* * *
She set the food on the table, glided away like a temple dancer at the court in Jakarta. Returned with a letter opener, laid a bundle of envelopes beside him.
There were no personal letters. He opened nothing. But he sat for a moment with each letter in his hand before he let it drop. He listened to its freedom, its mobility, its travels.
There was a postcard inviting him to an exhibit of modern Italian furniture, where even the spumante couldn't disguise how uncomfortable the pieces would be; a chiropractor would have to escort you home. There were somber-looking envelopes from collection agencies with return addresses in the Northwest. And tickets to a Doko E premiere. Discount offers from American airline companies. A letter from an English reference work, Great Personalities in 20th Century Comedy. He dropped them all on the table.
A telephone rang. The young woman appeared with the telephone on a small gold-lacquered tray.
They exchanged glances. He used a P.O. box at a mail service on Gasværk Street. Any letters and packages that arrived were brought here to the restaurant twice a week. His address in the national register was c/o Circus Blaff on Grøndal Parkway. He picked up letters from government authorities there every two weeks. The mail service was required to maintain confidentiality. Sonja on Grøndal Parkway would burn at the stake for him. Nobody should have been able to find him. Even Customs and Taxes had been forced to give up. Now someone had found him anyway. He lifted the receiver.
"Would it be okay if we came in fifteen minutes?"
It was the blond woman from the day before.
"That would be fine," he said.
She hung up. He sat with the humming receiver in his hand.
He called the information desk at Bispebjerg Hospital and was transferred to the children's psychiatric ward. Along with the government's School Psychology Office, the ward handled essentially all referrals of children from the Copenhagen area.
The receptionist transferred him in turn to von Hessen.
She was a professor in child psychiatry--he had worked with her on some of the more difficult children he'd had as patients. For the children, the process had been healing. For her, it had been complicated.
"It's Kasper. I had a visit from a man, a woman, and a child. A ten-year-old girl named KlaraMaria. They say you referred them."
She was too surprised to ask anything.
"We haven't had a child by that name. Not while I've been here. And we would never refer anyone. Without a previous arrangement."
She began to sum up. Painful aspects of the past.
"In any case," she said, "we would try to avoid referring anyone to you. Even if we had a previous arrangement."
Somewhere behind her Schubert's Piano Trio in E-Flat Major was playing. In the foreground a computer hummed.
"Elizabeth," he said. "Are you sitting there writing a personal ad?"
Her breathing stopped abruptly.
"Ads are a far too limited channel," he said. "Love demands that you open yourself. It needs a broader form of contact than the Internet. What would be good for you is body therapy. And something with your voice. I could give you singing lessons."
There was no response. In the silence he heard that it was Isaac Stern playing the violin. The soft very soft. The hard very hard. The technique seemingly effortless. And sorrow that was almost more than one could bear.
Somebody stood beside him; it was the young woman. She put a piece of paper in front of him. It was blank.
"The song," she said, "the poem. Write it down."
4
Darf Blünow's Stables and Ateliers consisted of four buildings that enclosed a large courtyard: an administration building with three small offices, two dressing rooms, and a large practice room. A rehearsal ring built as an eight-sided tower. A low riding house, behind which were stables and exercise and longeing pens. A warehouse containing workshops, sewing rooms, and storage lofts.
The cement surface of the courtyard was covered with a thin layer of quiet, clear rainwater. Kasper stood inside the entrance. The sun came out, there was a pause between gusts of wind. The water's surface hardened to a mirror. Where the mirror ended, the black Volvo stopped.
He walked to the middle of the courtyard and stood there, in water up to his ankles. His shoes and socks absorbed it like a sponge. It was like wading out into the fjord opposite the tent grounds at Rørvig Harbor on the first of May.
The car door opened, the little girl pattered along the side of the building. She was wearing sunglasses. Behind her, the blond woman. He reached the building and opened the door for them.
