To Siberia

  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.

  Now 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.

  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 no
body 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.