Leeway Cottage (40 page)

O
hnoOhNoOhNoOhNo.

 

The phone rang in Cressida Pease's kitchen. She had just come down from the fair. Everyone else was up there waiting for the fireworks. Cressida had seen fireworks in her time and she hadn't taken a heavy sweater. The evening had turned nippy.

“Hello?”

“Yes!”

“Hello?”

“Uuuuuuhhh…here…”

Cressida held the receiver away from her ear and looked at it in annoyance. Then she hung up before the voice on the other end could ask her if she had Prince Albert in a can.

S
hirley found them.

It was Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend. She didn't usually work on Sundays, but she'd promised Eleanor she'd come in, as she'd have most of the week off and Eleanor couldn't be there herself. The Applegates had gone to Rhode Island to a godchild's wedding. Jimmy was in California and Monica was at home nursing her mother-in-law.

Marlon was supposed to drive Sydney and Laurus to Connecticut Tuesday after the worst of the holiday traffic. Shirley had plenty to do before then, baking blueberry muffins and Mr. Moss's favorite butterscotch cookies for them to take home in freezer bags for the winter. She had all the laundry to do so the water could be turned off and the pipes drained before frost. After they'd gone, she had to pack up all the liquids in the house from kitchen and bathrooms and laundry and carry them home in cartons to keep in her own warm basement, where they wouldn't freeze and burst.

She'd let herself in the kitchen door and had the coffee made and the orange juice squeezed, and was setting the dining room table for breakfast, when she noticed it was time Mr. Moss was down, and she didn't hear anything. She stopped and listened for the creaking of footsteps crossing the bedroom floor above, of water running in the bathroom. All was quiet. She made the batter for blueberry pancakes. When there was still no stirring, she thought she better just run up and see if everything was all right.

“Mr. Moss?” she called, from the foot of the stairs.

Nothing.

She called again. The grandfather clock in the living room struck the half hour. He was always up by seven-thirty.

Stopping on the landing, she began to taste the air. There wasn't so much a smell, as something you could feel in the back of your mouth. She didn't want to go farther, but she did.

The bedroom door was shut; no one answered when she knocked. She opened it, and the smell was like a pillow against her face. She went straight to open the windows. Then she turned to take in the scene.

A lamp was turned on beside the bed, though it was bright daylight. The bedclothes where pulled back. Mr. and Mrs. Moss had both
been
in the bed, but they weren't there now. The bathroom door was open, and that light, too, was on.

It took her a minute to get herself moving toward the door, not wanting to find what she knew she would find.

They were lying together on the tiled floor. Mr. Moss was in an awkward pile, with one arm crumpled under him. It looked painful. He had a pillow under his head, though, and the blue and white overshot counterpane from the bed was bunched over him. He was still and his face was a bad color.

Mrs. Moss, in her pink nightgown, was lying on her side on the bath mat beside him. She had one arm around his shoulders, as if she were trying to keep him warm. With her other hand, she held his hand. Her skin was a waxy yellow, and one eye was open, unmoving.

Shirley went out to the bedroom again, and turned on the overhead light. She looked carefully at the scene. A cordless phone was on the floor. A glass of water on Mrs. Moss's side of the bed had been knocked over. She looked at the space heater; the dial was turned up, but it sure wasn't giving any heat. She turned the gas off, then went out, closing the door behind her.

In the kitchen, she sat down at the table and had a quiet cry. What if they had suffered? What if they'd been frightened? Then she blew her nose and tried to think whom she should call. They didn't have 911 in Dundee. This wasn't a case for an ambulance. She guessed she might as well call the fire department.

“Hullo?”

Who was that? Oh. “Al? Is that you? I'm calling the fire department.”

“What's on fire?”

“Nothing.”

“Good. Is that Shirley?”

“Yes…”

“I set the phone at the firehouse to ring through to home last night so everyone could go to the fair,” said Al. “What's the trouble?”

Shirley told him.

In the Pease kitchen, Cressida saw Al go still. He hung up abruptly, without saying goodbye. Sitting at the kitchen table in her pink quilted bathrobe, Cressida watched his mouth work in a way she knew. Trouble.

“Who was the fella said be careful what you wish for?” Al asked presently.

Cressida didn't know. “What'd you wish for?”

“Not me. Laurus Moss. He's gone.”

