To Siberia (13 page)

At my side Jesper let go of his bicycle and began to talk, quietly at first and then louder and louder.

“Bloodiest hell,” he said, “the devil in blackest hell, flaming devilish hell,” and when I looked up he had dug his hands into the half-melted outer layer of the dung heap. He tore big pieces out and threw them down the slope, and even though they didn’t reach far I was afraid the soldiers would turn around and see us and mow us down where we stood without any protection, because he yelled as well:

“The future is shit,” he yelled, the tears pouring down, “the future is shit, just like this. Take this, you Nazi swine! Do you hear!” And he pulled more half-frozen lumps from the heap and hurled them as far as he could, but they did not hear him. Not one helmet moved and the gun barrels pointed straight up at the sky. Then Jesper gave up. He stood there with his hands at his sides and lumps of cow dung right up his arms. He was gasping for breath and blinking and blinking and I took the few steps over to him and dried his cheeks with my handkerchief.

“I wish,” I said aloud, “I wish one of those vehicles would drive right off the road and disappear.” And I had barely finished before we heard a roaring from down there. One of the trucks had driven too far out, its back wheels spun on the ice sheets and the back where the soldiers sat slid over the edge and the roar we heard was the wheels in thin air. And then the truck vanished, rear first down the slope to the shore, and the soldiers yelled and jumped out on each side.

No one seemed to have been hurt, but one link in the unbreakable chain was suddenly missing.

“Well I’ll be damned, Sistermine,” said Jesper between two deep breaths—“that wasn’t bad,” and he smiled for the first time that day.

T
wo German soldiers stand on the quay weeping. They don’t stand together, but on each side of the gangway of a troopship. One of them faces Pikkerbakken behind the town, the other the shipyard, but I do not know if they see anything at all. They are young, not much older than Jesper, and they are being sent to Norway. There is a war on in Norway, in Denmark it is quiet. They have had a good time in Denmark.

“They drink the cream straight out of the bucket,” my father says and means it literally.

“They just come straight in from the street and drink the cream out of the bucket.” He has a gray mustache now and his temples are grizzled, I think he looks stylish and he blows cigar smoke into the air and the wind throws it back into my eyes until the tears start to run. I see the world through the same haze as the soldiers, the gray-green uniforms are wavering, it’s irritating, I blink hard, and the one who is looking at the shipyard moves his lips.

“What’s that he’s saying?”

“He’s saying mutti, ‘mama.’”

“I’d never say that. I would never stand here crying and saying mama,” I say, wiping my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket.

“Maybe, maybe not,” says my father. He has just told me I won’t be able to go on to gymnasium. That’s why we’re out for a walk. I am the best pupil leaving from middle school. I had Excellent for my main mark.

“We have discussed it and we agree,” he says and means my mother and himself, but of course I know she is the one who decided. He is just loyal.

“I can work in the evenings, and in the holidays. I can manage, I’m strong.”

“I’m sure you can. But it’s not just the money. There’s the war as well.”

“What war? Hardly anyone fights in this country.” I turn towards one of the soldiers and shout:

“NO ONE DARES TO FIGHT IN THIS COUNTRY!”

“Hush, girl! What are you thinking of?” He doesn’t know what to do so he puts his hand over my mouth. His hand smells of wood shavings and polish. I take his hand away and he doesn’t stop me.

“But it’s true! And he doesn’t understand what I say. They’ve been here two years and don’t understand a word of Danish. All they do is march, dig trenches, and bathe at Frydenstrand.” My stomach knots up and I take a step towards the one who said mama.

“Kommst du von Magdeburg? Heisst du Walter? Ist Helga die Name deiner Schwester?” He turns slowly, his eyes are full of tears, his nose is red and he dries his eyes with the back of his hand like a child.

“Nein,” he says, shaking his head.

“Idiot,” I say, and he understands
that.
I can
see
him drying up. He seizes the strap of his gun and his expression changes. My father grips my shoulder and mutters fiercely in my ear:

“Now we’re just going to walk calmly, do you hear?” His big hand clenches my collarbone, it hurts and the whole time we’re walking I feel the soldier behind us, his hand on his gun, my father’s stiff gait and hard body. I have the sun in my face, it is blinding and my eyes are swimming, but I do not raise my arm, I blink and blink but it doesn’t help. It is June but I feel the raw air at my back as if the ice lay thick up to the breakwater in wicked floes, the whole harbor frozen over again, no way out.

When we get to the harbor square in front of the hotel, I tear myself free and let him go up Lodsgate alone to where my mother is bound to be standing at the window waiting. The shop is shut for the day and a stream of blue-clad workers comes cycling from the shipyard. He said we should just go for a walk, and I agreed, for it was a long time since I last heard his voice without anyone else’s filling the cramped apartment.

I stop on Skippergate and look back. My father is still standing in the square with his hands at his sides and the dead cigar in his mouth. He does not know which way to go. He looks like a poor man, a childless man without shelter, quite alone in the world, and I think I must go down to him again, say it does not matter, that nothing matters. But that is not true.

The German ship lies hidden behind the shipyard cranes and I see there is no ice in the harbor basin nor on the sea, but from where I stand the opening in the breakwater is out of sight. Only two long arms stick up from north and from south and join in a ring around our town and hold it fast.

My father stands on the square for a long time. I stand still as long as he does, looking at him. He knows I am there, but he does not turn my way. We wait for each other. In the end he lights his cigar again and starts to walk slowly along past the Cimbria and up onto Havnegate instead of going home. Maybe to the Vinkælderen or to a place on Søndergate where he plays billiards now. He has not been to Aftenstjernen since we moved from the north of the town. Then I also turn around and hurry up Lodsgate. I see my mother out of the corner of my eye, she stands at the window looking down into the street waiting as I expected, but I do not look up. Just go into the yard for my bicycle and bowl off before she can get down to the gateway.

