Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  But if London sees Denmark as useless or even pro-German, Hitler is growing increasingly touchy on the subject of his Model Protectorate. Its king, for instance, who the Führer thinks should regard him as a brother royal. Christian X is seventy-one years old. Although in less than perfect health, he rides horseback through the streets of Copenhagen day after day, and when he appears, his subjects swarm around him, smiling, reaching to touch his horse, to shake his hand, to cheer. If the king keeps his back to the Germans when he enters a room, and passes them in the street as if they didn’t exist, what are his people to do? It is this sort of thing that led to the Incident of the Telegram.

  The king celebrates his birthday on September 26. The Leader of the Aryan Peoples sends him fulsome greetings, and looks forward to some royal bowing and scraping in reply. The king of Denmark sends this telegram:

  MY UTMOST THANKS. CHRISTIAN REX.

  People have said that the king expressed himself perfectly properly. People have said that Hitler sometimes actually foamed at the mouth when he was angry, or fell down and chewed on the carpet. In this case, whether or not offense was meant, offense is taken. Hitler recalls his plenipotentiary, von Renthe-Fink, from Copenhagen. He sends home Denmark’s representative in Berlin. He summons the Danes’ foreign minister, Scavenius, and reads him a riot act about the deference he wants to see from the Danes if the country’s charmed life is to continue.

  Now it’s a Sunday in October 1942. It has been a beautiful day in Copenhagen; Kaj has been sailing in the harbor all afternoon with his cousins Kjeld and Margrete Bing and a girl named Ebba, who has brown eyes the color of buttered toast. Kaj thinks Ebba was flirting with him. He hopes so.

  It is a little before full dark; the nights are drawing in. In the streets there is the scent of woodsmoke, and yellow leaves from the linden trees are skittering underfoot and beginning to collect in the gutters. Kaj is carrying his valise; he will sleep at the hospital for the next few nights. When he left home, his mother was just setting the table for Sunday supper and his father was reading the paper by the kitchen window, wearing his slippers. The kitchen smelled of rye bread and beer. Nina came in as Kaj was leaving. She’d been outdoors all day as well; they all knew it might be the last mild day of autumn. She and her friend had ridden bicycles all the way to Greve Stand, she said. Her cheeks were glowing.

  Kaj is almost at the hospital, passing a café, surprised to see lights still on inside. The door opens and a woman he knows by sight, the proprietress perhaps, steps out and puts a hand to him, as if to say, There you are, can you stop a minute? Surprised, he stops. She looks up and down the street. Two Germans soldiers walk on the other side, in the other direction. The woman greets Kaj as if they were friends. (Who knows who else may be watching?)

  “I was hoping I’d catch you,” she says. “Please come in.”

  Kaj doesn’t like sudden changes of plan. He wants to get settled into his room before his shift begins. But she does what she does so firmly that he finds himself responding as if performing a part in a play he doesn’t remember learning. He smiles at the woman. She holds the door open for him and he goes in. Promptly, but without hurry, she closes the shop door and locks it, then pulls down the shades of the windows that front the street.

  When that is done her manner changes. “Follow me, please,” she says, and hurries past the counter toward the back of the shop. Kaj follows her into the kitchen. There is a large young man sitting in a chair near the stove, his skin a clammy gray. He is about Kaj’s age, big, with thick blond hair soaked with sweat under his workman’s cap, and his entire midriff soaked with blood. Several white aprons have been strapped tightly around his stomach.

  “He took a cab as close as he dared to the hospital,” said the woman.

  Kaj is kneeling beside the man, feeling for his pulse. “What happened?” Kaj asks him, as much to learn if he can talk as anything.

  “My mates and I were trying to bomb Burmeister and Wain. I was the lookout. Some Germans arrived and I told them they’d have to shoot me to get past me. So they did.” He started to chuckle but pain broke up his smile, like a hammer crushing a walnut.

  Kaj glances at the woman. How did she choose him? What made her think he was safe? She could be on her way to Vestre prison if he turned her in.

  “How many bullets hit you? Do you know?”

  “Two, I think.” His voice was a whisper, made with breath from the upper chest.

  “Did your mates get away?”

