I didn’t really understand what he meant by that. I had heard of people drowning in big dresses lots of times, but I didn’t know it was possible to drown in a fairy tale. Now I know it is something everyone should be careful about.
When we stopped on the highway outside Hamburg, Dad started to talk about his father. I had heard it all before, but it was different now with all the cars whizzing by.
You see, Dad is the illegitimate child of a German soldier. I am no longer embarrassed to say it, because I know now that these children can be just as good as other children. But that’s easy for me to say. I haven’t felt the pain of growing up in a little southern Norwegian town without a father.
It was probably because we had arrived in Germany that Dad started to talk again about what had happened to Grandma and Grandpa.
Everyone knows that it wasn’t easy to get food during the Second World War. Grandma Line knew this, too, the day she biked up to Froland to pick cowberries. She was no more than seventeen years old. The problem was, she got a flat tyre.
That cowberry trip is the most important thing that has happened in my life. It might sound strange that the most important thing in my life happened more than thirty years before I was born, but if Grandma hadn’t had a flat tyre that Sunday, Dad wouldn’t have been born. And if he hadn’t been born, then I wouldn’t have stood a chance either.
What happened is as follows: Grandma got a flat tyre when she was up at Froland with a basketful of cowberries. Of course she didn’t have a repair kit with her, but even if she’d had a thousand and one repair kits, she probably couldn’t have fixed the bike herself.
That was when a German soldier came cycling along the country road. Although he was German, he was not particularly militant. On the contrary, he was very polite to the young girl who could not get home with her cowberries. Furthermore, he had a repair kit with him.
Now, if Grandpa had been one of those malicious brutes we readily believe all German soldiers occupying Norway at that time were, he could have just kept going. But of course that’s not the point. No matter what, Grandma should have stuck her nose in the air and refused to accept any help from the German military.
The problem was that the German soldier gradually took a liking to the young girl who had run into bad luck. Her greatest misfortune, though, was actually his fault. But that happened a few years later …
At this point in the story Dad used to light a cigarette.
The thing was, Grandma liked the German, too. That was her great mistake. She didn’t just thank Grandpa for repairing her bike for her, she agreed to walk down to Arendal with him. She was both naughty and stupid, no doubt about it. Worst of all, she agreed to meet Unterfeldwebel Ludwig Messner again.
That’s how Grandma became the sweetheart of a German soldier. Unfortunately, you don’t always choose who you fall in love with. However, she should have chosen not to meet him again before she’d fallen in love with him. Of course she didn’t do this, and consequently paid for it.
Grandma and Grandpa continued to meet each other secretly. If the people of Arendal had found out she was dating a German, it would have been the same as banishing herself to exile. Because the only way ordinary Norwegians could fight against the Germans was by having nothing to do with them.
In the summer of 1944, Ludwig Messner was sent back to Germany to defend the Third Reich on the eastern front. He wasn’t even able to say a proper goodbye to Grandma. The moment he stepped onto the train at Arendal, he disappeared from Grandma’s life. She never heard another word from him – even though for many years after the war she tried to track him down. After a while she felt pretty sure he had been killed in the fighting against the Russians.
Both the bike ride to Froland and everything that followed would probably have been forgotten if Grandma hadn’t got pregnant. It happened just before Grandpa left for the eastern front, but she didn’t know it until many weeks after he had gone.
Dad refers to what happened next as human devilry – and at this point he usually lights another cigarette. Dad was born just before liberation in May 1945. As soon as the Germans surrendered, Grandma was taken prisoner by the Norwegians, who hated all Norwegian girls who had been with German soldiers. Unfortunately, there were more than a few of these girls, but it was worse for those who’d had a child with a German. The truth was that Grandma had been with Grandpa because she loved him – and not because she was a Nazi. Actually, Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi either. Before he’d been grabbed by the collar and sent back to Germany, he and Grandma had been making plans to escape to Sweden together. The only thing that stopped them was a rumour of Swedish border guards shooting German deserters who tried to cross the border.
