The Woman from Bratislava (29 page)

‘Jesus Christ. Why the hell did no one ever tell me? Does Fritz know?’

‘Fritz has known for some years.’

‘But not little brother?’

‘Would it have mattered to you?’

He sat for a moment, puffed on his cigarette and said quietly:

‘No, sis. To be honest, no, it wouldn’t.’

‘There you are then.’

‘She showed me a picture of him in SS uniform. Fucking disgusting.’

‘Don’t be so childish. You’re a historian. You know how it was.’

‘Was he there on the Eastern Front. Did he lock up and torture decent Danish men and women?’

‘Yes to the first. A definite no to the second. But I think we should save this until I’m released.’

‘Will you be?’

‘Yes. They have nothing on me.’

‘They’ve been questioning me too, and other people. About your revolutionary past.’

‘I never did anything illegal.’

‘What about all your lot’s talk of revolution and bombs. Christ, you even had your own little newspapers. You were all so flaming high-minded that you wouldn’t give house room to any opinions but your own.’

That angered me, he saw it in my eyes and drew in his horns.

‘Sorry, sis. That sounded worse than it meant to. But Christ, the seventies was a weird time.’

‘Could I have another cigarette?’ I asked, and he lit one for me. This time it only tasted of smoke. It would be easy to start smoking again, it takes the edge off and gives you something to do with your hands. Like being a baby again, stuffing something in your mouth and being soothed by it.

I said: ‘Having such high principles probably did engender a certain lack of sensitivity. The aim justified the means. I freely
admit it. Some people remember the late-sixties as a dream, a time of hope, of euphoria. My own memories are actually tinged with bitterness at the implacability of the men in particular. My good memories are associated with the solidarity of the women’s movement. I do miss that sometimes. But the male
revolutionaries
? No thanks. I also admit that the ghost of totalitarianism hovered over our ranks, but the revolution never came to
anything
. Our principles were not put to the test, as Dad’s were. For the large majority of us theorising was as far as it went. The Danes did not want revolution. We did not have to choose which side to fight on in a war.’

‘Thank God for that.’

‘You’re an old social democrat, Teddy.’

‘Oh, no – I’m not anything, really. Slightly to the left, tending towards the centre, Danish wishy-washy, that’s my style.’

I smiled at him, my unprincipled little brother:

‘There was no actual risk attached to any of it, for me or the others. We took it very seriously, of course, all the time knowing, perhaps, that it was only a phase. And if you really want to know, I changed my outlook in the early nineties, after the Wall came down. I don’t suppose there is any way round the reforms.
Totalitarianism
is not the answer. The cost is too high. I have laid the totalitarian ghost, Teddy. Besides, I’ve always been a good girl, dutifully attending to my studies, my lectureship, my students and, eventually, my professorship.’

‘Better late than never,’ he said, and I felt a surge of resentment at his implicit disdain. He had never had any principles to speak of and like most people with no principles he found it easy to judge.

‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘They can’t do you for that, anyway. If they did, they’d have to collar a whole load of the nation’s finest sons and daughters along with you, haul them out of Parliament and Danmarks Radio and managing editors’ offices and wherever else the revolution’s somewhat ageing advance guard now spends its respectable, market-oriented time. They’d have trouble fitting
them all in here, I tell you. But it’s like I’ve always said: words are cheap in this country. They have no consequences.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Teddy. But don’t worry. They have nothing on me. This is just the last shock wave from the front line of the cold war. I’ll be out soon.’

‘I’m glad to hear it, sis. I mean, what would we do without you? You’re what holds the family together.’

I could tell there were a lot of private questions he wanted to ask, but he could see from my face that this would not be wise, not with so many ears – both human and electronic – listening in. We sat for a moment or two, holding hands, and then, unable to resist, he said:

‘What’s her name, this dear sister I’ve suddenly acquired?’

‘Mira. Mira Majola.’

‘Very pretty sounding, I must say, but she told me her name was Maria.’

‘Some other time, brother mine.’

The prison guard coughed and announced that our time was up, we would have to say our goodbyes. Sorry, he said, quite kindly really, but those were the rules. I could picture Toftlund with the headphones over his ears, cursing this stickler for cutting us off just as the conversation was getting interesting. I would have loved to spend the whole afternoon with Teddy anywhere else but the Western Prison, but I was also happy that the time was up. I was in no mood for sharing family secrets with the intelligence service’s great, hearkening ear.

We both stood up, hugged, and Teddy whispered in my ear:

‘So what’s your feeling about our real father, sis?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Nazi, bigamist, traitor to his country and his family. A
murderer
too, for all we know. Whose was that body in Hamburg harbour with his passport on it? Have you ever wondered about that? Because that’s one hell of a note.’

