Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  He is holding out a cigarette case to her, and to cover her spasm of fear she takes a cigarette. The officer lights it for her. He is a handsome man, with dark hair and pale eyes behind heavy glasses. He wears a wedding ring, and she pictures the wife and children waiting for him at home. Two little girls, will it be? No, a girl and a boy, she gives him. They will be tousled with sleep when he reaches them in the morning. Their warm bodies will squirm with happiness at being held by him again. “Vati!” they will cry.

  She smokes gratefully; it is much better tobacco than they have had at home. Her face is reflected in the black glass of the night window. How far have they gone now? Ten miles? Fifteen?

  As the minutes pass, the officer takes out a German paper and starts to read. The drunk soldier beside her is asleep, but not much quieter than he had been when awake. The second soldier is eating cheese. Her cigarette is finished and she wants another one. How far have they gone now? Twenty miles? What if it just goes on this way mile after mile, until they roll onto the ferry and on to Germany?

  There is a tremendous jolt. Suitcases are thrown from the overhead racks, and passengers land in the aisles. Nina finds herself in the officer’s lap. The train is stopped. After a stunned moment, the car fills with shouts and babble. “Sabotage,” the word spreads through the train. The drunk soldier is on the floor, awake and furious, as are many. One moment they are on their way home, the next they are stopped, stuck, thwarted in the middle of the night, in the middle of Danish nowhere.

  Passengers are pouring out of the train now to see what has happened. As instructed, Nina goes with them. The Germans leave their luggage on the train, and she does the same. There is a long drop from the steps to the bank by the tracks below; Nina’s shoes were chosen when it was cold but dry. Here in the woods it has begun to snow.

  The passengers who have gotten out tromp toward the front of the train, to see what has happened to the engine, to learn how bad the damage is, and will they go on tonight at all. But Nina goes to the back of the train and crosses the track in the dark to the right side. The train has stopped in a place where the woods are close and deep. She slips into them, and waits. Are there other figures doing the same? She senses that there are, but cannot see them in the dark.

  A light flashes, very briefly, two times. It is not quite the signal she is waiting for. She watches, and the light flashes again, twice quickly.

  That’s it, then. It must be. It is cold, her feet are freezing, it is pitch-dark. She goes forward, toward the place where she saw the torchlight. There is a great deal of shouting and hissing steam at the front of the train, but with every step, that is farther behind her. She begins to hear also forest noises. Branches underfoot, animals perhaps, wild night sounds. Finally she can make out a figure before her. A man, tall, standing. She goes toward him. She is listening for footsteps behind her, of the others from the car, but cannot hear them.

  “Moss?” says the man softly, when she is close to him, and he can see her.

  “Yes.”

  “Gut,” he says in German. “You are under arrest.”

  By the time Sydney finally met her, the story of Nina’s rescue was a family legend.

  “She was waiting in a line…” cries Ditte, or Henrik, or Tofa.

  “I know exactly where I was standing. It was night, and I was in a line…” Nina would say. But usually others took up the story again. They had all memorized every detail, every moment of it.

  It was April of 1945. Nina was at Ravensbrück. She had spent four months in Vestre prison in Copenhagen refusing to answer questions, and five at Horserød prison in north Zealand. In August, a new prison camp called Frøslev was opened near Padborg, on the German border. Sabotage and unrest had grown much worse in Denmark since the government fell; to try to avoid aggravating it further, the Germans agreed to build a camp inside the country for their Danish prisoners instead of deporting them. Frøslev wasn’t so bad, really. They were isolated from their lives, they were bossed around by Gestapo men and put on pointless work details. But there was food, and the sense that as long as they stayed in Denmark, they still in some way led charmed lives, compared with other guests of the Reich. For a month. Then the Germans broke the promise and began shipping people south. No one knew how the choices were made, who stayed and who went. In November of 1944, Nina and seven others were sent to the all-women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Such a beautiful name.

  On an April night in 1945, Thursday the fifth, she was standing in a line when a guard called her out. “You are going to Sweden,” he said to her in German.

  You are going to Sweden. She thought it was a new cruel joke. That when they thought of this new way to kill you, whatever it was going to be, they called it “going to Sweden.”

  But that was wrong. Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross had made a deal, somehow. He won permission to send Red Cross buses to the camps, to collect the Scandinavian POWs and take them to Sweden so the Germans, seeing defeat coming, wouldn’t kill them all first. They would be interned in Sweden, Berlin was told, until the war ended. And presumably, should the Nazis win after all, they could have the prisoners back.

  Why would the Germans make a deal like that? Probably hoping for some kind of mercy at the war crime trials to come.

  She was taken to the commandant’s office. The other Scandinavians from her barracks were already there, and there were two Finns from one of the satellite camps. The group was told they could only leave if they behaved perfectly every minute they remained, if they left their quarters spic-and-span as if they’d been at Girl Scout camp, and if they told everyone on the buses and in Sweden that their time as guests of the Germans had been useful and happy. They agreed to.

  Nina’s nieces and nephew pressed their cool, untouchable aunt to describe how she felt that last night, knowing she was going.

  “Was it like waiting for Christmas?”

