The Woman from Bratislava

LEIF DAVIDSEN

Translated from the Danish by
Barbara J. Haveland

Table of Contents

Title Page
Epigraph
Prologue

Part 1: TEDDY’S ACADEMIC LIFE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7

Part 2: PER’S HAPPY LIFE
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

Part 3: IRMA’S SECRET LIFE
15
16
17
18
19
20

Part 4: FOR THE GLORY OF DENMARK
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Epilogue
Thanks
About the Author 
Copyright

‘It may be strange and it may be irrational, but history means a very great deal, especially somewhere such as the Balkans.’

Velijko Vujacic, historian

Prologue

IT WAS A STORY often used by security-cleared lecturers in the civilian branch of FET, by serving officers of a certain rank and other trusted members of staff with PET when briefing new volunteers on the special conditions under which the secret services had to operate in a post-communist world. Right at the start, the importance of absolute confidentiality when dealing with classified information and documents was impressed upon the young and somewhat self-conscious new recruits, who always looked forward to the talk on what was referred to simply as the case. In other words, this story was not for repeating to their ‘partners’, as they were termed in politically correct Danish, along with other pillow talk. Historians have an ingrained disrespect for any information which is not at least seventy-five years old, so as far as they were concerned this particular case was still current. The new recruits, on the other hand, tended to regard it as belonging to some strange bygone time. But then, their temporal perspective seemed to extend little further than from one TV news broadcast to the next, or at least, not much beyond the German occupation of the country, the hippie era and that time back in the bizarre seventies when the students were crying out for a socialist revolution. To these young people the chronology was often a bit muddy. For their elders, the youngsters’ lack of historical knowledge was a regular topic of conversation in the canteen. It was inevitable, therefore, that lecturers on the courses for prospective analysts run by the civilian branches of the Danish Military Intelligence – FET – and Security Intelligence – PET – were given to introducing elements of storytelling into their teaching. In the academic world this would have been frowned upon, but for the budding spymasters and counter-spies such narrative techniques only made the lectures – and, not least, this particular story – all the more interesting. To put it bluntly: these secret agents of the future simply paid more attention.

Since the case in all its details was known only to a trusted inner circle and had, with typical, autocratic Danish common sense, been consigned to the archives for the next seventy-five years, only the most seasoned members of staff, those with complete insight into the matter, were allowed to lecture on it. It was mainly for this reason that the case carried so much prestige. That and the strangeness of the alliance. That two such diverse ideologies should have become bedfellows. First and foremost, though, the case was used as a means of making it clear to future spies and counter-spies that secret agents had existed since before biblical times and would go on existing for all time. The case also served as proof that the services’ budget demands were well warranted. Berlin Wall or no Berlin Wall. There is treachery and there is loyalty. Every day there are men and women who make a choice. People are easily tempted. There is no risk of unemployment in this job. That was the message. We deal in facts. Nonetheless, even those PET and FET lecturers with the highest security clearance could not resist adding the odd fictional flourish to their presentations. It always heightened the class’s interest. It was a common ploy to open with a description of the situation in the new, democratic Republic of Estonia, despite the fact that no one could say exactly how things stood there. Even when one is dealing with individuals who have willingly applied to join the secret services, with all their limitations, a couple of colourful, emotive adjectives has never detracted from the solemnity of the proceedings; adjectives of the sort with which Jytte Vuldom, the big boss and guru, often began her sermon on those occasions when she managed to escape from her administrative prison to teach the future defenders of the nation’s secrets.

Vuldom had survived just about everything; she knew how to handle the politicians, was a friend to her lads and the service’s steadfast, erudite champion in the face of the voracious, ignorant media. Vuldom often commenced her baptism of the new initiates by invoking her right to present her own interpretation of the ostensibly innocuous image of the times and the normal situation; and so occasionally, if she considered a fresh crop of Danish men and women ready to enter the unique brother- and sisterhood of the secret services, she would begin with the story as seen – as they say in the temples of dramaturgy – from Teddy’s POV. The aim was to give these future interpreters of the merchandise supplied by the dealers in secrets, these prospective analysts of the invariably double-edged nature of treachery, an initial insight into university lecturer Theodor Nikolaj Pedersen, his ambivalent part in things and the significance of history and of family ties. Or possibly to discreetly underline the fact that the gathering of information and, not least, the interpretation of same, always entails a considerable degree of subjectivity. In the end it all comes down to the unpredictability of the individual. These are the sorts of words which Vuldom used even when she was meant to be teaching new recruits how to predict a person’s many weak spots. She would run an eye over the handpicked gathering at the National Police Training Centre in Avnø near the south-western tip of Zealand, at the recruits with their notebooks on their desks and ballpoint pens or felt-tips hovering expectantly, all set to record her words of wisdom and the overhead projector’s instructive graphs. But Vuldom rarely took the overhead’s easy way out. Instead, she often began by describing a scene:

