Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  Kaj Moss never intended to join the Resistance. But by the third week of October, there are few at the hospitals uninvolved. One senior surgeon on Kaj’s service and one of the ambulance drivers have already had to flee to Sweden, after refugees they’d driven to Humlebaek were betrayed. A pediatrician was sent to Vestre prison when the Gestapo discovered that the patients on his ward were middle-aged and the men were circumcised. Things are uglier and angrier every day, as Berlin sends more Gestapo police to do the jobs the Wehrmacht seem to do without efficiency here. (It is alarming—that a climate of refusal to yield to one’s own worst instincts, such as the Danes were displaying, could infect good German soldiers…Berlin has assumed that infection would always spread the other way.)

  The captured Danish Jews, it is now known, are together at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, a brutal place with four crematoria. It is for many a station on the way to even worse places, but none of Denmark’s Jews are sent onward. From the first, the Danes, including the king, have mounted a campaign of vigilance, letting the Germans know that their captured Jews are out of sight but not out of mind. They have gone to the homes of those who were taken and gathered clothes to send to them. Soon a staff of thirty-five is employed full-time sending food, cigarettes, soap, and medicines to Danes, Jewish and Christian, in concentration camps. Jews from other countries arrive at Theresienstadt and then disappear again, but the Danish Jews stay where they are, and are the envy of the camp, as the steady stream of packages from home gives them lifesaving comfort and courage. It is common for camp officials to steal packages sent to prisoners, but the Danes attach a duplicate form with proof of receipt to return to the senders. It is thought the Germans cannot resist filling out official forms and, having filled them out, cannot disregard them.

  Danish saboteurs and Resistance fighters are not so privileged as the Danish Jews. If caught they are often tortured unless or until they betray their comrades. And when they are sent into Germany and east, it is to hard-labor and death camps. For these reasons, the more Jews who are rescued, the more dangerous things become for those who rescue them. The more escape routes, codes, and hiding places must be changed. And yet more and more Danes who started resisting by helping the Jews will stay in the underground, smuggling out other helpers of the Jews, or Allied airmen shot down over Denmark, or saboteurs who have been compromised and must get out of the country.

  Kaj does not know much about Nina’s work because it is safer if he doesn’t. He stays at the hospital. This frees a bedroom at the apartment, and Nina has use for it. Hers is the place where families wait for transport from Christianshavn. When a family has more small children than adults traveling with them, a child can stay with Nina until an adult is crossing who can carry the little one. Nina has learned how to comfort the parents, to amuse the children, to make it seem a great adventure. She has learned to turn her own fear to the best possible use, being brave for others.

  Early one afternoon, when Nina is at home, deep asleep, having been up all night at the warehouse on Wilder Square, she dreams there is a knocking at the door, and wakes up at the same time as she sits up, to find herself clammy with fear sweat.

  There is a knocking at the door. It is not, however, a pounding as in her dream, but a light tapping. Tap tap. Tap tap. Then a long pause. She listens to hear if the knocker has walked away, but the tapping comes again.

  She goes to the door in her bare feet. She listens, trying to intuit what is on the other side. Finally she says, “Who is there, please?”

  “Is that Nina Moss?” This frightens her more. Who would answer a question with a question but someone trying to trick her?

  She doesn’t answer and there is silence from the other side as well. After a moment or two, a paper is slipped under the door. It says, “I am Per Bennike. Please let me in.”

  She opens the door. A lanky man with broad shoulders and large knobby wrists and hands steps in quickly. She shuts the door again and locks it.

  “I didn’t want to say my name in the hall.”

  “Are you wanted?”

  The Gestapo now publishes posters, with pictures, of known Resistance fighters.

  “How do you do,” says Per.

  “Sorry.” She shakes his offered hand.

  “I am wanted, but they don’t know yet where to look for me.”

  “It was you who called me? To say my parents were safe?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are very welcome here. Come in.”

  She leads him toward the kitchen.

