by Knud Romer
For Carl there was not the shadow of a doubt. He had seen the light and he set up his projection room in the restaurant, arranged the chairs in rows and hung up a screen. He spoke to the press, and on Tuesday 17th July 1909 a notice appeared in The Lolland-Falster Times to the effect that, on the recommendation of the parish council, permission had been given for the establishment of a picture-house and that at 8 o’clock the following Saturday Orehoved Inn would open its doors for a motion picture show. Drinks would be served, and the show would be followed by music and dance – Grandfather staked everything on one throw. And people came in droves. They flocked in from Vordingborg and Nørre Alslev, and the farmers came walking across the fields carrying their Sunday shoes in a bag. Even squire Wilhjelm arrived from Orenæs in a horse-drawn carriage and sat himself down in the front row next to members of the town council and the parish priest, and Grandfather bade them all welcome and turned out the ceiling lights and got the projector rolling.
The screen began to flicker. Dust danced in the cone of light, and shadows began moving across the screen. Ahhh! Oooh! They saw a fisherman bid farewell to his family on the quayside and sail off with two friends. They capsize in the storm and drown, and his dead body is washed up on the seashore. There is a funeral. His wife and children stand at the graveside in mourning – and the reel ran out. It was as silent as the grave in the room. Grandfather scarcely dared turn on the light, and the audience sat as though turned to stone, staring straight ahead. And then from the fifth row came a soft sound. Someone was weeping, and she was followed by another and yet another, breaking down and sobbing. The priest went across to offer comfort, to hold her hand. People got up, crossing the room to offer their condolences, and the squire and the town officials hurried away without Grandfather being able to do a thing about it or stop them to explain the misunderstanding. It was the end of Orehoved Hotel.
The next day the flags all flew at half-mast in the town. People wore black and spoke in low voices and were in mourning for the remainder of that week. There was a funeral on the Sunday, the bells tolled, and the coffins were lowered. Grandfather had long since given up trying to explain that it was only a film, and, when Karen and he returned from the churchyard and sat at the dining table and she told him that she was pregnant with their second child, he poured a glass of wine and replied that they would have to move very soon.
It wasn’t the mayor who was in charge, nor was it the police or the director of the Bank of Industry and Commerce. It wasn’t people at all. It was the rooks. They flew around us, and they would scream and hop down the streets, and sit in clutches on the rooftops keeping a beady eye on us. The rooks emptied the dustbins, stripped the slaughterhouse clean and gathered in throngs down by the harbour when the fishermen came in. In spring they would fly behind the sowing machines, pecking up the seeds as quickly as they were scattered, and in the autumn they ravaged the orchards, stripping them of fruit. There was not a tree or lamp post that wasn’t occupied by rooks. They left no one in peace. They ate everything and, if you stood still for too long, they would come and peck at you, too.
They were the first thing I heard in the morning, long before I woke, and the last I heard when I went to bed. I lay listening to the rooks coming closer, flying over the house, their cries filling the air, and I had no defence. I tried to cling to my room, to my toys, to sing Baa, baa, black sheep…, but it was no good. I was almost indistinguishable from the dark, and the terror would well up inside me until I could hold it back no longer and it burst its banks and my greatest fear became real and the rooks swooped down and took me.
There was no one to understand why I used to scream when the moment came to say goodnight, and it turned into an endless battle. I dragged things out as long as I could and I did my best to explain, but all that came out of my mouth were hoarse noises. In the morning the rooks flew up, and my arms flailed and only stopped when my mother shook me awake, saying, ‘Knüdchen! Aufwachen!’ I was ill, feverish. Mother and Father consulted Dr Spock to read up about children’s illnesses but couldn’t work out what the matter was and rang for the doctor. He arrived with a black bag – his name was Dr Kongstad – felt my forehead, looked down my throat and took my pulse. Then he said it was whooping cough, wrote a prescription, snapped his bag shut and left. And I swallowed the pills and was given apples and juice. I did what they expected, what was written on the label, and everyone agreed that I was getting better when the bottle was empty.
From then on I knew the best thing was to pretend that nothing was wrong. When I went to kindergarten with Miss Freuchen, I copied the others as well as I could, laughing when they laughed and playing along with their games. I bit a little, but wouldn’t open my mouth when the others sang There is a black bird and it’s singing in the tree, though that got better and disappeared once I started school. When I biked through West Wood on my way to football with the Lilliput team, it didn’t bother me to hear them shrieking in the trees. I scrambled into my kit – blue jersey and stockings and white shorts – and acted normally, running around between the rooks across the tussocky field. You could follow the game from way off, watching the advantage pass from one side to the other as the ball made the birds fly up.
They hung out across in the wood where they had their nests – it was a real witches’ coven in there with bird droppings hanging from the branches in long stalactites. This was also the site of ‘Falster City Camping – An oasis in a city of opportunities’. There was an ice cream stall, and German tourists would sit in front of cottage tents and caravans, and despair. They had been seduced by the child-friendly beaches, the idyllic landscape, the snug little market town, all as described in the brochure. Of the colony of rooks not a word had been said.
They were woken from their dream holiday by the din that began at dawn, and towards evening the rooks would assemble in huge flocks out in the fields, fly in across the town and settle back in West Wood. Then came the worst of it all, when it would rain bird droppings. Shops put their wares under cover, washing was taken in, and people with open umbrellas and gumboots hurried through the muck. Most people stayed in, sitting and shaking their heads, listening to the droppings that drummed against window panes filthying everything. The tourists packed their bags and fled as far as they could go – and not a soul watched them go without wishing to join them. Night would have fallen before anyone dared take to the streets again, and life took up where it had left off, even though everyone knew it was on borrowed time. We were food for the birds. The rooks ruled the roost in Nykøbing.
I loved Grandmother’s cooking. She made Wienerschnitzel and Kalbsfleischgeschnetzeltes mit Rösti, but best of all was her Gullasch. She would stand in the kitchen busily cooking among her old pots and her butcher’s knives while the pork and the onions spat and sizzled in the pan. The air was full of spices – paprika and cinnamon and pepper – that made you sneeze, and the steam billowed up from the saucepans, filling the house with fragrances that nothing could match. It was hard not to stick a finger in to taste, and, when the moment finally arrived and the Gullasch was served, my world exploded on my palate into tastes that reached deeper and deeper and never had an end. It felt as though you had been far away on a distant journey, as though many years had passed, when you found yourself back in the sitting-room, your face glowing, and took yet another mouthful.
Grandmother’s Gullasch was irresistible. Once tasted, it would make you want more, would have you licking your plate forever. It would only come to an end when Grandmother said stop and took the casserole and put it in the fridge with a tea towel over the lid. There it would remain, and I could think of nothing else and grew hungrier and hungrier. As soon as Mother was out of the house, as soon as she had gone into town with Grandmother, I would run to the kitchen and look at the casserole in the fridge. There was one helping left. Sticking my fingers into it told me that the Gullasch tasted better than ever and it transported me all the way back to my great-grandmother, who fried pork and oni
ons in the casserole a hundred years ago – Lydia Matthes. She put in the paprika and tomato purée and garlic, the ginger and juniper and caraway – and when it was boiling hot, she poured in the red wine and the beef stock. Slowly my great-grandmother would brew her Gullasch, letting it simmer for hours, reducing it until the meat was tender. She would keep one helping to use as stock, and that was how the taste grew stronger and richer as the years went by, until Grandmother inherited the casserole, doing as she had done and making sure there was always a little bit left over for the next batch of Gullasch.
The casserole was black and heavy and made of cast iron, and it was almost lost at the end of the war. Grandmother and Papa Schneider had to flee Kleinwanzleben because the Russian troops were coming, and all they managed to do was to roll up their paintings, bury their wine and lock their doors. Then the English came and evacuated them. They drove off in lorries full of the sugar beet seeds that Papa Schneider propagated and that must not fall into the hands of the Communists. He wasn’t able to take anything with him – except the reflex camera that he managed to smuggle under his coat. The casserole remained behind with its stock, and they would have lost that along with everything else if it hadn’t been for Mother.
Mother had left Berlin in 1942 and had run off to Austria. They had not heard from her for a long time, and Grandmother was sick with worry, not knowing whether she was dead or alive. She hid herself well away from the war and the Nazis on a mountain in Steiermark, where she lived in a convent and ate potatoes, sticking it out for a winter, a summer and another winter, waiting for the war to be over and done with. During the final months of the war it became clear to her that the dividing line was going to be the Elbe and that Kleinwanzleben lay on the wrong side and would be occupied by the Russians. There wasn’t a moment to lose! They had to get out. She tried to contact the family to warn them, but it was too late. All lines of communication were dead. She searched her heart, and decided to go to their rescue, to travel home.
She took the first available train from Graz. No one could say whether it would leave and certainly not whether it would arrive. Most of the railway network had collapsed, and what was left was under constant attack. The train set off and travelled for an hour or two. Then they felt it brake, and everyone jumped off and threw themselves face down on the siding. The planes dive-bombed them, strafing the train and dropping bombs, and once they had gone it was quickly up again and on, covering as many kilometres as they could before the next air attack. They travelled eastwards because that was where there were still railway tracks, but it was the wrong direction, towards Prague, so Mother got off and found a train heading for the most terrible destination on earth – Berlin. A week later she had crossed Hungary and Czechoslovakia and was stepping out of a carriage riddled with holes onto the platform at Anhalter Bahnhof. The only thought in her mind was how to get out of there and, running for her life, she took a wild chance and scrambled aboard the last train to make it out of the city just as Berlin was blown to kingdom come behind her.
It was a miracle that Mother got to Magdeburg alive. It was bang on the front line, with American troops on one side and German troops on the other, and the bombs were raining down on the town. There were five kilometres to Kleinwanzleben, and Mother was ready to drop with hunger and exhaustion. She stole a bicycle and rode along the main road through a thunderstorm of artillery fire, and there at the end of her strength stood the house on Breite Weg. She ran up the steps. The door was locked, and she hammered on the windows. No one came. It was empty. She crawled in through a cellar window and wandered round calling their names – it was clear that they had fled in haste – and Mother hoped for the best. Her legs were giving way under her and she sat down heavily in the kitchen. And then she remembered the Gullasch.
She opened the door to the pantry. The casserole stood where it had been abandoned a couple of days before. It had the fragrance of A Thousand and One Nights, of the Garden of Eden and temptation whispered, inviting you closer, leading your hand down to the spoon, the dream was already so tantalizingly close that you couldn’t resist, could only follow your only desire, which was to eat – and Mother put the lid back on. If she gave in now and ate the rest, it would all be over, and the stock would be lost forever. With hunger raging inside her, she took the casserole under one arm, put it on the luggage rack and cycled out to the German army to find a safe haven and find her family and return the casserole to Grandmother.
This was how Grandmother could continue to serve a Gullasch that was a hundred years old, and it tasted sweeter and stronger with every secret spoonful I slipped down. I was so intent on eating that I never heard the door open, got a shock when Mother was suddenly standing in the kitchen screaming, ‘Was tust du?!’ What had I done? She was staring with wild eyes at the spoon clenched in my hand – I had scraped the bottom so as to leave nothing behind – and only then did I realize what I had done. My horror and remorse knew no end, but there was no going back. What was done was done. I smiled an apology with Gullasch plastered across my face. I looked at my mother, looked at the spoon and then, praying for her forgiveness, opened my mouth for the final spoonful.
My father shot up. He was tall and thin, and when I clambered up on his shoulders I could look across the hedge to the far horizon. He was too big to take in all at one go, so I knew him only in bits – he had a large nose and large ears and large feet. His boots, he would say, had been built in a boatyard. No matter where we were – in a restaurant, a cinema – he would complain about the lack of leg room, and we’d leave again. His arms reached to his hands, no further, and those hands were a long way off and kept the world at a distance. His forehead increased in height as his hair fell out – and Mother thought he was the handsomest man in the world.
Father was as kind as the day was long and his eyes warmed you like the sun. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, he was early to bed and early to rise, and I never heard him utter a swearword. He was always on time, always conscientious in his work, always paid his taxes. And 100 metres before a traffic light he would slow down, so that, even if it was green, by the time we reached the junction it would be sure to have turned red. He stood up automatically if he was talking to someone in authority on the telephone and would never put a plug in a socket without first having read the instructions. He was correct through and through, from top to toe, his conscience as clean as his shirt, and his tie was tied, his shoes were polished and his suit so crisply pressed it could stand on its own two creases.
Father was an insurance man, and every day he made sure that nothing would happen. The alarm went off at half-past six. Father got up, drank his coffee, ate his breakfast roll, kissed Mother goodbye – and then drove to work along the same route he had taken for fifty years. He worked at Danish Building Assurance in the town square, and his first question when he came through the door was ‘Has anything happened?’ Nothing had, and Father heaved a sigh of relief, went into his office and got on with insuring everything there was to insure on Falster. He dealt with the church and the town hall, with man and beast, while houses, cars and bicycles were all covered for theft and fire and water and rot and storm and any accident that could conceivably strike the planet. Father always assumed the worst would happen, pre-empting damage, wrestling with the unforeseeable and finding no peace until everything was safely secured. He sighed with satisfaction when he opened The Falster Times in the morning, and there was nothing in it. The paper could just as well have been blank. Nothing happened, nothing whatsoever. The days repeated themselves without even a leaf falling to earth, and surely and steadily life ground to a halt.
It was a task that could have no end. Father bore the world on his shoulders – there was always something or other to worry about – and his moods rose and fell with the barometer that hung on the wall in the living room. Arranging his face into earnest furrows, he would tap the glass. When the needle showed fair, his face lit up, but it wouldn’t be long before he was tapping again a
nd thinking about low pressure and rain and lightning strikes. He spoke of the October storm in 1967 as though it was an episode from the Bible. Summer brought the danger of fire – he hoped it would be wet – and winter awoke anxiety about frost damage and snow, and he never wanted a white Christmas. ‘Shhh!’ he would say and hold his breath, his forefinger pointing heavenwards, when we got to the most important bit of the news – the weather forecast.
Father came home for lunch on the dot of half-past twelve and sat down to a hot meal, and in the evening I would hear the car drive up Hans Ditlevsensgade and come to a halt in the garage. Then the front door would open and close, and Father would call ‘Hello there!’ and hang up his hat and coat in the wardrobe. We would hurry up into the kitchen, where Mother would be beaming and saying ‘Ach, Väterchen!’ and kissing him on the cheek and loving him beyond all saying. We laid the table in the dining room, where everything had its allotted place and stood on the table in systematic order – the porcelain, the napkins, the salt and pepper, the vases full of flowers – and Father had eyes in the back of his head. When I opened a drawer in the sideboard to take out the knives and forks, he was on to it in a flash.
‘What do you want?’ he’d ask, and then he would shake his head and tell you what to do and how. ‘The forks are in the top middle drawer. No, not there, the middle, at the back.’ And so it would go on. Father pursued his insurance business at home and went into the minutest detail. It was impossible to do anything right – and he would forever be adjusting the grandfather clock even though it kept perfect time.
To move was in itself to challenge providence. ‘Careful!’ he would say before you had even taken a step, and if you asked him for something – never mind what – he would say no. For him there was nothing worse than a draught. ‘Shut the door!’ he would shout as you opened it, and, when you closed it behind you, he would ask you to do it again – and do it properly. Father always thought there was something not quite shut. ‘There’s a draught,’ he would say and would walk around testing the air, checking the windows, drawing the curtains, until every last hole was plugged and all movement ceased. The floorboards creaked, the doors groaned, the walls had ears, and I was silent and careful and did as he said. I longed for the day when he would stop it and just let things be, but that day never came.