“Come on, come.” He came to himself and began walking, and then he did something no one had expected. He went right up to my father and put his arms around him and gave him a hug. One man laughed, but there was no shame in it this time, he just laughed and started to clap and a moment later everyone joined in. They laughed and clapped and stamped their feet on the floor. My father straightened his back and smiled cautiously, he nodded to someone he knew, took hold of us both by the shoulder and led us towards the door. There Jesper turned on his heel, pointed at the baron and shouted:
“You’re doomed!” The laughter rose again and my father seized Jesper by the collar and lifted him over the threshold, but I knew he was not angry any more.
Before I closed the door behind us I saw Grandfather standing alone with the baron’s empty glass in his hand, and for a moment it occurred to me that he thought Jesper had meant him.
What my mother was good at was telling stories. And singing songs. She was a composer of hymns. Her maiden name was Aaen, she came from Bangsbostrand, due south of the town where we lived. There they were almost all fishermen and every one of them was a Christian, and the Aaens were more Christian than the rest. The members of that family always spoke in a much more educated manner and did not use the Vendelbo dialect as did most people in the district who were not newcomers, and they were so Christian that when they started a cooperative it was called The Cooperative Society of Our Lord. I think it still exists. Those who did not belong to the Co-op faced the winter with foreboding, and when the fishing failed they stood at the door of Our Lord and begged to be let in, but by then it was too late. That was how they learned their lesson.
I do not know why they felt themselves superior. They had no reason to. Possibly it was because the family possessed a camera. A wealthy German had left it behind in payment for the loan of a boat when he stayed as a tourist one summer and rented a house down by the beach. His name was Eisenkopf.
There are a lot of photographs from that time, one of them shows my maternal aunts on their way up Søndergate from Møllerhuset Allé, they are wearing big hats and long dresses with all kinds of trimming and stuff, and they do not look like fisherman’s daughters. But that’s what they were. Anyway I am sure my mother felt she had married beneath her although my father came from Vrangbæk, which is no small farm even today. One of my uncles became sexton of Bangsbostrand church and had white skin and soft hands, but his son Kurt works at the shipyard and Aunt Else was never anything but a fisherman’s wife and in the end a fisherman’s widow when her husband Preben went down with the Lise-Lotte north of Skagen one moonless January night. She only just scraped through the following years with support from the congregation.
My mother had a piano that my father had bought and adapted when the old cinema closed down. It still had the sound of silent films and when she played it and sang it was a mixture of Chaplin and Christianity that seemed improper to me, but I don’t think she thought of it like that. She sat on the stool and felt her way over the keys and wrote down sentences and words in big brown books. The piano remained with her for the rest of her life, and when she finally moved to a rest home the piano went too. Even though she lived in another world most of the time she could sit down and play and sing and suddenly stop and say:
“Oh, wasn’t that a really lovely hymn. I wonder who wrote it?” And then after a few minutes she would smile and put her hand to her face and whisper to herself:
“But of course, I did!” Then she laughed with a pride I felt was equally improper. Many people thought she was probably as good as Kingo, the renowned Danish seventeenth-century hymn writer, but she never sent her hymns out anywhere and only the family and friends in the congregation were allowed to hear them.
Personally I could not stand them.
Jesper was fond of her. He remembered her birthday and called her Lillemor because she was so short, and he was not above teasing her mercilessly about it. Then she would hit him with the dishcloth, give up, and start to blush and giggle. If I tried anything like that there would be a slap and no laughing.
My mother told us about Sara in the woods and about the Man from Danzig. She sat on a chair by the door and Jesper and I lay in our beds as the man sailed through the room in his ship more than a hundred years before from what was Germany, a solitary helmsman with stinging eyes and the wind in his hair, with a cargo for Norway, and the weather was dark and stormy and the visibility poor. He was aiming to sail close to the island of Læsø between Sweden and Denmark and he looked out for lighthouses and steered by any he could see. Suddenly lights were everywhere. He tugged at the tiller and steered to starboard, realized that was wrong and turned to port again, and the lights came from all sides and then he hit bottom with a crash and stuck fast, then started to take in water. In the dark he heard the roaring of breakers and splashing of oars and the thumping of small boats against the hull, and he thanked his Lord he was saved. But the men who climbed aboard didn’t even look his way, they glided across the deck toward the hatches, and in no time his whole cargo had vanished over the rail and the men had gone with it. Without the cargo the ship lifted off the reef and floated out into deeper water, and there it sank quietly until it vanished with the man from Danzig still on board, and my mother began to whisper:
“The spit where he went aground is known as the Man from Danzig to this day.”
“Damn it, right scum, they were,” said Jesper after my mother had gone. It was all dark inside and dark outside, an endless January darkness, but I knew from the direction of his voice that he was sitting up in bed, and he meant the men from Læsø who had lighted lanterns to trick the man from Danzig into going aground so they could plunder the cargo. He was right, of course, and I was exasperated because what I dreamed of at night was the Man from Danzig at the bottom of the sea amid kelp and seaweed with eyes like burning charcoal and long wavy fingers that stretched out to grab me. But I realized that was because of the way my mother told the story, and I wondered for a long time whether she felt sorry for him at all. Perhaps she had relations on Læsø, or perhaps they were so poor there they felt they had to be wreckers. That was something else to wonder about.
