Lime's Photograph (33 page)

“I was, at least.”

“I forget about your loss sometimes. Please, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. I have to move on,” I said.

“That’s probably easier said than done,” she said, and of course she was right.

The waiter brought our coffee. It was in one of those peculiar jugs where you have to press the plunger down and suddenly I missed Madrid and a
café solo
, but Clara seemed to like the rather bland-tasting coffee.

“So what happened?” I said.

“It’s not very interesting,” said Clara. “He came home one day, terribly nervous and defensive, and said that he would like a divorce. Those were exactly the words he used. ‘I’d like a divorce,’ he said. As if he was asking me a favour. He’d found what men call a younger version. It’s so damned trite. As if he was just changing the old car for a new one. She was a consultant in Brussels. They’d been having an affair for more than a year. Mostly in Brussels.”

“At least it wasn’t his secretary,” I said.

“That’s a pretty stupid thing to say. What difference would that have made?” she said angrily.

“You said consultant. So she’s a lawyer or some kind of economist or something like that …”

“Lawyer, French, 32 years old, beautiful, charming – very feminine,” said Clara.

“Well, there you go. It took a lot to win him over. Wouldn’t you have felt worse if she’d been 25 and your husband’s secretary?”

She looked at me.

“Peter. Sometimes you surprise me, after all. Yes, I suppose it would have made a difference, but I hadn’t thought about it like that. I didn’t think Niels could be quite so idiotic. Even though some men, when they reach a certain age, seem to cease to be accountable for their actions.”

“So you took a lover, I suppose?” I asked.

She looked at me with an expression that said she had been expecting that question, but not quite so soon.

“I haven’t got a boyfriend, Peter, if that’s what you’re really asking. I’ve had ‘boyfriends’ – as we say in Denmark like we’re teenagers – since Niels, but not a regular boyfriend, which is how even women of my age refer to their partners when announcing that they’ve fallen in love.”

“Then what?” I said.

“I threw him out, took him to the cleaners in the divorce settlement and was cool as a cucumber when a year later he said the whole thing had been a mistake. He’d got married by then. He was in a hurry to get married, and he was in just as much of a hurry to get divorced again and come back to me. If I hadn’t thought he was such a stupid shit, I would almost have felt sorry for him. He’d been so in love, he said. She made him feel vigorous and virile again, and so on. But it didn’t work out as he had expected, after the first passion had died.”

“So he got divorced again?”

“No, no,” she said with an almost gleeful laugh. “He’s still married to the French woman and she’s still unfaithful to him. As far as I hear. He’s having a dose of his own medicine.”

“And that makes you happy.”

“Maybe not exactly happy, but satisfied. I know it’s wrong of me, but it’s what I feel.”

“Why wrong? I don’t blame you. Having a thirst for revenge and getting it satisfied probably saves a lot of pills or a lot of bottles,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said with a triumphant smile, but I could still see her pain. I don’t know if it was pain from failure and loss and dashed hopes or the pain of rejection, but she hadn’t got over it with quite the coolness that her account suggested.

I settled the bill and a taxi took us to her flat. I paid the driver and followed her to the door. Clara seemed momentarily to consider
asking me in, but perhaps she thought that I wouldn’t really want to – or maybe wouldn’t dare.

Instead, she said in a very businesslike voice, “Will you come and sign tomorrow, and get your photographs back?”

“If you’ll have lunch with me.”

“I’m a working woman.”

“Call it a meeting with an agent?”

“That’s a deal, Peter Lime. But I’m paying,” she said and kissed me on the mouth, light and fleeting, but erotic anyway, with a brush of her tongue, and I went back to my hotel feeling more buoyant than I had for ages.

My good mood held for the next few days. Signing the report was postponed, and when I rang we talked comfortably, but she was too busy to meet up with me. She said it in such a way that I believed her and it didn’t spoil my mood.

I played tourist, going on a guided canal boat tour and lunching in a restaurant in Tivoli where press people used to hang out. I bumped into an old colleague there and we chatted just as though it was the old days. I wouldn’t describe my state of mind as happy, but on hold. I didn’t know what I wanted from Clara, and I didn’t know what she wanted from me. I kept far enough away from the booze to be able to remember my dreams and they began getting erotic. But they were exciting in an uneasy way. I was in bed with lots of different women, but they never had faces, and now and then I would dream that Amelia was watching as I lay with a naked woman in a sterile room like a hospital ward. Then I would wake up feeling clammy, with a huge erection.

