To Siberia (10 page)

On Danmarksgate the flames of the gas lamps flicker. There are two rings high up under the lamps, and the lamplighter pulls them using a long pole with a hook at the end: he pulls one ring to light the lamp, another to put it out. Jesper used to have great fun sneaking after the lamplighter with a similar pole he had made, and when the man in the black uniform had pulled one ring and gone on to light the next lamp, Jesper scurried out of the shadows and pulled the opposite ring. They went on like that right up to Nytorv. When the lamplighter had arrived there he always turned to contemplate his work, for he was the lord of light and darkness, and then the whole street might be pitch black.

“Now that was really worthwhile work,” says Jesper, “but hell, I haven’t time to go on with it now.”

And that’s true. He puts in long days at the workshop and by evening he is completely worn out, for my father drives him hard. His head buzzes with the screaming of the saw and he is faint from the lack of voices. Jesper likes to talk, likes to tell stories, likes to
listen to
stories, but my father does not say much and works all day long bowed over his bench with his back to Jesper, and that humped back is big and hard …

“… as a rock,” says Jesper.

In the evenings he often goes out to meetings of the Spain Committee. The war there is raging in its third year and I feel good when I’m alone in the room, being able to read what I want without comments or just to gaze out of the window and not have to explain what I’m thinking about when I’m thinking of what I call nothing. But still I do miss him. There is not much laughter indoors when Jesper is out.

Lone is dead, but no one says what she died of. It is not mentioned at our dinner table and nobody else I talk to knows. When I deliver the milk to Rosevej there are always lights on in every room, and again when I cycle past in the evening the lights are on. I think they must be on all the time. Nobody waits on the steps when I get there in the morning, but the delivery is back to normal again. That was written on a scrap of paper fixed to the door frame. I sometimes see Hans at the top of the town, but he never even makes faces, just turns his back as if I was the one who had infected Lone with something indescribably terrible. I have not, no one can say that. But I feel miserable. I feel like being ill, really ill, and just lying in bed looking up at the ceiling and making myself go empty. But I am too strong and will not be left in peace. There are customers ringing the bell and bottles clinking and loud voices, there is my mother wringing her hands and asking what she can do, it is not like me, she says, and Jesper comes in and has to go to bed or just
be
there. So I go to school. I work even harder at my lessons, and my marks have never been better. But I don’t feel at all triumphant.

Where I live now there is no one to keep me company on the way to school, not many families live in the harbor area, so I have to walk on my own when the milk is delivered and my bike parked in the yard. When I come back along Lodsgate at three o’clock my mother is standing on the steps to the shop, she looks at me and says:

“If you walk along with your nose in the air you’ll never make any friends,” and says for the first time what I have heard for the rest of my life, that I am stuck up. But that is not true, I have friends. I have Marianne and Ruben and Pia and others, we go cycling and swimming, but I get queasy if I look at the ground when I walk. I hold my head high and glance sideways over the rooftops.

“What’s the weather going to be like?” asks Jesper. He follows my gaze and uses me to forecast the weather.

“Light cloud cover with glimpses of sun,” I reply and can’t help laughing.

“That’s fine,” he says, “we could do with some sunshine now. And you could do with tripping the light fantastic. I’m going out tonight, shall we say ten o’clock?”

Ten o’clock is my bedtime, I have to get up early for the milk and I like to go to bed before Jesper comes in and have an hour to read by the light from the street. I’m just fourteen now and he’s almost seventeen and we both look more. Everyone says so. I look at him sideways. He’s different, narrower in the face, older, but now he’s here again.

“Find something to wear,” he says.

I go down to the little room at quarter to ten as usual, saying good night on the way, and once in the room I go to the wardrobe, search and find the blue dress I wear at Christmas and important birthdays. I mustn’t wear it out, it must be saved, my mother says, and it is the only decent thing I have. I brush my hair till it foams around my head and get out my light shoes from under the bed, then sit down with my coat on my lap and wait. A little later he comes down.

“Why do they always want to chat when you haven’t got time, and only then,” he says.

I look out of the window while he changes. He notices, maybe for the first time. I feel his eyes on my back, everything goes quiet and then he starts to whistle the Internationale.

