Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

“Merry Christmas, Annabelle.”

  “Congratulations, Mr. Christie.”

  “Thank you. I hope you will call me ‘Bernard.’”

  After a longer pause, Sydney said, “You’re welcome. I hope you will call me ‘Sydney.’”

  “I’ll give you back to your mother.”

  “Best wishes, Mother,” said Sydney, when she heard her mother take the receiver.

  “Thank you, Anna. I’m sure you mean that more warmly than you said it.”

  “You know best,” said Sydney, and hung up.

  She sat for some time in a ruck of feeling. Then she launched herself toward the bedroom, got out of her Christmas clothes and into overalls and shut herself in the spare bedroom. Soon the only sound in the apartment was the muffled scream of her new power sander.

  Christmas night, 1941. Laurus and his commander are at an airstrip serving the RAF base at Stradishall. A converted Whitley bomber waits on the tarmac; pilot, copilot, gunner, and dispatcher are ready to go. Commander Hollingworth talks with the pilots, as Laurus and his countrymen, Carl Johan Bruhn and Mogens Hammer, stand together, edgy and restless. Above them a cloud cover as thick as a quilt has entirely stolen the moon and stars.

  In the weeks they’ve been training together, Laurus has come to regard Bruhn with profound affection. He’s a small man in his mid-thirties, a gentleman, which matters to the British, quiet, intense, and sometimes droll, which matters to Laurus. Laurus is sorry he is not going home himself, but he understands why Bruhn is the linchpin of London’s plans for a Danish resistance. He has a quality you can’t mistake, and he is young enough for the physical dangers of the work ahead, old enough to command respect, the right man at the right time. It will be up to Bruhn to identify trustworthy candidates for the work within Denmark, to create cells of partisans, to set up communications among them and back to the Danish Section of Churchill’s Special Operations Executive, and to invent invisible methods of funneling money into the country to support their activities, hoping they will soon be effective and many.

  It was Bruhn’s hope to be dropped into Zealand on Christmas night, when the Germans’ guard would be down. But as he stands in the cold wind, holding his cigarette in a cupped hand, from time to time exhaling smoke through his nose, he and Laurus can see from the way the pilot looks at the sky, the way he turns to Hollingworth with his mouth pinched, that they can’t fly tonight. Hammer, half a head taller than Bruhn, stands patiently watching too, and from time to time stamps his feet to keep them warm. He’s an engineer with the merchant marine by training, and most important, a radio operator.

  Laurus waits with Bruhn and Hammer most of the next day, going over plans, what they will do if this happens, what if that. There will be no reception committee for them on the ground, so they are going into the Haslev area where Bruhn knows the landscape and has contacts. They will go to a particular farmer and claim that an encounter with the Gestapo has forced them to go underground. Bruhn believes the farmer will help them get false identity papers. Then they will make their way to Copenhagen, to some editors and others known to be resistance-minded. Once they find a safe place to live, Bruhn will begin his work; Hammer will get a job in a bicycle shop in Vesterport, where the owner also fixes radios. From there, they hope he will be able to transmit to England without attracting notice. If this fails and they can’t communicate directly, they will place a classified ad in the newspaper.

  “What should it say?” Hammer asks.

  Laurus picks up a copy of the Telegraph and turns to the ad pages.

  “Here. ‘Lost lady’s handbag. Piccadilly Circus.’”

  “Yes,” says Bruhn in a cockney accent, “I ’ave lost me ’andbag, and I was that fond of it…”

  “Which one did you lose, darlin’?” asks Laurus.

  “Me green one.”

  “Oh, that is too bad, I liked your green one. Where? In case there are green handbags lost all over Copenhagen.”

  “I lost me green lady’s handbag, Vesterbrogade or Gyldenløvesgade.”

  “I used to go to a dentist in Gyldenløvesgade,” says Hammer.

  “Lost green handbag means you are both safe but you’ve lost the radio,” says Laurus. “Broken strap means Hammer is injured, broken clasp means Bruhn is injured. My brother is a doctor. If you need him, tell him you come with a message from Gunga Din.” He told them how to find Kaj at home or at the hospital. Bruhn and Hammer memorized the addresses.

