The Woman from Bratislava (4 page)

I scanned the street, then I spotted her. She stopped short, made a big show of looking in the window of a sports shop, then she glanced towards us, turned on her heel and strode off briskly down a side street.

I straightened up.

‘What about her?’

‘Old habits die hard when I’m in this part of the world, even if the country is a member of NATO and about to join the EU. I can’t help looking over my shoulder. You remember how sometimes in Moscow you could simply sense that you were being followed?’

I nodded. I remembered. We had not spent all our time with our noses buried in dusty books in the endless reading rooms in the yellow palace of the Lenin Library. We had also
met
people. We had visited the homes of the hospitable Russians and we knew that they knew that an eye was kept on dangerous foreigners who were liable to spread noxious ideas about democracy and freedom.

‘What about her?’ I said again.

Lasse looked after her, but she was long gone. Then, as he took my arm and led me away, he said:

‘She was in the back row at the Institute of Economics when I was speaking there yesterday. I thought about it when I saw her this morning, sitting in the front row at the Institute of History, when you were giving that talk on stagnation phenomena …’

‘Oh that – I had them snoring in the aisles during that one.’

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re a good speaker and the history students have need of your insight.’

‘Okay – and …?’ I said, as we walked on in the now somewhat
chillier late-afternoon sun. It was still only March. Spring was not quite here yet.

‘She was in the hotel lobby, and now here. It’s too much of a coincidence.’

‘You’re seeing things,’ I said. ‘The Cold War ended a long time ago. And we won. The Poles won.’

‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘She’s probably just a tourist. There aren’t that many sights to see here. I just think it was a bit odd. There’s something professional about it. You get the feeling that she’s been trailing us for a while and has finally decided to let us know about it. The way the KGB used to do, in the old days.’

‘Those days are over,’ I said.

But she showed up again in Prague. During the symposium at Charles University, when we were all lined up on the platform, boring the pants off each other and the audience in the large
auditorium
. I sat there half-asleep while Lena held forth and Klaus Brandt, the leader of the delegation, got himself tangled up in long-winded expositions. Again she was seated in one of the back rows, high up. Lasse and I spotted her at almost the same moment. She was wearing a plain blue dress with a simple white necklace. She appeared to be listening intently. Made notes and looked for all the world like a refined middle-aged lady taking some
extramural
course: her husband is gone, the children have flown the nest, now she can devote herself to learning and culture. At the interval I hurried down to confront her, but she had vanished. As mysteriously as she had appeared – I had not seen her arrive and I did not see her leave.

Afterwards there was a reception at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the former prime minister made his remark and my evening was ruined. I had too much to drink in the bar, but did eventually go up to my room. I called home – no answer – and fell asleep with a sour taste in my mouth that no toothpaste could dispel.

The next morning Klaus hustled us along like a bunch of little
kids and I could positively see his blood pressure rising when I deliberately did not turn up until the last minute, then took my time finishing my cigarette before climbing into the bus that was to take us to Bratislava. Thus prompting the other smokers to get back off. Anarchy threatened, and at the sight of our leader’s puce face I climbed aboard feeling slightly more cheerful. Lasse had of course observed the whole performance.

‘How childish,’ he said as I sat down beside him.

But the Czech politician’s snide comment still rankled. At any rate I was too sunk in gloom to enjoy the sight of the budding Bohemian countryside, dotted with sunken haystacks. The
landscape
and the little farms reminded me of Denmark in the fifties. It had an old-fashioned air about it. We had to sit in a queue at the Slovakian border and Klaus got my back up even further by archly calling out to Lena:

‘Well, Lena – we’re about to leave the shelter of NATO
protection
behind us. I hope you’re not feeling too nervous.’

‘Who’s being childish now,’ I muttered to Lasse.

Things were bound to go wrong. And so they did, after another few days of tedious meetings. It was late in the evening. I had had too much wine with dinner and too many drinks afterwards. On top of everything else my teeth had started hurting, or rather – according to my dentist – my gums. They’re going to rot away if you’re not careful, the heartless money-grubber had declared. I got into an argument with Klaus. I maintained that it would have been better if Gorbachev had been allowed to reform socialism a little at a time, instead of having the system suddenly collapse like that. Not that I actually believe this. I am glad that the rotten Soviet system came tumbling down like the vile, absurd house of cards that it was, but I knew exactly which buttons to push to get Klaus going. So we sat there yelling at one another like a couple of idiotic teenagers while the more sensible members of the
delegation
took themselves off to bed and eventually Klaus stomped off in high dudgeon leaving me alone, like the stupid fool that I was.