Cressida moved in her chair, relieved it wasn't one of their own. “I'm sorry,” she said. She knew Al had been truly fond of Laurus Moss. “He was a real gentleman.”

“Yuh,” said Al, surprised at how upset he was. He paused. “I better get over there.” Instead he sat down at the table with her and picked up his mug of coffee. Cressida watched him, wondering what he would do with these feelings, since expressing them was out of the question.

“Want me to heat that up?”

Al shook his head. He took a long swallow. Then he said, “I hope he's seeing his movie.”

Privately Cressida thought the only thing Laurus Moss needed to see a movie about was how he happened to marry that awful wife, but this wasn't the time to say it. “We'll never know,” she said, and stood up to clear the breakfast plates.

N
ina is in Frøslev prison camp on October 2, 1944, her
birthday. She turns twenty-two. The prisoners' barracks here are set in a semicircle like beams radiating from the sun, the role of the sun being played by the central guard tower. Barriers of barbed wire extend straight out from the tower on either side, bisecting the camp, captives on one side, captors on the other. The Germans' quarters are similar to the prisoners' barracks but there are important differences. The Gestapo men eat, drink, and smoke as they like. They come and go. They have no machine guns trained on them. The only route from the prisoners' side of the camp to the Germans' is a narrow choke point, the hallway through the base of the central watchtower itself.

Frøslev camp is run by the Gestapo, under SS General Pancke. General Pancke reports not to Dr. Best but directly to Berlin. Nina arrived at Frøslev in early September, in a van from Horserød prison near Helsingør, where she'd been sent after the SS in Copenhagen got tired of questioning her. Like all prisons in German-occupied territory, Horserød was growing crowded with resisters, Communists, and other thorns in the Third Reich's side, as well as its original population of criminals. Nina was among some twenty prisoners scooped up from Horserød without explanation and sent south. Others included an elderly Lutheran minister who had been caught hiding Jews in his crypt,and a half-dozen “asocials,” thugs who were not part of the Resistance except insofar as there was a profit in it or an opportunity for violence.

The asocials wear a thick stripe of hair running down the middle of their otherwise shaved skulls from forehead to nape, a style they call “Red Indian.” In the van they spat and made crude jokes throughout the journey, or sat in a row and stared at Nina in silence until her discomfort made them laugh. She was the youngest person in the van and easily the prettiest. There were older prisoners who would have intervened if they could, but it had been all too clear that the Gestapo men guarding them enjoyed the game as much as the asocials.

On arrival at Frøslev, an officer explained that they would be deloused as a sign of the Germans' care for them. As long as the men and women were to experience this care separately, Nina felt it would be easier to bear than the trip had been.

The women prisoners are all in barracks H-16.There are fifteen bunks to a room;she has an upper one. Each barrack is run by Danes appointed by the Gestapo. It saves the Germans trouble, as the Danes are very good at organization. It is also very good for the prisoners, who, Nina finds, have managed to “organize” all sorts of things not dreamt of in General Pancke's view of prison life. There is a gymnasium headmistress in Nina's room named Ulla, who has “organized” a complete set of art materials with which she makes forbidden pictures of camp life. She also conducts courses for the younger women, to keep their spirits up. There is nothing so cheering as learning new things. When Nina joins them, the course in progress is medieval history. On her birthday Ulla makes a beautiful card for Nina, which is signed by all the women in their room. It helps, in prison, to develop a prison “family,” and though Ulla has many acolytes in the camp, she responds to something in Nina, her intelligence, her wide frightened eyes, her gentleness. Nina is deeply grateful for Ulla's protection.

The women prisoners work in the laundry, doing the wash for the inmates and their warders as well. The workshops are also run by Danes,so the work is hard but not crushing. It will be worse in the last months of the war, when the population at Frøslev has swollen from the 1,500 it was designed for, to 5,500. But it will never be the murderous slave labor found in the south. Also, in early autumn of '44 the food is still adequate, as it will not be much longer, even here.

The women cross into the men's area of Frøslev only when they go to the dining hall. The men call this “the hormone hour.” Much information is exchanged at the hormone hour. At least two radios, illegal anywhere in Denmark if not set to the official government station, and especially inside a prison camp, have been organized. They are hidden under bunks, beneath trapdoors, the antennae concealed behind now a picture, now a shaving mirror. The radios come out for the BBC broadcasts after the Gestapo men and women have gone through the choke hole in the watchtower for their dinners on the other side. Maps of Europe have been drawn from memory, and the Allies' progress is marked every night, the news quickly spreading from barracks to barracks. Dieppe is liberated. Brussels is liberated. The Allies have broken the Gothic Line in Italy. The British are in Greece. The British are in Athens and Rommel is dead.

