Chapter One
She Almighty had tuned each person in a musical key, and
Kasper could hear it. Best in the brief, unguarded moments
when people were nearby but didn’t yet know he was
listening. So he waited by the window, as he was doing now.
It was cold. The way it could be only in Denmark, and
only in April. When, in mad enthusiasm for the spring
light, people turned off the central heating, brought their
fur coats to the furrier, dispensed with their long
underwear, and went outside. And only when it was too late,
discovered that the temperature was at freezing, the
relative humidity 90 percent, and the wind was from the
north and went straight through clothing and skin, deep
into the body, where it wrapped itself around the heart and
filled it with Siberian sadness.
The rain was colder than snow, a heavy, fine rain that
fell like a gray silk curtain. From behind that curtain a
long black Volvo with tinted windows appeared. A man, a
woman, and a child got out of the car, and at first it
looked promising.
The man was tall, broad-shouldered, used to getting
his own way-and capable of having a powerful impact on
those around him if he didn’t. The woman was blond as a
glacier and looked like a million bucks; she also looked
smart enough to have earned it herself. The little girl had
dignity and wore expensive clothes. It was like a tableau
of a holy, wealthy family.
They reached the center of the courtyard, and Kasper
got his first sense of their musical key. It was D-minor,
at its worst. As in Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor. Great
fateful pillars of music.
Then he recognized the little girl. At that precise
moment the silence occurred.
It was very brief, perhaps a second, perhaps not at
all. But while it lasted, it obliterated reality. It took
away the courtyard, the rehearsal ring, Daffy’s office, the
window. The bad weather, the April month. Denmark. The
present time.
Then it was over. Vanished, as if it had never
existed.
He clutched the door frame. There had to be a natural
explanation. He’d suffered an attack of indisposition. A
blackout. A temporary blood clot. No one survives with
impunity two nights in a row, from eleven to eight in the
morning, at the card table. Or it had been another tremor.
The first big ones had been felt way out here.
He cautiously looked behind him. Daffy sat at the desk
as if nothing had happened. Out in the courtyard the three
figures struggled forward against the wind. It hadn’t been
a tremor. It had been something else.
The true mark of talent is the ability to recognize
when to give things up. He’d had twenty-five years of
experience in rightly choosing to part with things. He need
only say the word, and Daffy would deny him a home.
He opened the door and extended his hand.
“Avanti,” he said. “I’m Kasper Krone. Welcome.”
As the woman shook his hand, he met the little girl’s
eyes. With a slight motion, evident only to him and her,
she shook her head.
He took them into the practice room; they stood there
looking around. Their sunglasses gave them a blank air, but
their tone was intense. They had expected more finesse.
Something in the style of the main stage at the Royal
Theater, where the Royal Danish Ballet rehearses. Something
like the reception rooms at Amalienborg Palace. With merbau
and soft colors and gilded panels.
“Her name is KlaraMaria,” said the woman. “She’s a
nervous child. She gets very tense. You were recommended to
us by people at Bispebjerg Hospital. In the children’s
psychiatric ward.”
A lie causes a delicate jarring to the system, even in
a trained liar. So too in this woman. The little girl’s
eyes focused on the floor.
“The fee is ten thousand kroner per session,” he said.
That was to get things moving. When they protested, it
would initiate a dialogue. He would get a chance to listen
to their systems more deeply.
They didn’t protest. The man took out his wallet. It
opened like the bellows of an accordion. Kasper had seen
wallets like that among the horse dealers when he was still
performing at fairs. This one could have contained a small
horse, a Falabella. From it emerged ten crisp, newly minted
one-thousand-kroner bills.
“I must ask you to pay for two sessions in advance,”
he said. “My accountant insists on it.”
Ten more bills saw the light of day.
He dug out his fountain pen and one of his old
letterpress cards.
“I had a cancellation today,” he said, “so as it
happens, I can just manage to squeeze her in. I’ll start by
examining muscle tone and awareness of body rhythm. It will
take less than twenty minutes.”
“Not today,” said the woman, “but soon.”
He wrote his telephone number on the card.
“I must be in the room,” she said.
He shook his head.
“I’m sorry. Not when one is working with children on a
deep level.”
Something happened in the room-the temperature
plummeted, all oscillatory frequencies fell, everything
congealed.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, fifteen
seconds later, the bills were still lying there. He put
them in his pocket, before it was too late.
The three visitors turned around. Walked out through
the office. Daffy held the outer door for them. They
crossed the courtyard without looking back. Seated
themselves in the Volvo. The car drove off, disappearing
into the rain.
He leaned his forehead against the cold glass of the
window. He wanted to put his fountain pen back in his
pocket, into the warmth of the money. The money was gone.
There was a sound from the desk. A riffling sound.
Like when you shuffle brand-new cards for one of Piaget’s
games. On the desk in front of Daffy lay the small
mahogany-colored stack of new bills.
“In your outer right-hand pocket,” said the watchman,
“there are two hundred kroner. For a shave. And a hot meal.
There’s also a message.”
The message was a playing card, the two of spades. On
the back, written with his own fountain pen, were the words
“Rigshospital. Staircase 52.03. Ask for Vivian.-Daffy.”
That night he slept in the stables.
There were about twenty animals left, horses and a
camel, most of them old or worthless. All the others were
still in winter season with circuses in France and southern
Germany.
He had his violin with him. He spread out his sheet
and duvet in the stall with Roselil, half Berber, half
Arabian. She was left behind because she didn’t obey anyone
except her rider. And not even him.
He played the Partita in A-Minor. A single lightbulb
in the ceiling cast a soft golden glow on the listening
creatures. He had read in Martin Buber that the most
spiritual people are those who are closest to animals. Also
in Eckehart. In his sermon “The Kingdom of God Is at Hand.”
One should seek God among the animals. He thought about the
little girl.
When he was about nineteen, and had started to make a
name for himself, he had discovered that there was money in
his ability to access people’s acoustic essence, especially
children’s. He began to cash in on it at once. After a
couple of years he’d had ten private students per day, like
Bach in Leipzig.
There had been thousands of children. Spontaneous
children, spoiled children, marvelous children,
catastrophic children.
Finally, there had been the little girl.
He put the violin into its case and held it in his
arms, like a mother nursing her child. It was a Cremonese,
a Guarneri, the last thing that remained from the good
years.
He said his bedtime prayer. The closeness of the
animals had calmed most of his anxiety. He listened to the
weariness; it converged from all sides simultaneously. Just
as he was about to determine its key, it crystallized into
sleep.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Quiet Girl
by Peter Hoeg
Copyright © 2006 by Peter Hoeg.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC
Copyright © 2006
Peter Hoeg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-26369-0
