by Knud Romer
Knud Romer was born in 1960 in Faster, in Denmark, ‘a town so small that it is over before it starts’. When not writing, he acts. His credits include The Idiots by Lars von Trier and Allegro by Christopher Boe.
NOTHING BUT FEAR
Knud Romer
Translated by John Mason
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Knud Romer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2006 Knud Romer
Translation copyright © 2012 John Mason
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published as Den Som Blinker Er Bange For Dodenx in 2006
by Aschehoug Forlag, Copenhagen, Denmark
First published in 2012 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 714 3
eISBN 1 84765 642 1
Designed and typeset by [email protected]
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Bookmarque Ltd,
Croydon, Surrey
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I feared my grandfather. Always nothing but fear. I knew him only as Papa Schneider. What else they called him, what his Christian name was I had no idea. It made no difference anyway, since I wouldn’t have dreamt of calling him by his first name. He was not a man you were on first-name terms with.
Papa Schneider had miles of scar on his face, all on his left cheek. They were duelling scars from the century before last, when he had been a member of a Schlägerverein. Members of the club would take it in turns to defend their honour by laying about each other with their sabres – their faces not moving a muscle, their left arm tucked behind their back.
He had grey-black, swept back hair and a high forehead, and to look him in the eye was to challenge him: Sie haben mich fixiert, mein Herr! He was beady-eyed, his gaze directed only outwards, and I don’t know if anyone ever met it without living to regret it. Except Grandmother – and that’s what made her great. She could look Papa Schneider in the eye – my mother never could – but she was the only one, his soft spot, hidden from everyone, while the rest of him was hard and impregnable.
He ruled supreme from the head of the table at my mother and father’s house, where his picture hung on the wall of the dining room. It had a gold frame and in it you could see a clearing in a woodland landscape. Papa Schneider was sitting in the grass with a book, gazing straight ahead. Grandmother was at his side with a baby in her arms, and my mother was the little girl holding their hunting dog, Bello. With book, baby and Bello each had been given their role. Papa Schneider was spirit and culture, the woman stood for childbirth, and the children were closer to nature and more akin to dogs that had to be trained.
When we ate, I sat straight as a ramrod on my chair with both hands on the table and my napkin tucked under my chin, as though Papa Schneider were sitting at table with us keeping an eye on me. If I made a false move – cut a potato with my knife or spoke without being spoken to – he would plunge a fork into my hand, I knew he would.
Papa Schneider was the strictest person I have ever known and was everything that is stiff and hard and hurts. He was the top button of your shirt. He was the teeth of the comb when you were being wet-combed. He was every grazed knee, he was the fear of being late. No, I was not on first-name terms with him – and nor was anyone else.
I don’t think anyone knew what his name was, or even thought about it. My Grandfather was alone in carrying it around inside him like a terrible secret – and the wildest of gambles. For if one day he heard it, he heard himself called by his Christian name, he would know whose voice it was. No one knew it apart from him – no one but God.
During the war my Grandmother – my mother’s mother – exploded in a cellar full of white gas. Her name was Damaris Dora Renata Matthes and she had been one of the loveliest women in Germany. She was as beautiful as a Greek statue, Mother always said, and, sitting and looking at photographs of her, we’d think they were postcards from a museum. Her first husband and the love of her life, Heinrich Voll, died in an operation on his appendix and left her alone with their daughter. It was 1924, not a good time to be a single mother, but thanks to her looks she was able to marry again, this time to Papa Schneider.
And then his lovely wife was blown to bits and burnt up, and what was left of her lived on in a nightmare of wartime surgery. She was patched together out of strips of skin and buttered with codliver oil because the doctor had hit on the crazy idea that it nourished the healing process and that it was good for the skin not to dry out. It was torture, and Grandmother walked the banks of the Elbe wanting only to drown herself, screaming and screaming with the pain, ‘Mein Gott, warum läβt du mich nicht sterben?’ She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed to die and twice tried to commit suicide and rid herself of the bits of herself that remained, but they were not that easy to do away with, and in the end she hung a veil over her face, took the pain and the shame upon herself and went on living, a thing destroyed.
