“That,” he said, deeply grateful, “is exactly how it began. With a headache.”

  Across the hatch, the yellow light from the lamp cast a gigantic magnification of the clown’s silhouette, like an immense black wall. Now Kristoffer leaned toward this wailing wall and opened up his heart, and to his great astonishment he found that it was not empty.

  “One day in the gymnasium, during a fencing lesson, I turned my back on Castenskiold,” he said.

  “In a fight,” said the dwarf, “you should never turn your back.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” said Kristoffer. “You see, all of a sudden I realized that it wasn’t him I was fencing with. In a way it was myself. Can you understand that?”

  The clown moved a step closer to him. “Yes,” he said, “that does happen to some. Particularly at school. A voice”—he eyed Kristoffer keenly—“there was a voice which spoke to you, wasn’t there?”

  Until that moment it had never occurred to Kristoffer that there might have been a voice. But now the clown’s eyes, which had been gleaming in the darkness before him, seemed to shed fresh light on his shadowy recollection, and as he recalled the echo of the gymnasium, the sound of canvas shoes on the copper surface of the piste, the clash of foil on foil, he heard the still distant but unmistakable sound of a voice speaking to him.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “There was a voice. But”—he looked imploringly at Monsieur Andress—“it’s so faint that I can hardly hear it.”

  At this the clown leaned forward, and above Kristoffer’s head the loft suddenly receded and he beheld the beams and wall bars of the gymnasium. And through the words of command he heard a voice that sounded exactly like Monsieur Andress’s asking: “Why do you fight?”

  Kristoffer got to his feet with a start, as if trying to shake off a nightmare, but the question held him pinned him to the spot. In self-defense he clutched at the first words to enter his head.

  “Because,” he said, “the important thing is to take part.”

  He caught sight of the old man’s gray hair, on a level with his face, and realized that he was on his knees. He wanted to say something, wanted to turn this conversation onto another tack, but there was a relentless air about the dwarf now.

  “And yet you know,” said the voice, “that if you lose today, you will make those who are watching even more unhappy than if you had not competed.”

  “Yes,” said Kristoffer.

  “So why do you fight?” The voice was insistent.

  “To win,” answered Kristoffer.

  “And if you win,” the voice persisted, “how long will you and the spectators take pleasure in your victory?”

  Kristoffer did not reply.

  “One night, perhaps,” said the voice. “Perhaps one hour. Or one minute. Is that not so?”

  “Yes,” said Kristoffer.

  “Porca madonna,” said the voice. “Such a fleeting moment for which to wear out your youth.”

  Like a priest who, having blessed the congregation, turns to face the altar, the dwarf wheeled around. But now Kristoffer would not let him go. With a great effort of will he pulled himself to his feet, pushing off from the homespun sack at his side, then went after the clown, torn between his terror at the thought of his apparent transparency before those bright eyes in the darkness and his need to hear the voice come with its answers.

  “What about school?” he asked. “What about going to school?”

  With a flick of his hand Monsieur Andress motioned to him to stay where he was.

  “Don’t they still tell you that you’re being fitted for life,” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Kristoffer.

  “And when life begins,” said the clown, “they’ll tell you that you live to work and that you must all work for your country and your children. Those children who in school da gerade are starting to learn that they are being fitted for life. And so it goes, so all of them—i goglioni—push life ahead of them, all the while bawling that they cannot catch up with it.” And slowly he recited: “Piu le cose cambiano, piu sono le stesse cose.”

  With an assurance born of knowing in advance the effect of one’s lines, Monsieur Andress turned his back on Kristoffer, positioned himself in the hatch, and peered down into the yard. And as if he himself had conjured up an effective underscoring of his own words, a string of lightning flashes threw his silhouette into black relief against a sky seething with electricity.

  Although Kristoffer could now feel in his blood a thin, cold coursing trickle of fear of this thing of which he was now a part, nonetheless he was spurred on by the thought that he might never again be presented with such a chance.

  “How,” he asked, “did you know there was a voice?”

  Slowly Monsieur Andress turned. And now when he stepped down to stand beside Kristoffer there was a somewhat cunning air about him.

  “There is always a voice,” he said. “All one has to do is listen. That is how I work in the ring.”

  His eyes grew distant and Kristoffer envisaged him in the square with his head cocked, listening in the night for a sound that only he could hear.

  “I have the audience in the palm of my hand,” he said, and his voice was languorous, enraptured, “I’ve collected their jewelry, I’ve been out there mingling with the crowd. And then I hear a voice, far-off and quite faint but still perfectly clear. And it says I am to bring a boy up onto the stage.”

  He took Kristoffer’s hand and meekly the boy followed the dwarf into the center of the room. For a second his mind turned to the assistant the clown had once used in his act, who had been the envy of everyone. Now, he thought, I have taken that boy’s place.

  “We are standing on the stage,” said Monsieur Andress, “the people in the audience are on the edge of their seats, and I feel something grow out there in the night. I hear the voice whispering about a good number. It whispers: “You have a boy. Now get hold of a girl as well. And tonight you will do something tremendous. Something to make the bells ring. And they are already ringing.” He turned to Kristoffer. “When the bells ring,” he said, “something momentous is afoot.”

