The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

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.

What happened then is something of which I have absolutely no recollection. It’s as if the story grinds to a halt here, the picture freezes, and the only thing I see, and continue to see, as though it were in front of me right now, is the image of him, Peter Høeg, not the congregation of Great Authors, but Peter Høeg, picked out from its midst as though in spite of it, existing in his own dimension, in another world entirely, that of the Conception itself.

And in that world, from that moment on, I am his shadow, or rather his shadows, the countless shadows of Peter Høeg.

I follow his example, doing everything of which I am unable, living nowhere and everywhere at the same time, on a sofa in the broadcasting corporation’s radio documentary department, beneath an overpass north of Marseilles, in the basement of New York’s Grand Central Station, in Joseph London’s front room, with an unmarried female schoolteacher in a suburb of Prague, with a Jewish glassblower and her Uzbek sister-in-law in their apartment on the “island of poets” in St Petersburg, on the floors of a former ice-cream factory in Hanover and a villa in Maisons-Laffitte. On a daybed in the attic of a public transport director in Risskov, I read Borderliners during the course of some nights of despair, a novel I actually purchase (albeit with money borrowed from a biscuit tin in the kitchen of a woman who was out). In it I encounter for the first time the author inside the Conception and for a moment I believe that it really is him, until I am told that things are not that simple. I sigh and read on. I read slowly and attentively, almost manically absorbed, as if I were searching for something. But for what? For Peter Høeg, indeed, but not only for him, which is to say me, and not only for the key to my own life. I am searching for something else, something bigger, a door leading out into another world entirely.

Years pass, I meet the Woman of My Dreams and propose marriage to her, and she accepts, and at the same time The Woman and the Ape is published, she buys it for me as a gift and I read it (as if it were my own), yet I’m no longer quite as certain as before. Nevertheless I carry on, getting up in the mornings, performing my exercises, dancing, practising my t’ai chi, doing my sit-ups and press-ups, and so on. Like him, I am still doing my utmost to do everything under the sun, I really am, only now I no longer know why.

Then all of a sudden, one day he is gone. Vanished! Rumours abound, the way rumours do when a phenomenon such as he disappears from one moment to the next after having been at the centre of everything for seven or eight heightened years, appearing everywhere, in all the media, in everyday conversations, in the reading clubs, bookstores and cinemas, even Hollywood. But the reality of the matter is that no one knows anything. The truth is that Peter Høeg has disappeared, not only from literature but from the world. At first I am puzzled, then increasingly with each passing day I despair, until at once I realize that this is no tragedy: on the contrary, it is the pinnacle of the Conception, the greatest of all strokes of brilliance: overnight, Peter Høeg went from being everything, everywhere and everyone (at the same time), to being nothing, nowhere and no one, vanished and gone.

And I? I had never been more than his shadow. And now he was gone. I felt I had to follow him and disappear myself. But how? I took the books from my removal boxes in the most distant of my wife’s colossal en suite rooms in Frederiksberg and reread the now complete oeuvre in the hope of finding the door through which I, in the way of the Messiah’s shadow, could proceed behind him into his other world. But the books were as though transformed. What I had thought to be the key to my life and to my redefinition within a completely different world, now seemed merely to be an illusion. Even the oeuvre’s tenderest of moments, in which Smilla is reunited with her lover, the electrician, a scene I had read as though it were the primeval love scene, the very image of utopian devotion, revealed itself to be nothing more than deception, a circus trick, something that in essence cannot be done, and yet “He did it!”; the world in reverse: Smilla sticks her clitoris into the slit of the electrician’s penis and “fucks” him. Voilà! The jingle of cash registers! All over the world, readers rise to their feet and applaud!

It was over. I closed the book and put it back in the removal box with the others. What then? I have no idea. I suppose time passed. Years. I missed him. Not the Conception, not the many lives and certainly not the books. I missed him, Peter Høeg the person, whom I had hardly even met, only seen once, many years before. And yet I missed him. I walked along the city lakes and looked across at the school I knew he had attended, Bording Realskole, where Borderliners takes place, a fine and uncomplicated red-brick building of three or four storeys. At the very top, on the flat roof, like a mirage, was a little house with a neatly enclosed garden. There it was, on its own, peaceful, as if situated deep inside a wood, among hills or far out upon a plain. I wondered if all the other people around me—the dog owners, the jogging businesswomen and art directors and cinematographers and lawyers and real estate brokers—could see the house too, or if it was only me. I kept wanting to ask, but I feared their replies. In my Conception of Peter Høeg he had moved into that house and was living up there completely on his own. What does a person do when he is no one? He does nothing. He waters the plants, trims the lawn with nail scissors, opens the curtains in the morning and draws them again at night.

And then catastrophe. The 9/11 of this tale. “Where were you on that fateful day?” I was alone in the reading room on the second floor of the library that is housed in the Blågården community centre. I still had my anorak on and was flicking absently through the day’s newspapers that lay spread all over the four or perhaps six tables that had been pushed together to form a single surface. Then at one point the front page of B.T. emerged from the heap, and on it was the headline: “See where Peter Høeg is hiding”. There are certain things in the world one ought never to investigate, inventions and discoveries that ought never to be made, for the sheer sake of humanity. But people don’t understand this fact. At least the journalists of the B.T. newspaper don’t. They had been looking for Peter Høeg, and they had found him. Not in the little house on the roof of the Bording Realskole. Not in a completely different world. They had found him in a modest single-family home in a suburb of Copenhagen. He was divorced, older, and worst of all: still writing. During the past ten years, in which I had believed he had been living the ideal life of no one, he had been working on the same great novel, which sooner or later would be published. There was no picture of him, only of his house. It was a black-and-white raster image on the usual cheap paper, and the photo had been taken from the road. Through a winter or early spring’s entanglement of bare branches, garden shrubs and a couple of evergreens of the kind found in cemeteries could be seen a low, whitewashed house and the black edge of its roof. It was an image of dismal grey, everyday life, the world exactly as it is, impossible to imagine any other way.

In the intervening years I had found my own way out of the world, now merely haunting it, a ghost, a shadow of no one. And yet I put down the newspaper and returned outside with a feeling not of despair, but rather of grief, a great and quiet grief.

A few months or years later, the book came out. I tried to hide, not listening to the radio, not reading any newspapers, and when I ventured out into the Netto discount store to buy avocados and carrots, I would avoid looking at the headlines, humming loudly to myself in the checkout line so as not to hear what the people in front of me were talking about. Only after several months, when The Quiet Girl suddenly appeared on the display shelf one day at the library, did I pick it up, almost in passing and seemingly quite without thought, and take it home with me to my flat (now, after my divorce, I was living but a pistol shot away from Blågårds Plads). I turned the key and went inside, tossed the book onto the kitchen counter, made some tea, ate a carrot, looked out of the window, and then, as I turned and passed the counter with the steaming mug of tea in my hand, I stopped and opened the book and began to read as I stood. Impossible. I grasped nothing. What I saw on the pages was at once regular and yet utterly chaotic. I understood the words on their own, of course, or at least most of them, and could even, as though through a dense entanglement of branches, make out a scene, or at least its outline, or perhaps more exactly a structure, and behind that structure another structure, and behind that one another, and so on. If it was a circus trick, then it was of such virtuosity that one could no longer see the artist or the figure he was drawing, the illusion. It was like thousands upon thousands of da Vinci drawings layered on top of each other, so dense and so extremely complex there was nothing to see. It was the opposite of nothing. It was everything. And all too much.

Just the other day—or perhaps this, too, is already several years away in the future—I ran into Peter Høeg, or rather I saw him again, for the second time in my life. It happens like this, out of the dismal grey: I have been visiting my publisher, for like the other Great Authors of Our Nation, I, too, now have a publisher, or rather my publisher has me, though what it wants with me I have absolutely no idea, I am certainly not good business; on the contrary, I am most probably Denmark’s leading worst seller, even if, fortunately, no one knows it apart from me, and the publisher, of course, my editor having just informed me after glancing at a screen that my latest book, unlike its predecessors that sold 128 and 329 copies respectively, has now just passed the 600 mark. I go out through the gateway and am walking along Pilestræde; the weather is very windy; the sky, I know nothing about the sky. I am looking down at the cobblestones, they are grey and glistening, slippery-looking in the drizzle. I cross Landemærket and continue on past Aage Jensen’s window display to glance in at the electronic keyboards and drum sets, the cymbals and hi-hats, the floor toms, the cheap Fender guitars made on licence in China that you can now get in a “starter pack” along with a case and a stand and a little amplifier, when suddenly I sense a slight fluctuation, a dark flutter at the periphery of my field of vision, and I know he is there. I stop, my heart suddenly racing, and turn around slowly. He is walking in my direction, some fifty metres further ahead on the other side of the street, passing the glass front of the Danish Film Institute, with the Kongens Have park to his rear. He walks quickly and with energy, not at any consistent pace, but in little fits and starts, as though the wind were propelling him on, nudging him chaotically along the pavement, unnoticed, it would seem, by everyone but me. He looks at least fifteen years older, which is not surprising, but nonetheless sad: at least fifteen years have passed since as a young man with at least twenty simultaneous lives within me, I saw him emerge from the congregation of Great Authors, the very hope of another world. He twirls around the corner and down Vognmagergade, slight and sinewy, tense, almost quivering, like a muscle that after forty years of unbroken focus on complete calm and equilibrium has now succumbed to cramp. He crosses the street and carries on past the windows of the Egmont Group building, turning his head as he goes, as if trying, not to look at something in particular, but rather to at least direct his eyes at something and keep them there for a moment, however brief. Then abruptly he stops, though without halting entirely, as yet in some continuing sideways motion, staring with wild intensity through a seemingly random windowpane, as though after twenty years someone has now seated themselves in the high-backed chair behind the polished mahogany desk of L. Ron Hubbard’s office display—but who? L. Ron himself?

And again I see myself reflected in him, the way I did twenty years earlier on the back seat of my parents’ car while heading north along the E45 motorway, only this time not as the person or persons I so much wanted to be, but as the one and only no one I have become: divorced, homeless, restlessly roaming, staggering unsettled from one day into the next, with strained and jagged features, and a look in my eyes that is far too intense, desperately searching, focused to the extreme, though without knowing exactly what I am searching for, but surely it can’t be L. Ron Hubbard?

It was like a video sequence, not a Hollywood movie, not even a cheap TV documentary, just a black-and-white clip from a surveillance camera, a recording that would certainly be forgotten, consigned to the endless fractal depths of the internet, seen by no one unless someone, me perhaps, by chance happened to notice, like when you’re standing in the checkout line in Netto and your eyes absently pass over the shelves of cheap German chocolate, and all of a sudden you see yourself in monochrome on the little monitor to the right of the checkout guy. It lasted less than a minute and concerned nothing, there was no story in it, no Conception, only what remained of one: a man, a human being, twirling around a corner and down a street, then gone.