The Woman from Bratislava (30 page)

So I was ripe for the picking when I met the man who initiated my awakening as a woman and as a human being. I was in third year at high school. It was early spring, with the time for some serious exam revision fast approaching. As so often before I was in the library, trying to find a book on the occupation which I had read about in the paper. Strictly speaking I had no time for reading novels, with so much studying to do for my exams, but I
had not been able to resist this one. It had been published the year before and had at last found its way into the library.

I spotted him right away, stole glances at him out of the corner of my eye. He was young, early twenties. He looked different from other young men. His hair was long and fair, not slicked back with Brylcreme, but falling over his ears. It looked all soft and lovely. He wore brown corduroys and a thick sweater. He was tall and slim with limpid blue eyes and a high forehead. He looked a little like Jens August Schade, the poet, whom I had seen pictures of in the paper. They both had the same strong nose, but E–’s chin was more masculine, with a cleft in it. Almost like a film star’s. I could make out the cleft through his closely trimmed beard. It was also unusual to see a man with a beard. He actually bore a slight resemblance to Frederik of Nina and Frederik. He had a strangely charismatic air about him, I felt. The sort of sexual magnetism which some people possess without even knowing it. I was a virgin, knew nothing of sex apart from the heat and longing that flared up between my legs at the most inconvenient moments. That was definitely not the sort of thing which
respectable
people talked about at home or at school. It felt somehow dirty and wrong, like the silly, sniggering remarks of schoolboys or the rude drawings which young men from the lower classes found amusing. I was familiar with my body’s yearnings, even if I did not understand them and was even alarmed by them, but I could not imagine an attractive man ever seeing anything in me. I was short and skinny and I felt plain and awkward. E– said later that nothing could have been more wrong. I had the most beautiful, gentle, sad, yet striking eyes, small, well-formed breasts and skin as luminous and delicate as Thai silk. My well-turned, harmonious features were set off perfectly by the long hair which I pulled back into a ponytail. He told me he fell in love with me the minute he laid eyes on me. Both because my sex appeal, latent though it was, was so powerful, and because he instinctively felt that our destinies were linked, sensing as he did that I harboured
a secret in my shattered heart. Even as a young man E– had a way with words.

He came over to me. I felt myself blush, but he took the book I was looking at out of my hand, as if we knew one another, and looked at the title page.

‘Tage Skou-Hansen,
The Naked Trees,
’ he read. His voice was husky, it almost seemed to crackle. ‘This is a good novel actually, even if it does represent the official picture. But it’s more realistic than all the other rubbish written about those years. You can safely read this. You won’t be any stupider for it.’

I was flabbergasted by his words. It was unheard-of for anyone to speak of those years in such terms. Not with such detachment, showing no respect for the freedom fighters.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked stupidly.

‘That it’s time we took a more realistic look at that period. It was not so much a time of heroes and villains, as of victims.’

Those were the most remarkable words I had ever heard in my life. I did not know how to reply, or whether I even wanted to reply to this strange young man. But before I could say anything:

‘Can I buy you a cup of coffee,’ he said, taking my arm. ‘You must have exams coming up soon, you can read all the novels you want after that.’

‘How do you know I have exams coming up?’

‘Well, you’re obviously a student. You have that hunted look in your eyes that they all get at this time of year. But just bear in mind that this is the last lovely spring you’ll have to miss out on. And besides, there’s something else you really ought to read. I’ve got this collection of poetry by a new Danish writer – his name’s Klaus Rifbjerg. You’re going to be hearing a lot more of him. He is part of the future. The old guard can stuff their stupid conservativism.’

As he talked he was steering me towards the exit.

‘I’ve no money to buy books,’ was all I said. ‘Do they have this guy Rifbjerg in the library?’

‘I told you, I’ll lend you the book. Or give you it. If you would like?’

‘You can’t just go giving your books away like that.’

‘Of course I can. We should not be slaves to material
possessions
. The only things worth holding on to are the knowledge and insight we have between our ears.’

‘What an odd thing to say.’

‘The truth is sometimes odd, but that doesn’t make it any the less true. Don’t listen to all the garbage your teachers fill your poor student heads with. But get your degree, whatever you do, and then your life can begin. You still have to have the piece of paper, but you can forget everything you’ve learned.’

He was just making small talk really, but it was so new to me that I could not help laughing, something I rarely did. Nobody talked like that.

‘What do you do when you’re not spouting weird statements?’ I asked, as if it was the most normal thing in the world for me to be walking with a young man in the lovely early spring light, which was lending the first touch of warmth to the keen wind blowing down the main street.

‘I’m at Århus University, I’m writing a novel.’

He said it so matter-of-factly. As if it was perfectly natural for a person who was walking beside me to be writing a novel. To me, bookworm that I was, writers were like some sort of divine race who would never dream of mixing with ordinary mortals. But here I was, walking next to a man who said he was writing a novel, said it as casually as he might have said he was just running down to the baker’s.

‘Oh, and what’s it about, this novel?’

‘The truth.’

I laughed again. I do not know why. It’s not as if it was not funny. Just unusual. We went down to Brodersen’s pastry shop. He ordered coffee and pastries for us both. He was not to know that it was a totally new experience for me to eat a pastry with relish, but this I
did, while we talked. I cannot remember the details of our
conversation
, only that it simply flowed. We chatted about books, about the approaching spring, about my teachers, whom I described with a wit I would never have believed I possessed, and about my
forthcoming
exams. A perfectly normal conversation of a sort which I had never had with a young man before. He ordered more coffee and then he walked me home. At the garden gate he asked:

‘Would you like to go to the pictures with me?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘How about this evening?’

‘I’ll have to ask my parents.’

‘Okay, why don’t we ask them now.’

‘They’re not home.’

‘Of course you can go, dear,’ he said, making his voice deeper, and I laughed again and felt myself blush.

‘I don’t even know your name.’

He told me his name then asked:

‘What’s your name?’

‘Irma.’

‘It suits you.’

And with that we were friends. He shook my hand and walked off and I watched him go with a pounding heart. He was going to call for me at half past six.

To my great surprise I had no trouble obtaining permission to go to the cinema. Obviously they asked who this young man was and I told them he was a student I had met at the library a few times. My mother and step-father actually looked relieved and my step-father even gave me a whole five-kroner note, saying it was high time such a pretty girl had a boyfriend. Mum shook her head at him, but she looked pleased, for all her warnings not to be late home, I needed my sleep, had to be fresh for school the next day. I could tell it reassured them to see me acting like a normal girl, getting invited to the pictures, like all the others.

They were at the living-room window, watching, when E– came
to pick me up for the early evening showing. He had changed his clothes, was now wearing a pair of smart grey flannels, a tweed jacket and even a tie. I had put on a floral print dress with a broad belt, like the ones starlet Ghita Nørby wore, and had my hair in a ponytail. E– nodded to my mother and step-father through the window, offered me his arm and off we went to the pictures, for all the world as if this were not a first date, but simply the latest of many – it felt so natural, being with him. I was walking on air, but I was also absolutely terrified. I could not help wondering whether it was all a dream from which, at any moment, I would wake to the same old emptiness and loneliness.

I do not remember which film we saw. All I remember is his hand, soft, warm and dry, taking mine as the lights went down in the packed cinema. Afterwards we walked back along dark streets wet with rain which glistened so poetically in the glow of the street lamps that I found myself thinking that only a great writer could have described the magic of that evening. I was certain that a poet like Frank Jæger would have captured the mood of it perfectly.

We halted in the darkness between two street lamps and he turned me to face him. I had to stand on tiptoe to reach his lips. He kissed me, lightly at first, then probingly with his tongue, and I felt a flicker of heat between my legs. I had never kissed a boy before. I thought it was something you had to learn, but there was nothing difficult about it. He knew all about kissing so it was just a matter of following his lead. We kissed many, many times before we reached my house. It was one of the most unsettling
experiences
I had ever had. There was a light on in the living room, of course. The headmaster and my mother were silhouetted against the blind. E– played his cards well right from the start. Made sure that those in authority would never suspect a thing. He got me home on time and merely pecked me on the cheek when we said goodbye at the white garden gate in the light of the street lamp, but he knew that I took the taste of his tongue and lips into the house with me. That I could feel his hand on my breast.

From the very beginning he was an adept double agent who knew never to reveal his true identity to the enemy. Outwardly leading a life which accorded with the establishment’s outmoded ideas of propriety and order, while at the same time pursuing another, secret, existence of which other people knew nothing, and of which they could never be a part. I lay in bed and thought about him and about that wonderful day, with my pillow squeezed tightly between my legs, and felt almost happy for the first time since my father had left me.

