The Woman from Bratislava
Read The Woman from Bratislava Online
Authors: Leif Davidsen
LEIF DAVIDSEN
Translated from the Danish by
Barbara J. Haveland
‘It may be strange and it may be irrational, but history means a very great deal, especially somewhere such as the Balkans.’
Velijko Vujacic, historian
IT WAS A STORY
often used by security-cleared lecturers in the civilian branch of FET, by serving officers of a certain rank and other trusted members of staff with PET when briefing new
volunteers
on the special conditions under which the secret services had to operate in a post-communist world. Right at the start, the importance of absolute confidentiality when dealing with
classified
information and documents was impressed upon the young and somewhat self-conscious new recruits, who always looked forward to the talk on what was referred to simply as
the case.
In other words, this story was not for repeating to their ‘partners’, as they were termed in politically correct Danish, along with other pillow talk. Historians have an ingrained disrespect for any
information
which is not at least seventy-five years old, so as far as they were concerned this particular case was still current. The new recruits, on the other hand, tended to regard it as belonging to some strange bygone time. But then, their temporal perspective seemed to extend little further than from one TV news broadcast to the next, or at least, not much beyond the German occupation of the country, the hippie era and that time back in the bizarre seventies when the students were crying out for a socialist
revolution
. To these young people the chronology was often a bit muddy. For their elders, the youngsters’ lack of historical knowledge was a regular topic of conversation in the canteen. It was inevitable, therefore, that lecturers on the courses for prospective analysts run by the civilian branches of the Danish Military Intelligence – FET – and Security Intelligence – PET – were given to
introducing
elements of storytelling into their teaching. In the academic world this would have been frowned upon, but for the budding
spymasters and counter-spies such narrative techniques only made the lectures – and, not least, this particular story – all the more interesting. To put it bluntly: these secret agents of the future simply paid more attention.
Since the case in all its details was known only to a trusted inner circle and had, with typical, autocratic Danish common sense, been consigned to the archives for the next seventy-five years, only the most seasoned members of staff, those with
complete
insight into the matter, were allowed to lecture on it. It was mainly for this reason that
the case
carried so much prestige. That and the strangeness of the alliance. That two such diverse
ideologies
should have become bedfellows. First and foremost, though,
the case
was used as a means of making it clear to future spies and counter-spies that secret agents had existed since before biblical times and would go on existing for all time.
The case
also served as proof that the services’ budget demands were well
warranted
. Berlin Wall or no Berlin Wall. There is treachery and there is loyalty. Every day there are men and women who make a choice. People are easily tempted. There is no risk of unemployment in this job. That was the message. We deal in facts. Nonetheless, even those PET and FET lecturers with the highest security clearance could not resist adding the odd fictional flourish to their
presentations
. It always heightened the class’s interest. It was a common ploy to open with a description of the situation in the new,
democratic
Republic of Estonia, despite the fact that no one could say exactly how things stood there. Even when one is dealing with individuals who have willingly applied to join the secret services, with all their limitations, a couple of colourful, emotive adjectives has never detracted from the solemnity of the proceedings;
adjectives
of the sort with which Jytte Vuldom, the big boss and guru, often began her sermon on those occasions when she managed to escape from her administrative prison to teach the future
defenders
of the nation’s secrets.
Vuldom had survived just about everything; she knew how to
handle the politicians, was a friend to her lads and the service’s steadfast, erudite champion in the face of the voracious, ignorant media. Vuldom often commenced her baptism of the new
initiates
by invoking her right to present her own interpretation of the ostensibly innocuous image of the times and the normal situation; and so occasionally, if she considered a fresh crop of Danish men and women ready to enter the unique brother- and sisterhood of the secret services, she would begin with the story as seen – as they say in the temples of dramaturgy – from Teddy’s POV. The aim was to give these future interpreters of the merchandise
supplied
by the dealers in secrets, these prospective analysts of the invariably double-edged nature of treachery, an initial insight into university lecturer Theodor Nikolaj Pedersen, his ambivalent part in things and the significance of history and of family ties. Or
possibly
to discreetly underline the fact that the gathering of
information
and, not least, the interpretation of same, always entails a considerable degree of subjectivity. In the end it all comes down to the unpredictability of the individual. These are the sorts of words which Vuldom used even when she was meant to be teaching new recruits how to predict a person’s many weak spots. She would run an eye over the handpicked gathering at the National Police Training Centre in Avnø near the south-western tip of Zealand, at the recruits with their notebooks on their desks and ballpoint pens or felt-tips hovering expectantly, all set to record her words of wisdom and the overhead projector’s instructive graphs. But Vuldom rarely took the overhead’s easy way out. Instead, she often began by describing a scene:
A small group of people stands in a forest west of Narva in the now independent Estonia. It is a day in early June. Everything is lovely and green, the singing of the birds the only sound. It has rained during the night and drops of water hang like exquisite little pearls from every leaf and blade of grass. The group consists of six men and a woman. They stand quietly, gazing at a granite stone. One of the men supports himself with a stick. There are tears in
his eyes. With his high, bald pate and small, sunken eyes he must be close on eighty. His skin is thin and wrinkled, it looks as though it would tear if one scratched it. But he still stands straight and tall. The other men are in their fifties, all in the middle-aged male’s various stages of decline. There are bald patches and pot-bellies, but also a certain firmness of purpose, as if they have come a long way and have now, finally, reached their goal. The woman stands out from the rest. She must be about sixty, but if her body too is marked by age then her elegant trouser suit hides any signs of the decay. She has short, greyish hair, very lightly tinted, strong, beautiful lips highlighted in red and keen green eyes set nicely in a face that is well-proportioned, if a little irregular. Her figure is slim and she stands with her head only slightly bowed. She is holding a bouquet of roses. It is very quiet. Only the birdsong and the swish of feet on damp grass. In the distance, the sound of a plane cutting across the blue sky, somewhere up there among the
scattering
of fluffy white clouds in the stratosphere. The woman takes a step forward and lays the bouquet at the foot of the rough-hewn, brown granite stone, gently, as if it were of porcelain. The red roses stand out brightly against the green grass and the mound of black soil left over from the setting of the stone. She steps back a pace again, seems to be studying the coat-of-arms with the Dannebrog cross and the legend beneath it, as if to brand it on her memory. She already knows it by heart, though. It seems to me that a look of peace descends upon her face as she reads it aloud to herself, like a little child who has just discovered the magic of words, but has to recite them in her head in order to make sense of them.
