That Jack still had that nightmare, when he dreamed of death, at last made sense to him on that April morning in Copenhagen. It was still raining, but what did it matter? In Jack’s mind, he had already drowned. When he awoke, as he did every time, to a lasting cold, Jack now knew where the cold came from—from the moat, from the Kastelsgraven, where he always met those centuries of Europe’s dead soldiers. The little hero who saved him stood out among them—most notably not for the disproportionate size of his penis, which Jack had probably exaggerated in his most unreliable memory, but for the stoic quality of his frozen salute.
Jack had correctly remembered the salute; it was not a real soldier’s salute, but a young boy imitating a soldier. Not the littlest soldier in Jack’s imagination, but Niels Ringhof, a twelve-year-old going on thirteen—a thirteen-year-old, tops—who’d been sexually abused by Jack’s mother. (As surely as Mrs. Machado had molested Jack!)
He’d made an appointment to see the organist at the Kastelskirken, the Citadel Church. That view of the commandant’s house from the church square was familiar to Jack; he remembered being carried from the Kastelsgraven to the commandant’s house, where he was dressed in Niels Ringhof’s clothes. (His off-duty clothes, Alice had called them. She’d been a gifted liar.)
The organist at the Citadel Church was Lasse Ewerlöf. A Swedish-sounding name—maybe he was Swedish. At the age of fourteen, he’d studied the sitar, the violin, and the piano; he’d started the organ relatively late, when he was nineteen or twenty. Jack was disappointed that Ewerlöf couldn’t keep their appointment—he’d been called out of Copenhagen rather suddenly, to play the organ at an old friend’s funeral—but he’d been kind enough to ask the backup organist at the Kastelskirken to meet with Jack instead.
Lasse Ewerlöf knew that Jack was interested in hearing a little Christmas music—just to imagine what he might have heard at those Christmas concerts his dad had thought would be stimulating to the boy. (The concerts he’d never heard.) Ewerlöf had left Jack a list of his Christmas organ favorites, which his backup—an older man, who told Jack he was semiretired because he suffered from arthritis in his hands—volunteered to play.
“But will it hurt your hands?” Jack asked him. The backup organist’s name was Mads Lindhardt; he’d been a student of Anker Rasmussen’s and had known Jack’s father.
“Not if I don’t play for too long,” Lindhardt said. “Besides, I would consider it an honor to play for William Burns’s boy. William was very special. Naturally, I was jealous of him when I first heard him play, because your father was always better than I was. Most unfair, because he’s younger!”
Jack was unprepared to meet someone at Kastellet who’d actually known his dad—much less thought of William as “special.” Jack couldn’t respond; all he could do was listen to Mads Lindhardt play the organ. Jack could scarcely tell there was anything the matter with Lindhardt’s hands.
They were alone in the Kastelskirken, except for a couple of cleaning women who were mopping the stone floor of the church; the women might have thought it strange to hear Christmas music on a rainy April morning, but the music didn’t appear to interfere with their work.
Among Lasse Ewerlöf’s Christmas favorites, Mads Lindhardt told Jack, were a few of William’s favorites, too. Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium and his Kanonische Veränderungen über das Weihnachtslied, which Jack already knew his dad liked to play; also Messiaen’s La nativité du Seigneur and Charpentier’s Messe de minuit, which were new to Jack.
Jack realized, listening to Mads Lindhardt, that William would have (many times) imagined playing the organ for his son. But this had been forbidden, lost among the other things Alice had not permitted.
“It’s Christmas music, Mr. Burns,” Mads Lindhardt was saying gently; only then did Jack notice that the organist had stopped playing. “It’s supposed to make you happy.” But Jack was crying. “That boy, Niels, was the darling of the citadel,” Mads said. “And your father was the darling of the entire Ringhof family—that was why it was such a tragedy. No one blamed your dad for what happened to Niels. But Karin had adored her little brother; understandably, she simply could not look at your father in the same way again. Even the commandant was sympathetic, but he was destroyed; for him, it was like losing two sons.”
“Where are they now?” Jack asked.
Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof had retired. He was an old man, living in Frederiksberg—a place quite close to Copenhagen, where many retired people went. Karin, the commandant’s daughter, had never married; she’d also moved away. She taught music in Odense, at a branch of the Royal Danish Conservatory.
The only mystery remaining to the Copenhagen story was why William had followed Alice and Jack to Stockholm. Jack understood that it would have been painful—even impossible—for his father to stay at the Frederikshavn Citadel, but why did William follow them when Alice had caused him such a devastating loss?
“To see you,” Mads Lindhardt told Jack. “How else was he going to get a look at you, Jack?”
“She was crazy, wasn’t she?” Jack asked. “My mother was a madwoman!”
“Here is something Lasse Ewerlöf taught me,” Mads Lindhardt said. “ ‘Most organists become organists because they meet another organist.’ ” Lindhardt could see that Jack wasn’t getting his point. “Many women become crazy because they can’t get over the first man they fall in love with, Jack. What’s so hard to understand about that?”
Jack thanked Mads Lindhardt for his time, and for the Christmas concert. Leaving Kastellet, Jack regretted that he had not seen a single soldier; maybe they didn’t march around in the rain. Leaving the Frederikshavn Citadel—as angry and saddened as Jack now knew his father must have felt when he left that fortification—Jack tried to imagine his dad’s state of mind as he had followed Alice and Jack to Stockholm.
En route to Stockholm—in advance of his second arrival—Jack also tried to imagine what deceptions and outright deceits his mother had created for him there. In Copenhagen, it was not the littlest soldier who had saved Jack—and his rescuer had been his mother’s victim. Now he wondered if he had been saved by a Swedish accountant in Stockholm, or not. And who had been his mother’s victim (or victims) there?
So much of what you think you remember is a lie, the stuff of postcards. The snow untrampled and unspoiled; the Christmas candles in the windows of the houses, where the damage to the children is unseen and unheard. Or what Jack thought he remembered of the Hedvig Eleonora Church—the one with the golden altar in Stockholm, where his memory of meeting Torvald Torén, the young Swedish organist, was (Jack was sure) not exactly as it seemed.
Torén was real; Jack recognized him when they met again. But William hadn’t slept with a single choirgirl—much less with three! Alice had invented Ulrika, Astrid, and Vendela; no wonder Jack had no memory of meeting them. In Stockholm, Jack’s dad had been more celibate than a Catholic priest—well, almost.