To Siberia (16 page)

“Are you crazy?” he says. “He could have killed you. Why did you hit him?” But I do not answer.

“Where’s Jesper?” I say. “He should be here by now.”

“I know. Take it easy. The bike is in my backyard, he borrowed another one. Do you think I don’t know what’s going on?”

But I know nothing about that. Since we have lived on Lodsgate we have only said “Good morning” and “Good evening” and “Nice weather today” or “What a downpour!” to each other, and I’ve no idea what he knows about me. But he
is
a member of the Artisans Union and maybe he knows us through my father.

“Do you think I don’t know the Gestapo car when I see it? One day I’ll come across Jørgensen on his own in the harbor and then we’ll be rid of him.” He looks at me with that blue gaze like a child’s, and I believe he means what he says. He strokes my hair and turns my head to the side.

“Perhaps you’d better wash off the worst of the blood before your mother comes down.” I feel my cheek hurting again, and he is so safe and familiar and so new at the same time that I first bob, then lay my head against his chest and wipe the blood off on his apron, and he strokes my hair and says:

“Jesper told me to say you know where he is.”

I
n one of the cold winters before the Germans came the ice lay shining all the way out to Hirsholmene. We stood on the hard-frozen shore with our skates tied in a string around our necks gazing out at the lighthouse, and it looked as if it was just a kilometer away across the water. Our breath hung in the clear air. Everything was at the same distance. Everything could be touched if we just stretched far enough. If we held our bare hands out straight we were sure to feel stones, ice, clouds, the roofs of Strandby and the frozen surf at Frydenstrand.

“I’m going across today,” said Jesper.

We had been given screw-on skates for Christmas, my father had sharpened them in his workshop, and we used them every day for several weeks. There was hardly any snow, but the ground was frozen hard and the puddles and ponds were solid ice. The Elling brook was iced over as far as we had the energy to go. But now Jesper wanted to skate on the sea.

I hesitated. I knew the lighthouse was as far away as it always had been. It was tricking us, and I knew Jesper knew, but he could not resist it. The island with the lighthouse had always been there no matter where we stood on the coast looking out, and there was a school there, and twice a year the island children came from that school to our town in a fishing boat and walked through the streets bunched together in a little flock gazing at the shop windows. We talked to them and asked them questions and they knew a little about the world and a lot about the sea, but we had never been across to visit them.

Jesper sat down on an old fish box, he took the key from his pocket and screwed his skates tightly on to his boots. Ruben was there, and Marianne, and Mogens who was a friend of Jesper’s, and we all screwed our skates on tight and walked knock-kneed over the sand, which squeaked horribly against the skates, and on to the ice to test if it was firm. Jesper glided cautiously back and forth a few times, and when he felt it was safe he set his course straight out. Mogens followed him for some distance, but stopped where the third sandbank rose up slightly with crushed ice around it, then he turned and came back. I quickened my pace and did an airplane, I sailed off like my father on his bicycle with one leg straight out behind me and both arms to the side and ended in an almost successful pirouette, but it was not much fun because I had to keep turning around to look for Jesper’s back slowly growing smaller without the lighthouse getting bigger.

He was gone a long time. Marianne and Ruben had to go home, then Mogens went home, and I was left alone gazing out over the white sea waiting and waiting until the cold bit me so hard I could stand there no longer, and then I went home too.

A boy had fallen through the ice two days earlier and disappeared, but we did not know about that. The grown-ups knew, and I had never seen my father so angry as when I arrived home alone that winter evening with my skates in one mitten and the other soaked in tears. Never again until several years later when I stood in the workshop with a big wound on my cheek, and my wrists swollen and blue from Gestapo Jørgensen’s grip, and so bereft of feeling that when I tried to pick up a cup or a glass it fell to the floor at once and broke. My father stood before me in a frenzy with his hammer and chisel in his hands, and I was telling him what had happened, but only halfway through I suddenly realized he was furious because he was frightened and could not show it in any other way. That this was how it had always been, which I had always misunderstood. And then I knew too that he was never angry with me as he could be angry with Jesper. He hurled the chisel into the wall where it lodged quivering, and with the hammer he shattered the cupboard he was making until nothing was left of it but small bits and pieces. His back bulged and his forearms bulged with the effort and then he slung the hammer at the wall after the chisel so the chisel broke and both fell on the floor and lay there. He who could never end the day without hanging his tools up clean and tidy each in its place above the bench. Then he took off his apron and flung that on the floor too, pushed me out of the door and locked it.

I cycle north at dusk towards Kæret beach past the marshes at Rønnene where the seagulls sit in long rows in the shallows beyond the reeds, and all the rows take off as I ride past, unfold like gray-white sheets and land again in the dim light that slowly fades and disappears towards Skagen. There are thousands of them, I hear their soft rushing and feel the wind in my face as if this were the last time I would cycle here in just this way, and I see myself from the outside as more and more often I do, in a film at the Palace Theater progressively one row of seats farther back from the screen, on the same brown bicycle I have had for many years, and my hair streams back and at the same time almost merges with the advancing night, and I hear the creaking of my right pedal against the chain guard, squeak, squeak, again and again a thousand times, and my breath, puff, puff, quite alone with no other sound now the gulls are silent.

It grows darker and darker, but I do not light my lamp, for on these flat stretches I would be seen a kilometer away and the drone from the dynamo would block out all other sounds. I dare not do it. Everything would be easier on the road to Skagen farther inland on the bridge over the Elling brook, but there is German traffic there now and it is past curfew time.

