The Woman from Bratislava

by Leif Davidsen

  At school we simply said that our father was dead, hinting that he had fallen in the battle for the Freedom of Denmark. When the boys played their war games Fritz was a resistance fighter as often as he was a German. You had to take turns. More and more often, though, they would play cowboys and Indians instead, inspired by the Westerns they saw at the cinema on Sunday afternoons. But in any event our Mum and Dad were not divorced. That we made very clear.

  Pretty soon people ceased to take any great interest in why we had moved to the town. Society was changing. Maybe not so as you would notice yet, in the latter half of the fifties, but the old world was on its last legs and a new one was knocking at the door. When Fritz turned fourteen and, to his great relief, could finally leave school at the end of seventh grade, Mr Kelstrup secured him an apprenticeship to one of the local baker’s. Fritz was happy at his simple, straightforward work – his main concern was whether his greased-back quiff made him look like James Dean.

  Teddy was too young to understand. The one time Mum mentioned Dad’s name was on the day after she got the job at Mr Kelstrup’s office. She sat us down around the tile-topped coffee table and told us that now we were going to make a life for ourselves here. We had been granted a fresh start and starting afresh was never easy, but it was all going to be alright. We were not to say anything to anyone about our past, where we came from, or about Dad. The war was in the past now and the man in the street no longer gave it much thought. Only the newspapers still wrote about the resistance movement and those five accursed years. Ordinary people had other things to think about and we were now decent folk like all the rest. Which was good, and we should be happy about that. As usual, Fritz said nothing, but I asked about Dad. Mum took my hand and said:

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, pet. I don’t know. He’s been gone before, but he always came back.’

  ‘Is he going to come back this time, Mum?’ I asked, tears filling my eyes.

  ‘I don’t think you should count on that, Irma dear. I think you should consider your Dad dead.’

  ‘He’s not dead. He’ll come back to us!’ I had screamed, not surprisingly, and ran from the table to my bed, where I wept into my pillow and railed at Mum for letting Dad down until she came in to comfort me. She stroked my hair, which both pleased and infuriated me. She made soothing noises, but said nothing. I think she felt just as confused as I did, but as a woman her first instinct was to comply with the ways of a man’s world, bow her head and accept the situation.

  I appeared to be the only one with an aching heart, a hollow sense of longing and betrayal mingled with the hope of once more hearing my father whistling as he came up the stairs, this time to ring the bell on our nice, brown front door. It may sound as if I remember a lot, but I don’t really. In actual fact, I only remember the feeling of loss and the terrible loneliness, because I did not form any close ties. I made no friends, had no school pals. I was not part of any of the giggling, whispering groups of girls who sauntered around the playground, arm in arm, pretending not to see the boys. But I was never bullied either. It was simply accepted that I was a bit of a weirdo, who did not play with the others or, later, talk to the boys, but just read books and was boring. I don’t even remember my mother’s marriage, at the town hall, to our head teacher and have only the vaguest memory of moving into his spacious headmaster’s residence. I remember my room there, but I was sixteen by then and starting to emerge from the gloom. It is the years from thirteen to eighteen that are like a dark tunnel containing only brief flashes of recollection and I am not even sure whether these are things I remember or only heard about. Mum told me much later, when I was grown up, that she had been very, very worried about me. I wore away to a shadow, grew so thin that she had been seriously concerned for my health. And the onset of my periods was long overdue, or so both my mother and the doctor felt. The doctor recommended that I drink double cream and have regular phototherapy sessions at the hospital. You could have talked to me about Dad, I told my mother later when I was a grown woman, but she had looked hurt and replied that she had not wanted to waste any more of her life on that man. And anyway, she had had more than enough to do, providing food and clothing for three young children. Then later she had found a new husband who had been good to her and the children, so there had been no reason to go raking up the past. No good could come of that. She would never talk about him. It was almost as if she denied his very existence. She insisted on us calling the headmaster Dad. Fritz went along with it for the sake of peace and Teddy because he loved our step-father, but I absolutely refused, even though this earned me the only slap in the face my mother has ever given me. However, once she understood that I had no intention of relenting, she let it go. Possibly also because my step-father did not seem to have any problem with me calling him by his first name. Although, looking back on it, I think he was hurt. He had married late and felt that he had accepted his wife’s family as his own. They had no children together. I don’t know whether it was too late, or Mum didn’t want to, or maybe my step-father couldn’t have chldren.

  I don’t know why my mother married the headmaster. He was very much in love with her though. Anybody could see that. He adored her and would have done anything for her. Mum liked him for his patience and kindness and selfless love, but she was not the slightest bit in love with him. That much was obvious to me. She may have grown to love him eventually, but their’s was not a passionate relationship. Mum went on working after she got married, which was still not all that common then. She already had the same surname as him, but she took a certain satisfaction now in introducing herself as Mrs Pedersen, the headmaster’s wife. Perhaps she married him because he promised to be faithful to her and because he gave her financial security. In those days the headmaster was one of the leading lights of the community, a solid figure of authority who commanded respect. Perhaps she married him because he was dull and predictable and would never surprise her, positively or negatively, as Dad had continually done throughout their stormy, passionate years together.