  “Yes. The ones inside got away, and I got away when they chased the others. All clear…”

  So far, thought Kaj, who still had to get him to the hospital, and do it before he bled to death. “I’m not going to risk touching this tourniquet.” To the woman: “Can I get into the alley behind the hospital kitchen from here?”

  “Yes. Out that way.”

  To the man: “Can you stand?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  They get the man onto his feet and his face goes paper white.

  “Are you going to faint?” The woman steps quickly to support him on the right; Kaj has him on the left.

  For a minute the eyes swim as if they’re going to roll up inside his head. Then he vomits down Kaj’s sleeve and onto his shoes and the floor. He stays conscious, however.

  “Can you stand it?” Kaj asks. The woman is on her knees before them with a wet tea towel, sponging away the worst of the mess.

  “Better now,” says the man. Meaning, vomiting doesn’t feel good.

  “I believe you,” said Kaj. “Here we go, then.” And they begin, like large children in a very slow three-legged race. Kaj suspects strongly that one of the bullets has hit the hip or pelvis. With the heroism of this man’s walk, the war begins for Kaj.

  Twenty-three minutes later he and the senior surgeon are in the operating theater. It takes them over an hour to find both bullets and stop all the bleeding in the abdomen. Kaj is right; the pelvis is chipped very near the hip socket. These are the first gunshot wounds Kaj has worked on. When they are finally cleaned and closed, the nurse hands the senior surgeon a patient chart to fill out. Kaj watches him name the man Svend Olesen. He pauses for a moment at the space for diagnosis, then writes “perforated ulcer.” This is true, as it happens. They had found quite a large one near the site of the second bullet, and repaired it. No doubt the patient’s brand of factory work was stressful.

  The next morning, lest he be traced by the cab driver or other bad luck, the man is transferred to another hospital under yet another name. Kaj never does learn his real one. His story will eventually reach London, though, in a coded letter from Kaj to Laurus. Laurus has by now told Kaj and Nina how to evade the censors. This particular letter will be in a batch collected in the bookshop across from the D’Angleterre, then given to a girl whose brother works a fishing boat between Dragør and Malmö, Sweden. From the docks in Malmö, the sack is taken by a Lithuanian Jewish Swede to the train station. There it is left at the feet of a certain passenger waiting for the train to Stockholm. From Stockholm, where Allied countries still have consulates, the letters go out in diplomatic pouches to the Allied world.

  In November of 1942, when Eleanor Moss is three months old, Norway’s Jewish Problem is suddenly addressed. Several hundred Jews are deported from Norway to Auschwitz. From exile in London, Norway’s King Haakon has begged Sweden to offer them sanctuary, but Germany forbade it. In Copenhagen the illegal presses slam and grumble out the news of the deportations, and it has an inflammatory effect on the Danish people. The blacked-out winter nights in Copenhagen seem particularly long this year as people come and go in darkness from three in the afternoon until late the next morning.

  By the time Eleanor is six months old (she can smile; she can turn over by herself!), Hitler’s General Paulus has surrendered the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, and become the first field marshal in German history to be taken prisoner. (Hitler had recently promoted him, evidently hoping, to no avail, to inspire him either to figh
t to the last man or fall on his sword.) It is Hitler’s second important defeat, following Rommel’s at El Alamein, and it does not have a good effect on the mood in Berlin. When Eleanor is nine months old, the remaining Jews still trapped in Norway are ensnared and sent south. Of 530 deported, only 30 will survive the war.

  Soon it will be time to turn attention to the Jews of Denmark. According to Kamptegnet, it’s a turn of events the great majority of Danes long for. Since the Nazis not only want to do what they want to do, but also want to be thanked for doing it, they allow general elections to be held in March of 1943, to give this majority of Danes a chance to express their appreciation. As a public relations gambit, this is ill-advised. The election proves only that the Danish Nazi party is much smaller than Berlin thought possible, and despised.

