The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel by Peter Hoeg

fish and incredible poverty, the course of the year had evolved into a series of celebrations. At these gatherings, drunken villagers tried, through the snatches of song handed down to them and well-worn tales into which the raging elements penetrated deeper and deeper, to hang on to a hope long since swamped by a seemingly never-ending poverty. And, in fact, the inhabitants were able to endure such conditions only because of their pigheadedness and the notion they had formed that Lavnœs was surrounded by a host of legendary monsters. They had but the haziest notion of how these creatures looked, but they associated them with the towers, far off on the horizon, and with the high wall, a corner of which could be glimpsed on a hill high above Lavnœs and which was, in fact, the manor of Mørkhøj—although no one now remembered this.
    When the Count at Mørkhøj had the wall built, Lavnœs was, to all intents and purposes, cut off from the outside world. The fishing village had originally been part of the estate, but thanks to his absorption in his research work, the Count had lost any inclination to exercise his right to the first night with every new bride in the district. Then, too, the smell of fish was—even from a distance—quite offensive. So the estate wall gave a wide berth to Lavnœs, which was thus forgotten by the outside world, attracting attention only on a few occasions, as, for example, when one of the state tax collectors found his way to the village. Well, of course a tax collector—who else?
    He was a single-minded sort of man, a former army officer who still felt and thought like a soldier. Having noted the fact that Lavnœs’s name was listed in the ministry registers but did not appear in the local district court reports, he fought his way through to the town on horseback in a thunderstorm, in an atmosphere so charged with electricity that it made his sword hilt sing out ominously. The storm had also transformed the village streets into an impassable mire in which floated the swollen white bodies of skinny beasts that had perished in the floods preceding the thunderstorm. The village was still numb from the wake held for the flood victims. The tax collector sought out the biggest and best-kept house and stepped inside. On a packed-earth floor saturated by the rain, an old man was sitting by an open hearth, boiling up a thin soup of seaweed from his roof. The tax collector glanced around at the furniture, which looked as if only the inveterate stubbornness of the room were holding it together.
    “What do you live on?”
    The old man looked blankly at him, his eyes watering in the smoke from the burning dung.
    “We eat our own shit,” he replied.
    The tax collector turned on his heel and left Lavnœs to its poverty.
    Although Thorvald Bak had never set eyes on Lavnœs, he found the place exactly as he had seen it in his vision. As the wagon reached the first houses, the mists were dispersed by a burning sun which, by the time they had driven to the other end of the village, had dried the mud into a cracked crust, and people were sitting outside their houses, on the golden-white sand, playing cards for coins that had gone out of circulation fifty years before. Inside the dilapidated church a man was lying on the altar steps. Thorvald Bak nudged him with his foot. The man opened his eyes onto the painful light falling through the broken windowpanes and asked, “Who bought the last round?”
    This man was the former pastor of Lavnœs.
    In that first year, not a single soul came to church. For a year, Thorvald Bak’s wife—despite the fact that she was pregnant and was growing both heavier and more gaunt—was the sole witness to his preaching. His sermons grew ever more radiantly animated and full of conviction, despite the howling gale and the chill of the building, which left them both with the coughs and sneezes of chronic colds. At the end of the year she gave birth to a daughter—this was, of