tediously familiar journey across the width of Denmark from Jansborg, in the east, to Sande, off the west coast. He knew every small-town railway station and fish-smelling ferry dock and all the flat green landscape in between. The journey took the whole day, because of multiple train delays, but he wished it could be longer.
He spent the time anticipating his father’s wrath. He composed indignant speeches of self-justification which even he found unconvincing. He tried out a variety of more or less groveling apologies, unable to find a formula that was sincere but not abject. He wondered whether to tell his parents to be grateful he was alive, when he might have met the same fate as Poul Kirke; but that seemed to make cheap use of a heroic death.
When he reached Sande, he further postponed his arrival by walking home along the beach. The tide was out, and the sea was barely visible a mile away, a narrow strip of dark blue touched with inconstant smears of white surf, sandwiched between the bright blue of the sky and the buff-colored sand. It was evening, and the sun was low. A few holidaymakers strolled through the dunes, and a group of boys around twelve or thirteen years old were playing football. It would have been a happy scene, but for the new gray concrete bunkers at intervals of a mile along the high-tide mark, bristling with artillery and manned by steel-helmeted soldiers.
He came to the new military base and left the beach to follow the long diversion around it, welcoming the additional delay. He wondered whether Poul had managed to send off his sketch of the radio equipment to the British. If not, the police must have found it. Would they wonder who had drawn it? Fortunately there was nothing to connect it with Harald. All the same, the thought was frightening. The police still did not know he was a criminal, but now they knew about his crime.
At last he came within sight of his home. Like the church, the parsonage was built in the local style, with red-painted bricks and a thatched roof that swept low over the windows, like a hat pulled over the eyes to keep out the rain. The lintel over the front door was painted in slanting stripes of black, white, and green, a local tradition.
Harald went to the back and looked through the diamond-shaped pane of glass in the kitchen door. His mother was alone. He studied her for a moment, wondering what she had been like when she was his age. Ever since he could remember, she had looked tired; but she must have been pretty, once.
According to family legend Harald’s father, Bruno, had been thought by everyone to be a confirmed bachelor at the age of thirty-seven, wholly dedicated to the work of his little sect. Then he had met Lisbeth, ten years younger, and lost his heart. So madly in love was he that he had worn a colored tie to church in an attempt to appear romantic, and the deacons had been obliged to reprimand him for inappropriate attire.
Watching his mother as she bent over the sink, scrubbing a pot, Harald tried to imagine the tired gray hair as it had once been, jet black and gleaming, and the hazel eyes twinkling with humor; the lines of the face smoothed away, and the weary body full of energy. She must have been irresistibly sexy, Harald supposed, to have turned his father’s remorselessly holy thoughts to the lusts of the flesh. It was hard to imagine.
He went in, put down his suitcase, and kissed his mother.
“Your father’s out,” she said.
“Where has he gone?”
“Ove Borking is sick.” Ove was an elderly fisherman and faithful member of the congregation.
Harald was relieved. Any postponement of the confrontation was a reprieve.
His mother looked solemn and tearful. Her expression touched his heart. He said, “I’m sorry to have caused you distress, Mother.”
“Your father is mortified,” she said. “Axel Flemming has called an emergency meeting of the Board of Deacons to discuss the matter.”
Harald nodded. He had anticipated that the Flemmings would make the most of this.
“But why did you do it?” his mother asked plaintively.
He had no answer.
She made him a ham sandwich for his supper. “Is there any news of Uncle Joachim?” he asked.
“Nothing. We get no answers to our letters.”
Harald’s own troubles seemed nothing when he thought about his cousin Monika, penniless and persecuted, not even knowing whether her father was dead or alive. While Harald was growing up, the annual visit of the Goldstein cousins had been the highlight of the year. For two weeks the monastic atmosphere of the parsonage was transformed, and the place was full of people and noise. The pastor had for his sister and her family an indulgent fondness that he showed no one else, certainly not his own children, and he would smile benignly as they committed transgressions, such as buying ice cream on a Sunday, for which he would have punished Harald and Arne. For Harald, the sound of the German language meant laughter and pranks and fun. Now he wondered if the Goldsteins would ever laugh again.
He turned on the radio to hear the war news. It was bad. The British assault in North Africa had been abandoned, a catastrophic failure, half their tanks lost, either crippled in the desert by mechanical failures or destroyed by experienced German antitank gunners. The Axis grip on North Africa was unshaken. Danish radio and the BBC told essentially the same story.
At midnight a flight of bombers crossed overhead. Harald looked out and saw they were heading east. That meant they were British. The bombers were all the British had, now.
When he went back inside, his mother said, “Your father could be out all night. You’d better go to bed.”
He lay awake for a long time. He asked himself why he was scared. He was too big to be beaten. His father’s wrath was formidable, but how bad could a tongue-lashing be? Harald was not easily intimidated. Rather the reverse: he was inclined to resent authority and defy it out of sheer rebelliousness.
The short night came to an end, and a rectangle of gray dawn light appeared around the curtain at his window like a picture frame. He drifted into sleep. His last thought was that perhaps what he really feared was not some hurt to himself, but his father’s suffering.
He was awakened brusquely an hour later.
The door burst open, the light came on, and the pastor stood beside the bed, fully dressed, hands on his hips, chin thrust forward. “How could you do it?” he shouted.
Harald sat up, blinking at his father, tall, bald, dressed in black, staring at Harald with the blue-eyed glare that terrified his congregation.
“What were you thinking of?” his father raged. “What possessed you?”
Harald did not want to cower in his bed like a child. He threw off the sheet and stood up. Because the weather was warm, he had slept in his undershorts.
“Cover yourself, boy,” his father said. “You’re practically naked.”
The unreasonableness of this criticism stung Harald into a rejoinder. “If underwear offends you, don’t enter bedrooms without knocking.”
“Knocking? Don’t tell me to knock on doors in my own house!”
Harald suffered the familiar feeling that his father had an answer for everything. “Very well,” he said sulkily.
“What devil took hold of you? How could you bring such disgrace upon yourself, your family, your school, and your church?”
Harald pulled on his trousers and turned to face his father.
“Well?” the pastor raged. “Are you going to answer me?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you were asking rhetorical questions.” Harald was surprised by his own cool sarcasm.
His father was infuriated. “Don’t try to use your education to fence with me-I went to Jansborg, too.”
“I’m not fencing. I’m asking whether there’s any chance you’ll listen to anything I say.”
The pastor raised his hand as if to strike. It would have been a relief, Harald thought as his father hesitated. Whether he took the blow passively, or hit back, violence would have been some kind of resolution.
But his father was not going to make it that easy. He dropped his hand and said, “Well, I’m listening. What have you got to say for yourself?”
Harald gathered his thoughts. On the train he had rehearsed many versions of this speech, some of them most eloquent, but now he forgot all his oratorical flourishes. “I’m sorry I daubed the guard post, because it was an empty gesture, a childish act of defiance.”
“At the least!”
For a moment he considered whether to tell his father about his connection with the Resistance, but he
