The Lindegaard Boy

One evening that first summer of freedom when the rapeseed fields were dark gold and a smell of burnt corn had settled in the air, a farmhand appeared and called everyone to the street, saying they were coming, they were coming. The maid bore the Lindegaard boy in her arms, his face all sticky with rhubarb jam, slogged the fifty yards of gravel, lifted him up onto the fence, and they watched together the solemn little procession of three women marching single file, pushed along by members of the military police.

“Here they are,” the farmhand snarled, “Feltmadrasser! Feltmadrasser! Feltmadrasser!”

Field mattresses.

The jibe passed from mouth to mouth in steady trochees until it turned fugal and finally thickened to unanimous plainsong. The women’s heads were shaved carelessly, tufts growing amid that sickly white of scalp, their faces bruised, their eyes dead and limbs so thin and angular in coarse gray rags that they looked insane and not long for the world. The village women who were watching joined the chorus as heartily as the men. Those three had lain with the Germans. Everybody wondered where they had been hiding all these weeks. One of the three harlots wasn’t even ashamed, hurled back insults of her own. “Hypocrites,” she kept saying, firm syllable by firm syllable, grinning wildly.

“They won’t cut Mummy’s hair, will they?” said the Lindegaard boy when the spectacle was over.

“Why would they do that?”

“But they won’t?” he said, then answered it himself, “No, they won’t. I won’t let them.”

Before the war, Marlinde had an old limewashed church with a stepped gable, a sawmill, a florist’s, a bakery across from the station hotel where salesmen would put up for a night or two in the rooms above that unheatable hall in which local girls took waltz lessons from a withered little fugitive from Cologne and sought their mates at an annual dance. Along the outskirts of the scattered village stood three or four estates, most of which had been bought by angry fathers for younger sons in the hope of getting them thirty miles from the city and whatever it was they had done there.

The Lindegaards moved into one of these houses. They came from Copenhagen, the pretty bride suspiciously stout when she was handed out of the evening train car and the groom a dour man fortified by tweeds and a dark sad eye, his hair already brittling into gray. Mrs. Lindegaard grew slender soon enough and turned herself up in clothes of a cut no one else in Marlinde could afford or dare to inhabit. She smiled politely at everyone, but that smile did seem a bit tentative, too narrow, as if she’d reserved a spot of contempt for her private pleasure. Her husband, poor man, seemed to suffer in silence. The birth of their boy changed nothing.

By the time the boy appeared, in the very first month and year of the occupation, Mrs. Lindegaard was in her late twenties. It had been feared that she would remain childless forever and nobody took seriously the fact that she’d never expressed a desire not to remain so until her belly swelled. The boy turned into a bright child, a flesh and blood angel, the villagers kept saying. They pinched his cheeks, nestled him in their arms if their hands were clean. An old woman who was able to see the future by dint of a handful of tossed oats blessed the child and said if this world shall ever be redeemed it will be by golden-haired children exactly like this little boy.

The plump cherub lost his bulk and flew about catching butterflies in his straw hat. His mother said never be unkind to the common people, the maids, the farmhands. Be good to their children, even the worst of them, as long as you know that you are not one of them. Kindness is the debt of privilege. The boy shared his sweets, helped with the animals. Baker Hansen told him tales of forest creatures and he listened with...