The Woman from Bratislava

by Leif Davidsen

  E– cleared his throat and said:

  ‘Irma, I love you.’

  Those banal little words made me feel faint with happiness.

  ‘I love you too.’

  ‘Merry Christmas, Irma.’

  ‘Merry Christmas to you too.’

  ‘And because I love you I’m going to tell you something. But you have to promise not to be mad at me.’

  ‘Why should I be mad at you?’

  ‘I know who your father is.’

  He knew me. I got mad. He was trespassing on emotional territory where not even he was allowed to tread. Invading the private, locked room to which only I held the key. I lifted my lips off his chest and dug a fingernail into one of the red welts.

  ‘Ow! Je-sus!’ he yelled and shot up in bed, so suddenly that I almost rolled off it.

  ‘That hurt,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you liked that.’

  ‘You promised me you wouldn’t be mad.’

  He regarded me with eyes which, while they shone with indignation, were also playful and calculating. As if in everything he did there lay the germ of an experiment, a way of testing other people, a study of transience and the lack of control. Even in those days he was extremely charismatic, a great seducer and manipulator, but probably also, in truth, cold and callous. This was a side of his character with which I never came to terms. I can see now that I may not fully have understood the way his mind worked, and I never penetrated his most secret recesses. Then, as now, it was hard for me to understand how he could be so well-balanced, articulate and in control in his outward, everyday life, yet in the dimness and intimacy of the bedoom liked to be dominated and totally defenceless. Because that became the pattern after our first experiments. In bed, as a rule, we swapped roles. Not always, though. I too had come to know and to appreciate the link between pain and desire. But we only indulged in these forbidden pursuits every now and again. As if fearing that it could be a very slippery slope. We had no formal knowledge about what we did. Such things were not spoken of, or written about. More often than not we simply made love in the normal way, passionately and joyously, seemingly unable to get enough of one another.

  I stubbed out my cigarette, lit another and smoked it, with E– eyeing me searchingly: he knew I would calm down once his words had sunk in. He leaned back against the bed-head, then swung his legs out of bed, got up and fetched two glasses of red wine. He handed me one, still without saying a word. I drained my glass in three big gulps and placed it on the floor. He sipped his own wine and set his glass down on the other side of the bed. I looked at him and was filled with love for him. We sat cross-legged, facing one another, like a couple of Red Indians, and he began gently to stroke my breasts and my face.

  ‘Little Irma. You and I have no secrets from one another, but there’s a time for everything.’

  ‘You surprised me, that’s all,’ I said, and heard the faint tremor in my voice.

  ‘That’s because you’re ashamed.’

  I felt my temper rise:

  ‘What would you know about that?’

  ‘I just know, that’s all. Because your shame is a reflection of the shame I once felt. Because in the eyes of society we’re branded. We’re bound to inherit the sins of our fathers. Society demands it of us.’

  ‘I’m not with you,’ I said, hearing myself how thick my voice sounded.

  He lifted my hand and kissed it, leaned forwards, took my cigarette, put it out, kissed me on the lips and eased me down onto my back with my head on the pillow; then he began to talk, while his warm, gentle hands stroked my body, as if he were giving me some new sort of healing massage.

  ‘My uncle and your father fought together on the Eastern Front. I don’t know exactly what happened to your father, but I’ve seen a picture of him with your mother, you and Fritz. Your father’s in uniform in it. I found this picture in the attic at home among a lot of other old stuff left by my father and my uncle. It wasn’t hard to see Irma the child in Irma the teenager, and your mother was easily recognisable. I knew who you were the first time I saw you on the street. You must have been about fifteen, you came walking towards me with your mother. A chance meeting, but such things don’t really happen by chance. You and I were always meant to meet. I’m convinced of it. The fact that my aunt lives where she does was no coincidence. So I found out who you were. And tied up whatever information I was able to unearth with the things my father and uncle had told me when I was a little boy. When I felt you were old enough, and could no longer fight my longing for you I made contact with you. The happiest contact I have ever made. What I know about that time I learned from my uncle and father. And from what I read. Like you I tried to piece together the forgotten, hidden story.’

  He paused, took a swig of his wine, put the glass back on the floor, lit a cigarette and let me take a couple of drags. I did not raise my head from the pillow, merely gazed at him, captivated by the beginning of his story, his gentle hands, which I longed to have running over me again, the strangely suggestive tone of his voice and the sense, beyond the heavy curtains, of a dark and rainy Christmas night cloaked in the strange hush that hangs over Denmark on Christmas Eve, when everyone is indoors.

