Authors: Leif Davidsen
“Bingo! But where did you get your information?”
“It doesn’t matter. Because it gets even better. The woman you call Laila Petrova lived in the same commune …”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Indeed.”
“Can you prove it?” he asked.
“I’ve got photographs of them together. I lived there too. I took the photographs. I’ve made a statement about it to the NSS. A sworn statement. I’m one hundred per cent certain that there’s another report, and that if the Minister of Justice denies it to you or parliament then he’s lying. And you’re still not allowed to do that in Denmark, are you?”
“Danish politicians can screw around, but they mustn’t tell lies or they’re for the high jump. You’re quite right about that.”
“Then he’ll have to admit that he’s received other information?”
“Maybe not to me, but I’ll make sure questions are asked in committee. And if he tells lies there, he’s finished,” said Klaus.
“You’re the source?” He asked after a brief pause.
“I don’t know, I suppose you could call it that,” I said.
“Well I’ll be damned!”
“Join the club.”
He paused again and I could hear him saying something to the editing technician.
“Where are you?” he came back to me.
“At the Royal.”
“I’ve got to finish my 6.30 p.m. bulletin, so I could come with a crew just after that. Then we can do an interview and some cover shots, you can walk into the hotel and sit down, that kind of thing. Something quick. You know the score. And I can get it on the nine o’clock news.”
“OK.”
“Can I have the photographs?”
“No, but you can duplicate them.”
“OK. And Peter? Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“My motives aren’t important. You know what it’s like. Where there’s a secret, there’s always someone ready to tell it to someone who wants to hear it.”
“OK. See you,” he said, and I could hear the journalist’s dream
of a scoop making his voice quiver in anticipation, excitement and delight.
I passed the mobile phone back to Oscar.
“What was that all about?” he said.
“Could you order some coffee? I’ll just go and have a shower and get changed.”
“Why?” Gloria asked.
“I’m going to be on television,” I said.
Oscar laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.
“That’s my boy! That’s the way to get it out of your system. Excellent idea. Your little police lady won’t like it either.”
I didn’t know what he meant. All of a sudden it was Clara’s fault, and the strange thing was that I accepted the allegation against her as though I was a schoolboy who had been seduced. The desire and passion had been mutual. After all, that’s why I felt so dreadful. I had wanted to make love to her. I would never admit it, not even to Gloria and Oscar, but not being able to felt like a blow to my manhood. And I hated and despised myself for it. It was primitive and not particularly intelligent, but feelings aren’t located in the intellect.
“Is this really wise, Peter?” Gloria asked. She went into lawyer-mode when she realised what I was about to do.
“I don’t know, but it feels good.”
“It will be revenge,” said Oscar.
Maybe it was revenge, maybe it was an ignoble way of making trouble for Clara, because I was furious with myself and with her. I despised myself and thought I might feel better if I took it out on her, because she had seen me humiliated. At any rate, that’s what I felt. Maybe it was an attempt to rid my system of the agony that had been the last few months. To put it all put behind me. I had acted spontaneously when I decided to ring Klaus.
I got up.
“Check us out of the hotel and rent a car, we’ll drive to Germany this evening and get a flight from Hamburg or Frankfurt. I’m not up to talking with the Danish reporters tomorrow. All hell will break loose when they run the story this evening. Let’s get out of the country. Let’s go home,” I said.
“So you’re coming home to Madrid with us, Peter?” Gloria said happily.
“Yes, I’m coming home with you,” I said. “This story has gone on long enough.”
We fought for a combination of socialism and freedom, a noble objective that failed utterly but which I still believe is possible. I hold to my beliefs, although they have been tempered now by time and experience. But I am no defector, and this memoir is not a confessional bid for redemption.
On everything we do, we stake our lives. Every moment is lived at the gaming table, even though we may not know it.
