by Roy Jacobsen
“Perhaps she’s too old,” the knife-thrower wondered. “After all, this is an art that has to be learned from the earliest age.”
She was shown how to concentrate and did stand still now and then, but then she had to move again, she would move a limb into the danger zone without thinking, or sway slightly, not enough to cross the imaginary border her father had traced around her slender body, but enough to put him off, because she didn’t trust him, that was obvious, she was frightened of him…
But then the knife-thrower realised that these movements didn’t make her any taller, only broader sometimes, so they continued to practise, she stood still, full of fear, he reassured her and urged her to trust him, and they were making progress, even when they trained with real knives.
The stunt eventually became part of his repertoire and was an eye-catching addition to the poster they stuck to walls and telegraph poles when the circus came to town, with the trapeze artists, elephants and jugglers. But things went wrong, terribly wrong, the sixth time he performed the number, in front of 500 horrified spectators, and without the knife-thrower knowing how it had happened – he hadn’t done anything wrong!
Thereupon he had a nervous breakdown and had to give up his career, his wife left him and disappeared with his son, so there was only one thing to do, return to his father’s farm in the run-down village of Siebenbürgen in Romania, where he made his living selling eggs, chickens and other poultry.
But it would be wrong to say he was well received, after all he had entertained the Nazi scum with revolting experiments using his own children – even though the rest of this country had been on Hitler’s side too – but enough is enough, the village had not only supplied the German armies with a considerable number of young men but also lost many of their women and children, and now they had their hands full mourning them and licking their wounds, as well as trying to make ends meet, so why should they have any sympathy with this cynical child-killer.
The knife-thrower had to take to the road again, everybody could see that. He left on foot with as little as possible, through a devastated Hungary and an equally devastated Slovakia, and ended up in a completely devastated Germany, where he deceived himself into thinking he was searching for his missing family, like so many others at this time. He drank all the spirits he could get his hands on, he worked for crusts and potatoes clearing ruins and ploughing fields for crippled farmers, mumbling to himself between sobs that it was only after he had killed one of his two children that he realised he loved them both equally, that there was no William Tell Formula, and, yes, that he was also too slow-witted to understand how it had happened.
As a result he became thinner and thinner while Europe slowly but surely rose from the dust and the tragedies and its own memories. The knife-thrower walked over a narrow, rickety bridge into the Ardennes forests, where time stood still, and he worked with a wheelwright, for whom there was no longer any need either, apart from on remote farms where cartwheels and millwheels were still in use and needed repair and maintenance. If people didn’t find out on their own what a terrible tragedy he carried around with him, he made sure they were told, so that they could chase him away again, he deserved no less, he didn’t belong anywhere, now he was going round in circles, he came to a village where a baker gave him a job delivering bread to the local community in an old van, or else he would idle his time away or work for the local forestry commission looking for shrapnel with a metal detector in the trees woodcutters were about to fell.
The great tragedy in the knife-thrower’s life did not fade so easily into the mists of oblivion as the war, neither in his own mind nor in the minds of others. People whispered and gossiped and shuddered in cowsheds and living rooms, around the kitchen table and the fireside and of course at Frühschoppen and in the school, where the Siebenbürger had now become the big bogeyman.
But the fact that this man – who never talked and was never seen with anyone – drove around year in, year out, delivering bread, so necessary and trivial, yet so heavily laden with holy parables and symbols, must nevertheless have helped to wrap him in an aura of reconciliation, those wonderful, rounded Graubrot loaves with their crispy crusts, which all children in this region will think back to with longing in their hearts wherever their adult lives may take them, to the Tuaregs in Africa, to Regent Street to study optics or to Karelia to shoot bears, the loaves will accompany them on their journeys like rising suns, the way they are produced in the old brick ovens in a small, mealy-white house next to the cemetery, situated in the leaden peace up on the hill where only the buzzard distinguishes the ridge from the sky.
And suddenly all is quiet.
For even if there is a lot of malice in a small village, it also holds some tiny secrets; it contains more than one sinner when all is said and done, and one morning there is a notice hanging from a telegraph pole outside the school on which an unsteady hand has written: “I wish I were one of you.”
It’s not long before the words are read and reflected on and make their way into the houses in the village, and people slowly begin to greet the knife-thrower, not only when he arrives with the bread but also when they bump into him in the narrow streets or in the forests, where he still rushes about with his metal detector to protect the woodsmen from the long fingers of the war. And the knife-thrower tentatively returns their greetings, shame-faced and humble, relieved but also greatly surprised, because it wasn’t him who wrote the notice and hung it up – he hasn’t even read it – it was the parish priest, Father Rampart, and where people can’t see a mystery, they don’t look for an explanation.
Léon the Angel
1
At noon on 27 May, 1944 eighteen-year-old Léon V. was lying full length on the hayloft floor at home on the outskirts of the sleepy village of Dorscheid, spying on three girls who were bathing naked in the stream which wound its way through his father’s lush fields; they were his two sisters, thirteen-year-old Gertrud and little Leni, who was nine, and the third was Agnes, the house help on the farm, a mature twenty and God’s Revelation to Léon’s sharp eyes. He had dammed up the river at this point to entice them into the trap.
