by Knud Romer
Uncle Helmut believed in spirits and had good reason to. As a seventeen-year-old he had been sent to the Eastern Front and had marched on Stalingrad. Two millions deaths later he marched back through the Russian winter, losing three toes and his sanity. He saw his parents standing beyond the grave, shielding him from enemy fire and frost, and even though he made it back alive, he never really returned home. He lived in the past with his family, surrounded by ghosts that only he could see, and the hallucination of life before the war was all that remained to him once it was over.
Over the years Uncle Helmut collected ancestral heir-looms and antiques, any item he could get his hands on that had been in the family, and he placed them in corners and on chests of drawers and hung them on walls, turning the house into a mausoleum for the family. It was full of relics from grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents – all the way back to the armour that stood at the top of the stairs and rattled round the house at night as Uncle Helmut sleepwalked, marching on through that eternal winter. For their confirmations he gave his sons signet rings that belonged to the family and placed them between portraits and armour and family silver, and there they stood with no hope of escape, for their fate was sealed with the coat of arms and red wax.
I was envious of them and felt myself cheated of my part of the story, and on one of those days before Christmas Uncle Helmut told me to come up to his room after dinner and I would get something that was better than a ring, and he winked at me. The minutes crawled at a snail’s pace, and I thought the meal would never end. The dessert dragged on and melted on our plates, before he said ‘Mahlzeit,’ laid his serviette to one side, pushed back his chair and rose from the table. He took his wine, went up the stairs to his room and closed the door. I was already standing outside, and the knocking on the panelled door was the beating of my heart. I’ve had it now, I thought, as Uncle Helmut opened the door and wished me good evening.
It was a welter of books and papers, and shelves lined every wall. He began to tell me about the things in the room – a Samurai sword he had brought home from Japan, Indian prayer bells, the antlers on the wall. He sat down behind the desk, which was covered in parish registers and old photographs. This was where he sat at night, studying and drawing family trees that grew ever more fantastic branches as he drank his way through the bottle. A wreath hung behind glass in a frame above the desk, bound together by a black bow, and he explained that it was a plait that had been cut from his grandmother’s hair when she died in 1894. It had hung in his parents’ sitting room in memory of her. Uncle Helmut coughed and fell silent, looking me straight in the eye so I knew that now it was coming, and he opened the drawer.
There was no such thing as withdrawal in the German Army, he said – and placed a small piece of metal on the desk. Uncle Helmut showed me the scar on the underside of his arm and told me about the battle that had been the cause of it and about their retreat through Russia. When they needed supplies, they had to send advanced troops out to beat back the SS, who were defending the depots against their own soldiers. They managed to hold their position for as long as it took the company to run past and to have food, clothes and ammunition shoved into their hands, and then they continued westwards, fleeing annihilation. Uncle Helmut sighed, rolled his sleeve down and handed me the piece of metal. It was a piece of a Russian hand grenade, and now it was mine.
Uncle Helmut was full of fragments of grenade, which came out of his body at regular intervals, and every time we met he gave me a new piece and told me more about the war, until fragment by fragment I pieced the stories together. They were about survival but always ended with a corpse, and the only thing he could do was to drag it out for as long as he could. Sometimes he would come to a standstill, losing himself in the details of a landscape or describing a uniform jacket and counting all the buttons. When I asked who it had belonged to, he answered that the man had been lost in action and gave me the fragment – and there would be no more stories until next time.
Apart from me there was no one who thought much of Uncle Helmut really. Or rather, my mother was fond of him, and I suppose my father was too, but his wife and children weren’t. The strongest feeling they had for him was fear, and an oppressive cloud hung over the house. Aunt Eva had married him for his money and because he was one of the few men left to marry after the war, while the sons crept around like dogs with their tails between their legs and agreed with everything he said. For them it was one big act. When they smirked and went about their duties, when they sat and ate nicely at table, I could see behind their movements the cogs turning round and was sure they were mechanical dolls wound up by fear – fear of beatings, of being confined to their room – and most of the time I kept myself to myself.
It came as a release when Christmas was over and we were to return home. I couldn’t wait to get away from the ghosts in that icy house that gave you a cold the moment you walked through the door. Mother and Father packed the car and we said our thank you’s and goodbye’s and posed out on the terrace for the last time – it was snowing – and Uncle Helmut waved his hand and asked us to bunch up – Aunt Eva, Axel, Rainer and Claus, Mother and Father and I. Then we said ‘Cheese’, and he raised the camera to his eye and pressed the button, and I screamed and screamed and screamed, but it was too late. The picture was taken, and I knew that Uncle Helmut would be able to see from it which of us would die.
Every time we had to go out shopping it was the same old story. Mother sighed, fished out the shopping bag and put on her fur coat – it was yellow with black spots, an ocelot, and Father had said that it kept an eye on her. If anyone came too close – so I imagined – they would get eaten. Mother put on a matching fur hat, then she reached for my hand and gave me a melancholy smile.
‘So, Knüdchen, jetzt gehen wir einkaufen,’ she said, and we summoned up our courage, took a deep breath and went into town.
