Often I Am Happy Read online

  The single risk he allowed himself was to come into the bakery every afternoon, buy a cake, and keep a straight face as he met her eyes. It was only reluctantly that he’d begun to show up in the taproom again. He was afraid it might cause suspicion among the others if he stayed away and one of them thought to combine his absence with the cigar-smoking officer’s assault. He was touchingly cautious, almost timid. It wasn’t exactly what you might have expected from a soldier. They met at night out at the cove, on the overgrown paths along the meadows. They could talk ever so freely, as if they’d known each other for a long time. He was from a village close to Weimar, where his father owned a small printing house. He spoke of Goethe and recited to her. He wanted to know which books she cared for, and he couldn’t comprehend that she’d never read Ibsen. His dream was to become a stage director. When it happened he would stage The Lady from the Sea. He retold the story about the woman in the fjord who is waiting for a sailor. He has said to her that he will come back one day and take her with him. In spite of that she marries someone else, a widower with grown-up daughters; and you know what, Anna? The sailor comes at last. When she asks her husband to release her, and he brings himself to do so, she decides to stay with him at the very last moment. “Later on, I thought that it seemed as if Thomas had tried to make me understand something,” my mother said. It was curious to hear her mention him by his first name, but it was actually even more curious that I should be surprised. A young German called Thomas, still not my father. “But I didn’t marry,” she said. “And he didn’t come,” she added after a pause.

  One evening in the autumn they were following the track between the meadows and the reeds. The last formations of migrant birds had already passed over the Baltic Sea. She and Thomas had been watching them one Sunday. Each of them had defied all security measures, as if driven by the same impulse, and taken to their customary meeting place in the clear October sun. They had seen it as proof of their intimacy, two minds with but a single thought, yet in the wind and the darkness he was gloomy. The war would end soon, he said. In a few months’ time Hitler would have lost everything, and her country, all of Europe, would be liberated. Later, she wondered how he could have seen everything so clearly. He pulled her close, told her he would come back one day, “in einem anderem Anzug.”

  You can’t help imagining the two of them together, can you? In front of the windswept, brackish water behind the rush. She is standing by her black lady’s bicycle as he hugs her, lean and angular in his uniform. At some point, she has given herself to him. I know it sounds old-fashioned, Anna, but I can’t use any of the other words available. They didn’t screw, they didn’t fuck, not that way, and it is not that I want to make them more pure than they were. Only I’m certain it was something other than lechery that made the difference. It’s not that I wish to romanticize unduly, but who says that the truth must always be crude? Stefan thinks so when he’s had a bit too much of his California red wine while he grills steaks on the terrace. When Mie has to calm him down with an admonitory hand on his nape, not because he’s being uncivilized but because it’s uncool to reduce all human striving to tits and pricks.

  It’s not that I want to romanticize. What is a love story? Two young people who feel driven toward each other. She was nineteen, he was going on thirty while they were together. She gave him a silver spoon, her most precious possession. It had been given to her as a christening gift, and apart from everything else, she had to bear her mother’s silent disappointment that she’d allowed the spoon to become lost. Somewhere in Germany, there is a silver spoon with her name engraved in italics on the handle. Perhaps his children inherited it. Perhaps they let it pass on, with a shrug, to the secondhand dealer who collected the things they couldn’t use. Or some great-grandchild eats yogurt with it, and they remain ignorant, all of them, of where it started its journey toward that chubby little German hand, far or not so far from Weimar. My mother didn’t even remember the name of the village where his father had a printing house—which had probably been bombed to rubble anyway, like so much else. There was no way of knowing his whereabouts in that devastated country where shabby, anonymous bands drifted around, and where it was impossible to distinguish the ruins of one city from the ruins of another. She wouldn’t have had the slightest idea where to start looking for some Thomas Hoffmann, a former officer in the German occupying troops in Denmark, that is, if she’d decided to try.

