Хьелль Аскильдсен - The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

And I? I had never been more than his shadow. And now he was gone. I felt I had to follow him and disappear myself. But how? I took the books from my removal boxes in the most distant of my wife’s colossal en suite rooms in Frederiksberg and reread the now complete oeuvre in the hope of finding the door through which I, in the way of the Messiah’s shadow, could proceed behind him into his other world. But the books were as though transformed. What I had thought to be the key to my life and to my redefinition within a completely different world, now seemed merely to be an illusion. Even the oeuvre ’s tenderest of moments, in which Smilla is reunited with her lover, the electrician, a scene I had read as though it were the primeval love scene, the very image of utopian devotion, revealed itself to be nothing more than deception, a circus trick, something that in essence cannot be done, and yet “He did it!”; the world in reverse: Smilla sticks her clitoris into the slit of the electrician’s penis and “fucks” him. Voilà ! The jingle of cash registers! All over the world, readers rise to their feet and applaud!

It was over. I closed the book and put it back in the removal box with the others. What then? I have no idea. I suppose time passed. Years. I missed him. Not the Conception, not the many lives and certainly not the books. I missed him , Peter Høeg the person, whom I had hardly even met, only seen once, many years before. And yet I missed him. I walked along the city lakes and looked across at the school I knew he had attended, Bording Realskole, where Borderliners takes place, a fine and uncomplicated red-brick building of three or four storeys. At the very top, on the flat roof, like a mirage, was a little house with a neatly enclosed garden. There it was, on its own, peaceful, as if situated deep inside a wood, among hills or far out upon a plain. I wondered if all the other people around me—the dog owners, the jogging businesswomen and art directors and cinematographers and lawyers and real estate brokers—could see the house too, or if it was only me. I kept wanting to ask, but I feared their replies. In my Conception of Peter Høeg he had moved into that house and was living up there completely on his own. What does a person do when he is no one? He does nothing. He waters the plants, trims the lawn with nail scissors, opens the curtains in the morning and draws them again at night.

And then catastrophe. The 9/11 of this tale. “Where were you on that fateful day?” I was alone in the reading room on the second floor of the library that is housed in the Blågården community centre. I still had my anorak on and was flicking absently through the day’s newspapers that lay spread all over the four or perhaps six tables that had been pushed together to form a single surface. Then at one point the front page of B.T. emerged from the heap, and on it was the headline: “See where Peter Høeg is hiding”. There are certain things in the world one ought never to investigate, inventions and discoveries that ought never to be made, for the sheer sake of humanity. But people don’t understand this fact. At least the journalists of the B.T. newspaper don’t. They had been looking for Peter Høeg, and they had found him. Not in the little house on the roof of the Bording Realskole. Not in a completely different world. They had found him in a modest single-family home in a suburb of Copenhagen. He was divorced, older, and worst of all: still writing. During the past ten years, in which I had believed he had been living the ideal life of no one, he had been working on the same great novel, which sooner or later would be published. There was no picture of him, only of his house. It was a black-and-white raster image on the usual cheap paper, and the photo had been taken from the road. Through a winter or early spring’s entanglement of bare branches, garden shrubs and a couple of evergreens of the kind found in cemeteries could be seen a low, whitewashed house and the black edge of its roof. It was an image of dismal grey, everyday life, the world exactly as it is, impossible to imagine any other way.

In the intervening years I had found my own way out of the world, now merely haunting it, a ghost, a shadow of no one. And yet I put down the newspaper and returned outside with a feeling not of despair, but rather of grief, a great and quiet grief.

A few months or years later, the book came out. I tried to hide, not listening to the radio, not reading any newspapers, and when I ventured out into the Netto discount store to buy avocados and carrots, I would avoid looking at the headlines, humming loudly to myself in the checkout line so as not to hear what the people in front of me were talking about. Only after several months, when The Quiet Girl suddenly appeared on the display shelf one day at the library, did I pick it up, almost in passing and seemingly quite without thought, and take it home with me to my flat (now, after my divorce, I was living but a pistol shot away from Blågårds Plads). I turned the key and went inside, tossed the book onto the kitchen counter, made some tea, ate a carrot, looked out of the window, and then, as I turned and passed the counter with the steaming mug of tea in my hand, I stopped and opened the book and began to read as I stood. Impossible. I grasped nothing. What I saw on the pages was at once regular and yet utterly chaotic. I understood the words on their own, of course, or at least most of them, and could even, as though through a dense entanglement of branches, make out a scene, or at least its outline, or perhaps more exactly a structure, and behind that structure another structure, and behind that one another, and so on. If it was a circus trick, then it was of such virtuosity that one could no longer see the artist or the figure he was drawing, the illusion. It was like thousands upon thousands of da Vinci drawings layered on top of each other, so dense and so extremely complex there was nothing to see. It was the opposite of nothing. It was everything. And all too much.

Just the other day—or perhaps this, too, is already several years away in the future—I ran into Peter Høeg, or rather I saw him again, for the second time in my life. It happens like this, out of the dismal grey: I have been visiting my publisher, for like the other Great Authors of Our Nation, I, too, now have a publisher, or rather my publisher has me, though what it wants with me I have absolutely no idea, I am certainly not good business; on the contrary, I am most probably Denmark’s leading worst seller, even if, fortunately, no one knows it apart from me, and the publisher, of course, my editor having just informed me after glancing at a screen that my latest book, unlike its predecessors that sold 128 and 329 copies respectively, has now just passed the 600 mark. I go out through the gateway and am walking along Pilestræde; the weather is very windy; the sky, I know nothing about the sky. I am looking down at the cobblestones, they are grey and glistening, slippery-looking in the drizzle. I cross Landemærket and continue on past Aage Jensen’s window display to glance in at the electronic keyboards and drum sets, the cymbals and hi-hats, the floor toms, the cheap Fender guitars made on licence in China that you can now get in a “starter pack” along with a case and a stand and a little amplifier, when suddenly I sense a slight fluctuation, a dark flutter at the periphery of my field of vision, and I know he is there. I stop, my heart suddenly racing, and turn around slowly. He is walking in my direction, some fifty metres further ahead on the other side of the street, passing the glass front of the Danish Film Institute, with the Kongens Have park to his rear. He walks quickly and with energy, not at any consistent pace, but in little fits and starts, as though the wind were propelling him on, nudging him chaotically along the pavement, unnoticed, it would seem, by everyone but me. He looks at least fifteen years older, which is not surprising, but nonetheless sad: at least fifteen years have passed since as a young man with at least twenty simultaneous lives within me, I saw him emerge from the congregation of Great Authors, the very hope of another world. He twirls around the corner and down Vognmagergade, slight and sinewy, tense, almost quivering, like a muscle that after forty years of unbroken focus on complete calm and equilibrium has now succumbed to cramp. He crosses the street and carries on past the windows of the Egmont Group building, turning his head as he goes, as if trying, not to look at something in particular, but rather to at least direct his eyes at something and keep them there for a moment, however brief. Then abruptly he stops, though without halting entirely, as yet in some continuing sideways motion, staring with wild intensity through a seemingly random windowpane, as though after twenty years someone has now seated themselves in the high-backed chair behind the polished mahogany desk of L. Ron Hubbard’s office display—but who? L. Ron himself?