That winter everything turns into ice. There is snow in the streets, snow on the fields, and the ice lies shining on the frozen sea right out to the small islands called Hirsholmene when the wind blows low from the north and sweeps aside everything in its way. It has been cold before, but not so cold as this, and no one has seen this much snow for twenty years. Some say it was once possible to walk dry-shod to Sweden and back again, but that must have been long ago, and I think the cold has something to do with Grandfather, that it comes seeping in after someone has hanged themselves or taken their life in some other way, and it seems to happen particularly in a town where such a death has occurred. But my father says it is cold all over Denmark, and that is really too much to blame Grandfather for, so the theory does not hold water, even though Jesper rather liked it.
I’m in the classroom looking out of the window at the wind tearing at the trees and I hear it howling around the corner of the school. The old windows are not windproof, there is a fiendish draft along the wall and those of us sitting in the window row have put on all our outdoor clothes. Marianne whose desk is in front of me has a big red scarf around her neck, her breath issues like frosty vapor while those along the opposite wall near the stove take off almost all their clothes and smirk sweetly and meanly at us on the outer row. In particular that slob Lone, the headmaster’s daughter. She is pretty. She wears a newly ironed dress every day, has fair curls, and gets good marks. So do I. Get good marks. The two of us are far ahead of the others. She is because she gets everything free, I am because I work hard. If I am ever to get away from this place and right to the other end of the world, I need good marks. First the middle school and after that the sixth form, then my door will open. My mother thinks I am good at learning and sometimes even tells me so, but she despairs of Jesper, who takes things
more lightly because he’s going to be a worker in the shipyard and a socialist and train himself for opposition. If you are going to be an activist you do not need to do lessons. That’s the first commandment, thinks Jesper, and believes he’s well on the way. So he is in trouble at school and gets scolded at home.
On the way home from school I walk right behind Lone and mimic the way she moves. She minces along. I go on doing that as long as it is fun, and Lone never once looks back. She lives in a big house on Rosevej almost at Frydenstrand. I don’t go as far as that, but in the same direction. We never walk together. Lone is upper class and must not be seen in my company. The feeling is mutual. But as I’m about to turn up Asylgate she does turn around. She stares at me with eyes full of hate, takes hold of her scarf and wrenches it around so the knot is at her nape and hitches it up until it’s really tight, sticks out her tongue, and squints at me. At once I start to run, hit her with my shoulder, and knock her backward into a snowdrift. I give her a thorough ducking. She may be the headmaster’s daughter, but no one makes game of me. No one.
There are several big houses on Rosevej. When my mother goes out for a walk that is where she often goes, down the road and back again, and I know what she is thinking. She’s thinking what a good life the people there enjoy. They must be happy. To live so well. Once we went out together, my day was aimless anyway, nothing but empty hours one after the other until darkness fell and my body getting in the way wherever I turn. We walked past one of the houses and looked into the yard. It was a big yard, and in the middle of the lawn a young girl sat in a wheelchair. It was summertime then, her face was in shadow and she wore a red dress with a ray of sunshine over her chest. My mother turned and said:
“There, think of that. Better to be poor and able to walk than rich in a wheelchair.”
But she is talking to herself. What I see is a girl without a face in a red dress, often at night when I’m asleep, and at first there is just darkness and then the red comes and spreads until it fills everything and I have to wake up or explode, but I do not dream of being rich. My mother does that, somewhere behind the place the hymns come from.
“Why couldn’t he at least have given us a house,” she says when we hear Grandfather has not left us anything. The Aftenstjernen had taken its share and the house we live in is not our own but belongs to the Baptist church next door. My father is the janitor there. The only thing we own is the carpenter’s shop, and though it may be true that my father is the best joiner in town he is not the best at making money. He has so many acquaintances, the town is too small for a professional. They come in from Danmarksgate, across the yard where the cobblestones are slippery with ice and into the golden light from the lamp above the workbench, throwing shadows over the sawdust and wood shavings and the piles of moldings along the walls. They stand fingering well-used yellow-brown tools, keeping at a safe distance from the bandsaw in the middle of the floor, chatting about the times that have never been worse, and my father nods and asks after someone’s mother and has she recovered from breaking her thigh and is the son better now? It’s not often that things are better, and my father nods again, he knows how it is. When they have gone away they leave a dusty emptiness behind them, the air is stuffy and lifeless like the bottom of a purse, and my father gets to work on the cupboard or the chest and shapes up and remakes and polishes and rubs until the surfaces shine with the glow that is at the heart of all wood, shining without any varnish and with handles of finely carved bone. After a few days they come to fetch it, and then the piece stands there in the center of the floor as good as new, better than new, and I have searched for the word year after year, looked it up in books and thought and pondered and found substance. They bring a wreck and leave with substance, and they see it and look dumbfounded and praise my father until his ears flame. When they have gone he has charged them the same amount as last year and the year before that and the year before that again.