Summer turned into autumn, but the story didn’t fade away quickly. Not that I had really expected it would, but there was no way I could have known that the stakes would be so high when we escaped Denmark in our hire car on the ferry to Puttgarten, like thieves in the night. We left behind a media storm which kept politicians and reporters busy for weeks. It didn’t have any effect on me because I didn’t respond to the approaches from the Danish press made via the office. Requests for interviews, in-depth profiles, magazines wanting to know about the photographer who had emigrated, publish a follow-up to my exposé. The press agency sent piles of cuttings from Danish newspapers and magazines about what was described as a scandal and the lack of a political will to set up an impartial commission of inquiry. The articles also described how, one by one, left-wing veterans came forward and demanded to know if they featured in the archives. It was as if it became a badge of honour, admission to a VIP list, to have been bugged and kept under surveillance. But then, as is often the case with stories in Denmark, the scandal died away when the media found other things to write about. This is symptomatic of the mass media all over the western world today, unable to concentrate on a single issue for long. Like distracted school children, they move on to something else when a subject bores them. The scandal was
marginalised, appearing only on special-interest radio programmes and in the occasional small-circulation newspaper.
Most of the articles I received contained reports on the photographer Peter Lime, the cause of all the fuss. I was described variously as a mole in the Danish left-wing at the beginning of the 1970s, a fashionable paparazzo who rubbed shoulders with the wealthy, international jet set, a hard-boiled photojournalist who had been in all the trouble-spots of the world, a tax exile from Denmark and a drunken NSS agent who had suffered a breakdown after his wife and child had been murdered by Basque terrorists. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but mostly did the former as I translated some of the more extravagant articles for Oscar and Gloria.
One tabloid and two magazines sent reporters and photographers to Madrid. I refused to speak to them, even though they tried to appeal to me as a member of the profession. I was on the other side of the lens again. They took photographs of me as I arrived at and left the office, and they questioned the receptionist at the Hotel Inglés, having tailed me there. Carlos, of course, said nothing. My nerves were frayed. The long telephoto lenses were trained on me and I seemed always to be looking straight back at them, just as Uncle Sam’s finger in the “I Want You for the U.S. Army” poster is always aimed directly at you, whatever angle you look at it. They found the site where my home had been and took photographs. But they didn’t stick it out for long and went home after a week, and soon things returned to normal.
Oscar and Gloria tried to persuade me to start working again, but I had lost my appetite for it. Finally they gave in and bought me out of the firm without any drama. They wanted me to find my own lawyer, but Gloria had always seen to my affairs and I decided she could sort this business out too. If I couldn’t still trust my two old friends then there was no point in anything.
With the help of one of Gloria’s contacts, I rented a small, furnished
flat in my old neighbourhood. Mostly I kept to myself, strangely empty and dark inside, as if someone had switched off my soul’s light. I trained at the karate institute and started going to AA meetings again. I really had to force myself to walk through a room full of strangers again for the first time, strangers bound together solely by their struggle with the inner demons they tried to numb via the bottle. But in time it became almost habit to stand at the lectern once or twice a week and look out at all the faces with their understanding eyes and utter those therapeutic words:
Buenas tardes. Soy Pedro. Soy alcoholico
. It kept my drinking bouts in check, but it didn’t prevent me from falling headfirst off the wagon now and then, and waking up after a blackout. More often than not I was in my flat. I seemed to have a homing pigeon’s ability to navigate my way back there even though I could never remember how I had managed it. On one occasion, I came to in the gutter without a peseta in my pocket, all papers and money gone. And on another occasion I found myself with a very young prostitute who looked at me with pity and contempt, demanding payment even though her heroic efforts had apparently come to nothing. I lived, but wasn’t really living. I often thought about Clara and while in the process of getting tanked-up, before losing it completely, I would put my hand on the telephone to ring Copenhagen, but my courage failed and by later in the evening I’d be too drunk to do it.
