The Tempest

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  Twenty-Seven People Lose Their Lives in Aeroplane

  Accident on the Inner Islands

  The plane, believed to have been a four-engined Vickers Viscount, was on its way from Copenhagen. The weather was poor at the time of the accident. For some reason, the plane had come in to land at too low an angle; the pilot made a last-minute correction to the course, but the plane reared up in the air and then fell straight out of the sky – ‘like a stone’, according to one eye-witness. It immediately caught fire. The reporter had taken note of these and other particulars. Burning people hung from the trees, he notes. This was of course what Mr Carsten had said to Minna and me. Had Mr Carsten really been at the site as it happened and seen everything, or had he read the same Dagbladet article that Johannes had read and saved? In other words, had he lied to our faces? On the other hand: if our parents had not been on the plane, why would Johannes have taken the trouble to show us the fragile newspaper pages so often and instruct us about all the repulsive details? In the first place, why would he have bothered to say that our parents had been on their way to collect us? Was it because he could not bear to live with a huge lie, as he would say when he was drunk? Or simply because he could not resist the temptation to tell a good story that could be presented in suitably dramatic ways to a young and receptive audience? The pile of newspapers contained other items of interest as well, articles describing the clearing up after the accident, work that Johannes claimed to have participated in; discussions of the damage caused by the impact to the forest and the land; reports about Sigrid Kaufmann, who took the accident as the starting point for what would become her lifelong campaign against the flight paths across the Inner Islands. Johannes had saved several illustrated pieces about her: she stands near the lake and speaks about the necessity of protecting the unique bird populations, a need that could only be met by reducing the inhumanly high noise levels. It is the first time I have seen her in print; she is eyeing the camera with an alarmed but defiant gaze, as if it were a feared opponent whose Medusa-like stare she feels has to be met full on. Out there on the islands, quite a few people still believe that Mrs Kaufmann herself made that Viscount fall out of the sky. Sheer willpower, you see: exactly how Kaufmann himself had once made white butterflies rise out of the ground or foxes mate. Johannes never peddled such superstitions, but Minna said that this kind of thing did the rounds out there. All just to prevent our parents from getting back on the island? (Having failed with poisoned drinking water pumped up from the forest lake, they had another go.) True, it could be that my head was full of such beliefs at the time, even though I would never have expressed them in so many words. But the small boy at the end of the row in the group photo from the West Island, the boy with the flattish face and protruding ears who I feel is so familiar, his presence instantly denies all that. He must have been allowed to join the colony because he was under Kaufmann’s protection. If not, he would never have been let in. But, if so, why force him to go away when, twenty years later, he had moved to the island? It made no logical sense. And if, as a grown man with wife and children, he came back because he had spent some years here as a wartime child evacuee, then it stands to reason that his return would be known to quite a few locals. Like Johannes, for instance. After all, he had driven all the new children to West Island from the station at Holmen. Nonetheless, Johannes had never suggested, not by a single word, that our father had ever been to the island before or that he was somebody other than who he claimed to be: an American employed on some mysterious military task who had brought his family with him to stay in the NATO villa for a limited time. But why did people insist on secrecy if the truth was out there for anyone to see, for instance in Steinar Brage’s book? Exhausted, I put it all down – books, newspaper cuttings and notepads. At this point, it strikes me that I have spent hours in the attic without any interruptions at all. The vandals, whoever they are, have kept away all night. Rifle in hand, I patrol the empty house, then open the cellar door and go outside. The rain has stopped and the sky cleared. A slender crescent moon hangs high above the garden, spreading a pale, waxy light that makes the trees look as if they have no shadows. Perhaps that is why the boys did not bother to turn up tonight: the moonlight makes it too easy to be seen. Presumably, I am fully visible where I stand at the far end of Johannes’s garden, staring up towards the farm. Up there, behind the dark stable block, Mr Carsten is waiting for me. If anybody around here knows the answers to all these questions, he does.

