To Siberia (12 page)

“But here we sit with three empty glasses, that wasn’t what we ordered, was it?”

“No, no, that’s all wrong, we’ll soon change that,” says Uncle Nils and picks up the bottles in one hand and waves them in the air so the glass clinks to tell the waitress to bring more. Soon three full bottles are on the table. Uncle Nils is in fine fettle and pours out for us before we can do it ourselves, and then we have to skål again.

“Welcome to the town then, Uncle Nils,” I say, I feel I ought to. “First it was our father, and now it’s you. Maybe everyone will come soon,” but instead of raising his glass Uncle Nils stops smiling. He leans forward so one of the bottles falls over, he is drunk, beer runs over the table, but he does not care, he just grips my arm and squeezes it so I am almost frightened.

“But don’t you two understand anything? Magnus
wanted
to stay at Vrangbæk. He wanted to be a farmer and nothing else. He slaved like a dog to please those two, I’ve never seen anyone work so hard, it was painful,” he says, his eyes fill and the musicians are on the dais starting to play so he has to lean farther forward while two couples make their way on to the dance floor, and he raises his voice:

“But that damned witch wouldn’t look at him, would never touch him or talk to him, and as soon as he could manage on his own he was sent off to town. And the old man let it happen, blessed be his memory, that randy old goat, if you’ll pardon the expression.” Uncle Nils stops talking, he looks down at his hand clutching my arm, the skin is white on both sides right down to the fingers, and he lets go and says:

“I beg your pardon, I’m sorry, I hurt you, I didn’t mean to.”

“It’s nothing,” I say, rubbing my arm cautiously, the blood runs again and it smarts and stings right up to above the elbow.

“Yes, it is. I’ve had too much to drink tonight, I must go home now.” He rises heavily, another bottle falls over and Jesper catches it in flight and gets to his feet too.

“Don’t go, Uncle Nils, stay here with us for a while.”

“No, this ought to be a joyful day for me and I don’t want to spoil it. It was a pleasure to meet you here and not at Vrangbæk, and I understand it’s a secret.” He smiles faintly.

“Besides, I haven’t too far to go home now.”

“Welcome all the same, though.”

“Thank you. And forget those things I said.”

He walks between the tables looking rather like the old Uncle Nils, but not entirely. I turn to Jesper, who is still standing up.

“What was all that about?”

“Nothing. Nothing I haven’t thought about before. I’m not stupid after all.” Then he bows gallantly and says:

“Come on, let’s dance.”

We drink what’s left in our glasses and go out on the dance floor. There are a lot of people there now and the music is loud and there is laughter at the tables and at one of them everyone is singing in chorus. I am not stupid either, no one can say that, and I think of my father out in the fields with his back slowly growing bent and Grandfather in the barn swinging to and fro and Grandmother’s rigid face in the shadows, she is there watching him throw the rope over the beam and standing up on the stool, but she does not stop him, I can’t understand why and I do not know if that is exactly true. Maybe it’s something I have dreamt, but that is what I see and there’s something wrong about it. It doesn’t matter, though, for what I chiefly feel is two bottles of beer on an empty stomach and at some tables the ladies are looking at Jesper, I realize they do not know who I am, for they look at me too, and it’s obvious they hate me with all their hearts. That makes me laugh out loud. Jesper whirls me around to the music, I feel his firm hand on my back. Everyone knows who
he
is, and I am the secret woman.

II

I
  was fourteen and a half when the Germans came. On that ninth of April we woke to the roar of airplanes swooping so low over the roofs of the town that we could see the black iron crosses painted on the underside of their wings when we leaned out of the windows and looked up. The Danish warship
Peder
Skram
was anchored outside the harbor, but it merely lay there silently and did not fire a single shot.

It was still cold then, it had been a hard winter that year with icebreakers along the coast and inside the breakwater, gusts of wind blew in from the west across the mainland from the North Sea, and there was still snow in drifts on the fields and on the roads out to the farms and in Vannverk forest up to the Flade Bakker and the church where my grandfather lay in the graveyard.

In the afternoon a man came cycling down Lodsgate. He wore a cap with ear warmers and a scarf around his neck.

“They’re coming! They’re coming!” he shouted. I thought I had heard that shout before. We got up from the table leaving the layer cake where it was and went up the road together. We were not the only ones. Fishermen and shipyard workers came from the harbor in overalls, the door of Færgekroen flew open and the staff came out with the proprietor leading, he was already drunk, and Herlov Bendiksen came to his door with the apron over his stomach sparkling with tiny splinters of glass when he stood still and even more when he started to walk. Soon there was a small procession of silent people, I heard nothing but their steps on the cobblestones, and we crowded together on the pavement to see the first column arrive. Nothing came, so we went on along Danmarksgate almost up to Nytorv and came to a stop just opposite the offices of the local paper. A figure came rushing out of the door, he tore down the latest posters fastened to a notice board on the wall and left everything blank and bare where there had always been something before. It was my brother Jesper. He called:

“Hi, Sistermine!” right across the street and waved, and I waved back. He looked around and then bent down with his hands on his knees and his rump toward the south, where those approaching would soon enter the town. A man started to laugh and soon everyone standing there was laughing. It was a strange and lonely sound among the buildings, otherwise all was quiet, and Jesper raised a clenched fist in greeting.