The people of Arendal attacked Grandma and shaved her head. They also beat and kicked her, even though she was the mother of a newborn baby. One can honestly say that Ludwig Messner had behaved better.
With not so much as a hair on her head, Grandma had to travel to Oslo to stay with Uncle Trygve and Aunt Ingrid. It was no longer safe for her in Arendal. Although it was spring and the weather was warm, she had to wear a woollen hat, because she was as bald as an old man. Her mother continued to live in Arendal, but Grandma didn’t return until five years after the war, with Dad in tow.
Neither Grandma nor Dad seeks to excuse what happened at Froland. The only thing you might question is the punishment. For example, how many generations should be punished for one offence? Naturally, Grandma must take her part of the blame for getting pregnant, and that is something she’ll never deny. I think it’s more difficult to accept that people believed it was right to punish the child, too.
I’ve thought a great deal about this. Dad came into the world because of a fall of Man, but can’t everyone trace their roots back to Adam and Eve? I know the comparison stumbles a little. One case revolved around apples and the other around cowberries. But the inner tube which brought Grandma and Grandpa together does look a little like the snake that tempted Adam and Eve.
Anyway, all mothers know you can’t go around your whole life blaming yourself for a child that is already born. Moreover, you can’t blame the child. I also believe that the illegitimate child of a German soldier is entitled to be happy in life. Dad and I have disagreed slightly on this particular point.
Dad grew up not only as an illegitimate child but also as an illegitimate child of the enemy. Although the adults in Arendal stopped beating the ‘collaborators’, the children continued to persecute the unfortunate innocents. Children are very clever at learning devilry from adults. This meant that Dad had a tough childhood. By the time he was seventeen years old, he couldn’t take any more. Although he loved Arendal like everyone else, he was forced to start a life at sea. He returned to Arendal seven years later, having already met Mama in Kristiansand. They moved into an old house on Hisøy Island, and that is where I was born on February 29, 1972. Of course, in some way I have to bear my part of the blame for what happened up at Froland as well. This is what is known as original sin.
Having experienced a childhood as the illegitimate child of a German soldier and then spent many years at sea, Dad had always enjoyed a strong drink or two. In my opinion he enjoyed them a little too much. He claimed that he drank to forget, but here he was mistaken. For when Dad drank, he always started to talk about Grandma and Grandpa, and his life as the illegitimate child of a German soldier. Sometimes he would start to cry as well. I think the alcohol just made him remember all the better.
After Dad had told me his life story again, on the highway outside Hamburg, he said, ‘And then Mama disappeared. When you started nursery school, she got her first job as a dance teacher. Then she started modelling. There was quite a lot of travelling to Oslo, and a couple of times to Stockholm as well, and then one day she didn’t come home. The only message we got from her was a letter saying she’d found a job abroad and didn’t know when she’d be back. People say this sort of thing when they’re away a week or two, but Mama’s been
gone more than eight years …’
I’d heard this many times before as well, but then Dad added, ‘There’s always been somebody missing in my family, Hans Thomas. Someone has always got lost. I think it’s a family curse.’
When he mentioned the curse, I was a little scared. But then I thought about it in the car and realised he was right.
Between us, Dad and I were missing a father and a grandfather, a wife and a mother. And there was even more which Dad must definitely have had in mind. When Grandma was a little girl, her father had been killed by a falling tree. So she had also grown up without a proper father. Maybe that’s why she ended up having a child by a German soldier who would go to war and die. And maybe that’s why this child married a woman who went to Athens to find herself.
TWO OF SPADES
… God is sitting in
heaven laughing because people don’t
believe in Him …
At the Swiss border we stopped at a deserted garage with only one petrol pump. A man came out of a green house and he was so small he had to be a dwarf or something. Dad got out a gigantic map and asked him the best way over the Alps to Venice.