  “He’ll know Gunga Din is you?”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  “When we meet again, be sure to explain that to me,” says Bruhn.

  “And missing strap or clasp means one of you is dead,” says Laurus.

  “Aren’t you just a ray of sunshine?” says Bruhn, smiling.

  They get the signal that the mission is on, at last, toward the evening of December 27. Bruhn just has time to say a goodbye (again) to his wife. Hammer is ready. To minimize danger, in case one of them is captured, only Bruhn has been fully briefed with names of the Danish intelligence officers covertly working with SOE, and a courier link to the journalist Ebbe Munck in Stockholm, their conduit to the outside world. Hammer and Bruhn have been briefed together by a recent Danish arrival on the latest gossip and jokes inside the country, so they can slip unnoticed into the stream of daily life.

  The plane will pick its way over the North Sea, across blacked-out Southern Jutland, then south of Fyn toward the bridge that connects the north end of Falster Island with the southern tip of Zealand. There it will bomb the Masnedø power station, then make for Haslev. The pilots will descend to five hundred feet as they circle the drop zone, and the dispatcher, in the roaring belly of the plane, will signal Bruhn and Hammer to jump, then send out after them a large metal container of arms and explosives, with its own parachute. Because Bruhn is smaller and lighter than Hammer, it is he who will jump with the radio.

  When the plane finally lifts off into the night sky, after so many hours of waiting, Laurus feels an out-of-body elation. It has begun. They will have their direct contact into the heart of Copenhagen within a day, two at the most. And they will have in charge a man of brains and unusual courage who is mercifully free of troubling ego. That was a rarity in someone willing to take epic risks, and it could make all the difference to what they hoped to accomplish.

  Darling girl, Laurus writes,

  I’ve thought so much about you this week, our first Christmas apart. If I live to a hundred I will cherish my image of you with cake flour in your eyebrows and the gold ring in your lips. How did you celebrate this year? I’m sure the season is muted, now that you are at war. I suppose you are blacked out now, as here. It is rather bleak outdoors when night falls, and it falls early.

  We had a service of carols on Christmas Eve that made me miss your voice beside me. Otherwise it was quiet, the weather very gray and threatening snow but not delivering.

  I hope you continue to feel as well as you claim in your last letter. I wish I could play for you and the baby. Do you suppose he can hear in there? There is a piano here, but it is not a good one and no one left about knows how to tune it. If you can send me a package, could you put in my Brahms? There’s a passage of the Romanze that’s gone from my memory and it irks me, as I like to play it and picture you listening. There’s no other news here, but please write and tell me all of yours. And send me a picture of yourself with our son. Tonight I am quite sure it’s a boy and I plan to name him Gaylord Trousers. Will you like that? (Who is Gaylord Hauser?)

  Much love, my swan

  He writes this sitting on his bed, leaning his writing tablet against a copy of the evening paper which reports that the Japanese have completed their occupation of the fallen British fortress of Hong Kong. And all the time, his heart is over Denmark in the dark, traveling with Bruhn and Hammer. They should be making their jump any time now, assuming they managed to cross the German installations in Jutland without trouble.

  As Laurus is cleaning his teeth with ba
king soda, having been unable to find proper tooth powder, Mogens Hammer is in the dark on the ground in Zealand. The sound of the Whitley on its way back toward the North Sea has died away to the west. It’s a thrill to know he’s on Danish soil, but there is snow on the ground and he knows that with every step he takes he’s leaving a trail of footsteps proclaiming, We fell from the sky. We are enemies and we’re here, but he doesn’t know what to do, he can’t find Bruhn. His own parachute is balled up and hidden, but the adventure can’t begin until he has the radio in his arms. He wouldn’t mind finding himself in a nice warm barn about now either, but first, they’ll have to find the canister full of guns and explosives and hide it. It takes two of them to carry, and where will they hide it, when they’re leaving tracks like this? And where is Bruhn?