  After just a few hours’ sleep, I am up and about again at dawn. The crescent moon, like a splinter of bone, hangs in the transparent sky that is as fragile and improbably thin as glass and has a faintly turquoise streak running through its blueness. To the south, what is left of last night’s storm, a saddle of dark clouds, has settled above the forest. The air is warm and moist after yesterday’s rain and redolent of damp bark and bare soil, the tart scent of spring. The annual procession has not yet set out but the rhythmic, heavy and strangely thrilling sound of drums is carried along in the wind. From the school, where they traditionally set up the children’s play area and the frankfurter stall, come the clanging tones from the brass players, who are trying to blow new life into their instruments. But nobody comes along the road. Not a trace of the boys who were hanging around outside yesterday. Up on the hill, the farm looks empty too, silent, shut down. Though that is how it has always been on Procession Days, perhaps the only time in the year when the islanders definitely turn their backs on the people up there. I am not sure when this custom began: perhaps in the early fifties, perhaps earlier still. One version I have heard is that three youngish men got together after an outstandingly boozy celebration on 17 May and concocted a plan for evicting the old man from the island once and for all. One of them, an assistant in a menswear shop on the mainland, contributed a shop mannequin; they dressed it in hat and coat, a collarless linen shirt and wide trousers with braces, placed the effigy in a wheelbarrow, disguised themselves with leafy branches, painted their faces with military camouflage paint and set out down King’s Road with the Kaufmann doll’s long legs splayed over the edge of the barrow. A crowd gathered behind them, people they had run into on the way, mostly returning from other National Day parties with no idea of what was going on, and there were children too, of course (even then, the island was full of children), and by the time they reached the barrier, or the cross as it came to be called (back then, the public road ended with a barrier), the ‘procession’ was already several hundred strong. Everyone shouted and clapped delightedly when the wheelbarrow was upended and the effigy tumbled down into the clay and gravel patch at the edge of the field where Mr Carsten took the rubbish bins out for collection twice a week. Just a prank: a trifle distasteful, perhaps, but harmless enough. Besides, the war was history and Kaufmann had already served his sentence. But Sigrid Kaufmann saw the matter in a different light. Not only her husband but her entire family had been humiliated in full public view, and on National Day. She notified the police and demanded damages. Inevitably, this caused the spectacle to be repeated a few weeks later: the procession followed exactly the same route and stopped at the same spot for the ceremonial dumping, which took place to, if anything, even greater acclaim from an even bigger crowd. Only this time the doll wore a lady’s wig and a brown checked tweed skirt just like Mrs Kaufmann’s, out on her rare errands down the Mains Farm Road. The event lapsed for a few years because it was thought an undignified rival to the proper festivities on National Day. Still, some islanders stubbornly carried on. For the sake of the children, they would usually say by way of explanation. It was moved to a couple of weeks earlier in the year and turned into a dressing-up party. I have memories of Procession Day from when I was little: all happy images of small girls in fanciful princess-style tulle creations with angel’s wings stitched onto the back, and boys with black face paint and saucepan helmets with fir-branch plumes. But what happiness lasts forever? Once the wealthy upstarts on the island had redrawn the proce
ssional route so that it passed their newly bought or built villas, it was not long before the so-called Friends of the Sports Club had trained the entire football team to march along, wearing the club’s training kit. And once the football team was in the procession, all the other societies had to join as well to show willing: the bridge players, and the Rotarians and the members of the music society, of course. The musicians were those same elderly male amateurs who played at the National Day events and for parties at Christmas and New Year: flautists and bass players and drummers, who could be heard above the children’s banging on saucepan lids, pinging on shrill cowbells and piping on whistles. Their playing formed a thick blanket of turgid, heavy marching tunes, uninterrupted but for the occasional roar of highly tuned engines when some super-expensive car simply had to be revved up on the island’s only straight stretch of road across the isthmus, between the sailing club and the supermarket. In just a few years, the carnival spirit had faded and the jolly procession had been transformed into a dull exercise in self-promotion. Which explains why it was such a scandal when, one year, something really happened. This was when Minna came running at full tilt from the Mains Farm, pursued at a gallop by one of Mr Carsten’s horses. The horse was not the white one, not my horse, who always stood dreaming in the paddock below the lamp on the wall. (I knew that the horse was dreaming because its dream was at its side. The horse’s dream was the enamelled bathtub next to the wooden fence around the meadow. The horse and the dream had exactly the same colour, both white in the pale, strangely floating dimness of a summer’s night.) The animal Minna had released was a harness-racing roan, one of the horses Mr Carsten took