In the evenings he sits at the living-room table gazing at the bills with his pencil in his right hand and the rationed cigar in his left. There is rent for the Baptists and coke for the stove and gas for the kitchen range and a new blade for the saw. There is Jesper to be confirmed. Jesper doesn’t want to be, but he must. He will have his first suit and the whole family will be invited. My father sits writing down numbers on paper, he only takes every other pull at his cigar. He should have had a house built of wood that would smell like the workshop from floor to ceiling and not of mold as it does here after the autumn and driving rain on the outer walls. Here everything is brickwork and cement. The water seeps in through the cracks and spreads in damp flowers through the wallpaper so it peels off and the kitchen floor is icy to the feet even in summer with the sun shining in. There is no glow in bricks. In Siberia the houses are built of timber that gives off the good smell of tar and warmth in summer, and when the long winter sets in the glow stays in the logs and never fades. The wood contracts and waits and stretches out when spring comes and drinks in the wind and the sun.
When no one is listening my father grinds his teeth. But I listen all the same. I show him books with pictures of Siberia and the houses there, and he slowly holds it at a long-sighted distance and after a while he says:
“That’s a good piece of craftsmanship. But it is cold outside, terribly cold.”
I do like it when summer comes with warm wind inside my dress on my bare thighs, but I don’t think the cold will bother me. They have different clothes in Siberia that I can learn to wear instead of now when I have only my thin coat against the wind that comes in from the sea between Denmark and Sweden and blows straight through everything. They have caps made of wolfskin and big jackets and fur-lined boots, and lots of the people who live there look like Eskimos. I might pass as one of them if I cut my hair short. And besides I shall sit in the train and look out of the window and talk to people, and they will tell me what their lives are like and what their thoughts are and ask me why I have come all the long way from Denmark. Then I will answer them:
“I have read about you in a book.” And then we’ll drink hot tea from the samovar and be quiet together just looking.
I brush the snow off the front of my coat and see Lone disappearing with her schoolbag under her arm and her cap in her hand. She isn’t mincing now, and then I still don’t go up our road, but down the main street until I get to the gateway and the rear courtyard where the workshop is. I walk through the gateway and see my father coming out of the door of the workshop with his coat on. I wait until he has locked up before I say hello, and he comes up to me and brushes snow off my back and looks at my face that has a scratch on one cheek.
“Have you been fighting?” he says.
“Yes. With Lone.”
“Why?”
“Grandfather,” I say, and demonstrate what she did, turning my scarf back to front and pulling it until it’s tight, and then he says:
“Are they talking about it at school?”
I nod, and he tightens his lips and walks out through the gateway and locks that too and won’t be going back today.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“We aren’t going anywhere. I am going to the savings bank.”
“What are we, I mean what are you going there for?”
“To borrow money. You can come along if you stay behind and wait nice and quietly.”
He goes in through the heavy door, and I wait nice and quietly till he comes out again only a quarter of an hour later. He stays there on the steps beside me saying nothing before I look up into his face, and then he says very very softly:
“That didn’t go too well.”
I don’t know what to make of this.
“That’s a shame,” I say a bit too lightly, running down the steps and starting to walk off. But he does not follow. He stands there with his hands in his coat pockets staring straight at the wall on the other side of the street, and when I speak to him he doesn’t answer. He runs his hand down his chin and turns.
“Wait here,” he says and goes inside again.
This time he’s gone half an hour. It’s too cold to stand still so long. I jump around and walk up and down the street looking into the windows and thinking what I could have bought if I’d had any money. But it’s not good to borrow money, and it was my father who said that. “If you’re broke they’ll tear the ears off you if you’ve borrowed money,” he’ll say.
His ears are red when he comes out and I think they may have tried to tear them off in there, but I don’t say that, I say:
“Did it go better this time?”
He takes out a cigar and lights it, it’s the last but one, and he takes a long drag before replying:
“You could say that. They’ve lent me money, but I’ve pledged the workshop as security.”
The missionaries travel all over the world, to the benighted regions, to Tasmania and the negroes in Africa and further to the Far East. They spread God’s grain among those who wander through barren valleys, and have to suffer bitter hardship. Sometimes they are slain, their heads struck off, or thrown to the lions or buried in the earth with only their heads showing so the ants can slowly devour them. But they do not give up, they have God’s hand of authority at their backs. Each year new ones start out from the mission centers and every week we get the missionary journals through the post. Sometimes I read them if there’s nothing else, but my mother really studies them. She shows me the journals with pictures of fair-haired women and men who stand tall beneath distant stars, and she says:
“Perhaps you can be a missionary,” because she knows I want to travel and to her that is the only route. But I don’t want to be eaten by ants and I don’t want to be a missionary. I am too short, my hair is dark, and I would much rather sit still keeping quiet and listening to the people I meet telling me about themselves.
To Siberia Page 4