As she did so, before her wondering eyes the room filled with people, with a new light from all the glittering gowns, and with the clamor of voices. At one end of the room, amid much laughter and gaiety, a little group was practicing some dance steps in time to the music, and over against the opposite wall her colleague, Monsieur le Docteur, was deep in conversation with two young girls, their bodies inclining toward him. He was now dressed in a long coat and narrow trousers that set off his perfectly formed calves and, just as Charlotte caught sight of him, he lifted up one girl’s dress with all the assurance of an expert and placed his hand on her thigh and she laughed, enchanted. With that rare, transcendent sensation of being both part of all of this and outside it, Charlotte steered Jean-Luc to the upright desk and in a whisper begged him for just the first line. And with his back to her, thus shielding whatever he wrote on the paper, the young man proceeded to write slowly and with great concentration. This done, he closed the book and took her in his arms once more. Never once taking her eyes from his, she went with him, backward, through the room, and, all smiles, the party guests made way for them as if for a couple trying out a tricky gavotte. Out through the door they went and the music increased in volume. They were now standing in the adjoining room behind the pianist hunched over the spinet and so wrapped up in his playing that he did not once turn his head. With her face an inch from the poet’s, Charlotte allowed him to lift up her dress. As he propped up her thigh she thought fleetingly of what Bohr had said about the scientist’s being at all times both actor and audience and then she yielded, for had she not always been willing to sacrifice anything for the truth, and as he slid inside her, she was bombarded by a storm of images and feelings and she understood that, from a physiological point of view, she must now be linked up to the historiometric discharger that had—through this boy, her medium—put her in touch with this bygone age, and just before desire washed over her, she realized, gurgling and ecstatic, that she had been right, that modern love was but a shadow of the love of times past, that emotions decay, that her theories had been borne out in every detail.

  * * *

  That night the storm tore up the freshly planted saplings, toppled Rousseau’s monument, and in a sense, in so doing, swept the garden back into an earlier condition. It also blew in several windows of the laboratory and gusted a lake of water across the scrubbed floorboards. Then it went on its way, and the next morning when Charlotte entered the laboratory the white sun and blue sky could be seen reflected in the floodwaters as perfectly as in a mirror with not a single refractive fault.

  That morning Charlotte had woken instantaneously. She had fallen, so to speak, into the shimmering morning without warning, to find herself alone in the white lacquered bed, one of the props from the Louvre that had been put to one side.

  She woke up bereft of memory and with no thought of the future, with the stunned notion that all laws of nature had been declared null and void, that she was now faced with a life that could go any way. Then she opened the door into the salon and, in a desperate attempt at self-irony, thought to herself that this was how the chosen women would feel on the morning after the Day of Judgment, when they came to take stock of the devastation and realized that this truly was the end of all things and that ahead of them lay the big cleanup, and nothing but that.

  The gardener lay on his back, snoring, in the shallow layer of water. In his fall the wires had pulled the control panel over onto its side and smashed the instruments. Charlotte stood for a moment or two looking down at him. Then she bent over him, not to caress him but to brush the hair back first from one temple and then the other. She found no trace of scarring.

  She waded through the mirrorlike water toward the doctor. He was sitting in a chair, and he was dead. On the floor next to him sat the empty mortar. Charlotte looked at him long and hard and understood that there was no talk here either of an accident or of suicide. As surely as if he had advised her of his decision, she knew that the great psychotherapist had turned his back on his neurotic age and taken the big step backward into the free and uninhibited eighteenth century.

  As a reminder of the massive surge in blood pressure at the moment of death, out of his unbuttoned trousers jutted a rampant white erection, preserved by a physiologically unaccountable but undeniably lustful rigor mortis.

  Stiffly, Charlotte pressed on to the desk and opened the book in which the previous evening the young man had written something for her. In a clumsy and unpracticed hand there stood:

  “No one journeys this far for a love that will decay.”

  * * *

  A week later, as Charlotte came out of the doorway leading to the offices of the special court of inquiry in the Palais de Justice on the Quai des Orfèvres, a figure on the stairway at her back stood up and slowly followed her down the front steps.

  “I’ve been thinking about the principles of love,” said the gardener.

