The Lover From an Icy Sea (66 page)

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I’m sorry. I said no philosophy, and here I am—.” She paused for a moment before continuing her story. “She didn’t need to worry. A few days later, her father—my grandfather—found them in the woods and immediately saw what they were up to. Then he kept watch for several days over her and her German lover. He watched that German lover of hers bring food to the shelter. He saw the many Jews they’d hidden in that shelter come up for a few minutes each day for fresh air and a few precious seconds of sunlight.

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One night, after he had been watching for several days, he confronted her. He told her that she was a disgrace to him, to her mother, to the Danish people, to all humanity, to human dignity itself. That she was lower to him than the whores of Copenhagen. And then he raped her.

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The next day, that same father who was now her violator, the proud Danish patriot and protector of human dignity, the man who would not allow the word tysk or Tyskland one second in his mouth—in any of their mouths, his hate of all things German was so great—went to the German compound and reported everything he had seen.

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One German officer and several soldiers followed my grandfather out into the forest. As my mother’s lover opened the hatch to the shelter that day, the German soldiers came out from behind the trees and surprised him. He did not resist. He told them he was proud of what he’d done, of what the people of Bornholm had done. He told them that he was, himself, ashamed to be a German soldier. And then he did an odd thing. He took an armband out of his pocket, as if it had been there all along for just this moment, and he put it on. The armband had on it—what else? The Star of David. Then he looked his commanding officer directly in the eye, and said: ‘
Auch ich bin Jude
.’ ‘I, too, am a Jew.’

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This, as you can well imagine, infuriated the officer. He ordered his soldiers to line up everyone in the shelter. And next to the Jews, to line up the Danes. My grandfather protested. He said his daughter, my mother, should be spared—after all, he’d led the German officer to the shelter and to this soldier who was a traitor to the German cause.

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The officer simply told my grandfather to stand in line with the others. Then he ordered my mother’s lover to shoot all of them. Not in the back of the head, as was usual. But face to face, and between the eyes. To let those eyes see how one Jude kills another.

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This lover first stepped up to my mother. What to her were the softest, bluest eyes in all the world now looked once again, and for the last time, into hers—into her own Baltic-blue eyes. She told him she forgave him. That she understood it was not his will. He took one long, last look at her, turned abruptly around to face his commanding officer, put the gun into his own mouth and pulled the trigger.

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There was a moment of confusion. With bits of his brains splattered all over her face and body, my mother became delirious. She had the feeling she was somewhere outside of herself, watching all of it from a cloud.

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The German officer stepped forward and ordered his soldiers to shoot all of the Jews and all of the Danes—including my grandfather. Then he marched off, and the soldiers agreed among themselves to spare my mother. She told me she never knew why, but that she suspected they’d known the secret all along. In this case, they, too, risked their own lives by disobeying an order.

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Somehow, she got home. Somehow, she survived. Her own mother did not. Her mother died a few days later—perhaps of a broken heart—though my mother never revealed what her father, her mother’s husband, my grandfather, had done to her and to her lover.

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And then, somehow, several months later, she delivered a girl. I am that girl. It is why my name is Dagmar—as much a German name as a Danish one.

Kit’s head was spinning as he took out another cigarette, and Mrs. Sørensen looked at him with sympathy. “I’m afraid, Kit, that I’ve told you only the beginning of the story. Could I have one of those, too?” she asked, pointing to his pack of cigarettes. He extended the pack, then half-stood up out of his chair to light it for her.

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My mother never married. She raised me alone through the years following the war. She did so by running our home as a kind of Bed & Breakfast for tourists—Danes, mostly, from the mainland. Occasionally, a haughty Swede or two who seemed to mistake our island for one of their own—perhaps because it lies so close to Sweden—and who in any case seemed to think our house was for their very neutral, very exclusive Swedish pleasure.

The venom Dagmar had just attached to the word ‘neutral’ did not escape Kit’s attention.

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Over the years, little by little, the Germans also discovered this island and our particular Bed & Breakfast. They came often to the island of Bornholm. Perhaps because of my mother’s experience of the war, perhaps because of me—I don’t know—but she did not feel towards Germans the way most Danes did then and still do today. She met everyone—German, Swede, Dutch, it didn’t matter—without prejudice, and then waited to see how they would prove themselves. She would not act with the collective, and she would not treat her country’s former enemies collectively. She exercised her free will, her choice. And she taught me to do the same.”

Kit noticed how Mrs. Sørensen seemed to withdraw into herself as she next spoke. “And I taught Daneka—at least I thought I did. But perhaps I did not spend enough time. Somehow, after she’d left Denmark and had lived for a while in New York, she seemed to change. I don’t know why. I don’t know if there is something about New York, or if it is … was … just Daneka. It was very small at first, but it was there. I saw it even in the way she treated you, Kit—yes, even you. It troubled me because I sensed when I saw the two of you together for the first and only time here ten years ago, that you, too, felt it. And that if it didn’t destroy you first, it would sooner or later destroy your love for her.”

Kit suddenly wished he had tried much harder to reach Daneka through this woman. It might’ve made a difference; it might not have. There was a great deal of history between these two women which he couldn’t know or even guess at. What could he have done even if he’d known? In any case, their story—his and Daneka’s—was just another little history, now and forever buried beneath a head- and tombstone.

Mrs. Sørensen interrupted his reverie. “One German family in particular had been staying with us the first month of summer, every summer, for many years. They had a son, Olaf, who’d been my playmate all of those years. And then, in the summer of my eighteenth year, that playmate and I fell in love. Just as my mother had, I exercised my free will, my choice, and Olaf and I did what young lovers do.

