The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

by Kathryn Davis

  Swine! Maeve announced. Who did those swine think they were, anyway? She kicked off her shoes and fell back onto the sofa. In the streets people were saying it was only a matter of time before King Christian surrendered. Roll over and play dead like dogs, Maeve muttered. Did Helle want to end up with a collar around her neck? Did she want to live in a kennel? Back in Ireland, Maeve said, her mother had a wolfhound named Rosie, and whenever there was a thunderstorm Rosie would hide under the bed, whimpering. That was what it was like to be a dog. Thus she anticipated the rhyme which was to become popular during the five years of occupation: “To feed the German appetite/ Pretty Denmark’s cows and pigs/ Every day get turned to meat/ Of which you cannot take a bite/ For those with muzzles cannot eat.”

  It isn’t my intention to recount the atrocities of a period with which everyone is already familiar, for although I don’t subscribe to Helle’s belief that a reliance on fact has never helped illuminate the truth, I am willing to admit my limitations as an historian. Oh, I could tell you that the Germans consumed millions of tons of Danish pork and beef between 1941 and 1945. And if I felt like doing the appropriate research, I suppose I’d know precisely how many millions of tons, as well as how many millions of dollars Danish profiteers made on the black market. I could go on to relate how many millions of kroner changed hands every day in the fashionable stores on the Strøget, how many millions of pelts went into the making of the fur coats worn by the wives of the profiteers—beautiful coats of ermine and lynx they flaunted as they guided their horse-drawn carriages up and down the roads from Skagen to Nykøbing, as millions of people died.

  Millions of people, numbers too large to understand: as Helle described it, they constituted an edifice as overwhelming, as constrictive to the heart, as Speer’s vast shrine to the Nazi dream in Nuremberg, its red banners bigger than houses, its 130 columns higher than clouds. The only possible response to something so huge, Helle said, is fear. If you’re required to love it as well, what you have to do is turn your fear into a song that brings a tear to the eye, and then you have to sing that song with a million other frightened people, all of you carrying torches. The torches were a nice touch, for they presumed to illuminate an otherwise comprehensive darkness; and the more colossal the edifice, the more colossal its shadow.

  That shadow, ultimately, was the element within which Helle had to learn to live. Even as the April sun shone on the deep green water of the canal, creating mutable constellations, as six or seven blinking stars proliferated into an entire galaxy with the passing of a cloud; even as the December sun turned the canal to a mirror of ice, and the brightly whirling hats of the skaters to meteorites and comets; even as she felt that sun heating her face, she understood that darkness and not light was the primary condition of the universe. Maeve subscribed to the resistance paper, Frit Danmark, where Helle read about the efforts of such brave Danes as Count Carl-Adam Moltke, who was responsible for helping Niels Bohr escape to London with information about German work on the atomic bomb. She read about the perfidy of the Danish police, “more deadly than Nazis,” and the sabotage efforts of a group of Aalborg schoolboys called the Churchill Club, who set fire to railway cars carrying German troops to Norway.

  Maeve, meanwhile, began keeping strange hours, leaving the apartment in the middle of the night and not showing up again until early the next morning. At first Helle suspected she was having an affair, and she admitted to having followed her once: along the moonlit canal, past the intertwining dragons’ tails on the Bourse tower and to the Nyhavn, where Maeve disappeared down the shadowy steps of the very shop where Mandrill had tattooed an eye on Helle’s neck twenty years earlier. But Mandrill was no longer there, and the man with whom Maeve entered into immediate and intense conversation—a tall man in a well-tailored black suit and a gray homburg—was obviously not a tattooist. Better not ask questions, Maeve replied, when confronted in the morning. The suggestion was that the nature of her activities was political, not romantic. “She had this way of squinting one eye and widening the other,” Helle said, “as if she was concealing something and revealing it at the same time. Like that fortune-telling ball of Ruby’s, you know the one I mean? The messages rising and sinking, rising and sinking. A hateful toy.”