I take Rosevej out of town to the Seamen’s School. Lone’s father stands outside the fence clipping the hedge. I look straight ahead and try to get past without him noticing, but he turns and calls out:

“Good evening, young lady, see you in the autumn!” He used to be the head teacher at the primary school, now he is the principal of the gymnasium and like everyone else he thinks I am going on there. My results were in the local paper, they always publish the marks of the best pupil, and it was Jesper who typeset the notice. He had put an eye-catching frame round my name, with the marks, so they could be seen the moment you opened up at page two. It was embarrassing, I did not go out for three days. My best work up to now, said Jesper, he had wanted to use Gothic type to make the announcement even more impressive, but there were not enough characters left. The Germans had worn them out, and when I thought of it afterward I felt it made it look too much like a death notice.

Lone’s father is just Hans’s father now, and I do not understand why he talks to me, I have been taboo for several years. But perhaps he has not many friends left. He is a member of Denmark’s National Socialist Workers Party, and some workers’ party that is, says Jesper,

“Where the best-known toilers are Count Bent Holstein, Count Knut Knuthenborg, Count Rathlau and Sehested, Master of the Royal Hunt. And they are not even Danish, but imported from the south, like foot-and-mouth disease.” Many farms have had a taste of that. Every single cow at Vrangbæk had to be slaughtered and Grandmother has sold the farm and moved into a home for old sourpusses at Sæby, where she sits in a chair all day long heaping insults on anyone who dares go near her.

So Vrangbæk has gone for good, and no one grieves over that except my mother who can be heard to utter her eternal:

“He might have given us a house, you know.”

All that is behind us now, we do not cycle that way any more, but at night I ride Lucifer along the paths in the Chinese garden behind the house. It has grown into a forest of sky-high trees and there is a sun and a moon at the same time there. Lucifer’s hooves clatter over the wooden bridges and I am hot and sweaty and feel the wind on my chest and the horse rocking between my legs, and I grip hard with my thighs and lean forward holding tight to his mane so as not to fall off.

But the Chinese garden has been demolished and turned into a gravel pit to sell sand and gravel at high prices to the Germans, who need quantities when they build bunkers and tank traps and defenses for the South Battery in the hills near Understed. But none of this makes any difference to Lone’s father, for he has chosen another country than ours, and I bowl past and call out:

“Wir sehen uns niemals, Herr Oberhauptbahnhof,” thinking that is one for him. But it doesn’t give me any pleasure, indeed I should have been glad to see him at the gymnasium in Hjørring in the autumn, and when I turn round I see a melancholy Nazi in the road, shears in hand, who fraternizes with the Germans because they take a scientific view of life and see the potential of ants in the human world.

My friend Marianne lives in a brick house where the town ends and the farmlands begin, past the snobs and the white fences, past the Seamen’s School and out on the windswept heath behind Nordre Strandvej. Jesper’s old shack is not much farther as the crow flies, but to get there you have to cycle along the Elling brook inland to the bridge on Skagensvejen and then right along the field path again on the other side. That’s the good thing about that shack. Few people bother to go there.

If Lone came from a home with a grand piano and I from one with a cinema piano, Marianne is from a home with a Jew’s harp. She has five unruly brothers younger than herself, her mother is dead, and her father is a carter. That’s what he calls himself; Carter Larsen. All through the winter he combs the beaches for driftwood, he clears away trees blown down by gales in autumn storms, and sometimes in the dark he goes into Vannverks forest getting wood illegally. Then he cuts it up into suitable lengths and splits it and puts it into big piles to dry all around the yard, the scent makes me go numb. When autumn comes he drives around selling it in sacks and cord measures to people who will buy in a town where coke is the usual fuel for the stove, but now dried peat because trade with England has stopped. There is not much money in that.

At first he had a horse and cart, then a small truck he kept in the stable, and now he has a horse again because gasoline is rationed. The truck and the horse share the stable. The truck rusts on the side where the salt-laden wind blows in from the sea, and the horse kicks at the other when he feels cramped. That is what I remember best from that place; the scent of wood drying in the sun and the horse whinnying in the stable and the crack of its iron shoes striking the truck. He is called Jeppe after Jeppe of the Hill in Holberg’s play because he is so thirsty and neither the truck nor Jeppe will be moved because Carter Larsen knows his horse and believes he has a right to kick.

“He’s good to animals, I’ll say that for him,” says Marianne, and leaves it at that.

When she was thirteen her mother died and Marianne took her place and proved she could do it, she had no choice, otherwise the social would have come to take her brothers and place them like silver foxes on farms in the district. People call it that because it provides extra income for farmers, like keeping foxes does.

Marianne has cigarettes and beer. I borrow a swimsuit from her and we cycle to the swimming place north of Frydenstrand. The German soldiers have built a wooden swimming jetty that reaches out beyond the third sandbank where the water is deep. We sit on the beach in the shelter of a dune and smoke Virginia cigarettes Marianne has got hold of, I don’t know where they came from, and we each drink a Tuborg and watch the soldiers swim and dive. They look at us as they run past, and it’s hard not to show off a bit. They’re like small boys at summer camp. They don’t look so dangerous without their uniforms. I smile, but I hate them.

I stub out the cigarette in the loose sand and take a big gulp of beer. It tastes flat and warm. “Have you ever seen such cocky young roosters?” says Marianne.

“A lot of them will be going to Norway soon. Then they won’t be quite so full of themselves.”

A tall fair soldier runs by, he smiles and waves, but I’m done with smiling for today.

“It’s a shame really. That one’s got smashing thighs on him.” Marianne waves back.