Leeway Cottage Page 20

  So much for brave little Denmark. And “Eleanor cried a great deal” was virtually the only time her grandchild was mentioned. “Horrible Old Trout” is how Sydney taught Eleanor to speak of her grandmother.

  Sunday morning, while Per is out and many Danes are at church, there comes a rapping on the door of the cottage in Hornbæk, the front door facing the lane, which hasn’t been used since they arrived. Ditte and Tofa grab for each other’s hands. Mrs. Roth pulls her youngest child to her and puts her hands over his mouth. Mr. Roth and Mr. Saloman leap to their feet and start herding people toward the basement. The rapping is repeated. In under a minute, only Henrik is left. He walks very slowly toward the front door. Before he can reach it, the door opens. (Unlocked! How could that be? Who had unlocked it? The children …?)

  A man in a rumpled suit, slightly bent, with large strong hands that dangle from his sleeves and a large asymmetrical head, stands on the step. What hair he has is white. His blue eyes meet Henrik’s. Then he steps inside and says loudly, “I’m looking for the family Roth. Are they here?”

  Henrik is dumbfounded. “I am—alone, at the moment. I am Per Bennike’s uncle, from Aarhus.” The moment it was out of his mouth he felt his pulse rate rise to 1000. Aalborg! Not Aarhus! What if everyone knows the Bennikes have no relatives in Aarhus?

  The man with the head is looking at the kitchen table. There are dominoes laid out in a half-finished game the Saloman girls had been playing.

  “I am looking for Samuel Roth,” says the man again, loudly. Suddenly to his further horror Henrik hears Samuel cry from the basement, “We are here!”

  There are rapid footsteps on the stairs from below and Samuel Roth bursts into the kitchen.

  “Mr. Kjaer!”

  “Is that you, Samuel?” asks the man with the head. “What happened to you?”

  “This is Mr. Kjaer!” Samuel cries to Henrik. “Sylvia! Come! It’s Mr. Kjaer!” Now there are more footsteps hurrying up the basement stairs. “This was my employer when we first came to Denmark!”

  “Oh! You shaved your beard. Good morning, Mrs. Roth.”

  “How did you find us?” Now the rest of the Roths, followed by the Salomans and Ditte and Tofa, are crowding into the kitchen.

  “My wife heard you’d spent the night at the Domkirke. At the church they thought you had gone with someone from Hornbæk so I started knocking on doors.”

  “You mean…you walked here from Helsingør?” The man is at least seventy.

  “I rode my bike. Mrs. Kjaer is expecting you.”

  When Mr. Kjaer has ridden off to borrow a car from his friend, a veterinary surgeon, the Roths explain that Kjaer owned a transport firm where Samuel worked as a bookkeeper. “He’s been retired five years, he moved to Saunte, I haven’t seen him…”

  Shortly after lunch Mr. Kjaer returns with the car, and departs again with Mrs. Roth sitting beside him and the rest of the family crouched under blankets behind the front seat. When Per comes back, he seems delighted with the tale. He immediately leaves again, to return with an elderly couple who had been jammed into an attic room down the street with eight others. “And I’ve found a boat. You leave tonight,” he announces.

  They all crowd around him. When? How? “Anka will bring the details this evening,” he says.

  It starts to rain in the afternoon. It is a bleak day. Ditte finds herself longing to play the Bennikes’ piano, which is under a sheet in the living room, but does not dare. The hours drag. Hanne and Inge have finally begun to talk to Henrik. Henrik plays Hanne in dominoes, then Inge plays the winner. (Hanne beats them both. They are very smart, these quiet pretty girls.) By teatime Henrik has them both laughing. Their nerves are so taut they would sing like harp strings if you blew across them.

  At six o’clock, Anka arrives. This time Henrik introduces her to the others. She is wet with rain. “The boat will leave at exactly nine o’clock,” she says. “Per will take you to the beach when it’s time.” She collects their passage money for the fisherman. They press her to stay to get dry, as it doesn’t take a doctor to see she has a hard cold. But she is off again.

  They wait.

  At eight-thirty, Per arrives. A good deal of his jaunty manner has worn off in the last two days. He looks drawn and weary. “Did you eat?” Mrs. Saloman asks.

