“Older boys attacked me with snowballs.” I sniffed to keep from laughing as my fifth-grade teacher, Fru Jensen, examined my torn pants and skinned knees without laying a finger on any part of my anatomy. Her whole body bristled with distaste.
My insides jiggled with silent glee. If she only knew that, once away from the train station, I’d skated across an iced-over sidewalk a mile from Kreps’ Skole. I fell down repeatedly until both knees were bloody pulps. They hardly hurt. The clear vision of my brother plunging onto the train tracks erased the pain.
Fru Jensen clicked her tongue. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”
“They hit me in the head.” I touched the top of my skull. “I think one of their missiles contained rocks.”
“You must go to the school nurse. Can you walk? Shall I accompany you?”
And let my classmates call me pussy behind my back? “Thank you, Fru Jensen. I can walk by myself.”
As I left my classroom, I curbed my impulse to strut. From my study of Machiavelli, I’d learned the power of deceit.
Twenty minutes later, the assistant headmaster Herr Petersen reported he’d called my house. My mother was indisposed. My father had not yet reached his office. What to do with me?
Had I been less different—more like my Danish classmates—I’m sure Herr Petersen would have expressed a bit of sympathy for my knees now bandaged as a precaution according to the nurse. He must’ve debated whether sending me home on the street car with Dimitri was ethical.
It was snowing harder. Dimitri was only nine months older than me. Perhaps Herr Petersen’s Danish conscience reminded him I was a child. In the end, the assistant headmaster insisted on escorting us to the streetcar, then riding to the house in Hellerup where Dimitri lived with us.
Dimitri is also different—though not quite as nerve-jarringly different.
Sending us both home must’ve allowed the school administrators a collective sigh.
As we trudged to the street car stop, Herr Petersen marveled aloud at what the world was coming to so long after the War when young ruffians would attack a schoolboy on his way to school. Of course, attending my elite school carried the danger of attracting riff-raff. Implicit in his tone was the suggestion I had somehow provoked the attack.
Brilliant educator that he was, Herr Petersen failed to notice that my attackers couldn’t have seen my prestigious school uniform under my thick, fur-lined coat.
His blindness inflated my confidence that no one witnessing the accident at Hovedbanegård had noticed either.
After a freezing ten-minute wait, heads down against the bitter wind, we boarded the street car. Herr Petersen directed me and Dimitri to a seat in front of him. As soon as he sat down, he pulled out his newspaper. Undoubtedly, he would stop for coffee on his return trip.
Unless my mother offered him a cup with a mid-morning kringle.
Dimitri, my only friend and companion since infancy, sat next to me without speaking. He knew I’d fill him in later. Dimitri and I kept no secrets from each other.