A few days later I signed my statement at the Security Service headquarters on Borups Allé and got my photographs back. Clara was there with two colleagues, both men. They were polite and pleasant, thanked me for my kind assistance and left quickly once I had signed.
My statement corresponded with what I had said, so I had no qualms in signing it. Clara stayed behind and gave me a letter addressed to the Gauck Authority in Berlin. That whole issue suddenly seemed rather remote. A few days in summery Denmark had turned out to be like a holiday. She had drawn up the letter, but without my address in Madrid. I wrote down the office address and she took the paper away and then came back with the address printed on it. All I had to do was sign. The letter requested access to documents on the basis of my assumption that, due to my work as a photographer and journalist, I had a file in the Stasi archives. Clara would enclose a recommendation from the NSS for speedy processing and send it, as she said, via the usual channels. We parted with a handshake.

Clara invited me to lunch three days later, at a restaurant called KGB, on the same street where the Danish Communist Party’s headquarters had been in the days before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Back when the party could afford to pay the rent. The restaurant had a cool feel, the only decoration on the white walls was a square-faced clock. It matched the fresh, pleasant Danish summer weather which was very agreeable if you still felt the heat of Madrid in your body. Or knew that the unfortunates left behind in the Spanish capital were groaning under a humid heat.

The restaurant looked as though it had just been given a quick once-over with a spot of paint, and then a handful of tables had been scattered around casually. Some wiring had been left uncovered in the corners, a reminder of socialism’s hopeless workmanship. In the toilets a looped tape played Russian language lessons. So while you were having a pee, you could entertain yourself with questions like – “Where can I buy a stamp? How much will it cost to send this letter to Denmark?” – first in Danish and then in Russian. The menu included borshch, various kinds of vodka, blinis and caviar costing several hundred kroner. The young waitress was wearing army trousers and
an old Eastern bloc cap with a KGB badge on it. The borshch and the steak were first-rate. Clara drank a beer. I drank a beer and a vodka. We had espresso afterwards.

“An unusual place you’ve brought me to,” I said, taking in the room and the waitress’s outfit. “So this is how one of the most brutal and lethal organisations ended up – as kitsch.”

“I still think it’s strange,” said Clara.

“The Berlin Wall?”

“That you have to search for the Wall in Berlin. That it’s vanished. That it’s as if it was never there, never cost lives, never sealed people in. That the Soviet Union doesn’t exist. That the world has changed completely and it’s as if no one realises it.”

“Many dreams hit the rocks, maybe it ended up as nightmare, but I think originally those dreams were beautiful,” I said.

“It was an evil system. I don’t think that should be forgotten or turned into kitsch. Would you open a restaurant called SS or Gestapo?”

“That would be in bad taste, but you chose this place,” I said.

“I thought you should see it.”

“And, yes, it’s amusing that even the KGB can end up as a joke.”

Her voice took on a serious tone.

“But that’s just it, Peter. The KGB’s OK. It’s not considered bad taste. The whole of the old communist system is a joke today, even though it has got millions of lost lives on its conscience. I think that’s really peculiar. It’s as if the Gulags never existed and there weren’t any Danes who supported the system. It’s as if that world just didn’t happen, and yet it was an inescapable part of our world too for almost half a century. Isn’t that strange?” said Clara.

“Maybe it isn’t so ludicrous that there are young people today who think that GDR is a deodorant. Maybe it’s a good thing that an evil regime didn’t fall in blood, but with a little whimper, while
the whole world watched with a broad, amazed grin.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I just don’t think the past disappears so easily.”

I took her hand.

“Can’t you take the afternoon off? We could play tourists. I’d love to take you to Tivoli. Or the Deer Park or a walk through the city. Or to Paris. Or to Malmö. Or whatever tourists do in Copenhagen.”

She put her hand on top of mine.

“I have taken the afternoon off, Peter. I’ve done more than my fair share of overtime recently and we submitted our report yesterday. I’m finished with it, thanks to you. So, yes, thank you. I’d love to.”

“What shall we do then?” I asked.