WHAT MORE IS THERE
to tell you, sister? Only, perhaps, about the final, decisive chain of events. In which two people lay bare their lives, openly and honestly. It is night again. There is no moon tonight, only a dark chill from the tiny window, as if it were winter out there in the free air. I count the days until the next court hearing. They have to let me go, but with this system you can never be sure of anything. They will do anything they can to cover themselves, although they will of course dress up their coercive methods in legal jargon. The bourgeois, capitalist society in a
nutshell
, wouldn’t you say: hypocrisy is its mainstay, dissemblance the key to understanding it, and, at its core, lies and self-deception? But they will not break me. I will be strong, as I have been all my life. As I needed to be, in order to survive in the cold, harsh,
materialistic
world of men.

This I learned from E– during the first, wonderful summer after I met him. The summer of 1958, when the weather went haywire, with frost in June and rain, rain, rain all summer through. But I didn’t care if the sun didn’t shine. I was eighteen and a high-school graduate. The legal age of majority was still twenty-one then, but I had already gained my independence. My step-father and my mother accepted that I should be able to live my own life now. They had no real worries about me either. I was a good, sensible girl, after all. I had graduated with flying colours, praised by all my teachers. They too had noticed how I had blossomed, and how I spoke up more in class. Besides which, my fiancé from Århus was such a nice, polite young man. In his tweed sports jacket and tie and neatly pressed slacks he could look like every mother-in-law’s dream when he wanted to. He had also chosen to study a subject
with excellent prospects. He was so good to Irma and so well-
spoken
. You really could not complain, not when you saw the sorts of characters other parents’ daughters brought home these days. They had not met his parents. But there was time enough for that. Irma was possibly a bit on the young side, but it certainly looked as if these two young people planned to get married once the young man had got a bit further with his studies. And his father was
something
with the State Railways over on Zealand. So he came from a good, solid background. A respectable family. Well, you could see that – his manners were excellent. The only thing that struck them as rather odd was that Irma wanted to go to university in
Copenhagen
, and not in Århus, but teenagers nowadays were so restless and independent. Life was good in little Denmark. The younger generation already appeared to have forgotten those five terrible years. They took their nice, secure life for granted. They never gave a thought to what we went through. No, the young did not always appreciate what their parents’ generation had endured, but Irma was a good girl who knew how to say ‘Thank you’. She would have to find herself a job now, though: a university education cost money and they couldn’t afford to do more than help out every now and again. Well, it was the least they could do. And of course
Copenhagen
was a long way off, but there was work to be had there. And it was true that if you wanted to study literature, then the University of Copenhagen, with its long and illustrious history, was the place to be. If nothing else, at least they had helped her to find a room. Not big, but neat and clean and with a nice family.

So my mother went on, all summer long, pleased as punch with her clever and now – so everyone said – pretty daughter. Fritz was doing well too, a big, strong lad with his journeyman’s papers within reach and, thereafter, a job with a big bakery in Odense obtained for him by Mr Kelstrup the solicitor. And Theodor was still just sweet little Teddy whom everyone spoiled. My mother’s gratitude that life had worked out so well for her despite the dark years, as she called her life with my father, was almost palpable.

Had they but known. As it was, they had no idea that I had stepped out of my darkness and into a secret life to which only E– and I were privy. In any case, my mother and step-father were only interested in material things. They no longer listened reverently to the radio, or read books. Instead they sat in front of the monstrosity of a television they had purchased. Sat there staring at the test card or the black-and-white clock with the hands that ticked round, marking the time until the programmes started. The new
household
altar had made its entry into the small Danish homes. My mother and step-father also bought a little car. A green
Volkswagen
Beetle, only slightly used. Like all other middle-class Danes they took to going on Sunday drives, equipped with a thermos of coffee and camping stools. Fritz had no desire to go with them. All he was interested in was his bored-out moped – that and girls. I, too, always found excuses, but young Teddy thought it was great fun to go for a drive on a Sunday. There they would sit at the side of the road, the little nuclear family – letting everyone get a good look at their
nice
car while they drank coffee, ate their sandwiches and had such a
nice
time. God, how I hate
nice
! Later they also went on their first package tour, travelling by bus to Harzen in Germany and from there all the way to the Mediterranean with Spies, Denmark’s first package tour operator. The good times were finally here, they sighed with typical Danish smugness.

