The Spectator Bird (12 page)

Rain like sand pattered at the window. I heard the clogged downspout by the door overflowing a heavy stream onto the bricks. I would have to get the leaves out of that before the next rain. “You want your pound of flesh,” I said.

“Oh, Joe!”

“I told you, this isn't going to give either of us much pleasure.”

“I didn't think that was the purpose.”

“No?” I said. “What
was
the purpose?” But after a second or two in which we looked at each other with that baffled, stubborn expression that people who have been a long time married often wear when they are reading each other's minds, I started reading again. My problem was the opposite of what I said it was. In our relationship with Astrid Wredel-Krarup, and in the recollections that the diary brought back, I wasn't quite spectator enough.

 

She sat down but wouldn't take a drink. She was at once more statuesque and more nervous than usual. She couldn't keep her hands still. Finally, with a little laugh, she took one in the other and stopped its jittering, and holding them so, manacling herself, she lifted her shoulders and said, “You saw my husband.”

“I didn't know,” I said. “I thought he might be.”

“I have not seen him since many months. He has not lived here since the day the war ended. Now he asks to come back.”

After a cautious interval, Ruth said, “And what do you think?”

She provoked a surprisingly fierce response.
“Think?
In such matters I do not
think.
I do not live in my head. I live down here.” She slapped her hand melodramatically against her belt, or below it. “Ever, all my life. I feel better than most people think.”

I smiled, Ruth frowned, the countess had no idea what she had said.

“You don't
feel
you want him back,” Ruth said.

The countess bent her head, heavy with smooth hair, and pondered. Then she raised her face, made an apologetic smile, and said, “I am feeling many things at once. Excuse me, please. I know I should not bring this to you, it is nothing of yours. But I could not—sit in there any longer.”

Ruth's pleasant opaque look said to me that I'd better get out and let the women deal with this, but the countess read the look as clearly as I did. She reached a hand as if to hold me in my chair. “No, please.” We sat uncomfortably, liking her, sympathetic with her in her troubles, as humanly curious as the next couple, and not quite sure she could be trusted. Ruth was murmuring that of course she should come to us, what were friends for?

“You know about him, of course,” the countess said.

She drew a blank. “You mean that he's left you?” Ruth said.

“Oh, that was only the finish! Someone must have told you that he was a quisling.”

If anybody had told us that, it would have explained a great deal, but who would have? She was the only person in Copenhagen we knew.

“At the opera, you could not help seeing,” the countess said. “It was an embarrassing for you, I am sorry. I should not have tried. But I thought, maybe because I was with
you.
And I had not been out like that, to the theater, since before the war ended.”

I figured on my mental fingers. “Really? That's nine years.”

“Yes.” A shrug. “The cinema only, where it is dark and no one has a face.” Not quite intending to, I caught her eye. It was clear, steady, and serious. She had a look as patient as sculpture. Up till then I had never seen her unprotected by the smile and the excessive animation. But, my God, nine
years.

“I wish you to know,” she said, sitting straight in the gilded French chair. “During the Occupation, German officers came here—relatives, cousins of some degree. I suppose they thought, because of Erik? I don't know. Possibly they were bored and lonely in a country where they were hated and avoided. Perhaps their mothers had told them to call, or being gentlemen, they thought they understood what was correct. They understood nothing. I said to them, ‘I am a Dane, I love my country. Put on other clothes and I will receive you for your family's sake, but in that uniform I will not let you in.' ”

“But your husband did let them in.”

“Not here. I did never know what he did. They accused him of all things—collaborating, giving informations, spying. Once something made me think Goering had bought him.”

“Goering?” I said. “Why? How?”

“Because he tried to buy
me.
In Kassel, where we have relatives. We are all related, there is some Schimmelman and Knuth in all of us a generation or two back. I had to go to Germany for an operation on my knee. He came to my hospital room. I never asked him to sit down, he understood that much, he was standing the whole time. It was not spying he wanted, only to be accepted. That swine. If more of us would act like Erik, he said, and say in public that the Germans were behaving very well. It was the first time I was sure that Erik had been what at home they were saying he was. I was furious. I planned to get a gun and murder that fat Goering if he came to me again.”

She stopped, halted, I suppose, by the skepticism in my face. “Oh, I did,” she said. “I got the gun. I have it still. But he never came back. Only that once, to tell me how generous the Germans were prepared to be if we would accept them. They didn't want to have to be harsh. You have heard how on the first day of the invasion they ran down the flag before the royal palace, and the King with his own hands ran it up again. They left it there, it flew throughout the war. They wanted our good will. Erik's they had. He hated the socialist Danish government that squeezed the landed families, and he was educated in Germany. He was always bitter, and he caught the Nazi disease.”

With two fingers she touched her upper lip. “You saw that he ...”

“Yes.”

“When he was a little boy his mother would never kiss him. She would not let him walk beside her. He must come behind as if he did not belong to her. She hated it that he was marked.”

“Ugh,” Ruth said. “No wonder he was bitter.”

“But that wouldn't necessarily make him pro-German,” I said.