I felt anger well up inside me, but I did not want to part from
my little brother on bad terms, so I did not rise to the bait. Instead I simply said:

‘You don’t understand, Teddy. But one day it will all be explained to you. And then you’ll understand. But not now and not here.’

‘Alright, sis,’ he said and gave me a squeeze, although I could tell that it hurt his back. ‘Take care. We can’t wait to see you out of here.’

‘Neither can I. Say hi to Fritz for me.’

‘Right-oh.’

‘And give Mum a call.’

‘She doesn’t understand a word you say.’

‘She recognises your voice. Talk about the weather. It doesn’t matter what you say. She just likes to hear our voices.’

‘How can you tell. The inside of her head’s like a chalk pit.’

I took a step backwards, laughed at him. He could always make me laugh.

‘Teddy. Behave yourself.’

‘Come home soon, sis. We miss you.’

‘It won’t be long now. Say hello to Janne too.’

‘Will do, sis. Will do.’

He left and I was taken back to my cell, but not, strangely enough, to interrogation. Maybe they had to decipher and analyse my conversation with my little brother before coming back to plague me with questions which, more and more, seemed to go round in circles.

So I paced up and down my seven square metres, staring at the yellow walls and the tiny window. The light outside my cell had a blue cast to it today, as if the April sun was beginning to gain the upper hand. Easter can’t be that far away. I sat down on my cot then got up again, my thoughts going back in time, as I tried yet again to remember.

The truth is that I can recall very little of the time after we
trundled
off in the removal van, leaving the village on the island of Fünen like thieves in the night. There are a couple of years which
are shrouded in twilight in my memory. A darkness relieved only by a few fragmented recollections, but otherwise consisting of nothing but a dull, constant ache and a sense of loss.

THE FACT WAS
that I felt betrayed, but I also missed my father as badly as only my adolescent heart could. I could not accept that he would willingly have left us. There had to be more to it than that: some deep, dark conspiracy which the grown-ups were keeping from me. My mind seemed to be caught in an eternal twilight. I do not think my mother was particularly aware of how I was feeling. I don’t think she realised how unhappy I was. If she did then she certainly did not do anything about it. She wanted no hysterics, as she put it. In any case she had more than enough on her plate, getting us installed in a small three-room flat in a sedate
provincial
town in Jutland and creating a decent life for us in the thrifty fifties when times were still lean. Money was tight. Being a single mother with three young children was no picnic then either.

Mum was intelligent, she had taken her school-leavers’
certificate
. This gained her a job in a solicitor’s office as a sort of general dogsbody. But it was not long before her sunny smile and quick wit made her indispensable to Mr Kelstrup the solicitor. He was a stout, rubicund widower in his early sixties, with a penchant for partaking of lengthy and substantial lunches at the town’s quality restaurant in the Chamber of Commerce building, while a trainee took care of the most pressing business. Mr Kelstrup was an
easygoing
sort of man who did not worry too much about expensive academic qualifications. So in no time Mum was acting as
secretary
, personal assistant and even something of a sparring partner, whom her employer could bounce ideas off. There were not that many of them in the office, it was not a big practice. It dealt mainly with conveyancing, a bit of debt-collecting from lowlier members of the community, the execution of wills and the occasional court
case, providing legal aid for petty criminals. Only later did I
discover
that he too had been on the wrong side in the war and had even spent six months at Faarhus Prison Camp for collaboration. His sentence had been suspended, though, and his licence to
practise
law restored to him. The last German refugees had been sent home long ago, or chased out like cattle, the last executions for treason carried out and most people in the town felt that, well, they had always known Mr Kelstrup the solicitor, and he was only a little fish. And besides, he was cheaper than the other solicitors in town, so for goodness sake. There was really no more to it than that. And anyway, plenty of folk had been taken with the thought of a
Neueuropa
in the days when everything had looked very
different
. As long as he remembered to put a light in the window on May 4th then he was no different from anyone else.

Mum was given some help getting started. By people who remained nameless, but also by Kelstrup. It was no accident that he should have given her a job at a time when his practice was not doing enough business to merit taking on another member of staff. But Mum was good for business. She was well-liked, she inspired confidence and she organised Mr Kelstrup’s diary, thus ensuring that he kept all of his appointments – something which, due to his weakness for the delights of the table, he had not always been so good at doing. As a teenager I did not understand the set-up. This was something I only discovered later: how people discreetly tried to help one another, even when they had long since forsaken their old ideals. A small favour here and there. That was how it worked all over Denmark. And that, I suppose, is how it still works in my native land.

