Excerpts from
The History of Danish Dreams
By Peter Høeg
Foreword
This is the History of Danish Dreams, an account of what we have dreaded and dreamed of and hoped for and expected during this century; I have endeavoured to make it exhaustive and keep it simple and, as an argument for even so much as trying, I would like to mention two incidents.
One day in the early spring of 1929, Carsten was helping his father, Carl Laurids, to assemble a machine gun which, when it was finished, stood on a tripod and ranged from wall to wall of the pillared salon in the villa off Strandvejen. Anyone else might well have wondered at a machine gun in a living room, but Carsten saw it as a natural extension of his father´s brutal elegance. Lying on his stomach, looking along the perforated barrel he had the feeling that the weapon pointed, with the most liberating determination, into a hazy future. Then Carl Laurids said, well m´lad, you´re seven years old now, and old enough to be told my motto, which is: always look ahead because that´s where the money is, and although Carsten was only five and had not understood a single word, still he listened, enthralled, because by this time it had become a rare occurence for his father to address him directly. That is the first incident.
The second took place at precisely the same moment, in a tenement building in Christianshavn, where Maria Jensen was watching her mother Anna doing her cleaning. Anna had been engaged upon this clean-up - which she intended to be the final, the definitive clean-up - for several years. Now she had borrowed, from the parish doctor, a magnifying glass that allowed her to peer into the bottomless pit of germs on panels she had believed to be clean and which she was now in the act of washing down with methylated spirits. Standing right behind her mother, Maria took a deep breath to conquer the stammer that had become more pronounced of late. Then she said Mamma, wh-wh-why are you using that glass?, and Anna replied, it´s so this place can be really nice and clean. But, Maria objected, it won´t do any g-g-good, because there´ll always be more dirt, and Anna could not really come up with any answer to this; she just stood there for a moment, looking at her daughter.
The next moment both incidents are past. Anna turns back to her interminable polishing. Carl Laurids dismantles the machine gun and a day later he has disappeared without trace. It may not be a coincidence that their children have remembered these events and been able to tell me about them, but neither is it an indication that they were of any particular importance, since Carsten and Maria remembered so much else. The point is precisely that these two incidents resemble so many others. Nevertheless, I believe that, at the moment they occur, a staggering muster of all the hopes of the twentieth century is assembled on Strandvejen and in Christianshavn. If I carry on now, in due course to return to Carsten and Maria, it is because I believe that, encapsulated within many everyday events - and, yes, possibly any event whatsoever - lies the essence of an entire century.
Peter Høeg: The History of Danish Dreams
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1995
Translated by Barbara Haveland
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