The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel by Høeg Peter

Author:Høeg, Peter [Høeg, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

MARIA AND CARSTEN AND THEIR CHILDREN

The house by the Lakes

(and other matters)

A longing for order

1939–1989

ON AUGUST 10, 1939, Amalie said goodbye to Carsten and sent him off to Sorø. In parting, she shook his hand—shook his hand, no more than that, not so much as a kiss on the cheek. Since their car accident in the grounds, shaking his hand was as far as Amalie could go, although to Carsten she explained this away by saying, “It isn’t quite proper for me to kiss you now that you’re all grown up.”

Carsten was dressed in the white summer uniform of Sorø Academy: white trousers with no pockets, dark blue jacket and vest, white shirt, and white-crowned cap with gleaming peak and shiny leather strap; and from a distance he looked like a naval officer. Several of their neighbors from the adjoining villas witnessed their leavetaking, having grown accustomed that summer to keeping a sharp eye on the goings-on in the white villa. Now they were trying to guess whether this smartly turned-out naval officer, this lieutenant or captain, was Amalie’s lover or just a friend. It never occurred to any of them that this was Amalie’s son, that this was just Carsten—the boy who had, not so long ago, been playing with their own children—standing here in front of the big six-cylinder Hudson that Amalie had borrowed for the occasion, looking handsome and broad-shouldered, with one forelock fluttering free of his cap.

At this moment of parting, Carsten has the look of a young man leaving his mother and father to start a life of his own and that was how Amalie wanted to see him, even while life without him was out of the question. Which was why she had done everything she could to prepare for his departure, to assure him and herself that even though she stayed behind, still, in a way, she would be with him. Some weeks earlier she had gone, by herself, to Sorø—well, of course she had gone down there, driving off in the same showy car that Carsten would ride in, which she had borrowed from a client, without having the faintest idea of where Sorø lay. At school she had been too faint with hunger to pay attention during geography lessons, and in later years Carl Laurids and her son had been her only clear focal points; she really had had more to worry about than where Sorø lay. Nor, strictly speaking, had she any idea what kind of place the academy was; the director of education’s descriptions had gone over her head, and the only thing she was sure of was that it was very, very respectable.

She had been happy with what she saw. Driving up the avenue, she noted how, with its park and library and church and main academy building and headmaster’s residence and pavilions, the huge school looked like a cross between a university, a country house, and a reform school. But the external structure was not her main concern.

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