by Frank Conroy
Now the ship was on an even keel. As we approached our first port, on the coast of France, the atmosphere on board quickened. People rushed here and there, seeing to their luggage, queuing up for passport control, making special arrangements with the harried officers and crew. As the ship docked it seemed almost not to be a ship any more, but a large, crowded hotel with every man elbowing his neighbor aside in the struggle to leave. Night fell and I watched the disembarking passengers walk down the long gangway under the white brilliance of a hundred spotlights. Below me the stevedores moved back and forth with platforms of freight, their blue shirts stained with sweat. Testing the reality of the scene, I called down to one of them.
“Bonjour,” I said, my heart beating wildly. A man looked up, and unable to think of anything more intelligent to say, I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, “C’est un grand bateau, n’est-ce pas?”
He lowered his head and after a moment turned to another man working a few yards away. I caught the end of what he said “... S’quil a dit? Que c’est un grand bateau!” They laughed and didn’t look up again. I moved away, filled with mysterious shame. But I’d found out what I wanted to know. French, which I’d failed three times in high school, was in fact a real language, spoken by real people. Europe existed.
At dinner the girls were nervous, talking fast and laughing too much. I bought a bottle of wine to celebrate our last evening together and Paula had a picture taken of the table, all of us with glasses raised, myself with eyes carefully crossed. When I said my goodbyes she kissed me on the cheek. I left the dining room with my head full of perfume and my cheek tingling where her lips had brushed against me.
The next day we docked at Bremerhaven. Making my way along the crowded deck I reviewed the morning, making sure I’d done everything I was supposed to. I’d tipped everyone mentioned in the chapter on tipping in my Traveler’s Handbook, I had all my luggage (a suitcase and an Army-surplus duffel bag), I’d cleared customs and passport control, and my embarkation pass was sticking up out of my breast pocket. By getting an early start I was ahead of everyone else, ready to go. Two screaming children almost knocked the duffel bag from my shoulder as they ran by. I hitched it up and continued forward saying, “excuse me, sorry, excuse me,” as I struggled through. A brass band was playing somewhere forward, trumpet runs clearly audible above the shouting and confusion. As someone moved away from the rail I stepped into his place to rest for a moment. On the pier down below a crowd of soldiers stood with upturned faces, some of them waving and calling up to the people looking down. As I started to turn away I caught sight of Paula and two or three of the girls on the rail a few yards away. I could see Paula quite clearly through the crowd, and was about to call out when she turned in my direction. She was crying, her mouth twisted up as if reacting to some terrible pain. Her eyes passed over me without a trace of recognition. She looked down at the pier, raising her arm to wave, her head going forward, her whole body strained with longing. Behind her one of the other girls, also crying, seemed not to be able to look any longer and collapsed against Paula’s back, holding on to her shoulders and lowering her forehead against her friend. Stunned, I turned away instantly and re-entered the crowd.
Near the gangplank I came upon the brass band standing with their backs to the wall, playing hard. My friend the pianist was at the end of the line, a glockenspiel resting on his hip, his eyes narrowed to read the music clipped to the top of the instrument, his fingers holding, with almost visible distaste, the little mallet with which every now and then he struck the silver bars. It was so ludicrous I felt embarrased for him, and moved past without attempting to catch his eye. At the gangplank my heart began to race. I got on line and moved slowly past the officials. My pass was checked and my luggage marked on a list.
“Okay?” I asked an officer.
He nodded and I stepped off the ship. The music fading behind me, I moved down the long, covered gangway toward the square of light in the distance.
18
Elsinore, 1953
DOCTOR BLOCK took my knight with his bishop. Surprised, I stared down at the board. He would lose a bishop to gain a knight, with the rest of the exchange, as far as I could see, coming out even. Was it a trap? Perhaps he was simply determined to break up my developing offense earlier than usual. After playing the man two games a day every afternoon for the past two months I had developed the knack of responding to his response, of building my attack along the lines suggested by his defense without actually being able to see (as he could) how it was supposed to turn out. I invariably lost, but I was becoming a good player. Doctor Block’s straightforward defensive play (he was not tricky, and always defended himself at what was, empirically, his weakest point) elicited increasingly complex attacks from myself, showing me the way, as it were. Without a common language, we played in silence. He was German.