  As Laurus is sliding into a narrow bed between sheets so cold they feel damp, wishing for the warm solid body of his wife, Hammer finds his answer. He steps on something resilient in the dark and almost falls. He steps back, then crouches. The stars sing in the cold overhead as he touches what he stepped on: Bruhn’s hand. It is attached to the rest of him, but by something more like a narrow bag of broken sticks than an arm. He may have extended it before him, the last instinct he would ever feel as if he were in a fall that could be broken instead of breaking him. Bruhn has slammed into the ground as if he were himself a bomb. His parachute is still on his mangled back, neatly packed. The radio is smashed beneath him.

  As Laurus finally drifts into sleep, Hammer, too shocked to weep, is cutting the boots off his dead friend’s feet. He knows there are no incriminating papers on the body but he’s had to search it anyway, to find out where Bruhn was carrying their Danish money.

  Sydney is fast asleep in New York on the first night of the new year, content and convinced that the baby she is carrying will be a girl. She’s had her palm read by a tipsy violinist at a New Year’s Eve party. In England, it’s the morning of January 2, when Laurus’s growing disquiet over the silence from Denmark is resolved into knowledge. A wire is brought to him from Ebbe Munck in Stockholm. It reads: 1 JANUARY: LOST, A GREEN LADY’S HANDBAG WITH MISS-ING CLASP IN VESTERBROGADE OR GYLDENLØVESGADE. REWARD. APPLY K.520 POLITIKEN.

  Laurus stares at it. At first he feels nothing. Then there is a buzzing in his ears and he wonders if he’s going to faint. When he is sure he is not, he takes the wire and goes to look for Hollingworth.

  Kaj Moss has always suffered somewhat from being the second son. He is plump like his mother, but it is not he who inherited her musical gift. He has been quiet where Laurus is merry. He has doubted himself, where Laurus meets the world with the sunny expectation of delight. Kaj hangs back and waits to be sure it is safe to advance. He has his father’s hands. His hands are like smart animals; they can make sense out of anything physical. He is training to be a surgeon.

  Which is all very well, but the future has been elbowed aside by the present for him, as for many of Denmark’s young people at the start of 1942. They have been arguing back and forth since the occupation began. Shouldn’t Denmark have done as Norway did? Maybe, but how? They are much smaller. They have no mountains or deep forests in which they could hope for local advantage in battle. Denmark has farmland, open as a dinner plate. But shouldn’t they be resisting? Yes, of course. The poet-priest Kaj Munk has said, disgusted, that Danes will put up with anything as long as they have plenty to eat, and this seems shamefully true. Life is too normal. And the German soldiers are not without honor. There is a difference between a career army German and a Nazi, a confusing truth they wouldn’t have to consider if everything were not so chummy. What to do?

  Kaj knows of a Copenhagen bookstore with printing presses in the basement. Some of his friends from student days spend a good deal of time there. No one can say that Danes don’t have a sense of humor; this store is directly across the street from the Hotel d’Angleterre, where the German chiefs are living. In the bookstore basement they print an illegal paper, with news from the occupied countries. It is known, now, what is happening in Poland, eastern Germany, and Czechoslovakia. How the Jewish Problem is being solved. With every new issue, the horror grows here in the Model Protectorate. What can be done, what can be done, what can be done?

  Arguments are endless at the university as well. Nina tells Kaj it goes this way: What would you do if Gestapo men broke in and announced they would kill your mother? Would you kill them first? The most common answer, pained and impassioned, is, “No. I would cover her body with mine. I would not kill, but I would give my life to protect another.”

  “But you are young, she is old. She wouldn’t choose that.”

  “But I choose it. Resistance is necessary. Sacrifice is a necessary response to evil. You can shame evil by showing it honor.”

  “Nonsense. If you won’t kill the murderers, they will kill others.”

  Then the argument starts at the beginning.

  At the hospital the conversation is slightly different. What do you do when a Nazi comes to you to have his leg set, his wound dressed, his burst appendix removed? You treat him. You have to, you took an oath. But if he then threatens to kill your Jewish patients, can you shoot him? So far, there has been no need to make such decisions, but there are those who fear that this could change.

