The Lover From An Icy Sea Page 47

  one swinish night more in this sty.

  In spring, I’ll come running back home to your arms

  outstretched, bearing handfuls of sage,

  if you’ll just relinquish those motherly charms

  that can’t come to grips with my age

  and leave me to suffer my hedonist’s binge

  on wine-baited women and song,

  the better to serve them my head on a fringe

  of lace—as they’ve asked all along.

  But please don’t suggest that redemption and grace

  can somehow be gotten by prayer;

  you are the steeple I mount for the chase,

  the blue-ribbon prize at the fair.

  So, empty your pail full of nettles and needs,

  and don’t let our cabin grow cold;

  then strip your decrepit old coat of its beads

  and hang it outside to be sold.

  In his concentration, Kit couldn’t have known that all activity and foot-traffic on the street below had come to a halt; that even the rappers had turned off their boom boxes and now stood listening; that as distant as this rhythm, this music and this language were from their own experience, they, too, felt it with an unaccustomed poignancy.

  In her perfect understanding, Hope could be of no help to any of them—least of all to Kit. While she understood with both her mind and her heart that each of them was simply “a piece of the continent,” she knew, too, that every man’s grief was ultimately his own. As she sat down on the stoop and put her head in her arms, she would’ve gladly—as her name implied—taken all of their collective grief upon herself. But she couldn’t. She had looked into Kit’s eyes; had felt his lips upon her cheek; had smelled him up close. He was in pain—that was clear—but he’d survive. He had the smell and the feel of a survivor. It would only be a matter of time, she knew, and of hope.

  Chapter 79

  The next day, Kit got up at his usual hour. He showered, shaved, brushed his hair and teeth, dressed, grabbed his camera and a scarf—then walked, rather than bounded—downstairs and out the front door. As he walked west along Eighth Street, he tied a tight knot in his scarf to cover the front of his neck against a chill autumn wind.

  The knot was indicative—tight—suggesting caution, experience, the weariness—and wariness—of age. It was a brisk day towards the end of November, with clear skies and a bright sun: a day, Kit thought, for work. He headed out towards the “N” or “R” line to take him uptown to Madison Square.

  At the intersection of Third Avenue and St. Marks Place, as he heeded the pedestrian signal and waited on the curb for a green light, he observed a limousine heading south along the avenue. As it sped past, Kit glanced at the car, then at the license plate—the digits were a wash—then noticed a head and a bob of straight auburn hair against the headrest in the backseat. The figure inside, Kit believed, was that of a woman.

  * * *

  This was not to be the last time he would see a woman from a distance and be deceived by the illusion. In the days, weeks, months, and then years to come, his world would be haunted by likenesses of Daneka: hurriedly through rear windows of passing limousines or taxis disappearing around corners; looking straight out from behind a sea of faces in a packed elevator just as he arrived and the doors closed; or making last-second exits from a subway car before he, and it, pulled out of sight—however unlikely it might be, he knew, that she’d be taking a subway. It would always be the same. It couldn’t be. She was long gone. In a city of eight million, there would be hundreds of Daneka look-alikes. She would have aged anyway, while he was stuck with the image of an ageless woman. And yet, he would always look until the limousine or taxi or subway was out of sight, or until the elevator had actually begun its ascent. If both he and the woman were on foot, he’d run to the corner. If the woman were then still visible, he’d run to a point just beside her and attempt a sideways glance to convince himself that no—this one also wasn’t Daneka.

  And yet each such instance was only the beginning. He’d subsequently find himself trapped for a good part of the remaining day in reviewing the details of their affair, item by item, event by event, each item and each event holding him in the muck as he tried, in vain, to pull himself out. But the memories were like a stubborn grapnel anchor, each bill holding fast to the bottom no matter how hard he pulled or twisted.

  Chapter 80

  Spring, ten years later

  It was a glorious day towards the end of April—in many respects, identical to the one on which a certain camera had made accidental contact with the front bumper of a certain limousine traveling south along Lexington Avenue a decade earlier.

  Kit, now graying at the temples but with nothing even remotely gray in the same fiery dark eyes, was visiting his mother in Radnor. His father had died years earlier and had been buried—and so, allowed, finally, to join the other Charles Wesley Addisons in all of their knickerbockered splendor—in the cemetery just up Fletcher and off to the right down Upper Gulph Road.

  Kit was in Radnor on a mission: he’d promised his mother he’d construct a pond for her garden. She wanted—she’d told him—to hear at least the sound of running water through the last of her remaining days. They’d finally decided to put it just off the kitchen terrace, right alongside a moss garden he’d already constructed for her many years earlier.

  Over the years, he’d had a number of assignments abroad. From each, he’d never failed to harvest and return with a lichen or some kind of native moss—and then carefully, lovingly, to incorporate the new addition into the moss garden. The lichens and moss were, of course, for his mother; but they were also for this other woman who sat with his mother on the terrace leading off of a colonial house where they both sipped their morning coffee. Mrs. Addison read the Philadelphia Inquirer—on paper. The second woman read The New York Times—on a palmtop. Others had read and signed a certain declaration not far from this house whose construction pre-dated even that document by some forty years—on parchment.

  The other woman taught young children—as much her avocation as her vocation. She and Kit had two of their own, both toddlers, with whom he now played in the middle of a yard spreading out over several acres at the corner of Fletcher and Brower.

  As he was alternatively inspecting the grade of the land and watching that his children didn’t wander too far out of sight, the other woman approached him, palmtop in hand. Kit noticed a pained expression in her eyes, and he wondered what kind of news she was bringing him.

  “What is it, Надежда?” he asked as he abruptly stood up. She handed him the palmtop. Once his eyes had adjusted to the tiny print, he saw the headline in bold: Managing Editor Found Dead, Alone, in Own Apartment. Next to the announcement was a picture. Kit recognized the face immediately and took out a cigarette.

  He sat back down on the grass to read the article. The cause of death would remain unknown pending an autopsy; the body of the deceased, by request of next of kin, would be sent to Denmark for burial. The Times had spelled the final destination “Roenne.” The Times, Kit decided, still had no special feelings for any vowels or consonants but its own—and apparently found nothing particularly sexy about “ø.” Even Daneka’s last name—Kit lamented—had been Times-sized to “Soerensen.”

  Leading their two toddlers by the hand, the other woman came up behind him just as he was finishing the article. He stubbed out his cigarette and felt a hand on his shoulder. He put his own on top of it, finished reading the last paragraph, then looked up into his wife’s eyes.

  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 cou
nt 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.