that, thought David, one would have had a hard job finding room to scribble the tiniest “Quod erat demonstrandum” on those impossibly spotless dress whites. David knew nothing of military matters, but among the gleaming symbols he recognized the German eagle and he was struck by a vague sense of surprise at meeting this ruffle-feathered bantam cock from the losing side here, among the representatives of the nations that had won the war.
Out in the sunshine stood a slim black servant girl in a white dress. She carried a large leather trunk belonging to the fourth and eldest member of the party, a ruddy-faced man with doleful eyes, a coarse and unhealthy-looking complexion, and a flamboyant waxed moustache. He wore an expensive tweed suit, complete with waistcoat and stock, an outfit that seemed tantamount to suicide in the tropical heat.