The baker was a few streets further down on Enighedsvej, and there was a moment’s hush when we walked in through the door and people stared at us and turned away. We stood in a queue that grew longer and longer, and it was never our turn. Mother might say ‘Excuse me?’ and maybe raise a faint hand, but no one responded, and so it went on until the girls behind the counter couldn’t keep it up any longer and sniggered, exchanging glances with the others in the shop, and asked Mother what it was she wanted.
Mother asked for a white loaf and wholegrain rye bread and a litre of milk and half a pound of butter. Her voice was nervous, her accent thick, and they filled our bags with sour milk, rancid butter and stale bread, and gave us too little change, and Mother bowed her head, mispronouncing her ‘Thank you’ and ‘Sorry’, and we hurried out and never returned. We walked up Grønsundsvej and into butcher Bengtsen on the corner and over the bridge to the greengrocer on Østergade and to Jeppesen’s coffee shop on Slotsgade – and in shop after shop it was the same thing over and over.
Mother and I made our daily rounds through a town that had turned its back on us. We saw everything from behind and all we met were people hurrying away from us or waving a hand to ward us off when Mother approached. They looked the other way. Doors were slammed shut, goods were sold out, chairs were taken, and at Christmas after church the priest withdrew his hand. We were the only people in the world. Mother held my life in her hands as I held hers, tripping along at her side when the two of us went to the market square together and hurried all the way back home.
It was a relief to lock the door behind us and to be standing safely in our own hall. Mother hung the ocelot in the wardrobe and went up to the kitchen to put away the things we had bought. Then she would pour herself a glass of vodka, go down into the sitting room and put on a record. She would light a cheroot and lean back in the sofa breathing out smoke, and the rest of the afternoon she would spend partying by herself and listening to hits from the Germany of the ’30s – Zarah Leander, Marlene Dietrich or Heinz Rühmann – and thinking about Berlin.
My mother was bl
onde and beautiful, and she had lived her life to the full before the Nazis came and took it. She arrived in Berlin to study in 1939 and lived in a classy place for young women called Victoria Studienanstalt. There were parks and porters and parlour maids, and the strict house rules were there only to be broken. She studied at the university by day and partied by night. They drank champagne, danced to American music and made fun of busts of Hitler by sticking ice-buckets on his head. Even though she sometimes sat for six or seven hours in the cellar when the air-raid sirens sounded, they carried on with their parties afterwards, she said, and didn’t think about the war. It was way off in the distance, something you read about in the papers – and her friend, Inge Wolf, had taken her final exams even as the Russians were entering the city.
I could picture Mother waltzing through the smoking ruins of Berlin to the sounds of Zarah Leander singing Davon geht die Welt nicht unter, while Inge was up in front of the blackboard answering the examiners on that day of judgement, and none of it seemed that dangerous. Mother made light of it, telling me about the work camps where they had to do social service so they could go to university – it was called Arbeitsdienst – and where female camp commandants had their hair plaited in coils, wore brown dresses and were out-and-out sadists. At six o’clock there was Fahnenappel, the morning roll call, when the flag was raised – Sieg Heil! – followed by gymnastics before breakfast. They worked on the farms in blue overalls, hacking beets, emptying latrines and spreading their contents on cabbages as manure, and in the evenings they would be schooled in Nazism. After that, cabbage was served up and then it was bed. Mother played the accordion for community dancing and got up the nose of the camp commandants, who hated her for her beauty, her pride and her wealth. They sent her out to pick the caterpillars off the cabbages in the fields all day long, and at morning roll call it was, ‘Hilde Voll, vortreten!’ And she would step forward and be given a dressing down. She was subversive by nature. She was inflaming the camp. ‘Du hetzt das Lager auf!’ It was the same old story at every camp they were made to set up before the war – and so much the better, for the main thing was at all costs to avoid being sent to a munitions factory.
Mother put on a fresh record, Das Fräulein Niemand, humming along to the words.
Miss Nobody loves the Prince of Nowhere;
When he is near, so happy is she.
They both of them live in a castle of air
In the land of dreams by the Golden Sea.
Then she talked about her childhood friend, Stichling. His father had been chief of police in Kleinwanzleben, where she grew up, and he had a skeleton key, and they had let themselves in all sorts of places in the town, and Grandmother loved him. He had gone into the cavalry and become a tank commander. Mother fell silent. The record was finished, and that was the last I heard of him.
My mother was a woman of the world who had become stranded on the edge of the world, and she had lost more in Nykøbing, had let herself go more than I ever realised. After the war she left the remnants of her life behind – her family and her name, her country, her language – and moved to Denmark because she fell in love with Father. She put up with the humiliation, the contempt, allowed the hatred of Germans to fall on her head, and carried on loving Father and calling him her Apollo. He was her be-all and endall, he was all she had – no one else would consort with a German. Mother sighed in that way of hers and said ‘Ach ja’ and then took a puff of her cheroot and emptied her glass before putting on The Threepenny Opera, and we sang ‘Mack the Knife’ and ‘Cannon Song’ and ‘Pirate Jenny’, and when it came to the place where they ask her who is to die, we answered in unison, ‘Everyone!’