  “I don’t remember,” Per says, Mrs. Saloman hands him the packet of cheese and rye bread they have packed for the journey. Per shakes his head and Mrs. Saloman puts it into his pocket. “Please,” she says. “I’m a mother.”

  Per lets it stay. They will not all fit in the hay burner, so the Salomans go first. It is necessary for one more person to go, and the elderly couple won’t be separated. Henrik volunteers. That leaves Ditte and Tofa and the old ones sitting in silence. Twenty minutes go by. Ditte looks at her watch. The girl said nine o’clock exactly. She made a point of it. What if it leaves without them? What if Henrik goes on board and then they miss the boat?

  Per reappears. He is chewing the cheese and rye bread. He leads them out through the rain and into the car, then sets off without his headlights. This is terrifying. What if something comes along and hits them?

  They pass no cars, and Per turns down a small lane to a beach. He turns the engine off and carries the old couple’s bag for them. With their coats over their heads, they hurry behind him through the rain toward a small shed that proves to be full of sail bags, oars, and other boat tackle. Here the Salomans and Henrik sit huddled along with three other forlorn people, a couple with their teenaged son.

  “Has Anka come?”

  They all shake their heads. No. It is well after nine o’clock.

  At ten past ten, Anka walks up from the beach. She has come on the fishing boat, which is offshore; it took on passengers near Villengebaek first and there were more people there than expected. Anka guided the fisherman to this spot, and rowed ashore, but it is to tell them that the boat is full. They cannot go tonight.

  She can feel the courage draining out of the group in the shed. They knew it, really. They are not going to get away. It will be like all the stories they have heard. It will be the way it has been everywhere else. They will end in the camps.

  “What about the rowboat?” asks Mr. Saloman.

  “It’s too rough now,” says Anka. “You couldn’t row in this.”

  “But couldn’t the bigger boat tow it?”

  Per and Anka look at each other.

  “It could, I think,” says Anka doubtfully.

  “How many could it take?”

  “Four or five.”

  There is silence. Four or five of them can go tonight after all. It may be more dangerous. But how to tell, perhaps staying here is more dangerous. Which is it?

  Mrs. Saloman says, “We’ll go.”

  Her family turns to look at her in surprise. She looks at her husband. They both turn to the daughters. Hanne and Inge look at each other. Then Mrs. Saloman says again, “We’ll go.”

  Anka says, “Can one of you row out? Do you know how?”

  “I’m sure I can do it,” says Mr. Saloman.

  “I can row,” says the teenaged boy, suddenly. Now his parents look surprised.

  “Can you?” Anka asks. “The boat will be heavy, and there’s a lot of chop.”

  “Yes, I can.” To his parents he says, “I’ll wait for you in Helsing- borg.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll go to the police till you come,” he says. Suddenly he is saying goodbye to his mother, who has to hold her hands over her mouth to keep from crying. Then the boy, whose name is Flemming, shakes hands with the Salomans, and Anka leads them out.

  Per waits in the shed with the rest until Anka comes back. She has signaled the fishing boat with her torch from the little bathing pier, then watched as the rowboat, riding low, pulled steadily out to the fishing boat. She has waited to see if the pilot will send them back, but he doesn’t. She has watched from the shore as, instead, the pilot hands a tarp down to the rowboat, and the Saloma
ns and the boy snug it down around themselves, for concealment, and protection from the rain. The fisherman, standing in the stern of his boat with rain pouring down his neck, bends a towline onto the rowboat’s painter, so it won’t ride too close to the stern, which would cause it to swing, maybe even overturn. Then he gives the order to weigh anchor, hoists his sails, and slips out into the dark sound, with his rowboat bobbing behind him.

