The Woman from Bratislava

by Leif Davidsen

  It was my brother, Fritz. The hardy baker did not sound quite himself. His Fünen accent was even more pronounced than normal and his voice at least an octave higher when he said:

  ‘Teddy. It’s Irma. She’s been arrested … what are we going to do?’

  ‘Fritz! What in God’s name are you talking about? Where is she?’

  ‘The police called. They’ve got her at police headquarters in Copenhagen. What am I going to do?’

  ‘Calm down, Fritz. Who’s her lawyer?’

  ‘How should I know, Teddy. I’m all the way over here on Fünen, what can I do? There’s nothing I can do. What is all this? Irma hasn’t done anything.’

  ‘Calm down, Teddy,’ I said again absently, as I tried to think.

  ‘Why has she been arrested?’

  ‘They won’t say.’

  ‘Well, they must have said something.’

  ‘They say she’s a spy,’ my brother said. ‘What’s going on, Teddy?’

  Teddy had no idea, of course, but Fritz was quite sure that Teddy would find out.

  6

  AFTER FRITZ’S CALL there followed a couple of hectic days. The newspapers could not publish Irma’s name, of course. She was being held in solitary confinement under tight security, so the media were not even allowed to say what she was charged with. Only that she was being detained under the Official Secrets Act, which never really goes out of date. But the press had, nonetheless, managed to dig up some details. So they had a field day anyway, speculating on whether this was the big fish that everyone had been expecting to see caught ever since the Wall came down. In their reports they used her cover name, which was apparently Edelweiss. That very evening there had been a big item about the case on the Nine O’Clock News. And the morning papers were full of it. They had had access to some of the material which Edelwiess had passed to Stasi in East Berlin from as far back as the early seventies until the beginning of 1988. Chickenfeed for the most part, relating to Denmark’s oil policy or the Danish view on security in the Baltic area, but also more crucial documents, such as maps of Danish NATO depots and plans for mine-laying in the event of war. The papers also said that Edelweiss had reported on top-secret NATO meetings. But what the hell would Irma have been doing there? She had spent her whole life inside her intellectual glass bubble with little thought for the real world outside. She had only ever had one student job, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She had never had access to classified material of that nature. And even if she had applied for a job with NATO she would never have got it. She was a Red of the first water and she made no secret of this in the numerous articles on the need for revolution which she wrote for Information and diverse obscure left-wing journals. She had been a member of a variety of different parties on the far left until rendered wiser by age (or the fall of the Berlin Wall). But she had never struck me as being a particular fan of the former GDR. As a young woman she had been more a devotee of such characters as Chairman Mao and, God help us, Pol Pot. Now she was a professor at Roskilde University. Denmark is a tolerant, forgiving little country. Words do not count for a whole lot here.

  A read through the papers left me little the wiser, despite their massive coverage of the case. At Roskilde University everyone knew, of course, that they were talking about Irma, but it says a lot about how much the world has changed that her colleagues kept a very low profile. No one protested or wrote to the newspapers. The wind from the Right blew strong and keen across Denmark and the old left-wingers were sheltering from the storm. They couldn’t go sticking their necks out, not now, with their pension only ten years away. They knew only too well that having taken part in a peace demo or been a member of a delegation to Moscow during the cold war, with free lunches and all, was all it took for Jyllands-Posten or Ekstra Bladet to condemn them as spies or tail-wagging communist lackeys. Time was when they had taken a very black-and-white view of the rotten capitalist society. Now the victors on the Right were paying them back in the same black-and-white coin. I did not really feel sorry for them, and yet I found it hard to reconcile myself to the bumptious, self-righteous tone of the attacks made on them. On the other hand they could have refrained from lunching with Pol Pot or writing articles extolling the Cultural Revolution. The past has a way of catching up with most people.

  These were some of the thoughts that went through my head as I tried to figure out what I could do to help my sister and why she had been locked up. She had been assigned a counsel who had made a routine, but unsuccessful appeal to the High Court against the order to keep her in solitary confinement for four weeks, but I got in touch with Kenneth Graversen. He was one of those hot-shot lawyers capable of conducting a case both in the lawcourts and in today’s other great seat of judgement: the media. He was in huge demand, but he agreed to look at the case. He was already familiar with it, of course, from the press and TV. He did not actually need any persuading. I had the feeling that he could already smell the publicity: the blazing flashlights, the seductive television cameras. This could well become something of a cause célèbre once Irma’s identity became known. Graversen had a deep, rich, cultured voice. He would give me a call after he had spoken to his new client, but he wanted to make it quite clear that he would not be able to tell me anything about the substance of the case, since the High Court had upheld the order authorising solitary confinement in a high security wing. It would be against the law for him to run telling tales, so to speak, to old Teddy.

  At long last I managed to get hold of the police spokesman for the case, a detective inspector, in the press at least, had sounded pretty sure of himself – as if my sister had already been found guilty. He was a pleasant middle-aged gentleman whom I had often seen on television: the very image of trustworthiness and not the sort of seedy alcoholic who tended to populate the detective novels which I occasionally read for amusement. I recognised his voice when he eventually called back, after I had left umpteen messages for him. Although that was possibly a little unfair: it was actually quite hard to get through to me on the phone. When I wasn’t trying to reassure Fritz, I was arguing with Janne because I could not look after the kids, talking to curious colleagues, receiving moral support from Lasse or trying yet again to make my mother understand that her daughter was in prison, although I do not think this fact penetrated the mists of senility she inhabited in the nursing home on Fünen. My back was all but forgotten in the Kafkaesque situation in which I suddenly found myself. My tooth, or gums, had, however, started to ache again. You did not need to be a doctor or a dentist to know that this pain was in fact psychosomatic and a symptom of stress.

  The detective inspector with that most Danish of all Danish names, Per Jensen, could not have been nicer. But he would say nothing about the case. He spelled out for me, as if I were some ignorant journalist, what it meant to try a case in a closed court, within prison confines and what it meant to be held in solitary confinement. In this the tiny democratic state of Denmark had a formidable weapon. Cutting an individual off from all human contact. Permitting them no communication with anyone except a lawyer. I tried to tell him that, as the accused’s younger brother I had certain rights, but there was no moving him. Out of the question at the present time, was all he would say, again and again. And besides, the investigation had been taken over by another department. Which one? That he was not at liberty to say at the moment.

  I also needed to keep an eye on the television news. I had to see whether the woman from Bratislava would show up again. But she did not. I searched on the Internet, found the item in which she had appeared. There was no doubt. It was her alright. Lasse suggested that I also check the news broadcasts on TV2. They often used the same agency footage as DR. I rarely watched TV2. I had grown up with Danmarks Radio and still found it hard to take the Odense based station seriously. I found its presenters too jaunty by half. Back to the Internet. And clever old Lasse was right. There she was, in two different shots. In one she seemed to be performing some sort of official role.
At any rate she was seen pointing and two men walked off in the direction she indicated. Later in the same piece the two men were back again. They stood facing her, looked as though they were presenting a report. But the item had been edited without any thought for the actual sequence of events, so it could just as easily have been the other way round. The woman was merely a prop to illustrate the reporter’s hackneyed spiel about the poor refugees. The trendily dressed female correspondent must have used the phrase ‘humanitarian disaster’ at least eight times. And informed viewers almost as often that Albania was the poorest country in Europe. First she presented her report, then she remained on-screen while the studio presenter asked inane, obvious questions and indulged in wild speculation – but that’s modern TV for you.

  I called Fritz and told him the whole story about the woman in Bratislava. I could hear him puffing and blowing all the way over there on Fünen and could tell from his laboured breathing that it both surprised him and yet did not. He was a heavy man in all ways and hard to get through to. I did not have the knack for breaking through his shell. When I was finished he said exactly what I expected him to say:

  ‘You really ought to talk to Irma, Teddy.’ His lilting Fünen accent made everything, even the gravest of topics, sound like an operetta. Even so, I could tell from his voice that I had hit a raw spot.

  ‘Fritz, for Christ’s sake. Irma’s in prison. In solitary. I can’t just pick up the bloody phone and call her, can I?’

  ‘Well, I still think that would be best.’

  I lost my temper:

  ‘Tell me. Is this story true? Have you two been hiding something from me?’

  ‘You were so young, Teddy. It was all before your time. You weren’t even born then.’

  ‘Do we have a half-sister down there?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Not that I’ve ever heard of,’ he said at last, sounding anything but convincing.

  ‘So what have you heard, Fritz?’ I hissed.

  ‘The bit about our father. That’s true enough …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dad fought on the Eastern Front. And he was a member of the party. There, now you know.’

  I stood for a moment, listening to his heavy breathing on the other end of the line. It was quite a blow, to learn in mid-life that your father had been a Nazi and a soldier with the SS. Take that. To say that lots of families have skeletons in their cupboards is a tired, old cliché, but this was one of the darker secrets. I suppose I had had some suspicion of his Nazi past, but I had had no notion about the rest of it.

  ‘So he didn’t die in Hamburg, the way you always said he did?’

  ‘I don’t know, Teddy. I really thought he had. As far as I was concerned he died the day he left home. You’d better talk to Irma about it.’

  ‘Why was I never told?’

  ‘You were so young, Teddy,’ he said again. ‘You weren’t even born. It was all before your time.’

  ‘And hence I was not made privy to this great family trauma.’

  ‘You use all those fancy words. But I’m not stupid. I have different talents from you and Irma, that’s all,’ he said, sharply this time.

  ‘Why wasn’t I let in on the family scandal?’ I asked.

  ‘You were so young. It was nothing to do with you,’ he repeated.

  I waited, expecting him to go on, but of course he did not, so I asked:

  ‘Was that why the bakery had to shut down?’

  ‘Folk were starting to talk. You know how they talk.’

