Nothing But Fear (14 page)

Mother had sold one of the paintings from Kleinwanzleben without telling anyone and had opened a secret account in Germany with her share – Eva and Grandmother got theirs – and she used it to make their lives a little sweeter and to help fight her corner. For she did hit back and was subjected to a campaign of spite, as gossip went the rounds – and things were not made easier by the fact that she was responsible for analysing the sugar percentages in the laboratory. This was what determined what the farmers got for their beet, and they complained, saying the figures were too low, but she refused to alter them by a fraction. Even the management was out to get her, since she had been employed over their heads by the company director, Arnth-Jensen.

It was difficult to say who hated her most, and she made it all that much worse by being lah-di-dah, as they put it. When the time came for the big summer outing with the Brage choir, where they all took their families and had lunch in the village of Virket, Mother was not invited and Father
resigned. He made a good second tenor and could play the trombone – he had been in the Boy Scouts brass band – but the only thing I ever heard him play was a record, a lacquer master, with the Brage male voice choir singing ‘How fresh and green the woodland glades'. He always put it on at New Year – we would sit in the sitting room and light the Christmas tree for the last time – and when it was over and you asked him what he wanted to listen to now, Father would reply that he did not care for music.

She was the perfect wife, he said at the lodge meetings when they broached the subject – the German problem – and he shuffled back home in his evening clothes as though he was returning from a funeral. Mother questioned him about what went on at the freemasons, and he was ashamed and wouldn't reply, changing instead into other clothes and hitting his top-hat to make it collapse and go flat. He told her later in the evening – of course – and tried to explain, turning their words this way and that, but it only got worse and worse. It was the freemasons or Mother – and Father never wore the hat again.

From then on one thing led to another. He packed his things and chucked in the home guard and he stopped going to the photographic society. This had been his great passion, and the desk was full of hundreds of photographs, where a country road rounded a bend, the oat fields were yellow, the farmsteads idyllic, the views glorious, the cliffs at Møn and Ålholm Castle. They looked like postcards, and there were no people in them – and as time went on people slid out of the picture in reality, too. Father invited guests to dinner,
and Mother served up ‘
Sülzkoteletten
' – complete with the intricate decorations that she cut out in pickled cucumbers and carrots – and people piled their plates high and drank and sang along when she sat at the grand piano and played – but no one invited them back. Their circle narrowed – even childhood friends fell away, until there was no one who wanted to see them – and Mother shrugged her shoulders and despised them and called them proletarians.

It came as a shock to him when Mother told him that he should resign from Danish Building Assurance – it was the last thing Father had to cling on to – and he broke down. He never wept on any other occasion, not once, and it sounded so strange, so distant and hollow. Mother comforted him and explained that he was the mainstay of the company, but still he was no more than… an assistant manager? Henry Mayland had married into his position and was useless. He sat and twiddled his thumbs in his big office because he was Damgård's son-in-law, and he let Father run the business – and he was the one who ought to be the manager.

Father resigned – he always did as she told him – and with some reluctance set off to Copenhagen, made contact with Ib and was employed in his company. He had an advertising agency and swindled, boasted and drank as much as he always had. They had just netted I G Farben, he said with a guffaw, and were bleeding the German swine – and it was all loudmouths and hot air! Mother said he should just put up with it and wait and see what happened. A month passed. Six months. And then the telephone rang at last. It was Victor Larsen, the solicitor. He was on the board of
Danish Building Assurance. Damgård had died, and they wanted to reinstate Father. He was prepared to say yes to anything, but Mother stood firm and forced him to demand what was his by right. There could be no question of him coming out of the meeting as anything other than manager. And Father could hardly believe it himself. He was walking on air as he came in through the front door. He had been made manager! Sub-manager!