  Charlotte did not turn.

  “I don’t believe there is any such thing as a closed system when it comes to us humans,” he said.

  She kept going and even the faint tap of her heels on the marble tiles was amplified in the resonance chamber formed by the huge courtyard.

  “Through love, energy increases,” said the gardener.

  Charlotte’s back remained deaf to him.

  “Perpetual motion,” the youth called out, “can be reached in one leap!”

  At this, Charlotte stopped dead and turned to face him. Though this may only have been in order to contradict him.

  PORTRAIT OF THE AVANT-GARDE

  ON AN OCTOBER DAY IN 1939, the painter Simon Bering and his friend Nina sailed out to the island of Christiansø. They sailed from Svaneke harbor on his twenty-eighth birthday, by which time six years had elapsed since the major exhibition at which his paintings had first made a wide public catch their breath the way one does when stepping out into the cold, then caused their eyes to water as if in a stiff headwind, and thereafter—and ever since—moved them to part with their money for a share in his faith in the future.

  Simon painted large-scale canvases across which the twentieth century progressed as an unrelenting cavalcade of machines and horses and military detachments and forest fires. Back then, these had raised a storm that had not yet died down and had gone so far as to blow him into the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste, to which only a very few foreigners of immaculate racial pedigree were ever admitted.

  One March night ten years earlier, as if in a fever Simon had painted the first of these pictures, works that did not close up to form flat planes but instead opened up like gateways into the future, and on this day in October he felt as though what was now happening to him came as a direct result of that night a decade before, as though—on a new and higher plane, so to speak—he was reliving that first breakthrough to himself.

  A weaker character might have been bowled over by such fame, but not Simon, who believed that he belonged to a generation and a race healthier than any before them had ever been. With the money that all at once began to pour in, he placed a hard-nosed agent between himself and the public and bought property in the center of Copenhagen, an old yellow house with a garden surrounded by high walls. Here he found the relative peace at the eye of the typhoon, here he was able to work, and here the gale that howled around his pictures and his person filtered through to him as no more than a gentle tailwind bringing congratulations and a soft rain of gold.

  He could have chosen to live and work as a recluse. He could have had his vast paintings carted off through the gates of the yellow house and could have watched from a safe distance as they detonated like shells in the capitals of Europe, but he did not. For Simon was also a speech maker. He felt a powerful urge to use words to speed the truths contained in his paintings on their way, for the word is also a brush and with it he wished to stand up in front of an assembly, to feel the crowd seething, to look upon these weaker brethren as a white canvas set before him, to make electrifying contact, create awareness, and then lean forward and apply his own hectic flush of color to the white faces upturned to his like so many blank pages. Hence the fact that the huge locomotives that thundered across his pictures also conveyed him all over Europe, a young prophet of a new age and a new truth. To begin with, he addressed art lovers only, but later he also made speeches at political rallies, and in Berlin on August 2, 1934, he assured his listeners that the young artists of Europe were right behind Germany’s new leader and chancellor. He told them there was only one God, and that was progress. His celebrity earned him a hearing and because he was young he got away with saying more than many others; thus Simon succeeded in giving clear and crystallized expression to ideas that at that time were still vague and diffuse, speaking always with the same fresh and forthright power as when in Berlin—at the joint opening of the Olympics and the art exhibition in 1936—he had raised his strong, pale face to a public gathering, looked out across that sea of humanity, and said fiercely, straight into the microphone, that while we are waiting for the great war we so fervently desire, we must arm ourselves with art that can cut to the quick of our souls, and this art must be painting. Books and music are for people beset by doubts; the war and the future decree that we must march and observe, not molder in theaters and reading rooms.

  Nina came to him as simply as his fame or an idea for a picture. He advertised for a housekeeper, having need of a helpmate, and one day there she was, standing before him, younger than he but steady-voiced as she assured him that she was up to the job. She spoke a dialect new to him, but true to his theories that the past is of no consequence he did not question her further. To his own surprise there came a day when he realized that he enjoyed having her around. Later he began to feel homesick for her when he traveled. And in the end he dreaded leaving her.