  And then one day in January of 1943 Daisy arrived in town, ostensibly to shop for drapery material. She and Helle had stayed in touch, Helle spending the occasional weekend at Asgard—which was, to Daisy’s embarrassment, the name Propp had chosen for his cement fortress—although these visits had more or less come to a halt with the German occupation. The coldest winter since 1871: hills of snow taller than a man piled up along the streets; icicles hung from the eaves, as long and sharp as the Greenland Eskimos’ legendary harpoons; ships were embedded in the frozen harbor, their frozen rigging tinkling like glass. The insides of the apartment windows were thick with frost, and because of the fuel shortage you had to wear your coat indoors. My poor dear! Daisy said when she saw Helle trying to assemble a cigarette out of dried cabbage leaves.

  Though she must have been close to seventy, Daisy was still unusually attractive, even though Helle could see in her face that peculiar blurring of gender common in the aged. Daisy was now what you’d call handsome, a handsome woman laughing as she reached into her alligator purse, her hand shaking slightly as she drew forth an unopened pack of Gold Flakes. American tobacco representatives, she said, had been supplying resistance workers with real cigarettes for almost a year, and when Helle looked at her in surprise, Daisy laughed again. Had the shaking been another sign of old age, or was Daisy merely cold, unaccustomed to being in such a poorly heated building, even though she was wearing a full-length fur coat? For it never occurred to Helle until later that the imperturbable Daisy might have been nervous, despite the way she jumped at the sound of something hitting the floor in the next room. What was that? Daisy asked. Just Maeve getting up from a nap, Helle replied. Oh, Daisy said, going on to explain that the cigarettes were intended as a reward for bravery; a nice enough reward if you happened to be a smoker, which she wasn’t.

  “They simply don’t get it, do they?” said Maeve, yawning and stretching as she entered the room, her thick reddish hair flattened on one side by the pillow, which had also pressed a red crease into her cheek. “They don’t understand that bravery is its own reward,” she elaborated, and then sat down heavily, pulling her coat—an expensive, hooded fur coat Helle had never seen before—tightly around her shoulders. “Hello, Daisy,” she said, “nice to see you.” Helle looked at the two of them, Maeve and Daisy, seated at either end of the long kitchen table, and at the time what she thought she was seeing was two women eyeing each other from opposite ends of the romantic spectrum. How could Maeve comprehend the cynicism of a woman whose experience of romance had been as its object rather than its instigator?

  “These days,” Daisy said, “there are no rewards.” She went on to complain that her involvement with the resistance was straining her marriage. It wouldn’t do, Propp had warned, to aggravate Hitler, whose annual birthday telegram to the king, more flowery than ever, had been met with a terse response. Everyone knew that the Führer was now referring to Denmark as “diesem lächerlichen Ländchen”—this ridiculous little country—and it was clear that his patience, if you could call it that, had finally worn thin.

  Ever since the beginning of the occupation, the king’s practice had been to ride out on his horse each day at eleven, his spine perfectly straight, his subjects waving Danish flags and cheering him on, his route so regular you could set your watch by it. The idea, as Helle said, was to console, not to dazzle. And then on the morning of October 19, as he was approaching the Yacht Club, his horse suddenly bolted, heading at a wild gallop toward a group of schoolchildren; when he tried to rein it in, the horse reared and threw him to the ground. “Don’t touch me!” King Christian was rumored to have shouted at the SS guard who appeared, out of the blue, to lend assistance. What could be more repulsive than to watch the enemy
’s face lit with spurious concern, hovering over your damaged body, to feel his prodding hands? The king chose to rest his head in the lap of a middle-aged waitress, his blood seeping into her skirt until the ambulance arrived.

  Now Daisy was eager to know whether either Helle or Maeve had witnessed the incident. Did they think it was true, as some people claimed, that the horse had been spooked by the sound of a train, or had someone, probably the SS guard, startled the horse with a slap on the rump? When you got right down to it, Helle answered, it didn’t make any difference; the foul spirit that was on the loose everywhere had sought a form into which it might funnel itself, a form without which its influence on the course of events would go unnoticed. A train, a guard—what difference did it make? What difference! Daisy exclaimed; how could Helle, of all people, say such a thing? Surely she knew the old adage, one of Propp’s favorites: If the gold rusts, what will the iron do?

  Although of course Helle didn’t really believe this theory—an assertion I base not only on the evidence of Fuglespil, where the source of all evil is shown to be the terrible human heart, but also on what she directly said about that period in history. According to Helle, those men who wanted to rule the world and then, when they discovered they couldn’t, plotted its destruction, weren’t possessed by anything external to themselves. To assume they were would be to deny their complicity, and to predicate the existence of absolute evil was to succumb to the power of its symbols: the motorcade, the Hakenkreuz, the salute.

  In fact, that day in the kitchen Helle was merely trying to find out whether Maeve’s response to Daisy was going to be one of admiration or antagonism, and whether she herself had the power to tip the scales. She should have known better. Because for Maeve the two qualities carried equal weight, a fact which would, at the very least, explain her relationship to horses. Helle always talked that way, Maeve said, assuring Daisy that her suspicions were correct, that King Christian was an experienced rider, and that no trains had been scheduled to pass at the time of the so-called accident. As far as she was concerned, they could now count their own king among the casualties of the war, and she, Maeve, wanted to join forces with those courageous few who, like Daisy, were willing to spit in Hitler’s eye. “Arrogant few, you mean,” Daisy replied laconically. Anyone who’d ever been to a carnival knew how hard it was to hit a moving target. If Maeve really wanted to help, she would heed the advice of Marius Fiil, the Hvidsten Group’s leader, and take the rabbit, not the hunter, for her inspiration. For wasn’t camouflage the key to survival in a country as flat as Denmark?

  “I was so stupid,” Helle confessed. “I actually told Daisy that Maeve would never be any good as a rabbit; that if she were a rabbit she’d wear her brown coat in the winter, her white one in the summer.” A personality shaped by a love of opposition, a personality too flamboyant to hide—it was extraordinary, really, how you could live with someone and never know her true nature. Her foolish niece, for example. Although husbands and wives were notoriously blind, wasn’t that the condition of marriage? Maybe you had to choose blindness, for otherwise how could you stand to spend a lifetime with another human being? “And what about you?” Daisy asked. Helle came from Jutland—surely she must be aware of the superstition still current there that rabbits changed their sex from year to year. Speaking of which, would she be interested to know that Dancer was engaged to a young woman he’d met on his last crossing? Once again Daisy reached into her purse, this time drawing forth a postcard, on one side of which was printed a photograph of a pretty redhead in a bathing suit, holding aloft a red-and-white-striped beach ball. Betty, Daisy said. Betty Barnes, a shipboard entertainer of some sort. Here, she said, turning the card over and handing it to Helle so she could see Dancer’s writing, row upon row of dark slashes, as primitive and cryptic as his mouth.

  Helle didn’t even try to read the message. Instead she found herself picturing a man and a woman on a ship’s moonlit deck, kissing, while under their feet U-boats drifted like sharks through the icy waters of the north Atlantic. I hope you’ll be happy, she thought, realizing even as she did that it wasn’t Dancer she was thinking of. Sleet tapped against the front windows; the lights flickered and went out. It was as if, Helle said, someone had darkened the house prior to shutting and locking the door; as if Maeve, though she still sat at the kitchen table watching one of her cats lap up the cream she’d spilled for it into a saucer, were already gone, the resistance’s newest heroine, already riding north in Daisy’s car. U-boats in the water, soldiers in the forests. You couldn’t go anywhere where something wasn’t prowling, charting your passage. For a moment all she could hear was the brittle sound of the sleet, the tiny, contained sound of the cat’s tongue, lap lap lap, as drop by drop the cream disappeared into the tiny pink cave of its mouth.

  And then suddenly the lights came back on, illuminating beads of cream on the cat’s whiskers, as far away a doorbell rang. Helle darling, Maeve said, have you seen my shoes? She was bent down, searching under her end of the table; at the other end Daisy was standing, an unexpectedly savage expression on her face—in their fur coats they both looked more like animals than women, Helle said, and all at once she wondered whether instead of forming an alliance they were about to tear each other limb from limb. By the stove, Helle replied—hadn’t Maeve left them there to dry out? Possibly, said Maeve, raising her head from beneath the table. Her cheeks were bright red, full of blood, her eyes shining.

