Nothing But Fear

by Knud Romer

  There was a financial crisis, and there was no work to be had. Leif was sent to a sanatorium in Jutland, and the bills poured in. Ib was expelled from school and blew it every time he got a new apprenticeship. He swaggered around wearing a hat and flared trousers and somehow managed to be better off than Father. Even though it meant taking a chance – not something he was keen on – he got Ib employed as a trainee at Danish Building Assurance in order to keep an eye on him. It went well at first, and then it started going too well to be true. Ib charmed and fast-talked his way, making more promises than he could keep. They got more customers than ever, but it was one big fiddle. He had his hand in the till and was eating out and playing the fat cat, buying drinks all round. It was a scandal, and it was left to Father to smooth things out, to apologise to the board and to Director Damgård – he would make sure everything was put right – and he settled the accounts and brought the clients back into the fold. Then he got hold of Ib. One thing was certain. Nothing and no one was going to rock the boat and take from him the little he had achieved!

  Father spoke to the bank and to Victor Larsen, the solicitor, and bought a second-floor flat for himself on Nybrogade 9. There was a little balcony and a dining room, a living room, a bedroom and a kitchen, all just as it should be, and the only way he could afford it all was to go to auctions and wait for the lowest bid. He bought a dining table with four mahogany chairs, a genuine leather armchair, carpets and paintings that he hung in gilded frames – a country road with pollarded willows, a harbour with fishing boats, a forest scene – and his greatest coup was the grand piano. He couldn’t play, but it was part of it all. Father even put sheet music on the stand for effect and the cleaner turned the pages once a week. Father relished his snug. He sat in the armchair reading German and English, dictionaries and grammar books mostly, and he applied to join the Brage male voice choir, went on outings to Pomlenakke and sang How fresh and green the woodlands lie. In the afternoons he could be seen crossing the Market Square carrying in his hands cakes from baker Jensen – two cream-filled angel cakes – making his calls and paying his respects to the ladies, even the married ones, and several cups of coffee later he was on his way back. They left him cold. He had his mother, and she cooked the food he liked and washed his clothes – that was all the woman he needed, and Father preferred to be left in peace. The icing on the cake came when he was allowed to join the Freemasons. He bought a tall hat and a dinner jacket and strutted off to lodge meetings on Wednesday evenings, and slowly he rose through the ranks and greeted the town’s élite and carved out his career inch by inch.

  Father constructed his existence around what meant more to him than anything else – security – and in the home he made for himself everything was perfectly ordered, while the world around him fell apart. Ib ended up in court, Annelise ran off with a man – and Father sorted it all out. It was always left to him to pick up the pieces. He was a character witness for Ib, who got off lightly with a suspended sentence, he made sure that Annelise came back home, and he found an apprenticeship for Leif with Balling & Sons (Hides, Skins & Leathers). He looked after his mother, who had got arthritis – no treatment helped – and helped his father, who was increasingly at his wit’s end, not daring to walk the streets for fear of running into unpaid bills. They were due to move from ‘Bellevue’, now mortgaged to the hilt three or four times over – and Father sat up going over the paperwork into the small hours, while his father tore his hair and gabbled on about business and tourism and transport and routes as straight as the crow flies. There was no way out. They might just as well give up – they had reached the end of the line. Grandfather ran up and down the stairs looking to see where the future had got to. It had to be there soon! But it never came. It never came – and Karen took the kitchen clock off the wall, and the packing cases stood ready to be fetched, but they were empty. All was lost. And then it did come after all and was the worst thing that had ever happened.

  It was on the morning of 9th April. Father and his little brother Ib were walking along Vesterskovvej – Ib’s suit always looked rumpled even though it had just been pressed – and everywhere there were people shouting ‘The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!’ As they stared up at the sky, the fighter squadrons flew north over the town. Ib threw a stone at them.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We go to work,’ answered Father. ‘What else?’

  When something was wrong, he acted as though nothing had happened – and as a rule it worked. Father was reckoning he could ignore the Second World War and make it disappear.