Father never managed to achieve proper recognition in the insurance company where he worked for forty-nine years and eight months. He had to learn to live with playing second fiddle to Henry Mayland, who never lifted a finger, and with kissing his wife's hand – Mother couldn't stand her. Father was granted a new title and a new office – a pokey room on the ground floor, from which a staircase led up to the spacious rooms where Mayland occupied a leather chair behind a vast writing desk. After his appointment and the board meeting there was a dinner. Mother had dressed for the occasion, had put up her hair and was as stunning as a film star. He got quite a shock – and she put Fru Mayland in the shade and showed the board of directors from Copenhagen who was the manager's wife around here. Father straightened up, growing taller and taller – and touched seventh heaven when she told him they were to have a child.

They had to find a larger place to live, and the increase in his salary would allow them to buy a house. Mother persuaded him to demand a company car suitable for a manager, and it was to be a Mercedes. He was given the smallest
model – a dark-blue Mercedes 180 – and it was the only one of its kind in town. Father gave her a fur coat, an ocelot, and she handed in her notice at the Sugar Factory and sat beside Father in the car. Then he cruised off in first gear, changed into second and took a drive around Nykøbing. It was the last time they saw anyone. From then on the space around them became completely void.

In 1959 they moved into a detached red-brick house on Hans Ditlevsensgade, and Mother had her belongings fetched from Einbeck. They arrived in a goods carriage, were unloaded at the station and ferried home. Then they reinstated the dining room rescued from Kleinwanzleben – sideboard, table and chairs, silver and tableware, all found a place. They unpacked the porcelain, and the double bed and the wardrobes were carried up into the bedroom. They unrolled the carpets in the sitting room, and Mother hung the paintings. Finally, to top it all, they opened one of the bottles of wine left over from Papa Schneider's cellar – it was an 1892 vintage and very expensive – and Father took a taste and said ‘Arghhh!', and Mother laughed. It tasted of vinegar. It couldn't travel and had gone off. She saw in her mind's eye the party elite in East Germany, who had been given the wine as a bribe, pouring it out, clinking glasses and screwing up their mouths. She brought out the duvet covers, embroidered with their coat of arms, and made the bed. Father took a look outside, checked everything, locked the front door and lay down to sleep beside my mother, who was a dream in a bed in another country.

S
unlight fell between the curtains in the morning, crept across the floor like a tiger and licked me on the cheek. I always woke before I got eaten. It was gone but I could hear it outside roaring. I was convinced that lions and tigers walked the streets – sometimes there was the sound of other animals too, apes or parrots – and the hedge around our house was there to keep out wild beasts, just like in
Peter and the Wolf
.

What I could hear was the Zoo. I had dreamt about it ever since our teacher, Fru Kronov, had said that we were going on a school outing. We lined up in two rows and marched through the town, past the railway station and on out to Sønder Kohave Wood, and there we walked around Nykøbing Folkepark. There was a kiosk at the entrance, where they sold spaghetti for the monkeys and ice cream for the children.

You could pat the goats, but the he-goats butted with their horns and we ran outside. To the left lay the bears' grotto, where a brown bear danced for sugar lumps and turned round and round in endless circles. Antelopes walked the ploughed fields among the cows, and the flamingos stood on stalks in the lake and rotted from the feet up. The monkeys chewed the bars and made faces and reached out their arms for the spaghetti. The lions were skeletal, their manes moulting, and the giant turtle lay on its back, dead. The stench was awful. At the exit a parrot, a blue and gold macaw, sat rocking from side to side pecking at itself and staring at me with evil yellow eyes, and I could not get it
out of my head.

We marched back to the school as though nothing had happened, and behind us the animals howled and bellowed and gathered themselves into a single ear-splitting scream. But no one heard it in Nykøbing. I took a porcelain figure home with me that I had bought at the kiosk with my sweet money. It was a sea lion, and Mother kissed me, gave me a cuddle and put it on the bedside table. There it stood, a memento of my school outing, a souvenir of hell on earth.