  By the time I learned Dad’s secret it was too late to talk to her about it properly. Because by then my mother’s brain could no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy. She inhabited her own imaginary world and I could not get through to her. Or was her ability to repress things so highly developed that even in her dementia she upheld the pretence of a happy marriage to just one man, my step-father?

  Mum never knew that I lived a double life. That as a double agent I had one face which I presented to the world and another belonging to my secret life, into which no one was allowed entry. I was known as a quiet girl, with a reputation for being moody, but I worked hard at school. Because I had realised very early on that education was my ticket out of the prison in which I felt myself confined; that if I was to hold my own in the rough, tough, suppressive world of men then I would have to be smarter and better qualified than them. It had not taken me long to figure out that even the dumbest, most poorly educated man believed he had a right to lord it over women purely by virtue of his sex.

  It was taken for granted that I would go to high school, even though at that time it was still not a matter of course for girls to do so. But my step-father, my mother and my teachers were all agreed that I was a very bright child and that, even if I was a little too withdrawn and did not show enough initiative in class, I was definitely high school material. My marks were always excellent. And I was never any trouble, which in those days was the ultimate seal of approval.

  If only they had known how I felt inside. I hated them with all my heart. I hated their bourgeois way of life, their double standards, their concealment of the truth, their hypocrisy and their ability to shape the past to fit their present life. I saw the people around me as insects trapped in a bottle, fluttering about, beating their heads off the glass which, in their blind stupidity, they could not see. These people did not know they were imprisoned. That for all their surface gloss, they could not hide how haplessly they were for
med by the spirit of the times. Their notion that the more they bought they happier they would be, that the good times were here and could only get better, made me sick. I was sure that my father would have seen right through them. He could not stand the complacency of Danish provincial life and had left us, not because he did not love us, but because our two-facedness made him sick at heart. Although obviously I knew nothing of it back then I intuitively perceived the repressive tolerance of capitalism and its exploitation of the individual. Although I could not have put it into words, my eyes were opened to the petit-bourgeois shackles of society.

  I sought refuge in the world of books, read every book in the library. To read was to be alone. To read was to be left in peace. To read was to be free. And reading held at bay, at least for a while, the urge to kill every last one of them. The only thing I liked about my step-father was that his income made it possible for us to live in a house where I had my own room. With a door which I could shut and lock. Which no one could enter. A room of my own. Nothing unusual in that today, but in those days it was no more than a dream for most women. Because it was not just the four walls themselves that mattered, but the fact of having a place that was totally your own domain. Where you could be a free woman.

  It was in this room that I endeavoured to understand what Denmark had been like under the German occupation. The local library was not a great help in this respect: most of its new acquisitions tended to be about the valiant freedom fighters and the Danish resistance during those five dark years when the people had stood shoulder to shoulder. Shelves and shelves on that subject. But about the other side, about the collaborators and those who fought on the German side, there was next to nothing. But reading between the lines, in all the touched-up accounts and the things left unsaid, I divined the hypocrisy of it all, the misrepresentation of those years from 1940 to 1945. I realised it was a case of a collective memory lapse and a general consensus to stick to the myth. The truth was suppressed, only myths were created. Victims were unearthed and scapegoats appointed, my father being one of the latter. I instinctively understood in my head and in my heart that Nazism was a heinous ideology, and I wished I could have asked my father how he could serve such a system, but I could not. I never disputed the killing of the six million Jews, but I understood all the Nazi talk of a super-race. The idea that some people were born to lead the masses, who did not know any better and needed, therefore, to be moulded. And I saw also that even worse than Nazism were the double standards of the bourgeois, so-called democratic society and its cynical exploitation of the naivety of ordinary human beings. I am not sure if I was capable of expressing myself in such terms at that time, but that is how I felt. I had been betrayed by my father, who had been betrayed by the society in which he lived and had therefore been forced to act as he did. They said he had acted of his own free will. They wanted us to believe that people are free to choose. The truth, as I saw it, was that like a puppet he had been manoeuvred towards his inevitable fate.

  So I was ripe for the picking when I met the man who initiated my awakening as a woman and as a human being. I was in third year at high school. It was early spring, with the time for some serious exam revision fast approaching. As so often before I was in the library, trying to find a book on the occupation which I had read about in the paper. Strictly speaking I had no time for reading novels, with so much studying to do for my exams, but I had not been able to resist this one. It had been published the year before and had at last found its way into the library.