All the clothes he owns hang over the chair beside his bed. At regular intervals the chair falls over and all the clothes land on the floor in a heap and stay there. Sometimes for ages.

“You need to have a clear picture of what’s in your wardrobe, otherwise it’ll be sheer chaos,” he says and finds what he is looking for in the heap. He always does this.
My
clothes hang in a neat row in the wardrobe and yet I’m the one who often stands there unable to choose what
I’m
going to wear.

The wrought iron gates to the yard are closed after nine o’clock and my father keeps the key, although Jesper has told them upstairs he is going out, and with me in tow we cannot go the usual way past the stairs, across the entrance and out into the street. So we go through the dairy shop, and Jesper has the key to
that
door in his pocket.

We get behind the counter and people are walking by in the light on the pavement and it’s dark in the shop between the shelves farthest in. We stay in the shadow of the icebox waiting. Jesper has hold of my shoulder. He is a head taller than me, my mother says I won’t grow any taller, perhaps she is right. When the street is empty again I walk towards the door, but Jesper bends over the sink where the milk bottles stand in water with only their necks sticking up and takes out a half liter bottle. A ray of light falls through the window, it drips and sparkles, he pulls down the cap and takes a long gulp, like a man in the Sahara.

“God, I was thirsty, skål, Sistermine,” he says to the ceiling and takes another gulp.

“That costs twenty-five øre,” I say, without knowing why.

“Money’s the one thing I’ve got plenty of, Your Stinginess. I’ll soon be upper class on the pay I get from him up there. You’ll have to clean my shoes. Here.” I take the bottle and drink from it too. It tastes rich and cool and slightly sickly, I would rather have it hot with honey before going to sleep. But I finish what is left and put the bottle behind the counter.

Jesper cautiously unlocks the door. Before he opens it he takes a woolen sock out of his pocket and pushes it into the bell so it won’t ring when we go out. He may have done this often before and I imagine a secret life after dark when he walks through shadowy backstreets to dim rooms with a password at the door and men with cover names and low voices leaning over tables and behind them faceless women in tight dresses showing most of their breasts, and long legs in net stockings under their dresses and all of them completely different from me. I feel like going in again, letting Jesper vanish alone into the evening and leaving me in peace, for I have to get up early tomorrow. But then I remember he’s always sound asleep when I have to go upstairs in the night, that his bed is never empty, but on the contrary seems to fill the small room, and I catch a glimpse of us both in the big plateglass window of Herlov Bendiksen’s, on the way out of a darkened shop. Jesper in the loose coat he bought with his own money and his black hair that has grown long and full of curls, and me with my coat and my beret on top of all the abundant brown. And I become what I see. I see a book in which this is the beginning and no one knows yet what will happen and why we are coming out of a dark shop at this time of night. There are butterflies in my stomach and a weightless feeling before what is to come.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see that when you see it.”

We went north along Danmarksgate, past the gateway into the backyard where my father’s workshop was in a low half-timbered building, and right up to the Løveapotek and the church square. The streetlights were lit the whole way, no one had taken up where Jesper had left off.

“The young are work-shy nowadays. It’s a sad sight,” he said. “I haven’t got a pole anymore, maybe I could climb up.” He went over and tried putting his arms round a lamppost and calculating the distance to the top.

“
I
can do that,” I said. “Jesper, let me do it.”

I ran up to the lamppost and pushed him aside, got hold of it as high as I could and started to pull myself up. I was strong enough, I was a squirrel, my arms could take it and the gloves I had on gave a good grip. At the top I squinted at the flame, pulled the ring, and the flame sank and went out. I leaned my forehead against the post for a moment, I was as hot as if I had a temperature, my head ached, and then I lowered myself down to Jesper. He stood with his hands at his sides, smiling.

“There’s hope yet,” he said. “The coming generation has seized the torch and extinguished it for a while. ‘Light over the land, that is what we want,’ but not at all hours. Well done, Sistermine.”

