The Woman from Bratislava (28 page)

The Jew shook hands with a couple of men whom he knew and was just about to take his seat at the place reserved for him when he caught sight of my father and my father caught sight of him. Their eyes were like blades clashing in the smoke-filled air between them. Dad’s face turned white. The Jew’s face turned red and the hand which he had out of habit and politeness extended to greet those of the Count’s guests closest to him checked in mid-air and hovered there as if it did not know what to do with itself. The Jew took a step forward and said loudly and clearly, in a voice that cut through the room and made everyone look up at him and Dad:

‘One is not in the habit of sitting at table with Nazis and Jew killers. One has no desire to eat with men who donned enemy uniform. One is quite prepared to leave. If you gentlemen would rather break Danish bread with the SS.’

There is a saying in Danish. I don’t know whether you have a similar expression in German. We say: an angel passed through the room. It is used to describe a moment when time stands still and everyone knows that something significant has just occurred, but no one yet knows exactly what. That statement was the angel in the room. It hung in the air and could not be called back. The lunch guests were discomfited by this turn of events. Just when they had been having such a nice, convivial time of it, with no women or children around. But such a statement was not to be ignored. This was a serious accusation; it gave rise to some unease among certain people at the table, a fear that attention might also be directed at them and their own sympathies back in the days when one faithfully followed the government’s recommendations until one deemed it wise to retreat from those positions as the tide of war began to turn at the front.

Hardly any time elapsed between the words being uttered and
their effect being seen, but it felt like an age. Dad had risen from his chair and put out his hand. It dropped to his side again and he had to steady himself against the table, as if he were drunk, or had had a momentary dizzy turn. The Count stood at the head of the table with his hand on the back of the chair which he had been about to pull out in order to sit down and merrily resume this most agreeable lunch. He looked from the Jew to my father and back again. Then his eyes flicked back and forth again. Clearly he, like the other men, was waiting for a response from my father or further clarification from the Jew. The two men squared up to one another like a couple of he-dogs, but Dad was the one with his tail between his legs. The Jew overpowered him with his gaze. Dad said nothing. That may have been a mistake, but it would have been unlikely to change anything. The Count, as host, felt bound to resolve the situation. With his first words he made it quite plain where he stood. He did not refute the Jew’s accusation, instead he simply said:

‘Perhaps you owe us an explanation, Mr Pedersen …’

Dad stared at him. He was still white as a sheet. But, shaken and mortified though he was, he was also seething with rage. What angered him most was the fact that the Count, their host, could permit someone who had just walked in to insult one of his guests. A respectable citizen and substantial pillar of the local
community
, a man who always paid his dues.

So: ‘I don’t owe anyone anything,’ my father said in a voice not much above a whisper, or like the hiss of a snake, the words uttered with so much venom and defiance. The Jew said nothing, only stared at Dad as if recognising the man before him from pictures in the files he pored over every day for the government, intent on digging up the weeds and keeping the torch of freedom burning, as he had written in the resistance movement’s newspaper,
Information
. He took a pace to the right, a tiny, imperceptible turn of the head indicating that he was all set to return to Copenhagen, when the Count said:

‘Perhaps it would be best if you were to leave my house, Mr Pedersen.’

Dad gazed at him as if not really understanding what he had said. Did not understand that he was being banished from the table and from the local community because of some stranger from Copenhagen who had suddenly shown up armed with
accusations
from a past which everyone at that table had tacitly agreed to put behind them, now that new times were so obviously on the way.

And it was after that, of course, that I had seen him come out, looking as though he had just set eyes on the Devil himself, and maybe he had.

By the early spring the patience of my father’s creditors had run out and on a day in March a removal van came to pick up the few bits and pieces of furniture and household utensils which we had been allowed to keep in order to pursue a modest, if very meagre existence. The car, most of the furniture, the paintings, Dad’s shotguns, his trophies, most of our books, the Royal
Copenhagen
porcelain figurines and everything else that had formed the framework of our lives was left behind to be sold at auction. I did not want to look back and see the white house retreating into the distance. I looked straight ahead. Oddly enough, I do not
remember
the removal man, only that he had a wooden figure of a naked African woman hanging from his rear-view mirror. It was a dull day with rain in the air and a stiff west wind blowing. Fritz sat stony-faced next to me on the front seat of the removal van. He did not look to right or left. There was only just enough room for the two of us in the new lorry. Dad and Mum had to take the bus to Odense with Teddy and the train from there to our new home in Jutland. The last I heard of them was Teddy’s howls and Dad’s deep voice rebuking him for being such a cry-baby.