So my mother found her feet. Teddy was looked after by a nice lady known to us simply as Mrs Hansen, found through Mr
Kelstrup
, and Fritz had made a good pal with whom he spent all his time. The whole family quickly fell into a routine that did not differ from anyone else’s. The essential thing was not to stand out. To have the same furniture and curtains as other Danes. To keep
one’s house and children neat and clean. To adhere to the
bourgeois
norms of the silent majority. Not to imagine one was
anything
special. Not to push oneself forward or show off.

At school we simply said that our father was dead, hinting that he had fallen in the battle for the Freedom of Denmark. When the boys played their war games Fritz was a resistance fighter as often as he was a German. You had to take turns. More and more often, though, they would play cowboys and Indians instead, inspired by the Westerns they saw at the cinema on Sunday afternoons. But in any event our Mum and Dad were not divorced. That we made very clear.

Pretty soon people ceased to take any great interest in why we had moved to the town. Society was changing. Maybe not so as you would notice yet, in the latter half of the fifties, but the old world was on its last legs and a new one was knocking at the door. When Fritz turned fourteen and, to his great relief, could finally leave school at the end of seventh grade, Mr Kelstrup secured him an apprenticeship to one of the local baker’s. Fritz was happy at his simple, straightforward work – his main concern was whether his greased-back quiff made him look like James Dean.

Teddy was too young to understand. The one time Mum
mentioned
Dad’s name was on the day after she got the job at Mr
Kelstrup’s
office. She sat us down around the tile-topped coffee table and told us that now we were going to make a life for ourselves here. We had been granted a fresh start and starting afresh was never easy, but it was all going to be alright. We were not to say anything to anyone about our past, where we came from, or about Dad. The war was in the past now and the man in the street no longer gave it much thought. Only the newspapers still wrote about the resistance movement and those five accursed years. Ordinary people had other things to think about and we were now decent folk like all the rest. Which was good, and we should be happy about that. As usual, Fritz said nothing, but I asked about Dad. Mum took my hand and said:

‘I’ll be honest with you, pet. I don’t know. He’s been gone before, but he always came back.’

‘Is he going to come back this time, Mum?’ I asked, tears filling my eyes.

‘I don’t think you should count on that, Irma dear. I think you should consider your Dad dead.’

‘He’s not dead. He’ll come back to us!’ I had screamed, not
surprisingly
, and ran from the table to my bed, where I wept into my pillow and railed at Mum for letting Dad down until she came in to comfort me. She stroked my hair, which both pleased and infuriated me. She made soothing noises, but said nothing. I think she felt just as confused as I did, but as a woman her first instinct was to comply with the ways of a man’s world, bow her head and accept the situation.

I appeared to be the only one with an aching heart, a hollow sense of longing and betrayal mingled with the hope of once more hearing my father whistling as he came up the stairs, this time to ring the bell on our nice, brown front door. It may sound as if I remember a lot, but I don’t really. In actual fact, I only remember the feeling of loss and the terrible loneliness, because I did not form any close ties. I made no friends, had no school pals. I was not part of any of the giggling, whispering groups of girls who sauntered around the playground, arm in arm, pretending not to see the boys. But I was never bullied either. It was simply accepted that I was a bit of a weirdo, who did not play with the others or, later, talk to the boys, but just read books and was boring. I don’t even remember my mother’s marriage, at the town hall, to our head teacher and have only the vaguest memory of moving into his spacious headmaster’s residence. I remember my room there, but I was sixteen by then and starting to emerge from the gloom. It is the years from thirteen to eighteen that are like a dark tunnel containing only brief flashes of recollection and I am not even sure whether these are things I remember or only heard about. Mum told me much later, when I was grown up, that she had been
very, very worried about me. I wore away to a shadow, grew so thin that she had been seriously concerned for my health. And the onset of my periods was long overdue, or so both my mother and the doctor felt. The doctor recommended that I drink double cream and have regular phototherapy sessions at the hospital. You could have talked to me about Dad, I told my mother later when I was a grown woman, but she had looked hurt and replied that she had not wanted to waste any more of her life on that man. And anyway, she had had more than enough to do, providing food and clothing for three young children. Then later she had found a new husband who had been good to her and the children, so there had been no reason to go raking up the past. No good could come of that. She would never talk about him. It was almost as if she denied his very existence. She insisted on us calling the
headmaster
Dad. Fritz went along with it for the sake of peace and Teddy because he loved our step-father, but I absolutely refused, even though this earned me the only slap in the face my mother has ever given me. However, once she understood that I had no
intention
of relenting, she let it go. Possibly also because my step-father did not seem to have any problem with me calling him by his first name. Although, looking back on it, I think he was hurt. He had married late and felt that he had accepted his wife’s family as his own. They had no children together. I don’t know whether it was too late, or Mum didn’t want to, or maybe my step-father couldn’t have chldren.

