Until I Find You

toes were pointed down.

At first, for no comprehensible reason, the boy believed it was Ladies’ Man Madsen. But closer inspection of the stranger’s bare feet revealed to Jack two un-tattooed ankles. Also, the feet between his mother’s feet were too small to belong to Lars. They were even smaller than his mom’s—they were almost as small as Jack’s!

In the light from the bathroom, something else caught the boy’s eye. On the chair, where his mother often put her clothes, was a soldier’s uniform, which Jack thought was about his size. However, when he put the uniform on, it was bigger than he’d estimated. He had to roll up the cuffs of the pants and cinch the belt in its last notch, and the shoulders of the shirt and jacket were much too broad. The epaulets touched his upper arms—the sleeves entirely covered his hands.

If he’d had to guess, Jack would have said that the littlest soldier’s uniform was at least a size larger than his civilian clothes—the ones Jack had borrowed to wear following his misadventure in the moat. (The soldier’s off-duty clothes, his mom had called them.)

Undaunted by this clothing mystery, which seemed of no consequence at the time, Jack was determined to stand at attention at his mother’s bedside. When she and the littlest soldier woke up, Jack would salute them—as soldiers do. (Given the costume and the boy’s intentions, his mom would later refer to this episode as Jack’s first acting job.) But while he was standing there, at attention, he realized they were not asleep. The gentle movement of the bed had at first escaped his notice. Although his mother’s eyes were closed, she was awake; her lips were parted, her breathing was rapid and shallow, and the muscles of her neck were straining.

All that could be seen of the littlest soldier was his feet. He must have been lying with his head between Alice’s breasts, which were under the covers; he was probably recovering from a nightmare, or so Jack deduced. (That would explain the quivering of the bed.) Besides, Jack knew it was a night for bad dreams, having just had one himself; it seemed perfectly obvious to the boy that the soldier had suffered one, too, and had therefore climbed into bed with his mom. Jack no doubt still thought of the soldier as a fellow child.

Suddenly the littlest soldier’s nightmare returned with a vengeance. He violently kicked the covers off—Jack saw his bare bum in the bathroom light—and Alice must have squeezed him too hard, because he whimpered and groaned. That was when her eyes opened and Jack’s mom saw him standing there—another little soldier, this one at attention. Alice didn’t recognize her son at first; it must have been the uniform.

Her scream was a shock to Jack, as it was to the littlest soldier. When he saw the four-year-old in uniform, he screamed, too. (He sounded like a little boy again!) And Jack was suddenly so afraid of the mutual nightmare they must have been having that he, too, began screaming. He also peed in his pants—actually, in the littlest soldier’s pants.

“Jackie!” his mother cried, when she caught her breath.

“I dreamed I drowned in the moat,” Jack began. “Dead soldiers, from the past, were with me. You were there, too,” he told the littlest soldier.

The soldier didn’t look so little now. Jack was astonished at the size of his penis; it was half as long as the bayonet on the rifle he’d used to rescue Jack, and it was thrust forward, at an upward angle, in the manner of a bayonet, too.

“You better go,” Alice told the littlest soldier.

True to his calling, he took orders well; he marched straightaway into the bathroom, without a word of protest, and when he’d done his business there, he came back to Alice’s bedroom to fetch his clothes. Jack had taken off the soldier’s uniform, folded it neatly on the chair, and crawled into bed with his mom.

Together they watched the littlest soldier dress himself. Jack was embarrassed about pissing in his rescuer’s pants, and he could tell the exact moment when the little hero discovered what had happened. An expression of uncertainty and distress was on his face—not unlike the anxiety and discomfort Jack had seen there when the brave lad was inching across the thinly frozen moat in his long underwear.

But after all, he was a soldier; he gave Jack a glance of vast understanding and grudging respect, as if the boy’s peeing in his pants struck him as appropriate to the situation. And before he left, the littlest soldier gave Jack and his mother what Jack had intended to give them: a proper salute.

Despite having seen him stark naked, Jack hadn’t noticed a tattoo—not even a bandage. The boy thought about it, in lieu of falling back to sleep—which would, in all probability, return him to his nightmare about drowning in the Kastelsgraven.

He asked his mom his troubling question. “Did you give him a free tattoo? I didn’t see one.”

“I … certainly did give him one,” she replied, with some hesitation. “You just missed it.”

“What was it?” Jack asked.

“It was … a little soldier,” she answered, with more hesitation. “It was even littler than him.”

Having seen his half-a-bayonet of a penis, Jack had revised his impression of how little the soldier was, but all he said to his mother was: “Where did you put it?”

“On one of his ankles—the left one,” she said.

The boy thought that the bathroom light must have been playing tricks on him, because he’d looked closely at the soldier’s ankles and hadn’t seen a tattoo there. He assumed that he’d just missed it, as his mom had said.

Jack fell asleep in her arms, as he often did after nightmares—and not at all in such an uncomfortable- looking position as the one the littlest soldier had taken up with her.

That was Copenhagen, which Jack Burns wouldn’t visit again for almost thirty years. But he would never forget Tattoo Ole and Ladies’ Man Madsen, and their kindness to his mom and him. Or the frozen moat—the Kastelsgraven, which almost claimed him. Or the littlest soldier, who saved him—and by so doing, saved his mother, too.

In reality, Jack understood little of what had happened there. Although he didn’t know it, a pattern had begun. At the time, he had lots to learn, especially in those areas his mom kept largely to herself—not only the meaning of a free tattoo but all the other things as well.

And when he had that nightmare about drowning in the moat, it was always the same. He had already drowned. There was no more struggle, only a lasting cold. In eternity, Jack was joined by centuries of Europe’s dead soldiers. The little hero who’d saved him stood out among them—not for the disproportionate size of his penis but for the stoic quality of his frozen salute.

3. Rescued by a Swedish Accountant

One day, when Jack was older, he would ask his mother why his father hadn’t gone to England—why they’d not looked for him there. After all, England has its share of women and organs—and a long- established history of tattooing as well.

Alice simply said that William was Scots enough to hate the English. He would never have gone to England for a woman, let alone for an organ—not even for a tattoo. But William Burns wasn’t quite Scots enough to have kept the Callum, was he?

From Copenhagen, Alice and Jack took the ferry across the sound to Malmo and then the train to Stockholm. In Sweden, in January, the hours of daylight are few. It was the New Year, 1970. It seemed that William had gone underground not long after his arrival, and Doc Forest wouldn’t open his first tattoo parlor for two years. Doc was almost as hard to find as William Burns.

Alice and Jack went first to the Hedvig Eleonora Church. The building was a glowing dome of gold, surrounded by tombstones in the snow; the altar and the altar rail were also gold. The organ facade was a greenish gold, and the pews were painted a gray-green color—a faint, silvery tint, not as dark as moss. The glass in the paired, symmetrical windows of the rotunda was uncolored, as somber as the winter light.

The Hedvig Eleonora was the most beautiful church Jack had ever seen. It was Lutheran, with a fine choir tradition. This time, William had made the fond acquaintance of three choirgirls before the first learned of the third. Although it was the second choirgirl, Ulrika, who exposed him, surely the other two, Astrid and Vendela, were just as upset. Until then, William had been doing rather well—assisting Torvald Toren on the organ at the Hedvig