A small group of people stands in a forest west of Narva in the now independent Estonia. It is a day in early June. Everything is lovely and green, the singing of the birds the only sound. It has rained during the night and drops of water hang like exquisite little pearls from every leaf and blade of grass. The group consists of six men and a woman. They stand quietly, gazing at a granite stone. One of the men supports himself with a stick. There are tears in his eyes. With his high, bald pate and small, sunken eyes he must be close on eighty. His skin is thin and wrinkled, it looks as though it would tear if one scratched it. But he still stands straight and tall. The other men are in their fifties, all in the middle-aged male’s various stages of decline. There are bald patches and pot-bellies, but also a certain firmness of purpose, as if they have come a long way and have now, finally, reached their goal. The woman stands out from the rest. She must be about sixty, but if her body too is marked by age then her elegant trouser suit hides any signs of the decay. She has short, greyish hair, very lightly tinted, strong, beautiful lips highlighted in red and keen green eyes set nicely in a face that is well-proportioned, if a little irregular. Her figure is slim and she stands with her head only slightly bowed. She is holding a bouquet of roses. It is very quiet. Only the birdsong and the swish of feet on damp grass. In the distance, the sound of a plane cutting across the blue sky, somewhere up there among the scattering of fluffy white clouds in the stratosphere. The woman takes a step forward and lays the bouquet at the foot of the rough-hewn, brown granite stone, gently, as if it were of porcelain. The red roses stand out brightly against the green grass and the mound of black soil left over from the setting of the stone. She steps back a pace again, seems to be studying the coat-of-arms with the Dannebrog cross and the legend beneath it, as if to brand it on her memory. She already knows it by heart, though. It seems to me that a look of peace descends upon her face as she reads it aloud to herself, like a little child who has just discovered the magic of words, but has to recite them in her head in order to make sense of them.

‘“The Danish Regiment. Croatia-Russia. Estonia-Lithuania. Courland-Pomerania. In memory of those who fought,”’ she reads to herself, without moving her lips.

They stand for a moment. A group of well-dressed modern individuals in a forest near Narva in Estonia.

‘That’s that, then,’ the oldest of them says.

‘Yes, that’s that,’ the woman replies. ‘And it was about time.’

‘It was indeed,’ the old man says and then, shifting the emphasis to the last word: ‘It was indeed.’

Then once more there is only silence and the birds and after a while the sound of feet on wet grass as they turn, on the word of command almost, and wend their way out of the Estonian forest.

Thereafter, another picture would be presented. Vuldom would pick up a sheet of paper, run the eyes behind her narrow reading glasses over the rapt assembly, before looking down at the white sheet in her hand and reading out loud, like a mother to her eagerly attentive children:

It is a picture of a white house. A large house surrounded by beech and elm trees. The tiled roof is red. The house is pictured from above, but even so the white walls are clearly visible in the soft, limpid light. This is an aerial photograph ordered by a proud householder. It is summer and there is a black Ford van in the courtyard. There are no other cars to be seen, only a team of horses pulling a combine-harvester in a neighbouring field. Here, only a few years after the war, Denmark is still a horse-drawn country and tractors are not yet common. It must have been in August that the plane flew over the white house. One can both sense and see that the sun is shining. There is a patch of blue sky. The colours are still bright, though tinged by the years, which have lent them a patina befitting those frugal times. There is a courtyard to the front of the house and a large garden at the back. It looks as if there are fruit trees in the garden, which is surrounded by a neatly-trimmed green hedge. There are five people in the picture, which is framed as if it were an oil painting. A man and a woman. The man is clad in white with a tall baker’s hat on his head. The woman has her arms crossed over a floral-print dress. Her black hair gleams in the sunlight. Both have their faces turned up to the pilot’s camera. They have waited a long time for him to fly over this home of which they are now the proud owners. Behind them stands a half-grown boy, he too in white baker’s garb, but bareheaded. Next to him is a girl of about the same age in a pastel-coloured frock. Her arms are bare and her hair hangs in two long, dark braids. They look alike, as siblings tend to. The aerial photograph is so sharp that the features of their faces can almost be made out as they gaze up at the plane swooping overhead. There is also a small boy in the picture. He is standing next to his mother, peering up at the aircraft, waving to it. His hair is curly and almost white and his bare knees can be seen peeking out below his short trousers. It is a very Danish picture. A picture which radiates security and comfort. A picture which speaks of good times just around the corner. The little boy in the photograph is me. This is the only thing left from my first childhood home and without it I would have no memory of that white house. I was almost four when the picture was taken in a fit of hubris. The following winter my father was forced to close the bakery when a certain matter came to light and his customers learned of his past. All this I have been told, but I do not remember it. I remember only the scent of flour and the sound of the delivery man whistling as he hopped up into the baker’s van, off to deliver crusty white bread to the customers. And sometimes the rich aroma of the pork, duck and geese with which my father filled the big, black ovens on Martinmas Eve, or on Christmas Eve when the whole village brought their Christmas roasts to the baker: the ovens of their coal or coke fired stoves too small to cope with the plump festive fare. Otherwise it is all a blank, and my first clear memories stem from the time after we moved to a small town in Jutland. By then my father was no longer a part of our lives. All in all, I have only the haziest recollections of him. And I am not sure whether those things I do remember are the result of personal experience or memories derived from family anecdotes and a handful of photographs. He left his family because he was ashamed that he could not provide for them properly and died, so legend has it, two years later in a bar in Hamburg. But the past did not die with him. It lived on, and the ripples from it spread all the way to the end of the century, that century which can only be called the century of the victim. But was he victim or executioner. Or both? This was the question with which the family had to wrestle over the years that followed. It had no real bearing on me, but it shaped the lives of the other two children in a way that was to prove crucial for them. It became for them the great secret of their lives and was guarded more carefully than the most clandestine love affair. Denmark entered the modern world and the majority of people forgot, but a few tended their memories and kept them burning so fiercely that these same remembrances eventually consumed them from within.

