Nothing But Fear

by Knud Romer

  I went round as soon as I could and asked to see Dolores. We took jay rides on the tram into the centre and strolled up and down the pedestrian precinct and in the Kaufhof. Once in a while we went to Palmengarten and rowed on the lake, and I fished coins up for her from the wishing well in the garden – 1, 2, 5, 10 and 20 Pfennigs in copper, 50 Pfennigs and 1 and 2 Deutschmarks in silver, and she showed me how to stick my hand up the vending machine and get a Coca-Cola out. So when I was told that we were going home to Nykøbing, both my flames were put out, Dolores and Emma Peel, and I sat in the yard stripping the green off chestnut leaves and waiting for Dolores to ask her if she would come and visit us in Denmark, and she said she would.

  Mother took me with her to Café Krantzler on the Hauptwache, and we ate cakes, and she said that we were to go to the opera that evening, and that was to be our farewell to Frankfurt. It lay in ruins on the Opernplatz – huge and hollow and burnt out – and I had to wear a suit and have my hair brushed for an hour, and Grandmother washed my face with her spit and a handkerchief. Mother smelled of perfume and was dazzling in her jewels and furs, and this was how we accompanied each other to the opera to hear Die Meistersänger. It was Wagner, she said, as we settled into our seats in the auditorium. The chandeliers glittered and there was a buzz of people. We were in the new theatre on Theaterplatz, and it was nothing like I had imagined, until the music began and the curtain rose – there were broken columns and smoke and rubble on the stage. Mother explained the plot, told me what was happening, whispering and chattering and telling me about the time she had heard Richard Strauss in Berlin in 1940, when Hitler came into the concert hall with Strauss’s widow, Pauline, at his side. Everyone had risen to their feet, and even though she had been frightened, Mother had remained seated with Horst and Harro and Libertas. I’d never have got up either, I said, nodding and sinking deeper and deeper into my seat until I fell asleep to music that went on forever. The shadows flickered, the sirens howled, and all around us flames engulfed the opera and razed it to the ground.

  My first day at school was just like Christmas and New Year and all my birthdays rolled into one. Grandmother had come up to Nykøbing to celebrate it. She had brought with her a ‘Wundertüte’, a colourful paper cone full of goodies that children were given in Germany to mark the day. I had never in my life seen so many sweets – it was almost too heavy to carry. And now we were ready, and Father took a photograph of me in the front door, Mother went with me to school, dropped me off at the entrance, said goodbye and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I was looking forward to it and ran into the playground, where children and teachers were chatting and laughing, paying no attention to me, and I felt rather lost until first one and then another caught sight of me and before I knew it I was standing at the centre of the whole crowd clutching my cone of sweeties – and dressed in short Lederhosen and green knee-length stockings – and then they started up, slowly and rhythmically the whole school struck up in unison the chorus I was to hear for the rest of the day, for years to come, for the rest of my life: ‘Ger-man pig! Ger-man pig! Ger-man pig!’

  Nykøbing Falster is a town that is so small that its beginning is its end. If you are in it, you cannot get out – and if you are outside, you cannot get in. You pass right through it, and the only trace the town leaves is on your clothes – the smell of manure in summer and sugar beet in winter. This is where I was born in 1960, and it was the nearest I could come to not being at all.

  Our house was on Hans Ditlevsensgade 14, in the last terrace before the fields of beet and Vesterskoven woods. It was the image of a red-brick house with a hedge and a garage and a garden gate, but it wasn’t that. It was a nightmare from which there was no escape. The front door was always locked, and so was the door to the cellar, and Father had the keys in his pocket. The curtains were drawn, and the windows looked inwards, closing around each other and our family, which consisted of Mother and Father and me – and no one else but us.

  It was the three of us around the dining table at breakfast, lunch and dinner year in, year out. When Christmas came we stretched out our arms but couldn’t make a ring around the tree, and at New Year we sat, the three of us, and drank champagne, blew paper streamers and drank each other’s health when the clock struck twelve. We celebrated by ourselves, our birthdays, Easter, Whitsun, and at mid-summer we watched the bonfires from a distance, listening to them all singing ‘Our homeland we love… ’ And every single summer holiday it was the three of us, Mother and Father and me, for always.

  We went touring by car to Bøtø and Corselitz and drove up to Pomlenakke and walked among the beeches on the ridge, and Mother and I looked for flat stones along the sea shore and played ducks and drakes. Father raked through the beach with his walking stick and fell into a daydream counting the grains of sand. In the autumn we hunted for mushrooms in the woods, and Father beat on the woodpiles with his stick. Some of them gave out notes and you could play a tune on them. In the spring we would pick anemones and lilies-of-the-valley. Mother put them on the table in little figureens of Royal Danish porcelain – a girl with a basket and a fisherman – and we ate our dinner and time went round in circles of sameness.

