To Siberia Read online

  “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.

  At my side Jesper let go of his bicycle and began to talk, quietly at first and then louder and louder.

  “Bloodiest hell,” he said, “the devil in blackest hell, flaming devilish hell,” and when I looked up he had dug his hands into the half-melted outer layer of the dung heap. He tore big pieces out and threw them down the slope, and even though they didn’t reach far I was afraid the soldiers would turn around and see us and mow us down where we stood without any protection, because he yelled as well:

  “The future is shit,” he yelled, the tears pouring down, “the future is shit, just like this. Take this, you Nazi swine! Do you hear!” And he pulled more half-frozen lumps from the heap and hurled them as far as he could, but they did not hear him. Not one helmet moved and the gun barrels pointed straight up at the sky. Then Jesper gave up. He stood there with his hands at his sides and lumps of cow dung right up his arms. He was gasping for breath and blinking and blinking and I took the few steps over to him and dried his cheeks with my handkerchief.

  “I wish,” I said aloud, “I wish one of those vehicles would drive right off the road and disappear.” And I had barely finished before we heard a roaring from down there. One of the trucks had driven too far out, its back wheels spun on the ice sheets and the back where the soldiers sat slid over the edge and the roar we heard was the wheels in thin air. And then the truck vanished, rear first down the slope to the shore, and the soldiers yelled and jumped out on each side.

  No one seemed to have been hurt, but one link in the unbreakable chain was suddenly missing.

  “Well I’ll be damned, Sistermine,” said Jesper between two deep breaths—“that wasn’t bad,” and he smiled for the first time that day.

  Two German soldiers stand on the quay weeping. They don’t stand together, but on each side of the gangway of a troopship. One of them faces Pikkerbakken behind the town, the other the shipyard, but I do not know if they see anything at all. They are young, not much older than Jesper, and they are being sent to Norway. There is a war on in Norway, in Denmark it is quiet. They have had a good time in Denmark.

  “They drink the cream straight out of the bucket,” my father says and means it literally.

  “They just come straight in from the street and drink the cream out of the bucket.” He has a gray mustache now and his temples are grizzled, I think he looks stylish and he blows cigar smoke into the air and the wind throws it back into my eyes until the tears start to run. I see the world through the same haze as the soldiers, the gray-green uniforms are wavering, it’s irritating, I blink hard, and the one who is looking at the shipyard moves his lips.

  “What’s that he’s saying?”

  “He’s saying mutti, ‘mama.’”

  “I’d never say that. I would never stand here crying and saying mama,” I say, wiping my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” says my father. He has just told me I won’t be able to go on to gymnasium. That’s why we’re out for a walk. I am the best pupil leaving from middle school. I had Excellent for my main mark.

  “We have discussed it and we agree,” he says and means my mother and himself, but of course I know she is the one who decided. He is just loyal.

  “I can work in the evenings, and in the holidays. I can manage, I’m strong.”

  “I’m sure you can. But it’s not just the money. There’s the war as well.”

  “What war? Hardly anyone fights in this country.” I turn towards one of the soldiers and shout:

  “NO ONE DARES TO FIGHT IN THIS COUNTRY!”

  “Hush, girl! What are you thinking of?” He doesn’t know what to do so he puts his hand over my mouth. His hand smells of wood shavings and polish. I take his hand away and he doesn’t stop me.

  “But it’s true! And he doesn’t understand what I say. They’ve been here two years and don’t understand a word of Danish. All they do is march, dig trenches, and bathe at Frydenstrand.” My stomach knots up and I take a step towards the one who said mama.

  “Kommst du von Magdeburg? Heisst du Walter? Ist Helga die Name deiner Schwester?” He turns slowly, his eyes are full of tears, his nose is red and he dries his eyes with the back of his hand like a child.

  “Nein,” he says, shaking his head.

  “Idiot,” I say, and he understands that. I can see him drying up. He seizes the strap of his gun and his expression changes. My father grips my shoulder and mutters fiercely in my ear:

  “Now we’re just going to walk calmly, do you hear?” His big hand clenches my collarbone, it hurts and the whole time we’re walking I feel the soldier behind us, his hand on his gun, my father’s stiff gait and hard body. I have the sun in my face, it is blinding and my eyes are swimming, but I do not raise my arm, I blink and blink but it doesn’t help. It is June but I feel the raw air at my back as if the ice lay thick up to the breakwater in wicked floes, the whole harbor frozen over again, no way out.

  When we get to the harbor square in front of the hotel, I tear myself free and let him go up Lodsgate alone to where my mother is bound to be standing at the window waiting. The shop is shut for the day and a stream of blue-clad workers comes cycling from the shipyard. He said we should just go for a walk, and I agreed, for it was a long time since I last heard his voice without anyone else’s filling the cramped apartment.

  I stop on Skippergate and look back. My father is still standing in the square with his hands at his sides and the dead cigar in his mouth. He does not know which way to go. He looks like a poor man, a childless man without shelter, quite alone in the world, and I think I must go down to him again, say it does not matter, that nothing matters. But that is not true.

  The German ship lies hidden behind the shipyard cranes and I see there is no ice in the harbor basin nor on the sea, but from where I stand the opening in the breakwater is out of sight. Only two long arms stick up from north and from south and join in a ring around our town and hold it fast.

  My father stands on the square for a long time. I stand still as long as he does, looking
at him. He knows I am there, but he does not turn my way. We wait for each other. In the end he lights his cigar again and starts to walk slowly along past the Cimbria and up onto Havnegate instead of going home. Maybe to the Vinkælderen or to a place on Søndergate where he plays billiards now. He has not been to Aftenstjernen since we moved from the north of the town. Then I also turn around and hurry up Lodsgate. I see my mother out of the corner of my eye, she stands at the window looking down into the street waiting as I expected, but I do not look up. Just go into the yard for my bicycle and bowl off before she can get down to the gateway.

  I take Rosevej out of town to the Seamen’s School. Lone’s father stands outside the fence clipping the hedge. I look straight ahead and try to get past without him noticing, but he turns and calls out:

  “Good evening, young lady, see you in the autumn!” He used to be the head teacher at the primary school, now he is the principal of the gymnasium and like everyone else he thinks I am going on there. My results were in the local paper, they always publish the marks of the best pupil, and it was Jesper who typeset the notice. He had put an eye-catching frame round my name, with the marks, so they could be seen the moment you opened up at page two. It was embarrassing, I did not go out for three days. My best work up to now, said Jesper, he had wanted to use Gothic type to make the announcement even more impressive, but there were not enough characters left. The Germans had worn them out, and when I thought of it afterward I felt it made it look too much like a death notice.

  Lone’s father is just Hans’s father now, and I do not understand why he talks to me, I have been taboo for several years. But perhaps he has not many friends left. He is a member of Denmark’s National Socialist Workers Party, and some workers’ party that is, says Jesper,