“No pasaran, they shall not pass!” he shouted, and vanished inside again as quickly as he had come out.

Only my father did not laugh. He took me by the shoulder and said:

“You must show you are Danish children now.” He was confused, after all it was only me standing there and he had forgotten I was no longer a child. I had been having periods for almost three years and had stopped growing a year ago too, but I had forgotten about it myself, and he probably just meant we should behave normally as they had told us to on the radio.

“Yes, of course we shall,” I said, “we’ll just stand here quite quietly looking at them, and we shan’t even smile.”

We stood there a long time. No one came. In the end a few people went home, and then my father did, but I stayed there gazing at the door across the street.

Three men came out. The first two walked calmly along the sidewalk, the third looked to right and left before he started to run around the house and into an alley with a brown paper parcel under his arm. And then Jesper came. He saw me at once and came straight across. His face looked drawn and he walked quickly, and I heard the slap of his heels on the road that was quiet again.

“Come on,” he said, taking my arm, “we’ll go on home.” The few people still standing about looked anxiously at his face, but he would not say anything before we were farther down the street. It was like a film at the Palace Theater; groups of people whispering to each other, the line in front of the savings bank where everyone wanted to draw their money out, frightened eyes behind windowpanes. Jesper glanced over his shoulder before he leaned towards me and said:

“The Germans have killed five Danish soldiers at the border.”

I saw five bodies lying at the spot where Helga and I had planned to embrace each other, the line was invisible now, the bodies covered it completely and streams of blood ran out on each side as if from a hilltop and down into each country, and one of those who did the shooting might have been Walter.

“So we’re at war then?”

“At war? I don’t think anyone is going to war in this damn country! Haven’t you heard Stauning on the radio? Behave naturally! Those five were sacrificed for appearance’s sake. It was murder. And now we must behave naturally.”

“Where did you hear all this?”

“I do work on a newspaper. We have got a telephone, damn it.”

When we went through the gateway on Lodsgate we did not go upstairs to the flat but on across the yard to the rack where our cycles were, and we pulled them out and rode into the street again and took a zigzag route on side streets until we came to the end of the town to the south. At each block we looked down into the main street to check, but there was no German column there yet. At Møllehuset we had to go out on to the main road to Sæby, for everywhere else was impassibly slippery because of ice and in some places the snow had been blown into drifts across the roads. It was a cold spring and I was frozen to the marrow and defenseless on my cycle when we came out into the open at Bangsbostrand, quite alone on the road with the cold gray sea right in and nothing between us and what was coming. Jesper rode very fast and I kept up, I had made good use of the hours on the goods cycle, but if he was impressed he did not show it.

Just this side of Understed, midway between our town and Sæby, Jesper braked, got off his bike, and squatted down to listen. I did the same. What we heard was the future. A faint drone through the cold, a drone that rose without a sign of fading again, an irreversible drone and Jesper straightened up with a shaking body and rubbed his shoulders before he looked out at the coast. A steep slope led down to the shore from the road with rough sheets of ice all along the edge, and he turned and looked up at the gentle slopes of Understed. The low houses with their red roofs could just be seen over the rise, and the little school called Vangen was hidden in a clump of trees. My father had been a pupil there for several years, in shorts and a peaked cap, to and fro from Vrangbæk which was farther inland. I had cycled that way many times. It was a long way, but his back was still straight then.

A cart track partly covered with snow wound up over the fields, and Jesper pointed and said:

“That’s the only possibility. We’ll nip up there. Fast.”

It was hard to pedal, so we dismounted and pushed the bikes all the way up to a grass field where the cart track came to an end, I felt my breath tearing at my throat and heard Jesper panting in front of me. At the top there was a heap of manure that had just begun to thaw out and would be spread on the fields as soon as spring really came. If it came. From the field we had a good view of the road in both directions and the gray shadow of the
Peder Skram
outside the harbor lying completely still, and we saw the thin floury layer of ice on the beach, a peaceful veil between land and water. And then the Germans came.

First two motorcycles with machine guns sticking up from the sidecars and only the helmets of the soldiers holding the weapons visible, and then came armored vehicles and trucks with soldiers in the back in two rows facing each other and cannons on trailers and two cars with heavy machine guns on the roof and then more trucks, everything in an endless row of helmets without faces and an endless roar that swallowed up all space around it so I could not tell if I was breathing. And perhaps I was not breathing, for there was not enough air left for anyone else. But I heard Jesper sobbing, thin and sharp, he was white in the face and clutching his throat as if he was being strangled. And then the tears came gushing in two straight streams from his eyes. He wiped his nose and sobbed again and again, completely out of control like a little brother. I looked down at the shining column that rolled along, forbidding and unswerving on its way to our town, and I realized that
No pasaran!
was meaningless now, that was what Jesper saw, that it was too late. Then I started to weep too. I leaned against the seat of my bicycle, for my legs would not hold me up any longer, the roar made them tremble and quiver, made the whole earth shake.