Who am I? Vuldom would ask in her cool, slightly husky and often quite sexy smoker’s voice.

Who is the ‘I’ in this story? Who is the ‘I’ in any story?

That gave them something to think about over the coffee break.

Part 1

TEDDY’S ACADEMIC LIFE

Oh, sister, when I come to lie in your arms,

You should not treat me like a stranger.

Our Father would not like the way that you act,

And you must realise

The danger.

Oh, sister, am I not a brother to you

And one deserving of affection?

Bob Dylan

1

I FIRST NOTICED the woman in Warsaw. She showed up again at a couple of gatherings in Prague, but she did not make herself known until Bratislava, and my meeting with her is, I suppose, as good a place as any at which to begin my story. She presented herself at my door with her staggering secret at an inconvenient moment: a surfeit of alcohol was still working its way through my system and my mind was awash with self-pity.

I had got drunk, and when I did that I missed the Soviet Union as badly as a slighted lover can miss his faithless sweetheart. I actually did not drink that much any more and seldom got really plastered. Partly because it gave me no pleasure – the booze was more wont to make me drowsy – and partly because after the fourth whisky I usually started thinking about my third wife and then I got depressed because in my own clumsy fashion I did in fact love her, but I was afraid that she was drifting away from me. I belong to a generation which bandies the pronoun I as freely as our parents used that discreet word one, and I make a living out of analysing things; nevertheless, in that cold, war-torn spring of the century’s last year I had seemed incapable of figuring out why, more and more often, I found myself feeling jealous and afraid of losing her. And the process of analysis is very important to me. Besides being my job, the ability to deduce, to discern connections is the crucial difference between us and animals. And if I am totally honest – and why should I not be – the capacity for reflection and analysis is also what separates the intellectuals from the rest, who simply take life as it comes rather than doing anything about it. In this, the final spring of my arrogance, I regarded myself as a man with a sincere desire to behave with dignity, but also with discernment in every stage of existence. This was indeed how I had always seen myself: as an individual in control of his life, both the professional and the private, despite the fact that both were, in truth, a shambles. I liked to think of myself as being smart but casual. The neatly pressed seams – the real and the imaginary – had to be there, though without being too obvious. Both sorts were, however, becoming more and more creased as time went on. The ability to fool oneself, to view oneself in the wrong light is, after all, only human. Too much self-awareness can lead to suicide. Another annoying side effect of drinking too much was, quite simply, the ease with which I succeeded in staining my clothes and making an unholy mess of my life. I had not wanted to get drunk, nor had I really wanted the Soviet Empire to collapse, and these two things were in a way connected.

Not to put too fine a point on it: I was lying fully clothed on a bed in a spanking-new, ultra-modern hotel in Bratislava, in Europe’s youngest state, Slovakia, yearning for the cold war and the great Empire. I missed the dear old terminology: Politbureau, Central Committee, Satellite States, Iron Curtain, East-West, Rearmament, Middle-distance Rockets, Summit Meetings, Berlin Wall. Being one of the few capable of reading between the lines of Pravda and being invited onto television to do just that. I missed the hammer and sickle, the cobbles on Red Square in the days when the Kremlin was a power centre, and longed to see the snow on the frozen canals in the beautiful, ramshackle city once known as Leningrad. Back when life consisted of great existential questions and not, as now, when the three main topics of discussion in the media and among one’s own acquaintances were early retirement, pension schemes and the smoking ban – this last debated so hotly that you felt you had been transported back to a time when all the talk was of the necessity for revolution and the imminent triumph of the working class. The world no longer made any sense, and no one now was interested in the knowledge I possessed. I was like a sculptor who had once been awarded first prize for my socialist ability to sculpt a splendid Lenin out of cold marble. The things I knew and could do were of no use today.