Prisoners make calendars marking each day they survive, and look ahead to the still blank squares of November, January, March, wondering on which they will mark
VICTORY
—on which will they mark
FREEDOM
. If at all. If they live.

They have made tiny chess sets out of contraband, they have manufactured decks of playing cards. There is even one camera, with smuggled film, making a secret record of prison life. They are lucky to be here.

Nina misses home and her parents desperately. She saw Kaj twice when she was in Vestre prison in Copenhagen, and once, to her joy, got a tiny message from Laurus,which had been rolled up and hidden in a cigarette lighter in the compartment meant for flints. It was handed to her by a man she passed on grim echoing stairs as she was taken down from her cell for transport to Dagmarhus for more questioning. It meant more to her than anything could have, short of a personal visit from the king. Though the lighter was soon confiscated, she managed to keep the scrap of paper with her like a fetish until the delousing at Frøslev. The loss of it frightened her badly.

She has not been tortured; she doesn't know why, except that it seems that many of the Germans in Denmark are lonely, and actually want the approval of the Danes, who are so beautiful, so Aryan, so like themselves. She has been asked over and over why she doesn't admire the Reich and its dream of strength and order stretching into the future for a thousand years. They never give up the hope that she will decide she has been misled by the bullying British and tell them who her contacts were, how the transports work, what codes she knows. Always they would start her interrogations by putting an open pack of Chesterfield cigarettes on the table in front of her. If she picked it up, she was theirs. There was more than one moment when, tired, scared, and longing for comfort, with the craving for nicotine singing in her nerves,she thought she would do it. Once, her hand moved out onto the table on its own, like a swimmer on a cold morning, putting a toe into the water. She could smell the tobacco, even the paper. She could feel already the hot smoke moving into her chest,the feeling of relief and calm it would bring, the sting in her nose as she exhaled. Her questioner,in his handsome black uniform, started to smile. Nina's brain deserted her hand and returned to her head; instead of grasping the pack, she flicked it with her finger and spun it off the table. It pleased her to see her inquisitor dive to the floor to retrieve it—no one under the peace and plenty of the Reich of 1944 was prepared to waste a pack of American cigarettes.

She didn't know why they gave up and sent her to Horserød, except that the Resistance had grown far more active and violent since her capture, and the Germans had their hands full. Trains and their tracks kept blowing up. German ships were blown up by mines attached to their hulls below the waterline, by partisans swimming at night in the inky water of blacked-out Danish harbors. In Odense a warship was given its official launching photographs, taken with smiling Nazis in crisp uniforms posed alongside the Danish workmen, and then blown up by a bomb left in a worker's lunchbox while the launching party went for schnapps and smørrebrød.

There were, too, accelerated retaliations for this sabotage. The beloved poet-preacher, Kaj Munk, had been murdered in January. The photograph of his corpse, on its back in a ditch, eyes closed and mouth open as if crying out, lived in Danish memories for decades. Through the spring of '44,in payment for bombings of things the Germans needed, there were bombings of things the Danes loved, carried out by the Danish Nazis of the Schalburg Corps. “Schalburtage,” it was called. In June, patriots managed to blow up the heavily guarded Globus plant, which made replacement parts for German warplanes. Two weeks later they succeeded again, this time destroying the Dansk Riffelsyndikat,which supplied the Germans with small arms and artillery. In retaliation the Schalburg Corps burned down the Royal Danish Porcelain factory, and destroyed the student union at the University of Copenhagen. In late June the Tivoli Gardens themselves were bombed, a devastating wreckage the Germans said was necessary to stop good Aryan young people from dancing like Negroes in the dance halls of the place. Widespread striking and civil disobedience flared throughout the summer. On September 19 the Germans,finally provoked past endurance by its hindrance, inaction, and apparent inability to keep partisan prisoners from “escaping” out the back doors, attempted to arrest the entire Danish police force. Nina and the women watch from the windows of the laundry when several hundred policemen are brought into Frøslev, smiling and singing. And they watch when they are taken away again, bound for Buchenwald.

