• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3218 0

Hamburg and Kiel were razed. Now he was learning more in a single day than he had over the past five years, and he'd have the same experience in the months that followed every time he met someone who had spent the war outside Denmark's borders. Something was wrong with them, and he just couldn't explain what it was. It wasn't anything they said, because they said nothing; it was almost as if they were all brooding over a huge secret that they kept to themselves only because it wouldn't help to tell anyone. They were part of a dreadful community that no one else could penetrate and that they couldn't escape.

The boy was crying. He'd seen nothing, but he sensed that something had happened.

"Will we never see Anton again?" he asked.

"No," said the woman, whom Gunnar Jakobsen thought must be the child's mother. "Anton's dead. He's not coming back."

It was a brutal thing to say, Gunnar Jakobsen thought, and he'd probably never have been so frank with his own children. Yet something inside him acknowledged the honesty of the woman's reply. To the children of war, you told the truth.

High above them a stork flew past. It came close to one of the burning steamers and seemed to vanish briefly in the clouds of smoke before emerging on the other side, unharmed. It continued across the town, and when it reached the other end of Markgade, it folded its wings and prepared to land in the nest on the roof of Goldstein's house.

Gunnar Jakobsen put in at Dampskibsbroen. This was where most of us were standing, and though he'd been shaken by the sight of Anton's body, he nevertheless felt that he was returning with a great story that deserved a big audience. He was bringing home the first people to return to Marstal from the war after an absence of more than five years.

Gunnar Jakobsen hadn't noticed that the dead were still lying on the wharf when the big legless man was helped out and settled among their covered bodies. We stared at him with curiosity and suddenly Kristian Stærk said loudly, "That's Herman."

A wave of unease went through us as the news spread, and those who didn't know who Herman was had it explained to them in terms that were far from flattering. Herman hadn't shown his face in Marstal for twenty years, but the mere mention of his name was still enough to fill those of us who'd heard the story of the Kristina with disgust. He sat strangely lost among the dead. His arm and leg stumps made him look like a stranded walrus waving its flippers, but his vulnerability didn't lessen our contempt.

"Help me up," he said.

We did nothing; we just kept staring at him. None of us wanted to go near him, so he just sat there in the puddle of his wet clothes, and his big body started shaking from cold.

A man in Kongensgade was running toward us, waving his arms and shouting, but we couldn't make out what he was saying: he was too far off.

At the same moment the church bells started to peal in a wild and breathless rhythm we'd never heard before, as if someone was improvising a melody fit for an occasion unique to the history of the town—neither funeral nor wedding service, sunrise nor sunset.

In a way that we couldn't explain, we knew that something momentous had happened, something much bigger than the burning steamers out on the water or Herman's sudden reappearance.

Finally the running man came within earshot.

"The Germans have surrendered! The Germans have surrendered!"

We looked at Herman and Knud Erik and Helge and Vilhjelm and the other men whose names we didn't yet know, and we looked at the woman and the child, and we understood that they were just the first. The sea was about to return our dead.

We lifted them up and bore them high through the streets. We even hauled Herman out of his pool of water and found a cart to pull him around on. Cheering, we marched through Kongensgade, along Kirkestræde, down Møllegade, along Havnegade, up Buegade, through Tværgade, and down Prinsensgade, where Klara Friis, as always, sat in her bay window, her pale face staring out to sea.

We went back along Havnegade and