Only those small groups at the university who could be bothered to study the history of the Soviet Union were still keen to know who Malenkov was, or Berija, or Breshnev. Who nowadays wants to read up on Gosplan’s abortive twenty-second Five Year Plan or is interested enough to pick my brains on the twenty-sixth Party Congress? Capitalism had won the battle. The triumphant progress of the free market was not conducive to Utopian scenarios or momentous decisions. And the fruits of victory were as bitter as a mouldy lemon on a dark November day in a bygone time in a Moscow which, with its Coca-Cola ads, Marlborough Men, an inane, babbling Yeltsin, nouveau riche mafiosi and small boys begging on the streets reminded me more of a Third World country. It could just as easily have been Brazil. Or Upper Volta. The only real difference were the nuclear weapons. Were it not for them it is unlikely that anyone would have taken much notice of Russia now. There was nothing special or ferocious about Moscow or the Russian bear. It was all just a big mess, one which really did not concern the rest of the world.

I was sick of this new, melted-down order and I was sick of myself. I lay on a big bed in a modern hotel in Slovakia’s impoverished capital, knowing full well why I was feeling so bloody sorry for myself. Why, after dinner, I had stayed on in the bar to drink first cognac and later whisky. It was the meeting, two days earlier, with the former prime minister of the Czech Republic that had ruined the trip for me. My mood was not helped by the fact that I had toothache. One of my back teeth was giving me gyp. It acted as a constant reminder that this old bag of bones was very much the worse for wear. That I was, in every possible way, going downhill. Less hair, fewer brain cells, deteriorating teeth, shortness of breath on stairs, a waning libido. I had to admit, though, that it was the former Czech prime minister who had destroyed my last vestiges of good humour.

There I was, lying in that modern hotel with toothache, hearing in my head again and again the leader of our delegation’s deliberately spiteful introduction of me. With a couple of well-chosen words he got his revenge for the Research Council grant I had snatched from under his nose twelve years earlier. In academia we never forget a slight.

In his atrocious English he had said:

‘And now here is Mr Theodor Nikolaj Pedersen. One of our leading experts in and researchers into Soviet affairs. Particularly the Breshnev years.’

The former prime minister, with his beautifully cut hair and immaculate suit, had looked at me with his ice-blue fish eyes:

‘What a lot of useless information you carry around in your head,’ he said. Then he turned his X-ray gaze on young Lena, she of the long legs and the useful degree in ‘Transitional problems in the phase between plan economy and the global market. A study in options.’

‘Extremely helpful findings – for us too,’ the arrogant bastard had said, holding both her hand and her eyes for just a little too long before releasing her fingers with a glance at the hidden and yet so obvious secrets of her Wonderbra which made the normally hard-nosed Lena blush. Power is a tremendous aphrodisiac and the Czech was outrageously well-preserved.

Fuck them all! Fuck the modern world! It sucks! As one of my numerous offspring would say. But I too had blushed, because he had hit me where it hurt. I had stood there trying to take comfort in the knowledge that I had had a fine academic career and no one could take that away from me. I had my history doctorate. My thesis had been described as a brilliant study of stagnation phenomena in the Breshnev era. It had been widely cited in international history journals and had earned me a guest lecture at America’s Harvard University in 1981, the year before the old bugger died. Unfortunately, my thesis had arrived at the conclusion that the inherent strength of the Soviet system outweighed its structural weaknesses. Reform was possible. The Soviet Union would enter the next millenium fortified and reinforced. The bipolar world dominated by the two big players, the USA and the USSR, was here to stay.

I got a couple of good years out of Gorbachev, but after that there were no more invitations from the major universities in the US and Europe. And I was no longer a regular guest in the blue television news studio, providing clear, concise answers to the presenter’s carefully rehearsed questions. Because the whole flaming set-up had collapsed! I had actually got it wrong. And my fellow academics knew it. No journalist was likely to read every line of a doctoral thesis which came to the wrong conclusion, but my colleagues had memories like elephants, a fact of which I was reminded by the sound of their barely suppressed, gleeful sniggers when the former prime minister made his spiteful remark. They knew that I knew that at the time when I completed my highly acclaimed thesis and was able to put the letters Ph.D. after my name I was still far too young. Added to which, there had been no vacant professorships at the time and now it was too late. My knowledge was sadly outdated. I would never be able to boast the coveted title of Professor. For the rest of my days, until I started drawing my nice, fat pension I would have to make do with calling myself Lecturer in History. Trailing out every day to the south side of the city and the University of Copenhagen’s concrete jungle, where the thinking was often as low-slung as the ceilings in the hideous classrooms. Here, Teddy, as I was known to everyone, high and low, went around feeling sorry for himself, without of course knowing that he was doing so. Here, Teddy made a half-hearted attempt to teach and do research, in order, at least once in a while, to publish a scholarly paper. Here, Teddy gave guidance to future generations, fitting them to take over the bastions of power. Here was Teddy, an academic relic, who, for some strange reason, society was still paying. And paying well.

I lay on the bed, fulminating, the alcohol in my blood causing my already well-developed talent for viewing my life and my career as an exercise in martyrdom to increase to the point where it gained the upper hand. I should have been leading this delegation. Instead I was merely a member, paying all my own expenses – although I was sure to find some loophole whereby the Institute would end up reimbursing most of my costs.

