To Siberia (9 page)

That was an expression we used now. Thorn in the flesh.

“If she doesn’t stop soon, I’ll get a thorn in the flesh,” Jesper said when my mother played the piano and sang for two hours. He held on to his behind where the flesh was plentiful and moaned and groaned and I could really see it, how the thorn went inward just as sharp as the sting in
Death, where is thy sting,
sharp and painful, and Grandfather had felt them both. But we couldn’t understand why he had used that expression at the Aftenstjernen that time and we did not dare to ask and my father never mentioned the event by so much as one word.

Now he was in debt with the workshop as security. I had never seen the furniture shop. Eventually he bought the Lodsgate Dairy and the tiny flat on the floor above. A steep winding staircase linked the floors with a door opening on to the dairy shop at the bottom of the stairs, and the lavatory was in the yard. The flat was much smaller than the house we had rented from the Baptists. The whole situation seemed uncertain. My mother was to run the dairy and had less time for her piano and hymns. “Praise the Lord. His name be praised,” said Jesper. I had to deliver the milk and cream to the customers before school. I asked my father, and he said Rosevej was a part of our milk round. Jesper had finished with middle school and had to get up early and go to the workshop every morning with an apron on right up to Christmas, and after Christmas he was to be a printer’s devil at the local newspaper office. He was pleased about that. The typographers had a strong trade union and there were more socialists there than flies around a pig’s asshole, he said.

So we moved from Asylgate one day in September. There were gray clouds driving across the sky and a strong wind, but no rain. We borrowed a horse and cart from Vrangbæk, Uncle Nils arrived early in the morning with a brown gelding pulling the cart. He sat bareheaded on the driver’s seat and the wind tore at his hair and the horse’s mane and forelock and it looked unkempt and mournful and nothing like Lucifer had been. Uncle Nils was going to help with the carrying, he usually came rolling up when there was something to be done, silent as always, but Grandmother and my father’s half-brothers stayed at home at Vrangbæk and the farms where they lived. My mother could have done with some help in the kitchen, but none of the women came, so I was the one who stood wrapping up cups and glasses in newspaper even though I was strong enough to lift most things, apart from the piano.

Through the window I saw all our possessions under the open sky, and the sky was huge and the wind beat against loose ends of tablecloths and curtains, the furniture had shrunk and took up ridiculously little space although the house had always seemed full. It was not easy to grasp, but there was not much more than one load plus an extra trip for the piano.

At Lodsgate the piano had to go on the first floor up the narrow winding staircase, and my father and Uncle Nils and Jesper had several bad moments on the way up. I stood in the gateway watching the veins swell in my father’s forehead and Uncle Nils’s gray face and Jesper grinning scornfully all the time.

“I can tell you Christianity was at stake on the turns,” he said afterward—“it was only just rescued. On that staircase I heard words a minor should be protected from. Hell,” he said, smiling as he spoke, enjoying himself more than he had for a long while. For a moment he had considered letting go and leaving the piano to fall, then we should be free of that grief, but then my mother might get hold of a cheap organ instead, so it wouldn’t have been worth the trouble, especially because my father was lowest down and would have had the piano on his head.

We are closer to the harbor now. I hear the throb of the fishing-boat motors and the cranes of the shipyard at evening and drunk men on their way up from the Færgekroen at midnight. Sometimes I hear animals screaming from the slaughterhouse. That cannot be right. I do not think they scream, but I know how they stand packed tightly together in the compounds waiting and scraping their hooves and perhaps that is the sound I hear when I lie in bed and can’t get to sleep.

I walk through our new home, from bedroom to living room, counting the steps, everything is cramped, the kitchen at the top of the stairs has two gas rings and one larder cupboard and room for two people if they
stand
without lifting their elbows. From the little window above the bench I look down into the yard. A little girl I don’t know is skipping outside the lavatory. I walk downstairs and through the door at the end and out into the shop and along the counter at the back to a door in the opposite wall that leads into a small side room with a window on to the street. This closet is three meters by three. Jesper and I have to share it. My mother is filled with misgiving, she bites her lip, she thinks it isn’t right, she wrings her hands and that irritates me. Though I share her misgiving. Jesper hangs up two pictures of ladies above his bed, one of Rosa Luxemburg and one of Greta Garbo, he hopes they will merge into one when he is not looking, when he sleeps and dreams of the new world. I hang a picture of Lucifer over mine. I want white curtains, he wants red ones, like flags, he says. We end up with one of each, so he gets his flag. It looks peculiar. My father blows into his mustache, he thinks it looks daft, but he makes no comment.

Every night I get undressed under the quilt. Jesper carries on as usual, because he has not changed. It makes me transparent and I have to go up the dark stairs in the middle of the night and look at myself in the big mirror and feel my face and my shoulders and chest while he sleeps. I stand there a long time with the small light on, and when I switch it off I can see myself almost without a face, and I think of Irma in her red dress. She stands freezing cold in a big room, she is rubbing her arms. Then I turn the light on and stay there in front of the mirror until I find myself again, and then I go back downstairs and through the shop. The tiles shine dully in the light of the streetlamps, the milk bottles are up to their necks in ice-cold water. I rub my shoulders as I walk past them.

“You brood too much,” my mother says, as if she’s anyone to talk, she walks into closed doors with both hands in her hair and hairpins in her mouth mumbling and her nose gets flattened.

“Dear oh dear,” she says. She is lost in thought at the till with her hand in the drawer searching for change, and she just stands there. A customer can rustle notes before her eyes and her pupils do not move. She is transported from this world, with one foot in heaven, one knee on the stool at communion with the taste of wafer in her mouth.