Fritz and I had received a hug from Mum and a handshake from Dad. My father’s face was pale, but his eyes were red and bloodshot. I did not want to say goodbye to the house. Nor did
I want to cry. I was not going to give those hateful people that satisfaction. While Fritz made a round of the half-empty rooms I sat on the steps, gazing across at the vicar’s enormous beech tree. The curtains were drawn over there and the village was deserted. Strangest of all, no sound emanated from the bakehouse, and no smell. The fragrant odour of sugar and flour, and the distinctive clunk made by the biggest of the mixers as it kneaded the dough for the rye bread and a slight bump in the rotor shaft knocked against the bowl at every turn. The creditors had had a padlock put on the bakehouse door. A man known as the ‘Royal Bailiff ’ had taken care of this matter. What a fitting name for a person representing the nameless denizens of a pseudo-democracy who wield power for international capitalism.

No neighbours came out to say goodbye to us. I did not realise that this was the last time I would see the father I knew, and that not until years later would I see his ghost when, thanks to you, we held hands across the decades, before death took him for good and all.

SOME DAYS HAVE PASSED.
They keep asking me questions about my life and my contacts. But they have nothing. They may think that Stasi’s Edelweiss and I are one and the same person. But they do not know for sure. It is hard to believe that they would waste so much money and manpower on a past which died along with Soviet communism. What does any of that matter today? And yet it is like something straight out of Kafka: they cannot prove my guilt, so it’s up to me to prove my innocence. They are
interviewing
everyone I have ever known. The prospect of punishment does not worry me. By delving into my life and revealing its most
intimate
details to friends, family and colleagues they have already punished me. They have branded me, and that mark will never wash off. In this they have been ably supported by the
conservative
press, which swallows police statements raw. But that’s not hard to understand, is it? You and I know that the conservative press is as easily bought as a Hamburg whore.

They keep going back to an incident in the Baltic states. A case which, since it dates from 1987, they feel is still recent enough to be prosecuted. Possibly even so serious that the statute of limitations has never run out on it. Because it involved the loss of lives, in some of the Soviet Union’s last executions for treason. The victims had apparently been denounced by a Western spy. It’s insane, really. As if that could be of interest to anyone today. But that is just how it is. The one side’s spies are the other side’s traitors. And the final verdict rests always with the victors. That is how it has always been. And that is how it was for my father.

I tell them I don’t know what they are talking about. That I do not know who Edelweiss is. They’ve got the wrong person. I am
a scholar and a woman and I have never had access to
confidential
information. That is their weak spot. They can find no link between what I’m supposed to have done and my work as an
academic
and exposer of late capitalism’s oppression of women. They keep harking back to the fact that for two years in the mid-sixties I had a student job with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Good God! That’s such a long time ago! Such an awfully long time ago – I was only a young girl, photocopying freely available information for men who thought themselves very important. That is not enough. Even one of capitalism’s own judges would not agree to me being imprisoned for something that happened so many years ago. Then they say that I might have recruited others back then. And I have to laugh. They have no proof of that either. But they keep going on about that time because it is the only period in my life during which I have had access to anything other than public
information
. They’re getting desperate, because my remand warrant is about to run out and I know that they know they’ll have a hard job getting yet another extension. My lawyer says the same. He is full of contempt for them. They have no case. And yet they go through the masquerade because they feel compelled to come up with a scapegoat, with the right wing now baying for blood in the conservative press – which, in Denmark today, means the media as a whole.

They weren’t all that interested ten years ago, when the Wall came down. Well, why would they be? I look around me in this country: all of my old friends and allies, my comrades from the meetings, groups, collectives, consciousness-raising groups, party schools and pioneer camps are now firmly in control of
government
, business and the media. They have put the past behind them. It is time to move on. It was all just an innocent bit of fun. I am not like them. Mistakes were made, but no amount of trendy make-up can disguise the evils of capitalism. Look over the welfare walls of Europe and America and the poverty and misery will hurt your eyes. The objective course of history will not be denied. Scholars
of the future will look back on the time around the turn of the century as a somewhat inexplicable setback before the peoples of the Third World set out to take back what imperialism had stolen from them.