He walked into the rehearsal ring; the little lamp on the piano was lit. He turned on the overhead light. Took his shoes and socks off.
There was a fourth person in the room, a man. Daffy must have let him in. He sat six rows back, bolt upright against the emergency exit. The fire department wouldn't have liked that. He had something by one ear; the light was poor--maybe it was a hearing aid.
Kasper opened a folding chair, took the woman by the arm, and led her to the edge of the ring.
"I have to stand very close," she said.
He smiled at her, at the child, at the man by the fire exit.
"You will sit here," he said quietly. "Or else all of you will have to leave."
She stood there for a moment. Then she sat down.
He went back to the piano, sat down, and wrung the water out of his socks. The little girl stood next to him. He lifted the fall board. The atmosphere was a little tense. The important thing was to spread sweetness and light. He chose the aria from Bach's Goldberg Variations. Written to soothe sleepless nights.
"I've been kidnapped," said the girl.
She stood very close to the piano. Her face was extremely pale. The theme modulated to a type of fugue, rhythmic as a guanaco's gait, charming as a cradle song.
"I'll take you away," he said.
"Then they'll do something to my mother."
"You don't have a mother."
His voice sounded to him as if it belonged to someone else. "You just didn't know," she said.
"Do they have her too?"
"They can find her. They can find everyone."
"The police?"
She shook her head. The woman straightened up. The little CD player he used for morning practice stood on the piano. He chose a disc, turned the machine so the sound waves were in line with the man and woman. He led the girl into the shadow of the sound, and knelt in front of her. Behind him Sviatoslav Richter struck the first chords as if he wanted to pave the grand piano.
"How did you get them to bring you here?"
"I wouldn't do something for them otherwise."
"What?"
She didn't reply. He started from below. The tension in her legs, thighs, buttocks, hips, and abdomen was elevated. But not forcibly. No indication of sexual assault or anything like that. That would have caused stasis or a resigned lack of tension, even in her. But she was completely tight from just above the solar plexus, where the diaphragm attached to the stomach wall. The double sacrospinalis was as taut as two steel wires.
Her right hand, which the onlookers couldn't see, found his left hand. Against his palm he felt a tightly folded piece of paper.
"Find my mother. And then both of you come back for me."
The music faded.
"Lie down," he said. "It's going to hurt where my fingers are touching. Go into the pain, and listen to it. Then it will go away."
The sound came again. Richter played as if he wanted to pound the keys through the piano's iron frame. The man and woman had risen.
"Where are they keeping you?" he asked. "Where do you sleep?"
"Don't ask any more questions."
His fingers found a knotted muscle, double-sided, under the scapula. He listened to it; he heard pain of a magnitude a child should not know. A white, dangerous fury began to rise in him. The woman and the man walked into the ring. The girl straightened up and looked him in the eye.
"Do as I say," she said quietly. "Or else you'll never see me again."
He lifted his hands to her face and removed the sunglasses. The blow had struck the edge of her eyebrow; the blood had run down under her skin and collected above her jawbone. Her eye appeared to be unharmed.
She met his
gaze
. Without blinking. She took the sunglasses from his hands. Put them on.
He walked to the car with them, opened the door.
"Continuity is important in the beginning," he said. "It would be nice if she could come tomorrow."
"She goes to school."
"One works best within a context," he said. "I wonder what her situation is. Are her parents divorced, are there problems? A little information would help."
"We're just accompanying her," said the woman. "We need to get the family's permission first."
The girl's face was empty. Kasper stepped away from the car, and it rolled out into the sea.
He stuck his hand into his pocket to find something to write on. He found the playing card. He took his fountain pen and wrote down the license plate number. While he could still remember it. From the time one reaches forty, short-term memory slowly declines.
He felt the cold from below. It suddenly dawned on him that he was barefoot. The sawdust of the ring still stuck to the soles of his feet.