I never questioned what Grandmother looked like because I did not compare her with other grandmothers. On the contrary I compared them with her – and thought how strange they looked with their big ears and their big noses. When Mother and Father took me to museums, or when we were on a class outing to the Glyptotek Museum of Art, I walked round seeing Grandmother standing on every pedestal – minus nose and ears, minus hands and legs. For me she was classical beauty, and her face, like those of the statues, had stiffened into a lipless smile.
Tears came easily to Grandmother. She wept when we visited her, and she wept and waved her handkerchief when we drove off in the car. And every time she was touched by something – by some occasion, a sentimental film – she would weep and tell us how moved she was. ‘Ich bin so gerührt,’ she would say. In the summer we would sit outside in the garden, and I would read aloud from Eichendorff, from Keyserling, or from Robert Walser – romantic books. ‘Ach, wie schön!’ she would say when the story was over, tears rolling down her cheeks. I adored my grandmother, felt an infinite tenderness for her, and I would have plucked the stars out of the night sky for her if I could – and one day that’s just what I did.
When I cycled the fifteen kilometres out to the bogs in Hannenov Wood, darkness was already beginning to thicken between the trees. The water was inky black and full of terrors. And then suddenly I could see them in the undergrowth. Glow worms! I took them home with me and, when everything was ready, I told Grandmother to come to the window and look out into the garden. The glow worms shone in the darkness, glinting on the lawn like stars and creating a constellation. Orion. We stood there for a long time, looking at it, until the glow worms crept away, and slowly the star formation began to fall apart, growing fainter, disappearing. I looked up at grandmother and waited in anticipation. There was nothing better than to hear her say it. ‘Ich bin so gerührt!’
As for my father’s father, Grandfather, it was just like him to open up a bus route in a town that was too small and at a time when nobody had any money. It was not long before the novelty wore off and the bus ran empty. He moved the bus stops and put up more signs, changed the timetables and reduced the ticket price, but it made no difference. Things went steadily downhill, and morning after morning Grandfather got up to the humiliation o
f putting his cap on, sliding behind the wheel of the bus and driving round and round the town without a single passenger.
Grandfather was not one to give up easily and instead of learning his lesson would double the stakes. There could be no question of folding up the company. Quite the contrary. Now was the time for action. He increased his fleet and extended the timetable – and the route was no longer much too short but too long, and worst of all its destination was a place where no one wanted to go – Marielyst.
Marielyst was my grandfather’s Las Vegas, and he was the only person who believed that this was the new Skagen, a Mecca for holiday-makers and health-seekers. Visitors would flock from Copenhagen, from Germany, and they would all need transporting. Just wait! It was nothing but bankrupted farmsteads, fields of sandy soil and wind-blown sea-walls with a solitary bathing jetty by the guesthouse, which stood empty for most of the year, and when Grandfather opened his grand bus route it led to nowhere.
‘They’ll be coming today,’ he would say, letting out the clutch and driving off towards Marielyst. And when he returned in the evening without having sold a single ticket, he would say, ‘Tomorrow.’ Over supper he would talk himself to a pitch and babble about the beauties of nature, about woods of gold and green, and about holiday-makers all poised to flood this seaside resort from abroad, while today became this year and tomorrow next year and the one after, and the less food there was on the table the more he talked.
Once in a while there were brighter moments. Grandfather could see people standing at the bus stop on the main road and he would step on the accelerator, but when he got there it turned out to be nothing after all. His heart sank the first time he opened the door and tipped his cap with a ‘Single or return?’ – and they laughed and handed him some crates full of chickens and said, ‘Single.’ And so in the villages and farms along the route – especially for the children – standing at the roadside to make the bus stop developed into a cheap laugh. They were never going anywhere.