  Daisy reached for the third and last time into her purse. A sure way to ruin good leather, she remarked. Didn’t everyone know that? But wasn’t it a little late for Maeve to be worrying about shoes? She stood there holding a revolver, a dull-gray and surprisingly professional-looking weapon. Monster, Daisy said. If it weren’t for this monster, Carl Bruhn wouldn’t be dead. Carl Bruhn, whose parachute had failed to open, who’d tumbled out of the sky and into a field near Haslev. His body broke into a million pieces, Daisy said—a million pieces that scattered all over Denmark, a million lively, elusive pieces.

  VI

  A MELODRAMATIC PIECE of storytelling? Think what you will, it’s clear something happened, whether on that particular January afternoon or at another less clearly defined moment during the winter of 1943, that would explain Helle’s strange behavior throughout the next ten years. Was Maeve really responsible for Carl Bruhn’s death? The truth is, I found that I didn’t really care, that I wasn’t so much interested in the accuracy of Helle’s account, or, alternatively, in the quality of her invention, but rather in the touching suggestion provided by that next decade of a heart susceptible to routine human breakage. For, whatever the cause, Helle was struck mute, all desire to devise a form durable enough to withstand her formless seething having been drained from her, along with the desire to transform her memory of Maeve’s being led at gunpoint down the apartment stairs—if indeed that’s what actually occurred—into art. As Helle described it, a pair of men in heavy overcoats were waiting in the hallway, and at a signal from Daisy they pushed open the door, one of them binding Maeve’s wrists behind her back with a length of whipcord, the other gagging her with a red silk scarf, the silk threads of its long red tassels branching like capillaries through her coat’s lavish gray thickets of fur. The kind of scarf men wore to the opera, Helle told me. Daisy’s choice, although she thought the irony might have been lost on Maeve.

  Unlike you, Frances darling, Helle said. Nothing gets lost on you, does it? To which I replied, truculent, that at least the irony of that statement didn’t. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t eventually come to the conclusion that the entire story had been trumped up, that a ten-year silence might not have been motivated by such a single and typically operatic instance of betrayal. Certainly Maeve Merrow’s appearance the following spring on the stage of the Paris Opéra—“a glorious Butterfly who, the orchestra’s chronic tendency to swamp its singers notwithstanding, and despite her own instrument’s lack of tonal center, managed to provide her interpretation of ‘Un bel dì’ w
ith great emotional intensity”—would tend to bear out that fact. Besides, it seemed clear to me that no matter what passions had originally shaped their relationship, by the winter of 1943 Helle would no longer have been surprised by Maeve’s routine infidelities and betrayals. “Love her?” Helle said, when asked. “Oh, I loved her all right, the way you love anything that promotes your own sense of righteousness. Also her voice—that wild, dark voice. I’ve always had a weakness for all of the wild, dark forces in this world which resist containment,” Helle said. “As you, of all people, should know. Except Maeve wasn’t just dark, she was in the dark. Stupid, really.”

  But what, if not Maeve’s perfidy, could serve to explain a prolonged period of artistic inactivity in a life otherwise dedicated to understanding itself through the making of art? Briefly I entertained the idea that such an explanation might be found in Inger Nissen’s death, which occurred, according to the obituary notice I came upon one day, folded inside a wine-stained paper napkin in the glove box, on December 30, 1942. Inger Fog, née Nissen, resident of Horns, the notice announced, died giving birth to her third child, a healthy baby boy. Hadn’t Helle herself already told me, even if she’d never specified when, that Inger died in childbirth, that she’d been buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Hjørring, and that her mica-flecked headstone wasn’t centered within the plot but was set off to one side, leaving room for Hans to join her, just as she’d learned to leave room for him in the conjugal bed? Hvil i fred, it said on the stone. Rest in peace. Which, Helle muttered, she guessed poor Inger would finally have been able to do, albeit temporarily. Poor poor Inger. A dull husband, three boys, a flock of moulting ducks.