“Ah, if I understood why! Most of us hated the Germans, the longer the war went on the more we hated them. We were ashamed that the Danes didn't fight, as the Norwegians did. Later, when the underground was organized, there were explosions, and sabotage, and shootings, and we were glad. Many people tried to get away to Sweden in small boats, or across the ice one winter when the ∅resund froze. Some were caught and shot People like Erik were blamed. I have been spitted on, can you believe that? Twice the partisans tried to kill Erik. The second time, only a day or two before the war finally ended, they shot him down on the steps of the D'Angleterre. Only the police who were there saved his life. That was the last day I had a husband. First he went to the hospital and then he went to prison. Two years.”

She pronounced the terminal s the way my mother used to, as if its sound were really s, not z—a sharp, hissing, unpleasant sound. Two yearss. Trying to imagine what her life had been during that time, I was thinking that two years from the end of the war brought us only to 1947. What about the other seven years since the German army broke up along the Schleswig-Holstein border? But the countess was still pouring.

“They took Erik's estate on Falster and even my place at Hornbaek, that was not his but mine. They left me only this apartment and my little cottage at Ellebacken. I did not like it that my husband was a quisling, but he was my husband, what should I do? I sold my silver, my dishings, many pictures, furnitures, all things, to pay his fine. From prison he wrote me pitiful letters, Get me out, save me. I went over and over to government offices. Some people told me I should be in prison too. I went to relatives who might have influence, they didn't dare do anything. I went to the King, I said we would leave the country. But those in power did not want Erik out of the country. They wanted him where his punishment would be plain. When they had insisted on that long enough, they let him go.”

She seemed to have finished. “Then did he come back?” Ruth prompted.

Sidelong flash of eyes. “I thought he would not be able to find work. I said I would support us with my designs. While he was in prison I lived by making designs for prints and wallpaper for Illums Bolighus—I had a friend there who would not tell who made them. But, you know, they released Erik and he came here for his clothes and went straight away with that woman he met during the war.”

Ruth made a nasal sound of female indignation and solidarity. As for me, I was uncomfortable. It always embarrasses me to have people confess or pour out their troubles. I never know what to say. I always feel a little like the man who fixed cats for a living, and who was asked why he filled his shopwindow with clocks. What would you put in the window? I left it empty.

“So!” the countess said. “Now. Now he would come back. Something has happened with his woman, I don't know—she has gone to someone else, or he has tired of her. He says it is I who have been his wife all along. He was not pleased that I did not ask him to move straight in. How could I, even if I wanted to? You are here.”

“But my goodness!” Ruth said. “If you'd like us to make room, you only have to...”

“Oh no, no, no, no. I would not have him. He is such a child. He shouted, you must have heard. He says I am not loyal, I have no sympathy for his suffering.”

“We didn't hear anything,” Ruth said. “We were out for a walk.”

Just then I thought of something to put in the window. “Would you like that drink now?”

Brilliant suggestion. The countess turned on her smile and it stayed on. Her angry flush faded away. Her humiliating story told, she was back to her old gaiety and animation. She reminds me in some ways of Ginger Gilbert, a girl I used to know in the beginning of the twenties, a game one, sassy, the original peppy date. If I should say, “Handsprings, anyone?” I have the feeling she would cartwheel around the room. That aspect of her goes oddly with the statuesque bearing and the unmistakable stigmata of breeding.

“Yes!” she said. “Pleass! A strong one!”

When I brought the three glasses in from the kitchen, she and Ruth were just parting from a sisterly hug. I handed the countess her drink. “
Vaer saa god
.”

“Tak
!”

She took the glass with her left hand, and with an impulsive, whole-bodied gesture she leaned against me and squeezed her right arm around my waist She surprised me.

“You are both so good!” she cried. “Oh, I am so glad you came here! It is so lovely to have friends!”

To keep the tableau from getting too corny I assumed a most
rigtig
stance, with the glass at the third vest button, and
skaal'ed
her, gazing deep, deep into her peerless eyes.

I closed the notebook and laid it aside and went to the closet for my pajamas. Ruth did not protest. She lay petting Catarrh, watching his hair lift with static. I was buttoning the pajama coat when she said, “It's funny, you keep speaking of her as ‘the countess.' ”

“That's what she was. I'm a plain American boy, I don't go around calling the nobility by their first names. I'm like Minnie. Their status is what impresses me, not their names. That Eyetalian. The countess.”

“I called her by her first name after the first day or so.”

“Well, I didn't, after two or three months. Ever. She called me Mr. Allston and I gave her back the full business. When I tried Danish, I didn't
Du
her, I De-ed her.”

“Yes.” She handed me the limp cat. “Here, Catarrh had better go out. Put him out the front so he can get to the flower bed without getting wet.”

I carried him to the front door and set him out in the entry surrounded by the drip and splash of rain. He stood with his back humped and then made a bolt to get back in, but I blocked him with my foot. “Go on and do your business,” I said, “and when you're done, come in the cat door even if you do have to wet your feet. Don't stand around the bedroom door yowling.”

He looked up at me as if he hated my guts. His eyes were as blue as Erik Wredel-Krarup's, and his lip was cleft. I shut the door on him.

In the bedroom Ruth had turned off the bed light and settled down. I snapped off the reading lamp by the chair and stood in the dark listening to the uninterrupted rain. Then I crawled into bed and put my arm around Ruth, soft and familiar, and without turning she laid her hand on my hand and squeezed. “Thanks, darling.”

“Hvorfor?”
I said, bemused by what we have been remembering, and oddly dim in the sight from looking down some roads not taken.