In the end Grandfather no longer stopped for them but drove out and back, motivated by routine and by the need to have something to do, and in the evenings he would still sit at the table and spout a bit about the growing cult of the great outdoors and about the hordes of tourists over the horizon, but he scarcely believed in it himself anymore and had reached the end of the road. He could not keep the creditors at bay and feed the family – they had nothing to live on – so one morning he said what everyone had been saying all the time, ‘They’re not coming,’ and took the bus on its last trip.
He drove out along the main road towards Gedser and through Væggerløse and past the station, where a young man was standing at the bus stop. It had happened so often before. Grandfather did not stop. Why should he? But this time it was different. The man ran after the bus, shouting and waving his hat. He wanted to get on! Grandfather opened the door, and he climbed aboard and said ‘Guten Tag’ and bought a single ticket and got off at the guest-house.
‘Marielyst Osterseebad,’ Grandfather said in German and wished him a good stay – ‘einen guten Aufenthalt.’ He had practised for years and now, when he needed it, it was, of course, too late.
Grandfather did not know whether to laugh or cry, and he looked out at the dikes with their lyme grasses, the white sand and the green stripes of water and the blue sky. He saw the beach populated with thousands of tourists, swimming and playing in the sand, and the Baltic overflowed in his eyes. Then he turned the bus around, drove back and dropped it off in town – and that was that. He went down and sat on the bench outside the station and there he remained, following the trains that trundled through, taking his life with them. It was the summer of 1914, and Carl Christian Johannes had given up.
The island of Falster actually lay below the surface of the sea and existed in people’s consciousness only because they refused to believe otherwise. But, when they couldn’t stand upright anymore, when they lay down to sleep, the water rose bit by bit and flowed in over the seawalls, over fields and woods and towns, and claimed the land back for the Baltic. I kept myself awake and saw it coming, looking out of the window at the black expanse of water filling the garden – the fish swimming round between the houses and the trees – and far away the town of Nykøbing sailing through the night like an ocean liner. The sky was full of starfish and I counted myself to sleep. In the morning the tide ebbed, and the water slipped away, retreating as people woke in their beds and got up to spend yet another day persuading each other that they existed and that Falster existed and that it all had a place on the map. The town smelt of sea and fish – the streets were full of seaweed and stranded jellyfish – and sometimes I found a conch or a fossilized sea urchin and put them in the drawer with the rest of my evidence of Atlantis.
There was a hole in our house where you could listen and music and voices would come out. This was the transistor radio. It stood in the kitchen and was caked in cooking fat, its aerial held together with tape, and my mother listened to it all day long when Father was at the office. Apart from me it was her only company, and she washed up to the sounds of ‘Record requests’, cooked to ‘Karlsen’s quarter-hour’, polished the silver to ‘That was the day that was’ and vacuumed to the sound of the midday concert, a cheroot in her mouth and a glass of vodka at hand. They played Beethoven and Brahms and Tchaikovsky to the accompaniment of a hoover, which ran up and down the music with a rhythmic drone, making long phrases in the hallway and short and powerful thrusts in the dining room where the carpet needed an extra going over. When all was quiet and clean, I was sent to the garage with the hoover bag, and it all got chucked into the dustbin with the rubbish – the music, the coughs, the voices, the applause. I lifted the lid and peered in – a couple of bars of the Pastoral Symphony leaked out, smelling of mould and fermented apples. I slammed it shut, and not a note was left. My father did not care for music.