5
The trailer was parked behind the ring, by a row of electrical boxes and water connections. He turned on a light and sat down on the sofa. What the little girl had given him was a sheet of paper folded many times and pressed into a small, hard packet. He unfolded it very slowly. It was a post office receipt. She had drawn and written on the back of it.
The page looked like a child's version of a pirate map. There was a drawing of a house, flanked on each side with what looked like a toolshed; under the house she had written "hospital." Below the drawing were three words: "Lona Midwife." And "Kain." That was all. He turned the piece of paper over and read the receipt. The sender was the girl herself--she had written only her first name, Klara-Maria. He couldn't read the name of the addressee at first because his brain stopped functioning. He closed his eyes and sat for a while with his face in his hands. Then he read the name.
He stood up. From among the music scores in the bookcase he took a small bound copy of Bach's
Klavierbüchlein
and opened it. Inside was not the
Klavierbüchlein
but a passport; between its last two pages was a slip of paper with a series of telephone numbers written on it.
He carried the phone over to the coffee table and dialed the top number.
"Rabia Institute."
It was a young voice he hadn't heard before.
"This is the municipal health officer," he said. "May I speak to the deputy director?"
A minute went by. Then a body approached the telephone.
"Yes?"
It was an appetizing voice. A year ago he had met the woman to whom it belonged. A nibble could have cost him his upper and lower teeth. But not now. Her voice was hoarse and practically lifeless with sorrow.
He hung up. He had heard only the one word, but that was enough. It was the voice of someone who has lost a child.
He dialed the next number.
"The International School."
"This is Kasper Krone," he said, "leader of the Free Birds Troop. I have a message for one of my little girl scouts, KlaraMaria. Our patrol meeting has been changed."
The voice cleared its throat, tried to collect itself. Tried, despite the shock, to remember what someone had instructed it to say.
"She's in Jutland for a few days. Visiting some of her family. May I give her a message when she comes back? Is there a telephone number?"
"Just a scout greeting," he said. "From the Ballerup Division."
He leaned back on the sofa. And stayed like that. Until everything returned to normal. Except the tight, cold, little ball of anxiety in the pit of his stomach.
6
Ever since the mid-1700s, when James Stuart, the "Old Pretender," went to the guillotine in Paris and then picked up his severed head and left the Circus Medrano ring to apocalyptic applause, nobody had been able to take death onstage. It was the hardest thing to do. Kasper had tried for twenty years without success; he felt powerless, and now too.
He crossed Blegdam Road and took one of the side entrances facing Fælled Park. Rigshospital was like the gray backstage of a circus in the Underworld: the muffling effect of the white curtains, the patients' seminakedness, the uniformed employees. The hierarchies. The character roles. The quantity of polished steel. The sound of an invisible machine nearby. The taste of adrenaline in one's saliva. The sense of being at the edge.
He stepped out of the elevator. With the playing card in hand he made his way through the white labyrinth of bed units, found
the right room, and opened the door.
Out in the hall there had been fluorescent lighting and smoking was prohibited. In the room he now entered, antique English Bestlites lamps swam in a cloud of tobacco smoke. On a low bed set in a wide cherrywood frame a man sat cross-legged, surrounded by silk pillows, smoking a cigarette. Unfiltered, but monogrammed in gold.
"I have to be in court in half an hour," he said. "Come in and say hello to Vivian the Terrible."
The woman was in her mid-sixties and wore a doctor's white coat. Her skin was pale, almost transparent, and quite thin; he could hear her blood through it, blood and life. She held out her hand; it was warm, dry, and firm. She was in A-flat major. Under other circumstances he could have listened to her for hours.
"It's only five months since you were here last," said the sick man.
"I hope this isn't inconvenient for you."
"I've been performing down south."
"You haven't been advertised since Monte Carlo. You haven't been out of the country."
Kasper sat down in an easy chair. There were Karzamra carpets on the floor, shelves filled with books, a pianette, Richard Mortensen's circus paintings on the walls, a television large enough to be the box for the trick where the woman gets sawed in half.