So there I was, caught in the straitjacket of toothache, with my earlier inebriation reduced now to a raging hangover, when there came a knock at the door. It was long past midnight. I got up off the bed, peered through the little spy-hole. Outside was that woman. My first thought was to just leave her there, but then I opened the door. She stared at me. I stared back at her. For a moment I thought I was seeing things. She looked like my older sister. They had the same ears and nose and the same dark green eyes. The same features one saw in the few pictures of our father.

‘Yes,’ I snapped.

She gave a faint smile, as if she were shy, then she put out her hand and said in slow, heavily accented, but perfectly lucid Danish:

‘Good evening, Teddy. My name is Maria Bujic. I plucked up the courage to come here. I almost didn’t dare to, but I did so want to meet my brother.’

IT TOOK ME A MOMENT
to grasp what she had said. I was still a bit woozy. Nor0mally the only people likely to come knocking in the middle of the night in Central Europe are hookers, but she did not look like a hooker. She bore an astonishing resemblance to my older sister Irma. She was possibly a couple of years younger. It was the mouth mainly, and that piercing green gaze, with which Irma had a way of transfixing her students. I stepped aside and invited her in. Even at this late hour she looked fresh and almost youthful, her skin clear and with the usual age lines, neither overly pronounced nor invisible. Which was just as it should be. One should be able to tell by looking at a person that they have lived. The short hair curling and waving softly around her head looked almost black. Did she dye it, I wondered. She wore a smart skirt and a shirt-blouse, with a small string of pearls at her throat. She was carrying a good-sized briefcase in soft calfskin. She could almost have been a successful modern businesswoman, the sort you see on any morning flight to Århus, but only almost. Because there was an emptiness in her eyes, a look of coldness or pain which at first glance was hard to fathom. I did my footman act, waved her into the spacious hotel room. The bed was unmade, but I shifted some newspapers and offered her an armchair.

She shook her head. We stood facing one another. Both
uncomfortable
with the situation.

‘What the hell is all this?’ I asked, with anger in my voice.

She looked me in the eye.

‘Could we possibly speak Russian or English?’ she said in Russian, fluently and with hardly any accent as far as I could tell. My own Russian is excellent, although I read it better than I speak it.

‘Fine by me,’ I said in English.

But that too she could speak without any difficulty.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘May I sit down?’

I motioned again to one of the armchairs and she took a seat, perching on the edge of the chair with the briefcase in her lap. She looked as if she was attending a job interview.

‘First I must tell you how sorry I am about the death of your, our, father,’ she said.

‘Now hang on a minute!’ I said. ‘What are you talking about? My father died almost fifty years ago. I never really knew him. He left us when I was very young. A hundred years ago, it seems like. In another time.’

With neat, efficient movements she opened her bag, produced a large manila envelope, removed a black-and-white photograph from it and handed it to me. In the picture was a young man; he was smiling the smile which Irma and Fritz shared with him. His hair was black and he was smooth-shaven, he had a little,
triangular
chin and a fine, high brow showing beneath his German army cap. The SS runes were clearly visible on the cap and on the
old-fashioned
, black uniform jacket. I’m no expert on SS insignia, but going by his badges I guessed the man in the picture to be a
Sturmbannführer
. My natural father, a major in the Waffen-SS. But that couldn’t be right. The face was most definitely that of my father, whom I could not remember, but of whom I had seen pictures. The SS uniform knocked me off balance momentarily. I broke into a sweat. The woman was eyeing me intently, she handed me another picture.

This one was in colour. It showed the same man. Some years older now. His hair a grizzled salt-and-pepper, but still thick. He had his arm around a rather plump little woman wearing a summer frock in a large floral print. They were standing in front of a yellow-painted house. Vines were visible in the background. A patch of blue sky. An array of brightly-coloured flowers in pots
and vases. Leaning against the man was a young woman, she had on a simple yellow dress, the skirt of which had been lifted slightly by the breeze, revealing something of her bare, brown legs. It was a younger version of the woman sitting across from me in this hotel in Bratislava. She had been an exceptionally beautiful young woman. It was a nice summery, idyllic picture. I gave the photo back to her without a word and, just as wordlessly, she handed me yet another.

This one too was in colour. It was the same man, but on his deathbed this time. His hair was sparse and white, his features very pronounced and the skin so thin that one felt one could see right through it to the bones of the skull underneath. He was dressed in a white shirt. His eyes were closed. His hands folded on the
emaciated
chest. Death had taken the big, strapping man whom the woman opposite me claimed was father to us both.