So maybe I will soon be released from this inhuman solitary confinement, in which I have actually got to the point of looking forward to seeing my tormentors at those interminable
interrogations
. That is what happens to people when they are cut off from their fellow human beings. They become attached to their
persecutors
, driven mad as they are by loneliness and the lack of social contact. Even such a thorn in the side as that witless stud Toftlund is welcome. He has just shown up again, can barely move for
testosterone
, struts around as if he were God’s gift to women. But rather this atavistic macho man than that searing solitude in which time stands still and every day is the same. I have regular talks with my lawyer, but always on a strictly professional footing. Usually he is also with me when I am questioned, but not always. Sometimes I agree to being interviewed without my lawyer being present.

The fact is, you see, that occasionally I am surprised to find these sessions intellectually stimulating. It is like sitting an exam, and I have a lifetime’s experience of exams, whether sitting or setting them. During the interrogation sessions, as in the
examination
room, assertions are made and one tries to make sense of the argumentation, dissect the hypotheses, find the weak points and expose the examinee’s ignorance or the gaps in the examiner’s own fund of knowledge by analysing the substance of the questions.

Toftlund does not know anything either. Like an angler he casts his line haphazardly. Thinks he is digging up bait from old
yellowing
files from Berlin. I cannot help but smile at their naivety. They believe that the Stasi files contain an objective truth. As if they were historical documents which would be of use to serious scholars. But Stasi did not write the truth. Stasi wrote what is, still, a work of fiction in which agents and informers, spies and
controllers, guilty and innocent, were all – wittingly or unwittingly – figures in a bizarre serial. It was not about reporting the truth. It was about making oneself seem important and impressing one’s superiors. An innocent exchange of opinions over lunch would, in a report, become a revealing conversation concerning the
strategic
considerations of the other side. An article in a newspaper on a forthcoming defence agreement became a classified summary of NATO’s plans for the Baltic region. No one ever expected these reports to be read. No one imagined there would ever come a time when these exaggerations, distortions, half-truths and downright lies would be studied for the purposes of research. No historian would ever do that. A historian deals in historical facts, not
interpretations
. But the intelligence service is not interested in the objective truth. It is only interested in finding a scapegoat. And I am it.

Toftlund has been away for a couple of days, but he came back armed with questions about my father. I told him that was none of his business. It was a personal matter. Private. His questions worried me, though. He also asked about you. He shouldn’t have known anything about you. As always, it hurt to have that part of my past raked up again. He said that everything was his business. When one was accused of a serious crime, there was no such thing as privacy. Not for the accused, nor for that person’s close family and friends. A crime did not only involve the perpetrator and the victim. The secrets and mental blocks of their nearest and dearest were no longer sacrosanct. Even casual acquaintances could be called in, their statements taken down, secrets revealed. A police investigation lays a person’s life bare in much the same way as a surgeon lays bare a growth, in order to cut away the diseased tissue. That was the image he used. Even his metaphors are rotten, they reek of male chauvinism.

I told him I had nothing to say. My father had left us in 1953, shortly before my thirteenth birthday and was declared dead the following year. That was the expression the authorities used:
declared dead. And it was that same wording which nurtured my hopes of his return. My mother remarried in 1955. My step-father adopted Teddy, but Fritz and I would have none of that, we wept as if our hearts would break and my mother bowed to our wishes.

Naturally the police have interviewed my mother, but her
senility
is so far advanced that nothing she says is of any use to them. That much was plain to me from Toftlund’s manner. She keeps contradicting herself and cannot remember whether she is ninety years old or twelve. One minute she says that Dad has gone for a walk, or is over in the bakehouse. The next, that she has never known a man by that name and that her husband died five years ago. It does not help, of course, that both her husbands bore the same good Danish surname: Pedersen. Teddy alone adopted the middle-name of Nikolaj, from my step-father. My mother’s memory is like one of those play pits full of little coloured plastic balls which kids happily hop about in while their parents are
shopping
or having lunch. In the same way, the balls of her memories bounce willy-nilly around her calcified brain.