“I’d like a trip to the beach. I think it’s the last day of summer,” she said.

I laughed.

“Good idea. But how do we get up north?”

“I’ve got a car. We’ll drive.”

“I haven’t got any swimming trunks.”

She looked at me.

“There’s not a soul where we’re going, not at this time of year, on a weekday. So I don’t think you need worry too much about that.”

She drove her blue Ford Escort fast and confidently. To my surprise we headed not north as I had expected, but west along the motorway in the direction of Holbæk, turning off towards Odsherred and Sjællands Odde. She had spent holidays there as a child and had more of an affinity with that part of the coastline than with the more fashionable areas of northern Sjælland. She had inherited a little holiday cottage on Sjælands Odde, but Niels had persuaded her that they should sell it. She didn’t say so, but I guessed that he hadn’t considered the location fashionable enough. It was a funny place, my old country. The casual spectator could be fooled by the seemingly perfect idyll of a nation united – the Danish people’s cult of flag, royal family and national football team. But underneath it all, the Danes were a divided tribe who rarely spoke or mixed socially with anyone other than those who held the same beliefs, or those who lived in the same way as their particular group.

I explained these thoughts to Clara as we drove along narrow roads in the wonderful, mellow early afternoon light, the traffic on its way to and from the ferry streaming past, and the reaped fields looking like a golden carpet between the well-kept farms. The sun shone from a cloudless sky and the breeze from the half-open window snatched at Clara’s hair, and the smell of straw and corn wafted into the car.

“I work for the police. You don’t have to tell me about the contradictions of our society. I see the ‘two-thirds’ society every day. We’ve thrown a third away, but we’re clever. We pay for our social tranquillity. We pacify them with welfare hand-outs. That’s why the middle classes – people like me – put up with high taxes. So we can live our lives in peace, so there’s enough money to keep the outcasts subdued.”

“That’s not actually what I meant,” I answered. “You’re making the forces of law and order sound quite revolutionary.”

“No, exactly the opposite. The system’s good for people like me. As Niels always said: deep down, every middle-class Dane is a social democrat, so you might just as well take that extra step and become a member of the party, thereby gaining some proper influence.”

“Flats and the rest of it?”

“That’s part of the package.”

“So that’s what you did?” I asked.

“No. I didn’t. I’m not a member of anything.”

She overtook a slow-moving car, swiftly but without much room, and gave an ironic wave of her hand at the oncoming car that flashed its lights angrily as she swung the Escort back to our side of the road again.

“On the roads, however, the Danes are real freethinkers,” she said. “This is where we become bold Vikings again.”

I laughed with her on that lovely day. We reached the top of a gently domed hill and suddenly, as if by magic, the sparkling blue Sejerø Bay appeared and soon we were driving with the Kattegat on our right and holiday cottages on our left. She drove past a general store and turned, first along an asphalt road and then an unsurfaced track, down to an area covered with heather where she parked. I could glimpse the sea between the trees.

“My parents’ holiday cottage wasn’t very far from here. One of the many things that I regret about my time with Niels is that he got me
to sell it,” she said, and took a straw basket out of the boot. I could see two towels, a blanket, thermos and a couple of plastic cups.

“And there’s a pair of trunks for you.”

“You had this all planned,” I said.

“Not a plan. But a hope,” she said. “I’d have driven up here by myself anyway, even if you hadn’t come with me. I did tell you it’s the last day of summer. It has to be enjoyed. It’s a gift in a country with a climate like ours. Come on!”

I followed her obediently through the heather. She strode out briskly in her jeans and shirt, her bare feet in lightweight slip-ons, almost like ballet shoes. Secluded white holiday homes stood among the pine trees, but there wasn’t a soul on the beach. The water in the bay was calm and blue and she spread out the blanket in a sandy hollow in the grass behind a large rose bush. The day had started out a little chilly, but it had warmed up again. It was an unpredictable climate. She turned her back to me, stripped off her shirt and undid her bra and put on a bikini top, then pulled off her jeans and briefs and put on her bikini bottom. I couldn’t help but notice that she was tanned all over and had a trim body with the soft, gentle curves of a mature woman. We were adults, from a generation that considered nakedness quite natural, but I still looked away and she turned round and smiled ironically at me, pointing at the pair of blue swimming trunks.