‘“The Danish Regiment. Croatia-Russia. Estonia-Lithuania. Courland-Pomerania. In memory of those who fought,”’ she reads to herself, without moving her lips.
They stand for a moment. A group of well-dressed modern individuals in a forest near Narva in Estonia.
‘That’s that, then,’ the oldest of them says.
‘Yes, that’s that,’ the woman replies. ‘And it was about time.’
‘It was indeed,’ the old man says and then, shifting the emphasis to the last word: ‘It was
indeed
.’
Then once more there is only silence and the birds and after a while the sound of feet on wet grass as they turn, on the word of command almost, and wend their way out of the Estonian forest.
Thereafter, another picture would be presented. Vuldom would pick up a sheet of paper, run the eyes behind her narrow reading glasses over the rapt assembly, before looking down at the white sheet in her hand and reading out loud, like a mother to her eagerly attentive children:
It is a picture of a white house. A large house surrounded by beech and elm trees. The tiled roof is red. The house is pictured from above, but even so the white walls are clearly visible in the soft, limpid light. This is an aerial photograph ordered by a proud householder. It is summer and there is a black Ford van in the courtyard. There are no other cars to be seen, only a team of horses pulling a combine-harvester in a neighbouring field. Here, only a few years after the war, Denmark is still a horse-drawn country and tractors are not yet common. It must have been in August that the plane flew over the white house. One can both sense and see that the sun is shining. There is a patch of blue sky. The colours are still bright, though tinged by the years, which have lent them a patina befitting those frugal times. There is a courtyard to the front of the house and a large garden at the back. It looks as if there are fruit trees in the garden, which is surrounded by a neatly-trimmed green hedge. There are five people in the picture, which is framed as if it were an oil painting. A man and a woman. The man is clad in white with a tall baker’s hat on his head. The woman has her arms crossed over a floral-print dress. Her black hair gleams in the sunlight. Both have their faces turned up to the pilot’s camera. They have waited a long time for him to fly over this home of which they are now the proud owners. Behind them stands a
half-grown
boy, he too in white baker’s garb, but bareheaded. Next to him is a girl of about the same age in a pastel-coloured frock. Her
arms are bare and her hair hangs in two long, dark braids. They look alike, as siblings tend to. The aerial photograph is so sharp that the features of their faces can almost be made out as they gaze up at the plane swooping overhead. There is also a small boy in the picture. He is standing next to his mother, peering up at the aircraft, waving to it. His hair is curly and almost white and his bare knees can be seen peeking out below his short trousers. It is a very Danish picture. A picture which radiates security and comfort. A picture which speaks of good times just around the corner. The little boy in the photograph is me. This is the only thing left from my first childhood home and without it I would have no memory of that white house. I was almost four when the picture was taken in a fit of hubris. The following winter my father was forced to close the bakery when a certain matter came to light and his customers learned of his past. All this I have been told, but I do not remember it. I remember only the scent of flour and the sound of the delivery man whistling as he hopped up into the baker’s van, off to deliver crusty white bread to the customers. And sometimes the rich aroma of the pork, duck and geese with which my father filled the big, black ovens on Martinmas Eve, or on Christmas Eve when the whole village brought their Christmas roasts to the baker: the ovens of their coal or coke fired stoves too small to cope with the plump festive fare. Otherwise it is all a blank, and my first clear memories stem from the time after we moved to a small town in Jutland. By then my father was no longer a part of our lives. All in all, I have only the haziest recollections of him. And I am not sure whether those things I do remember are the result of personal experience or memories derived from family anecdotes and a handful of photographs. He left his family because he was ashamed that he could not provide for them
properly
and died, so legend has it, two years later in a bar in Hamburg. But the past did not die with him. It lived on, and the ripples from it spread all the way to the end of the century, that century which can only be called the century of the victim. But was he victim or
executioner. Or both? This was the question with which the family had to wrestle over the years that followed. It had no real bearing on me, but it shaped the lives of the other two children in a way that was to prove crucial for them. It became for them the great secret of their lives and was guarded more carefully than the most clandestine love affair. Denmark entered the modern world and the majority of people forgot, but a few tended their memories and kept them burning so fiercely that these same remembrances eventually consumed them from within.
Who am I? Vuldom would ask in her cool, slightly husky and often quite sexy smoker’s voice.
Who is the ‘I’ in this story? Who is the ‘I’ in any story?
That gave them something to think about over the coffee break.