  “I am Otto Fischermann,” says the teenaged boy’s father, in the boat shed. “This is my wife, Ina.” Everyone shakes hands. When Anka comes in and reports that the boat is away, Per says to the Fischermanns, “You better come stay with us. We’ll get you all away together tomorrow night.” Again, he must make two trips in the hay burner, first with the old couple and Tofa and Ditte, then back to get Anka, Henrik, and the Fischermanns. The second trip is longer, as Per suddenly drives off the road into a copse of trees when he sees slits of headlights masked against the blackout coming at them like angry narrowed eyes. They sit together in the woods with their hearts firing like muffled guns. The SS staff car sweeps past them in the darkness, its headlights snooping along the road before it. But it has missed them. Henrik is deeply grateful for Per’s insistence on driving dark. They climb out and help get the car back onto the road while Anka steers; the mud beneath the wheels is slick and boggy with the rain. Per takes Anka north to the pier where she’s left her bicycle, then heads back once again to the Bennike house, to sleep for what remains of the night.

  It is now Monday, October 4.

  The whole house on Granvaenget is on short rations, as no one thought to ask the Salomans for their ration books, and before they left, the Fischermann family gave theirs to the couple who had been hiding them. It’s a long quiet day, in which Otto and Ina Fischermann sit together holding hands and praying. For supper, Per comes up from the basement with some tins of food whose labels were soaked off several years before when the storeroom floor flooded.

  “No one knows what they are,” he says cheerfully. “Could be carrots, could be pudding.” They set the table and open the cans. One large one holds stewed tomatoes. A little one has liver paste, one holds olives, two have soup—split pea and barley with vegetables—one lingonberries in syrup, and one some kind of beans. The old couple, fearing the soups have pork in them, eat the olives. Henrik says the liver paste is rather good with the berries. Ina Fischermann says, “Maybe Flemming and the others are in a warm restaurant right now.”

  “They are probably stuffed with herring and pot roast and potato cakes this minute,” said Per. “Skål, Mrs. Fischermann.” She smiles and meets his eyes as they raise their glasses of water to each other.

  This night, as they gather in the kitchen when it’s time to go, they all leave their ration books on the table. “If we get away,” Henrik says, “you can use them to take your girl out to dinner.” Although they strongly suspect he would use them to feed the next lot of refugees.

  “If I had a girl,” said Per.

  “Not Anka?”

  “Anka? No. She’s got a fellow.”

  “We’ll introduce him to Nina,” says Tofa.

  “Our daughter,” says Ditte. “You’d like her.” The mood is suddenly giddy. This is almost over, they are going. A second later the elation has seeped away. It isn’t over, it will never be over, they’ll never get away.

  Anka comes in. Her nose is red from blowing it, and she needs to wash her hair. All eyes turn to her, tension suddenly ratcheted to the scream point.

  “Everything’s ready,” she says. “You leave at midnight.”

  “From the same spot?”

  “No, there were new tire tracks down to the beach this morning. I think the Germans have been there. You’ll leave from Gilleleje. You can wait at the church till it’s time to go to the pier. It’s a bigger boat tonight. Don’t worry, this time it will work.”

  “It’s not the same boat?” Mrs. Fischermann asks, anxious.

  “No, he hasn’t come back. He probably stayed in Helsingborg to get some sleep.”

  “So you haven’t heard anything?” She means about Flemming and the Salomans. But Anka answers a different question.

  “I did hear one thing. There are freight cars in Helsingør that cross to Sweden empty, on the ferry, to bring back ball bearings and such to the Germans. Last night, it didn’t cross empty.” Her eyes dance with mischief. “They packed it with refugees, and took them all off on the other side before the car was delivered to the loading dock.”

  Per laughs with delight.

  The rest won’t be laughing until they are safe on the other side, and see their friends again. The Fischermanns silently take one another’s hands.

  This time they make the trip to Gilleleje all together in a Falck ambulance Per has arranged. It is long and black, with a white cross sign fixed to the bumper. These are among the few vehicles with permission to be on the streets day and night. How Per knows the driver, they never learn. The driver is a young man with very white teeth, who takes special care to get the old couple settled securely so they won’t bucket around in back. They say their goodbyes and thanks to Per and speed off in the night with a total stranger. The driver has his slitted headlamps on bright, and drives fast, as if speeding a heart attack victim to hospital. They pass one SS car going the other way and Henrik’s heart is in his mouth, waiting for the stop, the search. They speed on into the dark without mishap, and in fifteen minutes they are in Gilleleje. The church is dark but the door is open. They are shown the ladder to the attic. The old couple approach it timorously.