There were forty of us on this trip organised by the Danish Foreign Affairs Association. The majority were elderly tourists for whom this offered the opportunity of an organised cultural tour of Central Europe. Because these were not your ordinary charter tourists. No, no. They travelled in order to broaden their minds. Six of us would be speaking at various symposiums and conferences to politicians, journalists and civil servants; giving talks inspired by the tenth anniversary of the transformation of Eastern and Central Europe, but since NATO planes had bombed Yugoslavia a couple of days after we left Denmark our conversations often ended up revolving around the war which we were not supposed to call a war. At heart we were actually all agreed that NATO had taken the only logical step, but that it had simply come to late. Just to be contrary, though, I doggedly maintained that it was immoral not to send in ground troops. That this was a clear sign of just how pampered and egoistic we were in the West; we were more concerned about not getting killed ourselves than about not taking the lives of others. Our style of warfare was a logical consequence of our civilisation. The safety of the bomber pilots was more important than the sufferings of Kosovo Albanians. We could not cope with casualties within our own ranks. Our politicians could not stomach the thought of Western men being killed and they refused to countenance the media’s pictures of such things. What we wanted was a cartoon war. A real-life version of Star Wars. But my heart really was not in this discussion. Milosevic was simply another villain in history’s long line of villains. I ought to have studied Stalin instead, like my friend and colleague Lasse. As he so rightly said: pure evil and the endeavour to comprehend it never go out of date. Lasse too was only a lecturer, but with all the newly opened archives on the Stalin era he was in seventh heaven. He now had enough material to keep him busy for the rest of his natural. Not only was he a great guy, he was also a true scholar who loved his subject. I really envied him. He was still married to the same woman. He had children only with this one woman. They had a good life and try as I might I could not convince him that he was not happy. Like me he was on the wrong side of fifty, but with something as rare in our circles as a silver wedding celebration to look back on and his beloved archives to look forward to it was also hard to persuade him that, on the whole, life was turning out to be rather like a bad movie. Another thing that annoyed me was his refusal to face the fact that, deep down, modern man was in a hell of a mess.

We began our tour in Warsaw. The Polish capital lay cool and clear in the spring light. The city had changed a lot in ten years. Stalin had given the poor Poles a yellow wedding-cake skyscraper to remind them every day of who was in charge. Now, though, hemmed in as it was by modern skyscrapers in glass and concrete, Stalin’s gift did not dominate the skyline in quite the same way. Warsaw was teeming with cars and mobile phones, advertisements and neon signs, nightclubs and beggars. It had it all. The reek of low-octane petrol was gone. The limp salami of communism had given way to imported Danish hams and French cheeses. The party’s lies to the horse-trading of democracy. A normal country which was happy to be a member of NATO and hoped that Russia would eventually pull back to a point somewhere beyond the Ural Mountains, to that Asia to which it belonged, even though the Poles realised, of course, that it probably was not going to be that easy. We met all the right people, everybody said the right things, the tourists made notes and asked tentative questions and during the long, tedious meetings I thought of Lena’s breasts, and neither the talk nor the breasts excited me in the slightest.

The leader of the delegation, Klaus Brandt by name, chivvied us about as if we were a bunch of schoolkids on a class outing. He told us off if we were late for the bus and looked aggrieved if we did not go into raptures over his meticulously planned schedule. He had a way of looking like a mother who is not angry, but disappointed, if we skived off a meeting at which some bureaucrat was to deliver yet another deadly dull speech. As Lasse and I in fact did one afternoon, opting instead to take a walk around the city, past the monument to the gallant Polish soldier, through the streets and down to the Old Town, rather than having to hear about the in-fighting within the Polish government. The ochre-coloured buildings of the Old Town – which was in fact brand new, having been totally rebuilt after the war, and ought therefore to have been called the New Old Town – were bathed in sunlight and looked quite charming. Lots of pedestrians were unbuttoning their coats and doing as all we northeners do in the early days of spring: lifting their faces to the blessed sun.

We ate a hearty lunch at a small restaurant. That meal would have cost a Polish academic a day’s wages, but we consumed our roast wild boar with great relish and not a twinge of guilt; we drank Californian wine with the food and Czech Becherovka with the strong coffee, and I was smitten by Lasse’s sincere delight that everything had gone so well ten years earlier. That for the first time in history the Poles had the chance to be the masters of their own destiny. All of a sudden in 1989 a cat-flap had been opened and the Poles had realised, along with everyone else east of the disarmed Iron Curtain, that they had to seize this opportunity. Lasse had never flirted with socialism or Marxism. He had studied his Stalin too well for that. It had immunised him against any belief in a Utopia. And a year on a student exchange to the University of Moscow had dispelled any illusions regarding the possible blessings of the so-called Really Existing Socialism. Not that I had cherished any such illusions either, but I had leaned more to the Left in the seventies. It had simply been easier, even though I too had done my obligatory year in Moscow, living and working in conditions that would have caused any Danish student to rebel. But in the long-ago seventies it had been less trouble just to go with the flow. Those years had not been so easy for Lasse. As a conservative he had found himself pushed out onto the sidelines and had for a spell been faced with half-empty classrooms when he was boycotted for having said in a newspaper interview that basically there was no difference between the aesthetics of communism and of Nazism. Such statements did not go unpunished twenty years ago. Now he was a highly respected lecturer and students were queueing up to have him as their guidance tutor. He was that rarity in the academic world: an honourable man with no hidden agenda. Unlike the rest of us, he did not need to keep getting his name on this and that scholarly article as a way of masking idleness and intellectual burnout. For many years I thought it was all an act, that he had chosen to play a part, but I had come to see that he was that most uncommon of creatures, a good person. I cherished him as my friend.