  An anti-Semitic rag called Kamptegnet is being published by Danish Nazis, claiming that Jews are behind all resistance activities, that Jews control the press in Denmark as elsewhere, that true Danes, like Czechs and Poles, long to throw off their Jewish masters. The fact that the claims about Danish Jews are untrue matters less to the Danes than it offends their sense of who they themselves are. A Danish consciousness is a democratic consciousness. It is repellent to hear Jewish Danes described as a group that can be separated from other Danes. This is a matter of national identity. Even the all too accommodating government has remained firm on this one point.

  The doctors of Copenhagen dare to circulate a petition, knowing that the Germans can’t shut down the whole Danish medical profession. Germans get sick, too, and besides, it would look bad. Of the seventy-five doctors on staff at Kaj’s hospital who see it, sixty-four sign the petition, although they do not know what risk they may be running to do so. It is the same across the city. The doctors will support their own government, the petition says, and continue to work as healers, as long as there is no move of any kind to curtail the rights and freedoms of Denmark’s Jews. It’s a warning shot fired across the bow of the Model Protectors.

  The German plenipotentiary is a man named von Renthe-Fink. He is a pudgy fellow with thick glasses, a career diplomat rather than a fervent Nazi. He is quite aware that the average Dane will not stand to be told that Denmark has a Jewish Problem. He has repeatedly told Berlin that if they test this, they will upset a very comfortable applecart. Berlin is bewildered. But the matter can wait. The United States is in the war now. Rommel has his hands full in Libya. Nobody wants to have to pull troops out of Russia to deal with a temper tantrum in Denmark. Leave them alone and keep the butter and cheese and sausage coming, and the shipworks cranking out German U-boats. There will be time to deal with Denmark.

  The truth was, once America was in it, Sydney enjoyed the war. She hated being without her husband and she hated the sad things that happened to people, but there was plenty to like.

  The war for her was like being in the spring musical, except it ran for more than two nights. It was intense. It was full of drama. People who had always seemed to have everything were suddenly undone by grief. People no one ever appreciated, like herself, or like Homer Gantry, had exciting new roles to play; they had new jobs or appeared in crisp uniforms and made gallant jokes about the uncertain future. She enjoyed the world of women banding together with new time for each other now that their men were away. And while Laurus was safe in London translating things and playing the piano, Sydney was the hero in the family; she was having a baby.

  She was one of those women who seemed to have been born to be pregnant. She’d had o
ne week of morning sickness, and that was that. She ate well and slept well. Finally, something she was better at than her mother.

  She met her mother, Mrs. Christie, in Abbott’s grocery in Dundee in late June of 1942. It surprised them both, to find themselves face-to-face at the turning of the canned-goods aisle, each clutching her ration book.

  “Sydney!”

  “Lucky guess?”

  “You’re up early this year, dear,” said Candace as they brushed their jawbones against each other.

  “So are you. Mother, this is my friend Gudrun Ostlund. My mother, Mrs. Christie.”

  Candace accepted Gudrun’s outstretched hand. Gudrun was tall, blond, with a long-limbed, slim-hipped grace, and something sad around the eyes. Terribly pretty, Candace would tell Bernard, a classic Norwegian. Gudrun told her what a pleasure it was to meet her. Candace herself looked weary, almost for the first time Sydney could remember.

  “When did you get here?” Sydney asked.

  “Last night.”

  “Is…your husband with you?” She couldn’t make herself say “Bernard.”

  “Yes, but he’s having a quiet morning. You’re looking well, dear.”

  “Thank you.”

  Candace appeared quite struck, in fact, at the sight of her daughter. Here she was, trying to understand, was a can of peaches worth twelve ration points? Did Bernard like them enough? Yet here was Sydney, confidently pushing a cart loaded with things like Spam, with a wedding ring on her finger, a high round belly proud under her blouse, and a lovely friend with a charming accent. Almost as if this were a version of a daughter she could take an interest in. “And you’re feeling well?” she asked, gesturing vaguely at Sydney’s middle.