Read Online The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel by Peter Hoeg - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Peter Hoeg
Ads: Link
singing (because the Old Lady had been so confident about the way in which the evening would be conducted that she had not hired the bouncers), and after the last candle had burned down in its holder and the room lay in darkness apart from the faint glow of the tombstone—which the Old Lady did not notice because she had long since gone blind—did she say, out into the emptiness inhabited now only by herself and Amalie, “That abominable racket, it sounded like Christoffer!”
The next morning the housemaids found her in the room, dead. Her body was stiff and cold, but about the cracked but still full lips there hung a contented smile that made the servants think that she had, at the hour of her death, made a particularly advantageous deal with the Devil himself. That smile was kept in place by the rigor mortis that also made it impossible to pull her body free of the chair. Which is why they had a cover of oak made for it, and buried her sitting up.
* * *
It has not been possible for me to reconstruct the events immediately succeeding the Old Lady’s funeral. Once they were over, the people of the town forgot them in the same way that they forgot the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, and what occurred left no traces other than two extraordinary editions of the newspaper and a series of evasive answers. All we can be sure of is the beginning and the end. The Old Lady’s will was read aloud to Christoffer, Katarina, Amalie, and her sisters in a room that would be used on only one further occasion, after which it apparently ceased to exist. At the instant that the lawyer opened the big brown manila envelope that had been lying in his safe for three years—although he had not the faintest idea how it came to be there—he recognized, to his astonishment, his own handwriting and the Old Lady’s impatient dictation style. And at that same instant all of those present, and the rest of the town, were given a glimpse of eternity. The will was written on fine, almost transparent sheets of rice paper, and as the lawyer read out the date it became evident that this was the final, the definitive list, because this date contained no numbers. Instead, in the lawyer’s neat hand, it said: “From this day and for all time.” From the opening words of the will—which the lawyer read with quavering voice because he both recognized his own handwriting and yet felt sure that he had never written the document before him—both he and the family knew that this was the Old Lady’s most inconsiderate, most arrogant masterpiece: a complete record of the Teander Rabow family history for all time.
The Old Lady began by stating the date, the hour, and the place for the reading of her will to her vapid son and his ailing wife and her two grandchildren and Amalie, the willful one, and how the townspeople would realize that these precise moments had been predetermined. The lawyer looked up because the thought had suddenly occurred to him that he was reading to a group of waxwork dummies, and only the quick glance Amalie shot at her father made him go on, although he did not understand that this particular glance had not been predicted in the will before him, which otherwise contained detailed notes for every moment of the reading of it.
There followed a description of the Old Lady’s funeral; a description more deafly earsplitting, more impatient, and more detailed than ever before, and everything was as she said it would be, right down to her despotic and arrogant indications of where, in her funeral sermon, Christoffer’s father-in-law, the dean, would pause, distracted by the memory of the previous night, in the chapel, when he had wanted to unscrew the lid of the coffin in the futile hope that that disagreeable smile would have forsaken her face, never again to haunt his memory. After this came an account of the future of the newspaper, the printing plants, the offices, and the accounts and expansion projects and
The next morning the housemaids found her in the room, dead. Her body was stiff and cold, but about the cracked but still full lips there hung a contented smile that made the servants think that she had, at the hour of her death, made a particularly advantageous deal with the Devil himself. That smile was kept in place by the rigor mortis that also made it impossible to pull her body free of the chair. Which is why they had a cover of oak made for it, and buried her sitting up.
* * *
It has not been possible for me to reconstruct the events immediately succeeding the Old Lady’s funeral. Once they were over, the people of the town forgot them in the same way that they forgot the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, and what occurred left no traces other than two extraordinary editions of the newspaper and a series of evasive answers. All we can be sure of is the beginning and the end. The Old Lady’s will was read aloud to Christoffer, Katarina, Amalie, and her sisters in a room that would be used on only one further occasion, after which it apparently ceased to exist. At the instant that the lawyer opened the big brown manila envelope that had been lying in his safe for three years—although he had not the faintest idea how it came to be there—he recognized, to his astonishment, his own handwriting and the Old Lady’s impatient dictation style. And at that same instant all of those present, and the rest of the town, were given a glimpse of eternity. The will was written on fine, almost transparent sheets of rice paper, and as the lawyer read out the date it became evident that this was the final, the definitive list, because this date contained no numbers. Instead, in the lawyer’s neat hand, it said: “From this day and for all time.” From the opening words of the will—which the lawyer read with quavering voice because he both recognized his own handwriting and yet felt sure that he had never written the document before him—both he and the family knew that this was the Old Lady’s most inconsiderate, most arrogant masterpiece: a complete record of the Teander Rabow family history for all time.
The Old Lady began by stating the date, the hour, and the place for the reading of her will to her vapid son and his ailing wife and her two grandchildren and Amalie, the willful one, and how the townspeople would realize that these precise moments had been predetermined. The lawyer looked up because the thought had suddenly occurred to him that he was reading to a group of waxwork dummies, and only the quick glance Amalie shot at her father made him go on, although he did not understand that this particular glance had not been predicted in the will before him, which otherwise contained detailed notes for every moment of the reading of it.
There followed a description of the Old Lady’s funeral; a description more deafly earsplitting, more impatient, and more detailed than ever before, and everything was as she said it would be, right down to her despotic and arrogant indications of where, in her funeral sermon, Christoffer’s father-in-law, the dean, would pause, distracted by the memory of the previous night, in the chapel, when he had wanted to unscrew the lid of the coffin in the futile hope that that disagreeable smile would have forsaken her face, never again to haunt his memory. After this came an account of the future of the newspaper, the printing plants, the offices, and the accounts and expansion projects and
Similar Books