Teddy came to see me today. He gave me a hug and held my hand across the table at which we are allowed to sit and talk. This was the one weekly private visit granted me in my solitary
confinement
. A prison guard seated on a high-backed chair
monitored
our conversation, which I am sure was also recorded. There are limits to how deep a conversation one can have under such conditions, but it’s better than nothing. Other than that all I have to distract me are the sessions with my tormentors and the couple of times each day when I am allowed to stretch my legs in the enclosed prison yard – though always alone. I consider myself a law-abiding citizen and yet I dream of being able to stroll around the yard along with the other inmates. To take the morning air with murderers, rapists and thieves would be like receiving an unexpected gift. To eat my meals with others would be a sheer delight, even if my companions were serious felons of the first water. That is how much I yearn for human company.

Teddy was looking a bit rough. He said he had both backache and toothache; it was part of the price you had to pay for growing older. I found that quite funny. Typical male whinging. I am eight years older than Teddy and sound as a bell, mentally and
physically
. I don’t feel my age, but I do take care of myself. That Teddy has never done, and all his good living is starting to show on his face and body, but he is still his old, charming self. He gave me all the gossip from the academic world: who had won what grants, who was about to deliver their thesis, who could bask in the reflected glory of their clever Ph.D. students’ success and get their name into the academic journals, whose name was in the papers, who had been interviewed on TV, which of my fellow lecturers had attempted to put a stop to NATO’s crazy war, who was
sleeping
with whom. The wonderful stuff of the everyday to which you never give a second thought until you are deprived of it. He made me laugh out loud several times. And it was so nice to hear him call me ‘sis’ and ‘Irma, my lass’ as he always did, and still does even though I’m pushing sixty. He was always the apple of our eyes. I wonder if maybe Fritz and I compensated for our bitterness and disappointment by projecting all the love we felt we had lost onto little Theodor with his golden curls – they didn’t turn brown until he was well up in years.

Obviously we could not talk about what was really on our minds. Teddy asked how I was, of course, and I shrugged, and then he said I looked thinner, but I was still his lovely Irma with the stunning eyes. That’s my baby brother, always ready with a compliment and a little white lie, but stupid he is not and he knew it was best to leave certain things unsaid.

The hour went all too quickly. As it was drawing to a close he could not resist asking:

‘What really happened to your father?’

I noticed he said
your
father. Teddy regarded our mother’s second husband as his dad. He didn’t remember anything else, and our step-father had spoiled little Teddy rotten. There was
never any talk of a wicked step-parent in Teddy’s case. I thought for a moment. He was holding my hand across the table, but he let it go and lit a cigarette, and even though I gave up smoking years ago I took a cig from his pack and lit it. It tasted strange, I felt my head swim for a second. It brought back memories of my youth. One single, sublime drag and I was transported back to a time of smoke-filled bars, loud voices, long hair and
twanging
guitars. Night-long philosophical discussions about the need for revolution and the liberating, consciousness-raising process of feminism. Into my mind, too, came a picture of a long-forgotten lover and a morning in a bed with the light streaming through the window along with the May birdsong. All of that in a couple of drags, then I stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and took Teddy’s hand again.

‘I thought he died in Hamburg,’ I said, leaning across the table, so that we looked like a couple of lovebirds in a café. ‘That was what the police told us. Found in the harbour. The body had almost disintegrated, it had been in the water for weeks. There were some signs of foul play, though. A contusion on the head. Dad’s passport was in the jacket pocket, it too had almost fallen apart completely, but was still barely legible. End of story.’

He considered me:

‘Ah, but is it? I met a woman in Bratislava, Irma.’

‘We don’t need to go into that right now.’

‘She said she was my half-sister, and that our father died less than a year ago.’

I looked at him. He looked back at me. There was a look of
desperation
in his eyes. A frantic longing to know the whole story and since it sounded from Toftlund’s questions as if they must know something of it, I decided that I might as well confirm Teddy’s suspicions.

‘It’s true,’ I said.

‘What is?’

‘That Dad died just under a year ago and you have a half-sister.’