To Siberia Read Free Page B

tears streamed and I squeezed my eyelids into narrow cracks. All along one side of the deck the passengers hung over the rail waving their handkerchiefs, the Melchior swung around and slackened speed, and there came the tugboat, fixed the hawser on board and moved off with engines roaring and the hawser snapped out of the water so the spray leapt up and the drops sparkled in the sun. The big boat turned gently in toward the quay where people stood waiting in groups, and someone on land called:
    “Have you been seasick?”
    “YEEES!” yelled the whole row in chorus.
    When all the passengers had landed and the ones who were going by train were settled and the train had left, we turned away from the wind, dried our eyes, and went back into town. Then we crossed the street leading from the cobbled jetty towards the Cimbria Hotel and around the hotel to Lodsgate with Consul Broch’s house on the right and Færgekroen, the Ferry Inn, on the left and right along Danmarksgate to the corner where our street, Asylgate, joined it. We stopped there, and he said:
    “That’s all for the two of us today. Go home to your mother now.” He was strict about not having me along too much although he knew I would rather be with him. But I had to go home and soon I would hear all about the priest’s sermon that day and about the whole service, while my father went on to Aftenstjernen, the Evening Star, to play billiards with his friends as it was Sunday.
    The first time I do remember us going to Skagen was in autumn. Grandfather at Vrangbæk had just turned sixty-five, and everyone had been out to the farm, the whole family with uncles and aunts and people from the neighboring farms. The sun came in through the windows, the rooms were full of people, and some were out in the farmyard and among the shrubs in the Chinese garden, yet all the same the day was filled with clinking silence and stiff necks. Grandmother walked about in her white apron for the first time in forty years, she served drinks from a tray and smiled in a way that made Grandfather sit in his chair as if paralyzed and my father stand up all day long, and not once did their eyes meet. My mother’s voice was more fluting than usual and even though there were many guests, hers was the one I kept hearing.
    But at Skagen we found the tourists had gone back to Copenhagen for the winter. Not a fine dress to be seen in the main street, not a straw hat or parasol, and even though I knew we were making this trip for my sake, I was disappointed. My father was right, there was not much there except sand. The wild wind swept right down among the low yellow houses whose owners stayed inside behind closed doors, my mother held on to her hat and Jesper walked sideways with his back to the wind, and it was blowing so hard out at Grenen, where the two seas meet at the tip of the sand spit, that we could not go out there with horses as we had planned, and sand and salt stuck in my hair, my clothes, my mouth when I wanted to speak and it was difficult to walk without feeling it smarting between my thighs.
    What I liked was the train ride. It took an hour and that was enough for me to be able to lean backward against the seat with closed eyes, feel the joints in the rails come up and thump through my body and sometimes peer out of the windows and see windswept heathland and imagine I was on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I had read about it, seen pictures in a book, and decided that no matter when and how life would turn out, one day I would travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on that train, and I practised saying the names: Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, they were difficult to pronounce with all their hard consonants, but ever since the trip to Skagen, every journey I made by train was a potential departure on my own great journey.
    Jesper was heading for Morocco. That would be too hot for me. I wanted open skies that were cold and clear, where it was easy to breathe and easy to see for long