All of this suited me down to the ground. It left me free to live my own life, and have my other life with E–. To be honest, it was a miracle that I did so well in my high-school finals: I had no thought for anything but E–. One look at his picture and my stomach would start to flutter. Even when reading one of my favourite authors I would suddenly fall to daydreaming about the world we shared, and miss having him near. I felt I knew every inch of his body and yet it continued to surprise me. But three years of hard work and conscientious study at high school paid off. I knew my stuff. Not only that, but E– insisted that I study
properly
for my exams. Whatever opportunities the future might have
to offer would go to those with a good academic education. We would be the new ruling class. The coming aristocracy, but born of the people, whom we would guide and liberate. He also had to study for an exam, so until the summer holidays we only saw one another from Saturday to Sunday.

He rented a room in Århus and I would visit him there
whenever
I could scrape together the train fare. He came to my house when we knew that the headmaster and Mum were going for a drive. We sent Fritz off into town. We went to bed together for the first time only a week after our first date. I was nervous and scared, as one might expect, but he was gentle and experienced, with warm, soft fingers and patient, persuasive lips, so it only hurt a little. And very soon I could not get enough of it. How odd and wrong it seemed that sex had not figured in my life before. An erotic being had apparently been slumbering inside me. E– woke that being, and the discovery and exploration of my sexuality was like an unexpected, unguessed-at gift: a side of being a woman which no one had told me about. It would take the future women’s movement to find words to describe female sexuality and its
agelong
suppression, but E– understood, accepted and enjoyed the fact that the female libido is every bit as great and legitimate as the male. This may seem obvious today, but in 1958 it wasn’t. Although we did not know it, in the permissiveness of our relationship we were actually part of a consciousness-raising process which sowed the seeds of the rebellion against the established, hypocritical society. All unwittingly, we were in at the conception of what would grow into the student revolt of the late sixties and the massive
left-wing
revivalist movement in the seventies. We were pioneers. In our discussions and our reading too: Camus, Sartre, the banned Henry Miller, the exciting new Danish writer Klaus Rifbjerg, Erik Knudsen, and later Marx. But most of all in the music which we played on his new record player: jazz and rock, the music of this new age. E– taught me about the ways of the world; thanks to him I matured early, as a woman and as an intellectual.

It was E– who arranged for me to be fitted with a diaphragm before we went on a cycling holiday that summer, which did have its warm, sunny moments, but was for the most part wet and stormy. We did not mind the rain, though. We put up our little tent, crawled into our sleeping bag and made love with the rain hammering off the canvas. At the end of July E– got a student job with one of the ministries in Copenhagen and it was only logical for him to switch university. He helped me move in to my little room. We could not live together without being married, and although I am sure I would have said yes had he proposed, there was never any thought of this. There was a tacit understanding that marriage would hinder our development as free individuals. Besides which, E–, and I, felt it was vital that I should take my degree. I would be the family’s first academic. Education was
synonymous
with freedom. We were going to be part of a new
movement
, one which would cast off the bourgeois norms. We might even move to Paris, live with the other existentialists on the Left Bank and, like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, be lovers,
discussion
partners and comrades.

I loved Copenhagen from the word go. I loved the anonymity of the big city, the dense traffic, the life and the sounds of the night and my classes at university, because I found most of the
professors
interesting, even if they were like gods, preaching to us little students from on high. I rarely went home to Jutland. In my first year I possibly went back only once or twice. I think my mother was hurt, but I had my own life to live. And so what if we never seemed to have any money? Looking back on it I don’t really know what we lived on. But almost everybody was hard up, so it did not matter. It was all part of being young and at university. The only person I missed was Teddy. Mum told me later that he asked for me almost every day.

But my new life outweighed even my love for my little brother.

It was also E– who first suggested we test our sexual
boundaries
. I still remember the first time he tied me down and told me 
to say the word if I felt violated or frightened, but that the pain would take me to new heights of desire and pleasure. That pain and desire were two sides of the same coin. That through these forbidden games we would attain an undreamt-of sense of unity, so deep that it would bind us to one another for ever. And he was right. We were never wholly separated. There was always a bond tying us to the past and the other life we shared alongside our everyday existences. It goes without saying that we could not stay together in the traditional sense. Or remain faithful only to one another, as the Danish establishment preached, once the waves of change began to wash over our lives, bringing ban-the-bomb marches, the pill, the student revolt, free love, travel, Women’s Lib and the revolutionary awareness that came as a natural
consequence
of our development.

