Jo dipped a finger into the jar and dug out a little blob of ointment.
The man turned away respectfully so that she could lift the hem of her bloomers and rub the stuff into her leg. She found the entire situation so ludicrous that she had to suppress a laugh.
The ointment, at first quite thick, instantly softened on her skin. Moving her hand in a circle, Jo massaged it into her thigh.
She felt its effects immediately. At first, it was just a light prickling on her skin. Then it began to burn, a sensation that moved from the surface down into the deeper layers of her skin. She felt her hardened muscles grow warm and soft again, and the pain vanished. Jo raised her eyebrows in surprise. What kind of wonder substance was this?
“God?” shouted the farmer over his shoulder.
Jo laughed. “Good? I’ll say! This is . . . amazing!”
The farmer turned and clapped her on the shoulder so hard that Jo feared she might have a new injury to deal with. Then he signaled to her to keep the jar.
“Really?” Jo grinned broadly.
Jo swung her leg high and mounted her bicycle as if she’d never had a cramp in her life. “Thank you so much! You’ve saved me, I mean it!”
The farmer, who understood nothing of what she said but could clearly interpret her joy and relief, laughed.
“God rejse!”
The air smelled deliciously of seaweed, salt, and the smoke from the many fish-smoking operations in the area. The entire coast here made its living off fishing, which was not surprising considering the numerous small fjords, some of which penetrated a long way inland. Dozens of small fishing boats bobbed up and down in these sheltered tendrils leading in from the open sea. Along the shores, men with their hats pulled low hauled in large nets and carried crates of fish from the boats to land, their work accompanied by the constant screeching of seagulls fighting for scraps.
Josephine felt exhilarated as she rode past all of it. There was so much to see!
Still, her encounter with the farmer had left her thoughtful. Until today, she had never been in any serious danger on any of her rides, but how quickly that could change. She wanted to ride in the company of others going forward. But she hadn’t seen any of the other racers since the unfortunate incident with Isabelle. And when she rode into the next checkpoint, she was the only one there collecting a stamp for her booklet. Was anyone else actually still riding? she wondered, simultaneously worried and annoyed. What if she, too, had an accident? Adrian was a living example that her fears were not unfounded. When she thought about what had happened to him . . .
Josephine had kept a tight lid on any thoughts of Adrian’s disability since starting the race thirty hours earlier. Now, though, she saw him constantly in her mind’s eye, and the way he had to hobble with his damaged leg. They had shot him like a mangy dog. A callous robbery on an open road for a watch and a few dollars had changed his entire life from one moment to the next.
How lightly he had dismissed his inflexible knee! As if he were dealing with a sniffle that would go away in a couple of days. But what if the doctors at the Charité hospital in Berlin could not help him, either? What if he could never ride a bicycle again? What then?
“I’ve got my great cycling adventure behind me. Now it’s your turn!” he’d said to her. She would ride to the ends of the earth for him. But would that be enough? Would he ever give voice to his envy? How would she feel then?
You think some useless thoughts, she chided herself and was relieved when she saw the pretty half-timbered houses of Kalundborg appear against the light of the setting sun. Things were what they were. No one could force fate. All they could do was make the best of what they had, and that was exactly what she planned to do. Adrian was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, and no smashed knee or other handicap would change that. Now she just wanted to get her next stamp. Gradually, her booklet was filling up.
The next food station had been set up in Vordingborg. As on the previous day in Køge, Charles Hansen had rented a barn where the riders could sleep for a few hours. As she rode up, Jo was besieged by reporters following the race. How did she feel? Which stretch had been the hardest so far? What did she think of Denmark? Did she think she’d be able to finish the race?
Although Charles Hansen had warned all the riders to be friendly with the reporters, Jo answered their questions as succinctly as she could.
She was just leaning her bicycle against the wall of the barn when she heard a voice behind her, “You’ve made it this far, too?”