all over the country in the trailer. The screams of the terrified parents at the front of the crowd who were desperately trying to get their dressed-up children out of the way only served to madden the horse; meanwhile, the brass band at the rear, deafened by their own blaring, had not yet grasped that anything untoward was going on but noted the noise and tootled even more loudly to be heard above it. Next, Mr Carsten himself came down the hill on his Danish bike. A much younger Mr Carsten than today’s old man but just as stiff-legged, his face more than normally distorted by sheer rage. Mr Carsten hardly had time to show up before the near-panic turned into something else. Those who had not seen Minna running down the Mains Farm Road naturally jumped to the conclusion that it was Mr Carsten’s fault that the horse was out of control and so, while some of the men tried to catch it, others jumped on Mr Carsten and pulled him down off the bike, despite his furious resistance, and dumped him in a ditch. I observed that even some of the musicians threw their instruments away and ran to join those who were beating him up. It was so strange. Even though the majority of the crowd at this point knew next to nothing of how the procession had come about, the hatred and distrust of the people in the Mains Farm seem to have been widely felt, and as intense as ever. As if hatred has a life of its own, quite apart from the people it targets. It is that sort of hatred, indeterminate and unfocused, which makes normally laid-back youths come out at night to throw stones at the Yellow Villa. No one knows where the resentment comes from, only that it is still there, more alive than anything else on the island. I shut and bar those windows that can be barred, grab the rifle and go outside, turning off into the Mains Farm Road. The farmhouse window panes reflect the clear part of the sky in the same way as the forest is reflected on the surface of the lake on a quiet day. I approach the farm slowly, holding the hand with the rifle well away from my body. I assume that Mr Carsten would stay indoors on a day like this, but the dog has not yet started to bark and the yard ahead of me is as abandoned as it seemed to be the other day when I scanned it from the top of Bird Hill. The Volvo and the horse trailer are parked exactly where they were then and the dog’s long running lead is lying in the same loops on the muddy ground on the manager’s side of the yard. It looks as if no one has lived here for decades. It worries me. Where can Mr Carsten have gone? Were it not for the Volvo still standing there, I would have thought that he had left the farm and probably the island for good. Is he hiding? I step up onto the small veranda of his house and use the flat of my hand to bang several times on the upper part of the door in case he has become hard of hearing with the passing years. Nothing. I push the door handle down. The door is not locked. I have an uncomfortable feeling that he is skulking somewhere, watching me but out of my sight. Before entering, I call out his name again and again. Inside: a narrow hallway smelling sourly of wood rot, sweaty feet and damp woollen clothes. On the short wall under a fuse-box, there is a wooden key board, decorated with an ornate, old-fashioned pattern of flowers and leaves. A big bunch of keys dangles from one of the hooks on the board, a pair of bright red ear protectors from another. It seems he can hear, or he would hardly need the protectors. In the next room, an unmade bed stands in one corner. The sheets are dirty, almost as if he has been sleeping with his boots on. A tray on the table next to the bed holds jars and packets of medicines and, next to it, there is a bundle of well-read porn mags, the busty women on the covers greasy with thumbprints. I lift the bundle – nothing underneath. There is a kitchen alcove in another corner. The sink is stacked high with unwashed plates and mugs; a saucepan with porridge has been left on the cooker. Along the wall, a basin, a mirror spotted with fly shit and, on a nearby hook, a cloth of an indeterminate greyish-green colour. I have brought the receipts that I showed him the other day in my rucksack, and now I put the bundle on the kitchen table with a half-full ashtray on top to stop them from blowing about in the draught from the door. Then I return to the hall. Because none of the keys is marked, I shove the whole bunch into my jacket pocket and start out towards the main farmhouse. Over and over, I tell myself that I am here for Minna’s sake. If I do not dare to go to places where she went, there is no point in my coming up here at all. But the closer I get to the house, the steeper the ground under my feet seems to become, as if I were clambering up a hillside and not just a modest slope. The eerie feeling of being watched is growing stronger all the time. But it might be simply the drumbeat from the school, the memory of Procession Days in the past, and the way the farm was always forbidden territory for us children. And also the insight that I have crossed to the wrong side now: I am on the inner, the perverse side of the island, a place that my very nature rebels against. The space I am in makes me feel so flustered that just to stay upright, I have to grab hold of the banister next to the steps up to the entrance. The floor of the long veranda is covered with dried, windblown leaves and pine needles. Nobody has swept it for many years. I pick keys at random to try in the lock, and one of the larger ones slides in and turns smoothly. I keep the handle down for a while by pressing it against me, very clearly aware that the moment I step inside there will be no way back. And then I step inside.