When we had gone a little farther up the street I turned around and looked back. In the row of lights there was a black hole and I had made that. I felt like walking down the street again and standing in that darkness feeling safe. The clock on the church tower showed half past ten, the last bus from Ålborg came rattling up from Søndergate and passed us before it turned down to the station on the other side of the church. We watched the red rear lights disappear, it had filled the evening with sound and then it was quiet and I clearly heard the sea behind all the houses and I thought: how silent this town is, and yet never silent. But Jesper turned around and said:

“Oh, no, not again.” And then I heard it too, hooves on the cobblestones and squeaking wheels. It was Baron Biegler’s black landau. The two horses looked worn out with foam on their flanks, and when the carriage drove past you could see the coat of arms had fallen off the door and it was so close we could smell the reek of frightened horses. The carriage stopped just ten meters in front of us outside the Music House, the door was flung open and Baron Biegler got out in his sheepskins that were not so white anymore, and he had something big and heavy in his arms.

“It’s a gramophone,” whispered Jesper and the baron lifted it up high so I could easily feel its weight right up to where I was standing and he threw it in through the window.

“It doesn’t even work!” he yelled while the splinters of glass hung for a moment before crashing into the shop, and if a grown man could weep, that was what I heard. He was blind drunk. On his way back into the carriage he stumbled on the step and fell forward, and the groan I heard made me think of huge animals, elephants or rhinoceros with wrinkled lifeless skin falling down into the hunter’s pit.

“He doesn’t need any help, that one,” said Jesper, “he’s beaten by his own machine. Bankrupt, kaput, finished. I’m sure he couldn’t pay for that gramophone. All his money has gone into booze. Idiot!” And then the carriage vanished as swiftly as it had come, not towards the Aftenstjernen, not back to Bangsbo, but up towards the railway station.

“Where d’you think he’s going?”

“To the scrap heap of history,” said Jesper.

It was all over in an instant. On the church tower the clock still showed half past ten, and it struck once as we walked past. At the same moment we heard fog horns hooting from the harbor and fog came drifting up Tordenskjoldsgate, Lodsgate, Havngate, it fell silently over Fiskerklyngen in Gamle Fladstrand where the hero Terje Vigen landed in Ibsen’s long poem. Soon only the streetlamps rose clear and shone down on a mass that devoured everything, people and houses, we could not see more than three meters in front of us. The lights around us were hard to make out and Jesper stayed where he was; stretching out his arms like a blind man he said:

“This is what it must have been like when the Man from Danzig was shipwrecked. He must have been frightened. He thought he knew where everything was, and then it was all sheer chaos. Put your hand in front of your eyes, Sistermine, and spin around three times, then tell me which is the way home.”

I did as he said, I spun around so I almost fell down, I opened my eyes and peered in all directions.

“I don’t know.”

“Then anything can happen.”

He still stood with his arms out feeling around for our route as if in doubt before finally deciding and saying:

“Come on, we’ll try this way,” but I do not think he was ever in doubt. We turned right and I thought I could glimpse the shape of Tordenskjold’s House on Skippergate, and that street led back the way we had come, just farther east and nearer the sea. We walked carefully, reverently, I thought, as if at a funeral, and then the foghorn struck our bodies, for there was nothing to cut it off, there was nothing but cold vapor everywhere, my stomach felt shivery and the damp air covered my face and made me shudder even though my coat was warm and covered my knees.

“It’s cold,” I said.

“It’s colder in Spain.”

“What are you talking about? Oranges grow in Spain.”

“Not in the mountains. The earth is frozen so hard there you can’t dig trenches, so the Fascist hunters have easy targets. The eleventh battalion has so few weapons left now the new volunteers have to wait till a comrade falls before they get a gun.”

I tried to fill the fog with uniformed men in a frozen Spain, but the fog was only fog.

“And d’you know what they write home about?”

“No.”

“They run around in the snow with hardly any weapons freezing their butts off and then they write: ‘Send more chocolate!’ Damn it! Maybe we should rob a shop. We could do Fru Sandbjerg’s in Felledvej, she’s a stupid cow anyway. Her shelves are bursting with chocolate.” His arms cut through the fog, they were still stretched out, he turned, walked backward, and I said: