Part 3
IRMA’S SECRET LIFE
‘It sounds like a thriller, doesn’t it, but the thrillers are like life – more like life than you are.’
Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
15
Dearest sister,
I write to you knowing full well that you are unlikely ever to receive my letter, but you are the only one I can talk to. They have given me my computer, having first copied every single little document, of course. I can’t help laughing at the stupid, uneducated cops who are at this very moment poring over my dissertation on ‘The new role of women in the globalised, late-capitalist economy – a literary perspective’. Other than that there’s not much to laugh at. I am writing in our common language, German; using a code to hide my words. Might they be able to break it? Not that I care, because I might as well be writing in soap or in sand. Once I am finished I will erase my thoughts.
I am sitting in a cell: seven metres square by my calculations, containing a cot, a washbasin and a small table. The walls are an ugly yellow. It is night. I can sense more than see the moon out there beyond the little window high above my head – just under the ceiling, about three metres up, I would guess. An impression of a golden light shining down on the Western Prison, a light which would like to break through the walls and caress me if it could. I am a political prisoner in a country that boasts of being civilised and democratic while, in all its hypocrisy, practising the worse possible form of torture: that of cutting a person off from their fellow human beings.
I am allowed to speak to one member of my family for an hour once a week, strictly supervised of course. Fritz was here the other day, sat there in the interview room, heavy and silent as always, uncomfortable with the policeman who was monitoring our conversation. All he could talk about was his bread and buns. He looks like Dad. As Dad could have looked had he been permitted to lead a normal life. With none of Dad’s charm, but with his nose for business. Fritz may seem a bit dense, but he’s smarter than he looks. I can’t talk to him about serious personal matters, though. He sees everything in terms of buns and French loaves. As long as he can make a decent living, go hunting, enjoy life with his wife, ensure that the factory is doing well and his pension savings multiplying nicely, and know that his children continue to thrive, Fritz is a happy man. Teddy has not been to see me yet. He was out travelling when I was arrested. But he got me a lawyer so he must be back. I am expecting to see my shrewd and intelligent, if somewhat superficial, little brother very soon.
Otherwise, it’s just one interrogation after another. I can tell from their questions that they have spoken to everyone I know, but they have nothing; nor do they realise that the world has changed. They are like sheep, they follow the herd, and unlike you and me they have never understood that the world is an unjust place which only the chosen can change, to assure a better life for all. They are marionettes in the grim puppet show of capitalism, in which the people are seduced with Coca-Cola and TV. And in which a company director in the US earns as much as 479,000 farmworkers in Zimbabwe, as I read in one of the newspapers which they do, at least, allow me to read. That we, the affluent ten per cent of the world’s population, control eighty-six per cent of its resources – I don’t need to ask you: is that the justice of liberalism, because you know the answer as well as I do. We believed in another kind of society. Our dreams were shattered by the folly of mankind, but does that mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Would Christians deny Jesus Christ simply because the church has for centuries committed indescribable atrocities in his name? Should we deny our fundamental principles because of the rape by a handful of individuals of the great socialist and communist ideals. Something tells me, too, that a new generation of young people is waking up to these facts. They have cast off the trauma of socialism’s downfall and are starting to protest – in word and action – against global injustice.
But I did not mean to rant on about politics to you, sister. I simply wanted to while away the night by talking to you. I cannot sleep anyway, and the time goes so slowly. I know they’ll be back again tomorrow, asking the same – albeit courteous, but at the same time accusatory – questions. They think they actually know the answers and merely want me to confirm their misapprehensions, but I won’t.
It has grown darker outside, the moon has disappeared and I can hear the rain pattering against the wall and the little window. The sound of the cold spring rain takes me back to the day that marked the end of my childhood. Then as now, there was a sense that the rain could turn to sleet and thereafter to snow even. In the sort of false winter that can sometimes strike in the Danish autumn: the soft snow rendering the whole world hushed and white. It doesn’t seem quite right, though, for it to fall when we are looking forward to spring.
May I share that day with you?
It was not a spring day, but a day in autumn. Very early in the morning. I was twelve at the time, riding with a bunch of other twelve-to sixteen-year-olds in a wagon pulled by a dark-grey tractor, one of the new Fergusons which were starting to appear in the country. Even then, in 1952, they were something of a sensation in a land which, in many ways, still bore the scars of the war and where horses still supplied the main pulling power on the land. The tractor was driven by Niels Ejnar. We could see the back of his neck under his greasy cap and every now and again the breeze would blow the smell of his pipe tobacco back to us in the wagon. The scent of Virginia tobacco, which still seemed strange, but rich and sensual after the peculiar weed the grown-ups had smoked during the war. The tractor’s big wheels ploughed along the muddy cart-tracks and the wagon rocked and rolled as if we were on a ship. We were all dressed in warm trousers and sweaters, with thick socks inside our high rubber boots. It was a chilly morning, but with that crispness to the air which makes you feel good to be alive. It was still dark, but there was a lovely, slender band of light on the horizon against which I could see the bare-branched trees taking shape and coming to life. Rain lurked in the domed clouds.
Niels Ejnar was a big, beefy man in his early thirties with a high bald head and little blue eyes. He and his brother had a smallholding out on the fen, not far from the marsh that bordered on the beach, down where the meadows gave way to old grass-covered dykes. He was a friend of Dad’s, or at least they were somehow connected: they had a certain way of looking at one another sometimes. He never said much, but people didn’t in those days. He minded his own business and toiled for his bread, as they said. Along with his wife, a tall thin woman with a narrow, pockmarked faced of whom we were terrified as kids, because we thought she looked like the witch in Hansel and Gretel.
It was a chilly morning, but fraught with anticipation. My little brother Fritz was sitting across from me, next to Peter, the lawyer’s son who only had eyes for Bente, who was ages with himself. Fritz was only nine, but he had been allowed to join the beaters on the first big autumn shoot to be hosted by the Count. Hence the reason we kids were in that wagon, on our way to the first beat, with the promise of a daler at the end of the day and lemonade and pastries in the course of it. It made me all warm and fluttery and happy inside to think of my father being there with the other fine men of the district and the guests whom the Count had invited all the way from Copenhagen. The Count was a tall gaunt man with a little goatee beard, which was quite unusual back then. He was a curiously aloof man who lived on his estate a little way outside the town. As with so many others there was some mystery surrounding his wartime activities. Like the other farmers he had apparently made good money out of supplying produce to the Germans, but in 1944 the Count had had a change of heart. Still, though, when liberation came he managed to escape repercussions only because he had given shelter to two British airmen, or so my father and mother said. After the war he had gone on living in the area, on his estate. We had moved from South Zealand to the clement island of Fünen and taken over the bakery, which had been going cheap. ‘The comrades helped us,’ my parents said. It was best
that no one knew about our past. The photograph of my father in his black uniform had been hidden away as far back as 1944, though he was not even home at that point. They never mentioned the war, or where he had been. Why he had suddenly vanished after being home on leave in 1943. Fritz stemmed from that visit. And why he had suddenly shown up again towards the end of 1947. My little brother Teddy was the product of that homecoming.
I don’t remember much about the war. Only, in the early days, a feeling of happiness, uniforms, songs and speeches, the aroma of tobacco, the women’s heavy perfumes and my mother and father at the hub of elevated conversation in Danish and in German, that strange language that was both hard and soft. My lovely mother was the object of much attention from the handsome men. But I loved my Dad best. He was tall and slim and carried himself with dignity. It seemed perfectly natural when he said that some people were chosen to lead and that the Nordic race was superior to all the others. These words sounded so true, coming from the fine lips under his straight nose. Although maybe I don’t really remember this at all? Maybe it’s just something I read. My knowledge of that time is, after all, a product of my reading. But I do remember that good feeling inside. Or did I simply pick that up from the letters I found years later when my mother moved into a nursing home and I, as the oldest and the daughter, had the job of clearing out the house? I was only four when he came home from the front. All I remember is that he was very thin, his face grey, and his hands shook. That and the voices from my parents’ bedroom in the house where we were living at the time. They were loud and shrill; I remember my mother’s tears and my father’s hacking cough. Before, when he’d been home on leave, neighbours and friends had flocked to the house to sing songs and listen to speeches. But on this last furlough hardly anyone came to see us. Life went on just the same, though. Everyone carried on as normal. Did business with the Germans, got on with their work, listened to the government’s urgings to stay calm. But it was as if we had contracted a disease. As if the good times were over. Even though Dad and the others had gone off to war with the government’s support and blessing. With brass bands and parades and speeches on the radio. Later I learned the whole story, of course, but as a child I only sensed, more with my heart than my mind, how everything changed, slowly and imperceptibly, and treachery and hypocrisy became the order of the day. How the big men knew how to look out for themselves, offering up the small fry to satisfy the mob’s thirst for revenge at the end of the war.
But on that morning in 1952, riding in that wagon, the war seemed a million miles away. The country might have been poor and battle-scarred, but there was something in the air. We had moved to a new place where no one knew us, and the Danes seemed mainly concerned with making a better life for themselves. Most political prisoners had been released and if anyone was acquainted with my family’s past then they kept quiet about it, because they were a part of that same past. We lived in a big white house with lots and lots of rooms. It sat right next to the bakery, in which two time-served bakers and an apprentice were employed. We had a driver who delivered bread to all the farms. We also had a cold store to which people consigned their sides of pork or whole pigs. Come Christmas the house was filled with the smell of roast pork and roast duck. Not just from Mum’s kitchen, but also from the bakery to which the locals brought their Yuletide joints and birds for roasting in the big oven. In Europe, cities – not to mention whole countries – still lay in ruins, but once again Denmark had emerged more or less unscathed: the Danes are highly adaptable and know how to make the best of things. That was a happy time. My mother began to dress up nice again, she smelled of perfume once more, and mysterious sounds, both ominous and deliciously intriguing, issued from the big bedroom. The summer before that autumn shoot my father hired a photographer to take an aerial picture of the house and the bakery. It was a really hot summer’s day, the air heavy with scent and a-hum with insects, when the small single-engined plane swooped over my childhood home, skimming over the red tiled roof and the elm trees I remember so clearly from our huge garden. We were lined up in front of the house; Mum and Dad had put Fritz into baker’s togs just like Dad’s, because even at that point it was more or less understood that Fritz would be a baker like Dad.
The wagon jounced along and I looked across at Fritz. He might have been three years younger than me, but he was already a big lad with his father’s wide mouth and hefty shoulders. Under the raincoat his sweater strained across his chest. Beneath the rough cap which he had pulled down low over his forehead as always, he was grinning. My other little brother, Theodor, was at home, of course. At the age of four he was still a baby as far as we were concerned. While Fritz and I took after Dad, Teddy, with his blonde curls, beautiful eyes and sunny smile looked more like Mum. And like Mum he cried easily. Even for a little kid it didn’t take much for him to burst into tears. And not just if he happened to hurt himself: at the thought of someone dying, the sight of a mouse caught in a trap in the bakery or taken by the cat, or a dead ladybird on the sun-warmed stone of the front step, he was liable to start howling heartrendingly. It seemed only natural to call him Teddy, because he was exactly like a soft, cuddly little teddy bear. He was the family pet, as late babies often are. My father thought him a bit of a namby-pamby, but my mother defended him and coddled and cossetted him. Then my father would eye me proudly, remove the pipe from his mouth and say: ‘Irma, my lass. You’re a damn fine chap. The sort one can rely on. A true comrade. And you should always be able to rely on a comrade. Through thick and thin. Remember that! Never fail a comrade!’ My whole world revolved around my father and I loved him with all my heart.
He was there with the other men when we drove up. Niels Ejnar stopped the tractor – its enormous, brand-new rear tyres now caked with thick, black mud – clambered down from the driving seat and touched his cap to the gentlemen, but like us beaters he kept his distance from them. They were standing in a group, all drinking from steaming mugs of real coffee laced with aquavit to take the edge off the morning chill. ‘To warm the bones,’ Dad said as he passed the hip-flask round. The members of the shooting party were all burly men in heavy coats and green plus-fours which stopped just below the knee, leaving a length of thick knitted sock showing between them and the top of their rubber boots. They were all wearing caps and smoking pipes, cigarettes or cheroots. They reeked of masculinity, standing there discussing the forthcoming shoot. We kids were also offered coffee or lemonade, proper coffee with creamy milk and sugar, and bread rolls from Dad’s bakery with real butter, spread so thickly in honour of the occasion that it tickled the roof of the mouth when you bit into it. As the baker’s family we had no shortage of butter, but we had margarine scraped on our sandwiches at home, just like everyone else. Because that was what one did. Dad smiled at Fritz and me, but stayed with the other men, naturally. The colour had come back into his cheeks, he had filled out again too, and he stood there chatting away easily to the Count – so I noted out of the corner of my eye, while Fritz was fooling about with Niels Ole who was his best chum, even though his father was a vicar and didn’t take part in the shoot, and we never went to church. ‘The church has made people soft,’ Dad always said. We had been christened, though, and would be confirmed, because that was all part of being Danish, Mum felt – and Dad too really, I’m sure. We shivered in the cold air, but were proud to be on the shoot.
The Woman from Bratislava Page 23