  I stop in the hall. It is the place where I stood after coming to look for the old man because Minna had told me to kill him, and he talked to me, knew whose boy I was and gave me a slice of apple cake that I thought was poisoned and threw away. My child’s eyes perceived the house as huge, as large as a mansion or a small castle. Now, the hall I am in seems rather narrow and crowded with perfectly ordinary furniture: a wardrobe in one corner and, in another, a small wooden table with slightly splayed, turned legs. A mirror hangs above the table and I can see myself reflected in it, with the entrance door behind me. This figure, a man holding a rifle, with binoculars around his neck and the broad shoulder straps of his rucksack against a sheepskin-lined coat (it was Johannes’s) – he doesn’t look like me. But I don’t know who I look like. Next to the staircase to the first floor, something cold and white shimmers in the dull light. I reach out and my hand touches a broad metal edge, below which a dark space seems to open up. It makes sense only after I have taken a step back: I am standing in the entrance to a lift with wide metal doors that have been left open. The cabin is empty. It stands to reason: how else could the wheelchair-bound Helga have moved between floors? I follow the passage to the left of the hall. I
t shares one of its walls with the long veranda outside. A collection of old pieces of household equipment has been lined up along the opposite wall. It is like a craft museum: a spinning wheel, a linen-heckling block, a butter churn, hooped like a beer barrel. Above these things, the wall has been hung with tapestries of abstract landscape motifs in deep, muted colours. So the executors have not even gone through the personal property yet. It is so strange. I know that Helga died childless, but surely someone in the family could or would have a claim to inherit some of these objects? The hall passage ends in a gable room, which I guess was used as a drawing or sitting room. The windows at the far end face the yard, offering a view of the stables and the farm manager’s house over to the left. Anyone who stood here would have been able to keep tabs on everything that happened on the farm or on the road leading up to it from the crossroads at the Yellow Villa. Halfway into the room I turn round and find myself standing in front of a painting of a St John’s Eve bonfire, the same painting that I saw as a child. Then, as now, it hangs above the stone fireplace. But I do not recognise anything about the rest of the room. Did Kaufmann really invite me to come all this way into the house, or did I see the painting somewhere else in the house? I stare at the naked bodies of the men and women against the background of the rocks and at the flames that flare from the bonfire on the beach, rising so high they might be sucked up into the darkened sky. Perhaps it is the way with kitsch art that everything about it seems unreal in every sense; the seated or half-recumbent bodies around the fire are unreal, with their bulging, muscular limbs, portrayed in the same way as the rounded shapes of the rocks. Even so, the painting radiates heat powerfully, as if the landscape is warmed not only by the flames but also by the rocks and the bodies, glowing red with reflected light from the fire. And suddenly, not only the painting but also the house that encases it strike me as both very close and very distant. Everything around me I have seen before, and was imprinted on my memory when I was a child. But now I see the rooms as if in a mirror, with all perspectives wrenched inside out. I also felt this earlier, as I approached the house: as if the gaze of the entire island was fixed on me. I find my way along the passage to the hall and walk up the wide, curved staircase to the first floor. This was Helga’s part of the house. From the landing, similar to the hall on the ground floor, doors open into three rooms: a bedroom, a small, pantry-style kitchen and, on the left, a larger room that looks like a workroom or studio. It contains a loom with a long cutting table next to it. Yarns and lengths of fabric in different materials are set out on wide shelves above the table, which served as a low workbench, suitable for a person seated in a wheelchair. Tapestries similar to those on the ground floor have been put up on the opposite wall: fields in olive green and petroleum blue, broken up by long vertical or horizontal lines creating stylised landscapes: a rock face, the line of a beach or a forest. They must be Helga’s work. I wander about in the upstairs rooms, all of which are almost pedantically orderly. The windows in the bedroom are the only ones offering the same view as those in the downstairs drawing room. The studio windows face the interior of the island, the forest and the lake. I wonder if this was for purely practical reasons, if the yarns and fabrics Helga worked with should not be exposed to strong sunlight or if Helga preferred her work to be done in obscurity, out of sight. In any case, it must have demanded an intense physical effort from a person who towards the end of her life barely had the muscular strength to move her arms at all. I look more closely at the loom, and underneath it I spot coils of electrical cables which supply a rotary switch on a panel attached to the edge of the workbench, suggesting that at least some of the heavier aspects of weaving, such as moving the batten or the actual shedding, have been made possible independent of muscular strength. Even so, nothing on this floor fits the islanders’ usual image of Helga Kaufmann as the spoiled, languishing and almost ethereal daughter of the local landowners. But then, no one really knew much about her, apart from her being so enfeebled from birth by muscle atrophy that she could not go to school with the other children and also had to spend long periods abroad because the climate up here in the north, at least in the winter, was thought unfavourable for a person suffering from her condition. Was all that part of some kind of play-acting? With the exception of the loom powered by electricity and the absence of thresholds between them, there is nothing to indicate that these rooms were inhabited by an invalid. On the contrary, the way the entire studio has been furnished gives an impression of energy and vitality. The small photographs pinned to the short wall at the end of the workbench all show Helga engaged in a variety of outdoor activities. In one of them, she stands with her sunglasses pushed up on her forehead, leaning on a pair of ski poles jammed into the snow in front of her and smiling with an expression at the same time intrepid and mildly sarcastic. She does not look like her father: her build is stronger and her face broader, especially across the jaw. Only one feature brings him to mind: the physical tension, the hint of a grimace that always lingers. Kaufmann himself, as I suddenly recall, walked about marked by unceasing pain, as if every step cost him endless effort. I wonder when these pictures of Helga were taken. Probably sometime in the late 1930s. In another photo, the whole family stands together in lush parkland. It must be over on West Island. I feel sure that the white-limed walls of the hospital pavilions are in the background, and also the walled road down to the jetty. All three are dressed in light, bright summer clothes, with Kaufmann in a white suit with narrow lapels and a flower (a carnation?) on the lapel, Sigrid Kaufmann in a wide-brimmed hat that shadows her face and makes her smile look fleeting and vague. Helga is standing between them, leaning sideways, with her arm around her mother’s shoulders and the upper part of her body slightly angled backwards as if, in that instant, something down by the jetty had caught her attention. The twist of her body means that you get a glimpse of her long blond hair as it flows from under her hat down the back of her coat. The picture cuts her off at waist height so the callipers on her legs do not show, but still, she is standing up and definitely does not look like a sickly girl. This photo must have been taken around the same time as the group photo included in Memoirs of a Wartime Child, when Kaufmann was at the peak of his career. He was Secretary of State in the Department of Trade and had just contributed successfully to the negotiation of a trade agreement with the government in Berlin. Almost one hundred employees were working on his farms on the Inner Islands and, in addition, he operated on a grand scale as a philanthropist by playing host to large groups of poor city children every summer. He could even allow himself to house a complete wild-card child like my father among his charges. It does not take long before I find photos of Frank, too. He and Helga look as if they were really very close. You see them together in many of the pictures pinned on the wall above the workbench. They could be siblings: she, the elder one, the more mature, more stable and rooted; he, the younger one, short by nature and, at the age of ten or eleven (he could scarcely have been any older), rather slightly built and easily distracted, always into something else – a child at play. In one of the photos, which must have been enlarged from its original size, he is standing in the middle of a field, with the ears of wheat reaching to his waist, and holding what looks like a willow flute in his hand. His torso is bare and something about the way he is posed and seen a little from below, with his face in half-profile so that his neck and the line of his shoulders are in close-up, is reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl’s images of young athletes. The angle of the perspective is such that only the sky is seen above the ripening wheat: a sky that is wide open, with a few light, white clouds that look about to melt into the greater whole. On the wall next to that photograph, several landscape studies have been pinned up, probably to serve as inspiration for Helga’s textiles. The lake: a pale, shining surface, sliced down the middle by a long line of forest. Flights of birds. The even plough furrows on a field. In another, a field of wheat is shown, this time with the familiar gable view of the Yellow Vil
la at one end. On the drive, a large grey van is parked, the same old van that usually stood next to the garage when we were little. Its cab smelt of dust and rusty metal and mouldy fabric-covered seats. Johannes had stopped driving it ages ago but was unwilling to sell it. He had used it during the occupation years to take provisions to the farm. Because it was wartime, fuel was scarce, and Kaufmann alone was allowed extra rations. Once a week, Johannes went across to the mainland. I imagine that, in the picture, he is just back from one of these trips, which is why he has not yet had time to get the van parked off the drive. Perhaps he has just been up at the farm to unload. They must have known each other very well, he and young Frank. It could even be that Johannes had lifted him up into the driver’s seat and allowed him to hold the outsized steering wheel, the way I loved doing when I was a small boy. This kind of thing could explain the friendliness between Johannes and the family up in the NATO villa, their special relationship, which so many islanders would declare afterwards they simply did