  In place of Plenipotentiary von Renthe-Fink, gone from Copenhagen since the Telegram Incident, has come the career Nazi Werner Best. He is a small neat man in a long leather coat, with a cold smile. He is complicated, ambitious, and not especially sane. It will be up to Best to deal with the growing disrespect, and worse, that will be shown to his people in the cities and towns of Denmark as the days grow longer in the spring of 1943. Although the Germans have declared that the Jews are behind the unrest, the election that was supposed to clear the way for the boxcars has instead emboldened even surprisingly Aryan folk to do the most inflammatory things.

  Eleanor Moss has arrived for her first July at Leeway Cottage when the Allies invade Sicily. Finally, the Allies’ offensive begins on European soil. On July 25, Mussolini, who invented that snappy fascist goose step the Italians and Germans do, the only thing Hitler still likes about his Mediterranean ally, is overthrown. He has started blaming his losses on the Italian people, and comparing himself to Jesus Christ.

  In Denmark, the resistance has grown in strength and so, finally, has the support it needs from outside. Danes trained in sabotage in England are dropped into the country to organize and train others. All over Denmark, in farms and cottages, manor houses and churches, teachers and pastors and housewives and students learn to signal in code with flashlights to RAF planes circling in the night. With the parachutists come weapons, explosives, and money. In Jutland in the north, the materiel is collected at an inn run by the Fiil family. On Lolland in the south, it is dropped into the lake at Maribo with floating markers attached, to be retrieved later and hidden at the manor house at Egestofte, or buried in the pastor’s woods. Half the village is in on it, the minister, the local Communists. The lady of the manor herself, Baroness Wichfeld, often gets up in the middle of the night to row guns and explosives across the lake to her Resistance colleagues. When her husband wonders why her hands are covered in calluses, she says, Oh, it’s so hard to get good hand cream during the war.

  In Copenhagen, Nina Moss is watching a German film with her friend Harry and his girl-of-the-moment when someone in the film raises a Union Jack. A boy in front of her starts clapping. There is a frightened silence, then people around him start clapping too. Nina joins them. Soon the whole audience is clapping and the manager of the theater raises the houselights and stops the film until they promise to be quiet.

  Nina Moss is a luscious girl, the darling of her family. She has a laugh that starts in her chest and bubbles up as if her throat were a glass overflowing. She has sleek tawny hair, and brown eyes so light they look yellow in some lights. She danced with the Royal Danish Ballet when she was small; her musicality is all physical, and she has been a sprite, a gingerbread child, and a sugarplum fairy more times than she can count. Even now that she thinks of becoming a doctor, like Kaj, it is Laurus, the musician brother, whom she idolizes. She especially loves jazz, and spends many hours at the nightclub Blue Heaven with her friends, soaking up Dixieland, ragtime, and swing. She misses the American musicians who used to come.

  The other thing she minds, not for herself but for her parents, are the shortages. They are less bad here than most places in Europe, but more and more Danish produce goes now to feed the Wehrmacht. Her mother misses coffee; she and her father miss Virginia tobacco. Denmark can grow tobacco of its own, but it is hot and harsh. Power, too, is rationed, and every household is cautious about using heat and lights. Many have no hot water; they boil water on the stove for dishwashing once a day, and wash themselves at the public baths once a week. Her parents have such a talent for enjoying simple things that it hurts Nina to see them go without. For Ditte’s birthday in May, Nina got her aunts and cousins to pool their ration tickets to buy flour and sugar, almonds and cream, to make her mother a birthday cake. It was a surprise, and her mother wept. That day was a happy one, like before the war except that Laurus wasn’t there. But there are few days like that anymore.

  Nina and her friends are restless and angry. They have all read contraband copies of The Moon Is Down, by the American writer John Steinbeck, about a little northern town under occupation by armies of an unnamed country; the book calls the invaders “herd men,” people who never learn the lessons of the past because they follow orders instead of thinking. The young Danes feel that he wrote it for them. Nina and Harry and his girl-of-the-moment believe in literature; Harry has a Danish name but no one has used it since he played Henry V in school. They are all now intensely moved that someone so far away and unknown to them as Steinbeck has been able to imagine what this feels like. Since it is forbidden to own and read the book, they must make their own copies to pass on, but mimeo stencils wear out. So far the girl-of-the-moment has typed the novel in its entirety onto fresh stencils three times.

