When I went down to the bedroom soon afterward he was already asleep.
All through the years a photograph of my mother and her family hung by the sofa in the living room above the dairy shop. Now I have it beside my own confirmation photograph and one of Jesper in uniform taken just after the war.
My maternal grandfather was a fisherman at Bangsbostrand. In the photograph he wears a suit and a white shirt with a high collar; his thin hair is combed back firmly and his big mustache has been brushed until it shines. He died before I was born. I have heard he was a right bastard. My grandmother is only forty-five but she looks older than I do today. Yet she is beautiful in a southern way, like an Italian belle, or, with the right dress, a Moroccan woman, like one of those Jesper saw at the foot of the mountains in front of their tent, with the flock of goats and the small children wrapped up in blue cloth so they will not be burned by the sun. The sun is the enemy there, like the cold in Siberia.
There were thirteen children plus Franz who died of Spanish influenza. In the picture the eldest is twenty-three, the youngest two. My mother is fourteen, and she is the only one with a natural smile. She has the round face of youth, and I can see we resemble each other, as fourteen-year-olds. Shortly after that she was saved, and she was faithful to the Bible until her death. My father could wound her but not rule over her. Never in my life did I see anything to match the twinkle in her eye in the family photograph.
She saw the world in images, and the images came from the Old Testament. Before August 29, 1943, the German soldiers were like the swarms of locusts in Egypt, a gray-green penance imposed on an unbelieving people, and when they came into the shop to buy milk, it was the eighth plague she saw. She bent her head and endured it, for it was sent by a stern and righteous God. But from that day forward they were the oppressors of all peoples, executioners of the Israelites, we all knew that, and her back grew straighter.
They were far more aggressive now, Denmark was under German administration, the populace was hostile, and when they came into the shop to buy or maybe take milk, she moved out from behind the counter, took her stand in the middle of the floor and pointed to the door saying:
“Heraus!” in a high hard voice that brooked no argument. She was half a meter shorter than most of them, but she was as thin and sharp as a knife and her gaze was so blue that they looked right through it and could not see themselves reflected, and then they grew dizzy and naked with uncertainty in their eyes. They backed towards the door staring at the tiles and mumbling insults in German we quite understood, but Lodsgate Dairy Shop was a closed oasis, they could not get past the little lady in the striped blue apron. I was sure they saw the flaming sword she held in her hands. They were religious to a man, and Jesper stared, mouth agape, he had never seen anything like it.
I lay in my bed that night and heard Jesper dreaming in his, he mumbled and tossed from side to side and suddenly he shouted out loud, and then he was quiet. I gazed at the picture of Lucifer. I could swear he had moved in the dark. And then I fell asleep.
During the days that followed there was more blood on the streets of Ålborg, there were strikes in Esbjerg in the town and the harbor, and the Germans went amok. But the more people they beat and threatened, the more strikes were held and soon warehouses were ablaze, and there were fires in Odense and Kolding and many other places.
The German ship Norden lay at the bottom of Skagen harbor after an explosion that could be heard as far south as Ålbæk. The mine was a “limpet” with three magnets on each side that attached it to the hull and stayed firm even when the ship was at sea. Uncle Nils and two communists had made it on nightshift at the shipyard in our town, and it was Jesper who cycled to Skagen with the “limpet” on his luggage carrier and a Luger under his jacket. That was the longest ride of his life. It was a blazing hot day, but he could not even unbutton his jacket, and twice a German patrol drove past.
After a few days the Norden was salvaged from the mud and sent to our shipyard for repair, and it was not long before it was at the bottom of our harbor. Four workmen were arrested, but not Uncle Nils.
Two German soldiers came out of a house on Søndergate one morning and got into their car. They were heavy with sleep and bleary-eyed, they started up and were about to drive off, but the car did not move although they stepped on the accelerator and gunned the motor. They got out and saw the car had no wheels but rested on four piles of bricks. Then they savagely let fly with their submachine guns, now there were enemies all around them, and they broke all the windows in the block with their salvos. An old lady was taken to hospital with a bullet in her thigh. She would personally hang every German with piano strings, she shouted.
We had been Hitler’s little pet, but now it was war, and things would no longer be as they were in the verse we had learned:
We speak French with the ladies
and German with the dog,
And Danish? That’s for the servants.
The posters announcing “Man spricht Deutsch” disappeared from the shop windows. We did not do that any more. In one day almost the whole town suffered amnesia.
Every morning the milk truck brought the delivery from the dairy, and my task was to stand at the door at six o’clock and wait till I heard the truck coming, then go out and help the driver with the heavy crates, and listen to what he had to say that day in his oily voice about the mysteries of love, then take in the delivery and put the bottles in the cooling sink, knowing he was standing behind me staring up my legs when I bent over the icy cold edge. When he had driven off I rode the goods bike to the bus station where the ice machine was kept, remembering the two twenty-five øre pieces. I pulled the lever till the blocks of ice came sliding out and lifted them on to the bike with a gunnysack against the cold. Each time I lowered my face till I could feel the cold bite my cheeks, then blew out and saw the frost vapor float about in the late summer heat before I mounted the bike again and cycled back as fast as I could so the ice did not melt in the sun. In the shop I picked up the blocks and put them in place in the space on top of the icebox where they could slowly melt and run down on each side and keep everything cool inside.
There was enough milk, but most people were hard up. Many customers bought milk on credit and the Germans we delivered to paid in Kassenscheine instead of proper money, and those scraps weren’t worth much more than toilet paper. But when my father went to the Commandant to protest he was met with curses for his pains.
So more and more fell on my shoulders in the shop, I had no other work. My mother set up her sewing machine in the living room and took commissions from the ladies of Rosevej. My father tried in vain to keep up the prices in the workshop, and Jesper worked on the newspaper.
I have put change in the till, I have cleaned and made room for new bottles in the cooling sink, for butter and cheese in the icebox. Now I am standing in the shop waiting by the open door without switching the light on. I like this early half-light, the mild air from the sea, standing inside looking out without being seen, and there are almost no sounds from the street, and I can think and remember who I am before anything new comes along. Everything happens so fast it’s easy to forget, everything is exploding and burning. But now it is quiet.
There’s plenty of time before the milk truck comes. I stand in the middle of the floor distanced from all things and think I will always remember myself like this, alone on the black-and-white tiles in the yellow blouse and the semidarkness, and I raise my arms and stretch them out and slowly turn my body around. I dance a dance so quiet only I can understand it, so as not to forget the body I have at this precise moment. I am seventeen, and my dance is so slow that nothing is lost of what is me up to this day.
I finish my dance and see myself from above and see myself from the side and take it all in, and it is still quiet as I go to the door and sit on the steps as the light spreads through the street, all golden on the top of the house where Herlov Bendiksen draws aside the curtain and looks out. A fishin
g boat starts up in the harbor, it beats little holes in the stillness. Jesper is doing the milk round today with the rest of yesterday’s bottles. He will soon be back.
I look up past the roofs of the houses. There are two airplanes up there in the blue, so high they cannot be heard or identified. Perhaps they are English, perhaps there has been a drop in the night and an Allied spy has fallen like an angel through the dark and sought shelter in a stable. Now he is lying in the hay looking out and waiting for the day in a ray of light for the last quiet minutes. Just like me.
Then I hear the car. It drones up Danmarksgate and it is coming from the north today and not from the south as usual; it turns the corner and comes down our street. But it is not the milk truck, it is a car and it stops right in front of the shop. I get up from the steps and close the door and turn towards the street holding my hands clasped round the doorknob behind my back. Two men in uniform get out and one in a striped suit. This one is Gestapo Jørgensen. He is the man who chained Billegård the builder to a radiator and killed him with his bare hands in the Gestapo’s house at Kragholmen. The whole town knows about that. Billegård was a friend of my father’s at the Artisans Union. When this war comes to an end Jørgensen is a dead man. The whole town knows that too.
