Often I Am Happy Read online

  I bent forward in the open window and caught a glimpse, farther down the street, of our front door. A tricycle, rickshaw-style, was parked in front, and next to it a young Pakistani fellow stood smoking in trousers several sizes too big. He turned around as another fellow came out. They made a high five and continued along the sidewalk, shoulders stooping and their feet turned outward. My mother didn’t get to see the neighborhood change. She wasn’t even sixty when she died; for more than ten years I have been older than her, and I still haven’t gotten used to it. My mother, a younger woman.

  As usual, she first opened the door a crack until she recognized me and then closed it to take off the chain. I entered the living room before her and pushed the spinning wheel standing in a corner in memory of a rustic past even she had never known. “Why don’t you get rid of this hulk,” I said and watched the spokes of the wheel turn more slowly and finally come to a halt. I always asked when I came to see her, and she always remained silent, offended in a dignified way. She had put cups on the table, the ones with blue flowers on them. I handed her a paper bag of pastries, and as she stood in the kitchen, arranging them on a dish, I looked at the picture from her confirmation, resplendent with the defenseless trust of her youth. She sat on the sofa, and I got to sit in the armchair. “Still no news?” She put a finger on the lid of the china pot as she poured coffee into my cup. “They won’t find him,” I said. “It’s difficult to believe,” she said. “You know how much I loved him. And Anna, of course,” she added. “They were having an affair,” I said. I hadn’t even decided to tell her; I just said it. At first she looked as if she hadn’t understood. “Don’t say a thing like that,” she said. “It’s the truth,” I said.

  She put a lump of sugar into her cup and stirred mechanically while lifting the saucer. It would have been more affectionate of me to keep it to myself. I realized that I was burdening her with my own homeless anger. “How’s her husband doing, all alone with those boys?” She put her cup and saucer on the table and folded her hands in her lap as she looked at me. “He’s fine,” I said. “He’s quite practical, you know.” “You might help him out now and then,” she said. “Yes, I might,” I said. “I am sure he’d appreciate that,” she said. I shrugged. We became silent, as usual. One could hear the clock again, sluggishly marking time with its dreary weights between yellowed walls. I cast a sidelong glance at the framed picture of a young, trusting girl. It was the only thing she’d brought with her when she left her hometown one evening, sheltered by the darkness, with a baby girl in her arms. “It seems as if history repeats itself,” she said. “What do you mean?” I asked. She looked at me for a while before she continued, and the perpetual fearfulness in her eyes gave way to sadness and calm. “Now your husband has also disappeared. Just like your father,” she said in a low voice. “My father didn’t disappear,” I said. “The war was not an avalanche; the war was the war. I suppose he walks about somewhere, for all we know.” She looked down at her hands. “The war was an avalanche,” she said.

  I was surprised at myself when I sat on the bus. I could have told her about my afternoons with Georg and the boys. Had it been the thought of her recognition that I could not bear? I spotted a girl at a crosswalk, holding on to a woman with one hand and a large, striped lollipop with the other. She’d probably been to the Tivoli Gardens. I remembered that I’d promised Stefan and Morten a bag of Saturday goodies each, and I bought two bags of licorice allsorts at the station kiosk. Sitting on the S-train on my way out of town, I saw the picture again of a younger Georg with a firm hold on your waist as you’re dancing a slowfox, looking each other in the eyes. I continued one stop more than usual before I got off and hurriedly crossed the viaduct. I didn’t quite know the way and had to follow my instinct. A tournament like that probably lasted most of the day, but it was getting late.

  After a few minutes, I could follow the distant sound of boys’ voices, drowned from time to time by a strident whistle. I followed the wire fence along the grounds, looking for an entrance and watching the boys in multicolored shirts as they ran on the grass or stood with the grown-ups and followed the game. I was afraid that I wouldn’t recognize Stefan and Morten, or catch sight of your father. I hadn’t expected Georg to have joined them, but maybe that had been the agreement from the outset. He hadn’t seen me yet. I stopped a few steps from the cluster of parents anxiously following the match. The cheers became louder; apparently someone was about to score. He smiled, clenched his right fist, and put his left arm around your father’s shoulders. I stood still until he turned his head and saw me.