  We took turns smoking the cigarette. There was no one in the world but us and we had all the time in the world. Then he went on:

  ‘My father did not fight at the Front. We’ll come back to him. My uncle’s name was Karl Viggo. In 1940, after Denmark was occupied, he and my father went to Germany to work like so many thousands of others. They had no choice. They either took the work or lost their unemployment benefits. They were impressed with the Germans’ sense for order and discipline and the fact that jobs were found for everyone. Prime Minister Stauning was actually a social democrat, but once even he had spoken of the inevitability of the new order, it was only a short step to national socialism. It was easy for them to accept that the Jews were the root of all evil. Because the Jews were the symbol of capitalism. Weren’t pawnbrokers always Jewish? Even in the works of Shakespeare. And hadn’t Johannes V. Jensen said that the Nordic race was special? Didn’t rational men on national radio talk about the Germans’ new order? And had the government not called on everyone to cooperate? My father was not a clever man. He was a simple smith who took care of his wife and their baby – that was me – and kept himself to himself. Karl Viggo joined the Danish Legion, but my father was rejected as unfit: the hard physical labour he had been doing since the age of twelve had already taken its toll on his back. But in 1942 he started attending party meetings, he distributed newspapers and spoke on the radio, urging all good Danish men to enlist in the Danish Legion. By the end of 1943, however, he had lost faith in the party, although he remained a member, not least because Karl Viggo was still fighting for God and Denmark on the Eastern Front. He did not want to let his older brother down. Karl Viggo came home on leave for the last time in May 1944. They had a simple lunch together. Karl Viggo was in uniform. In the restaurant they sat in a corner by themselves. The Danes knew now that the Germans had lost the war, and were starting to distance themselves from them and forget all the talk of cooperation and adjustment. Then, too, the Danes were an opportunistic little nation. Two days after Karl Viggo returned to the front my father was killed in Aalborg in broad daylight. He was waylaid by two men who shot him seven times in the back and once in the head as he lay on the pavement in a pool of blood.’

  There was total silence in the bedroom. Not a sound came from the Christmas-quiet street. I looked at E–, saw the pain in his eyes. I got up, got us some more red wine to go with the fresh cigarettes which we lit.

  ‘After the war they called it the liquidation of a collaborator, but it was cold-blooded murder,’ E– said in a voice full of pent-up bitterness. ‘My mother and I were branded as a German whore and a traitor’s brat. We moved to Århus and later across to Zealand with my step-father, who knew nothing of my parents’ past. But that’s another story. I’ve looked at the files. Four hu
ndred people were liquidated in the same way as my father. Every case filed and forgotten about. We have been condemned for good and all by respectable society. The killers were regarded as heroes. The victims as butchers. Justice went by the board along with the truth, smothered by hypocrisy.’

  I stroked his face hesitantly.

  ‘You lost your Dad, just like I did. That’s why you understand me so well,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not the only reason, my love. But it’s part of the explanation. We can never get our fathers back. They’re lost to us for ever, but we can hope that someday they may be vindicated. Not because they were good men, but because they were unfairly treated, and we have had to pay the price for the crimes which society claims they committed.’

  ‘You know what it means to feel betrayed. To feel so black and empty inside that it’s like being made of glass and surrounded by spiteful, staring eyes.’

  ‘Yes, I know what it’s like.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He smiled. I took his face in my hands and covered it with little kisses until at last I found his mouth with its greedy tongue and he laid me back and we made love quietly and yet so passionately that it seemed we would never let each other go.

  On Christmas Day E– took me out to the woods north of the town. It was late in the morning and very quiet, the winter mist mantling the bare trees as if wrapping them in cotton wool. We biked out there in silence. There were only a few people on the streets, but we heard the church bells ringing for the Christmas service as we cycled out of the town and into the woods. The ground was damp and spongy and we had to wheel our bikes over the muddiest patches. I was tired and had a bit of a hangover, but I also felt totally lucid and almost euphoric. We parked our bikes on the edge of a thicket of pines and E– led me in among the trees. Water dripped from the green needles onto my coat and hat. There were signs of animals in the layer of needles underfoot and clearer tracks around the edges of the rain-filled puddles along the path we took. Even without snow it was a beautiful, cold, Danish winter forest, with the white mist and the quiet, moist drip-drip from bare branches and green needles. E– held my hand, almost dragging me through the pines and out into a clearing which looked as if it were man-made. We were deep inside the woods. It was very, very quiet, the silence seeming to be intensified by the winter mist.

  In the clearing stood a man in an old black overcoat and a battered grey cap. He was tall, with rugged, fine-drawn features. He was standing, shoulders slightly bowed, beside a small grey stone set in the middle of the clearing: discreet and yet forming a natural focal point. A single red poinsettia sat next to the stone. The man regarded us. He looked to be in his forties and had clear grey eyes, not unlike E–’s.

  ‘Irma, this is my uncle,’ E– said.

  I removed my glove and shook his hand. It was firm, dry and cold.

  ‘How do you do,’ I said politely, yet feeling oddly heartened. Here was a man who had known my father in a quite different way from me.

  ‘I’m delighted to meet the daughter of such a brave man,’ Karl Viggo said. His voice was deep and rasping, it sounded as though he smoked way too many strong cigarettes.

  ‘Could you tell me about him?’

  ‘Whatever I know I will certainly tell you. We’ll have lunch together today. Then you shall hear.’