Now he comes over to me and asks for Jesper.
“Is he up? Can we have a word with him?”
“He was up a long time ago,” I say, “he’s not at home.”
“Where is he then?”
“He’s gone to work.”
Jørgensen looks at the clock. “So early?”
I shrug my shoulders.
“Anyone with an honest job has to get up early,” I say. He doesn’t like that. He looks daggers at me.
“Can we come in and see?”
“No.”
“Out of the way,” says Jørgensen. He pushes me aside, tears my hands from the doorknob, and opens the door of the shop. My father has gone to his workshop, he is always early. Only my mother is upstairs. She is singing. She is in the kitchen washing up and clattering about, and the kitchen window faces the yard. The two soldiers stay in the street, and Jørgensen walks in. His heels rap on the tiles straight through the dance, which hangs there still in a shimmer he rips apart, and he walks toward the door of our room and pushes it open with one hand, holding his gun under his jacket with the other. He knows where Jesper sleeps, then he knows where I sleep too. Perhaps they’ve stood on the sidewalk looking in through the gap in the blackout curtain. Jørgensen bends down in the doorway and looks in. I go after him glancing sideways at the clock on the wall, and stand behind him. He turns around sneering.
“So this is where the lovebirds sleep. They only use one bed too. I might have known it.” I look in, I have made my bed, Jesper hasn’t made his as usual, and the way he tosses about at night makes it look as if two have slept in it. My face is burning. Jørgensen stares at my yellow blouse with its short sleeves and my brown arms and my breasts straining against the buttons, and he sneers again with moist eyes and I see what he sees, and I shout:
“That’s not true!” I hate Gestapo Jørgensen, I want him dead. I hit out at his face, but he grabs my wrists and squeezes so hard I can feel them cracking, he can snuff out a life with those hands, and the pain makes the tears spurt out.
“You little wildcat! I don’t care if you sleep with your brother, but I want to know where he is, do you understand!” He squeezes still harder, I feel sick, I’m going to be sick, I see the clock twisted into an eight on the wall, the second hand slams against the tiles, and I try to twist myself free and end up with my knees on the floor, looking up at his face that is big and raw as naked flesh. If only he would die now, his heart explode and his eyes fall out, and take with him everything they have seen and turned into hellish filth. If only Jesper could be delayed or get a flat tire.
“He has gone to work, I tell you!”
“That’s a lie!”
But it is no lie, for the milk round is work too, we take it in turns and he should be back by now and the German soldiers stand outside the window smoking and waiting and they will see him the moment he comes around the corner on the goods cycle.
I give up. I go loose in his grasp and let my forehead drop onto the tiles on the floor and start to cry. I am naked for all to see, and Jesper will be caught in a moment.
“Let go of her!”
Jørgensen starts, his arms jerk and I feel glad, he almost lets go of me and turns toward the door where Herlov Bendiksen stands on the steps with a soldier at each shoulder and says:
“She’s telling the truth. He went to work half an hour ago.”
“What’s it got to do with you,” says Jørgensen.
“Nothing. I’m just a neighbor, but I saw him go. So there’s nothing for you here.” He fills the doorway in his apron, with a smile on his face, he’s a member of the Artisans Union. His forearms bulge in a cross over his chest. If the two soldiers had not been there Jørgensen would have been in trouble.
“I thought you might be interested.”
Jørgensen slowly relaxes his grip, my arms flop down without blood or feeling. It is hard to get up, I cannot support myself with my hands, so I roll around and use my shoulder and knees, and my knees shake when I finally get up. I can feel I am still crying, my arms hang straight down, and I see Bendiksen’s blue eyes holding Jørgensen in a vice. He fingers his lapel and finally turns towards the door to the staircase, almost unwillingly. He does not know what is behind that yet. I don’t know either. He turns back to look at Bendiksen who moves back two steps so there’s a free passage out to the street. He is still just as calm, his eyes just as blue, and Jørgensen starts to walk out. Halfway to the door he turns and snarls: “That bed won’t keep you warm much longer, I can tell you!”
