The Lover From an Icy Sea (65 page)

His were dry. Hers, however, were beginning to tear. She would cry for both of them, as only a Russian could. In answer to his unspoken question, Hope simply nodded. Once.

Meaning ‘yes,’ of course, he must go.

Chapter 81

“
So, Kit, you have come to help me bury Daneka. I thought you might. I knew almost the first moment I laid eyes on you that you were someone I could count on—that both Daneka and I could count on.”

“
And if Daneka and I had been able—.” At the sight of Dagmar Sørensen, now also ten years older and stung by that singular grief that only parents of lost or prematurely dead children can know, Kit stumbled. “You and I wouldn’t now be standing here. Instead, we’d be burying you. Forgive me.”

“
My forgiveness is not necessary. You are quite right. I would be the one in the ground now, and the two of you would be dancing on my grave.”

“
Dancing is not what we’d be doing, Dagmar. Not on your grave or anywhere else.”

“
I would have insisted upon it!” she smiled. “For my own amusement. Daneka was never much of a dancer. I assume you aren’t either. You were alike in that regard—as you were in so many other ways. And so, I would have insisted that you two dance on my grave for my sake.”

Kit squeezed out a smile of his own. “I, too, thought we were very much alike. I guess you and I both guessed wrong.”

“
Not wrong, Kit. Your differences were very small. Your obstacle—your impasse—was the narcissism of those small differences.”

“
The what?”

“
It’s not important—just a Freudian thing.”

“
A Freudian thing is the reason I’m now here to help you bury Daneka rather than here with her to bury you? I’m sorry, but you’ve lost me.”

“
Never mind, Kit,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I want you, instead, to come with me on a journey. I want to tell you a story—a true story. Often, Kit, truth is stranger than fiction. This tale in particular is one with historical antecedent. I know. I read a lot. Well-read, Kit, doesn’t necessarily mean well-liked—trust me on that. But at my age, friends are here today, dead and gone tomorrow. I prefer to read.”

“
You’re losing me again.”

“
Sorry. I was saying—.”

“
You were saying, in so many words, that ‘but for the grace of God—’.”

“
Yes, I suppose I was—in so many words. I’m the one who should be in that coffin and going into the ground. We would all be happier. That’s how even I would have preferred it. Help me to do this thing that now must be done, and then we shall talk. There are reasons for everything in this world, Kit. And I shall very shortly try to help you understand those reasons—to help us both.”

*  *  *

Her burial place was a small churchyard just down the road from her mother’s house—the cemetery Daneka had pointed out to Kit the only other time he’d visited Rønne. He and Dagmar went there now on foot. On the tombstone, he saw her name:
Daneka Sørensen—and the dates: 24 februar 1960—25 april 2014.
Kit then read, beneath her name and dates, an inscription in English:

Here ends the nightmare;

to curds turns the cream.

I’ll never reprise it—

nor with it, the dream.

Alongside the stone was the head and neck of the Virgin Mary, a replica of Michelangelo’s
Pietà
, waiting to be put into place as a headstone.

It was nearly dusk when the service concluded. Daneka’s coffin was lowered into the ground, last flowers and symbolic handfuls of earth thrown in after it, the hole filled up with dirt, the headstone cemented to the tombstone. Kit and Dagmar walked back to her house together. Still two months away from the first day of summer, late afternoons on the island of Bornholm were still arrestingly chilly. Mrs. Sørensen asked Kit to make a fire while she went into the kitchen to brew a pot of tea.

He had a small fire burning when she returned with a tea tray set for two, which she then placed down in front of him. While Kit poured for both, she lit a dozen candles around the room—which flickered like fireflies in the small, dark interior.

Once she’d completed lighting her candles, Dagmar settled back into her rocker facing the fireplace. It was quite dark where they sat—but for the candlelight and the fire Kit had just made. Both of them sat for a moment in silence, mesmerized by the flames, until Kit finally broke the silence.

“
The inscription on her tombstone. How did it get there?”

“
She requested it—a month ago. I don’t know where it came from. She sent me the request and asked, should anything ever happen to her—‘before her time’ is how she put it—that I honor her last wishes. One was the inscription. A second was the headstone, the Pietà. I’m not sure of its significance, although I remember that when we first took her as a young girl to Rome, she stood as if transfixed before that statue and stared at it for a long time. Then,”—at this point Mrs. Sørensen angled her own neck just so—“she bent her neck in imitation of the Virgin and simply held it. The third wish—which you didn’t see today because I haven’t yet found someone to drive me out to the forest of Almendingen—was for a lichen to be placed upon her grave. You probably don’t know that following your one and only visit here to the island of Bornholm, Daneka began to take a very keen interest in lichens and mosses. She even constructed a moss garden at her cottage in Svaneke.” Mrs. Sørensen chuckled and shook her head. “She became something of a fanatic about lichens and mosses, would collect them wherever her business travels took her, would then bring them back to Bornholm and attempt to plant them in her garden.”

Without thinking, Kit reached for his pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, put it between his lips and was about to light it when he realized his faux pas. “Excuse me,” he said. He stood up and started towards the front door. “I need some air.”

Mrs. Sørensen stood up from her own rocker, took Kit gently by the wrists and sat him back down. She then went into the kitchen, got an ashtray and brought it to him.

“
There’s no need for you to go outside, Kit. I’m not my daughter.” She stated the last with a sad half-smile, and in that moment Kit understood that she perhaps knew a great deal about the grown-up Daneka who’d left the island decades earlier. He sat back down, grateful for her permission to stay indoors next to the fire where he could remain warm.

