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could predict births and deaths and suicides and bankruptcies long before they took place, convincing the people of the town that their fates were in the hands of a Providence with which the Old Lady obviously had dealings. And so the paper hung on to its subscribers, even when the Old Lady disappeared from view and the printers and journalists stepped between her and the paper, which had, by this time, grown into a dream of a newspaper: six loose sheets, its accounts of the previous day’s events scanned by more or less everyone in town, and the rest of Langeland, as they searched for their own futures.
    It was at this time that the white house on the square was built. Barred, sheer and sharply gabled as a chalk cliff, this was the house into which the Old Lady withdrew, and the day on which the water closet was put on view was the first occasion in a generation that the house had been opened to the public. Only the oldest living residents of the town had retained a vague memory from the time when it was built, of a rectangular, unechoing courtyard, a covered well, and dim, hushed colonnaded galleries.
    Somewhere among all those rooms and studies the Old Lady continued to dictate the newspaper’s editorial to her secretary every morning, without herself ever learning to read or write, and in these rooms her husband, Amalie’s grandfather—long since forgotten by the outside world—began to dissolve at the edges and, a few years later, disappeared completely. The Old Lady herself showed her face less and less often to her family, and through all her childhood Amalie saw her on only a handful of occasions. Scores of managers and secretaries—who had become necessary after the Old Lady bought up, first several other newspapers, and then printers and paper mills—received their dictated orders on slips of paper that they found on their desks in the offices and clerks’ rooms—more and more of which were being set up within the never-ending confines of the white house.
    Even on that momentous open day, even on water-closet Sunday, the Old Lady did not put in an appearance. Nevertheless, despite her absence (or, who knows: perhaps precisely because of it), the visitors had a strong sense of her presence, a sense they shared with the servants and with the Old Lady’s own family, for whom the preparations for the great day had begun without any warning: the servants were taken by surprise, one day, by the sharp hack of chisels and the bitter smell of new wood. At the end of one of the corridors they had discovered six foreign workmen working intently and with great dexterity at a mysterious task and talking a language in which they sounded as though they were smacking their lips. At the end of two weeks they disappeared, leaving behind a locked room which, when it was opened the following Sunday, proved to contain this wonder, the water closet—at that time possibly Denmark’s grandest premises for shitting in, ordered and paid for by the Old Lady, who had, in her youth, cut and sold peat, and had lived on a smallholding no better than a dunghill until her husband—Frederik Ludwig, now vanished—had, in a drunken haze, won a hand-operated printing press and begun publishing the broadside that would lead him and his family straight into that dream we all share of money, lots and lots of money.
    In her own way, Amalie is just an ordinary child: a little girl from a nouveau riche family, with parents and an upbringing and a life to which we will return a little later. But she is also something special; she is a person who has made a discovery or who, at any rate, feels that she is special. And for this reason she causes a chord to reverberate inside every one of us, or at least inside me, and the note she strikes is a reminder of the loneliness of a child growing up in the belief that it is different; a belief that prompted Amalie to gaze into every shining surface: into polished harnesses and shop windows; into the