Autumn came early to Madrid that year. An icy wind from the mountains swept over the Castilian plain and chased the inhabitants of the cold city round every corner. There’s no city as freezing as a Mediterranean one. The wind found every hole and crack, and the inadequate radiators and red-hot electric heaters fought a losing battle against an iciness, which seemed to bring out the worst in people. They shivered in coats that were too thin, elbowing their aggressive and bad-tempered way through the streets. We had a day
of snow and the roads were in chaos, then the weather changed again and was mild and pleasant, until a new cold snap and torrential downpours made the city which never slept become almost comatose. Rain poured down on the empty café tables and Felipe loitered in the doorway of the Cerveceria Alemana, flicking the cloth in his hand, with his back to the almost empty café, perhaps dreaming of bulls in an arena bathed by the sun. Madrileños stayed at home and lolled in front of the television, refusing to go out.
On the early November day that it snowed, Don Alfonzo died. If a death can be pleasant or easy then his apparently was, but how could I know what the last seconds of his life had been like? If they had been accompanied by intense pain or terrible fear as his heart gave out in the greenhouse where he was preparing for winter? Or if, in his religious way, he had prepared himself to greet the God he had cursed, yet believed in? His neighbour found him next to the potting bench with a trowel in his hand. His face was peaceful, as if he slept. The greenhouse was tidy and well organised as usual. The light was subdued and soft because of the unaccustomed snow on the roof.
I buried him next to Amelia and Maria Luisa. I often visited the cemetery, with its white crosses, doves frozen in marble and cool, immaculate headstones. Sometimes just to sit and read a book. Other times with a bottle. I held long conversations with Amelia and she told me that I should get my life together and start living again. That I mustn’t forget her, but that she should be part of the luggage I took with me as I continued my journey, and not a ball and chain. I argued with her, saying that this wasn’t possible, and I could hear her voice among the crosses, saying my name in full, the way she had when she’d been exasperated or even occasionally angry with me – “Pedro Lime. Just don’t you dare be awkward!”
I would cry when I heard her voice. It was as if she came alive, but then when I opened my eyes all I saw was headstones and the
occasional elderly widow dressed in black, tending a grave in the distance.
Don Alfonzo had left everything he owned to me. He had a small fortune in shares, but his best gift was the house. I had Gloria sell the motorbike for next to nothing and the house in San Sebastián for a little under market price to Tómas, and I moved into Don Alfonzo’s beautiful, well-kept house, surrounded by his classic furniture, extensive book collection, shimmering red geraniums and the cultivated orchids, which I accepted were bound to die. I didn’t know how to keep them alive. In the spring I would remove his greenhouse and build a little studio with a darkroom, and go back to my portrait photography again. And I also had plans to take up landscape photography. I imagined myself standing at my tripod in the wide-open Spanish countryside, waiting for a fighting bull to come down from the hills somewhere in Extremadura and move lazily towards me in the changing light. Large and ponderous, it would walk with its ears cocked and its curved, sharp horns pointing in my direction. It wouldn’t be aggressive, because its companions were right behind it, and these big dangerous beasts are placid and docile when in a herd. It would lift its head and the light would fall at a very particular angle through the olive tree and filter through the horns and down onto a parched tuft of grass next to a red desert flower. The moment would last a thousandth of a second. I could see myself growing old alone, standing at the tripod, waiting for the precise light that would produce the perfect photograph. Since I knew the perfect photograph couldn’t exist, I would be forever seeking it out, and I would always have something to do with my time.
In the middle of November Clara Hoffmann rang. It was evening, the weather was rotten, and the rain that had begun early in the afternoon was still hammering down on the roof and beating against the windows. I was sober and sat reading one of Don Alfonzo’s books
on the Spanish Civil War, and the brutality and lack of mercy people are capable of manifesting. I had a fire burning in the hearth, made with logs from the old man’s carefully stacked woodpile, and I was warm and composed. The melodic Danish voice threw me off balance at first, making my heart thump.
“It’s Clara. Clara Hoffmann from Copenhagen,” she said.
“
Si
,” I said.
“Is that you, Peter?”