“Lilo!” Josephine turned and embraced her friend. “It’s so good to finally see one of you again!”
Lilo grinned. “Did you think we’d given up? No way! I’ve already been here for two hours. I was just about to head off again, but what the heck. I’ll keep you company while you eat. Irene rolled in fifteen minutes ago. I’d love to hear how the race has been going for both of you.”
“Irene was just fifteen minutes ahead of me . . .” Jo murmured. That meant that they had been just a few miles apart the whole time. If Jo had known that, she might not have felt so lonely over the last few hours . . .
“So Adrian and Gerd Melchior haven’t come in yet?”
Lilo told her no, but Jo had not expected it to be otherwise. It would have taken them quite a while to get Isabelle to the hospital, then change horses and get going again. They may have taken a shortcut or followed the route in the other direction to make themselves available to other cyclists.
Charles Hansen had hired three coaches with helpers, tools, and spare parts as escort vehicles, and one of those was standing at the ready in Vordingborg. Jo asked the man to change her provisional front brake pads, then she went arm in arm with Lilo to the table with the food and drinks.
Josephine discovered that seven of the thirty starters had dropped out. She silently asked herself whether that number included Isabelle. But she didn’t want to bring that up before she got something to eat.
Susanne Lindberg and her fellow Danish riders had left Vordingborg long before. Susanne had to be superhuman, because it seemed she took hardly any breaks at all. No one knew exactly how far ahead she and her team were. According to an English rider, Leon Feininger and Veit Merz had joined the lead group now, too. How nice for Leon, thought Josephine grimly. All that mattered to him was riding with the leaders, even though his girlfriend was lying half dead in a hospital!
She was just spooning out a generous helping of mashed potatoes when Luise Karrer pedaled in. And with the words, “I can’t go on,” she threw first her bicycle, then herself, onto the grass.
Lilo, Irene, and Jo looked at her. All of them knew that feeling. They also knew that Luise would pull herself together in a few minutes. They joked about their disheveled appearance. Their hair was mussed and dusty; their faces were streaked with perspiration, road grime, and tears of pain; and their clothes stank of sweat and toil. But who cared? They were all still healthy and chipper.
Jo, sadly, had to dissent on that last point. Over a cup of tea and sweet pastries, she told the others about Isabelle’s accident. They were appalled.
“And Adrian’s the one who takes her to hospital . . .” Irene made a face. “Looks like she’s still keeping him on his toes!”
Luise told them that she had accidentally rolled over a dead rabbit and crashed north of Copenhagen. “Rotten little beast,” she said. “I’m lucky I didn’t end up like Isabelle.”
Then Irene reported that she had suffered such terrible cramps in her legs at one point that she had thought she would have to give up. Jo laughed and told them about her encounter with the farmer. Then she handed Irene the jar of brown ointment.
“It burns like fire!” Irene cried as she applied a little to one calf. “Are you sure you didn’t get this stuff from an Indian?”
Josephine looked at her in confusion.
Irene grinned. “Didn’t Adrian tell you? It took an Indian medicine man to heal his leg, and he used some kind of stinking
ointment as well.”
“My medicine man looked more like a Viking,” replied Jo with a laugh.
“Who knows? Maybe Susanne rubs her whole body with that horrible stuff, and that’s what makes her so fast,” said Luise, standing up with a groan.
Lilo set off again a short while later. She wanted to take the last third of the course slowly but without another nap. She had done it that way on her previous long-distance races and wanted to do the same here in Denmark.
Josephine, however, decided to grant herself a few hours of sleep. Irene and Luise did the same.
Only when Charles Hansen had personally assured them that he would wake them again at midnight did Jo lie down in the barn. The hay smelled wonderful, and it felt softer than the finest feather bed. Neither Luise’s snoring nor the rustling of mice around her feet stopped her from falling into a deep sleep in minutes.
Something was different. Jo sensed it almost instantly as she mounted her bicycle again. But what? She pedaled away with a sense of foreboding.