I stand in the living room looking out of the window between two houseplants, I have been standing there half an hour, she says.

“What are you looking at?”

I look out of the window as if for the first time. Herlov Bendiksen—Glazier, reads a sign on the other side of the street. That is not enough for half an hour.

“Nothing,” I say.

I have moved up to middle school. I like it, I like school and I’m old enough to borrow whatever I want from the library, and I do. I read the books that Jesper reads and I read Johannes V. Jensen and Tom Kristensen who drinks too much and is not a nice man, and I read about Madame Curie. The stacks beside my bed are growing. But Lone isn’t at school anymore. She just stopped coming and I am lonely at the top of the class. It doesn’t taste good. I do not ask after her and no one tells us anything, for her father is head of the school. But sometimes when I’m delivering milk in the morning I look in through the glass door, and I have seen her twice. She sits with her back to the door and does not come out.

One morning when I was a little late her father stood waiting on the stone steps, he nodded at me as if I had never been there before. Now I delivered the milk, the only one in town who was not a boy. He gave me a note asking for their delivery to be doubled. Then he nodded again without looking me in the eye and disappeared inside. There was darkness all around him, gone were the insects with their Latin names, the butterflies and ants and their enviable world. I stayed there on the steps feeling autumn had come. My father would be happy about the extra delivery, but I was not. The goods cycle was heavy enough as it was and if there had not been a wheel on each side of the crate carrier in front I would have crashed on to the cobblestones in a sea of milk more than once.

Then I pedal on and feel my calf muscles growing. They should not be that big on a girl, I get comments in gym lessons, but they make me stand firm, and can be useful for many things. For bracing myself in the playground, for kicking out when I swim, I have already won the school championship in the icy cold water behind Sønderhavn, and I get better and better. Two boys got cramps, I helped one of them up, and I picture long walks in Siberia to remote dwellings that must be made ready to resist the long winter before it sets in. There is weight and substance in all things and I am a girl, but I can walk all day long and keep up with everyone and just feel a pleasant faint trembling in my legs in the evening before I go to bed and sleep like a stone. Sometimes Jesper is there too, brown under his wolfskin cap, because he has just come from southern parts and needs to see other things than palm leaves and walls of hard-beaten clay. And I am happy to have him with me.

That is what I think about when I look out of the window, and I think of Ruben in my class who is the best-looking boy in school now that Jesper has left. He kissed me behind the shed in the playground, and it was all right, but when I went to bed it was already forgotten. He is a Jew. He must have been a Jew before too, but it’s something new now, no one thought about it then. All I know about Jews is what my mother tells me, and she says they hanged Jesus on the cross and let Barabbas go free. But Jesus was a Jew also, and anyway that’s a struggle I want nothing to do with, I think if the Jews hadn’t hanged him on that cross someone else would have, to give my mother something to write hymns and songs about, something to sigh over when she looks up at the big picture above the piano of Jesus on the Mount of Olives. He sits under the moon thinking, tormented in his hour of trial. It fills her life, it filled Asylgate and it fills Lodsgate right down to Færgekroen and then there is a Bible-free area right out to the breakwater, according to Jesper.

I do not think Ruben would have chosen Barabbas, but he says he is afraid. Afraid because his father is afraid when he hears news from Germany, particularly after what was called Anschluss in the newspapers.

I too hear news from Germany. From Helga in Magdeburg. We began to correspond more than a year ago, the whole class made contact with a class in that town to boost our German lessons, but I think I’m the only one to get further than the first two letters.

We write about our brothers. Walter is a member of the Hitlerjugend, but Helga does not want to join and her father does not dare say anything to either of them. I dare not tell Jesper about that bit. She describes her dog Kantor who howls each time the soldiers march through the streets singing. She tells me about the great river Elbe that runs through the town, so they have a harbor although Magdeburg is an inland town. I already knew that, it is in my geography book. I have studied that carefully. Her classmates who were Jewish have moved away, she writes. I tell her about Lone and about Siberia. I can do that because Helga is so far away. I do not understand, she writes, there are prison camps in Siberia, das habe ich in der Schule gelernt. But Siberia is a big country, and perhaps she has not learned very much, so I forgive her.

We have arranged to meet. We will go by train from our own hometowns and get off at the border and recognize each other at first glance and embrace each other at the precise spot where we are bound to see the line that is drawn between Denmark and Germany. But for the time being there’s no money, and everything is so uncertain here, she writes. So we shall have to wait.

I put down the last letter and I must look rather dejected. Jesper stands in the doorway, he has to mind the shop while my mother is out on an errand. He looks at me.

“What’s up with you?” he says.

“Helga says there are prison camps in Siberia. She’s learned about it at school.”

“Nazi propaganda,” says Jesper.

N
ow the nights are completely black. Only the white crests of the waves to be seen out at sea when it’s windy and the flashing lights from boats coming straight over from Sweden and sometimes I see the light from the portholes of larger ships and then it is reflected in the black water, lonely and yellow. When I lean out of the window of our little room I can just see down the street and out along the harbor and past the breakwater.

Gas has been found underneath the town and in neighboring areas. Fifty meters down, sixty meters down, there is gas under the sea and it bubbles up as if from thousands of bottles of pop. People go out in boats on Sundays to look, and boreholes are drilled at Bangsbo and near the Frydenstrand Hotel. They are boring on the lawn behind the Seamen’s Home and in several gardens in the town. The gas is piped or put into big bottles and used for stoves and cars, for factories, even the Sæby bus has two long gas containers on its roof. They are heavy, from the inside you can see the roof caving in.