  “The church bells?” asked Kristoffer, thinking of Monsieur Andress’s clerical past.

  “No,” whispered the clown, with a faraway look in his eyes. “No, not the church bells. It’s the cash register bells that will chime. If we just find ourselves a girl.”

  It was at this point that Kristoffer became aware of someone’s making their way up the stairs. Under other circumstances, this fact would have filled him with astonishment and sadness at his hideout having been discovered. But this night, in the grip of the clown’s magnetism, without being fully conscious of doing so, he chose no longer to be surprised.

  Then the girl was standing before them. Under other circumstances, Kristoffer would have stared at her, but he was not at all sure that she existed. Like the voice that had spoken to him and that was still ringing in his ears, she seemed to him a half-illusory prop in some supernatural performance. All he saw was that she was soaking wet, so wet that her long hair, which under other circumstances—if she indeed existed under other circumstances—must have been curly, now hung down over her shoulder, sending great drops of water cascading down her body and onto the floor. The utter improbability of her appearance was only added to by the fact that she was barefoot and to all appearances naked. Then Monsieur Andress dragged his attention back to himself, took the girl’s hand, and drew them both out onto the floor, and when he now bowed to an imaginary audience, Kristoffer recognized, from the show in the square, the characteristic salute that, beneath its superficial deference, maintained a firm grip on the hearts and minds of the spectators.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the clown, “I give you a young girl and a young man.”

  He turned to face them. “There is something momentous in the offing this evening,” he announced in measured tones. “Something that will make us all richer. In experience and in wisdom. My talent lies in picking up this feeling and putting it across to the audience. We, the audience and I, are expecting something quite beyond belief. Granted, I do not know how this will come about. I have no idea. But I am all ears.” And he cocked his head to one side, as if listening to the night sky.

  Then the girl took two steps forward and uttered a low moan, which sounded at one and the same time like a snarl and the prelude to a bout of vomiting.

  Looking straight at her for the first time, Kristoffer saw that she was not naked but simply so sopping wet that her dress was plastered to her body. He had been brought up to live in the world of good, solid facts, for which there is a language that is simple, blithe, and efficacious. The events of the past few weeks and more especially the last hour had, however, transported him into another and more perilous landscape, in which he found unexpected and fabulous turns of phrase coming into his head. He did not think he had ever laid eyes on the girl before, but he knew she was a princess. Right at this moment, nothing of what he had learned at school seemed to be readily accessible, and he could not place her as coming from any known mythology, but to his mind she resembled a tragic heroine from one of the great dramas. She was pale. Not wan and colorless, but with a throat and face of a lustrous snowy white; a chill wind hung in her clothes and he was in no doubt that with her she had brought some horrendous experience. Where Monsieur Andress had appeared in the loft surrounded by the light of transfiguration, the girl radiated a kind of exalted lunacy.

  She took two faltering steps across the floor, and only then appeared to notice the young man and the old. There was no way of telling what chaotic thoughts were running through her head but she seemed to have grasped the solemnity of the situation, for slowly she pulled herself erect, as if to deliver the eloquent opening line that was only to be expected of her. She raised one arm and stared fixedly at Monsieur Andress.

  “I know everything there is to know,” she intoned, “about cod.”

  Then she pitched forward, making no effort to save herself, and would have smashed her face against the floor had Kristoffer not caught her.

  No sooner did he feel her weight than he, too, felt the breath of the chill air that surrounded her. It was the wind from the sea and just for a moment he wondered whether she had come close to drowning.

  Then he recognized her.

  There had been only one person in Kristoffer’s life with whom he had shared the secret of his loft, and to this person—someone he had never spoken of to another living soul—his thoughts had kept returning, as to a warm rock amid the torrent of pointlessness he considered his life to have been. This person was Sonja Vaden. She was the same age as Kristoffer, the daughter of a fisherman whose family might well have taken their name from the town, but whom progress had long since driven beyond its walls to a windswept corner of the fjord. Anywhere else in Denmark these two children would have been separated for their own good, and it would have been explained that the social realities that divided them were a fact that it was in no man’s power to change. But in Vaden Town no one could bring himself to be that hard-hearted and so the two children continued playing on the shore and on the hills above the town. Sonja had lost her mother at the age of five, a sorrow she had faced squarely and without breaking. When Kristoffer’s mother turned away from her husband and her child to follow her voices, Sonja offered Kristoffer—wordlessly but instantly and unreservedly—her companionship and her slight but remarkably strong shoulders, to help him get over this terrible blow. Day after day, for weeks and months on end, Kristoffer wept when he was in Sonja’s company, inconsolable tears that no one but she was ever allowed to see. This had been followed by a spring when, he recalled, he had hauled his wagon up to the highest point above the town and driven Sonja down the snaking path with the sun and the wind from the sea in his face and a cloud of dust at his back.