  People had gathered in the square, even those from the office. They stood talking, and Director Damgård told them that troops had come ashore. The word was that they were on their way from Gedser at that very moment. They had taken the ferry from Warnemünde that night.

  ‘I hope they bought a bloody ticket an’ all!’ said Ib, laughing.

  Father was beside himself that his brother should be shooting his mouth off and tried to get him to shut up, but Ib didn’t give a damn. He said that the ferry should have been scuppered long since, and that the Germans wouldn’t have had much bloody trouble navigating into the harbour when they had the lighthouse to guide them, and why hadn’t anyone thought of turning it off?

  ‘Ib!’ shouted Father and was on the point of apologizing to Damgård and the others, but none of them said anything. There was nothing to be said. Ib was right, and they knew it.

  Repairs on the road running north-south on Falster had been due for years. No one had done anything about it and the council’s coffers were bare. But four days earlier the potholes had been filled in and the road was rolled and ready for use. The only bombardment that hit the invasion forces as they moved up through Gedesby, Bruserup and Marrebæk came from the signs saying ‘Zimmer Frei’ and ‘Potatoes for sale’. The stallholders on the Market Square discussed whether they should draw down their shutters or display their goods with prices marked in Reichsmark. It was getting on for nine o’clock and it wouldn’t be long before they reached Nykøbing. A German had been seen in Væggerløse and several more in Hasselø and Lindeskoven. They were on their way up Østergade and Nygade and Jernbanegade – and at that point reality overtook rumour. Soldiers arrived walking in columns, hugging the housefronts and covering both sides of the street with rifles at the ready. There was utter silence. Not a sound. And Father and Ib and the rest of them stood watching with gaping mouths, unable to believe their eyes, holding their breath, waiting for the influx that was approaching like rolling thunder, louder and louder, until it was just round the corner – and here was the German Army!

  They marched right through the middle of the town – infantrymen with knapsacks and helmets and rifles – tramping past, an endless sea of uniforms staring straight ahead. At the rear came the horse-drawn wagons carrying bread, but that was it – no tanks, no jeeps, not a single motorised vehicle. The blacksmith from the sugar factory could not resist and, as the last wagon clattered past, he tipped his cap and asked if the bread was for the horses. The soldier shook his head and said, ‘Nein, für uns,’ and continued down Langgade and turned right into Rosenvænget. After twenty minutes the troops were back, their feet beating the same tempo as they marched up Kongensgade – and so they went round in circles.

  Nykøbing was a tourist trap. The roads were one-way and each was a cul-de-sac. Once in, it was impossible to get out. The Germans had lost their way. With a bellow of ‘Himmikruzifixherrgottsakrament!’, the commanding officer snatched the map from the hands of a despairing adjutant, but it was no good. The invasion would have ended before it began, if it hadn’t been for Father, who raised his hand.

  ‘Entschuldigen Sie bitte,’ he said, finding a use for his German at last. ‘Kann ich Ihnen behilflich sein?’

  People stared at him as though he had gone crazy and would be shot on the spot. But Father went carefully across to the officers, greeting them politely and pointing at the map. They were to turn
right at the Bjørnebrønd and Zaren’s house and go past Holland’s farm and down Slotsgade to Gåbensevej. They should not take the turning to Kraghave but continue down the road to Systofte and Tingsted and then continue along the A2 through Eskilstrup, Nørre Alslev and Gåbense to the Storstrøm Bridge. From there the road went straight to Copenhagen, and Father wished them ‘Gute Reise’. They all waved from the Market Square and, when the last German soldier disappeared over the horizon, they could hear from the song of the blackbird how quiet things had become, how everything breathed out peace.

  The Germans covered the 40 kilometres from Gedser to Masnedsund without a hitch and without the garrisons in Vordingborg and Næstved being alerted. Anyone would think that the Storstrøm Bridge had been built for them three years earlier. No one would have dreamt of blowing it up. There were two marines, both on national service, at the fort in Masnedø. They knew nothing about its artillery, so the German parachute troops had taken the bridge without a fight. Telegraph operators at railway stations in Nykøbing and later in Vordingborg, aware of the German advance, rang head office in Copenhagen to ask if they ought to report it to the military authorities. They were told to mind their own business and that’s what they did – and that was also what my father planned to do, and the rest of Nykøbing with him.

