The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

  ‘Books are vapid,’ cried the Count, with an irate gesture towards the walls. ‘The blood is what counts – that is what you have to be able to read. He had wondrous tales and amazing pictures in his, this Belmare; wherever he opened it, there was always an account of something; not a page of his blood had been left blank. And at those occasional times when he shut himself up and turned the pages in solitude, he would come to the passages about alchemical ways of making gold, or precious stones, or colours. Why should these things not have been written down in it? They have been somewhere or other, for sure.

  ‘This man might easily have been able to live with a truth if he had been on his own. But it was no small matter to be alone with such a truth as his. Nor was he so lacking in taste as to invite people to see him when his truth was with him: he did not want her to be the subject of gossip; he was too much the oriental for that. “Adieu, Madame,” he said to her, truthfully, “till we meet again. Perhaps in a thousand years we shall be somewhat stronger, and less disturbed. Your beauty is just beginning to blossom, Madame,” he said, and it was no mere courtesy. With that he went off and established his zoo for the people, a kind of jardin d'acclimatation for the larger species of lies, which had never been seen hereabouts, and a palm-house of exaggerations, and a small, well-tended figuerie of bogus mysteries. People came from everywhere, and he went around with diamond buckles on his shoes, entirely at the disposal of his visitors.

  ‘A superficial existence, no doubt. Yet at bottom it was a chivalrous gesture towards his lady, and moreover he kept himself well.’

  For some time, the old gentleman had no longer been addressing Abelone; he had forgotten her. He was pacing back and forth like a madman, throwing challenging glances at Sten, as if at some given moment his valet were to be metamorphosed into the person he was thinking of. But Sten was not yet undergoing any metamorphosis.

  ‘The thing would be to see him,’ continued Count Brahe doggedly. ‘There was a time when he was perfectly visible, although in some towns the letters he received were not addressed to anyone; only the name of the town was written on them, nothing else. But I saw him.

  ‘He was not a handsome man.’ The Count gave a singularly hasty laugh. ‘He was not even what people call important or distinguished in appearance: there were always others more distinguished around him. He was rich: but in his case wealth seemed a mere whim, not to be relied on. At that time, of course, I could not judge if he had real wit, or this or that quality that people set store by – but he was.’

  The Count, trembling, stood there and made a gesture as if to place something in the space before him, something of abiding presence.

  At that moment, he became aware of Abelone.

  ‘Can you see him?’ he demanded of her. And suddenly he snatched up one of the silver candlesticks and held it dazzlingly in her face.

  Abelone recalled that she could indeed see him.

  Over the next few days, Abelone was summoned regularly, and after this incident the dictation proceeded much more calmly. The Count, drawing on all kinds of documents, was putting together his earliest memories of the Bernstorff circle,32 in which his father had played something of a part. Abelone was now so well prepared for the peculiarities of her work that anyone who saw the two of them might easily have taken their expedient togetherness for a true intimacy.

  On one occasion, when Abelone was about to leave him, the old gentleman stepped towards her, with the air of one who is holding a surprise behind his back: ‘Tomorrow we shall be writing about Julie Reventlow,’ he said, savouring his words. ‘She was a saint.’

  In all probability, Abelone gave him a look of disbelief.

  ‘Yes, yes, these things are still possible,’ he insisted in a commanding tone. ‘All things are possible, Countess Abel.’

  He took Abelone's hands and opened them like a book.

  ‘She had the stigmata,’33 he said, ‘here and here.’ And he tapped his cold finger on both her palms, hard and sharp.

  Abelone did not know what ‘stigmata’ meant. Wait and see, she thought; she was most impatient to hear about the saint her father had seen. But she was not brought in any more, neither the following morning nor on any later occasion. –

  ‘Countess Reventlow has often been talked of in your family,’ Abelone concluded tersely, when I asked her to go on. She looked tired; and she claimed to have forgotten almost everything. ‘But there are times when I still feel it in those two places,’ she smiled and, irresistibly drawn to the thought, looked almost with curiosity at her unmarked hands.

  [45] Even before my father's death, everything had changed. Ulsgaard no longer belonged to us. My father died in town, in an apartment that I felt to be hostile and alien. At that time, I was already living abroad, and was too late getting back.

  He lay on a bier, between two rows of tall candles, in a room that gave on to a courtyard. The scent of flowers defied comprehension, like a number of voices all babbling at the same time. His handsome face, in which the eyes had been closed, wore an expression of courteous reminiscence. He was wearing the uniform of the Master of the Hunt, but for some reason with the white ribbon affixed, not the blue. His hands were not folded, but lay crossed, looking artificial and meaningless. Someone had rashly told me that he had suffered a great deal; but none of that was visible upon him. His features had been as neatly arranged as the furniture in a guest-house room when somebody has left. I felt as if I had often seen him dead already, so familiar did it all look.

  The only thing that was new, unpleasantly so, was the setting. This oppressive room was new, and windows faced it opposite, quite likely other people's windows. It was new for Sieversen to come in from time to time and do nothing. Sieversen had grown old. Then I was asked to breakfast. Several times, breakfast was announced. I had absolutely no desire to breakfast that day. I did not realize that they wanted me out of the room; in the end, since I did not go, Sieversen somehow contrived to remark that the doctors had arrived. I did not grasp why they were there. There is something that still needs to be done, said Sieversen, looking at me intently with her reddened eyes. Then two gentlemen entered somewhat precipitately: these were the doctors. The first dropped his head abruptly, as if he had horns and meant to butt us, and looked at us over his glasses: first Sieversen, then me.

  He bowed with the formality of a student. ‘The Master of the Hunt had one last request,’ he said, in the selfsame manner as that of his entrance; again I had a sense of his precipitate haste. Somehow I compelled him to look through his glasses. His colleague was a portly, thin-skinned, blond man; I reflected that it would be easy to make him blush. A pause ensued. It was curious that the Master of the Hunt should still have wishes.

  Involuntarily I looked once again at that handsome, regular countenance. And at that moment I grasped that what he wanted was certainty. Essentially that was what he had always wanted. Now he was to get it.

  ‘You are here to pierce his heart.34 Please go ahead.’

  I bowed and stepped back. The two doctors returned my bow simultaneously, and began at once to confer about their work. Someone was already pushing the candles aside. But the elder of the two took another step or so towards me. When he was fairly close, he leaned forward to spare himself the remainder of the distance and gave me an angry look.

  ‘It is not necessary,’ he said, ‘that is to say, I mean, it may be better if you…’

  He made a worn and neglected impression, in his economy of movement and his hasty manner. I bowed once more; it was in the nature of the situation that I should already be bowing again.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said shortly. ‘I shan't disturb you.’

  I knew that I could endure the scene, and that there was no reason to avoid it. It was inevitable. Indeed, it was perhaps the meaning of it all. Nor had I ever witnessed anyone's breast being pierced. It seemed perfectly in order not to spurn so signal an experience when it was offered so freely and unconditionally. Even then I did not really believe in
disappointments any more; so there was nothing to fear.

  No, no, there is nothing in the world that we can imagine, not the least thing. In everything there are so many unique details which are impossible to predict. In imagination, we pass over them in our haste, not noticing that they are lacking. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.

  Who, for instance, would have dreamed of that resistance? Hardly had the broad, high chest been laid bare but the hasty little man had already located the right place. The instrument, however, speedily applied, did not penetrate. I felt all time had suddenly deserted the room. It was as if we were in a painting. But then time rushed in again, with a faint swish, and there was more of it than could be used. All at once there was a knocking sound somewhere. I had never heard a knocking like it before: a warm, muffled, twofold knocking. My ear registered the sound, and at the same time I saw that the doctor had driven his instrument home. It was a little while, though, before the two impressions merged within me. Very well, I thought: they're through now. The knocking, so far as its speed was concerned, had an almost malicious sound to it.

  I looked at the man I had now known for such a long time. No, he was in complete command of himself, a gentleman working away swiftly, with his attention on the matter in hand, about to leave for his next appointment. There was not a trace of pleasure or satisfaction in his manner. Only at his left temple, out of some ancient instinct, a few hairs were standing on end. He carefully withdrew the instrument, leaving something that resembled a mouth, from which blood issued twice in succession, as if it were uttering two syllables. The young, blond doctor quickly and elegantly dabbed it up with cotton wool. And now the wound remained at peace, like a closed eye.

  In all likelihood I bowed once again, this time without really knowing what I was doing. At all events, I was astonished to find myself alone once more. Someone had tidied the uniform, and the white ribbon lay across it as before. But now the Master of the Hunt was dead, and not only he. Now the heart had been pierced, our heart, the heart of our family. Now it was over. This, then, was the breaking of the helmet: ‘Brigge today and nevermore,’ something said within me.

  I was not thinking of my own heart. And later, when my thoughts did turn to it, I knew for the first time, with utter certainty, that it was not a heart suited to these purposes. It was an individual heart. It was already beginning afresh, from the beginning.

  [46] I know I supposed that I could not depart right away. First, everything has to be set in order, I told myself repeatedly. What it was that needed to be set in order was not clear to me. Next to nothing needed to be done. I walked about the town and noted that it had changed. It was pleasant to step out of the hotel I was staying in and to see that it was now a city for adults, trying to look its best for me, almost as if I were a stranger. Everything had shrunk a little, and I strolled down Langelinie and on, as far as the lighthouse, and back. When my walks took me to the Amaliengade neighbourhood, there might well be some presence I had been under the sway of for years and which tested its old power over me again. There were particular corner windows or archways or street lamps that knew a great deal about me, and used the knowledge threateningly. I looked them in the face so that they knew I was staying at the Phoenix Hotel and might be leaving at any moment. But I did so with an uneasy conscience. I had a growing suspicion that I had not yet put any of these influences or associations fully behind me. I had deserted them in secret one day, all unfinished as they were. My childhood, too, still lay ahead of me, in a sense, if I were not to give it up for good. And even as I was grasping that I was losing it, I sensed that I would never have anything else to which I could appeal.