I did not know what to think. Every family has its myths and legends, its secrets and skeletons in the closet and my own had plenty. My family’s history was a tragic one, but it had also been a success story. My parents’ bakery went bust because people began to talk: ‘Seems the baker was on the wrong side during the war. Decent people had better find somewhere else to buy their bread.’ But as a child I was never told exactly what it was he had done. It seemed to have something to do with him having gone to work in Germany. But a hundred thousand others had done the same. It was either that or lose their unemployment benefit. I knew his name was in the Bovrup Files. He had been a member of the DNSAP – the Danish Nazi Party. But so were forty
thousand
others. And it was not as if it was against the law, although just after the war ended it did mean you were a marked man. As a small boy I had pondered this a lot. I was the baby of the family, a bit of an afterthought, hopelessly spoiled by my mother and step-father and by Irma and Fritz. I was also too young to really understand the marital breakdown which followed in the wake of the social disgrace. I knew that it had been an extremely
traumatic experience for my sister and brother. They did not like my mother’s new husband, but I thought of him as my father and continued to do so right up until his death five years ago. We three children had all done well for ourselves, two of us within the
academic
world. I was a historian, as was my sister, but she was also a professor of comparative literature, specialising, not surprisingly, in feminist writing. Fritz had originally been a baker, of course, but had gone on to set up his own bread factory, mass-producing all sorts of bread and rolls, which were sold in the supermarkets as home-baked, even though they all came off a conveyer belt. But he had soon discovered that image is everything. And that a good advertising campaign can do wonders for sales. He instinctively understood, long before the media researchers got round to
formulating
the concept, that we do not buy goods but experiences, stories. He was also quick to spot the organic trend and latch on to that. He was the wealthy member of the family. We came of age just as consumerism was really taking off and we were doing very nicely, thank you. A pretty ordinary story, really, when told in a few words.

I must have become lost in my own thoughts, she seemed to be repeating a question:

‘Could I have a glass of water?’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said, as if I were a bad host neglecting an invited guest. And not some strange woman who had knocked on my door in the middle of the night in Bratislava. ‘Can I offer you something else, perhaps? From the minibar? A glass of wine?’

‘Wine would be lovely,’ she said.

There was a small bottle of red wine of dubious quality in the minibar. It was also very cold. Nonetheless, I poured two glasses for us and set them down on the ugly, little modern tile-topped table between the two armchairs. I was no longer feeling the effects of the alcohol I had consumed earlier in the evening. I was tired, but my head was clear. I think that already at that point I had subconsciously accepted her story as being true, even though
my analytical super-ego still regarded the whole thing as absolute rubbish, a pack of lies.

I offered my cigarettes to her and she took one.

‘I’ve actually given these up,’ she said.

‘Haven’t we all?’ I said, giving her a light before firing up my own. I picked up my glass of red wine, raised it wryly to her.

‘What should we drink to, madame?’ I said. ‘To death?’

She winced, but her eyes remained empty of expression. They were remarkable eyes: green as a sunlit lake. But it was the glacial green of a mountain tarn.

‘I was actually very fond of him,’ she said.

‘Sorry, that was too flippant,’ I said. ‘To life, then? Or to the past?’

‘To the past, may our lives not be ruined by it.’

So we drank to that and gently set down our glasses.

‘Might I hear the whole story from the very beginning,’ I asked in my best university lecturer tones.

So she told me. Presenting the facts as dispassionately as if she were delivering a lecture herself, or making a statement to the police. Even so, it took quite a while. At my age one is past the stage of breaking in with a ‘Really!’ or ‘You don’t say!’ every time
something
surprises you, and her story did surprise me. It did not really upset me, though. As I say: I never knew my real father. If she had been talking about my step-father, Poul, it might have been a
different
matter, and the story might have caused me greater mental and emotional upheaval than it did at that moment.

