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

churches were ringing for morning or evening prayer, they awoke to a paper full of hymn stanzas and quotations from Luther’s catechism and the dates of Danish military victories and the announcement that the great violinist and virtuous member of the royal orchard Fine Henriksen—as the printer’s apprentices put it—would be paying a visit to the town. Here was a mystery that the journalists wanted to have cleared up. On their way to the square they bumped into one another in streets filled with people who were rubbing sleep out of their eyes, or on their way home to bed, or who had just finished eating dinner. Outside the taverns, drinking cronies fought over what time it was, and they had to jump clear of the cobbled roadway so as not to be run down by a coach whose driver had collapsed in a heap on the box, weary with confusion, or trampled by horses whose riders had left them to go in search of some anchor to cling to in their lives. Wherever they went, they were pursued by the echo of the church bells, chiming at one and the same time for all the holy days and religious festivals of the year. This clamor pursued them all the way to the square, which, though it had been morning when they left their homes, lay bathed in moonlight. Beneath the stars, in the chill blue light, the stall holders were selling vegetables that were not in season, and here they met Christoffer Ludwig. He was sitting on the box of the newspaper’s big four-wheeled cart, his eyes were bloodshot with weariness, and the clothes that he had been wearing for a space of time as indeterminate as everything else were covered with a layer of lead dust from the printshop. But his eyes were shining as he—who had never learned to drive a cart—left the horse to find its own way around to the newspaper’s subscribers, delivering the morning’s paper, which he had written and corrected and typeset and made up and printed, folded, and glued all by himself, and if his eyes were shining it was because he was now sure that this was exactly what the will had predicted. He had, in fact, been reminded of the wording once the printers had fallen asleep at the presses after working nonstop through a night that would never come to an end and during which, after having written and printed the paper, they then had to deliver it because all the paperboys, bar one, had joined the frantic commotion on the streets. As he stood alone in the printshop with the sleeping workers, who looked like victims of a fire—slumped, arms poised to lunge, covered with lead dust, scraps of paper, and printing-ink stains—Christoffer’s gloom and doubt were dispersed by a dazzling light and he heard his mother’s voice reading aloud the section of the will which declared that the responsibility now rested on his shoulders.
    Christoffer thought he had better check this. That he succeeded in finding his way back to the room in which the echo of the lawyer’s reading still hung in the air, and the will lay, undisturbed, on the desk, seemed to him like some sort of confirmation, as though his mother had reached out a hand to him. Christoffer wanted, first of all, to count the number of sheets of rice paper, but he never succeeded. As he lifted the white bundle, the paper crumbled into dust between his fingers. He left the room not knowing that he would never find it again and without noticing that there was something very wrong with the furnishings. The tapestries and the rough wooden furniture and the torches on the walls and the chessboard-patterned marble floor belonged not to his own time but to another. For the first time, on his way through the house, he did not look at the clocks, and so he did not notice, either, that they had come to a standstill. Just as he did not hear the housemaids panting as they ran from room to room winding up the precious timepieces to keep them going, while their dinner was sticking to the bottom of the pots in the kitchens, and rooms and windows