  As the years went by, anyone else would have brushed it aside as a youthful infatuation, in this case an aberration, since we all know how the hormones are simmering at that age. How you can get butterflies in your stomach if only someone’s gaze rests upon you a little while longer than expected. There’s no reason to exaggerate; or, to put it differently, you would search in vain for a deeper reason except that it was her, and that it was him. It could have been a different young man, no doubt about it, but it wasn’t. The facts of a life become so enigmatic when that life is over. There is just that silver spoon somewhere, the rest is guessing, but the coincidence of it all is no reason to slander the defenseless trust of youth. Yes, they were inexperienced; they had but Goethe and Ibsen and whatever world literature she’d been devouring in her bed, but why should hormones and coincidence be weightier? Don’t we make ourselves poorer, with all our knowledge, than we need to be, only because we can?

  You couldn’t see that she was pregnant when Denmark was liberated. So far she only suspected it herself. In the tense atmosphere permeating the small town, she and Thomas hadn’t seen each other for several weeks. Every night she waited at the kitchen entrance of the hotel before she got on her bike. She had been out at the cove a couple of times before she went home. The regular table was empty, and on the night when the message of liberation was broadcast, new customers poured into the taproom. She was in a torpor as she served the liberated while the streets resounded with excitement. She recognized the baker’s son among the jubilant, drunken faces. He clasped her cheek in a frisky way. “Look happy!” he shouted at her, and she smiled the best she’d learned and hurried on with her tray full of beer bottles. There had been a touch of something in his eyes. When she returned to the counter, the proprietor handed her an envelope, staring at her fixedly. She stuck it under her apron without looking at it and rushed to open a new relay of bottles. Someone had ripped the blackout curtains from the windows and opened them wide, and the noise inside mingled with the exhilarated voices in the street.

  She didn’t read his letter until she came home late at night. Had he been to deliver it himself? As she sat in her small room it felt as if the proprietor’s expressionless gaze were still resting upon her. The first thing that struck her was that she hadn’t known his handwriting. So much about him remained unknown to her, and in her thoughts she clung to each of the few words he’d scribbled with tiny, cramped letters. He wrote that he expected to be deported within a very short time. He wrote that he would come back again, that he would not forget her.

  Shortly after, she stood in the crowd watching the German soldiers march past on their way out of town. There was no doubt any longer—she was long overdue. She tried in vain to catch a glimpse of him among the empty faces. She stood on tiptoe, stretching her neck, when all of a sudden someone grasped her arm firmly so that she almost fell. At first she didn’t recognize the baker’s son in the flat steel helmet. He was also wearing the armband of the resistance, but she couldn’t imagine his having performed in any important way with his pale, doughy hands. She was taken to the school and pushed into the gymnasium. She recognized the smell of sweat and floor polish between the lacquered wall bars and floorboards, lusterless from the footprints. She also recognized some of the faces on the line, regulars from the taproom, several of them belonging to the most enterprising people in town. There were other girls, and they all avoided looking at each other. The proceedings were of a shrill, bedraggled kind. She was questioned about the letter, and in her mind’s eye she saw once more the proprietor and his un
fathomable gaze. She supposed nothing else would have paid him, now that his clientele had been replaced so abruptly. They had been seen together after all, by whom or where, she could not conceive. She and the other girls had their hair cut off before they were taken through town on an open truck. As she lowered her eyes, listening to the jeering crowd, she asked herself if she would have been treated the same had it been visible that she was expecting.

  Her father never spoke to her again. She only heard him wheeze at night, through the wall, when she lay awake. Her mother said hardly anything, either. I have never known them; I don’t even have a picture of them. That summer, Sigrid stayed in the house. It was the loveliest weather, and everybody was so happy. She sat in the living room when her mother had gone to work and her father took a nap, or she stayed in her room. During the first weeks she hoped that there would be a letter from Germany, but he didn’t even have her address. Was any mail at all coming out of that bombed-out country? In the night, she sneaked out of the house and biked to the path along the cove, unaccustomed to the sensation of cool air on her scalp and nape.

