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Автор Питер Хёг

The Quiet Girl

Peter Høeg

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

19 Union Square West, New York 10003

Copyright © 2006 by Peter Høeg

Translation copyright © 2007 by Nadia Christensen

All rights reserved

Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

Printed in the United States of America

Originally published in 2006 by Rosinante, Denmark, as Den stille pige

Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First American edition, 2007

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Høeg, Peter, 1957-

[Stille pige. English]

The quiet girl / by Peter Høeg ; translated by Nadia Christensen.

-- 1 st American ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-374-26369-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-374-26369-8 (hardcover : alk paper)

I. Christensen, Nadia. II. Title.

PT8176. 18. O335S7513 2007

839. 8'1374--dc22

2007008187

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

123456789 10

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Jes Bertelsen, Erik Høeg, Karen Høeg, Nelly Jane,

Jakob Mailing Lambert, and Otto Moltke-Leth.

PART ONE

1

SheAlmighty 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.