  Every day I spent a few hours in Dronningens Tværgade, in those small rooms that wore the affronted look of all rented apartments where someone has died. I paced to and fro between the desk and the big white-tiled stove, burning the Master of the Hunt's papers. I had made a start on consigning his correspondence to the flames in bundles, as I found them; but the little packages were tied too tight and merely charred around the edges. It cost me an effort to untie them. Most of them had a strong, penetrating scent that assailed me as if to stir up memories in me too. I had none. At times photographs slipped out, heavier than the rest; these photographs burned incredibly slowly. I do not know why, but presently I got it into my head that a picture of Ingeborg might be among them. But every woman I looked at was mature and superb, of manifest beauty, and put quite different thoughts into my head. It turned out that I was not altogether without memories after all. It was eyes exactly like these that sometimes gave me a sense of myself when, as a growing boy, I walked along the street with my father. Gazing at me from within a passing carriage, they could enfold me in a look from which there was hardly any escaping. Now I realized that in those days they had been comparing me with him, and that I had been found lacking. But that was to be expected: the Master of the Hunt had no need to fear comparisons.

  It is possible that I now know something that he did fear. Let me say how I arrived at this assumption. Well inside his wallet was a sheet of paper, folded long since, brittle and broken along the creases. I read it before I burned it. It was written in his finest hand, firmly and evenly; but I perceived right away that it was only a copy.

  ‘Three hours before his death,’ it began. It was about Christian IV. Naturally I cannot reproduce the content word for word. Three hours before his death, he desired to get up. The doctor and Wormius, the valet, assisted him to his feet. He stood rather unsteadily, but he stood, and they pulled on his quilted dressing-gown. Then he suddenly sat down at the foot of the bed and said something unintelligible. The doctor kept hold of his left hand so that the King would not sink back on the bed. There they sat, and from time to time the King made an effort and sluggishly repeated the unintelligible thing he had said. In due course, the doctor started talking to him in encouraging tones, hoping little by little to work out what the King was saying. After a while the King interrupted him, saying all at once, quite distinctly, ‘Oh doctor, doctor, what is your name?’ The doctor had some difficulty remembering.

  ‘Sperling, most gracious Majesty.’

  But this was really of no consequence at all. The moment the King found that they understood what he was saying, he opened wide his right eye, which he still had, and put the whole expression of his features into that one word his tongue had been forming for hours, the one thing that still existed: ‘Döden,’ he said, ‘döden.’*

  That was all that was written on the sheet of paper.35 I read it several times before I burned it. And I recalled that my father had suffered greatly at the last. That was what they had told me.

  [47] Since then I have thought a great deal about the fear of death, not without bearing in mind certain experiences of my own. I believe I can truly say that I have known it. It has beset me in busy cities, amid the crowd, often without any reason at all. Often, though, there were reasons aplenty: say, someone sitting on a bench suddenly passed away, and everyone stood around staring at him, and he was already far beyond fear – I would have his fear. Or that time in Naples, when the young girl sitting opposite me in the tram died. At first it looked as if she had fainted, and the tram moved on for a while. But then there was no doubt that we had to stop. And the traffic halted behind us, stuck in a jam, as if nothing would ever be able to drive that way again. The pale, fat girl might easily have died peacefully like that, leaning against the woman beside her. But her mother was having none of it. She made it as tough for her as she could. She mussed her clothes and poured something into her mouth, which couldn't keep anything in any more. She rubbed some liquid that someone had brought on her forehead, and, when the girl's eyes rolled slightly, the mother began to shake her, to bring a straight gaze back into them. She screamed into those eyes, which heard nothing; she worried and tugged at the girl's body as if it were a doll; and in the end she drew back her arm and slapped the fat face as hard as she could, so the girl would not die. That time,
I was afraid.

  But I had already been afraid before. For example, when my dog died. The selfsame dog that laid the guilt upon me, for all time. It was very ill. I had been kneeling at its side all day long, when suddenly it barked, a brief, brusque bark such as it used to give when a stranger came into the room. That sort of bark was a signal we had agreed on, as it were, for this occasion, and I glanced up involuntarily at the door. But it was already in him. Unsettled, I tried to look into his eyes, and he tried to look into mine; but not to bid farewell. The look he gave me was hard and aggrieved. He was blaming me for letting it in. He was convinced I could have stopped it. It was apparent now that he had always thought too highly of me. And there was no time left to explain. He looked at me, aggrieved and lonely, till it was over.

  And then I was afraid in autumn, after the first night frosts, when the flies came into the rooms to revive one last time in the warmth. They were strangely dried up, and were startled by their own buzzing; you could see they no longer quite knew what they were doing. For hours on end they sat there, dead to the world, till they realized they were still alive; then they would fling off blindly in any direction at all, with no notion what they were doing there, and you would hear them falling again, over there, then somewhere else. And at length they would be crawling around all over, their death steadily infecting the whole room.