Read The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel for Free Online Page B

anticipated that of its readers—who continually, therefore, found themselves, and only themselves, in its pages.
    Amalie had, of course, always known her father. And yet it makes sense to say that she was about nine years old before she got through to him, and this expression “to get through to” was one she herself was later to use to explain her experiences.
    It so happened, one evening, that she heard a sound somewhere in the house and followed it and discovered that it was nothing but the distant clattering of the servants and of Gumma’s tricycle, so she went on and heard a second sound and followed that until she recognized her mother’s tubercular cough, and heard a third sound and followed that, and then something happened. She entered a large, lit room that rang with the sound of raised voices. In this room something quite unique was taking place. In this room her grandmother, who normally fought shy of appearing in public except when it was absolutely necessary, was celebrating her company’s anniversary, and at the moment that Amalie stepped into the room, her father, Christoffer Ludwig Teander Rabow, stood up to make a speech. Amalie rarely looked straight at her father, but now she stared at him and noticed a slight but disturbing resemblance between him and the portraits of his father that Gumma had once shown her. This resemblance lay in the fact that her father’s, Christoffer Ludwig’s, contours were so blurred and his form so elusive that it was possible to catch glimpses, straight through him, of the pictures on the wall behind.
    *   *   *
    From the moment he was born, Christoffer, Amalie’s father, had been treated like a doll—left in the paralyzing care of the housemaids by parents too taken up with their work of writing and editing and printing and distributing the paper and doing accounts and investing and buying up property and mixing with those townsfolk who at that time could still remember buying peat from Frederik Ludwig and treated the family with a contempt that was gradually quelled as the balance sheets expanded to the point where it was necessary to take on office staff. When Christoffer’s mother (later to become the Old Lady) looked up from the figures she controlled with all the poise of a juggler—notwithstanding her inability to read—and caught sight of her son, who was then just one year old, her first thought was: I wonder if he’s old enough to deliver papers. So she had his long white dress pulled off, only to find that his chubby legs, which had been kissed raw by the housemaids and smelled of scented talcum powder, could not even support him because he was only one year old. After that she forgot all about him again until he was four years old, and then, seeing that he could now keep his balance, she had a suit of clothes made for him, complete with waistcoat, jacket, high collar, and detachable cuffs. Every day the maids had to take him from the nursery, along the corridors, to a private office next door to his father’s. There they left the boy, on a raised chair, in a solitude broken only by sudden bursts of music from the musical cigar box on his desk, which was supposed to play whenever Christoffer offered his business contacts one of the Havana cigars, specially imported for the family, with which his mother had provided him, just as she had remembered to open an expense account for him—and all because she had not an ounce of understanding of children and their ways. This was also demonstrated by the way in which she and her husband took Christoffer with them to the grand dinners to which they were invited because the town’s mayor and doctors and pastors and lawyers and consuls and industrialists and merchants feared these two parvenus, this odd couple, who still carried the smell of peat and cow barns with them wherever they went, accompanied by their son—that performing monkey, folk called him, that dandified dwarf, that tarted-up