I wrench my body around and summoning all the strength in my half-dead arm I launch out at his face with my hand, but he easily parries and punches me on the cheek with the back of his hand so I fall backward and land on the floor again. He has two rings with inset stones on that hand, they have pierced my face and I feel the warmth on my skin and the warmth of my blood starting to run. I close my eyes to the pain and stay there on the floor until Jørgensen has gone and I hear the car starting up in the street. Then Bendiksen helps me up.
“Are you crazy?” he says. “He could have killed you. Why did you hit him?” But I do not answer.
“Where’s Jesper?” I say. “He should be here by now.”
“I know. Take it easy. The bike is in my backyard, he borrowed another one. Do you think I don’t know what’s going on?”
But I know nothing about that. Since we have lived on Lodsgate we have only said “Good morning” and “Good evening” and “Nice weather today” or “What a downpour!” to each other, and I’ve no idea what he knows about me. But he is a member of the Artisans Union and maybe he knows us through my father.
“Do you think I don’t know the Gestapo car when I see it? One day I’ll come across Jørgensen on his own in the harbor and then we’ll be rid of him.” He looks at me with that blue gaze like a child’s, and I believe he means what he says. He strokes my hair and turns my head to the side.
“Perhaps you’d better wash off the worst of the blood before your mother comes down.” I feel my cheek hurting again, and he is so safe and familiar and so new at the same time that I first bob, then lay my head against his chest and wipe the blood off on his apron, and he strokes my hair and says:
“Jesper told me to say you know where he is.”
In one of the cold winters before the Germans came the ice lay shining all the way out to Hirsholmene. We stood on the hard-frozen shore with our skates tied in a string around our necks gazing out at the lighthouse, and it looked as if it was just a kilometer away across the water. Our breath hung in the clear air. Everything was at the same distance. Everything could be touched if we just stretched far enough. If we held our bare hands out straight we were sure to feel stones, ice, clouds, the ro
ofs of Strandby and the frozen surf at Frydenstrand.
“I’m going across today,” said Jesper.
We had been given screw-on skates for Christmas, my father had sharpened them in his workshop, and we used them every day for several weeks. There was hardly any snow, but the ground was frozen hard and the puddles and ponds were solid ice. The Elling brook was iced over as far as we had the energy to go. But now Jesper wanted to skate on the sea.
I hesitated. I knew the lighthouse was as far away as it always had been. It was tricking us, and I knew Jesper knew, but he could not resist it. The island with the lighthouse had always been there no matter where we stood on the coast looking out, and there was a school there, and twice a year the island children came from that school to our town in a fishing boat and walked through the streets bunched together in a little flock gazing at the shop windows. We talked to them and asked them questions and they knew a little about the world and a lot about the sea, but we had never been across to visit them.
Jesper sat down on an old fish box, he took the key from his pocket and screwed his skates tightly on to his boots. Ruben was there, and Marianne, and Mogens who was a friend of Jesper’s, and we all screwed our skates on tight and walked knock-kneed over the sand, which squeaked horribly against the skates, and on to the ice to test if it was firm. Jesper glided cautiously back and forth a few times, and when he felt it was safe he set his course straight out. Mogens followed him for some distance, but stopped where the third sandbank rose up slightly with crushed ice around it, then he turned and came back. I quickened my pace and did an airplane, I sailed off like my father on his bicycle with one leg straight out behind me and both arms to the side and ended in an almost successful pirouette, but it was not much fun because I had to keep turning around to look for Jesper’s back slowly growing smaller without the lighthouse getting bigger.
To Siberia Page 11