  I took the place you left behind. I took over your life, Anna, as I’d once taken over your wedding dress. It wasn’t as difficult as one might have thought. The boys started on the sweets once they were in the backseat, dirt and grass all over their shorts and socks. Georg looked at me out of the corner of his eyes while he was driving. Your father followed in his own car. He had made lasagna at home; the roasting pan was in his trunk. Morten asked if I would stay for dinner, and Georg looked at me again. For the first time I felt like a visitor, but I would stay until the boys had been put to bed and your father had left. We stepped out onto the terrace with our glasses. I asked him if he would teach me how to dance a slowfox. He looked at me for a while before he smiled. That way, I thought, we might allow ourselves to touch, even if we weren’t a couple. “Now?” he asked. I nodded and rose from my chair.

  * * *

  WHILE WE WERE eating lasagna, your father turned to me and asked if I remembered the time when you brought me to his and your mother’s place out on Roskildevej. He had also made lasagna then. It must have been ten years ago. It was the only time I’d visited your childhood home, but he talked of it as if only a few months had passed. He spoke about my visit as if it were something important. I’d never thought of it that way; I’d almost forgotten about it. You never came home with me on Amerikavej, and we didn’t even talk about it. I also don’t think that you felt as if you had given yourself away, like I would. I have a clear memory of the little bungalow, the tiny front garden, the narrow concrete walkway behind the wrought-iron fence. One hundred and twenty-five square meters, that must have been it, but enough to make a world as long as you’re a child. I envied your affection as you put your arms around your father, who was a head shorter than you, and your tubby mother, who laughed at his pronunciation and corrected him all the time. It stung in a secret place to see the three of you together, because I came to think of my mother and how awkward we could be.

  Your mother laughed away because your father was the one who did the cooking, but she was proud, nevertheless, I could feel that. Everything was so meticulous in your living room, the tablecloth and the embroidered napkins, and your father had opened a bottle of wine. He told you off when you took it and wanted to fill the glasses. He had taught you a hundred times not to hold the bottle with your hand turned away from the person you were pouring out for; that was an insult. I almost got frightened by his tone, but you just laughed; apparently it wasn’t as bad as one might think from listening to him. “Pour,” your mother said, “not poor,” and then he also laughed. There was a picture on the wall, an oil painting of the slick sort, a rocky island rising from the blue, blue sea. I asked him if he was from Capri. “Salerno,” he said and dried his mouth with the back of his hand. You explained to me where Salerno was, and I asked how he’d ended up in Denmark. You and your mother watched him attentively as if you’d never heard the story before. How you’d become possible.

  I remembered it again as he sat across from me, between Georg and his grandchildren, a thin, furrowed man with hollow temples, salt and pepper in his close-cropped hair. I tried to guess what he might have looked like before the war, the young sailor from Salerno who had signed off in Copenhagen. You intervened in his account; it hadn’t been Copenhagen only, you said, and you told me how he’d met a fellow his age, in a bar in Nyhavn, and heard of the cryolite adventure in Greenland. They worked up there th
e whole summer, he added, and spent the winter in Copenhagen living on the money they’d earned. He grinned, exposing his gold teeth; they’d lived like kings, but then the war came, and he was stranded. He got a job in a factory making tools for the Germans. One had to make a living, he said with a shrug, and that was where he’d had his training. After the Liberation he had planned to go home, but Salerno was just about flattened, people lived like dogs, and then he ran into your mother.