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Luckily, I did not become pregnant. But my mother knew it was only a matter of time before I would—with Olaf, or with someone else. She did not wish for me the same fate she had suffered. Raising a child alone, poor, keeping house for other people. And so, she quickly found me a husband.” Daneka’s mother smiled in a slightly self-mocking way. “A kind man, who happened also to be rich—at least she thought he was rich.

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We started off well enough, and my first and only child was born the following winter, on February 24, 1960. That baby was Daneka.”

Kit took out a third cigarette and lit it.

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Daneka was—how do you call it in English?” Here, she paused and put a fist to her mouth in thought. “I think the word is ‘spitfire.’ Yes, that is it. She was a spitfire. She never needed me for anything. She took the world as she found it and converted it to her will. When she could not get the lessons or find the books she wanted here on Bornholm, she organized her own correspondence courses. Yes, really! Can you believe it? She was ambitious. Far more ambitious than I had ever been. Some might even say that she was calculating, though I would never allow myself to think of her in that way.

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As it turned out, my husband’s fortune was diminishing just as Daneka’s ambition was augmenting. As his fortune and fate seemed to darken, so did his mood. The only thing that seemed to give him real happiness was his daughter. Certainly I did not.

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With ambition, Kit, often comes precociousness. Was Daneka precocious? Yes,” she said with a self-deprecating chuckle, “even more than I was. She had a first lover at fifteen—at least I think it was her first, though older men had already begun to look at her years earlier in ways they do not usually look at young girls. I noticed it. So did my husband—and he tried desperately to hold onto the little girl who was still his daughter.

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But she did not want to remain a little girl. She did not want to remain that because she could not remain that. As much as she wanted the affection of her father, she also could not keep down those things—those thoughts and actions—that come naturally to girls once they cease being little girls.

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It is perhaps a great challenge for most men. For many, it is simply too great—especially if they are unhappy with their wives or with themselves. I speak of the challenge of watching a daughter grow into a woman, and of letting her grow, and change, and ultimately go off into the arms of another man. Some can do it, no doubt. Most struggle with it, but manage to overcome their desires—or at least to keep them under control. Some, however, do not.

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It was in Daneka’s fifteenth year that my husband and I had our first serious difficulties. Our finances may have had a lot to do with it. But I think it was also because he knew he was losing Daneka to the world outside. That summer, our little island of Bornholm had a visit from a family from New York City. We had occasionally had visitors from America before, but never from New York. They were different. Big and boisterous and full of the kind of confidence that is quite foreign to anything we know here in Denmark. And Daneka was smitten.

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They had a boy—very handsome, very lively. You reminded me a bit of him, Kit, when I first met you, though he wasn’t so quiet, so contemplative, as you. When he spoke or gestured, you knew that he was going places—that he would be a great success in life.

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He and Daneka became lovers. My husband was beside himself. With jealousy? I don’t know. I prefer not to think so. But sometimes fate is in the genes. And when there is a fateful disease in a family’s past—no matter how quiet or how many generations it may take—it always seems to find a way back into that same family’s present.

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Daneka’s father found them together one night—exactly as my mother’s father had found her with her German lover. Whether it was rage, or jealousy, or temporary insanity, my husband did to Daneka later that night what my mother’s father had done to my mother.”

Kit involuntarily sprang out of his chair. He needed air, badly, and he went to the front door and out into the early evening darkness entirely unaware of his motions.

He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, hyperventilating and looking off to a sun low on the horizon and all but obscured by heavy cloud-cover, when he heard the front door open behind him.

When he turned around, he saw two bodies framed in the doorway: one belonged to Mrs. Sørensen; the second, to another woman. It was impossible to know anything more at that distance—with the fire and candles as the only sources of light shining upon them, and from behind.

When he came back in through the front door moments later, the woman was sitting on the floor with her head in Mrs. Sørensen’s lap. Daneka’s mother was brushing the woman’s hair, and the woman was smiling. There was, however, something slightly wrong with the woman’s smile. She lifted her head to inspect Kit—as a dog might, out of curiosity, but only long enough to register the scent—and then laid it back down in Mrs. Sørensen’s lap. In that instant, a memory flashed before Kit’s eyes—just one or two frames in a fast-moving film that was the length of his life.

Daneka’s mother put down the hairbrush, leaned over the woman and kissed her gently on the top of her head. The woman looked up at her, smiled gratefully—or was it obediently, or dumbly, Kit couldn’t be sure—and then Mrs. Sørensen stood up and lifted the woman gently off the floor. The two of them walked to the staircase and up, Kit assumed, to Daneka’s former bedroom.

Eventually, Mrs. Sørensen came back downstairs and sat herself down.

Kit’s curiosity was piqued, but he decided to wait for Mrs. Sørensen to provide the answer to this latest riddle at her own pace and in her own good time.

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Daneka was not as fortunate as my mother. We cannot always discern nature’s order—but she has one, no doubt. And she also knows when it is time to put an end to things.

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That woman you just saw is Margarette, Daneka’s daughter. She lives with me now. For how much longer, we don’t know, as she has a degenerative disease. But as you can see, she was already predestined from the beginning. Margarette’s end is something both Daneka and I had been reconciled to long before Daneka decided that she, herself, needed to go first. Margarette, as you know, used to live in New York—alone, down around Fourteenth Street, I believe. I don’t know. I haven’t been to New York in years. Daneka always insisted on coming here, sometimes with Margarette, but not always. Margarette was her dark secret.”

*  *  *

There are moments in life when the body or the mind or both are so overwhelmed by a present reality that they go into shock and cease to register. The instant before your car slams into another. The seconds—or, if you’re unlucky—minutes left to you as the jetliner in which you have been comfortably and horizontally seated abruptly goes into a tailspin, and you realize that you and everything in your world are now fixed vertically, tragically, on an arrow called ‘doom’ that you are riding straight into the ground.