Occasionally it got really cold in winter, and then I knew that Germany was calling. We would soon be going down to visit my mother’s stepsister, Aunt Eva, and her husband, Uncle Helmut, and their three sons, Axel, Rainer and Claus. Mother and Father packed the car full of warm clothes and suitcases and presents, and I hopped onto the backseat behind Mother, who had made sandwiches for the journey. Father would double-check the front door, close the garden gate and peer into the boot one last time to make sure everything was packed as it should be. He squeezed himself behind the wheel with hat and gloves on – his legs were too long for him to sit normally – adjusted the rear-view mirror and read off the petrol gauge and the mileage which was exactly 9874.5, he said, noting the number and the time in his diary. We were two minutes behind schedule for the ferry. ‘Passport, money, papers,’ we said in unison, and then Father turned the key in the ignition, Mother lit a cheroot and turned up the traffic report on the radio, and we were off down Hans Ditlevsensgade, rounding the corner and journeying far back in time.
We stiffened when the officer checked us at the border, each becoming the spitting image of the photo in our passport – and for an instant we were smiling in black and white. Then it was over, and the motorway lay ahead. Mother unscrewed the duty-free and drank from the cap. We laughed and sang – and father asked her to turn the radio down and go easy on the vodka. That’s enough now! Twenty years before she had left Germany behind for the sake of my father, and she sat clutching her memories, looking out at the houses, the fields, the streets rushing past, and everything responded to her look, gleaming and glinting back at her. Softly under her breath she read out the names of towns on the road signs we passed and with her forefinger traced in Michelin the route that led home – Hamburg, Hannover, Göttingen, Frankfurt am Main – and it ran like a tear down the road map and came to rest in Oberfranken.
More and more fir trees appeared along the motorway, the hills became higher and turned into mountains, and when we turned off and took the final, dark stretch of main road to arrive in Münchberg the snow would be falling in heavy, white flakes. Mother shook me
, whispering ‘Wir sind da,’ and I woke up among hundreds of miles of sweet papers, peered out through the window and wiped away the mist with my sleeve. We drove through the arched gateway, and the headlights lit up the drive to the large house. It stood at the top of a hill looking like a castle with its towers and parkland and ancient trees, and here they lived surrounded by a winter landscape – the Hagenmüller family.
Aunt Eva and Uncle Helmut would be walking down the main stairway, waving to us, the sons standing stiffly in line with their short, blond hair and pressed trousers, bowing and greeting and shaking hands as though they were clockwork.
‘Grüβ Gott, Tante Hilde! Grüβ Gott, Onkel Knut! Grüβdich, Vetter Knüdchen!’
Aunt Eva planted a sharp kiss on my cheek.
‘Na, kleiner Knut, fröhliche Weihnachten,’ she would say, her voice snapping her ‘Happy Christmas’ into piercing little splinters. She greeted Father and turned at last to Mother, stepping back to get a good look at her ‘little mouse’.
‘Schau mal einer an, das Hildemäuschen!’
‘Ach, Evamäuschen!’ exclaimed Mother – and they fell into each other’s arms and hated each other beyond all saying.
The only one I liked was Uncle Helmut, who was small and round and bent because of the pains in his back. He had green eyes and wore glasses – and I felt as though he could see right through me and was surveying my bone structure and my inner organs when he pinched my cheeks and prodded my stomach to get me to laugh to order, like a doctor getting you to say ‘Aaaah’. I laughed and laughed and could already feel a cold coming on, and Uncle Helmut listened to it, thought long and hard and then pronounced his diagnosis and popped me a sweet from his pocket. It tasted of camphor, and that was good for most things, he said, and we went in together.
Uncle Helmut was a radiologist and spent his days taking pictures of people and telling them whether they would live or die. He came home for lunch and drank a glass of snaps before going back and taking some more photographs. The whole town filtered through his clinic. Strangers and acquaintances, friends and family – sooner or later their turn would come. It was taking its toll on him, and he grew paler and paler from the flash that showed things in their true light, felt more and more pain in his back, coughing and collapsing little by little. After work and dinner were over, he withdrew in silence, trudging up the stairs with a bottle of wine and locking the door to his room in the attic to continue what were called his ‘studies’. No one knew what they were, these secret sciences.