  And my own father, what about him? I suppose that he wanted to be polite, in order that the conversation shouldn’t focus on the host only, but he could see from your expression that he’d put his foot in it. You didn’t know anything, but you must have felt that I disliked being asked. “I’ve never known my father,” I said and smiled. “The war,” I added and gestured vaguely. “The war,” your father said again and looked down at his plate before he turned to you and asked you to pour us some more wine. “And don’t stick your elbow in our noses when you hold the bottle,” he continued on a light note. “Hold, not whole,” your mother said. I avoided looking at you, relieved when she asked me about my job in the advertisement department.

  The war was the war. The war had been an avalanche. Some had disappeared, and others had just come to live a different life than they had expected, in a different world. I would have liked to talk to you about my father. You are the only one I would have liked to tell who he was, except that I hardly know myself. Why was it that I could never summon up the courage to do it? I never told Henning anything, nor Georg. They must have thought, both of them, that I had never known him. Since my mother died, nobody knows who I am. Both Henning and Georg must have sensed that they weren’t supposed to ask me. Perhaps they assumed that he must be dead, but that Sunday, when you and I went to see your parents, he would probably have been alive. He was still only in his fifties, and in all likelihood he lived an ordinary life in some part of Germany. We didn’t even have a picture of him; we had only his name, Thomas Hoffmann. Quite common as a name. I never even thought to look for him, never.

  I know that it’s too late to tell you about it, but it isn’t pointless. If other people knew that I am sitting here writing to you, they would worry about me. Stefan wouldn’t want to hear about it, and Mie would send me to a psychologist—she has a solution to everything. None of them would be capable of comprehending that it may be hopeless and completely meaningful at the same time. It is in the words that they must be addressed to someone. If not, they just line up in the dictionary, waiting for the rain to stop. You’re allowed to take them into your possession but only if you pass them on in the same breath. You can’t just sit and hold them back; that way they come to naught. I wouldn’t be telling the story if it wasn’t for you, if it wasn’t for me. But it is you, it always was, and I would like to tell you about my parents. I would like to tell you about Sigrid and Thomas.

  * * *

  SHE WASN’T EVEN TWENTY. Her father had been employed in a gravel pit nearby, but he got bad lungs and had to stop. He could do nothing but sit at home, wheezing; the sound permeated the apartment, it even reached her through the wall to her small room. My grandmother was a matron at the hotel; that was how she got Sigrid a job in the taproom. Sigrid waited on the guests in the evening, and during the day she served in a bakery. As I said, she was pretty, and she didn’t mind getting things done. The baker would like to see her engaged to his son, but she wasn’t interested. She read in her bed before she went to sleep. Her mother told her to be careful that she didn’t end up needing glasses. That would be a shame, she said, as pretty as she was. But Sigrid kept on reading, and she told herself that life could be something more than this. She didn’t know exactly what, and she didn’t need to; in fact, it was better that way, not knowing. She did not want to know what the future held, but she knew that it would present itself somewhere other than Stege. Her future would never call on her in a place like this, she might have said that to anyone who asked her, and she prepared for the day when she would have to break out and go to meet it.

  The German officers liked to frequent the hotel. Every night they sat at a corner table in the taproom; eventually they were the only ones left apart from the contractors and businessmen who traded with the Wehrmacht. The other men in town stayed away, much to the disquiet of the proprietor, my mother told me. At this time, everyone knew which way things were going, except for the collaborationists in the taproom and the regulars at the German table. People talked hushedly among themselves about the war and how it would probably last for another year, at the most, but at the officers’ table they only became louder and more cheerful as the months went by. Manners were like that at their table, and new faces were quick to adapt. When the seas ran high they would start singing until the proprietor reminded them politely that it was after hours. Of course, Sigrid had to stay until the guests were gone and the dishes done. It would often be way past midnight before she could go to sleep. The officers were pretty taken by her, in all friendliness most of the time, and she was nice about it; she just smiled and let it bounce off her. She could feel that the proprietor was pleased to see how popular she was and how she handled it. Sometimes he gave her something special to take back home, a rolled-meat sausage, a pound of coffee, and other treasures. The officers would also tip her at times, and she accepted, with some reluctance. She would certainly hesitate when they were drunk and gave her to understand, smiling and winking, how sweet they thought she was.