  And then she disappeared. Throughout her childhood her father had been in the habit of taking her out fishing with him. One October day they had gone out very early in the morning. Around noon the wind had risen and when at long last Kristoffer had caught sight of the little boat from his hatch the wind had built up into a storm that swept across the sea like a huge, cold scythe, slicing off the tops of the waves and whisking them away across the water as white streamers of foam. Somewhere in that howling gale a sidelong swell had washed across the boat from astern and carried off Sonja’s father. The girl had lashed herself to the wheel and through the storm had steered the boat toward the shore. The entrance to Vaden harbor was a narrow one and the townspeople had looked on despairingly and helplessly as the girl in the tiny vessel neared the jetty with its cruelly grinning, stony rows of teeth—teeth that, in that boiling sea, were blanketed by white spume. There was not one among them who would not have risked his or her life for a child in distress if it would have done any good, but the storm had now increased to a force that made any attempt at rescue impossible, so they gritted their teeth against their sobs and thought, full of bitter hatred for the sea, that they would not forget this, that there would come a day when not even nature itself would be able to take a child from them.

  Kristoffer, too, had gone down to the harbor. But unlike most of the people gathered there he did not weep. He had walked out farther than anyone else and no one had had the strength to hold him back. Clinging to the harbor’s tall green entrance beacons he had gazed out at the boat, and the only water that found its way into his eyes was sea spray. Sonja had taught him that to everything there is a season. There had been a time to weep, but that time was not now. Now was a time to be strong. Immediately outside the harbor entrance Sonja reversed the engine and with remarkable coolheadedness, as if a little of the sea had entered her blood, she held the boat against the wind and the swell. Kristoffer alone knew why. At one point when despair had looked liable to get the better of him, she had told him that all the misfortunes in life come in waves. “And Kristoffer,” she had said, “you have to count, because every seventh wave is smoother than the rest. That’s the one you have to try to ride.”

  Now Kristoffer could see how Sonja counted the swells and how, just before the seventh, she lined up the boat, opened the throttle wide, and rode into the harbor on the clean crest of a high and perfectly level wave, only inches clear of the starboard jetty.

  Once inside the harbor basin she had collapsed. When they brought the boat into the quayside, Kristoffer had watched as they lifted her out and she had been every bit as white-faced then as she was now. Just as she came abreast of him she had opened her eyes, and he was the first person she saw. “Kristoffer,” she had said, and Kristoffer had bent over her and she had whispered so that only he could hear: “Could you take the tiller for a while?”

  As far as he could remember, that was the last time he had really seen her.

  She did, to be sure, stay on in the town, having been taken in by a reclusive uncle and a careworn aunt, people who had looked for the worst from life and gotten it. Their only child had been stillborn, a fisherman’s life was a poor and a perilous one, and in religion alone they had found bounty and quiet waters. They regarded Vaden Town much as they regarded the sea: reluctantly, fearfully, and with the feeling that it was an unavoidable evil that lay in wait for them each morning outside their front door, dogged their footsteps all day long, and did not let them out of its clutches until they were back home with the door locked behind them.

  Mindfulness of the woes which Sonja brought in her wake weighed them down even more, causing them to turn their backs even further on the world and hover even closer around the girl. They consulted a doctor, and following this visit Sonja was removed from the town’s coeducational school and sent to Lady Moltke’s school for girls, to which she was escorted each day by her new mother. Her foster parents did not belong to either the drama or the musical society, they did not take walks or attend the dances held in the town, so from then on, Kristoffer caught only glimpses of Sonja, who was always accompanied by an adult. For a while he tried to find some way of getting in touch with her, but this state of affairs was a new one to him and bewildering. He took to going to church every Sunday, sure that there, at least, he would be able to see her. But then her aunt and uncle switched to one of the small, intransigent Free Church congregations whose temple lay down by the harbor, a little whitewashed building to which no one gained entry unless his heart had been scrupulously studied and weighed. And feeling that his inner being could never bear such scrutiny, Kristoffer stayed away. Besides which, all the grown-ups in Vaden said that what Sonja needed was to be shielded and that this was best done by leaving her alone. So, unwillingly and with his longing for her like a flame that never died, Kristoffer abandoned the search for his lost friend.

  But now when, suddenly, he found himself holding her in his arms and realized that he was big enough to carry her and that she had changed to the point where she might have been a stranger to him, he also found himself thinking—of the rest of his life, as it were: but it’s too late now anyway.

  Monsieur Andress removed the cork from a flat, delicately curved silver flask and bent over the senseless girl. Kristoffer had seen him making a show of drinking from this flask in the arena, then go out to mingle with the audience, ostensibly the worse for drink, but Kristoffer had felt quite sure that the flask was empty. Now the scent of old rum made his head reel. He said nothing, but Monsieur Andress read his mind.

  “To drink from a flask that everyone knows is empty,” the clown said, “and then stagger around drunk as a lord, that is art. But to drink from a flask that everyone knows is empty and to have a spot of rum in it anyway, do you know what that is?”

  “No,” said Kristoffer.

  “That,” said Monsieur Andress, “is divine.”

  He poured a little of the liquid between the girl’s lips. She swallowed without gagging on it, then opened her eyes, and stared straight at Kristoffer with a look of instant recognition. Then what might have been a chill draft slithered between them, one leap brought her free of him and onto her feet, and, terror-stricken, she shrank back from the stairs.