T
wo or three times a year Mother and Father went on major shopping expeditions. We would take the ferry, and the tables juddered as we left the quayside, and King Frederik and Queen Ingrid and Princess Margrethe trembled in their frames on the wall. The woman's voice in the loudspeakers wished us a good crossing in three languages, and for 45 minutes there were no limits to the tax-free shopping. Then it was on to Lübeck, and we walked up through the pedestrian precinct, in and out of the shops. I tried on a jazzy shirt that Mother had found, and dreaded the idea of wearing it to school. We had lunch in the Rathauskeller – ‘
Wienerschnitzel mit pommes frites
' – and later we went to Niederegger, the confectioner where they made marzipan. I had an Italian ice cream. Mother drank coffee and smoked cheroots.

‘Such a marzipan they do not have in Dänemark,'
she said, sitting with the shopping bags at her feet – gloves, shoes and
a dress from Jaeger – and Father said how right she was, and nor could you get decent sausages or proper chocolate back home, and then we drove out to the end of the rainbow, where everything you wanted was brought together in one place, Citti Grossmarkt.

It was a cathedral. Even the shopping trolleys were so big that it took two people to push them. We walked along the shelves in the aisles, and everything looked as though you were seeing it through a magnifying glass. There were giant cucumbers and pickled gerkins and more varieties of chips than I had ever seen, and the rows of coloured Smarties went on forever. Father filled up the boot of the car with hams and
sauerkraut
and sausages in tins, with marmalade and salted crackers and chocolate, with wine and vodka. The car was so weighted down on the way home that the traffic in the opposite lane hooted and flashed at us, blinded by our headlights. When we got home, he systematically unpacked all the things we had bought in the sitting room, laying them out and taking a photograph of our haul. Then he stashed them away in the larder down in the cellar, wrote everything down in his diary and registered it all with the price and quantity. Maggi, Dr Oetker, Nutella. We ate frankfurters in the kitchen. Mother served them up with mustard and beetroot.
‘Mmmm,'
she said, and Father nodded and speared another sausage from the saucepan. It was as though they were stocking up for the war that was to come – and in a way they were.

A
unt Annelise, my father's sister, was the illegitimate daughter of King Christian IX and called herself Princess Ann. When she went down to collect her invalid pension it was her royal appanage. She was mad as a hatter, and I only knew her because I had been unlucky enough to answer the telephone a few times when she had been on the other end.

‘Hello, Knud,' she might say. ‘Do you think I might have a word with your father?'

I'd quickly fetch Father, who took the receiver and spoke with her – Mother and I were all ears – and the conversation always ended with Father saying goodbye and ‘I'll be sending you a little envelope'. As soon as he put the phone down, it was as though nothing had happened. But it had, and one day the bell rang, and Annelise stood there in the doorway.

I couldn't believe that it was her, Aunt Annelise, sitting in front of me on the sofa smoking one cigarette after the other. Her hands shook, and she had to get a grip on herself to hit the ashtray that Father had set beside her. I was frightened out of my wits, convinced that it was infectious and that soon we would all go mad. Mother came in with a beer – she placed a silver coaster under the bottle so it didn't mark the mahogany – and Annelise said thank you and gabbled in a nervous stream, skating dangerously along the edge of song and dance and swearing and gobbledegook.

Mother and Father whispered together in the kitchen about her afterwards – I wasn't supposed to hear – and
when Father said, ‘Not on your life!' Mother answered that she had nowhere to go and hadn't even got any clothes. Annelise had been arrested at the English customs smuggling pornography into the country – she had met a man in Nyhavn and they were lovers – the embassy had sent her straight back to Oringe Hospital, but instead she was now on her way to Copenhagen. When it came down to it, she was after money as usual. If Father could just give her a bit, she would vanish as quickly as she had come – and Father gave in and let her stay the night in the guest room.

Never had I heard so many illicit acts referred to at one time. I could hardly believe my ears and dared not think about Aunt Annelise lying and sleeping down in our cellar. When she emerged the following morning, Father handed her an envelope, and she was given some clothes by Mother along with a discarded fur. After savouring her own reflection in the wardrobe mirror, she looked at us as though she expected us to fall on one knee – and then she was out across the ploughed fields, taking the shortest route to Copenhagen, shaking her fist and shouting, ‘This place stinks of death and decay!'