But this is a black day for Luxembourg, it is not called Luxembourg anymore but Gau Moselland and is to be brought back “home to the Reich”. The River Our has not changed its course, it is standing its ground, but it has lost its meaning and identity. Léon has been called up by the Wehrkreiskommando in the capital to be fitted out for a German uniform. So, lying there in the hayloft, he is ready to depart and is taking such a solemn farewell of the only world he knows and especially the woman who breezed into his life when his mother died three years ago and erased the bitter sorrow with Stardust and bright laughter.
Quite a number of his countrymen have been called up, all too many, and again people have begun to mutter about boycotting these occupation troops and seeking refuge in the forests or staying at home in their houses and seeing to their civic duties, such as looking after children, animals and the land we all live off, and Léon – who also possesses a streak of heroism – is in no doubt about what a decent person should do, he is a resistance fighter and an anti-Nazi, lived a secret life in the depths of the forest with others of his age for the whole of last year, they have an old radio set, they smuggle Belgian army guns across invisible borders, speak in code and wave semaphore flags from rooftop to rooftop in the cold Ardennes air, all of this incidentally kept well hidden from his father, who Léon suspects might be doing the same, on a larger and more significant scale.
But when he aired this possible “boycott” with his family he began to have doubts; his sisters and Agnes wanted him to stay at home of course, the countryside is full of hiding places and it is only a question of time before Hitler is brought to his knees. His father, however, had been silent while the girls were there and was reluctant to commit himself when Léon got him on his own, so the boy had drawn his own conclusions: if he bravely went ahead with a boycott he would endanger no
t only his own life but also the lives of his family, his father did not want to admit this straight out and force him to make a sacrifice, so Léon made the decision himself, in deadly earnest.
He got up and brushed the hay off his Sunday suit, cupped his hands round his mouth and yelled at the top of his voice:
“I can see you! Everyone can see you – the whole world can see you!”
The sisters let out some delightful squeals and made clumsy attempts to hide behind clothes and close-cropped beech hedges while Agnes threw up her arms and laughed in delight and was as naked as anyone had been, at least around these parts. But then she saw from his suit he was leaving and pulled her dress over her head and strode resolutely towards him through the ankle-high grass.
“Where do you think you’re going!?” she shouted angrily up to the hayloft. Léon climbed down the ladder to meet her.
“To the capital,” he said brightly and stared at the black hair which clung to her marble-white skin, her neck, shoulders and – as she turned for him to button up her dress – her back which arched down to her hips and resembled the curve of a swan’s wing or something that cannot be described by an earthly being.
“You’re not going!” she said, the white arch of her back pressing against his burning fingertips. “You’re going to do your exams and become a lawyer. All of us here are agreed on that.”
“Not Dad,” he laughed. “Who would take over the farm then?”
“If doctors can run a farm, so can lawyers.”
She was referring to a retired village doctor in her home town of Hosingen who ran a farm alongside his practice, or at least had done so until the war broke out and he was needed on all fronts. Doctors and lawyers were princes and kings in Agnes’ eyes, so it went without saying that in her self-appointed role as mother she was behind Léon and his sisters with a whip to make sure they worked hard at their studies.
“Shall we make a deal?” he asked, without managing to do up a single button. “I go. I come back. I promise to become a lawyer – and I take over the farm. And you wait?”
“You’re just a boy, Léon, you can’t make a promise that not even God can keep.”
He had to accept that if he continued to fiddle with these buttons his heroic journey would soon be at an end, so he let go and, still caught in two minds, turned to the barn door, scanned the fields and forests down to the neighbouring village of Munshausen, and a moment later saw the figure of his father come round the corner and stop suddenly when he saw them: Agnes still had her back to him, either waiting or wise, Léon hesitant, as a quiver ran down his spine. His father nodded and withdrew, and Léon put a hand around her neck, the first touch, but now it was time, and he let it slide down between her cold shoulder blades where the drops of water glistened on the tiny hairs, then turned again and walked towards the car.
“We’re going too,” he heard. “Come on, girls, we’re going with Léon to the station!”
“Oh no, you’re not,” his father cut in sharply, and Léon turned and saw the girls bounding towards him, Agnes a little way behind, her arms crossed, her body bursting with spring promise, one single touch, nothing to write home about, but God help me, it was more than enough for someone going to war, it was much too much, so he had to scan the fields again and blink a few times.
“Léon’s going, girls,” his father shouted through the open car door as he twisted the ignition key, with his suitcase on the back seat, the cows mooing, the mist rising from the fields and the dog in the neighbouring house barking. “Give him a kiss and say goodbye. And get started on the food. We’ve got visitors this afternoon.”
Léon hugged them in turn and pinched them and made them laugh and flashed a quick smile to Agnes as he got in. They were on their way before he managed to close the door.
“It’s not good to remember a tearful farewell on the platform when you’re in the thick of it,” his father mumbled after a few minutes of concentrated silence behind the wheel. Then he added with a cough: “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“O.K.,” Léon said, when nothing more was forthcoming.