“
Do you know anything about Danish history, Kit?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “No, of course you don’t. Why should you? Ours is what the Germans once called ‘the little country.’ Our national history is not remarkable. It is, like any national history, a story of the collective, of the universal. Leave that to the Germans and to their Hegel. Have you, since we last met, read Kierkegaard, Kit?” Once again, she didn’t wait for his answer. “For Kierkegaard, existence was a matter of free choice.

“
But I don’t want to talk philosophy tonight,” she said, cutting herself off with an abrupt wave of her hand. “I want to tell you a story. A personal history. I mention this idea of Kierkegaard’s only because I agree with it—and because I think this personal history I’m about to tell you is one even he might have liked.” She got up again from her rocker and stirred the fire. “So let us first talk a little geography and a little history.

“
I don’t want to insult you, Kit. But I know that Americans generally don’t have much patience with things like geography and history. We Europeans have no choice. Geography, in particular, affects everything we do. Do you know what country lies directly below ours?”

“
Germany. And a piece of Poland, I believe.”

She smiled. “Exactly, Kit. I’m impressed.” He blushed.

“
And history. Do you know why the year 1940 is important to us Danes?”

“
I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.”

“
In 1940, the
Bundeswehr
marched into and over Denmark—and into and over Holland and Belgium, Luxembourg and Norway—just as it had marched into and over Poland the year before. But that’s war. That is a collective action. Individual action, individual choice is where I start my story—or rather, where I start my mother’s story as she told it to me. You see, I was not yet here on earth at the time of the German invasion.”

Kit took a deep drag on his cigarette and sat up straight in his chair.

“
These other Danes—the ones before me—knew about Hitler’s
Endlösung
for the Jews long before the rest of the world did—or at least long before the rest of the world chose to acknowledge it. You know, perhaps, that all Danes wore armbands in solidarity with the Jewish people. But here, on Bornholm, the islanders did much more than that.

“
I believe you know of our little forest here in the middle of the island, Kit—the forest of Almendingen. Daneka used to take long walks in that forest when she was a girl.” Mrs. Sørensen smiled. “I think those long walks helped to nurture her thinking skills. Unfortunately, people these days—and yes, Daneka, too—do not seem to have the patience or the stamina for long walks and quiet, thinking time.”

Kit also smiled as he thought for an instant back to their one visit together to the island and to their love-making in the same forest. “Yes, I know the place. And yes, I unfortunately agree with you.”

“
The people of Bornholm built an underground shelter in that forest, Kit. They took as many Jews from the mainland as their network could smuggle out. The islanders kept them there for several months. It was not home, by any means, but it was safe—for a while, at least. I say ‘them,’ but the Jews and the Danes were the same at that point—just as they would be in the end.

“
One day, a German soldier found them, and they thought—how do you say it in English … ? Ah, yes—they thought ‘the gig was up.’ That was because they did not know he had been watching them for some time. He knew all about their shelter and their network. And yet, he had never interfered.”

Kit’s expression suggested he was thoroughly confused by this story—both by the content, which contradicted everything he’d ever heard or read about the behavior of the Germans in the war, and by her purpose in telling it—which he couldn’t yet discern.

“
I see that you are a little surprised,” Mrs. Sørensen said. “Allow me to continue.”

“
Please do.”

“
My mother didn’t know why he chose her, of all the people there were to choose from. At that very instant he walked up to her, she thought she would be the first to die. Instead, he took her arm, very respectfully, and walked her off into the forest. When they found a place far enough away and where the others could not hear them, he stopped her. He saw that she was trembling and he put a hand on her shoulder. ‘
Nein
,’ he said. ‘
Es ist nicht meine Absicht, Ihnen zu schaden
.’ ‘I don’t wish to harm you,’ is what he said.

“
He then asked her if she understood German. She told him she did. For the next quarter of an hour, he explained to her that he had been watching them—and her in particular—every day for some time. He admired what they were doing. He hated what he and his country were doing—to the Jews, certainly, but also to the Danes, and to much of the civilized world. He told her he had not been born into this world only to become what he called
ein Todesportier
—a porter, a janitor, of death. He wanted to live. He wanted others to live. And now he wanted to help them.

“
Nothing could have surprised my mother more, as you can imagine, Kit. He told her he would bring what he could, whenever he could, from his own supply depot. And he did just that. For the next several months, he brought things—food, mostly—every day. He risked his life. As Kierkegaard would have said, he proved his existence through his individual action.

“
They became lovers. I know that may sound risible to you, to think of an old lady in that way. But she was not always old. She—like me—had once been a young woman, a woman of desires, a woman like Daneka was to you ten years ago. And yet, for a Danish woman who had not seen even her twenty-years birthday, to be the lover of a German soldier was … I don’t know if I can make you understand how it must have torn her heart to love this man who spoke the hateful language of the enemy.

“
You can guess the rest, as it is in the nature of living, loving things to perpetuate themselves. One day, she became pregnant. She knew she couldn’t tell him, that it would have been his end. He was as much in love with her as she was with him, and he was full of life. He would not have been able to keep the secret, and his own happiness would have been his betrayal.”

Mrs. Sørensen got up from her rocker and stood for a moment in front of the fire with her back to Kit. Then she turned around and faced him again. “That’s often how it is with happiness and love and wanting deeply, deeply to live and let live. Those things are hateful in the eyes of many men, however much they may claim the contrary. And not just in war, Kit. No, in times of peace, too. We pay tribute to love and life—all of us. But what most of us really teach our children is hate and fear and slow death. In schools, certainly. But also at home and by our example—so that we can eventually return to war—our more natural state.