I always hoped that it would be just as it was in the song, that a ship would come with fifty cannons and bomb Nykøbing to smithereens and rescue us and take us far away. When I was down at the harbour playing, I would stand looking out for the ship, would imagine it sweeping up the sound with all sails set and laying anchor out there. Then the Jolly Roger would be run up the masthead and the bombardment would begin. And before the day was over the town would be pulverized to a heap of dust and rubble, and the day of vengeance would have come. A tribunal would be set up in the Market Square, and they would find out who my mother was, and the neighbours and the baker’s shop-girls and the butcher and the greengrocer and the priest and the children and all the others would kneel with a single neck on the block. We would smile to each other, Mother and I, and then we would say ‘Hopla!’ and the heads would roll on and on forever.
My father’s mother, Karen, we called Farmor, and she had a broad, serious face. She had lost her mother when she was twelve, and managing a girl and two half-grown boys as well as the farm ended up being too much for her father. He sent her off to live with her Auntie Bondo in Store Heddinge, and she grew up in her drapery shop, which was an offshoot of the Flensborg Department Store. Auntie Bondo was old and would forget that Karen was there at all. Most of the time she was left to her own devices and went around missing her father and her brothers, pining for her mother and having really no one at all. In the afternoons she would sit in the shop among the underwear, the dresses, the rolls of fabric, and wait for the right man to come and carry her off. She dreamt of romance wrapped in tulle, of passion in chiffon, of love eternal crocheted in lace, and she was sold the moment Carl showed up. He was tall and handsome and told her stories about Canada, promising to take her with him and planning it all in the minutest detail. And she crawled out from under the piles of tulle and chiffon and lace, said yes and gave him her first kiss.
It was the spring of 1902 when Farmor and Grandfather had got engaged. They then ran off to Copenhagen together without Auntie Bondo noticing – or maybe she just didn’t care. They were married in the Garrison Church. Once his military service was over, Karen was pregnant, and they returned to Falster and leased Orehoved Hotel. It looked out across the Great Sound, and Grandfather’s eyes could follow the tongue of water to Masned Island and, further out, to Zealand. He could see the railway ferry sailing in and he pinned his hopes on transport, having read in the papers that there was no stopping its growth. Trade and tourism were the future and would transport them off and away, right across the Atlantic!
Guests were few and far between at the start, but that was how it always was. It took time for a place to get a name. Grandfather spread the word as best he could and stuck signs with arrows on the roadside, while Karen looked after the child, cleaned and cooked and ran a hotel that had no guests. She changed sheets that had not been slept in, put fresh flowers in vases no one would see, and Grandfather placed advertisements in the papers and gave the hotel five stars. He described all its comforts and mod cons, pouring praise on a landscape that was flat and fog-bound, inventing attractions where there was nothing worth looking at, and every evening Karen took her place in reception and prepared to receive travellers who never came. The ferry docked, and the traffic drove past the hotel. No one had anything to stop for in Orehoved.
After a couple of seasons in an empty hotel their plans lost their romantic glow, and they decided that they would rely on local trade instead, on running an inn – dinners and parties, perhaps even music and dance to attract a wider clientele. That would do the trick! They’d have guests for lunch and a dish of the day and the week’s menu and the wine of the month and seasonal seasonings, and Grandfather hired a dance band for the Saturday and hung posters up. When they got to the end of the week, the tables and chairs stood untouched, and Karen took the lunches, the dish of the day, the week’s menu and the seasonal seasonings and poured them all on the compost heap, and Grandfather still stood in the doorway with a roll of tickets and the wine of the month. The band played, and the lamps twinkled far into the night. Not a soul turned up. He might as well close down.
Grandfather threw himself into one event after the other, sending out invitations for special evenings – talks and discussions, port wine tastings, piano and song recitals – and even though he sat debati
ng with himself and applauding music for which he and Karen were the only audience, he continued to insist that if you don’t succeed at first, you try and try again, that the losers were those who gave up. There was nothing wrong with the idea. It was the way it was put into practice. And he talked about getting a national politician to pay them a visit. Or what about a famous cabaret artist? He wrote letters and waited for the postman, and then wrote more letters, and when bedtime came he would reassure Karen, insisting that soon their luck would turn – and then one day it happened.
Grandfather came running in with a letter. It was from an agent in Copenhagen, and he could put them in touch with stars from the world of the theatre, of culture. A week later Grandfather had already arranged a meeting and was climbing aboard the train to Copenhagen. Karen and he had not been separated since his stint in the Army, and it seemed like an eternity before the front door was flung open again and Carl stepped in, beaming and waving his hat and shouting, ‘We are saved!’ He took out a couple of glasses and a bottle of the wine of the month and told her about his trip to Copenhagen, about the agent and about how everything would be different from now on. ‘Moving pictures,’ he whispered and lifted his glass. They would open a picture theatre! They clinked their glasses and drank, and Farmor could scarcely hold back her tears because it all was too much, and she knew that this time it would all go wrong.