  One day when things had reached this stage, he was standing behind her in a bright room. The sun dissolved her contours into a yellow haze and condensed her figure to a black silhouette. Rooted to the spot by some obscure expectation, Simon tried out an exercise he had resorted to on previous occasions when—faced with a white expanse of canvas—he had been overcome by doubt. He closed his eyes and made his mind go blank, then slowly opened his eyes once more, imagining as he did so that until then the world had not existed but that it was being created, like a painting, in the moment that he laid eyes on it. Now, too, this method brought relief. With eyes screwed up against the light, he could see that another figure stood alongside that of the girl, and by stretching his creative faculty slightly he saw that it was himself.

  And then he kissed her.

  In keeping with his conviction that all ancient rituals were absurd, marriage was never an option for Simon and he was secretly proud of the fact that he never presented his declarations of love to Nina as anything but casual remarks. He had long since told the public at large that the true essence of love lay in there being no strings attached and he had an agreeable feeling that this put him, historically speaking, in good company with the long string of artistic movements that, since the middle of the previous century, had underlined their own particular brand of the avant-garde by proclaiming the virtues of free love.

  Between himself and Nina, therefore, he had naturally insisted on a distance befitting two modern individuals. Since he traveled a great deal and worked even more, this distance was something that grew up all unbidden and they had been living together for a year before he learned that she had been born on Christiansø, an island that, as far as the map of Denmark is concerned, is near enough the end of the world. On this same occasion she told him that she was pregnant.

  * * *

  It was then that Simon decided to take a break in his life to rediscover the peace he had lost in the course of the preceding six years. He made his decision known to the world at a party he gave for his friends at the restaurant Stephan à Porta in Copenhagen. The guest list was composed of young businessmen, politicians, artists, and army officers, who demonstrated their contempt for the past by smashing champagne glasses against the walls, eating beluga caviar and Russian peas with their fingers, and fighting with the waiters and one another. At one point only did they quiet down and that was when Simon made his speech, but then on the other hand you could have heard a pin drop in the large room.

  “There are,” said Simon, “three stages along the way to total control over life.

  “The first leads out of the nursery. From infancy, the world bends over us in the form of a woman: mothers, wet nurses, maids, and governesses endeavor to block our path to life. The first prerequisite for freedom is, therefore, the ability to say: I will do as I please with my own person. It is to this point that we are attempting to bring the masses. A man cannot march if he is still lying in the cradle. There is no way the necessity of war can be discerned from a nursery.

  “But then comes the next stage, on which stand the politician and the soldier”—and here Simon let his eye fall on those politicians and soldiers in attendance. “This is reached when we become capable of infecting others with our own enthusiasm and then steer them in the right direction, when we have dominion over life and death, when we can do as we please with other people.

  “Then there is a third stage: for my own part, I have given the world six years of my life. I have quelled all wishy-washy deliberation and rolled light and dark into one and played my part in raising the waters that are now washing over Europe. I have given the world an art form that is akin to a slap in the face.”

  Here Simon paused and eyed every single member of the company, feeling that his words had gotten through to them like a sudden attack of sobriety and that it was no longer clear whether they were his guests or his victims.

  “Now,” he went on, “the world has become accustomed to this slap in the face. If I were to stop for a moment, the world would come crawling to me and grab me by the throat with one hand while begging me with the other to give it a sound beating. And so I have made up my mind that during this seventh year I will rest, and this I have decided to do in order to show that I can do with the world exactly as I please.”

  * * *

  Three weeks later, Nina and Simon set sail from Svaneke harbor. It was the first day of winter; from the south there blew a wind so cold that it seemed to come straight off some icy waste. The town of Svaneke is built atop rocky cliffs that slope steeply down to the harbor, and the cauldron thus formed caught the chill winds and swept them over the quayside and the white mail boat and the reporters who had pursued Simon, all of whom felt it as a reminder of their own mortality. They had made the journey on behalf of their newspapers and their readers, to write a piece about Simon’s departure and his birthday, but for the moment all of that was forgotten. By now they were chilled to the bone, worn out, and greatly preoccupied with the war in Europe. A number of them fully expected on their return to be fired for some unspecified reason or to be posted overnight to distant war zones, and every one of them feared for the future, every one of them was haunted by just one question: How will it all end? And suddenly, this morning on the quayside, it seemed to them that this celebrated, pale-faced agitator ought to be able to answer that question. But Simon waved them away, roughly shoving back one of their number who was rash enough to follow him up the gangplank. They have been sent, he thought to himself, by the life I am about to leave behind, to prolong the leavetaking, but for me, for the new man, taking leave of the old life is a pleasure. And he turned his back on them.

  As they sailed out of the harbor the reporters followed them along the pier like lost children.

  * * *

  For as long as the town was still visible off the boat’s stern, the sea was sluggish, menacing, and of the color of congealing pewter. Then Simon shut his eyes and made his mind go blank. Only now does the world come into being, he thought. Then he felt warm sunshine on his eyelids, as though the boat had sailed into summer. And to say that in especially hot summers the seas around Bornholm store up the warmth of the sun and create an unnatural postponement of winter would be a feeble rebuttal to the sense of omnipotence with which Simon was filled as he gradually opened his eyes, creating first the season and his own hands on the rail in front of him, then Nina’s silhouette, then—with triumphant awareness of his sex as a mighty brush—the child in her belly, and finally the blue sea under the sun and, sitting on the horizon, the two tiny islands—Christiansø and the even-smaller Frederiksø—and, like a fine black thread, the bridge connecting them.

  He noticed that Nina had her eyes shut. “You’re dreaming,” said Simon. “It’s the way of the world: women dream and men act.” Nina look at him, sharp-eyed. “Don’t you dream?” she asked. Simon thought fleetingly of his pictures. “Even my dreams are actions,” he said and immediately felt that he ought to follow up such an astute remark. He glanced round at the other passengers, trying to judge whether this might be the right spot for an impromptu speech.

  Suddenly Nina was standing very close to him and when she spoke she was as grave as he had ever seen her.

  “We went to school on Frederiksø,” she said softly, “and there we learned about Bjarke’s dreams. During the battle at Lejre, Bjarke slept while a fearsome bear fought in his place. They tried to wake him but he said: ‘Leave me to dream.’ Nonetheless they forced him to come with them and at that the bear vanished. The bear was Bjarke’s dream.”

  Full of incredulous wonder, Simon realized that, for the first time ever, Nina had given him a warning. But of what he could not tell.

  “The dreams of women,” he said coolly, “are not bears.” And on that note he would have liked to end the conversation, but it stuck in his mind like a burr, like a prophecy he did not understand.

  * * *

  By their second day on the island, Simon was admitting to himself that everything around him was totally alien to him and that Nina had come home.

  He had always thought of himself—and often painted himself—as some fiery natural phenomenon, as an uninterrupted volcanic eruption, setting light to everything around it without itself ever being touched by its surroundings. He had always been of the opinion that it was he who spoke to mankind while it, in turn, kept its mouth shut and listened. Now, for the first time in a long, long while, he found himself passing unrecognized in the street. Not only that, but on this little island, which one could stroll around in an hour, there was not so much as a street on which he might be recognized, only dirt paths. On these paths they bumped into people who remembered Nina. These people greeted him kindly and asked after his health without knowing or understanding that before them stood a world-famous painter and eminent philosopher. Then they turned to talking to and about Nina. In his unaccustomed role as listener to a story with a central character other than himself and as spectator to a day-to-day life in which he figured as a welcome but anonymous guest, Simon noticed that there was something wrong with the vision of the people around about him. Their life, he now saw, lacked perspective. The men were fishermen who would now and again stare into the deeps and now and again into the heavens but who more often than not kept their eyes on the tools in their hands. As for the women, as a rule they gazed into the cooking pots and occasionally up at the religious samplers on the walls and sometimes down at the children. But no one, thought Simon, neither man nor woman, ever looks straight ahead; here, he thought, the horizon wraps itself so closely around them that even their questions do not stretch beyond the bare necessities of the daily round they follow with such short strides that they have no hope of ever getting on in life. He felt very lonely, and in his loneliness he caught himself missing the upturned faces of his audiences and his picture in the newspaper and the feverish chatter of private viewings, and it occurred to him that possibly, just possibly my public has given me something after all.