  She assisted in the house, cleaned and cooked for her parents, but was excused from doing the shopping and thus exposing herself to stares and taunts. One evening when she was washing the dishes, her mother came into the kitchen. She began to wipe the glasses and dishes in the drainer but stopped, towel in hand, and stared into the small kitchen garden behind the washhouse where her father grew vegetables and cabbage. It had come in handy, whatever he’d been able to grow in the small strip of land, while there was a shortage of everything. “Who would’ve thought my daughter to end up a soldier’s whore,” she said in a low voice, as if speaking to herself. Sigrid didn’t answer. “Don’t tell me you’re waiting,” her mother continued, a little louder. “You’re not fancying that the German pig was in love with you?” Sigrid turned toward her. She had accustomed herself from when she was little to seeing only faint and indirect traces of whatever her mother felt on her coarse, contracted face, and she’d never before witnessed or even pictured to herself that it might actually shine with evil. Her mother’s words repeated themselves in her head when she had gone to bed, like a record stuck in the same groove.

  As weeks and months passed, she lost her faith that a letter from Thomas would finally arrive, or that he would come back as he had promised. To begin with, she told herself that of course he couldn’t come, the situation being what it was in his country. She kept fighting back the thought that he had made a fool of her, and that she had loved him in vain. She never surrendered to that thought.

  “I suppose he forgot you,” I said harshly when she had told me her story. She shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said softly, “that would make no sense.”

  I HAVE MOVED, ANNA. I live on Amerikavej again, and there is such a childish crudeness to my joy that it hardly fits into my septuagenarian frame. I almost didn’t bring anything. I emailed the boys and told them they could come and take whatever they wanted. Stefan never answered; he is sore. Morten came in a rental van to collect the Kjaerholm sofa. This way, he wouldn’t have to invest in the sofa Mie recommended to him, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. He made sure to avoid speaking of her or Stefan, and I inferred that they must have talked about our failed tête-à-tête.

  I remember when you got your new sofa, you and Georg. You invited us to come over for the inauguration, and Henning couldn’t stop caressing the brandy-colored calfskin. The first many times I sat in it, it felt like being on probation. You know the feeling I always had, of not being good enough. You knew it, but you didn’t know the reason why I felt ashamed. I still do from time to time, although I have put it all behind me, like the furniture. I called an Internet auction house and had them collect the rest. Afterward, I went to IKEA and found the most basic stuff—a bed, a table, a few chairs. It’s a little less than empty here. Can you say such a thing, Anna? Below empty, meaning sparsely furnished. They say it’s trendy, by the way. Less than nothing, meaning not dead yet. With a little luck, and if I have the brains for it, I may have fifteen, perhaps twenty years left. Not bad when you think about it, but I have no time for nonsense. I have no time for Stefan and his self-centered way of feeling rejected.

  I hadn’t heard from him in weeks when he suddenly called. Why had I never answered? I told him I had canceled the landline phone. But I didn’t answer my cell phone, either, he insisted. I explained to him that it hadn’t been charged since Georg died. But I answered now! Was it because he called from a different number? I hadn’t even looked at the digits on the display. He had called and called. His tone was oscillating between offended and reproachful. I tried to tell him that my phone has an unfortunate tendency to go into soundless mode, without my having asked it. You’ve been spared a lot, Anna, where those things are concerned. Cell phones lead their own lives, or rather, we live theirs. Cordless, oh yes, but always available. What kind of freedom is that? Of course I could have decided not to answer it.

