My anger at this now being my life, the anger that rose up in me when all else was erased, was what made me go on, though my strength was long gone, had seeped away, shed onto the senseless rock.
When the second night became a dawn, when I could no longer manage to lift a hand, I found myself at the summit.
The wind buffeted me, blowing warm, dry air into my face. He’s here, it said. The one you love is waiting for you. You’ve arrived now. You must find the hall where he lies in a casket. Go past the planes and the hangars, pay no heed to their gaping mouths through which the people surge and vanish.
I got to my feet and looked out over the airfield. The enormous planes, so big as to almost defy belief, were lined up in a row with stiff and shiny wings.
People on the ground, milling all around them. Lorries driving up the ramps into the bodies of the aircraft. The sound of the engines. A thunderous clamour that caused the earth to tremble.
One of the planes detached itself and taxied away, accelerated and heaved itself into the air. I watched it climb into the sky and vanish.
I crossed the airfield, at the perimeter of the world, and went towards the light, so bright I had to look down at the ground so as not to be dazzled. Somewhere inside me I knew I was dead.
THE AUTHOR HIMSELF
(from My Encounters with the Great Authors of Our Nation: A Hall of Mirrors)
MADAME NIELSEN
I SAW PETER HØEG from the back seat of my parents’ car, a sudden perception, like a revelation, an abruptly descended prophet, as I leaned forward between the seats in front to take the piece of blue SorBits chewing gum that my father, hidden behind his headrest, was holding out in the palm of his hand while we sped northwards through Jutland on the E45 motorway. He (the author, my future real self) was actually concealed behind a half-mask of leather, and his intensely, almost insanely bright, eyes were gazing up at the sky from above an article on page 4 of Politiken’s arts section, which my mother, in the passenger seat next to my father, held in her lap. “Who’s that?” I asked, and my mother, who didn’t have the courage to take her eyes off the road for fear that my father would steer us into a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle, handed back the newspaper between the two headrests, and I took it and laid it out on my bare knees and read what from then on would be a holy scripture, a kind of personal genesis penned by the author himself and recalling the moment in his life at which he had become an author. Until then it had never occurred to me to write as much as a single line outside the confines of my school exercise books or my reports in physics or social studies, but from that moment on I wanted to be an author too, or rather I wanted to be Peter Høeg, a person of multiple talents and personas who would never need to decide, because he could do everything all at once: study drama in Paris, trek through deserts, speak Swahili, fence, ski, dance ballet, climb mountains, write novels, sail the seven seas (simultaneously!), give talks, and meditate and look like a monk, and be a monk, and play Johannes V. Jensen, and be Johannes V. Jensen with the aid of only a half-mask, and marry an African and have beautiful children, and live like a saint in ten square metres of space in an oasis in the middle of the city, and write his books on his lap in only two hours a day, in the evenings even, when he’s feeling at his most exhausted, and breast-feeding, even though he’s a man! I wanted to meet him. But where? How do you meet a person who seems to be everywhere all at once?
The only thing I had to go on was the novel that the article claimed was the centre of everything, and which the caption said had been published earlier that year. But since I was only twenty-five or twenty-six and had read little more than adventure books, Troels Kløvedal’s travel writings, and The Clan of the Cave Bear, the title Conception of the Twentieth Century[1] sounded like it might be heavy-going. So to begin with, I simply tore the page out of the newspaper, folded it up and put it in the back pocket of my sister’s cut-off jeans (which I was wearing, and which she would end up giving me a few years later, because, she said, “Those boxer shorts you go around in aren’t shorts at all, they’re underpants, and I don’t want people seeing me out with a brother in his underpants!”), and after that I leaned back in my seat and looked out through the window at the Danish summer flashing by as I sank deeper and deeper into my own Conception of Peter Høeg.
It wasn’t until a few years later, after I had gone back to the house by the sea and had finally got round to visiting the library in the little town that I discovered Conception of the Twentieth Century on the shelf, alongside the librarian’s recommendation, and borrowed it and took it back home with me to read at once, while lying on the coir mat in the shady living room. After that, everything happened so quickly. I was only six years younger than he, but the only thing I had achieved in my life at that point was… nothing. As soon as Tales of the Night appeared in Arnold Busck’s bookstore, I took it down from the shelf and slipped it inside my anorak and hurried out again, pregnant with significance. I had read neither Márquez nor Karen Blixen, and so I found it to be both brilliant and unique. I enrolled immediately in a drama school in Vordingborg and stole Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow from the local bookstore there. At the same time, in a kind of parallel life—or rather two, ten or twenty parallel lives—I was accepted into the School of Journalism, attended ballet lessons at Det Fynske Balletakademi, worked out at the gym, took a course in Spanish, went to Alpe d’Huez to become a skiing instructor, played the flute, toyed with the idea of applying to the Academy of Music, studied psychology at Aarhus University, Spanish at Odense University, played in a local band, took guitar lessons from Svend Staal, practised t’ai chi under the guidance of Tal R, and applied to work on a development project in a village outside Managua in Nicaragua (a motor scooter came with the job), all at the same time. I was everywhere, doing everything I couldn’t, and without success, but most importantly: without meeting him, the revelation around whom my life revolved.
But then at last, one day in the spring of 1993, the twenty lives converged into one:
I step through the door of the meeting room of the Danish Authors’ Society at Strandgade 6, and in the midst of what looks like the entire teeming congregation of Great Authors, along with their mothers and stepchildren and publishers and worst critics, all with wine glasses in hand and faces turned towards the man giving the award speech, there he stands among them, the only person in the room without a wine glass in his hand, seemingly unaffected by all his success and the leading of so many hectic lives in recent years, wearing sandals and airy, loose-fitting cotton trousers that are unrestrictive of the genitals, undamaging to precious eggs, and a casual, unironed, flax-coloured smock, his tousled hair bleached by the sun, his skin golden brown as though, quite unlike any other Great Author, he has not stepped directly from a taxi cab but from a circumnavigating wooden schooner, an engineless vessel that almost silently, with only the gentle glug of water under its stern, slipped into the harbour with the first blush of rising sun to moor at the quayside some fifty metres away behind the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He stands as one sits, or more exactly stands, in a saddle: back straight, legs apart, knees slightly bent, anus thrust forward into alignment with the spinal column so as to allow the free flow of energy and inspiration and to permit the soul to plume like a flame from arsehole to cosmos. His gaze is intense, almost manically attentive and yet calmly and indulgently directed towards the man who stands only a couple of metres in front of him, mumbling his award speech into an occasionally squealing microphone.
1
The English-language version of Høeg’s novel would later be published under the title