  The dining room was filled with Papa Schneider’s furniture, shiny, dark, mahogany – the chairs we sat on, the table, the sideboard. It was his cutlery we ate with, his monogram engraved in the silver, and when knife and fork lay at each side of your plate they spelt out SS. It was his tableware – Villeroy & Boch for everyday and for special occasions his Meissner porcelain. It had flower patterns in clear colours, and when Mother said ‘das Meissner’ and brought it out, the words chimed like Christmas and New Year. It was stacked away with pink tissue paper between each plate – enough for five courses for twelve people and bowls and tureens – and to use it was a sacred act. An embroidered white tablecloth was spread on the table. There was cut glass, and beside our places lay napkin rings like handcuffs made of silver. We sat down and followed the ritual, saying the same things, doing the same things, and the cutlery would clink and play glockenspiel tunes on the porcelain about the fear of falling to pieces.

  We lived alone, and there was no place for the world around us. Mother and Father had no friends or acquaintances and no social life. Where my grandparents should have been there was no one – and that went for my Danish cousins and uncles and aunts, too. It was strange not being related to anyone. Father never spoke about it, and if I asked about them I was told that all that was a closed chapter, as though that explained everything. Mother could go so far as to say that Grandfather had been a dreamer and had squandered everything, to which Father replied that it had been tough. They never went into more detail, but I kept on at them, until one evening Father stopped beating round the bush and told it to me straight. They had cut us off, washed their hands of us – and in my mind’s eye I could see the blood and our severed limbs strewn around the living room and could not understand how they could be so heartless.

  Ib had disappeared immediately after the occupation, and Father did not hear from his younger brother again until 1944, when the telephone rang. He had joined the resistance movement, and Father knew that it was him when riots broke out in Odense and sabotage spread. You could chart his movements across the country from one place to another each time something was blown up – a railway or the factory owned by a collaborator. Ib had always made trouble and now he could do what he wanted – until at last he had to go underground. He had to go to Sweden, but couldn’t take his girlfriend, Jeanne, with him unless he married her – and he wanted to borrow Father’s dark suit for the wedding – if that was ok?

  It was not up Father’s street at all – and Ib may have been wanting to tease him – but he went to Copenhagen anyway, because he was to be best man. Holding the suit up in front of him on a coat-hanger, he walked out to Frederiksberg, where Ib lived, but there was no one home. He had taken an address under a fake name somewhere else. Father continued from one flat to the next – Vesterbro, Østerbro,
Christianshavn – asking for Andersen or Nielsen or whatever other name Ib went by – and he unravelled the clues until he rang the bell on the right door and was hauled inside.

  Ib’s eyes were swollen and clotted with blood and he had been badly beaten up. He sat down in front of Father in the kitchen, lit a cigarette and gave him a lop-sided smile.

  ‘Thanks a lot!’ he said. ‘You’ve been a great help. You’ve just shown the Germans the way to this safe house and put an end to one of our cells. What the hell do you think you’re doing?!’

  Then he got to his feet saying that there was no time to lose, and Father went with him to the house of one of the men who was to ferry Ib and Jeanne to Sweden. She was waiting there with the priest, and in no time they were married and jumped into the back of a van, Ib shouting that he’d make sure Father got it back – the suit – and then they drove off safely.

  Things were getting too hot for Ib. He had been picked up a few weeks earlier and the Gestapo had interrogated him. He had cigarette burns up his arms, but he had said nothing and played the innocent. He had been transferred to an ordinary prison, where he had been sprung by resistance people – not so much to save his life as to stop him talking, for he knew too much. Ib returned in 1945 with the Danish Brigade, cursing the Swedes, who were traitors and had cooperated with the occupying forces. But most of all he nurtured a vicious and savage hatred for Germans that simmered beneath the surface ready to erupt – and next time it was Father’s turn to be married, and his bride was that beautiful girl from Germany.

  They made their excuses. They couldn’t come, Ib and Leif and Annelise – not even Auntie Petra. None of them wanted to come to the wedding. Mother said that they could manage without them, and Father bought a new suit. Then they travelled down to Kelkheim in the Taunus mountains, where Auntie Eva lived with Helmut, her husband. For she had found one at last. He was small and round and of good stock, and they were the only people present at the town hall aside from Grandmother. After coffee and cakes they were married in an empty church – a quick kiss with pursed lips – and Helmut drove them to Königstein, where they were to spend the night at a smart hotel set in the middle of a park called Sonnenhof. In the evening they all went to the restaurant – Haus der Länder – and Father kept the bill as a memento of the day. They had paté de foie and toast mit Butter (4 Deutschmarks), turtle soup (7 Deutschmarks), Chateaubriand steak with pommes frites and sauce béarnaise and salad (12 Deutschmarks), and for dessert there was sorbet. At half-past eleven the wedding was over, and it had come to 135 Deutschmarks in all, including beverages.

  Now Mother’s name was Romer Jørgensen – Hildegard Lydia Voll Romer Jørgensen, and that was the first thing they took away from her. She was not allowed to be called Romer, and Father could do nothing about it. A veto had been granted on the use of the name. She hung her bridal bouquet to dry and put it away for safe keeping. And she used the name anyway, even though it was not in her passport. It was German, and so was she – and she would not be allowed to forget it. The Second World War had never ended as far as Mother and Father and our family went. Nykøbing was still in the grip of the enemy.