We ordered another round of Becherovka and coffee, savoured the cinnamon scented liqueur. There were not many people in the restaurant. The tourist season had not yet started, and the Poles could not afford it. Brisk little waitresses flitted about, sweeping crumbs off the blue-checked tablecloths. The place was redolent of the spirit of Central Europe, that and red cabbage. I leaned across the table and eyed my friend. Lasse wore his years well. He was tall, with a slight stoop, and as always he was wearing his drab grey tweed jacket. He had fine-drawn features and a full head of hair. Only now it was grey. He wore narrow-framed glasses and had a rather feminine mouth, wide and soft-looking. His teeth were very white. I lit a cigarette:

‘Shouldn’t you be giving that up,’ he remarked placidly.

‘Yes,’ I said, blowing smoke in his face and making him waft the air impatiently with slender hands marked by the first liver spots.

‘Why did you really come on this trip?’ I asked.

‘I had some time to spare. And I wanted to see how things had been going here. Take my nose out of the archives. Look at real life instead of the relics of the past. Broaden my empirical horizons. Anyway, Lisbeth’s in New York.’

Lisbeth worked within the broad field of IT. It was a gold mine. She had originally trained as a teacher, but the world of computers had got to her, rather like one of the viruses she was so skilled in combatting. For people like Lisbeth the advent of the new millenium was a licence to print money. IT specialists are the crusaders of our day, travelling the world, ridding worried businesses of heathen foes, real or imaginary, known as computer viruses. She earned at least twice as much as Lasse. Not even that seemed to bother him, I thought peevishly.

‘So – what have your archive-weary eyes observed?’ I asked.

‘Well, most of it’s positive. It’s very healthy to come to a country like Poland. People’s hands don’t shake here when they talk about democracy and freedom. They’re just so happy to have these things. It’s quite ridiculous, really. I mean we’re all free. That goes without saying, right. But not here. Here they don’t take it for granted.’

‘Not yet maybe, but they will.’

‘With any luck. That’s what it’s all about, after all,’ he said and took a sip of his Becherovka.

‘In any case, this is excellent, and I get to spend time with you,’ he said.

‘Daddy won’t be pleased,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well. That’s his problem. We’re grown men, aren’t we?’

‘Well, you are at any rate.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean, Teddy?’

I drew on my cigarette, considered him for a moment.

‘How many women have you actually slept with in your life?’ I asked.

Lasse stared at me in amazement. When he was baffled a horizontal crease appeared between his eyes. He must have gone through life in a constant state of bafflement because the crease was now permanent, merely deepening when something took him by surprise.

‘That’s an odd question, I must say,’ he replied. ‘How many have you slept with?’

‘Other than my three wives I haven’t really kept score.’

‘And you’re proud of that? Sort of like a big-game hunter?’

‘Not really. It’s just that my dick has always been one step ahead of my brain,’ I said, making him smile. Then he grew serious.

‘Seven,’ he said.

‘You know the exact number?’

‘I remember every one of them. You don’t remember all of yours. What’s better? One unique experience or loads of superficial ones?’

‘Point taken, Lasse. I’m just amazed by you and Lisbeth. Your fidelity to one another. Over twenty-five years with the same woman. How the hell do you keep the spark alive? Can you really manage to keep your eyes off Lena’s tits? Never imagine her lying starkers on your big hotel bed?’

‘Numbers six and seven were after Lisbeth.’

Now it was my turn to be surprised.

‘Does she know?’

‘She knows about number seven. That lasted some months. Number six was just a one-off,’ he said quietly and drank his coffee, as if we were simply discussing how many millions Stalin had left to starve to death.

‘When was this?’

‘Fifteen years ago.’

‘And afterwards?’

He regarded me with his soft, brown eyes:

‘We never spoke of it again. And I made a decision. It was either Lisbeth and our kids or the other woman, or women. And I’ve never regretted the choice I made,’ he said.

‘Sounds like a pretty simple choice to me.’

‘Nobody says it was easy.’

‘You make it sound as though it was an existential choice,’ I said.

‘Spare me the sarcasm. It was not an easy decision to make, but I’ve never looked back. Maybe my sex-drive just isn’t that great.’

‘I never noticed a blind thing.’

‘Ah, well,’ he said with that soft smile that made his Ph.D. students go weak at the knees with gratitude. ‘I’m not as much of a talker as you. You could always smooth-talk your way to good grades, and into girls’ beds. I don’t have your gift of the gab.’

‘I wonder if Majken knew,’ I said, more to myself.