You can write one letter a month from Frøslev. You are allowed to write twenty lines,of not more than sixteen syllables each. Nina writes to Kaj. You are supposed to be allowed one visit a month, of ten minutes' duration, with an interpreter present. On the day Kaj is to be with her,all visits are suddenly canceled, no explanation given. Nina learns after the war that Kaj waited in Padborg for two days hoping to be allowed in, but at last had to give up and go back to Copenhagen. Travel is very difficult,the trains crowded and unreliable, being subject to sudden stops and searches, long delays, and of course, sabotage. By the time Kaj can come again, Nina is gone.

In Frøslev you can receive a Red Cross package every six weeks. Nina gets hers the day before her birthday. It is a wonderful day. She washes with real soap, she shares her sausage with Ulla and the women in her room. On that same day, during the hormone hour,one of the girls is passed a copy of a song someone has written, the words set to music known to them all from the songbooks that are in every Danish household. After supper they sing it lustily, and can hear that in other barracks the men are singing, too. It wakens deep and soul-feeding memories of singing this melody with parents, with classmates, around bonfires on midsummer nights, or snugged in from the deep winter around parlor pianos,and in cafés and bars. Having known these songs by heart from childhood is part of what makes them all Danes together. Another part is that if you are German and do not perfectly understand the Danish sense of humor,it sounds respectful, and sweet,even about their German brothers. If you know, however,to listen only for every second line, the song is very rude indeed.

One day in late October,Ulla is taken out of the laundry during work detail, and she disappears. Nina is agitated until Ulla is with them again. She reappears in a fierce mood.

“What happened?” Nina asks when she can.

“Stupid questions,” says Ulla.

“Who was it?”

“The fat one with the walleye. I don't think he enjoyed it much.”

“No?”

“No—I corrected his grammar. His German grammar.”

Nina laughs aloud.

“Poor Germany,” says Ulla. “In the hands of furious bricklayers and washerwomen.”

There is a new officer from General Pancke's staff in the camp. Day after day, people are pulled out of work, out of meals,even out of bed, taken to the central watchtower house, and questioned. The week after Nina's birthday, suddenly, several dozen of the men are seen standing in the cold, each with one bundle or valise, being loaded onto a bus. Then they are gone.

A week later, Nina, Ulla, and five other women in the laundry are called out one afternoon and told to pack their things. Nina is so frightened her bowels start to rumble. They are loaded into the back of a truck equipped with wooden benches; it is already full of men with their overcoats on and their bundles between their feet. They sit in this truck under armed guard, without moving, for several hours,getting colder and colder,and Nina thinks maybe this is some witty new form of torture. Maybe in the end they will all pile out again and greet their friends and have supper.

Then a second man with a machine gun swings into the truck with them and pulls the gate shut behind him. He knocks on the back of the cab. The engine starts. The truck pulls out of the yard and stops at the gate. The gate opens, and the truck moves through. Nina feels the gears shift. Craning her neck to look out over the tailgate as they gather speed, she sees the gate to the prison yard being swung back in place and relocked, closing them out. In a matter of minutes they cross the border into Germany.

 

Hours later, in the blackness of a rail yard in Hamburg, they are ordered out of the truck. The men are formed up and marched away into darkness. The women are loaded into a freight car waiting on a siding, already crowded with women from prisons in France and stinking from the one inadequate half-drum in the corner that is serving them all as a toilet. When the door of the car slides closed, they are left in a darkness like a dirty black sock pulled over the face. It is hard to breathe, it is so dark, and there is no room to sit or lie down. Nina has lost Ulla. Around her, strangers stand stock-still, packed together, and wait. The women smell of sweat and rotting gums. Some swear, some weep, some pray aloud. One keeps keening “ma petite…ma belle, ma petite…” until someone tells her to shut up. Then they lurch like drunken livestock when the car begins to move. Nina can feel the breasts of the woman behind her push against her back, and the hard bony butt of the woman in front of her shoved against her ribs. The woman in front is well over six feet tall;it is hard to believe she is a woman at all. Where is Ulla? In the rattle and racket, someone close by her in the crushing dark snakes a hand into the pocket of Nina's coat. Nina angrily jabs an elbow into the press of bodies. By accident she also steps hard on someone's foot who cries out in turn. She doesn't know if she has found the thief or hurt someone as bewildered as she, but the hand withdraws.