  “I won’t stay long. If I can help it.”

  “Tell me what’s happened.”

  “Last night when we took our guests to the loading point, a Gestapo car was waiting on the beach. It might have been coincidence, but I don’t think so. We sent a man across two nights ago who didn’t seem quite right to me.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “We ditched the car before they saw us. We scattered into the woods …I don’t know if the others were caught. I got to Helsingør, walking, in time for the early train. There were Wehrmacht guards in the station, but no Gestapo. I pretended to sleep, and kept my hat over my face on the train.”

  “Do your people know you are here?”

  “Yes, I called. When my father heard my voice, he said, ‘I’m sorry, he isn’t here and we really don’t expect him,’ so I knew Gestapo were there, or had been. After that I stayed out of sight until I thought of you.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Starving!” He smiles, and Nina can’t help smiling back. Together they scavenge a meal, which they eat together sitting in the chairs her parents always use when they have their meals in this kitchen. When the kettle boils, Nina takes the little package of Earl Grey down from the best sugar bowl in the pantry. She carefully warms the pot with boiling water and empties it again, then measures out enough precious tea for them both. When the hot water hits the leaves and the scent of bergamot suddenly plumes up from the pot, Per straightens like a dog that’s heard a whistle too high for human ears.

  “I’m hallucinating,” he says.

  She sets a tray with pretty cups and cross-stitched napkins. She even has enough milk for a little pitcher. When she pours his cup, he lifts it in both hands and holds it to his face, breathing.

  “I’m not going to ask you where you got this. I don’t care if you killed someone.” The flavor of that tea, the shimmering pleasure of safety and of hunger satisfied, make the moment dreamlike. The little room is warm with the steam and drifting smoke of the cigarettes she puts on the table between them.

  “Thank you,” Per says.

  “You are most welcome,” says Nina. For saving my parents. He understands, and she knows he does; to say it aloud would embarrass them both.

  “The last time I saw your parents, they said they were going to introduce me to you, after the war,” says Per.

  Nina blushes and looks at her plate. When she looks up, Per is smiling at her; he’s never seen a girl do that before.

  “I guess they already have,” says Nina.

  She has an intense moment of wishing she were going to Sweden with him. She would see her parents. Luck comes in strange forms sometimes. He can’t stay, and she can’t go. She stands up.

  “You’re going to be asleep with your eyes open soon,” she says. “Go to bed. I’ll go see what can be arranged.”

  Nina shows Per to her parents’ bedroom, then goes out to talk to the people she knows. The Dragør lighthouse boat is full for tonight and tomorrow. But there is a group at Rockefeller Institute arranging passages from the south coast.

  Laurus will hear all about his escape from Per, after the war. How Nina told him to go to a particular bar and order a drink with a strange name. How a man then joined him and made an odd remark, to which Per made the correct rejoinder. How he was taken to a van waiting in an alley, and shut in the back with three other people, one a fisherman, and one an English parachutist with a bullet wound in his shou
lder. How they drove through the night in pitch-darkness, they could not tell in what direction, they did not know for how long. How in Strøby he and the others were taken aboard a fishing smack and each nailed into a herring crate in a fetal position. How his heart nearly stopped when he felt the boat come into the wind and stop moving, and he heard the sound of footsteps pacing back and forth on the deck. He believed, too, he could hear German voices, although from where he lay, it could have been something else, a Swedish dialect…How at last the boat was under way again, how the minutes passed, unless they were hours, until someone came with a hammer to open the crate in which he lay, cramped and aching. About the Danish voice saying, Welcome to Sweden, and hearing the pop of a champagne cork. How, as they sailed the rest of the way into Malmö, with Per standing on the deck under the stars, smiling so hard his face hurt, one of the “sailors,” a Danish Resistance fighter, explained that they were often stopped now by German patrols and that often, as on this night, the Nazis brought police dogs aboard. But a Dane in Malmö had invented a powder made of human blood and cocaine. The “sailors” carried it in handkerchiefs and, when they were stopped, scattered it on the decks so in a moment the noses of the excited dogs were completely useless. After the war they will laugh, that the Germans never did figure out why the dogs couldn’t tell a saboteur from a salmon.