There is not a tree to be seen, only some low bushes that cannot grow any bigger because of the wind from the sea and the reeds in front of them in a dark wall against the last light. Far ahead where the road ends I steer the bike off the gravel, out into the marram grass and right down to the dunes by the shore. There I leave it at the end of the path where I know I shall find it again.

It is high tide. There is a dark shining mirror where you can walk dry-shod in the middle of the day, it covers everything and it is impossible to see which way the brook runs when it has left the reeds. I take my shoes off, put them beside the bike and wade out. The water comes up to my ankles, it is warm and pleasant and the bottom is soft on my soles. Little flounders have hidden themselves in the sand and they wriggle against my toes and shoot off when I put my feet down. If it had been light I could have followed the lines of whirling sand and caught them in my hands where the whirling stopped and felt them tickle my palms, put them in a bucket and watched them go flat on the bottom so as to be invisible.

I walk cautiously through the water, narrowing my eyes and peering for the darker current where the brook runs deeper, but everything is equally dark and smooth right out to the first sandbank where the waves roll in. I lift up my dress to be prepared but still I suddenly step into much deeper water than I had expected. I sink up to my hips at first and then to my chest, and I lose my balance and fall forward until the water is up to my throat and covers the whole of my dress and thin jacket, and it is fresh water just here and much colder. I sob when I can’t feel bottom under my feet, so I draw a deep breath and start swimming the few meters until I can reach bottom and the water only comes up to my ankles again.

The wound on my cheek smarts when I stand up, water pours from hair and dress, and the dress sticks close to my skin. It’s like being touched by a hundred hands. I should have been less naked without clothes, I think and pull off jacket and dress, and at once it is so lovely that I unclasp my bra and take off my pants and walk completely naked through the water, wringing out the clothes so the water splashes around me and I can feel the big darkness close to my body. No one can see me, even the lighthouse is dark, and I am free from the eyes of Gestapo Jørgensen that have rested on me all day. But it does not take long for the gooseflesh to spread. It is autumn, and I can’t remember when summer ended. Maybe today. Maybe yesterday. Maybe long ago. With a mirror I would have seen my skin grow slowly blue in big patches around my mouth, on my shoulders and thighs. My teeth start to chatter. I cannot stop it, and it makes such a clatter I’m scared the Gestapo will hear it in Kragholmen. I put my dress on again and the thin cardigan, and it’s not easy, I have to
drag
the sticky dress down over my hips, and that makes me even colder. And then I start to run. In over the shoals so water and wet sand splash around my feet until I get to the beach on the other side of the reed belt around the brook, and I run north along the beach as close to the water as possible so as not to step on the mussels and sharp shells lying in a white strip where they have been washed ashore a few meters inward the whole way along, thinking that if only I run quickly enough the warmth of my body will
steam
the dress dry.

I didn’t tell my father I knew where Jesper was, he was so angry I thought he might do something stupid, so he went to Uncle Nils on Søndergate to ask, but Uncle Nils was not at home. He was not at the shipyard either. He had vanished.

I stood at the corner of our street and saw my father coming back, he didn’t turn down to the dairy shop, but went on walking to and fro on the sidewalk. He was so furious he couldn’t talk, and people who knew him hurried past when they saw his face, and finally he stripped off his jacket, walked into the road, flung it down on the cobbles, and trod on it, and not until he picked it up again did he calm down. He shook it carefully as if asking forgiveness, put it on, and I went up to him and brushed the top of his back where he could not reach. Then he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the few coins he had on him and looked at them, and I thought he was going to give them to me, but he turned and said:

“I’ll be away an hour or so,” and walked along the block and down Havnegate to the Vinkælderen.

For the rest of the day I stood behind the counter serving customers who came in, answering questions and smiling when they left, behaving as if nothing had happened when they stood there staring at my cheek. I was wearing a cardigan with long sleeves so the bruises should not show, and I concentrated and tried not to look down at the tiles or at the clock on the wall, and every time I picked up a bottle I used both hands in a way that looked natural. When five o’clock came I shut up shop and went upstairs for dinner stiff in every limb.

My mother had laid a place for Jesper. She sat biting her lips not looking at his place. My father raised his eyes from his plate one single time and looked me straight in the face, and he asked why the hell I sat there smiling like that. He was probably a bit drunk, but my mother did not realize that, “but Magnus, really,” she said, and I put my hand to my mouth and felt I had not taken off my smile for the customers yet. When I finally relaxed, my face hurt. At half past eight I changed into a clean dress and my knitted jacket and cycled out of town without saying where I was going, and now I am running along the beach in the dark as fast as I can with the sticky wet hem of my dress in one hand so as not to stumble over my own clothes and fall down.

Sometimes when I think of Jesper all I can see is his dark back on the way across the white sea to Hirsholmene. It gets smaller and smaller and I stand at the edge of the ice feeling empty. Why didn’t he ask me to go with him? I have a will of my own, but if he had asked I wouldn’t have hesitated. I always went with him. After all, I had to look after him and he had to look after me, and my father would have been furious with us both. Staying there alone was meaningless.

Sometimes I imagine he tells me everything, but I know that’s not true. He never told me if he went all the way to Hirsholmene. I don’t tell him everything either, but I feel he knows what I am thinking, and I know what
he
thinks. I have taught myself to do that.

And yet all the same I am not sure. I stop running when I realize I’m almost at the shack. Anyone could hear my breath, and I have to bend over and lean on my knees and pant down between my thighs until my lungs calm down and my heart stops beating so loudly I can’t hear anything else.