John Irving - Until I Find You

They were a wonderful family, William wrote to Alice—he felt he was marrying all of them. Once Jack had started school, his father hoped that Jack’s mother would allow the boy to spend part of his Christmas vacation in Copenhagen; William thought that Jack would find the atmosphere of the Frederikshavn Citadel stimulating at that time of year. There were Christmas concerts, and what boy wouldn’t be excited to spend time in a fortification with all the soldiers?

“But your mother had her own agenda,” Ladies’ Man Madsen told Jack.

Soon Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof and his daughter were exposed to various sightings of Alice—and the same long-distance sightings of Jack that his mom had permitted his dad in Toronto. Nothing had changed in Alice. “She had a keep-me-or-lose-Jack mentality,” as the Ladies’ Man put it.

In Copenhagen, Alice added a new rule to the conditions she imposed on William: if he wanted to get a look at his son, William had to bring his fiancée with him. She had to see Jack, too. Naturally, it was Alice who wanted to get a look at Karin Ringhof, but Karin complied; she loved William and shared his hope that Alice would one day permit the boy to spend time with his father.

Additionally, Lars told Jack, Alice tried to seduce the only men in William’s life who mattered to him. Anker Rasmussen, the organist, was justifiably appalled by her behavior—Rasmussen refused to see her. Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof, the widower who loved William almost as much as he loved his own little boy, was also appalled. Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof tried to reason with Alice, to no avail; he most certainly didn’t sleep with her.

“The situation was at a standoff,” Ladies’ Man Madsen informed Jack. “Then you fell in the Kastelsgraven—the damn moat!”

“But what did that have to do with it?” Jack asked.

“Because the commandant sent little Niels to rescue you!” Lars told Jack. It was Niels Ringhof, not the littlest soldier, who’d saved him! “Until then,” the Ladies’ Man continued, “everyone had done a good job keeping your mom away from Niels. She barely knew he existed. I know that Niels knew nothing about her. But that was how she met him, Jack. Your mom must have said something to the boy; she must have thanked him for saving you, I suppose.”

That had been Jack’s idea—that his mom should offer his rescuer a free tattoo, not that a tattoo was what she offered Niels.

“She seduced the kid ?” Jack asked Ladies’ Man Madsen.

“She sure did, Jack. She got to him, somehow.”

Niels Ringhof’s clothes had almost fit Jack, but not the soldier’s uniform; Niels had obviously borrowed or stolen it. Maybe that was how Alice had got him in and out of the citadel—she’d dressed him like a soldier. And that night she’d sent him back from the D’Angleterre, he must have walked home alone !

“He was how old? Did you say twelve ?” Jack asked Lars.

“Maybe twelve going on thirteen, Jack. I’d say thirteen, tops. ”

Their last night in Copenhagen, Tattoo Ole and Lars had taken Jack and his mom to a fancy restaurant on Nyhavn. But William had picked up the tab. That would have been William’s last sighting of his son in Copenhagen—his and Karin’s last sighting, because Jack’s mom insisted that his father bring Karin to the restaurant, too. (“To see us off,” Alice had told William.)

“They were there, in the restaurant?” Jack asked Lars.

“At a table on the same side of the fireplace,” the Ladies’ Man answered. “You may remember the restaurant, Jack. You had the rabbit.”

But Alice had not told Niels Ringhof that she was leaving; the twelve- or thirteen-year-old was crushed. Until Jack and his mom left Copenhagen, Karin Ringhof and her father, the commandant, had no idea that the boy had been seeing Alice—not to mention the depth of the child’s infatuation with her. William had no idea, either.

“What happened to the kid?” Jack asked. It had started to rain again, which was not a good sign.

“Niels shot himself,” Madsen said. “It was a barracks, after all—a military compound. There were lots of guns around. The kid either died of the gunshot wound or drowned in the Kastelsgraven. They found his body in the moat, about where you broke through the ice. He died where he saved you, Jack.”

The moat, the Kastelsgraven, looked more like a pond or a small lake. In April, without the ice, the water had a greenish-gray color. Jack didn’t think it looked deep enough to drown in, but it might have sufficed when he was four. And Niels Ringhof was only twelve or thirteen, and he’d just shot himself; clearly the Kastelsgraven had been deep enough for Niels.

If there’d been ice on the moat, Jack would have tested it again—this time hoping no one would save him. The wooden rampart, on which the soldiers’ boots had made such a racket—putting even the ducks to flight—now looked like a toy road.

Of course Jack knew it hadn’t been Anker Rasmussen, the organist, who’d come running with Alice. In all likelihood, there had never been a soldier- organist, a military musician, at the Kastelskirken. The man in uniform would have been the commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Ringhof; he’d sent for his young son, who was sick in bed, because the commandant knew that the ice would hold Niels but not a soldier.

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.