not understand. They were so close, Frank even left his two children in Johannes’s care when he had to drive his wife to the hospital. I remember how Johannes used to praise Frank’s good Norwegian, and how sometimes, sitting in his nook of an evening, he would amuse himself and us by imitating Frank and speaking with a pretend American accent. Minna found it only moderately funny and would get cross after a while, because she insisted on speaking her own English, the language she said she and her mother had used, and which excluded Johannes and me. She could keep at it for several days, walking around and muttering to herself. Was it Helga who taught young Frank Norwegian during the many days of leisure they spent together? I imagine that he is chosen to push her in the wheelchair while she guides him around the island, shows him the secret paths to the lake, points out the different water birds and their breeding sites but also instils in him how crucial it is for him to be cautious when he is with people he does not know and how he must avoid visiting places where his presence might arouse suspicion. Even so, it is a mystery that he was able to stay on the island unnoticed for such a long time. In those days, only the Mains Farm had more than a dozen permanent employees, though the numbers multiplied during the harvest season. And yet no one on the island ever remarked on this boy who not only looked like a stranger but could hardly speak the language! Naturally, those who met him must have thought him the right sort of German. But still, it does not explain everything, including why he chose to return to the island so many years later, bringing his own wife and children. Next, I have a look at what was presumably Helga’s bedroom: it contains a broad bed with a colourful coverlet stretched over it, fitted wardrobes along the opposite wall, a mirror placed half a metre lower than normal, to suit a handicapped person, and a small writing desk of white wood with a set of drawers fitted inside a cabinet on the right-hand side. The drawers are all locked. I go back to the studio, pick up a screwdriver and a hammer and, by forcing the screwdriver in between the uppermost drawer and the top of the cabinet, I manage to break the lock. I scrutinise the contents: desktop files, folders, stiff envelopes full of bills and bank statements, insurance agreements, contracts and various invoices. Two fat brown envelopes turn out to contain a lot of small black-and-white photographs, all taken several years before the war and seemingly intended to document the routine work of the farm. They show farmers carrying out everyday tasks like milking, harnessing horses to a plough, cutting and stacking hay (in the picture, this is done by women) or threshing with long flails. Another, larger envelope is also stuffed with black-and-white photographs, but these are from later dates and taken with a much better camera. There are twenty or so landscape images: rods of light shining between tree trunks, boulders overgrown with shimmering moss, a mountainside viewed through falling rain, with distinctive zones of woodland fading into each other like thin veils, one behind the other. At the bottom of that envelope, I find a picture in the same format but of a quite different kind: yet another group photograph of the whole family together – Mr and Mrs Kaufmann and Helga herself. Here, she is much older than in the ones I have seen so far, but apart from being seated in a wheelchair (a plaid is hiding her legs), Helga looks surprisingly unchanged. Her hair is still long, if perhaps a shade thinner where it is spread over the collar of her slightly low-cut lacy blouse, and her head is heavier, more sculptural, with the wide jaw if anything even more prominent. But, to me, what is truly remarkable about this photograph is that both my parents are included and that it must have been taken about the same time as those in the Javanese box. So much about my parents seems almost identical to what I have seen before: the expressions on their faces, their postures, even the clothes they wear. As in the Javanese box photo, Frank, short but broad-shouldered, stands with a slight forward stoop, as if he is forcing his grin on the camera, and Elizabeth’s blond hair is piled up on her head in one of those bouffant styles that everyone fancied in the sixties. Frank has put one arm around his wife’s shoulder, pulling her a little closer, presumably to make more room for the hosts and their daughter; Mr Kaufmann himself, with his slender, frail bones that have grown thinner over the years, his hair is also thinner and combed across his skull, but he is smiling, too; and then Sigrid Kaufmann, standing furthest to the right, her hand resting on her daughter’s shoulder, without a smile, unlike the others, but at least also without the alarmed distrust that marked her on the photo taken down by the sea. An eye-catching detail makes this photo different from the rest: pale, yellowy discolouration running along all four edges, as if it has been framed but then removed from the frame and left to end up here, at the bottom of a locked desk drawer – as if it has been treated with reverence and then become disfavoured. And it is at this point that I am struck by the obvious conclusion, a thought that has previously been unthinkable: of course, they are related, my father and Kaufmann. I stand absolutely still, holding the photograph and, at that moment, it seems to me as if all five of them, including Helga, stare at me with challenging expressions. As if this is the moment I have journeyed towards all my life. Without knowing, however, when it might happen or whether it ever would.