The air was moist and heavy, and Jo’s lungs hurt when she breathed. It was a dingy, overcast night, not at all like the night before. There were no stars in the sky, and her gas lamp only dimly lit the road ahead.
“There’s rain in the air,” said Irene, pulling up on her left.
Jo nodded. That’s what it was! The weather had been so glorious up to now that the possibility of rain had never crossed her mind.
To avoid endangering each other on the gloomy road, Jo, Irene, and Luise had decided to keep a distance of several yards between them and to take turns riding in front. Irene was the first to take the lead. Jo pedaled along mechanically behind her clubmates. She felt like screaming with pain every time she made the slightest movement in the saddle. She had rubbed her skin so raw that it stung. Her bones ached like an old woman’s, her eyelids were heavy, and her eyes burned with exhaustion. The night—which she otherwise loved so much—stretched ahead of her in terrifying endlessness.
First, she heard a roar from the east, the direction of the sea. Then the wind came up and began lashing Zealand’s coast. Josephine soon felt as bent from the wind as the bizarrely formed trees she’d seen throughout the area. At first, she tried to brace herself against it, which cost her a lot of energy and didn’t help. She rode on, hunched over, her left leg working harder than her right. Irene, banked crookedly ahead of her, rode and swore. Jo had to smile.
Jo was just passing Luise to take her turn at the front when she felt the first raindrops. Every drop was cold and painful on her chafed skin, and her fingers were soon so ice-cold and stiff that just holding onto the handlebars was agony.
“Shouldn’t we get under cover?” she screamed over the wind and rain.
“Yes, but where?” Irene yelled back.
Jo narrowed her eyes. Irene was right. They were riding through a barren dune landscape, and there was not a house, barn, or even large tree in sight.
“Maybe we should ride side by side for a while,” Luise shouted, coming up on Josephine’s left. Irene joined them. “Now let’s be sure we don’t have an accident,” she said, spitting out a wet strand of hair from between her lips.
They rode on through the rain in silence. Soon they were soaked through to their underwear.
I can’t go on. Josephine didn’t know whether she had just thought the words or spoken them aloud. She looked first to Luise, then to Irene, riding doggedly beside her, stubbornly looking straight ahead.
The words must have been in her head. But even in there, they were dangerous enough . . .
“I can’t go on . . .”
Josephine turned her head in surprise.
“Yes you can!” Irene hissed.
Her face twisted in pain, Luise pedaled on.
Jo felt like crying. “My chest . . . Breathing hurts so much . . .” She wanted to throw herself onto the wet sand and never get up again.
“You think I’m doing any better?” Irene snapped at her. “Pull yourself together, damn it!”
Jo nodded, feeling dismal.
Dawn began to break around six o’clock. The wind and rain stopped as if someone had thrown a switch. The three exhausted women looked at one another. Was God just fooling with them?
Two hours later, Copenhagen came into view. Copenhagen—the start and the end of the race—but only once they had completed the long loop north of Copenhagen a second time!
What I wouldn’t give to have the race be over now . . . thought Jo. For the first time in all the years that she had been riding, she had lost her love of cycling. All she wanted was for the pain to stop. And to sleep. She was so tired . . .
“Eight hours to cover less than eighty miles. What a miserable section,” said Irene when they stopped to warm up and reenergize themselves with a glass of schnapps in one of the fishermen’s shacks on the harbor. “We’re not going to win anything by riding like that!”
Jo, who had recovered a little in the warmth of the shack, looked up in surprise from her herring sandwich. “What do you want to win? It’s been clear from the start that Susanne Lindberg will come in first.”
“Exactly,” said Luise, pushing her empty schnapps glass back across the grubby counter. “Besides, it’s the principles of the race that matter more. Cooperation. And a common goal.”
“Everyone who sticks it out for six hundred miles is a winner,” Josephine added.