  The Second World War passed straight through the town and out the other side like a bullet that hit nothing and did no damage because it met with no resistance – and it was left to others to show the courage and the strength required to stand in the way. This was right up my father’s street, and he was able to resume his daily duties at the office, to go on his excursions with the choir and to attend lodge meetings on Wednesdays as if nothing had happened. He breathed a sigh of relief and turned to Ib.

  ‘Well, how about getting to work?’ he said.

  But Ib was gone.

  It was summer and the hedges were chirping, blue tits leapfrogged in the air, and Mother and Father and I sat eating lunch on the terrace. A lawnmower droned in the distance, and out on the road the girls jumped in hula hoops and skipped and peed their pants. Susanne had forget-menot eyes and fair hair and freckles and all the children in kindergarten sang Under the arches and knew I was in love.

  When I started at school, I would sit and write letters to her – will you? won’t you? do you? don’t you? – and fold the paper into envelopes that I never gave her. I hoped that she would say yes anyway, and at the party at the end of the first year we held hands and walked round and round the kiss that was waiting for me like a bee in a blackberry bush.

  I cycled out to the beach, taking the main road that went up hill and down dale, heading straight out to where the larks would be singing above the sea-wall. There was the scent of pine and heather and salt water, and I lay there all day long thinking of Susanne and listening to the grasshoppers quivering and jigsawing their way through the stillness until Marielyst erupted in my ears and made my spine shiver with sheer delight.

  Sex was the mysterious X and had no place in our family. I never saw my parents undressed – not once – and if it was ever mentioned on the radio when we were driving, they would immediately switch to another programme and pretend it hadn’t happened. It was a no-go zone riddled with guilt and shame; just to mention it would be enough to get your hands chopped off at the table, and I’d be keeping well clear.

  It was not just that it was unmentionable. It was also unthinkable, and I could not really form an idea of what it was. It was just round the corner, hiding under the bed and out in the dark, waiting for me, crouching, ready to attack me at any moment. I couldn’t get it out of my head. Something was missing. There was an enigma, dangerous and forbidden, and when I was alone at home I went exploring without ever knowing what I was looking for.

  We were visiting Grandmother in Frankfurt, and I took the chance to creep across to the bookshelves in the living room. They were massive and made of dark mahogany with cut glass in the doors, and they were full of books – Papa Schneider collected them. I started with the largest volume I could find that had pictures, leafing through Greek temples and Roman ruins and a world of flora and fauna – the flowers all coloured by hand – and then I started out on the encyclopaedia, Der Groβe Brockhaus. These were heavy books bound in black, dark-blue and gold, and they contained everything. ‘Jeden Tag ich Brockhaus preiss, denn er weiss, was ich nicht weiss,’ Mother said – and I was sure this was it when I came to the letter ‘M’ for ‘man’ and looked up ‘Der Mensch’.

  There was an illustration of a naked woman. She was pink and there was not a hair on her body, not even on her head – she was bald – and you could unfold her to full length to include her legs and feet. She had breasts that you could open like doors in an advent calendar and showed what was concealed under the skin, her guts and her veins. Her flesh was as red as raw steak. I unfolded her stomach – it was just like opening the 24th December – and opened her up layer by layer and gazed at liver, intestines, heart. It was scary, and I quickly put the book back on the shelf – my conscience black as pitch – and could hardly wait until next time.

  This gave me a taste for reading and I started going to the library in Nykøbing – a chalk-white building with a wide stairway. It was the most peaceful place on earth, it was on Rosenvænget and I left the town, the other children, everything behind me when I stepped in through the door. I ploughed my way through the rows of books in the children’s section and, when I had emerged at the other end and shut the last book, I was old enough to set about the real task towering above me in the lofty room – the adult library.