  She returned to the Sugar Factory for the following season and continued in the laboratory, handing her wages over to Father as people did in those days. He gave her housekeeping money, 25 crowns a week. It didn’t go very far, and everything cost over the odds for Mother, saddled with war guilt and paying the price over and over again as she laid the table on the balcony on Nybrogade. She served up lobster bisque and steak and Riesling and melon and cream cakes for Father – he was thin as a rake, she said, and kissed him on the cheek – and for his birthday she gave him a scarf, genuine cashmere. Father had hit lucky, and when he told them about it at choir practice, they couldn’t believe their ears and complained to their wives. Why couldn’t they make their money go as far as she could and dish up something other than stewed cabbage?

  Mother had sold one of the paintings from Kleinwanzleben without telling anyone and had opened a secret account in Germany with her share – Eva and Grandmother got theirs – and she used it to make their lives a little sweeter and to help fight her corner. For she did hit back and was subjected to a campaign of spite, as gossip went the rounds – and things were not made easier by the fact that she was responsible for analysing the sugar percentages in the laboratory. This was what determined what the farmers got for their beet, and they complained, saying the figures were too low, but she refused to alter them by a fraction. Even the management was out to get her, since she had been employed over their heads by the company director, Arnth-Jensen.

  It was difficult to say who hated her most, and she made it all that much worse by being lah-di-dah, as they put it. When the time came for the big summer outing with the Brage choir, where they all took their families and had lunch in the village of Virket, Mother was not invited and Father resigned. He made a good second tenor and could play the trombone – he had been in the Boy Scouts brass band – but the only thing I ever heard him play was a record, a lacquer master, with the Brage male voice choir singing ‘How fresh and green the woodland glades’. He always put it on at New Year – we would sit in the sitting room and light the Christmas tree for the last time – and when it was over and you asked him what he wanted to listen to now, Father would reply that he did not care for music.

  She was the perfect wife, he said at the lodge meetings when they broached the subject – the German problem – and he shuffled back home in his evening clothes as though he was returning from a funeral. Mother questioned him about what went on at the freemasons, and he was ashamed and wouldn’t reply, changing instead into other clothes and hitting his top-hat to make it collapse and go flat. He told her later in the evening – of course – and tried to explain, turning their words this way and that, but it only got worse and worse. It was the freemasons or Mother – and Father never wore the hat again.

  From then on one thing led to another. He packed his things and chucked in the home guard and he stopped going to the photographic society. This had been his great passion, and the desk was full of hundreds of photographs, where a country road rounded a bend, the oat fields were yellow, the farmsteads idyllic, the views glorious, the cliffs at Møn and Ålholm Castle. They looked like postcards, and there were no people in them – and as time went on people slid out of the picture in reality, too. Father invited guests to dinner, and Mother served up ‘Sülzkoteletten’ – complete with the intricate decorations that she cut out in pickled cucumbers and carrots – and people piled their plates high and drank and sang along when she sat at the grand piano and played – but no one invited them back. Their circle narrowed – even childhood friends fell away, until there was no one who wanted to see them – and Mother shrugged her shoulders and despised them and called them proletarians.

  It came as a shock to him when Mother told him that he should resign from Danish Building Assurance – it was the last thing Father had to cling on to – and he broke down. He never wept on any other occasion, not once, and it sounded so strange, so distant and hollow. Mother comforted him and explained that he was the mainstay of the company, but still he was no more than… an assistant manager? Henry Mayland had married into his position and was useless. He sat and twiddled his thumbs in his big office because he was Damgård’s son-in-law, and he let Father run the business – and he was the one who ought to be the manager.

  Father resigned – he always did as she told him – and with some reluctance set off to Copenhagen, made contact with Ib and was employed in his company. He had an advertising agency and swindled, boasted and drank as much as he always had. They had just netted I G Farben, he said with a guffaw, and were bleeding the German swine – and it was all loudmouths and hot air! Mother said he should just put up with it and wait and see what happened. A month passed. Six months. And then the telephone rang at last. It was Victor Larsen, the solicitor. He was on the board of Danish Building Assurance. Damgård had died, and th
ey wanted to reinstate Father. He was prepared to say yes to anything, but Mother stood firm and forced him to demand what was his by right. There could be no question of him coming out of the meeting as anything other than manager. And Father could hardly believe it himself. He was walking on air as he came in through the front door. He had been made manager! Sub-manager!

  Father never managed to achieve proper recognition in the insurance company where he worked for forty-nine years and eight months. He had to learn to live with playing second fiddle to Henry Mayland, who never lifted a finger, and with kissing his wife’s hand – Mother couldn’t stand her. Father was granted a new title and a new office – a pokey room on the ground floor, from which a staircase led up to the spacious rooms where Mayland occupied a leather chair behind a vast writing desk. After his appointment and the board meeting there was a dinner. Mother had dressed for the occasion, had put up her hair and was as stunning as a film star. He got quite a shock – and she put Fru Mayland in the shade and showed the board of directors from Copenhagen who was the manager’s wife around here. Father straightened up, growing taller and taller – and touched seventh heaven when she told him they were to have a child.