I took his bishop, he took my other knight. I took his knight with a pawn, but instead of taking my pawn as I’d expected he brought out his second bishop and put my rook en prise.
“Shit,” I said softly.
He sucked his pipe. “Hmmmm.”
I studied the board, trying to find a way to save my rook. In a flash, I saw something. Not bothering to think it out past a couple of moves I surrendered to a delicious impulse and brought out my queen. “Check.” If I had to go down, I’d go down fighting. He blocked my queen with a pawn. “Check,” I said, developing my bishop. He nodded calmly and moved his king behind a line of pawns. My queen was threatened. I sacrificed a knight. “Check.” He took the piece and I moved my freed queen. “Check.” He retreated farther behind the pawns, but now, at least, I could exchange bishops and save my rook. I was down a piece, but I had a rook for the end game.
He looked down at the board, up at me, held two fingers in the air, and said “Mate.”
“What?” I looked at the board, trying to see how he could finish me off in two moves. It took me several moments. Nodding, I stood up. “Tak,” I said in my awkward Danish. “I morn.” We shook hands and he began to put away the pieces. There was no one else in the common room, so I left, passing through the cold hall, up the stairs, and into my room.
The youngest student and the only American at the International Folk High School of Elsinore, I’d been given a room of my own. My grandfather (a small, gentle man with whom I could not converse but who nevertheless managed to convey his interest in me—he’d met me at the Copenhagen railroad station the night I arrived, alert, grey-haired, almost apologetic as he struggled with me over my suitcase which, despite his age, he insisted on carrying) had given me an old radio, a rug, and some colorful maps to animate the room. I’d bought a small table lamp with a red shade. My typewriter stood on the desk, surrounded by the pages of a short story I was writing. I liked the room. At night I lay in my bed listening to the bitter wind outside, congratulating myself on its cosiness.
I walked to the window and stared through the double panes at the girls’ dormitory across the way. It was already dark at four in the afternoon. Light from my window spilled out over the snow and mixed with light from the Frog’s window directly opposite. The Frog was a big, hulking farmgirl from Aarhus, so named by the French boys because of her acne. As I stood watching she appeared at her window (her long shadow wavering across the snow), saw me, and darted away like a frightened animal. I rubbed my nose. The mixture of ugliness and extreme shyness was interesting, but I couldn’t help wishing that someone pretty, someone like Christina, lived there instead.
There was a knock at the door, and as I turned, Henri entered. He was by tacit agreement the leader of the French group, six boys and one girl, to whom I had attached myself. They were kind about my French, ignoring my grammar and praising my vocabulary.
“Come on,” he said, “we’re playing Hysteria.”
“Immediately. I’ll change the shoes.” I sat down on my bed and reached underneath for a pair of sneakers.
Henri went to my desk and looked down at
the pages of my story. “Does it march?”
“Yes. But slowly.”
“Good.”
“Is everybody there?”
“They’ve started already.”
I tied my laces and jumped up. “Let’s go.”
We went down the hall toward the far staircase. A few of the German boys were practicing a dance in the open area by the stairwell, big, clumsy oafs in lederhosen, slapping themselves and shaking the building as they jumped around, their red faces glowing. They didn’t look up as we passed.
“What a bunch of cows,” Henri said as we jogged down the stairs. “Have you observed how they never talk to anyone but themselves?”
“They wouldn’t last five minutes in the game,” I said.
He laughed. “Tu parles!”
The gym, a large room perhaps sixty feet long, had gone unused until the afternoon we invented the game. There was a small stage at one end, and the other three walls were banked with horizontal wooden bars, six inches apart, covering the whole surface from floor to ceiling. Assuming that the stage was “safe,” it was possible to make a complete circuit of the room without touching the floor. In a storeroom we’d found ropes and gym equipment which, when placed intelligently around the floor, added another dimension. The ropes hung from the ceiling, gym mats and jumping horses were strategically lined up, chairs stacked here and there, and it became possible to leap from a wall, swing to a safety zone, have a rope thrown by a confederate, and wing again to another wall. The game was tag, with only two rules—you couldn’t touch the floor, and in the event that you were tagged and made “it,” you had to count to twenty-five to give the person who’d tagged you time to get away. Hysteria was the most exhausting game I’ve ever encountered. We could hear the screams of the players echoing off the high ceiling even before we entered. Pushing open the door, we jumped up on the stage.
“Who’s It?” we yelled together.
“Midou!”
Midou the Algerian, a bony, slope-shouldered boy of nineteen, was the youngest student after myself. He glanced at us from his perch high on the wall and began climbing down, angling toward us. We trotted across the stage and clambered up onto the bars on the opposite wall. In the center of the room Albert sat on the jumping horse combing his hair, patting the high wave over his forehead between strokes like a sculptor working with clay. We scuttled across the wall to a place opposite him.
“Albert!” I called as Midou landed on the stage with a thump.
“One second.” He stood up on the horse and motioned for Georges, spread-eagled on the far wall, to send a rope. When it arrived he held it with his right hand and threw us ours with his left. Henri leaned out from the wall and caught it in the air. Midou quickened his pace and I could feel the bar under my hands vibrating as he approached. Henri swung through the air to the horse as Albert swung to the-far wall. I climbed up a few rungs and looked back over my shoulder for the rope. “Hurry.”
Henri stood on the horse, smiling. “Softly,” he said as he threw, “grace is everything.”
It was a perfect toss, allowing me to jump into the air to meet the rope. Henri reached out and caught me around the waist as I arrived. Laughing, I turned to taunt Midou, but he kept on moving across the wall, having shifted his attention to Marcel, who was resting on the stacked chairs in the corner.
“He’s wasting his strength,” I said. Marcel was the fastest of us all.
“Bien sur,” Henri said. He took the rope, jumped, swung back to the wall we’d just left, leaving the end entwined in the bars.
Midou and Marcel, ten feet apart, were moving fast across the wall. “Pig!” Midou shouted. “Son of a dog!” Marcel began to laugh. “Maggot!” Midou yelled, sensing an advantage. (In the game of Hysteria, laughter was dangerous. Once you started, it was often hard to stop. The tension of the chase and the inherent ridiculousness of the game itself brought on fits of uncontrollable laughter, and more than once I’d found myself at the brink of safety, with a rope in my hands and nothing more to do than jump, unable to move because I was laughing so hard, my will utterly sapped.) Still laughing, Marcel slipped. He hung by his hands, flat against the wall. With an eerie scream Midou pounced, slapped his arm, and moved away gibbering like an ape. Marcel rested for a moment and then turned around. I was the first person he saw. “Prepare yourself, my friend,” he said. I called for a rope the moment he began to move.
I’d been “It” for ten minutes. Swinging off the wall, I let go of the rope, flew through the air and landed on a gym mat at the precise instant Russe left on another rope, climbing hand over hand up to the ceiling, across a rafter to the safety of the wall. Too tired to follow, I collapsed on the mat and folded my arms over my head. Instantly a chorus of jeers, catcalls, and shrill whistling sounds filled the air.
“Sleepy-head!”
“The poor child is tired!”
“Too many cigarettes!”
I struggled to my feet, my chest heaving, and surveyed the situation. I had the strength for one more attempt. They were all in the corner—Henri, Midou, and Albert on the stacked chairs, Marcel and Georges on the wall, with Russe climbing down to join them. Albert played with a rope, faking clumsiness, gasping theatrically as he almost dropped it. I studied the placement of the gym mats. My single advantage was long legs. Except for Midou, not one of the French boys was over five and a half feet tall, and I knew from experience that I could jump farther than any of them. In the course of the game one of the gym mats had crept a bit closer to the wall than was usual. With sudden decisiveness I began to run, leaping easily across two mats, and then, as I got to the third and last, I put on a burst of speed. There was a sudden panic in the corner.