  The shelves went on forever, and for the first couple of years I could only reach the topmost ones with the aid of a stool. I followed my inclination, consulting the card index, looking for interesting titles, hunting among the bookshelves – and, even though I fought the temptation, slowly and surely I read my way in to the dangerous books, knowing full well where to find them: the Sengeheste series, Soya’s novels, Lady Chatterley. I did not dare take them down. Simply skimming a passage or two demanded a steady nerve, a firm grip on my hammering heart. I was terrified of being caught. At long last I gave in, hid Hvordan, mor? under my sweater and read its revelations on the toilet. So there I sat cultivating the forbidden knowledge whenever I could – and felt so much at home out there that I stayed for hours and fell asleep.

  It was inevitable. One day I overslept and, when I emerged from the toilet, it was long past closing time. The library was empty and dark as the grave. It was locked. I couldn’t get out and was grabbed by panic, my pulse hammering in my throat. I was alone, a prisoner of the dark, and whatever would Mother and Father be thinking? They would be at their wits’ end wondering where I had got to! I fumbled my way round the library as I remembered it – rows A, B, C – and my memory kept playing tricks on me, and I got more and more lost in the labyrinth of my own thoughts until I no longer knew where I was. I had walked into the trap – there was no way out, for the books went on forever – so I sat down and prayed that someone would find me before it was too late. The fluorescent lights flickered and caught. And there were Mother and Father walking in with the librarian. I leapt up and rushed to them, and it was a long while before I went out to the toilet again.

  Autumn had arrived. I was on my way home from school, walking under the bridge by the station and looking forward to the holidays. Torn pieces of paper were strewn like confetti across the pavement, shining in thousands of colours like leaves from the Garden of Eden, and I couldn’t resist taking a look and peeling them off the slabs. They were easy to find because they glittered – more lay under the bushes and in the gutter – and I put them all in my school bag. When I arrived home, something stopped me in my tracks, and instead I turned my bike and rode out to Vesterskoven where, with the rooks screaming from the treetops, I dug a hole and buried the fragments of paper to save them for later.

  It was an age before I could get down from the table and say ‘thank you for the food’ an
d ride back to the wood. I dug up the pieces of paper and then I put two and two together in pairs and started to assemble the jigsaw puzzle with a small roll of Sellotape. As it grew, so did my arousal, and slowly a picture took shape of what I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams. And I hadn’t a clue where I was supposed to put it or what I was supposed to do with my secret once the last piece was taped into place and I found myself holding a dirty magazine in my hands: Colour Climax, 1973.

  Mother was not to go and live with them in Kleinwanzleben until after the marriage had been consummated – as it was put – and Grandmother had given birth to a daughter with Papa Schneider. They hugged each other now and Grandmother wept, but they were miles apart, and from now on she would be the daughter of a previous marriage and come in second place after her stepsister, Eva. There was nothing to be done about it, so Mother patted the dog that was leaping about her – it was called Bello – and took her place in the Prussian upper-class like a guest moving into the others’ lives.

  Papa Schneider owned most of the district – the land, the people, the villages – and he walked around in riding boots and had the most magnificent motorcar, a Daimler-Benz. There were horses in the stables and servants. Mother was given her own room with a dressing-mirror and a wardrobe and a wide soft bed all to herself. She would never forget that first Christmas. There was the dinner, a tree full of candles, and she had been given everything – sledge, skis, dresses and picture-books. It was as if she had gone to heaven, Mother said, and she planned to keep her place there no matter what.

  There was a daily drill, and times were as precise as the crack of a whip. At six o’clock in the morning: riding lessons. She was given the most skittish horse and rode around with a stick up her back and a book on her head, and God help you if it fell off. Then came French and English and piano until one o’clock, when Papa Schneider sat down at table. It would have been unthinkable to arrive late or for lunch not to be ready – it was sent up in the dumb waiter – ding! – and served as the hour struck. Nothing was said during the meal – or about the meal. You ate to live and did not live to eat! Afterwards Papa Schneider listened to the stock market report on the radio. The entire house held its breath and heaved a sigh of relief when it was over and he put on his coat and left, and Mother struggled through the remainder of the day, fighting to retain her place.