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

before anyone else, the significance of the relationship between time and financial calculations. She wrote away for Swiss-made precision chronometers and had them set up in all of the offices and, later, in all the corridors and communicating rooms of the house and, as time went on, in the bedrooms and the boudoirs and the water closets; and every morning—when she was always up before anyone else—she synchronized all the clocks. Hundreds of them were fitted with striking mechanisms that made the building vibrate every quarter hour with their crisp and utterly, perfectly synchronous chimes. When she first started to withdraw, she carved up the day for her employees. Everywhere—in the offices and the printshop and the editorial offices and the stockrooms—charts were discovered that seemed to have appeared out of the blue and laid down the time at which work should begin, the course of the working day, the brief lunch break, and the time to go home.
    Christoffer Ludwig took to these straight roads of time so diligently and meticulously that his fondness for storybook creatures made of paper might in fact always have been a hankering after order of the kind he now discovered in the lists of accounts, the yellow filing cabinets, and the growing piles of orders, all of which he went through only in order to draw up the endless number of charts that appeared—without anyone’s being able to clarify where the order came from—to be his one great and weighty responsibility. They were timetables, these charts, in which it was possible to look up any hour of the clock and see, in the first instance, what he himself would be doing. The first chart was a checklist of his own time, from that point in the morning, in his bedroom, when he was dressed by the maids—those intermediaries in Christoffer Ludwig’s never-ending battle with items of clothing with which he never came to terms—until, back in the same place, he was helped into bed after a day spent in the big office or on his long walks along the maze of corridors that always left him baffled, and through which he found his way only because he was accompanied by one of the housemaids. The maids, for their part, always kept to the corridors with which they were positively familiar, and never went anywhere in the house without experiencing a pang of fear at the thought of getting lost.
    First of all, Christoffer mapped out his own time—so precisely that there was an entry for every half second of the day (an onerous task for a man so averse to being in close proximity to women, since this involved three housemaids keeping watch at his bedside for several months, in order that he might map out his normal sleeping pattern). Then he turned his attention upon the other office employees—not because he had reached the end of the road as far as analyzing his own time was concerned but because his mother was urging him to get a move on.
    Then, one day, the Old Lady disappeared. One morning she was seen by a few employees, who came in particularly early to clean their offices, following her son at a distance as he was escorted through the house, which had now become like one great smoothly running timepiece. Wherever he went, Christoffer’s movements were synchronized with the innumerable clocks that he passed on his way to his office; and, for the employees, it was as though all the delivery dates, deadlines, and bill-of-exchange expiry dates hung around them in an atmosphere so concentrated that they could reach out and touch it. The Old Lady stood for a while at the double doors into her son’s office, gazing intensely upon his hunched back. That was the last anyone saw of her. As she turns away and disappears into the labyrinth, all of those who see her go are struck, at the same moment, by the thought that under the straining satin dress and the stays that two of the brawniest kitchen maids have drawn tight every morning with the aid of a broom handle, her plump body