“Attention! He’s going to jump!”
My timing was right. I pushed off from the last mat with every bit of strength I could muster, sailed through the air, my arms outstretched, and hit the wall. My foot was on the lowest rung and hadn’t touched the floor.
“Hola!” someone called. “Bien fait!”
As I began to climb they converged on Albert, screaming like girls, everyone trying to get a hand on the rope. They came away from the wall as I arrived, a tangled knot of humanity, laughing and cursing as Midou’s foot caught in the bars and stopped their movement. I could have tagged Midou easily, but I didn’t. I watched as he extricated himself. Without momentum, and with all that weight, the rope simply hung over the open floor. Gradually the entire group began slipping down a few inches at a time, the few hands with a firm grip on the rope unable to keep hold. They fell to the floor with a tremendous crash, those from the top of the rope landing on those from the bottom. I climbed down from the wall as they separated themselves and lay on the floor catching their breaths.
“It must be time for supper,” Midou said after a while.
Someone loosed a long, splintering fart and we all laughed.
Meals at the school were simple and, for me at least, almost entirely inedible. Breakfast consisted of porridge, bread, and coffee. Lunch and dinner were boiled potatoes, a boiled vegetable, and meat every other day. No one seemed to mind. The French boys complained occasionally in private, but in the dining room they remained cheerful and stoked it down without a word. (I do remember a raised eyebrow from Henri one night when, instead of the usual fatty meat, each table was served a huge boiled fish-head, eyes and all.) All I ever ate was potatoes with salt, pepper, and margarine. Since room, board, and tuition cost the students less than a dollar a day, I suppose no one expected much in the way of food.
The school was part of a Scandinavian movement called Folk High Schools. The idea had originally been to provide some sort of informal education for the agrarian poor. The Elsinore school had survived the death of the movement because it took students from all over the world, thus enjoying the continued support of an internationally minded government. Most of the students were there to learn Danish. When spring came they would go to work on Danish farms, learn Danish agricultural methods, and
return to their own farms the following winter. Others were at the school simply because it was cheap. Like myself, they had wanted to leave their own countries but could not afford tourism. Some of the girls were there to catch a husband, some of the men to find wives, and a few naïve souls perhaps expected to learn something from the curriculum. Toward the end of my stay I learned that there was a continuous flow of students from one of the larger mental institutions in Copenhagen, that the school was also being used as a sort of way-station between the hospital and society. It was not so much a school as a hostel for all ages. The oldest student was a woman of sixty-seven who, were she not at the school, would have been in a rest home.
On the way to the dining hall I saw Christina coming down the steps of the girls’ dormitory. She was alone. On an impulse I stopped in front of the dining room door, as the French boys went ahead, and went through the motions of tying my shoe. Christina approached and I straightened up. She walked with her head down and would have passed me by if I hadn’t reached forward to open the door. She glanced up quickly. “Thank you,” she said, with the faintest trace of a Swedish accent.
“Do you speak French?” I asked.
“A little. Why?”
“Why don’t you sit with us?”
I followed her through the short passageway and the second bank of doors. Once inside, we stopped. It was warm, the air filled with voices and the sound of chairs being pulled from the tables. She turned, her thin face slightly puzzled, as if she’d forgotten something. She wore square rimless glasses and her blonde hair had been pulled into a tight bun on the back of her head. “I usually sit with Karen and Hanna. But I will change tonight.”
“Good.”
We crossed the room to the French table. Feeling slightly self-conscious, I held her chair. She sat straight, her back not touching the wood. A faint, lemony scent rose from her head. “This is nice,” she said, smiling as I sat down.
