John Irving - Until I Find You

On the way to their chambermaids’ rooms, Jack and his mom often stopped for a Christmas beer. The beer was dark and sweet, but strong enough that Alice diluted Jack’s with water.

One of Alice’s clients at Tattoo Ole’s—a banker who had different denominations of foreign currency tattooed on his back and chest—told her that Christmas beer was good for children because it prevented nightmares. The boy had to admit that, since he’d been drinking it, the banker’s remedy for bad dreams seemed plausible: either he’d not had a nightmare in a while or he’d not had one he could remember.

In Jack’s dreams, he missed Lottie—how she had hugged him, without reservation, how they’d held their breath and felt their hearts beating chest-to-chest. One night at the D’Angleterre, Jack had tried to hug his mom that way. Alice had been impatient about holding her breath. Feeling the thump of her heart, which seemed to beat at a slower, more measured pace than Lottie’s, Jack said: “You must be alive, Mom.”

“Well, of course I am,” Alice replied, with more detectable impatience than she had demonstrated when he’d asked her to hold her breath. “You must be alive, too, Jackie—at least you were, the last time I looked.”

Without his knowing exactly how or when, she had already managed to extricate herself from the boy’s embrace.

The next day, before the sun was up—in Copenhagen, at that time of year, this could have been after eight o’clock in the morning—Jack’s mother took him to the Frederikshavn Citadel. “Kastellet,” the historic fortification was called. In addition to the soldiers’ barracks, there was the commandant’s house and the Citadel Church—the Kastelskirken, where William Burns had played.

Is there a boy who doesn’t love a fort? How exciting for Jack that his mom had brought him to a real one! He was more than happy to amuse himself, as Alice asked him to do.

“I would like to have some privacy when I speak to the organist,” was how she put it.

Jack was given the run of the place. His first discovery was the jail. It was behind the Citadel Church, where a prison aisle ran along the church wall; there were listening holes in the wall, to enable the prisoners to hear the church service without being seen. It was a disappointment to Jack that there were no prisoners—only empty cells.

The organist’s name was Anker Rasmussen—a typical Danish name—and according to Alice, he was both respectful and forthcoming. Jack later found it odd that the organist was in uniform, but his mother would explain that a soldier-musician was what one might expect to find in a citadel church.

During William’s brief apprenticeship to Rasmussen, the young man had mastered several Bach sonatas as well as Bach’s Präludium und Fuge in B Moll and his Klavierübung III. (Jack was impressed that his mom could remember the German names of the pieces his dad had learned to play.) William was quite the hand at Couperin’s Messe pour les couvents, too, and Alice had been right about the Christmas section from Handel’s Messiah.

As for the seduced parishioner, the military man’s young wife, Jack’s mother told him little—only enough that the boy assumed his father hadn’t been asked to leave Kastelskirken for flubbing a refrain.

When Jack tired of the jail, he walked outside. It was freezing cold; the medium-gray daylight merely darkened the sky. While the boy was thrilled to see the soldiers marching about, he kept his distance from them and went to have a look at the moat.

The water around Kastellet was called the Kastelsgraven; to a four-year-old’s eyes, the moat was more of a pond or a small lake—and to Jack’s great surprise, the water was frozen. He’d been told in Tattoo Ole’s shop that the Nyhavn canal rarely froze, and that the Baltic Sea almost never froze; except in only the coldest weather, seawater didn’t freeze. What, then, was in the moat? It had to be freshwater, but Jack knew only that the water in the moat was frozen.

There are few wonders to a child that equal black ice. And how did the four-year-old know the water was frozen? Because the gulls and ducks were walking on it, and he didn’t think the birds were holy. Just to be sure, Jack found a small stone and threw it at them. The stone bounced across the ice. Only the gulls took flight. The ducks raced to the stone as if they thought it might be bread; then they waddled away from it. The gulls returned to the ice. Soon the ducks sat down, as if they were having a meeting, and the gulls walked disdainfully around them.

At times far away, at other times marching nearer, the soldiers tramped around and around. There was a wooden rampart near the frozen moat’s edge; it was like a thin wooden road with sloped sides. Jack easily climbed down it. The round-eyed staring of the gulls taunted him; the ducks just plain ignored him. When the boy stepped onto that black ice, he felt he had found something more mysterious than his missing father. He was walking on water; even the ducks began to watch him.

When Jack reached the middle of the moat, he heard what he thought was the organ in the Citadel Church—just some low notes, not what he would have called music. Maybe the organist was calling upon the notes to enhance a story he was telling Alice. But Jack had never heard notes so low on the scale. It wasn’t the organ. The Kastelsgraven itself was singing to the boy. The frozen pond was protesting his presence; the moat around the old fort had detected an intruder.

Before the ice cracked, it moaned—the cracks themselves were as loud as gunshots. A spiderweb blossomed at Jack’s feet. He heard the soldiers yelling before he felt the frigid water.

The boy’s head went under for only a second or two; his hands reached up and caught a shelf of ice above him. He rested his elbows on this shelf, but he hadn’t the strength to pull himself out of the water—nor would the shelf of ice have held his weight. All Jack could do was stay exactly where he was, half in and half out of the freezing moat.

The gulls and ducks were put to flight by the racket of the soldiers’ boots on the wooden rampart. The soldiers were shouting instructions in Danish; a bell in a barracks was ringing. The commotion had brought Alice and a man Jack assumed was the organist. In a crisis of this kind, what good is an organist? Jack was thinking. But Anker Rasmussen, if that’s who he was, at least looked more like a military man than a musician.

Alice was screaming hysterically. Jack worried that she would think this was all his father’s fault. In a way, it was, the boy considered. His own rescue struck him as uncertain. After all, if the ice hadn’t held him, how would it hold one of the soldiers?

Then Jack saw him, the littlest soldier. He’d not been among the first of the soldiers to arrive; maybe Anker Rasmussen had fetched him from one of the barracks. He wasn’t in uniform—only in his long underwear, as if he’d been asleep or was sick and had been convalescing. He was already shivering as he started out across the ice to Jack—inching his way, as Jack imagined all soldiers had been trained to do, on his elbows and his stomach. He dragged his rifle by its shoulder strap, which he clenched in his chattering teeth.

When the soldier had crawled to the hole Jack had made in the ice, he slid the rifle toward Jack—butt-end first. Jack was able to grasp the shoulder strap in both hands while the soldier took hold of the barrel at the bayonet-end and pulled the boy out of the water and across the ice to him.

Jack’s eyebrows were already frozen and he could feel the ice forming in his hair. When he was on the surface again, he tried to get to all fours, but the littlest soldier yelled at him.