Angel of Absence

The Kingdom of Heaven--the Heaven of Stories, of course--is full of forgetful kings and wicked queens, reluctant princesses and, above all, princes. Snow White’s Prince and Sleeping Beauty’s Prince Charming, those gallant masters of CPR; St. Exupery’s Little Prince with his fox and his baobab tree; the Prince of Heaven himself and his nemesis the Prince of Darkness. Now a new “Prince” has washed up on our shores from the land of the Crown Prince of Tales, Hans Christian Andersen. “Prince” is the first of 20 books of prose and poetry to appear in English written by Ib Michael, a modern master who has spent much of his life sailing out from the island kingdom of Denmark to explore the world of ideas. Yet this “Prince” transports us to Denmark, to a Danish seaside town, to wander with a young prince during a single summer of discovery.

Malte, at 12, is the same age as the century. He is the “summer boy” at Mrs. Swan’s boarding house, a boy farmed out by his single mother, a glamorous ballet dancer felled by injury and desertion. Malte is a solitary boy, whose friends are other loners--the doctor, the lighthouse keeper, the mute daughter of the pharmacist. Like St.-Exupery’s Little Prince, Malte even makes friends with a special fox.

Malte is forever returning to Mrs. Swan with muddy hands and ruined clothing, forever causing her grief with his rambling tales and his occasional disappearances. But there is more to the barefoot boy, as there is more to his American cousin, Huck Finn. This is the summer the servant girl Oda teaches Malte to read, to travel far from shore in the pages of “The Children of Captain Grant,” “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea” and “The Flying Dutchman.” And this is the summer that, on one tide, washes a coffin into the direct path of Malte’s feet and imagination. The coffin holds the body of an unknown sailor, dressed in a style 100 years past. The people of Kikhavn file past his bier without a single sign of recognition. Only the ancient Aviaja Bertelsen, heiress of the long-dead Amber King, seems to know who he might be, and her lunacies have been ignored by the people for decades.

Yet Malte, more spirit than boy, slowly seems to discover the identity of this sailor, this “secret playmate, the sort born when children play too long under the full moon.” The sailor has indeed returned home. After 70 years in a coffin, frozen aboard a frozen ship, stuck in the ice of the northern fiords, the sailor has floated into his home port in search of a reunion with the sweetheart who chose to stay behind. Thawed by the summer current, the sailor--ghost or angel--is freed to become the narrator of Malte’s story, to tell how he and Malte pass this enchanted summer together. He hasn’t returned to haunt the sweetheart or wreak revenge on the sailors who murdered him. In his cosmology “there is no difference between evil and good. We constitute a rungless hierarchy, barren, incapable as we are of undoing the patterns of Creation. . . . [W]e represent absence and absence nurses no thought of revenge.”

The voice of this angel of absence is Michael’s bit of genius. Like St.-Exupery’s aviator, he is shipwrecked on a desert with only a sensitive boy to tell the secrets--of ice, of thunder, of amber. And like Malte himself, he is alone. “I am as alone in space,” he says, once his sweetheart has died, “as only other souls can be; no living being can understand, but only in the flesh can we come together and only in the flesh does love make any sense. . . . Up here we are as elusive to one another as clouds of gas or stellar nebulae. Whoever we were, we are no longer. Romeo’s mistake, therefore, was twofold: he will never find his Juliet on the other side.”

The summer of 1912 must eventually come to an end. The sailor’s work is done, and he must fly to the icebergs off Newfoundland, where a new story, soon to become legend, is being born aboard an unsinkable ship. “In fairy tales,” the sailor says, as the snow of a new season begins to fall, “long stories are cut short and the characters reworked into dragons and princesses.”

Michael’s sense of snow and sense of story may be as Danish as his colleagues’ present and past. But although there is a fierce logic to both his physical and his ethereal Denmark, there is also a dreamy openness to his gentle ghost story that continues to haunt long after Malte’s summer is done. There is more on heaven and earth, another Danish Prince once remarked in another Danish ghost story, than is in our philosophy. And more to be translated, one hopes, in the library of Ib Michael.