  I stepped forward to look at the stone. The inscription on it said simply: They fell for Denmark.

  ‘This is just the start,’ he said. ‘One day we’ll erect a proper stone, here and in the place out east where our comrades are buried. One day they’ll be vindicated and justice will triumph.’

  ‘Uncle was jailed for three years after the war,’ E– said. ‘He spent some months in Frøslev prison camp with your father. They had changed its name to Faarhus by then. Both Karl Viggo and your dad were released once the worst of the anger and the recriminations had died down. But they were marked men nonetheless. Why were they convicted? In the case of many, including Karl Viggo and your dad, for joining up, and yet they had done so with the government’s blessing. There lies the injustice.’

  ‘Yes, I see that,’ I said.

  ‘Today that camp is just a plain, ordinary army barracks. No one wants to be reminded of that injustice. They commemorate the members of the Danish resistance who were interned there during the last years of the war under excellent conditions. But the fact that Frøslev became Faarhus, the biggest concentration camp for political prisoners in so-called free Denmark – this they don’t want anyone to know. It doesn’t fit with the nation’s image of itself.’

  I understood what E– was saying, but in my mind I could also see those awful pictures of the gas chambers and the walking skeletons from the concentration camps. That appalling massacre of millions of people. As if E– read my mind he said:

  ‘Irma, Nazism is dead, but that doesn’t make it right for society to lie about the past and tailor the truth to suit the myths which the powers that be want the people to believe in. This we can learn from.’

  I touched the stone. It felt cold and rough. But there was something magical about it too. As if it were possessed of some power, a link with the past. When I touched it I felt a line running from me to my father, a faint but distinct connection which brought me peace at heart, because I was no longer alone in the world with my loss and my pain.

  E–’s uncle stood with his head lowered and his eyes half-shut, as if he were praying. And the place did have a religious air about it, I thought. But, as always, E– maintained his cool, analytical overview, wherein emotions were never allowed to gain the upper hand. And as usual he knew just what to say:

  ‘Our fathers’ analysis of society was correct, but they drew the wrong conclusion. They had their guns pointed in the wrong direction. But the hypocritical society which bred them must not be allowed to blacken their memories and penalise them and us in the belief that by doing so it can conceal its own shame. That is what their story teaches us. You shouldn’t feel guilty, Irma. It’s the others who should be ashamed.’

  I looked at him. That may have been the moment when my life acquired meaning. At any rate, when he took me in his arms and held me I burst into tears. There in the bare, hushed clearing in the woods I knew that I would never let this man down.

  Part 4

  FOR THE GLORY OF DENMARK

  ‘Misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows.’

  William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  21

  PER TOFTLUND WOKE before the alarm went off and lay in the morning gloom listening to Lise’s slow, laboured breathing. She was lying on her back, her enormous stomach swelling like a great hump under the duvet. Her face was faintly blotched and covered with a fine layer of sweat which plastered her thick hair to her temples. He did not know why, but he felt very tired and a little off-colour, almost as if he were coming down with a spring cold. Or maybe he did know. There had been small signs at work: how the time seemed suddenly to disappear; someone would say something to him and he would not catch it. Little lapses of memory which disturbed him. Maybe it had been like this ever since he made a mess of the assignment at Flakfortet, or maybe he was simply afraid that he was not up to the job to which he had returned? During the working day he would also find himself worrying about becoming a father. He felt bad for not looking forward to it wholeheartedly. That, after all, was how it was supposed to be. Maybe it was just that he did not know what he was getting himself in to. There was no denying it, he was over forty now, and he could feel it. That alone ought to be a clear sign that, from a purely biological point of view, tying the knot had been the right thing to do. But tying the knot meant being tied down and maybe that was what made him nervous. There was no doubt in his mind that he loved Lise, but marriage was also a daunting business and coming home this time had not been easy. The image of the blood slowly running onto the floor of the restaurant kept coming back to him, awake and in his dreams. Sometimes it was vividly realistic. Other times the blood was bright
orange, almost fluorescent. And on a couple of occasions he had been the man on the floor, with another version of himself looking down on him, notebook in hand. Lise had been angry and hurt. At first he had thought she was mad at him for not calling home to ask how things were with her and the baby, but then it had dawned on him that she felt let down. She felt he was selfish, thinking only about himself and what she called his bloody work. ‘Talk to me, damn you!’ she had screamed and then burst into tears. He had stood in the kitchen, staring out at the bare, loamy garden like a fool, instead of going to her and putting his arms round her. He loved her so much, so why was he so emotionally inept? They had had a couple of weird days when they had circled around one another like two strangers. They had still not had a proper talk about his trip or his failure to keep in touch while he was away but the air appeared to have been cleared by the unborn baby when she kicked one evening while they were watching the news and they saw the contours of a tiny foot under the smooth stretched skin of Lise’s stomach. They had both started to laugh and Lise’s great belly had bounced up and down like a huge basketball. The mood had changed, they had kissed and his penis had swelled hard and tight. There was nothing to be done about that, though.