To Siberia

by Per Petterson

  “Where the best-known toilers are Count Bent Holstein, Count Knut Knuthenborg, Count Rathlau and Sehested, Master of the Royal Hunt. And they are not even Danish, but imported from the south, like foot-and-mouth disease.” Many farms have had a taste of that. Every single cow at Vrangbæk had to be slaughtered and Grandmother has sold the farm and moved into a home for old sourpusses at Sæby, where she sits in a chair all day long heaping insults on anyone who dares go near her.

  So Vrangbæk has gone for good, and no one grieves over that except my mother who can be heard to utter her eternal:

  “He might have given us a house, you know.”

  All that is behind us now, we do not cycle that way any more, but at night I ride Lucifer along the paths in the Chinese garden behind the house. It has grown into a forest of sky-high trees and there is a sun and a moon at the same time there. Lucifer’s hooves clatter over the wooden bridges and I am hot and sweaty and feel the wind on my chest and the horse rocking between my legs, and I grip hard with my thighs and lean forward holding tight to his mane so as not to fall off.

  But the Chinese garden has been demolished and turned into a gravel pit to sell sand and gravel at high prices to the Germans, who need quantities when they build bunkers and tank traps and defenses for the South Battery in the hills near Understed. But none of this makes any difference to Lone’s father, for he has chosen another country than ours, and I bowl past and call out:

  “Wir sehen uns niemals, Herr Oberhauptbahnhof,” thinking that is one for him. But it doesn’t give me any pleasure, indeed I should have been glad to see him at the gymnasium in Hjørring in the autumn, and when I turn round I see a melancholy Nazi in the road, shears in hand, who fraternizes with the Germans because they take a scientific view of life and see the potential of ants in the human world.

  My friend Marianne lives in a brick house where the town ends and the farmlands begin, past the snobs and the white fences, past the Seamen’s School and out on the windswept heath behind Nordre Strandvej. Jesper’s old shack is not much farther as the crow flies, but to get there you have to cycle along the Elling brook inland to the bridge on Skagensvejen and then right along the field path again on the other side. That’s the good thing about that shack. Few people bother to go there.

  If Lone came from a home with a grand piano and I from one with a cinema piano, Marianne is from a home with a Jew’s harp. She has five unruly brothers younger than herself, her mother is dead, and her father is a carter. That’s what he calls himself; Carter Larsen. All through the winter he combs the beaches for driftwood, he clears away trees blown down by gales in autumn storms, and sometimes in the dark he goes into Vannverks forest getting wood illegally. Then he cuts it up into suitable lengths and splits it and puts it into big piles to dry all around the yard, the scent makes me go numb. When autumn comes he drives around selling it in sacks and cord measures to people who will buy in a town where coke is the usual fuel for the stove, but now dried peat because trade with England has stopped. There is not much money in that.

  At first he had a horse and cart, then a small truck he kept in the stable, and now he has a horse again because gasoline is rationed. The truck and the horse share the stable. The truck rusts on the side where the salt-laden wind blows in from the sea, and the horse kicks at the other when he feels cramped. That is what I remember best from that place; the scent of wood drying in the sun and the horse whinnying in the stable and the crack of its iron shoes striking the truck. He is called Jeppe after Jeppe of the Hill in Holberg’s play because he is so thirsty and neither the truck nor Jeppe will be moved because Carter Larsen knows his horse and believes he has a right to kick.

  “He’s good to animals, I’ll say that for him,” says Marianne, and leaves it at that.

  When she was thirteen her mother died and Marianne took her place and proved she could do it, she had no choice, otherwise the social would have come to take her brothers and place them like silver foxes on farms in the district. People call it that because it provides extra income for farmers, like keeping foxes does.

  Marianne has cigarettes and beer. I borrow a swimsuit from her and we cycle to the swimming place north of Frydenstrand. The German soldiers have built a wooden swimming jetty that reaches out beyond the third sandbank where the water is deep. We sit on the beach in the shelter of a dune and smoke Virginia cigarettes Marianne has got hold of, I don’t know where they came from, and we each drink a Tuborg and watch the soldiers swim and dive. They look at us as they run past, and it’s hard not to show off a bit. They’re like small boys at summer camp. They don’t look so dangerous without their uniforms. I smile, but I hate them.

  I stub out the cigarette in the loose sand and take a big gulp of beer. It tastes flat and warm. “Have you ever seen such cocky young roosters?” says Marianne.

  “A lot of them will be going to Norway soon. Then they won’t be quite so full of themselves.”

  A tall fair soldier runs by, he smiles and waves, but I’m done with smiling for today.

  “It’s a shame really. That one’s got smashing thighs on him.” Marianne waves back.

  “Put a sock in it. They are the enemy, for God’s sake.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that? But he is good-looking. He’s bound to have a young wife in Germany. She sits at home listening to Sara Leander on the radio and knitting warm socks with a blond baby inside her. And now he’s going up to those ferocious Norwegians, and maybe the socks won’t get there in time. Poor thing.”

  She’s trying to get out of an awkward situation, I can hear that, but all the same I get mad. But Marianne is my best friend now, so I just say:

  “When the war’s over I’m going traveling.”

  “You may still be at gymnasium. You know you’re the hope of us all, our only one.” Marianne is to start work as a shop assistant at Damsgaard’s in the autumn. It cost a lot of free wood, but now it’s all fixed. I am, or was, the only one outside the white fences with a “future.”

  “I’m not going to gymnasium. I’m not allowed to.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not allowed to go. I don’t care, I’ll go off traveling anyway.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Siberia.”

  “To Siberia? How are you going to get there? It’s not possible.”

  “I’ll join the communists and go to the Soviet Union, and then I’ll get leave to go on the Trans-Siberian Railway.”

  “But you know there are prison camps in Siberia, don’t you?”

  “Nazi propaganda,” I say, but it does not sound convincing and I am not certain. I’m not certain of anything.

  “Don’t be cross,” I say, “I didn’t mean you are a Nazi. Got another cigarette?” Marianne has and she is not cross. I take one and light it, though I don’t really feel like smoking any more, my mouth is dry and I think, I shouldn’t have said that about Siberia. I don’t know why I did, I haven’t thought of Siberia for a long time. Now I must think of something to make her forget it and remember something else instead.

  “You should have seen Jesper when he came home the other night,” I say.

  All the girls I know fancy Jesper, some make no secret of being in love with him. They have no shame, they lie in bed at night and think of him, they tell me and laugh. He’s public property. I don’t know when that came about.

  Marianne raises her head. “Why is that?” she says.

  I tell her, but I do not tell her everything.

  When curfew began at ten o’clock that night Jesper was not in. He had been home after work, had his evening meal and gone out again. But we weren’t worried, we thought he had gone to a friend’s house and would go to work from there. He often does that, and I went to bed at eleven. I fell asleep, and in my dream someone knocked at the windowpane. It was a familiar sound. I got up and went over to the window of the attic at Vrangbæk and looked out into the Chinese garden. I knew Jesper was out there, that he was hanging from the
roof, and I was afraid he would fall down, because he had hung there for a long time, several years. I opened the window and it was daylight. In the sunshine I saw the bulldozers demolishing the garden, and in front of one of the shovels Jesper was rolling around wearing an army coat. His face was badly wounded.

  “JESPER!” I called, but he smiled and waved with bandaged hands.

  “No pasaran, Sistermine,” he said and his voice was so clear and calm that it calmed me too, and I thought everything was all right, he knew what he was doing, it was part of a plan I did not know about, so I closed the window, I was tired and wanted to go back to sleep. And then it was night again. I lay down under my quilt, but the knocking went on. I opened my eyes and got up. It was darker now, and it took a few moments for me to realize that this was because of the blackout curtains. I opened them and Jesper’s face was close to the pane, one eye was black and swollen and blood ran from a cut on his cheek. He smiled as he had in the dream and whispered insistently:

  “Open up for Christ’s sake!”

  I pulled at the catches and pushed the window up, gripped his jacket and pulled and dragged. He was heavy and did not help much, he was holding his hands to his chest and trying not to fall, and he just slid over the sill. Something fell out from under his jacket and hit the floor with a thud and Jesper fell after it with his hands held to his chest. It must have hurt him. I bent down quickly and picked up the thing he had dropped. It was a pistol, a Luger, and it was German. It was warm in my hands from his body and different from anything I had ever held, hard and real. Jesper crawled away and sat against the wall between the beds. He stretched out his hand and I gave him the pistol, and I must have looked frightened, for he pressed it to his chest and held it carefully as you hold a child and said:

  “Calm down, he doesn’t know he hasn’t got it, anyway there were a lot of us, I’ll never see him again.” He wiped his cheek and got blood on his hand and he looked down at the blood as if it was something quite unexpected, and he picked up the pistol again and looked at it with the same surprise. Then he leaned his head against the wall and closed his good eye with the pistol on his lap.

  “Yes, well,” he said, “that’s it. It’s going to begin soon.”

  I do not tell Marianne about the pistol, nor about my dream, only that Jesper had been fighting a German soldier and what he looked like when I opened the window and he fell into the room and thumped the floor face down. And that’s plenty. That is all Marianne will think about now.

  “Poor Jesper. You bandaged his wounds, I expect?”

  “Of course I did,” I say, and that’s true, but when I see Marianne’s face I regret having said anything at all.

  The wind has got up and it blows chill. It has changed from light airs to a stiff breeze and still more, coming from the north, and I feel gooseflesh break out on my thighs and back. I put the towel around my shoulders, crouch down and smoke the last of the cigarette, and the marram grass bends in the wind and fine grains of sand fly in my face and hair so I have to turn on my heels and talk backward to Marianne.

  “Shall we swim or just sit here?”

  All the soldiers have come in from the jetty and gone up to the beach house to change. We can hear their voices and laughter behind the peeling walls. The strange tongue that I know but don’t feel at home in makes me restless. I get to my feet and walk around. Marianne looks up at the sky. It is still just as blue.

  “I’m not promising anything,” she says.

  It’s still colder on the jetty. We clasp our arms around our bodies and walk slowly over the splintery boards, and Marianne says “ow” every other step. She’s two meters in front of me, she’s reluctant and fussy. It irritates me. This day has been meaningless, unreal.

  “We’ll rub it out,” Jesper would have said, “we’ll just tear it out of the calendar.”

  “It can’t be rubbed out,” I say aloud.

  “What can’t be rubbed out?”

  “Today can’t be rubbed out.”

  “Why should it be?” Marianne turns around. I stop, I’m so cold my teeth are chattering. She puts her head on one side and looks me in the face.

  “Oh, you really are in a bad way. To think I didn’t see that at once!” She takes two steps backward and puts her arms around me and drops her towel, and that helps a bit, just now. She is dry and warm and a shelter from the wind. I shut my eyes. When I open them again I see the fair-haired soldier over her shoulder. He must have been in the water as we went out or hiding under the jetty, and now he has climbed up at the far end and is looking back. Perhaps he is waiting for us. There are just the three of us out here now.

  “Marianne,” I say, “turn around.”

  She turns. “Oh ho,” she says, “the man with the socks. There’s no more cigarettes and beer. So it must be rape. Maybe our last hour has come.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He slides his heels on to the edge and balances on his toes and raises his arms straight out sideways. He is going to dive, he wants to show how clever he is, but he is not aware of the conditions. When we arrived it was high tide, now it is low. In half an hour the water drops by a meter, and it’s not safe to dive there now. Not backward anyhow. But he raises his arms to a point above his head, squats down and takes off and dives in a big arc backward to vanish past the end of the jetty. We hold our breath and wait for him to come up again. But he does not come.

  Marianne looks at me, biting her lips.

