The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel by Peter Hoeg Read Free Book Online

tot—Christoffer Teander. Thus he had learned, from a very early age, to conceal his disquiet behind a mask of courteous indifference until no one, no one at all, paid any more heed to him. Until the day when his father raised his head from years of hard work and realized that they must have made a mistake because his son’s desk was covered, not by balance sheets or articles or charts, but by a forest of storybook creatures cut out of the pages of the newspaper. Frederik Ludwig would have demanded an explanation of his son, but by that time his contours were already starting to dissolve and his voice wavered as he asked Christoffer why he was not writing. From his son’s hesitant replies he grasped the fact that he could neither read nor write but was, like himself, illiterate. And when, speechless with grief, he pointed at all the cut-up sheets of Christoffer’s childhood lying scattered around the room in a layer three feet deep, the child answered, “You see, Father, it comes apart so easily, because the pages aren’t glued in!”
    Frederik Ludwig would have warned his wife, but his voice let him down. Not long after this she had the family’s German doctor, Dr. Mahler, admit Christoffer to the nearest sanatorium, where he underwent Dr. Kneipp’s water cure and contracted a dreadful bout of double pneumonia from the morning walks—barefoot, across the dewy autumn meadows—prescribed as part of this cure. This bout of pneumonia lodged itself in his skinny body in the form of a malignant fever that refused to release its grip on him, even after he had returned to his childhood home, where his father, Frederik Ludwig, was now no more than a vague shadow against the tapestries and high paneling. At this point, Christoffer lost his hair, even though he was not yet twenty, and thereby acquired a staggering resemblance to his father. And the fact that Christoffer was now the spitting image of his father may have accounted for Frederik Ludwig’s dissolution’s going almost unnoticed.
    One morning, Christoffer woke up to discover that the fever had left him. Driven by an impulse to make his dreams come true in some way other than by cutting them out of paper, he decided to leave home. He hunted in vain for clothes, which were kept he knew not where—there always having been women around to help him get dressed—and all he found was a necktie that he could not tie. Dressed in slippers and pajamas, he left his childhood home, dismissing his worries with a wave of the hand. What was a tie compared to freedom of the individual. And it was late in the day before he gave up, having lost his way and wandered around the streets, being laughed at by people who pointed at him and knew that there went the editor’s son, who couldn’t even tie his own shoelaces. It was night by the time he found his way home, to a door that his mother had locked, and when he was let in the next morning a new and chilly calm had settled over his movements, previously so febrile and aimless. It was as though he had left his impatience behind, out there in the cold of the night through which he had sat on the doorstep, contemplating the twinkling stars. The next day, for the first time, he wore the Swiss fob watch he had had since his confirmation without ever learning to tell the time, and his mother—whom people were starting to call the Old Lady—felt convinced that he had sorted himself out. When, a week later, she asked him what the time was and he answered correctly, her eyes filled with a triumph reminiscent of what the rest of us would understand by happiness.
    When she and her husband began publishing their broadside, she—who had only ever been familiar with the seasons and the difference between night and day—became obsessed with the passage of time, with the inexorable march of minutes and seconds. It may have been thanks to her visionary talents and the business sense with which these were inextricably linked that she realized,