Free The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel by Peter Hoeg

new acquisitions and investments—being particularly mindful of a new and promising world war—there you are; and here the will was as gracious as though this war were a gift to the bereaved, in their sorrow. Next came a month-by-month recital of the front-line positions, so that, when the time came, the newspaper could be first with the news. This will was a true catalogue of eternity. The Old Lady had not even considered it necessary to exhort her audience to listen and take all her words to heart. Nor was it necessary, since, during the reading, the terse sentences had retained all of her effrontery, to such an extent that now, before her family, she loomed large in the room, a solid specter that made them all sit even more improbably still than usual. Even Amalie stopped glancing at her father as the will set out the family’s private conditions and decreed which parts of the house they could frequent and specified their bedtimes and departures from these and when they might take sleeping drafts and where, under the bed, they could place their chamber pots and how Christoffer was to dress and the way in which his cuffs would fray: a never-ending number of details that were then discussed in greater depth in the footnotes. After having unfolded the course of Katarina’s illness and given a precise description of the last stages of her tuberculosis—during which Christoffer was to carry his wife’s bloody sputum to the public sewer twelve times a day, to prevent the children from being infected—this part of the will closed by predicting that the lawyer would pause at just this point because Katarina would have collapsed in a tearful coughing fit and because the reading could just as well continue another day, since it involved a catalogue of eternity, after all, and eternity does not change from one day to the next. So we can continue, the Old Lady snarled from the rice paper, we can carry on after the twenty-one days of mourning, which will be conducted as previously stated, and that’s that!
    To begin with, everything went as it should. For one week the newspaper was published with blank white sheets, meant, along with the broad black border that edged them, to remind everyone of the Old Lady—which they did.
    The following week the newspaper printed all the obituaries and poems and blessings and condolences written by important personages in Copenhagen. These letters gave the first clear indication of what a powerful influence the Old Lady had exerted, even over people who had never met her: there were letters from bishops and professors and landowners and company directors and famous surgeons, and a violin sonata composed for the Old Lady by the great violinist and virtuoso member of the Royal Theater orchestra Fini Henriques, and a poem in hexameter stanzas, filling four closely written pages and hailing the Old Lady as the Odysseus of the turbulent waters of politics, written by the country’s Minister of Justice, former counsel to the Supreme Court Peter Alberti, whose political career the Old Lady had at all times supported.
    During the third week the newspaper published the tribute from the town, and for this it expanded to include two extra sections in which everyone who could read and write wept publicly for the town’s patroness, our dear mother and grandmother and mother-in-law, benefactress of the hospitals, protector of the poor, patron saint of the chamber of commerce, angel of the dairies, fairy godmother of the banks, lady bountiful of the fire brigade, good Samaritan of the sanitation department, and among all these tears, besides the sorrow, there was an element of fearful trust, inasmuch as many of these people still found it hard to believe that the Old Lady, remembered by them as a wise woman, was dead. Especially when they heard how warmly and teasingly she had smiled, from her coffin, upon those who came to pay their respects.
    On the following Monday the newspaper was to be published as