  “It’s too shallow there now, isn’t it,” she says.

  We start to walk out. It’s a long jetty, more than a hundred meters to the end, and we do not walk fast.

  “Just think, he may be dead,” says Marianne. I do not reply, I have to use what little will I have to go on. At last we stand on the very edge looking down into the water. He is floating there stretched out just under the surface, turning gently in the current from the Elling brook that runs out a little farther north and along the shore here before turning out into the sea. It is completely silent, his fair hair waves back and forth.

  “He’s drowned,” Marianne says in a small voice. Suddenly she cannot stand still. She clutches herself around the chest, she lets go and holds her chin as if she had toothache, she lifts one leg and puts it down again, she lifts the other and puts it down again.

  “He’s drowned, he’s drowned,” she whimpers.

  “Not quite yet,” I say.

  He is unconscious, his mouth is open and from it small bubbles issue and rise to the surface. I think of smoke signals, messages from far away I have to interpret, and I force myself to be calm and concentrate and bend forward from my knees; I gaze at the bubbles, I listen.

  “He is the enemy,” Marianne says behind me.

  That’s true. I straighten up again. Perhaps the fact that the soldier is drowning now is part of the war. But no one is fighting in this country, not yet. The bubbles come more slowly, they stop, and then I jump.

  I hit the water just by his arm and it reaches to my chest when I stand on the bottom. I am 1.62 meters, he must be 1.90, and at first I step back, his white body looks horrible, and I think of the Man from Danzig on the seabed, but then I get ahold of his hair and lift his head to the surface, and hold him under the chin so his mouth is above water. He is not breathing now, but I start to pull him in. It is hard work and goes far too slowly because of all the resistance in the water, so I lie back and swim on my back, still holding him under the chin. I look up into the blue sky that spreads all over the world and it doesn’t move, I’m not moving, and then I have to turn my head and count the posts along the jetty the whole way in so as not to lose my nerve. I can hear Marianne up on the planks, she’s running to and fro calling, but I don’t understand what. Maybe she’s scolding. I don’t care. I stop swimming when I feel the sandy bottom scraping my back. I put my head back until it rests and I want to stay like that, but his head is against my stomach. It’s heavy and German, and I twist myself away and get ahold of one of his arms and
pull him up and out of the water. My legs shake, the wind is cold against my wet back, and I think I’m not thinking. Marianne is behind me or maybe somebody else is, I can hear heavy breathing, but I do not turn around, I push the soldier over on to his side, put my finger in his mouth and straighten his tongue then push my knee down hard on his stomach several times until the water starts to run out and spread in a big dark patch over the white sand. I turn him over on his back, lower my head and put my lips over his lips and pinch his nose and blow air into his lungs at a steady rate. I keep on until my chest whistles, everything goes black and suddenly he coughs. I raise my head, I have saved his life. He was in the sea, and now he is as alive as Jesper by the breakwater when I pulled him up and out of the grasp of the Man from Danzig. But I have been closer to this enemy soldier than I have been to my brother, I can still feel it on my lips, and when I realize that I slap him hard on the face.

  Marianne calls my name. I stand up slowly. All the soldiers have come out of the beach house, now they are standing motionless around me, they have their uniforms on, and they are looking down at my hand.

  August 29, 1943. At last!

  Jesper went out in the morning, but not to work. Throughout the day there were riots and fights and explosions from sabotage actions in all the big towns. In Ålborg, German sharpshooters launched an attack to disperse the crowds. More than a hundred people were taken to hospital, thirteen of them dead.

  He came home just before curfew. He looked exhausted, and I often thought afterward that if he had been involved in so much it was no wonder he was tired. He had not organized all of it, of course, but he had been involved.

  We had dinner in silence, except for the ticking of the clock on the wall and the clink of spoons. Once we heard a shot. My father stopped chewing and looked at the window, he clenched his jaws until they bulged on both sides, but Jesper did not lift his eyes from his plate. When he had finished eating he left the room.