The little man pointed at the map and replied in a squeaky voice. He could speak only German, but Dad interpreted for me and said the little man thought we should spend the night in a small village called Dorf.
The whole time he spoke, the little man looked at me as though I was the world’s first and only child. I think he particularly liked me, because we were exactly the same height. As we were about to drive away, he came hurrying over with a little magnifying glass with a green cover.
‘Take this,’ he said. (Dad translated.) ‘I cut this once from some old glass I found embedded in the stomach of a wounded roe deer. You’ll need it in Dorf, indeed you will, my boy. Because I’ll tell you something: as soon as I saw you, I knew that you might need a little magnifying glass on your journey.’
I started to wonder whether the village of Dorf was so small that you needed a magnifying glass to find it. But I shook his hand and thanked him for the gift before getting in the car. Not only was his hand smaller than mine, it was also a lot colder.
Dad rolled down the window and waved to the dwarf, who waved back with both his short arms.
‘You come from Arendal, nicht wahr?’ he said as Dad started the Fiat.
‘That’s right,’ said Dad, and drove off.
‘How did he know we came from Arendal?’ I asked.
Dad looked at me in the rear view mirror. ‘Didn’t you tell him?’
‘Nope!’
‘Oh yes, you did,’ Dad insisted. ‘Because I certainly didn’t.’
I knew that I hadn’t said anything, and even if I had told him that I came from Arendal, the little man wouldn’t have understood, because I didn’t speak a single word of German.
‘Why do you think he was so small?’ I asked when we were on the highway.
‘Don’t you know?’ said Dad. ‘That guy is so small because he is an artificial person. He was made by a Jewish sorcerer many hundreds of years ago.’
Of course I knew that he was only joking; nevertheless I said, ‘So he was several hundred years old, then?’
‘Didn’t you know that either?’ continued Dad. ‘Artificial people don’t get old like us. It’s the only advantage they can brag of. But it’s pretty significant, because it means they never die.’
As we drove on, I took out the magnifying glass and checked to see whether Dad had any head lice. He didn’t, but he had some ugly hairs on the back of his neck.
*
After we had crossed the Swiss border, we saw a sign for Dorf. We turned off onto a small road which began to climb up into the Alps. The area was virtually uninhabited; only a Swiss chalet or two lay dotted among the trees on the high mountain ridges.
It soon began to grow dark, and I was about to fall asleep in the back seat when I was suddenly woken by Dad stopping the car.
‘Cigarette stop!’ he cried.
We stepped out into the fresh Alpine air. It was completely dark now. A star-filled sky hung above us like a carpet, electric with thousands of tiny lights, each one a thousandth of a watt.
Dad stood by the roadside and peed. Then he walked over to me, lit a cigarette, and pointed up to the sky.
‘We are small things, my boy. We are like tiny little Lego figures trying to crawl our way from Arendal to Athens in an old Fiat. Ha! On a pea! Beyond – I mean beyond this seed we live on, Hans Thomas – there are millions of galaxies. Every single one of them is made up of hundreds of millions of stars. And God knows how many planets there are!’
He tapped the ash from the end of his cigarette.
‘I don’t believe we are alone, son; no, we are not. The universe is seething with life. It’s just that we never get an answer to whether we’re alone. The galaxies are like deserted islands without any ferry connections.’
You could say a lot about Dad, but I’d never found him boring to talk to. He should never have been satisfied with being a mechanic. If it had been up to me, he would have been employed by the government as a national philosopher. He once said something similar himself. We have departments for this and that, he said, but there’s no Department of Philosophy. Even large countries think they can manage without that kind of thing.
Being hereditarily tainted, I sometimes tried to take part in Dad’s philosophical discussions, which arose just about every time he wasn’t talking about Mama. This time I said, ‘Even though the universe is huge, it doesn’t necessarily mean that this planet is a pea.’