Irene snorted. “If you don’t care about finishing with a decent time, that’s up to you. I won’t think any less of you for it. And as far as Susanne’s concerned, she can win whatever she likes. But speaking for myself, I want to cross the line as soon as possible behind her.”
Josephine rolled the last mouthful of schnapps back and forth over her tongue. Perhaps it would take away a little of the bad taste she’d had in her mouth the last couple of hundred miles. If she were honest with herself, she’d been hoping to finish as close behind Susanne as she could, too. But the trials of the previous night had made her question her plan.
“Well . . .” said Luise slowly. “You’re right. If we’re going to all this trouble in the first place . . .”
“Do you really think we can do it?” Jo asked tentatively, feeling new strength even as she asked the question.
Irene grinned. “Want me to show you how?” She threw a few coins on the counter and jumped up from her chair. A moment later, she was out at the bicycles.
Josephine put down her half-finished sandwich and looked at Luise. “Shall we?”
Luise nodded grimly. “You bet!”
It was as if someone had thrown a switch not only on the weather but inside the women. Suddenly, Josephine found riding fun again. Her legs once again did what they were supposed to do, namely, to pedal on, strong and steady.
As they were given their final stamps, Josephine’s heart swelled with pride. Every empty square was now filled—a visual record of her accomplishment.
From there, it was a mere thirty miles to their goal. They were in the home stretch!
It happened ten miles outside Copenhagen. The culprit was a large rock. Irene managed to dodge it with her front wheel, but her back wheel slammed into it. A metallic clang sounded and all three women stopped.
“Damn, it’s buckled,” said Irene, inspecting her back wheel.
Jo let out a quiet sigh. Then that was that . . .
Irene’s eyes sparkled. “Don’t think a little thing like this is going to stop me, or even slow me down!” She swung herself back onto her saddle.
“But . . . you can’t!” Jo and Luise cried out simultaneously. Both of them had suffered buckled wheels before, and they knew how horribly the bicycle vibrated afterward. Fadi Nandou had once described it as like being like having a thousand bumblebees in your behind. But Irene didn’t care.
“What’s taking you so long?” Irene called from a hundred yards ahead, and she even managed to take one hand off the handlebars of her wobbly machine and wave back at them. With her rump swaying back and forth lik
e the rear end of a cow, she looked ridiculous. Josephine and Luise began to giggle uncontrollably.
“Now we know which one of us is truly obsessed,” said Luise, and she set off in pursuit of her clubmate.
The finish line had been constructed from two freshly cut trees, to whose leafy branches someone had tied many golden bands that fluttered merrily in the wind. I’ll never forget this image, thought Josephine, and she felt a lump form in her throat.
A loud cheer went up when the three women crossed the line. After sixty hours and six hundred miles, they were at the very limit of their strength but also elated.
Tears of joy rolled down Jo’s face as they waved to the crowd. She was laughing and crying at the same time, and had goose bumps all over, from her toes to her scalp. Had they really done it? Yes, they had done it. They had crossed the finish line, undeterred by all manner of obstacles. And in just sixty hours!
Jo dismounted painfully from her bicycle, her entire body so tired and overstrained that her arms and legs were trembling. Then she, Irene, and Luise threw their arms around each other and danced with joy. It did not dampen their spirits in the slightest to know that Susanne Lindberg and two other women had reached the finish just under six hours ahead of them. Hearing that she had come in three hours ahead of Leon Feininger and the other men was the best news of all. Veit Merz had had to drop out early with a knee problem, and fourteen other men and women had also withdrawn. Others were still pedaling; only half of those who’d begun the race had a chance of making it to the finish.
“Thank you,” said Josephine to Irene as they made their way to the improvised changing rooms. “Without you, I probably would have given up.”
“Nonsense,” Irene replied brusquely. “A Neumann never gives up! And the way I see it, you’ll be one of us soon enough. Look, there’s Adrian . . .”
While the World Is Still Asleep (The Century Trilogy Book 1) Page 39