  What Per does not tell Laurus, nor Ditte and Henrik, when he sees them, was that by the time the arrangements were made, he could hardly bear to go. There he was, a displaced person again when he finally didn’t want to be. He had changed a great deal since the first of October. And just as he understood that, he walked through Nina’s door, and she gave him a cup of real Earl Grey tea as if she’d been saving it for him. She fed him and made him laugh and gave him the first cigarette he’d had in a day, and suddenly it seemed that everything he wanted for the rest of his life was in that apartment. Beauty. Civility. Gentleness. Courage. Purpose.

  When he woke in the near dark in her parents’ bedroom that first night, she was sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Have you been here long?” he asked her.

  “I couldn’t bear to wake you.”

  It was so much what he had just been dreaming, that he sat up and kissed her, as if they’d been together for years instead of hours, and she kissed him back. When he finally left, he took the thought of her with him, and carried it around for the rest of the war, and for years afterward.

  When Nina is betrayed, it is late November.

  Resistance in Denmark has reached critical mass at last, and cooperation is flowing between partisans and SOE the way Laurus has hoped for three years that it would. Codes, reception points, safe houses, and escape routes are established. The codes in Denmark all have to do with the table. Agents are Jam, or Napkin, or Mustard or Gossip or Tennis. A signal that the moon, wind, and weather are right for a scheduled drop is called a “kettle.” It’s a particular predetermined sentence spoken during the nightly BBC broadcast. The partisans have shortwave radios, but the more agents and materiel are safely dropped, the more sabotage increases, and the more danger there is in using them. The kettle is the safest way to communicate to a whole reception team at once.

  The more sabotage increases, the more Werner Best forbids any mention of it in Danish papers. He doesn’t want Berlin reading about exploding armament factories or rail lines in a press he controls. In fact, Best has a rather antic view of the truth, as if by controlling the news he controls what is happening. He has actually announced with pride that Denmark is finally “Judenrein.” It is, but only because seven thousand Danish Jews are now in Sweden.

  On a certain night, the kettle has been broadcast, and a circle of people wait in a dark pasture on an estate in Northern Jutland, near Randers. When a circling plane appears overhead, the correct signal is given by electric torch. Two men appear in the night sky dangling from parachutes, and huge canisters of materiel drift after them. As sometimes happens, one of the men, a former merchant marine, lands far afield and can’t be found by the reception team. He sinks his parachute in a pond and hides in a barn until light; then he walks into the nearest town to buy breakfast and arrange to get to Aarhus, to his contact. Unfortunately, he discovers only then that by error he has been given French money instead of Danish. This is enough to attract the interest of the Gestapo officer who comes into the café as he is trying to buy breakfast. The fact that when he is searched it is found that his Danish farm clothes, which have been made for him by SOE, do not have Danish, or any, labels, is enough to indict him. His claim to be the son-in-law of a pig farmer on Fyn is not believed. Even more regrettably, he has failed to shred and swallow a number of slips of paper containing information he should have committed to memory but hadn’t. One of them is the address of a safe house in Copenhagen, should he have to leave the country. It is the Moss apartment.

  Nina is walking home from class in the early dark. It is cold. She is thinking about the Christmas package her parents will send from Stockholm. It will be the first Christmas of her life apart from them. She stops on the Strøget to look in a shop window. What can she send to them?

  She is surprised to find at her elbow her neighbor, Mrs. Jespersen, who has emerged from the café on the corner, in a hurry apparently; she isn’t wearing her hat or gloves.

  “Don’t go home,” Mrs. Jespersen says.

  Nina is taken aback.

  “They are waiting for you.” Mrs. Jespersen is frightened.