  A boy from Nina’s philosophy section at university spat at a German soldier and was beaten and sent to Horserød, a prison near Helsingør where Danish Communists are interned along with others the Germans consider malcontents. He was there for weeks. When they can now, they put things into the gas tanks of the Germans’ cars, slash their tires, bump into them in the streets. There are more attacks on factories doing German war work. There are bars and restaurants that the Germans are simply ordered not to patronize, as their presence would antagonize the patrons to a point the Germans want to avoid. A girl Nina knows from the children’s corps de ballet, last seen in the role of a dancing mouse, is observed holding hands with a German soldier. He is handsome, and all the Germans are lonely. The girl is caught later in a stairwell at school and, as three boys hold her, her hair is cut off. Nina is there. She doesn’t help, but she doesn’t try to stop it. She is changing. She is angry all the time. They all are. Things can’t go on this way.

  Laurus is sometimes sorry he didn’t let Sydney come to London with him when she offered. London is full of girls doing useful work: nursing, driving ambulances, and crowding into Quaglino’s and the Café de Paris at the end of the workday. But it is chilling to pick up the papers day after day and read the obituaries. All those civilians who “died very suddenly,” which means killed by a bomb. If she’d come and had the baby here, he’d be going mad trying to get her out and home, frightened if he succeeded, since Allied ships and passenger planes are all targets now, and terrified if he failed or she wouldn’t go. And knowing her, he believed she wouldn’t have. She had taken on a new aspect in his mind, as he imagined and reimagined her, so gradually that he didn’t see her changing; she became strong, wise, unselfish, loving, and steady, everything he missed. And the more he missed her, the more he felt farther from her than three thousand miles. Since the summer of 1940, when Londoners grew accustomed to a certain manic community, as night after night the tube stations became giant bomb shelters with no place for reserve or privacy, there were and are many, especially the young, who are in some way thriving on the shared danger, the altered sense of time, living intensely for the present in case there is no future. There will be no way to describe this later, and none of them knows yet that when it is over, they will miss it.

  In the spring of 1943, Laurus is restless and frustrated at SOE. They have finally dropped into Denmark a group trained to sabotage the ferries, which are so i
mportant to a nation of islands, but the group’s equipment was lost. They have gotten some radios and operators in, but German trucks with better and better tracking equipment roam the Danish streets like ironclad dinosaurs, and last September, a man Laurus particularly liked was killed in the middle of transmitting from Copenhagen. Three weeks later the Copenhagen safe house of Michael Rottbøll, whom they trained for months to replace Carl Bruhn, was betrayed, and Rottbøll was killed by Danish police. Mogens Hammer was compromised, escaped to Sweden by kayak, and made his way back to London. With almost senseless heroism he agreed to be dropped back into the country to take Rottbøll’s place as temporary leader of Operation Tabletop, never mind that there is almost nothing organized enough to lead. Laurus is deeply stung by the contempt the English rarely hide for Denmark’s showing in this war, even while he sometimes shares it. He feels starved for something other than failure: for fresh fruit, for strong coffee, for that moment when you sit poised, hardly breathing, with other musicians, before the flash of joy as five of you hit your opening notes at the same instant.

  One night Laurus goes with some other Danes to Rainbow Corner, where the GIs drink and dance. It’s friendly and loud, and visiting American movie stars stop in, as they go to and from entertaining the troops. Laurus’s friend Kjeld is convinced that if they go there enough they’ll get to meet Rita Hayworth.

  They don’t, but there are cheerful Dutch and English girls who like to dance and can hold their beer, and there’s an American nurse called Libby who talks to Laurus about Copenhagen, where she’d been enchanted by the Tivoli Gardens. She isn’t truly pretty; her head is too long, her face too narrow, but she’s beautiful when she smiles. Those full lips, those perfect American teeth. She is from Oklahoma. The only thing Laurus knows about Oklahoma is The Wizard of Oz, but Libby points out he’s thinking of Kansas. She has a brother in the navy, and she’s seen things in the wards that she’ll never talk about when she goes home, but here, for as long as it lasts, nobody has to be told, and they’re all in it together. One night, when her girlfriends are already dancing, she turns to Laurus and says, “Shall we?”