  “No, not quite like that,” Nina would say. (This disappointed them…they wanted to share in her joy, and this was the feeling of nearly unbearable anticipation they could recognize. But Faster Nina was juiceless and precise, about this especially.)

  “It was not like waiting for Christmas because you know that will come, and that it will be very happy. We did not dare hope that. If you let yourself hope that you’d really be leaving, you felt as if your heart might burst…or you felt as if electricity were burning up all the nerves in your body, and it hurt…” Her nieces and nephew would stare at her, trying to follow this. But failing.

  “So what was it like when the buses arrived?” They wanted her to tell this until she told it the way they wanted to hear it. And she tried.

  “We couldn’t believe it. We’d been tricked and lied to so much. But here they came, just as we were promised, big white buses, clean and bright with big red crosses on them.” She would sometimes try here to fit in a little exegesis about the Red Cross, its good works in times of war and other disaster. Sometimes Nurse Cavell even got into it, but the children learned how to get her back on track.

  “And then did it feel like Christmas?”

  “More. But we were still very sad because we were leaving so many others. Two in our bunks were Dutch and one French. They had to stay behind. And one was very ill.”

  “But the war was almost over, Faster Nina. They would be out in another month or so.”

  “We didn’t know that.”

  She would tell about how she felt when the buses actually pulled out of the camp. How she was given a cigarette, her first in months and months, and how she saw out the window a child in a farmyard, pulling a little red wooden horse on wheels by a string. How amazing it was, to see life going on, right here, so near. And then, the devastation that war had brought to the German countryside—the people so starved and sad-looking and so much ruin. How they passed a troop of new recruits training for the front. They looked about twelve years old, in uniform, bravely marching. And when they came to bombed-out towns, the Nazi g
uards on the buses made them pull the shades down, closing out the spring sun they longed for, so they wouldn’t see the Germans’ humiliation. When they were once again in the countryside they could put the shades back up. Finally the Swedish driver grew irritated and told them to leave the shades up or down, but leave them alone. The Germans left them down. They crossed Brandenburg and then into Holstein and finally Schleswig without being able to see outside, as if they were traveling in a tunnel. When they reached the Danish border the shades went up again for good.

  “And what happened when you crossed the border?” the children asked happily, because they already knew.

  “When we crossed the border, well then…” Nina would have to stop, to keep from crying. She never spoke if her voice might shake. When she could, she went on calmly. “When we crossed the border, the road was lined on both sides with people. They were waiting for us. They were singing, and waving the Dannebrog, and when we came right to them they were crying out, ‘Welcome back, welcome to Denmark…’” Her smile was pinched because her eyes had filled. It was so much harder to speak calmly of gratitude than of anger.

  “They hadn’t forgotten us, you see, that whole long time,” she would go on, finally. “We felt forgotten. Godforsaken. But we were not. And we cried, and they pushed flowers and chocolate and cigarettes in at the window, and bottles of milk…we hadn’t seen milk in such a long time…”

  “And were you allowed to stop and get out?” They knew she was.

  “We stopped in Padborg, right past the frontier. And the people of the town—we got out of the buses and they vied with each other for the chance to take us to their homes, to give us hot food and water for washing…” She had to stop again. “Well. And then the whole way through Jutland, across Fyn, on to Copenhagen, people lined the roads, more and more as we approached the city. At one point we began to sing the Danish national anthem but the Gestapo men couldn’t stand that. They pulled their pistols out and ordered us to stop. And when we got to Copenhagen, the streets were filled with people out to welcome us. Filled. The buses couldn’t move. The Gestapo men got mad and they broadcast through loudspeakers, if people didn’t be quiet and move away from the buses, they would turn around and take us back to the camps.”

  “What did you do?” they would ask, though they knew the answer.

  “We stopped singing and shouting, but we couldn’t stop smiling,” Nina would say. “We smiled and smiled, on the ferry to Malmö. Although it was hard to have to go right through our country and not stop. It wasn’t until we were on dry land in Sweden, and the Gestapo men were on the ferry back to Denmark, that we could shout and cry.”

  “Did you see Uncle Kaj when you went through Copenhagen?”

  “He says he was there and watched us pass, but I couldn’t see him. I looked and looked.”

  “Did Farmor and Farfar meet you at the ferry?”

  “They did. They came down from Stockholm, with Auntie Tofa, and Farmor cried so much, because she’d been told I was dead.”

  “She must have been really happy,” Eleanor would say.

  “Yes.” Though the truth was, it was days before Ditte could stop crying at the sight of Nina. In those days, people had never, even in pictures, seen living people so thin they looked like skeletons, with a terrible parched film of flesh stretched over their bones, teeth falling out of their heads, and their eyes sunk way back in the sockets. The phrase “like something out of a concentration camp” did not exist yet.

  The children wanted to know all about what she ate for her first dinner in Sweden, and what she did next, and Nina didn’t want to tell them how long it was before she could keep food down without terrible cramps, and how her teeth were loose and her gums bled, and she was so cold, even though it was summer; so she told them about the meals she had dreamed of when she was still in Ravensbrück, how she and her bunkmates used to take turns at night saying what they would be eating if they were at home at that moment.