  “Who?”

  “Do you need money?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Here,” says Mrs. Jespersen. She slips a hand into Nina’s pocket. “That’s all I had in the house. Pay me back next time I see you. Don’t come any closer.” She hurries off down their street. Nina stands in the dark, adjusting. Then she turns back the way she came, and walks very quickly.

  There were lists of refugees in her apartment, of moneys paid, of money owed, of boats, and of fishermen. There are names of contacts, addresses, and telephone numbers. They are in the piano bench, in the form of musical notation. It’s a pretty simple code; it looks like a student composition, and she hopes to God the men who search the apartment don’t try to play it.

  She is in the maternity ward at Kaj’s hospital, listed as a Mrs. Haxen. One of the nurses has given her a wedding ring. She has been here three days, going a little mad with anxiety and with having to play the patient. The only thing good about what has happened is, she will have Christmas with her parents after all. But the waiting for an escape plan is terrible.

  “Your husband is here, Mrs. Haxen,” says the nurse on duty this afternoon. Nina looks up to see Harry in the doorway. Behind him, a German soldier passes the door and looks in. Harry is carrying flowers. He comes to her bedside and kisses her.

  “Hello, darling,” she says, and suddenly thinks of Per Bennike. Perhaps she will see him in Sweden as well.

  “Are you feeling better?” Harry is all gentle concern.

  “Yes, I’m stronger now.”

  “We’ll have other children,” he says.

  “I know.”

  The woman in the next bed, who gave birth this morning, chooses this moment to wake up. She turns over heavily, wincing, and stares at them, not seeming to know where she is. Then closes her eyes again.

  Nina and Harry are silent for a bit, each glancing at the woman as if to signal the other. Be careful.

  “I came to tell you—I’m going to Germany tonight,” says Harry. Nina looks startled. “On the midnight train.” She stares.

  “I thought you were…I thought you were going by sea…”

  “The train will be safer. It will be full of soldiers, after all. I hope nothing happens to it…” He waits to see if she is understanding him.

  “I do too,” she says.

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll sit in the next-to-last car, as I always do. You know, my lucky charm.” He smiles, and she nods.

  “What will you do if—something does happen to t
he train?”

  “I feel sure God has me by the hand.” He takes her right hand in his. “I’ll trust in Him and wait for a sign.” On her wrist, with his finger, he taps: once, then twice, then once. Dum da-da dum.

  “All right, then,” she says. The nurse, who has taken the flowers, comes back with a vase and the paper they were wrapped in, neatly folded. She gives this to Nina. On the inside, in pencil, there are several bars of musical notations.

  At ten minutes before midnight, Nina boards the Berlin train at the Central Station. She speaks German when she buys her ticket, and when she speaks to the conductor, and when she finds a seat in the next-to-last car. The train is quite full, of soldiers who have been celebrating the beginning of their home leave, and of German civilian office workers who serve Werner Best or the Wehrmacht. She is dressed in the woolen skirt and stockings she wore to school four days ago; her blouse and underclothes have been laundered for her by the nurses, and she carries an empty overnight bag. She has money for her passage across the sound and enough to get to Stockholm. She does not know if her parents know she is coming. She does not know if her brothers know where she is. Any contact with Kaj could have endangered him, so she has not seen him since she arrived at the hospital.

  Nina sits beside a window. There are two soldiers on the seat beside her, one heavily drunk. An officer sits across from her, and smiles at her when the train begins to move. “We’ll be home soon now,” he says in German, and she nods. The air smells of beer and sweat and the hot metal of the tracks outside. The noise of the train builds as it gathers speed, and soon they are out of the station and on their way south. There are three others like her in this car, Nina knows, but has no idea which ones they are. She is terrified. And helpless.

  The officer across from her reaches into an inside pocket of his coat and brings out something metal. Nina is so tense that she flinches. For a moment she had hallucinated a gun, the man smiling, “We know who you are. You are under arrest.”