  “She’s afraid of heights,” her husband says, as if not sure whether to laugh or cry. With her eyes shut, the old lady gets up the ladder. There are many already there waiting, close to a hundred, Henrik thinks. When they are all upstairs, a fisherman’s boy comes up behind them and goes among the newcomers, collecting money. The price tonight is only 600 kroner a head. When he leaves with the money, the trapdoor shuts behind him. And trap it could be; what if the boy pockets the money and goes to the police? Why shouldn’t he? They sit in the pitch-darkness and wait. There are small round windows set into the attic eaves, so even up here they must not light so much as a match. Somewhere up here there are buckets for toilets, Henrik guesses from the smell, but if you needed them, how would you find them?

  It is well past midnight when they hear steps below, then on the ladder. The trapdoor opens again. All eyes are fixed on the square of light it brings—from a torch someone is pointing upward from the floor below—dreading the appearance of a German helmet. The head that appears belongs to the pastor’s wife.

  “The schooner is in the harbor. You must come very quickly.”

  The young carry bundles and the old stretch their stiff limbs and all make haste. They move in astonishing quiet. Even the old couple (whom Henrik now has under his protection) get down safely, though the woman misses the last step and hurts her ankle. Outside, in the church garden, helpers are waiting to shepherd them to the pier, where rowboats will ferry them out to the schooner.

  The old lady is limping. Her anxious husband tries to hurry her, but her face tightens with pain when she puts the foot down.

  “You go ahead,” the husband says to Henrik. Tofa and Ditte have started but keep looking back, torn between anxiety at leaving him and fear of delaying.

  The fisherman’s boy appears from the garden with a wheelbarrow. “It’s quite clean,” he says cheerfully. The old lady is bundled into it and the boy wheels her along at a trot beside the others.

  It takes what seems like forever to get everyone out to the schooner. There are men and women well past youth rowing boats back and forth. Once on board, the refugees are taken down into the cargo hold, packed in tight.

  To be locked below in the dark while a ship rocks at anchor is a test for even the steadiest stomachs. A young woman, one of the first aboard, is failing this test. Ditte is crammed next to her. Down in the dark, waiting, they hear at last the rings of the mainsail making a great clatte
r as the sail is run up the mast. Just as the boat falls off and the sails fill, and the dark hold in which they lie lurches and begins to heel, the young woman begins to vomit.

  The boat shapes a course for Sweden (they hope, though it could be for anywhere) and the girl helplessly retches. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t know what I can do.”

  “Just what you’re doing,” says Ditte. She holds her in the rank darkness, smelling of fish and fear and wet wool as the boat rocks through the water. Time seems to stop—it could have been minutes or hours in the inky dark—until the boat turns and stops moving, upright. It has come into the wind. Why? Have they been caught? The hatch doors down to the hold are opened; those nearest can smell the fresh air and see the stars. Appearing in the rectangle of the open hatch is a man in uniform, who calls down, “Welcome to Sweden.”

  That same evening in Stockholm, this is happening. At ten in the evening, Niels Bohr is finally willing to leave for England. He says goodbye, and when his car is out of sight, Captain Gyth and Dr. Bohr’s hosts dismiss the guards and open champagne. Two hours later, when all is quiet in the house, the doorbell rings; Captain Gyth goes to open it. He finds Niels Bohr standing alone on the doorstep. The plane took off but an engine malfunction has forced it back to the airport. Dr. Bohr has taken a taxi back to town.

  Captain Gyth spends the night guarding Bohr’s bedroom himself. In the dawn, a little keyed up, he hears footsteps approach the front door. He creeps to the door with a pistol in one hand and a candelabrum in the other and comes very near braining the woman who delivers the morning paper.

  As the schooner skims out of Gilleleje harbor Monday night, several Gestapo cars arrive at the seaside in time to see it get away. By the time they could summon and send patrol boats in chase, the ship will have reached Swedish waters. Gestapo Juhl has been teased and tricked from here to Helsingør and he badly wants to find a choke point, to cut off the stream of losses.