  I spotted him right away, stole glances at him out of the corner of my eye. He was young, early twenties. He looked different from other young men. His hair was long and fair, not slicked back with Brylcreme, but falling over his ears. It looked all soft and lovely. He wore brown corduroys and a thick sweater. He was tall and slim with limpid blue eyes and a high forehead. He looked a little like Jens August Schade, the poet, whom I had seen pictures of in the paper. They both had the same strong nose, but E–’s chin was more masculine, with a cleft in it. Almost like a film star’s. I could make out the cleft through his closely trimmed beard. It was also unusual to see a man with a beard. He actually bore a slight resemblance to Frederik of Nina and Frederik. He had a strangely charismatic air about him, I felt. The sort of sexual magnetism which some people possess without even knowing it. I was a virgin, knew nothing of sex apart from the heat and longing that flared up between my legs at the most inconvenient moments. That was definitely not the sort of thing which respectable people talked about at home or at school. It felt somehow dirty and wrong, like the silly, sniggering remarks of schoolboys or the rude drawings which young men from the lower classes found amusing. I was familiar with my body’s yearnings, even if I did not understand them and was even alarmed by them, but I could not imagine an attractive man ever seeing anything in me. I was short and skinny and I felt plain and awkward. E– said later that nothing could have been more wrong. I had the most beautiful, gentle, sad, yet striking eyes, small, well-formed breasts and skin as luminous and delicate as Thai silk. My well-turned, harmonious features were set off perfectly by the long hair which I pulled back into a ponytail. He told me he fell in love with me the minute he laid eyes on me. Both because my sex appeal, latent though it was, was so powerful, and because he instinctively felt that our destinies were linked, sensing as he did that I harboured a secret in my shattered heart. Even as a young man E– had a way with words.

  He came over to me. I felt myself blush, but he took the book I was looking at out of my hand, as if we knew one another, and looked at the title page.

  ‘Tage Skou-Hansen, The Naked Trees,’ he read. His voice was husky, it almost seemed to crackle. ‘This is a good novel actually, even if it does represent the official picture. But it’s more realistic than all the other rubbish written about those years. You can safely read this. You won’t be any stupider for it.’

  I was flabbergasted by his words. It was unheard-of for anyone to speak of those years in such terms. Not with such detachment, showing no respect for the freedom fighters.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘That it’s time we took a more realistic look at that period. It was not so much a time of heroes and villains, as of victims.’

  Those were the most remarkable words I had ever heard in my life. I did not know how to reply, or whether I even wanted to reply to this strange young man. But before I could say anything:

  ‘Can I buy you a cup of coffee,’ he said, taking my arm. ‘You must have exams coming up soon, you can read all the novels you want after that.’

  ‘How do you know I have exams coming up?’

  ‘Well, you’re obviously a student. You have that hunted look in your eyes that they all get at this time of year. But just bear in mind that this is the last lovely spring you’ll have to miss out on. And besides, there’s something else you really ought to read. I’ve got this collection of poetry by a new Danish writer – his name’s Klaus Rifbjerg. You’re going to be hearing a lot more of him. He is part of the future. The old guard can stuff their stupid conservativism.’

  As he talked he was steering me towards the exit.

  ‘I’ve no money to buy books,’ was all I said. ‘Do they have this guy Rifbjerg in the library?’

  ‘I told you, I’ll lend you the book. Or give you it. If you would like?’

  ‘You can’t just go giving your books away like that.’

  ‘Of course I can. We should not be slaves to material possessions. The only things worth holding on to are the knowledge and insight we have between our ears.’

  ‘What an odd thing to say.’

  ‘The truth is sometimes odd, but that doesn’t make it any the less true. Don’t listen to all the garbage your teachers fill your poor student heads with. But get your degree, whatever you do, and then your life can begin. You still have to have the piece of paper, but you can forget everything you’ve learned.’

  He was just making small talk real
ly, but it was so new to me that I could not help laughing, something I rarely did. Nobody talked like that.

  ‘What do you do when you’re not spouting weird statements?’ I asked, as if it was the most normal thing in the world for me to be walking with a young man in the lovely early spring light, which was lending the first touch of warmth to the keen wind blowing down the main street.

  ‘I’m at Århus University, I’m writing a novel.’

  He said it so matter-of-factly. As if it was perfectly natural for a person who was walking beside me to be writing a novel. To me, bookworm that I was, writers were like some sort of divine race who would never dream of mixing with ordinary mortals. But here I was, walking next to a man who said he was writing a novel, said it as casually as he might have said he was just running down to the baker’s.

  ‘Oh, and what’s it about, this novel?’

  ‘The truth.’

  I laughed again. I do not know why. It’s not as if it was not funny. Just unusual. We went down to Brodersen’s pastry shop. He ordered coffee and pastries for us both. He was not to know that it was a totally new experience for me to eat a pastry with relish, but this I did, while we talked. I cannot remember the details of our conversation, only that it simply flowed. We chatted about books, about the approaching spring, about my teachers, whom I described with a wit I would never have believed I possessed, and about my forthcoming exams. A perfectly normal conversation of a sort which I had never had with a young man before. He ordered more coffee and then he walked me home. At the garden gate he asked: