by Knud Romer
There was no chink in the iron control that Father exerted over his surroundings. If he so much as glanced away, everything would disappear, never to be found again. All he ever did was to keep checking, reassuring himself that reality really did exist, that everything was in place and happened at the right time. When he spoke, it was to state accepted truths – ‘They say… ’, ‘What people do is … ’ – and all he expressed were self-evident truths. For him all talk was in one sense a telling, a kind of counting, and when he wanted to recount something it turned into a catalogue of prices and shopping lists, inventories of our possessions – the centrepieces, the bronze clock, the carpets – balanced against what they had cost. And that was a long story. In the most literal sense what he did was register life. For him it consisted of facts and figures, and he would observe that it was cloudy, or that it was late – that was just how things were. Afterwards he would sit and write it all down in his Mayland diary, duration and location, income and expenditure, price of petrol, mileage, time and temperature. He counted the days and added them together, smiling each time they added up to a year he could draw a line under, and the diaries were set side by side on a shelf, where they provided accounts of every year from 1950 onwards.
Father watched over us twenty-four hours a day and 365 days a year. It felt as though our lives would collapse about our ears if he relaxed for one moment. After dinner he would begin all over again, brushing the crumbs off the tablecloth and putting the cutlery back in the sideboard. He counted the knives, the forks, the spoons and locked the drawer. Then he took the key, returning it to the bureau and locking that too. He ranged things in order, put things away, turned off anything that was lit, pulled plugs out of sockets to prevent short circuits, and placed the silver candlesticks in the washing basket – just in case. He checked the radiators, which had to be set at 2½ precisely, went out and closed the garage doors and the garden gate before locking the doors to the house – the front door, the garden door, the cellar door and the doors to the utility room and the garage – and then he hid the keys to make sure no one could break in. Once he had finished locking up and checking lights and packing the house away for the night, he would kiss Mother and me goodnight and lie down in bed. Then he took the key of keys and placed it in his pyjama pocket, drew the duvet over him and, with a mind at ease in the knowledge that all was secure, he would click the lamp on the bedside table, and the last light in the universe went out.
For some reason or another, I decided on ham sandwiches, and that was what I took with me to school. I wouldn’t have anything else. There was something wrong – I could feel it quite clearly – and they began to talk behind my back and laugh at me and move away from my table when we had our dinner break. I didn’t know why and did my best to fit in, but it got worse and worse, until finally there was someone who pointed a finger and said it to my face. It was my ham sandwich. Instead of being cut lengthways with crust around each slice, it was cut across with the crust on the ends – and that was not how you did it in Denmark.
Mother sliced bread the way she was used to doing in Germany, and I could not bring myself to tell her. I went to school with my alien ham sandwich and chewed my way through the lunch break, but after a while I stopped taking it out of my school bag at all. I left it there, tried to pretend all was as it should be and after school I cycled round trying to find a place where I could throw my packed lunch away without being noticed.
This wasn’t as easy as I had thought. There were either too many people or too few, and I was sure that someone would see me through the window if I threw it into a garden. There was always something that held me back, and at last I chucked the package of sandwiches in between some bushes and cycled on. But I knew straightaway that my mother would walk past that very spot and find it, so I turned around, fished it out and took it home with me.
Even before I got past the garage it was more than I could bear. I parked my bike and ran up the cellar steps shouting ‘Hiya!’ to Mother. She was standing in the kitchen, and I looked at her, my face wreathed in smiles for fear of discovery. My guilty conscience was smouldering in my school bag. I went to my room and carefully opened the drawer of my desk – it was the only place that I could call my own and that could be locked. I held my breath, laid the packed lunch in the drawer, closed it as quickly as I could when I heard my mother calling from the living room, ‘Knüdchen! Håndewaschen! Essen!’ and obediently went to wash my hands before eating.
My mother would sit at the table with her cheroot and a beer while I ate. She looked knotted and tense and almost always sad. The only thing holding her in place was her will, and she locked herself inside herself and clenched her fists until they looked like hand grenades, the knuckles shining white. I would have given my life to make her happy, would often take one of her hands and stroke it and tell her about my day. We had played football, and I had gone up to the blackboard. Susanne had got braces and the twins were sending out invitations to their birthday… And it was all lies. For the day had been spent being a German pig, hiding in the breaks, hiding my packed lunch, my bike, my clothes. For everything I had they poured scorn on, even on her name, jeering and sneering, ‘Hildegard! Hildegard!’ You couldn’t be called that! I was never able to bring myself to tell Mother and diverted her as best I could. And she would look at me and slowly open her hand, and into its palm I placed what I had and hoped that it was enough.
Mother was alone in a foreign country and as lonely as a body can be. Ever since she was little, all she had known was the loss of those she loved, one by one, and nothing – not even the vodka bottle in the kitchen cupboard – could console her. Her father, Heinrich Voll, was taken to hospital with appendicitis in 1924 and died on the operating table. He was an eye specialist, a gentle, happy man, and between him and Grandmother had been a marriage of true love. Their photograph stood in a silver frame in the living room at home, and showed them sitting on a slope looking across the valley, Grandmother beautiful, Heinrich in uniform. When the First World War broke out, he served as a medical officer and, when he was on leave from the front, he told her about the fox cub he had found in the woods and cared for, about how it had got well again, how he had set it free. After the war he opened a private practice in Halle an der Saale, and Mother would run round the place, playing in the apartment they had next door and popping in when he didn’t have any patients. They would laugh together. Those were happy days – and in the twinkling of an eye her heart was wrenched from her. Her father was dead, she was six years old, and there was no greater misery on earth.
They stayed in the apartment, Grandmother and she, and would have had nothing to live off had it not been for the pension the doctors allotted them – 300 Deutschmarks a month – perhaps to salve their guilty consciences for the operation that had gone wrong. But inflation swallowed most of it up, the money became worthless, and, even though Grandmother rented out the practice and later more and more rooms in the house, things could only go from bad to worse. When at last they found themselves crammed into the smallest room that was left and could see no other way out, Grandmother took off her ring and surrendered to Papa Schneider, who had proposed to her. And one day she came home in tears and told Mother that she was being sent away for a time to live with his cousin in Biebrich.
Aunt Gustchen lived with her son and his wife and their two daughters in a little town on the outskirts of Wiesbaden. They were sectarian Protestants and belonged to ‘The Church of the Confession’, and there were only two things that interested them – the gossip from the parish council and their eternal war against Catholics and the archbishop in Mainz. Despite the fact that they owned vineyards by the Rhine, they didn’t drink and would never even taste the wine. When we visited them once a year, it was just like stepping into an undertaker’s.
Her son was a giant. Stooped and bowed under a weight of faith, he sat in the low-ceilinged room with his stick-like wife. Their daughters wore flounced dresses and now and then peeked
sideways out of the corners of their eyes, their glances fluttering like sparrows pecking crumbs off the tablecloth. We would sit down round the table for coffee and fold our hands into steeples and say grace in time to the ticking of the clock.
Vater, segne diese Speise.
Uns zur Kraft und Dir zum Preise!
‘Father, bless this food we eat. It brings us strength, Thy praises meet.’ The house was riddled by Pietist madness. It sinuated itself in ivy and evergreens, Jesus hung on the wall weeping, and there were crucifixes everywhere and needlepoint in frames cross-stitched with Bible quotes in Gothic letters. Father would be fidgeting in his chair, trying to make room for his legs and doing his best to fit in, and I would look across at Mother and think of all she had gone through – and whisper ‘Satan’ instead of ‘Amen’.
It was a chilly and sombre and joyless place. It was hard to imagine what it must have been like to lose your father and say goodbye to your mother and arrive here with a suitcase in 1926. Aunt Gustchen had a bun at the nape of her neck and a hairnet, wore buttoned black dresses and had never been young. Her mother had been a church warden’s daughter from Thüringen and had been possessed by the devil – she was an epileptic – and Gustchen learned the fear of God at her mother’s knee. She lived her life on the lip of the grave with her hands folded and a cross round her neck. They ate stale bread, scrimped and saved, never throwing anything away, despite being comfortably well-todo, because wastefulness was a sin. She pounced upon the least sign of enjoyment and hounded the slightest pleasure – it was cheap to dress up and sinful to smile, while laughter was evil itself breaking the face into devilish grimaces.
Mother was sent to Sunday school and infected with lice. Her long fair hair was chopped off and her clothes were exchanged for an ugly black shift that rasped against her skin. She was given a prayer book, and they were always praying, following the church calendar on their knees. A year of birth, death and resurrection passed. And then another. And Mother kept waiting to hear from Grandmother and couldn’t understand why she had not long since sent for her. She was sure that letters were not being passed on to her but were hidden away somewhere, and she dreamed of escape and cried herself to sleep so as not to wake Aunt Gustchen, who lay beside her in the bed, snoring with eyes wide open.
Mother had felt that she had been forgotten by the whole world, so when at last the message came it was as if a coffin lid had been lifted to let the sun stream in. She was to go to Kleinwanzleben and rejoin her mother and live with her stepfather! She had never met Papa Schneider, and now she took her suitcase and set off by train, thrusting her head out of the window to relish air and speed, and rushed to meet her mother at 100 kilometres an hour. At the station she was met by a servant girl, and together they walked through the streets and out along the country road until they reached the manor. It was surrounded by fields and had long red barns on either side and black timber framing and towers with steep roofs, and on the largest of these there was a clock. They crossed the courtyard and rang the bell. Papa Schneider opened the door, and Mother summoned up her courage, gave him the broadest smile she could muster, reached out her hand to this complete stranger whom she was about to make her father and said, ‘Guten Tag, Vati.’
In 1910 Grandfather and Farmor moved from Orehoved Hotel to one of the smartest addresses in Nykøbing. The name ‘Bellevue’ stood out in gold letters, and the house had three storeys with a look-out tower at the top built in green timber and clad in copper. Farmor could have fainted when Carl took out the keys and let himself in. The living rooms they walked through went on forever and their ceilings touched the sky. All Karen wanted was to get out as quickly as she could, but Grandfather told her not to worry. He was planning to open a haulage company and that would pay for the house and the children and more besides! It was just a question of speeding up developments, and then just wait and see! Before long the link between Copenhagen and Berlin would go straight as the crow flies, and Nykøbing bang in the right place, the new centre for business and tourism. And Karen never said a word but unpacked and hung the kitchen clock on the wall. A few years later he was bankrupt.
They were up to their ears in debt, and Grandfather at his lowest ebb sat on the bench down by the station watching the trains go past, staring at the world as he walked around, silent, refusing to talk to anyone. He kept himself to himself in the study at home, twiddling his thumbs in the dark behind drawn curtains, while his beard, his hair, his nails grew longer and longer and he gave up washing and eating. This carried on until Grandfather hit rock bottom and was dead to the world. Then he picked himself up, dusted himself down and started out afresh. There were endless opportunities! Nothing was impossible!
After the buses it was a shoe shop in Frisegade. It went bust. Parisian fashions were not made for hoeing beet, and people stood outside and laughed at the models in the shop window. Customers were so few and far between that when the shop bell jangled he jumped and asked people what they were doing there. Then he read about the Copenhagen Telephone Company in the paper – more than 50,000 subscribers – and tried to sell telephones to people who didn’t know anyone but those who lived next door, and was left with hundreds of sets and no one to call. He sat himself down on the bench and shut himself away in his own world, but it wasn’t long before he flung open the door again and was trying it out with motorbikes – Nimbus motorbikes! – and the cameras flashed and Grandfather was there, his arms spread wide, smiling to the press, who were on the spot photographing him with flags and spirits flying high in front of the next doomed enterprise.
His downfall could be followed year by year in The Lolland-Falster Times, and, as time went on and any hope of making things work out in reality fell apart, Grandfather began to invent. He bought on tick and kept creditors at bay with stories, coming up with one excuse after the other, and the worse things got the better the stories. Returns on shares in Canada! An equity advance from a distant uncle, guarantors whose signatures must have got lost in the post – he had just had a meeting with the barrister, who would contact them in person within the next few days! Grandfather was convincing, and he managed to swim abreast of the catastrophe as he gambled on a future that had to reach Nykøbing sooner or later, even though the town lay at the furthest corner of the earth – and he closed his eyes and begged the powers that be for it to be his turn before it was too late.
It was left to Karen to deal with everyday life and keep things ticking over. She had two children to look after, and then three, four – Leif and my father, Ib and their little sister Annelise – and she worked herself to the bone to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. She took on cleaning jobs on the side, did piecework in the strawberry fields in the summer, baked bread, grew vegetables and rechristened the soup every evening – onion soup, potato soup, consommé with egg – Grandfather asked if there was brandy in it, and there was – and she made it last so long that in the end it tasted of nothing but goodwill and pure love. She cut a heel out here, a toe out there and knitted and sewed and made the best out of nothing, while the things they did have were sold one by one, and when she came to the end of her day, she put the children to bed and bade them goodnight with a kiss and a small white lie.
They lived on air, and no one realised how bad things were – except Father. He grew taller and thinner, feeling the pinch as clothes and shoes didn’t fit, and at Christmas knew that the presents were empty words packed in wrapping paper. He did what he could to help out at home, got good marks at school and when he turned fifteen left school and got a job as a trainee at the bank. He looked after Leif, who had spinal TB and limped in and out of hospital, covered Annelise’s dancing lessons and paid the school money for his little brother Ib, who was into skiving and stealing and smoking. If anyone teased Leif for being an invalid, Father told them off and threatened to go to the police, after which they got stick from Ib, who hit them too hard and too long, his behaviour turning more and more criminal. Annelise used make-up a
nd began going out on the town, and Father would fetch her home at night from the inn, the Friser. He got up in the morning and helped Ib with his homework, even though he hung out with the wrong crowd down at the quarry and was drinking. And after work Father would tuck a file under his arm and go to evening classes to learn bookkeeping and stenography and German, and when he put up his hand he had the correct answers at his fingertips.
The day he got the job at Danish Building Assurance – that day in 1934 – was the happiest of my father’s life, and he needed no excuse to tell the story over and over again, remembering the advertisement in the newspaper and Director Damgård who received the applicants in the company’s premises in the Market Square. He was a large man and had started the business from nothing with three employees, Frøken Slot, Max Christensen, who kept the books, and his son-in-law, Henry Mayland. Clients were reinsured and they saved two Danish crowns if they took out a ten-year policy – that kind of thing would be completely impossible nowadays! I heard Father tell the story at least a thousand times, and he always beamed when he came to the point when Director Damgård looked in at the office – it was late in the evening and he was working late – and asked him what he thought about bridge. Father had learned bridge from the old ladies in town – he was fond of visiting them, chatting to them – and he stepped into the breach as a fourth and played cards with the board and drank coffee and cognac and said no thanks to a cigar – and was promoted to chief clerk. Damgård had always thought highly of him, said Father, smiling at the thought, and then started the story all over again, retelling it like a gospel that spread light in a time of darkness.