So, as I say, marriage was never on the cards. That was only a line we fed the grown-ups when we were very young, so that we could be together in the narrow-minded, bourgeois Danish society. We wanted to be free, original individuals, untrammelled by the ties of convention. This was not as easy as it may sound, but it was a necessary progression if the shackles of the old order were to be broken.

Throughout our lives we were, however, true to each other on another, much higher plane. True to our innermost convictions and, in spite of the setbacks, true to our realisation that only a new social order could fundamentally alter the state of global
injustice
which keeps the majority of the world’s population in abject poverty while the rest of us, led by the United States, live high on the hog thanks to this inhuman exploitation.

And then there was our own private secret, which E– shared with me at Christmastime in 1960, when I had come home for the holidays, knowing I would have the house to myself. Fritz and Teddy had gone with the headmaster and Mum to spend Christmas with our step-father’s brother in Tønder. They had left on the 22nd. The weather was wet, but mild. Even so, we spent
most of our time indoors. We made food together, talked, drank schnapps and lemonade, listened to music, danced, experimented and enjoyed not having to worry about the neighbours as we did in Copenhagen, where only the thin walls of our rooms separated us from other people. There was such physical and mental
satisfaction
in using our bodies, conscious of how naturally in accord they were, like two finely tuned instruments. The heavy curtains were drawn, the door locked. We had the radiators turned full on, wore as little clothing as possible and I was gloriously happy. I never asked him what he did when he wasn’t with me, or whether he had anyone else. Nor did he ask me, but I knew that he was less readily prey to the green-eyed monster than I was. I tried to fight off this feeling, but it hurt to think I might be sharing him with other girls. He did not lose his temper on those occasions when, nonetheless, I hinted that I felt jealous. He only laughed, showing his strong, white teeth and said that right here and now we were together and nothing else existed. I was hopelessly in love with him, but I knew – and this was what really hurt – that if I were to express this love in standard, conventional terms, I would lose him. I would rather have him to myself completely every now and again, than lose him completely. That was what my heart said. My mind was in unconditional agreement with his revolutionary talk of sexual freedom as a logical consequence of personal and
political
liberation. But, then as now, a person does not simply throw away all their historical baggage and everything that has made them who they are without some cost and emotional upheaval.

It was on Christmas Eve that he told me another of his secrets, when he confessed that he had not simply happened to run into me in the library, but had come there looking for me. We were lying in bed, smoking. The bedroom was in semi-darkness, lit only by candles, their flickering light tracing patterns on our sweat-soaked naked bodies. He lay on his back. There were red welts across his chest from the whip, I caressed them lightly with my lips. I had removed the handcuffs from his wrists and we were both sated
and content. While everyone else in Denmark was dancing around the Christmas tree we had been acting out our fantasies. We felt so superior to all those common little slaves to convention. There was more cheap wine on the table next door and in a little while we would go through to the kitchen and rustle up something to eat. It was the best Christmas I had had since I was a girl during the war. We had entered upon a new decade. In the October E– and I had marched the sixty kilometres from Holbæk in the west of Zealand to Copenhagen along with eight hundred other
pioneers
from the new left wing, in protest against the A-bomb, that appalling weapon. I remember the stiff wind and the rain pelting down on all those hundreds of young people. But the weather was nothing to us because we were all part of a new phenomenon, unlike anything the world had ever seen. We did not know the term – it had not yet entered the Danish language – but we
represented
Denmark’s first grassroots movement. The radio and
television
stations boycotted the march and made no mention of it whatsoever. As so often before we felt the tide of history sweeping across the country. Although I could not know it that Christmas in 1960, come Easter we would march again. Despite the snow and sleet our ranks would swell from less than two thousand
marchers
when we raised our placards in Holbæk to over ten thousand by the time we reached Copenhagen. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was the first big step forward. Lying in bed on that Christmas Eve I knew that we had entered a decade which, I was sure, would change Denmark and the rest of the world for ever.