‘I think it was her who told Lisbeth.’

‘Bloody women, always sticking together.’

‘It all turned out okay, Teddy,’ was all he said.

‘What about Lisbeth?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Has she ever …’

‘Ever cheated on me? Is that what you’re asking?’

He was getting a little rankled, I could tell. We were friends and we talked about all sorts of things, but here I seemed to be getting a little too personal.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never asked her. I have no reason to.’

I stubbed out my cigarette, lit another and, wise man that he was, he asked:

‘I don’t suppose all of this could have anything to do with the fact that yet another marriage is on the rocks?’

‘I don’t have anything going on the side,’ I said.

‘Well, you usually do, but I’m not going to get into that,’ he said. ‘There are two sides to every story, you know.’

The other side in this case being that of my present wife, Janne. She was an assistant lecturer at the Institute and I had fallen head over heels in love with her five years earlier, when she started as a Ph.D. student and I was growing tired of living alone. She had been married at the time, only in her early thirties; she left her husband and brought two small children into my life from that first marriage. It had not exactly been plain sailing. I felt I had had my share of small children. They took over the whole flat. They robbed me of my freedom, but if I wanted her I had to take her offspring too. And I was in love. Or at least: in love with the thought of being in love again. Of experiencing the grand passion. Although it was probably also a symptom of a midlife crisis. It’s not easy when the magic five-oh is looming on the horizon. Part of me did still love her, of course, but there was no passion to speak of. Our days followed a routine pattern punctuated by fights and icy silences. So it had actually been good to get away on this trip, even though Janne had gone on about the kids and who was supposed to see to them? And how she always got stuck with all the household chores. She had her work too. I had expected her to complain. But I had not expected her to give in so quickly, saying only that she supposed I’d better go then. I immediately began to wonder whether she had met someone else. To be honest I couldn’t have blamed her. Our marriage, if you could call it that, was stuck in a rut.

‘Did you hear what I said, Teddy?’ Lasse asked.

‘I don’t know whether it’s going to last between Janne and me,’ was all I said, and I could see that this did not surprise him. It was no secret between us that Janne and Lisbeth did not get on well. They were civil to one another, but no more than that. My previous wife, Majken, and Lisbeth were the same age and still saw a lot of one another. They were friends. My first wife and I had been teenage sweethearts, we married in order to get a flat. Five years and two children later it was over. Our divorce had been a relatively painless, amicable affair. These days we could run into one another, pass the time of day, without feeling any emotion, great or small. I think we both wonder what we saw in the other. The children had been a bond of sorts between us. Now they were grown up, married themselves, had provided us with grandchildren whom we saw separately. We very rarely met. Majken and I were married for almost twelve years, but the divorce was a nasty business. She had had one child from her first marriage and together we had three in rapid succession before it all fell apart. I cheated on her and she eventually found out. Both she and the children went ballistic and I don’t think any of them has ever really forgiven me. We imagine that we live in an age when our hearts cannot be broken, but betrayal and broken promises hurt as much as they ever did. Our youngest was eighteen now, we could have a polite conversation, but I was still not very popular. What annoyed me most was that it bothered me and affected me more than I was prepared to admit. Majken had remarried. She had had another child, late on. Her new husband already had two of his own. Just as well Majken was a mathematician. Because it took a mathematician’s brain and methodical mindset as well as a hefty diary to keep track of all the birthdays, the Christmas and New Year holidays, when you had to allow not only for your own offspring but also for all the various step-children. We belonged to a generation which had not gone through life quietly and unremarked. To be honest I don’t think we had ever thought about anybody but ourselves.

‘Do you even want it to last?’ Lasse asked.

‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘But let’s talk about something sensible, like Poland or NATO…’

He laughed.

‘You started it. Lunch is on me, seeing as you’re paying all that child maintenance.’

‘Thank heavens my own two are over eighteen now,’ I mumbled morosely and we both laughed again, possibly as a way of covering up a growing awkwardness, and I felt better.

We strolled along the narrow streets like two gentlemen, coats open and arms swinging. All we needed was a couple of top hats and somebody to tip them at and we could have been in a Hollywood musical. Horses’ hooves clip-clopped over the cobbles, but as yet there were few passengers behind the drivers in the carriages they drew. Down by the old Town Hall, where a hot-dog stall emblazoned with the evocative name ‘Dania’ struck a strangely tasteless note, Lasse suddenly stopped short and put a hand on my arm.

‘Don’t look now. Remember the old days in Moscow …’

I knew what he was getting at. I bent down, pretended to be tying my shoelaces. I glanced back. There were about a dozen people behind me.

‘There’s a woman, d’you see her?’ Lasse said. ‘Blue coat, chest-nut-brown hair, sensible shoes. Good-looking woman in her early sixties. Maybe a bit younger. Well-preserved, but still …’

I scanned the street, then I spotted her. She stopped short, made a big show of looking in the window of a sports shop, then she glanced towards us, turned on her heel and strode off briskly down a side street.

I straightened up.

‘What about her?’