  ‘Naw – I live in a city. Nobody ever talks here,’ I sniped, out of old, sarcastic habit, as I stood there with the receiver to my ear, gazing out across a city which seemed to blur at the edges and fade from my view. Possible title for this picture: Teddy Learns of the Past Over the Phone.

  I tried to get more out of him, but he was not especially forthcoming. This much he was prepared to tell me: that our father had been an SS soldier, a non-commissioned officer. That he had been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for enlisting in the Danish Legion, but that he had been released after a few months. That ‘someone’ had helped him to go into business for himself as a baker. That he had left home when he became the victim, as Fritz put it, of reprisals in the early fifties. But the bit about a daughter and another life in Yugoslavia, that I would have to talk to Irma about. That he really could not go into. I had the feeling that he was hiding something from me, but I also knew that I was not going to get any further with him. So I changed tack:

  ‘I’ve hired a very good lawyer, Kenneth Graversen …’

  ‘I’ve seen him on television,’ the voice from Fünen said, as if this were the seal of approval. But then Fritz was not familiar with the players in the daily media circus, where everybody knew everybody else and nobody was interested in the truth, only the image.

  ‘He doesn’t come cheap,’ I went on.

  Another of those long pauses when all I could hear was his breathing, then:

  ‘That’s not a problem. I’ll put up the money.’

  ‘I’ve no idea how much Irma has in the way of a nest egg, but I’ve got nothing.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see to it,’ he said sounding a little happier. Finally, here was something that Fritz the baker could do. Where he was one up on the rest of us. Because he actually did have a nice little nest egg, although these days it was more likely to be certificates in a safe deposit box.

  ‘Great, well I’ll reassure the brief on that point then,’ I said, but Fritz jumped in quickly:

  ‘No, I’ll do that,’ he said, the firmness of his tone betraying that he really did have some cash stashed away. He had not got rich by being stupid. Quite the opposite. ‘Give me his number and I’ll have a word with him. Then we can discuss the details.’ I knew what he was getting at. He would pay for Irma’s defence, but first he wanted to negotiate the fee. There was no reason for the family to be ripped off by some Copenhagen lawyer. I found the number and read it out to him. There followed another of those long pauses. It struck me that we were like strangers, despite the fact that we had been boys together, for some years at least, and always met up at the usual Danish family gatherings: confirmations, weddings, funerals. At the church and later around the dinner table. But I did not know him. He was born in 1943. Irma was born in 1940, which fitted perfectly with the date of our parents’ marriage. At long last they could fuck without having to worry and the first baby followed pretty much as a matter of course. Fritz’s birth in 1943 tied in – so I calculated after a quick recap of the dates of the occupation – with my father’s first trip home on leave. The men of the Danish Legion thought they were going home to take their native land by storm. Instead they had been ostracised by almost everyone, with the possible exception of their closest family. I was born in 1948, which fitted with the time when he returned home. Or at least, was released from prison. ‘He’ was my father. A figure whom Teddy found it rather difficult to relate to. If the woman in Bratislava was more than a mirage in a mysterious desert then she had been born in 1944, which corresponded with my father’s service with the Nordland Regiment in Yugoslavia at the end of 1943. The old man had been pretty prolific. Not like the young men of today. The past was both an obscure bastard and a database full of concrete facts – and dates which brooked no denial.

  ‘Was our father in Yugoslavia?’ I asked.

  ‘He served on the Eastern Front,’ Fritz said after a lengthy pause.

  ‘That covers a lot, Fritz.’

  ‘Maybe. I think you should talk to Irma.’

  ‘I can’t talk to her, goddammit. Come on, tell me!’

  ‘I think so.’

  There followed another long silence. The only one getting any joy out of this conversation was the phone company. The minutes ticked by and the meter ran as I listened to his heavy breathing. I could see him in my mind’s eye: a burly, middle-aged man with a bit of a paunch, standing in his nice, respectable living room in his nice, re
spectable detached bungalow in a small town by the sea in which he produced the bread that had made him a wealthy man. He and Dorthe had two sons, both grown up and doing well, as they say. Hans-Peter was a long-distance lorry driver, transporting fish to Spain and Italy. They got all the top-grade produce which we were not prepared to pay for. Little brother Niels was a schoolteacher in Lemvig, married to the local vicar. They lived far away from the aggravation of Copenhagen and were the sort of provincial Danes who could not understand why anyone would willingly live in the capital. To them Copenhagen was an exotic place, inhabited by restless, confused people and prodigal Jutlanders and Fünen folk forced into exile by misfortune. Copenhagen sucked honest, hard-earned money out of the provinces. That one just had to live with, but to actually live in the big city was another matter. Beyond the imaginings of decent souls.

  ‘Well, let’s keep in touch,’ I said to break the silence.

  ‘Of course. Everything’s going to be alright, you’ll see. We know our Irma, right?’ he said in the soft, lilting burr to which he had reverted so easily on his return to the island.