He shrugged, threw his cigarette butt onto the ground, and lit a new cigarette. He’d never really cared about other people’s opinions when he talked about life and the stars. He was too wrapped up in his own ideas for that.
‘Where the hell do the likes of us come from, Hans Thomas? Have you thought about that?’ he said, instead of really answering me.
I had thought about it many times, but I knew he wasn’t really interested in what I had to say.
So I just let him talk. We had known each other for such a long time, Dad and I, that I had learned it was best that way.
‘Do you know what Grandma once said? She said she’d read in the Bible that God is sitting in heaven laughing because people don’t believe in Him.’
‘Why?’ I asked. It was always easier to ask than to answer.
‘Okay,’ he began. ‘If a God has created us, then He must regard us as something artificial. We talk, argue, and fight, leave each other and die. Do you see? We are so damned clever, making atom bombs and sending rockets to the moon. But none of us asks where we come from. We are just here, taking our places.’
‘And so God just laughs at us?’
‘Exactly! If we had managed to make an artificial person, Hans Thomas, and this artificial person started to talk – about the stock market or horse racing – without asking the simplest and most important question of all, namely how everything had come to be – yes, then we’d have a good laugh, wouldn’t we?’
He laughed that laugh now.
‘We should’ve read a little more from the Bible, son. After God created Adam and Eve, He went around the garden and spied on them. Well, literally speaking. He lay in wait behind bushes and trees and carefully followed everything they did. Do you understand? He was so enthralled with what He’d made, He was unable to keep His eyes off them. And I don’t blame Him. Oh no, I understand Him well.’
Dad stubbed out his cigarette, and with that the cigarette stop was over. I thought, in spite of everything, I was lucky to be able to take part in thirty or forty of these cigarette stops before we reached Greece.
When we got back in the car I took out the magnifying glass the mysterious little man had given me. I decided to use it to investigate nature more closely. If I lay on the ground and stared long enough at an ant or a flower, maybe I’d spy some of nature’s secrets. Then I’d give Dad some peace of mind as a Christmas present.
> We drove higher and higher up into the Alps, and more and more time passed.
‘Are you sleeping, Hans Thomas?’ Dad asked after a while. I would have been, the moment he asked, if only he hadn’t asked.
So as not to lie, I said no, and at once I was even more awake.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m beginning to wonder whether that little fellow tricked us.’
‘So it wasn’t true, then, that the magnifying glass was in a roe deer’s stomach?’ I mumbled.
‘You’re tired, Hans Thomas. I’m talking about the road. Why should he send us into the wilderness? The highway went over the Alps, too. It’s now forty kilometres since I last saw a house – and even farther since I saw a place where we could spend the night.’
I was so tired I didn’t have the strength to answer. I just thought that I might hold the world record in loving my father. He shouldn’t have been a mechanic, no way. Instead, he should have been allowed to discuss the mysteries of life with the angels in heaven. Dad had told me that angels are much smarter than people. They aren’t as clever as God, but they understand everything people understand, without having to stop and think.
‘Why the hell would he want us to drive to Dorf?’ Dad continued. ‘I bet you he’s sent us to the village dwarfs.’
That was the last thing he said before I fell asleep. I dreamed about a village full of dwarfs. All of them were very nice. They all talked at the same time about everything, but none of them could say where in the world they were or where they had come from.
I think I remember Dad lifting me out of the car and carrying me to bed. There was the smell of honey in the air. And a lady’s voice said, ‘Ja, ja. Aber natürlich, mein Herr.’
THREE OF SPADES
… a little strange to
decorate the forest floor so far away
from people …
When I woke up the next morning, I realised that we’d arrived in Dorf. Dad was fast asleep in the bed next to me. It was past eight o’clock, but I knew he needed to sleep a little longer, because no matter how late it was, he always had a little drink before he went to bed. He was the only one who called it ‘a little drink’. I knew these drinks could be pretty big, and quite numerous, too.