I don’t know why my mother married the headmaster. He was very much in love with her though. Anybody could see that. He adored her and would have done anything for her. Mum liked him for his patience and kindness and selfless love, but she was not the slightest bit in love with him. That much was obvious to me. She may have grown to love him eventually, but their’s was not a passionate relationship. Mum went on working after she got married, which was still not all that common then. She already had the same surname as him, but she took a certain satisfaction
now in introducing herself as Mrs Pedersen, the headmaster’s wife. Perhaps she married him because he promised to be faithful to her and because he gave her financial security. In those days the headmaster was one of the leading lights of the community, a solid figure of authority who commanded respect. Perhaps she married him because he was dull and predictable and would never surprise her, positively or negatively, as Dad had continually done throughout their stormy, passionate years together.

By the time I learned Dad’s secret it was too late to talk to her about it properly. Because by then my mother’s brain could no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy. She inhabited her own imaginary world and I could not get through to her. Or was her ability to repress things so highly developed that even in her dementia she upheld the pretence of a happy marriage to just one man, my step-father?

Mum never knew that I lived a double life. That as a double agent I had one face which I presented to the world and another belonging to my secret life, into which no one was allowed entry. I was known as a quiet girl, with a reputation for being moody, but I worked hard at school. Because I had realised very early on that education was my ticket out of the prison in which I felt myself confined; that if I was to hold my own in the rough, tough,
suppressive
world of men then I would have to be smarter and better qualified than them. It had not taken me long to figure out that even the dumbest, most poorly educated man believed he had a right to lord it over women purely by virtue of his sex.

It was taken for granted that I would go to high school, even though at that time it was still not a matter of course for girls to do so. But my step-father, my mother and my teachers were all agreed that I was a very bright child and that, even if I was a little too withdrawn and did not show enough initiative in class, I was definitely high school material. My marks were always excellent. And I was never any trouble, which in those days was the ultimate seal of approval.

If only they had known how I felt inside. I hated them with all my heart. I hated their bourgeois way of life, their double
standards
, their concealment of the truth, their hypocrisy and their ability to shape the past to fit their present life. I saw the people around me as insects trapped in a bottle, fluttering about, beating their heads off the glass which, in their blind stupidity, they could not see. These people did not know they were imprisoned. That for all their surface gloss, they could not hide how haplessly they were formed by the spirit of the times. Their notion that the more they bought they happier they would be, that the good times were here and could only get better, made me sick. I was sure that my father would have seen right through them. He could not stand the complacency of Danish provincial life and had left us, not because he did not love us, but because our two-facedness made him sick at heart. Although obviously I knew nothing of it back then I intuitively perceived the repressive tolerance of capitalism and its exploitation of the individual. Although I could not have put it into words, my eyes were opened to the petit-bourgeois shackles of society.

I sought refuge in the world of books, read every book in the library. To read was to be alone. To read was to be left in peace. To read was to be free. And reading held at bay, at least for a while, the urge to kill every last one of them. The only thing I liked about my step-father was that his income made it possible for us to live in a house where I had my own room. With a door which I could shut and lock. Which no one could enter. A room of my own. Nothing unusual in that today, but in those days it was no more than a dream for most women. Because it was not just the four walls themselves that mattered, but the fact of having a place that was totally your own domain. Where you could be a free woman.

It was in this room that I endeavoured to understand what Denmark had been like under the German occupation. The local library was not a great help in this respect: most of its new
acquisitions
tended to be about the valiant freedom fighters and the
Danish resistance during those five dark years when the people had stood shoulder to shoulder. Shelves and shelves on that subject. But about the other side, about the collaborators and those who fought on the German side, there was next to nothing. But reading between the lines, in all the touched-up accounts and the things left unsaid, I divined the hypocrisy of it all, the
misrepresentation
of those years from 1940 to 1945. I realised it was a case of a collective memory lapse and a general consensus to stick to the myth. The truth was suppressed, only myths were created. Victims were unearthed and scapegoats appointed, my father being one of the latter. I instinctively understood in my head and in my heart that Nazism was a heinous ideology, and I wished I could have asked my father how he could serve such a system, but I could not. I never disputed the killing of the six million Jews, but I understood all the Nazi talk of a super-race. The idea that some people were born to lead the masses, who did not know any better and needed, therefore, to be moulded. And I saw also that even worse than Nazism were the double standards of the bourgeois, so-called democratic society and its cynical exploitation of the naivety of ordinary human beings. I am not sure if I was capable of expressing myself in such terms at that time, but that is how I felt. I had been betrayed by my father, who had been betrayed by the society in which he lived and had therefore been forced to act as he did. They said he had acted of his own free will. They wanted us to believe that people are free to choose. The truth, as I saw it, was that like a puppet he had been manoeuvred towards his inevitable fate.