  One late evening in August, they were even more vociferous than usual. The taproom was empty except for the usual crowd of officers around the regular table. They blurred in their uniforms, and she hadn’t yet noticed the latest face. It was a warm evening and it didn’t help that the windows couldn’t be opened due to the blackout curtains. Several officers had opened their jackets, and they were drinking heavily. One of them had lit a cigar, and as she served another round of beers he suddenly grasped her around the waist and forced her down on his lap. She expected him to let go of her straightaway when she felt his hand around one of her breasts and pulled away with such force that he fell backward with his chair. There was a roar of laughter while she stood completely paralyzed and watched the presumptuous, flushing officer pick himself up. She had just the time to notice the only one of them who didn’t laugh. She hadn’t seen him before, younger than the others and still with his uniform jacket correctly buttoned, pale and motionless. The proprietor came running, alerted by the turmoil, and she raced past him into the kitchen. She could hear the party leaving and the proprietor good-humoredly accepting their apologies in broken German. He allowed her to go home before the place was cleared, but she remained standing for several minutes in the darkness behind the kitchen entry until it was completely silent outside.

  The air was almost as warm as it had been in the taproom, and the laden harvest moon was low over the cove. She wheeled her bike across the courtyard and was about to mount it when the gravel crunched behind her back and made her start. The young officer stepped out of a shadow and took off his cap in a ceremonious way that would have made her smile if he hadn’t frightened her. She had been good at German in school, and she almost understood everything he said. He wanted to apologize. She said that he’d done nothing wrong. He said that he felt ashamed of having been sitting at the same table. They walked together; there was no one else in the street, but in the silence it felt as if everybody must be hearing each word. He’d been transferred recently and didn’t know the town. She said that he would have to be careful not to lose his way. There was something ever so courteous about his manner that incited her to tease him a bit. She could hear from his voice that he smiled. Perhaps it was best if he didn’t accompany her much longer? Yes, perhaps, she said.

  That’s how my mother’s love story began. She thought of him when she’d returned to her small room, and the next day, until she thought of him no longer. She didn’t see anything of him the following days; he was not at the regular table in the evening, nor the even
ing after. The others were more quiet than usual, and the cigar smoker who had groped her breast made a point of being distinguished and aloof. She’d almost forgotten the short conversation in the August night when suddenly one afternoon, the polite young officer stood in the bakery where she served. He looked as if he, too, was taken by surprise. There were other customers in the shop, and when it became his turn he just looked fixedly at her for a second before he asked for a cake. He has a sweet tooth, she thought, and she suppressed a smile. He paid and left, and she served the next customer, glad that he hadn’t revealed that they’d met before. But what would he have had to say? She became irritated with herself for thinking about him. He was more handsome in daylight than she remembered him. A narrow face, green eyes, sandy hair, it seemed.

  “You look like him,” my mother said. She told me the story on New Year’s Eve when I was fourteen. We were always on our own during Christmas and the New Year; she had only me. She’d lived that way ever since we came to Copenhagen—secluded, on the alert. Until then, I’d thought that my father had died when I was a baby. I asked if she’d never considered the fact that he was German. “To begin with, yes,” she answered.

  A few evenings later he was at the regular table again. He avoided looking at her when she served, and he left before the others. When she was free, he stood waiting in the courtyard. He accompanied her some of the way, like the first evening. It happened several times; he would wait, and they walked next to each other, through the streets to begin with, or in the direction of the cove. She never told me when he kissed her for the first time, and of course she was too shy to tell me how they found a place where they could be together. She kept that to herself, and I haven’t even tried to imagine it. You will have to what without the details, Anna, like I have. All I know is that they were as careful as you can be in a small town. She never walked down the street on his arm as did the other German-loving sluts, intoxicated by their own conceit, or just stupid. She looked at me. “You’re the daughter of a German-loving slut,” she said with an eerie smile. “Now you know.”