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

normal. On that Sunday the journalists got on with their work, suspecting nothing and unaware of the electricity in the air. They wrote their articles, all of which still dealt with the way the town grieved for its lost daughter and mother, and how it would take a while for it to recover from its loss—as predicted in the will, which was also mentioned—and then they went home. And from that moment things started to go wrong: that night they slept a sleep filled with oppressive dreams, and this sleep ran on and on into an endless night that was morning for others in the town. With the result that the journalists did not turn up for work at the time that was, for some, the next day.
    Do not expect me to know what happened to Rudkøbing on that night and in the time that followed. The best I can do is to say that time apparently lost its significance. It is possible that at that very moment, and purely by chance, Rudkøbing passed through one of those points in the universe where time stands still. It is also possible that this confusion arises because I have to rely upon Amalie’s and Christoffer’s memories of what happened. Because in one sense they were, of course, obedient; in one sense they were the Old Lady’s son and grandchild; but they were also rebels, and it is quite likely that their greatest wish had been to see the Old Lady’s laboriously maintained timing fall apart. If so, then Rudkøbing’s chaotic time was actually Christoffer’s and Amalie’s dream. But if that is the case, then it was a discreet, almost covert dream, since, initially, time administered a severe shock to Christoffer. He was the first to arrive at work, the first to see that something was wrong. He noticed that the journalists had not shown up, and when he opened the morning paper he discovered that it bore a date from a lifetime ago and was filled with articles on people from a bygone age who had died long ago in places that no longer existed. He had risen from his chair to walk over to the printshop when a sudden impulse made him pull back the curtain to see the morning sun coloring the roof of the white house on the other side of the dark courtyard. Instead he saw the stars, and as he walked through the building on his way to the printshop he passed through rooms facing onto the square, where dust particles danced in the winter morning sunlight—yes, we all heard it right, winter morning sunlight. And when nighttime and daytime are present simultaneously, then something is really wrong. Then anyone less well schooled than Christoffer, or less odd, would have quit the place. But not he. He went on to the printshop, which he found deserted apart from four printer’s apprentices, who had suffered no ill effects from this crazy merger of night and day other than some slight headaches.
    The gap between these four men and Christoffer was very wide, one might almost say colossal. It had been part of the Old Lady’s lifework to create the gulf across which her employees and her son, Christoffer Ludwig, now regarded one another. Furthermore, there had never been any need for them to speak to one another, since the Old Lady’s commands rang in all their ears. And so Christoffer circulated among his workers like some solitary sleepwalker, trying to recall whether these unexpected difficulties had been predicted in his mother’s will. Finally he leaned up against a big printing press, looked into the expectant faces, and said, “Gentlemen, you will have to write the newspaper.”
    The Old Lady had always made sure that everyone employed by the family could read and write, for the very reason that she herself had never mastered these skills. But, faced by the white sheets of paper, all that the printer’s apprentices could call to mind was the fragmentary schooling from the distant days of their childhood. When the journalists awoke from their sleep to a light belonging neither to day nor to night, in which the bells of the town’s