“I got out of it,” his father said at length. “In 1941 – because of a knee injury. They’ve been terrible years.”
“Oh, yes?” Léon said, when it went quiet again and no more was added. “Was that what you wanted to tell me?”
His father nodded. Thought for a moment, came to a decision and said:
“You’re going to come back. Remember that. And remember one more thing – it’s you you’re fighting for, not them, whatever happens, it’s your right.”
2
Everything follows a pattern, it has been documented, because it has been done before and because some remember, and because people lack imagination, and here is Léon on the train, watching fields and forests and platforms passing by, with German checkpoints, military vehicles and uniforms, and he thinks about what his father said in the car, about how “terrible” it was not to go to war, perhaps it meant he wasn’t in the heroic resistance movement after all, and Léon feels uneasy because he can’t see that fate spares none of us, that those who escape don’t, in fact, because they are doomed to suffer vicariously, to feel guilt and self-contempt, if they are decent people, that is, and not just donkeys with only grass on the brain and therefore derive no benefit at having escaped. This is why Léon also thinks – after arriving in the capital and hearing the Wehrkreiskommandant’s angry outburst that only fifty of the eighty conscripts in this quota have obeyed orders and reported for duty – that in this way they get their hands on the best of us, while the cowards and those without families, the egoists and the donkeys escape, survive and perpetuate their inferior blood line. But he soon begins to wonder if this is such a big disadvantage as the war is not yet over, it depends on how it progresses and how you look at it, well, does it really, he thinks, because there was no clarity in his mind that day, to be frank it was all one great big mess.
Léon knew none of the other conscripts, but that same evening he met two young boys from the Ösel area in the north, strong, naive farmers’ sons with flitting eyes and uncertain smiles, with whom he could discuss the situation in their own language, their common fate, for as soon as his uniform was on he felt an urge to take it off again as soon as possible while the reason he had reported here at all, for the sake of the family, faded with every kilometre that passed between himself and home. And there was only one thing to do now, his thoughts were beginning to take shape, both in him and his comrades, plans to desert, they would have to wait for an opportunity, they would have to have something of their own to fill out this alien uniform.
They were transported east, by train, to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where the three comrades ended up in the same camp and were given weapons training – and stuck together in their own small enclave speaking a different language. But after a month they were separated, and Léon was assigned to the 82nd Panzergrenadier Replacement and Training Regiment, a motorised unit in the hastily formed Panzer Division Tatra, where after only two days he heard rumours that the Americans had landed somewhere in France, but had been pushed back into the sea by Rommel’s impenetrable Atlantikwall, the fortifications along the western coast of Europe and Scandinavia. And then there were tales about how the Americans, far from being repulsed, were storming eastwards, there were all sorts of stories going around although nothing was confirmed, but since they weren’t sent west to defend the Reich against the Americans and British but east to Slovakia to stem “the communist tidal wave”, both Léon and his fellow soldiers assumed there couldn’t be any truth to the rumours about an Allied landing.
Here in the east, during the summer and autumn months, Léon discovered to his surprise that it didn’t bother him so much to fight in a German uniform, perhaps because the ordinary German soldier treated him like one of them, on the whole; he had even made friends with two of them, a terrified lad from Westphalia who was no less press-ganged than Léon himself,
and a war-weary thirty-year-old from Dresden who had “wasted his whole life” on the Eastern Front and who because of his very clear stance on things no longer felt at home in the uniform he wore, him too. It probably also made a difference that Léon was fighting for his life now and not some airy-fairy principle or abstract sense of nationhood, or for his family, not directly anyway, and was happy to have as many soldiers as possible at his side in the same position, no matter where they came from.
The battlefield also made him feel unreal and unconnected; he did what his officers and his body told him, and was pleasantly surprised to find that he didn’t go to pieces – he was on a high, he was alive and was living while soldiers around him fell like flies, the war-weary thirty-year-old was shot to ribbons at a machine-gun post close to his own, the young Westphalian just disappeared, during a night op, “Vermisst”, as it was called, and Léon felt a strange tremor steal into his high, it would not go away, the question of who he was and where he came from was of absolutely no significance to him, for God was holding his hand over him, it was his war, God said, not Europe’s nor Hitler’s nor Luxembourg’s, for the simple reason that it was his life.
The week after Léon’s young friend “went missing” there was a pause in the fighting, and in this period he discovered what pleasure his comrades’ grudging acknowledgement gave him. But then a new rumour did the rounds: the Allies had not only established a bridgehead on Rommel’s impregnable coastline but also liberated Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of Holland; apparently in his home country this had been quick and painless, it had taken only a day or two according to the rumours, but this was not confirmed by their superior officers nor by the signals section, who occasionally shared their valuable knowledge. Nonetheless, a strained atmosphere arose between Léon and his comrades, for which he considered there was no cause: after all it wasn’t him who had liberated his country but the Americans, while he had been striving to purge his heart of this hope and had tried to be as good a German as any of them, an endeavour they surely ought to respect…? It was almost with a sense of relief that he returned to the battlefield, where everyone was equal, God’s errant children and not the stigmatised sons of individual nations.