  I was in a discount DIY in the western suburbs, speculating if I had room for ten liters of wall paint in my handlebar basket, or if I should make do with five. They were hefty tubs, I tell you, but there is something pleasurable about doing things yourself. Getting lost in the routines of the job. I am beginning to understand why Georg loved his workbench in the garage so much. Everything was in its place on the shelves. He had even outlined the claw hammer and the crowbar and whatnot with a pencil on the perforated Masonite sheet where he hung his tools. When I saw it for the first time, I almost said something witty, but I kept my mouth shut. Stefan loved to stand out there with him and be let in on it, contrary to Morten, who shunned implements of all kinds, as if they were evil creatures out to bite and scratch him. He sprawled on the Kjaerholm sofa reading Enid Blyton while Stefan and Georg were fixing things. There is historic justice to the fact that the sofa has become his and Thea’s, but it isn’t what it used to be, I have to confess that, Anna. First, there is the cup of cocoa that was spilled during I don’t know which birthday party, and the cushions have become chappy. I should have thought to wax them. Do you remember how you rubbed away?

  Stefan had an agenda, I could hear that as I wavered between luster 10 and luster 20. He was angry, and his anger had been accumulating. He had been compelled to deposit it at the bank, so to speak, since he couldn’t get through to me on the cell or the landline phone, and now it was payback time, with interest. He demanded that I apologize. “What for?” I asked. “You are to excuse yourself to Mie. You are to treat my wife with dignity.” He had a comically solemn way of saying “my wife,” as if we were strangers. Suddenly we were. My voice was thick with uneasiness. “I think I do,” I said. “You have no right to cast aspersions on her motherhood,” he persisted. Oh, I thought to myself, of course. Stefan is a good, empathic husband. He has been sent on an errand. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about; you never tried it yourself,” he continued. Bloodlust, I thought, and felt myself becoming tough and cold. “That might be,” I said, “but I still don’t believe it’s healthy for children to be breast-fed until they change their teeth. They may get some antibodies on that account, but they will be lacking in backbone if they’re not weaned in time. They were about to gnaw off her nipples.” He was silent for a moment. His voice sounded completely different when he continued mutedly: “I had no idea that you could be so base,” he said. “And yet, I guess I knew all along.”

  I remained standing with my phone after he had hung up. I remembered again his tiddly, infantile way of blabbering about tits when he’d had a little too much red wine, ebulliently self-satisfied in the role of bad boy. It was useless since there would never be an opportunity to remind him about it. In any event, his ears were incapable of tuning in to any other wavelength than Mie’s. I guess he’s the dream of a husband, brutally fixated on his career yet biddable at home. As I lugged the bucket of paint out to my bike, I realized that he had touched me on the raw. He had known where to strike. He’d ha
d that knowledge in reserve throughout without betraying it, and I’d never given it a thought. The humiliation etched itself into where he had intended it to catch up with me as I biked back into town. It is an awkward business, to balance ten liters of emulsion paint in your handlebar basket when you feel as exposed as that. As if everybody can see the kind of person you are. It wasn’t that I’d never known the prototypical, estrogenic fermentation of motherhood, God bless. Where that was concerned I was only baffled, slightly dizzy even, at Stefan’s determination to go all the way, but his final remark went further. The word base. His admission that he’d never forgotten, never entirely disregarded where I really came from. He had struck a hideous, grimy bottom within me, and it was no solace that he knew nothing about the even deeper shaft beneath it.

  Sigrid’s vague ideas of something more never got her very far. An avalanche came in the way, and suddenly she was somewhere else. It was midwinter when she gave birth to me at the hospital in Naestved. One of her mother’s elder cousins lived in that town and let Sigrid move in shortly before her delivery. The story was to go that my father was a sailor on a coaster. I was told a version of it when I was five years old and began to ask questions. In it, his ship had gone down after hitting a mine. The cousin shook her head in place of condemnation. “My dear,” she said, “what a mess you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in.” She bought accessories for her, including romper suits and cotton diapers, and she lent her an old stroller that had been left over in the basement. One evening, a week after my birth, Sigrid boarded the last bus back to Stege. The driver helped her with the stroller. His kindness brought tears to her eyes because she thought of what was coming to her. Even though she had made sure to arrive when most people were going to bed, it still felt as if she were being watched from the windows as she passed. The dark, glossy windowpanes reflected the streetlights, and behind them she imagined how they watched as the German-loving slut returned with her progeny.