‘Old habits die hard when I’m in this part of the world, even if the country is a member of NATO and about to join the EU. I can’t help looking over my shoulder. You remember how sometimes in Moscow you could simply sense that you were being followed?’

I nodded. I remembered. We had not spent all our time with our noses buried in dusty books in the endless reading rooms in the yellow palace of the Lenin Library. We had also met people. We had visited the homes of the hospitable Russians and we knew that they knew that an eye was kept on dangerous foreigners who were liable to spread noxious ideas about democracy and freedom.

‘What about her?’ I said again.

Lasse looked after her, but she was long gone. Then, as he took my arm and led me away, he said:

‘She was in the back row at the Institute of Economics when I was speaking there yesterday. I thought about it when I saw her this morning, sitting in the front row at the Institute of History, when you were giving that talk on stagnation phenomena …’

‘Oh that – I had them snoring in the aisles during that one.’

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re a good speaker and the history students have need of your insight.’

‘Okay – and …?’ I said, as we walked on in the now somewhat chillier late-afternoon sun. It was still only March. Spring was not quite here yet.

‘She was in the hotel lobby, and now here. It’s too much of a coincidence.’

‘You’re seeing things,’ I said. ‘The Cold War ended a long time ago. And we won. The Poles won.’

‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘She’s probably just a tourist. There aren’t that many sights to see here. I just think it was a bit odd. There’s something professional about it. You get the feeling that she’s been trailing us for a while and has finally decided to let us know about it. The way the KGB used to do, in the old days.’

‘Those days are over,’ I said.

But she showed up again in Prague. During the symposium at Charles University, when we were all lined up on the platform, boring the pants off each other and the audience in the large auditorium. I sat there half-asleep while Lena held forth and Klaus Brandt, the leader of the delegation, got himself tangled up in long-winded expositions. Again she was seated in one of the back rows, high up. Lasse and I spotted her at almost the same moment. She was wearing a plain blue dress with a simple white necklace. She appeared to be listening intently. Made notes and looked for all the world like a refined middle-aged lady taking some extramural course: her husband is gone, the children have flown the nest, now she can devote herself to learning and culture. At the interval I hurried down to confront her, but she had vanished. As mysteriously as she had appeared – I had not seen her arrive and I did not see her leave.

Afterwards there was a reception at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the former prime minister made his remark and my evening was ruined. I had too much to drink in the bar, but did eventually go up to my room. I called home – no answer – and fell asleep with a sour taste in my mouth that no toothpaste could dispel.

The next morning Klaus hustled us along like a bunch of little kids and I could positively see his blood pressure rising when I deliberately did not turn up until the last minute, then took my time finishing my cigarette before climbing into the bus that was to take us to Bratislava. Thus prompting the other smokers to get back off. Anarchy threatened, and at the sight of our leader’s puce face I climbed aboard feeling slightly more cheerful. Lasse had of course observed the whole performance.

‘How childish,’ he said as I sat down beside him.

But the Czech politician’s snide comment still rankled. At any rate I was too sunk in gloom to enjoy the sight of the budding Bohemian countryside, dotted with sunken haystacks. The landscape and the little farms reminded me of Denmark in the fifties. It had an old-fashioned air about it. We had to sit in a queue at the Slovakian border and Klaus got my back up even further by archly calling out to Lena:

‘Well, Lena – we’re about to leave the shelter of NATO protection behind us. I hope you’re not feeling too nervous.’

‘Who’s being childish now,’ I muttered to Lasse.

Things were bound to go wrong. And so they did, after another few days of tedious meetings. It was late in the evening. I had had too much wine with dinner and too many drinks afterwards. On top of everything else my teeth had started hurting, or rather – according to my dentist – my gums. They’re going to rot away if you’re not careful, the heartless money-grubber had declared. I got into an argument with Klaus. I maintained that it would have been better if Gorbachev had been allowed to reform socialism a little at a time, instead of having the system suddenly collapse like that. Not that I actually believe this. I am glad that the rotten Soviet system came tumbling down like the vile, absurd house of cards that it was, but I knew exactly which buttons to push to get Klaus going. So we sat there yelling at one another like a couple of idiotic teenagers while the more sensible members of the delegation took themselves off to bed and eventually Klaus stomped off in high dudgeon leaving me alone, like the stupid fool that I was.

So there I was, caught in the straitjacket of toothache, with my earlier inebriation reduced now to a raging hangover, when there came a knock at the door. It was long past midnight. I got up off the bed, peered through the little spy-hole. Outside was that woman. My first thought was to just leave her there, but then I opened the door. She stared at me. I stared back at her. For a moment I thought I was seeing things. She looked like my older sister. They had the same ears and nose and the same dark green eyes. The same features one saw in the few pictures of our father.

‘Yes,’ I snapped.

She gave a faint smile, as if she were shy, then she put out her hand and said in slow, heavily accented, but perfectly lucid Danish:

‘Good evening, Teddy. My name is Maria Bujic. I plucked up the courage to come here. I almost didn’t dare to, but I did so want to meet my brother.’