  Then she would tell about how the British marched into Copenhagen in May, and how in June they all left Sweden and went home. And how Moster Tofa’s neighbor had taken care of her apartment and watered the plants and fed the cat, how Aunt Tofa said it looked better than when she went away. How Jewish friends came home to find their apartments freshly painted and flowers blooming in the window boxes. Sydney’s children loved these stories and asked for them again and again. Apart from stories, they found it hard to spend time with Faster Nina, she was so touchy and reserved, and they knew their mother thought she was basically a pain in the ass.

  On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself. On May 4, the German High Command surrendered Denmark to Field Marshal Montgomery. The whole city of Copenhagen rang with joy, as Montgomery was driven, waving from an open car belonging to the king, through streets filled with confetti and Union Jacks. It was no small thing that he reached Denmark before the Russians, or its future would have resembled East Germany’s or Czechoslovakia’s, not that of the Free West, and Monty didn’t beat the Russians by all that much. Christmas Møller came home a national hero for the courage and persistence he had called forth with his passionate broadcasts from London, once the Resistance gathered force and his mission finally clarified. Laurus Moss came home with him.

  Laurus was in Copenhagen when his parents and Nina came back from Sweden. There were tears, especially for the marks of suffering Nina wore like a poisoned cloak, which everyone could see but no one talked about. There was a great deal of laughter. It was almost enough to see the comfort Nina drew from simply being again in the completed family circle. Laurus could have stayed for months, revisiting old friends, hearing over and over how this one had escaped, how these others resisted, how the survivors had survived. There were calls to pay on families of those who had not come back. There was so much that was not yet known, just the empty beds, the absence of news from a husband or wife, a son or daughter. Per Bennike came to call more than once, though Nina always withdrew soon after he appeared; Laurus noticed how Per’s eyes followed her as she slipped out of the room. And Nina wouldn’t talk, to Laurus or anyone, about her time in Germany. “I’m not ready,” she would say. Laurus always wondered if he could have helped if he had stayed. If he could have seen signs that others missed that she could start coming back to them, if given the right stone to step to, the right hand to hold for balance. Kaj was so busy with his work and his new girl that he was hardly at home, and Ditte and Henrik were so shattered by the thought of Nina’s pain that to them she showed a quiet mask and they all pretended it was her face.

  But Laurus couldn’t stay in Denmark when he had a wife and child waiting across the ocean. He tore himself away to go back to London, resigned his commission in the Buffs, and managed to book a seat on a Pan Am flight from London to Idlewild on the twentieth of July. He thought about traveling in civilian clothes, but decided that his wife had done without him for four years because he was a soldier; a soldier was what she ought to get back.

  The flight, a dreamlike interlude between all that he’d seen and what was to come, took forever. An Englishwoman in the seat next to him was going to Connecticut to retrieve the small son and daughter she’d sent to America at the start of the Blitz. She showed him pictures of the way they looked the last time she saw them, and the pictures her sister in Norwalk had sent a month ago. Laurus showed her a picture of the daughter he’d never seen; Eleanor on the beach at Dundee in her little striped bathing suit. The woman took her shoes off and went to sleep. Laurus dozed, too, and found himself swallowed by a ferocious longing for Sydney, a dream Sydney he’d been inventing and perfecting for four years, for touching and holding her, for the moment they would once again be together as man and wife. It was a longing he had managed to keep tamped down for so long that he felt as if he had opened a door to an empty room and found there a ravening tiger. He had to try to keep himself awake, fearing he might otherwise say in his sleep words that should only be heard by his wife.

  When they were
finally circling New York, the woman beside him awoke and found that her feet had swollen so that she couldn’t get her shoes back on. She began to weep at the thought that she was going to have to greet her children barefoot. The stewardess gave her a pair of bed socks from the first-class cabin, and Laurus convinced her it was funny. His elation at being almost home, almost back in his darling’s arms, was so huge, it was like a derangement.

  Customs seemed to take forever. As the customs officer handed him his passport and said, “Welcome home, Captain Moss,” he turned to wave goodbye to his seatmate. She was putting her shoes on and stuffing the socks into her purse. The delay had done some good.

  He walked out into free America with his heart hammering. He heard Sydney before he saw her.

  “Laurus!” She was running toward him. He stood by his luggage with his arms stretched wide. She was tan and glowing, taller and thicker than he remembered; then she was in his arms, laughing as they staggered backward a step. Then, a kiss to seal away all that they had missed and to bind them together, lips and tongues and breath. She was finally real, after all those fantasy nights. She smelled delicious, her skin like lemons, her mouth like Dentyne. He was sure he smelled like airline upholstery, stale air and cigarettes, but if she noticed, she didn’t care.

  He held her at arm’s length, at last, so they could look at each other.

  “You!” he said.

  “You!” she cried. They were giddy.

  When they were finally seated in a taxi, with four years of his life stowed in the trunk behind them and the city before them, they looked at each other for long moments, then both began to talk at once.

  “When did you—”

  “How was the—”

  They laughed and subsided. Then they did it again.

  “Did you have any—”