‘My father came to Croatia at the beginning of September 1943. He was just a sergeant with the Danish Regiment. His company made camp at the village of Sisak, fifty kilometres outside of Zagreb. My mother told me that the Danish soldiers’ nerves were in a bad state, they were thin and exhausted. They drank too much of the excellent Croatian brandy. As if the alcohol could chase away their memories. The Danish Regiment had been formed in part by soldiers from the Danish Legion, which had been disbanded by
the SS along with the other foreign legions. The men were angry about this, but that was not what drove them to drink. No, it was the memory of the bitter fighting in Russia, at a place they called the Demjan Cauldron. It was the memory of returning home on leave to a Denmark where they were not welcomed as heroes, but spat on and denounced as traitors. My mother was twenty and worked as a secretary at the local town hall. Croatia was a free country, though possibly fascist. Or so it was said after the war. The country was not occupied, but cooperated with Germany in order to remain a sovereign nation. We called our army the Ustashi. They fought against Tito’s partisans, who were all over the place. The Danish Regiment was actually only meant to be in Croatia for a few months for training, along with the other units from the Nordland Division, but they were immediately dispatched to fight the partisans. It was a terrible conflict, with no mercy shown on either side. Partisans hung from every lamp post. German soldiers who were taken prisoner were killed and castrated. None of this did my father’s bad nerves any good. Only one thing kept the
soldiers
going: there was plenty of food in Croatia – the Good Lord has blessed us in this respect. They loved the Croatian fruit and vegetables. And they loved the dancing in the square at Sisak on a Saturday night. This was sometimes possible, despite the war. The soldiers danced with the local girls on the warm summer evenings and that was how my father met my mother. At a dance in the soft darkness of a Croatian night in the middle of the war. One tends to forget that pleasures are most intense when the horrors of war are at their height. When were Sarajevo’s women loveliest? When was their make-up most immaculate? When were their dresses at their most elegant? During the worst bombing raids. Mankind’s gift for survival never ceases to astonish me. It’s such a banal story really. At a time when death and rape were as certain as the fact that the sun rises in the east, they fell in love. Throughout their lives they would tell us children how blissfully in love they had been, despite the sounds of gunfire in the night. Despite the
indescribable horrors they experienced and the blood there must have been on my father’s hands. I have a picture of them. They look so happy. My father was a fine figure of a man. My mother was a beautiful young woman. The Danish Regiment was
transferred
to the Russian front in the November. By then I was the tiny, growing fruit of their love.’

I sat there, rapt and expectant. I had a number of questions I would have liked to ask, but I was so intrigued by her account, although it was, in fact, a fairly common wartime story. There must be thousands with similar tales to tell. It had all happened so many years ago that it hardly seemed to have anything to do with me personally. She asked for another cigarette, took a gulp of her wine and continued in the same soft voice. She had a habit of tugging her right ear lobe, usually when she came to a part of her story which seemed to affect her. Otherwise she appeared to have full control over her emotions and the narrative devices she was employing.

‘The outcome of the war was, of course, a foregone
conclusion
. Germany lost. Tito won, and Croatia was incorporated into Socialist Yugoslavia. Some said that Tito the Croat had betrayed his own country. But maybe it was the best thing that could have happened. For a few years at least. Although it was no fun being on the losing side. My mother had not been directly associated with the Ustashi, but still. She had been a secretary for the system and she had gone out with a soldier in the Waffen SS. She was interned for a while, but even though brutality is an inescapable part of life in the Balkans, she was not abused. Maybe the guards’ hearts were softened by the tiny infant at her breast. Me. What do I know? Maybe she never told me the truth. She had received no word of my father. He had written several letters to her from the Eastern front. Tender letters, but also missives from which even the censors could not delete the hopelessness and the knowledge that the war was lost. My mother accepted the protection, as it was called, of one of the new socialist officials who had taken over. She
got a new job. He got her body. For a couple of years it was a good deal. I do not remember him. He may have been purged, while my mother was cleared. Or forgotten. The new job was very much like the old one, only the masters were different. I have no memory of that time, I was too young, but after 1949, when Tito broke with Moscow, it was possible to be both a socialist and a nationalist. Croats, Serbs and Bosnians had to form a concerted front against Stalin’s plans for invasion. In the Balkans the past is never
forgotten
. History lives on in every single person. But there are times when they are very good at suppressing it. And you might think that it does not matter, but it always matters. In 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, my father turned up. Suddenly one day there he was. We were living on the outskirts of Zagreb, down near the river. It was a beautiful sunny day and the air smelled of summer as it only can in Croatia. A tall, powerfully built man with a broad grin. My mother looked as if she had seen a ghost. I can’t have been more than seven. But I remember it as if it was yesterday. He picked me up and hugged me. My lovely little daughter, he said in German. My mother told me later that that was what he had said. I felt so incredibly comfortable with him. Not for one second did I doubt that he was my father. Being fatherless was a fate I had shared with millions of children in the post-war world. But I think every one of those children dreamt that one day
their
father would come back from the war and take them in his arms. My mother burst into tears. She came over to us, he put me down gently and wrapped his arms around us both. That is the first time in my childhood that I can remember being absolutely happy. My father had come home.’