But she was too late. Kirsti had gotten there first.
"And he poked Annemarie's book bag with his gun, and then he grabbed my hair!" Kirsti was chattering as she took off her sweater in the center of the apartment living room. "But I wasn't scared. Annemarie was, and Ellen, too. But not me!"
Mrs. Johansen rose quickly from the chair by the window where she'd been sitting. Mrs. Rosen, Ellen's mother, was there, too, in the opposite chair. They'd been having coffee together, as they did many afternoons. Of course it wasn't really coffee, though the mothers still called it that: "having coffee." There had been no real coffee in Copenhagen since the beginning of the Nazi occupation. Not even any real tea. The mothers sipped at hot water flavored with herbs.
"Annemarie, what happened? What is Kirsti talking about?" her mother asked anxiously.
"Where's Ellen?" Mrs. Rosen had a frightened look.
"Ellen's in your apartment. She didn't realize you were here," Annemarie explained. "Don't worry. It wasn't anything. It was the two soldiers who stand on the corner of Østerbrogade—you've seen them; you know the tall one with the long neck, the one who looks like a silly giraffe?" She told her mother and Mrs. Rosen of the incident, trying to make it sound humorous and unimportant. But their uneasy looks didn't change.
"I slapped his hand and shouted at him," Kirsti announced importantly.
"No, she didn't, Mama," Annemarie reassured her mother. "She's exaggerating, as she always does."
Mrs. Johansen moved to the window and looked down to the street below. The Copenhagen neighborhood was quiet; it looked the same as always: people coming and going from the shops, children at play, the soldiers on the corner.
She spoke in a low voice to Ellen's mother. "They must be edgy because of the latest Resistance incidents. Did you read in De Frie Danske about the bombings in Hillerød and Nørrebro?"
Although she pretended to be absorbed in unpacking her schoolbooks, Annemarie listened, and she knew what her mother was referring to. De Frie Danske—The Free Danes—was an illegal newspaper; Peter Neilsen brought it to them occasionally, carefully folded and hidden among ordinary books and papers, and Mama always burned it after she and Papa had read it. But Annemarie heard Mama and Papa talk, sometimes at night, about the news they received that way: news of sabotage against the Nazis, bombs hidden and exploded in the factories that produced war materials, and industrial railroad lines damaged so that the goods couldn't be transported.
And she knew what Resistance meant. Papa had explained, when she overheard the word and asked. The Resistance fighters were Danish people—no one knew who, because they were very secret—who were determined to bring harm to the Nazis however they could. They damaged the German trucks and cars, and bombed their factories. They were very brave. Sometimes they were caught and killed.
"I must go and speak to Ellen," Mrs. Rosen said, moving toward the door. "You girls walk a different way to school tomorrow. Promise me, Annemarie. And Ellen will promise, too."
"We will, Mrs. Rosen, but what does it matter? There are German soldiers on every corner."
"They will remember your faces," Mrs. Rosen said, turning in the doorway to the hall. "It is important to be one of the crowd, always. Be one of many. Be sure that they never have reason to remember your face." She disappeared into the hall and closed the door behind her.
"He'll remember my face, Mama," Kirsti announced happily, "because he said I look like his little girl. He said I was pretty."
"If he has such a pretty little girl, why doesn't he go back to her like a good father?" Mrs. Johansen murmured, stroking Kirsti's cheek. "Why doesn't he go back to his own country?"
"Mama, is there anything to eat?" Annemarie asked, hoping to take her mother's mind away from the soldiers.
"Take some bread. And give a piece to your sister."
"With butter?" Kirsti asked hopefully.
"No butter," her mother replied. "You know that."
Kirsti sighed as Annemarie went to the breadbox in the kitchen. "I wish I could have a cupcake," she said. "A big yellow cupcake, with pink frosting."
Her mother laughed. "For a little girl, you have a long memory," she told Kirsti. "There hasn't been any butter, or sugar for cupcakes, for a long time. A year, at least."
"When will there be cupcakes again?"
"When the war ends," Mrs. Johansen said. She glanced through the window, down to the street corner where the soldiers stood, their faces impassive beneath the metal helmets. "When the soldiers leave."
2. Who Is the Man Who Rides Past?
"Tell me a story, Annemarie," begged Kirsti as she snuggled beside her sister in the big bed they shared. "Tell me a fairy tale."
Annemarie smiled and wrapped her arms around her little sister in the dark. All Danish children grew up familiar with fairy tales. Hans Christian Andersen, the most famous of the tale tellers, had been Danish himself.
"Do you want the one about the little mermaid?" That one had always been Annemarie's own favorite.
But Kirsti said no. "Tell one that starts with a king and a queen. And they have a beautiful daughter."
"All right. Once upon a time there was a king," Annemarie began.
"And a queen," whispered Kirsti. "Don't forget the queen."
"And a queen. They lived together in a wonderful palace, and—"
"Was the palace named Amalienborg?" Kirsti asked sleepily.
"Shhh. Don't keep interrupting or I'll never finish the story. No, it wasn't Amalienborg. It was a pretend palace."
Annemarie talked on, making up a story of a king and queen and their beautiful daughter, Princess Kirsten; she sprinkled her tale with formal balls, fabulous gold-trimmed gowns, and feasts of pink-frosted cupcakes, until Kirsti's deep, even breathing told her that her sister was sound asleep.
She stopped, waited for a moment, half expecting Kirsti to murmur "Then what happened?" But Kirsti was still. Annemarie's thoughts turned to the real king, Christian X, and the real palace, Amalienborg, where he lived, in the center of Copenhagen.
How the people of Denmark loved King Christian! He was not like fairy tale kings, who seemed to stand on balconies giving orders to subjects, or who sat on golden thrones demanding to be entertained and looking for suitable husbands for their daughters. King Christian was a real human being, a man with a serious, kind face. She had seen him often, when she was younger. Each morning, he had come from the palace on his horse, Jubilee, and ridden alone through the streets of Copenhagen, greeting his people. Sometimes, when Annemarie was a little girl, her older sister, Lise, had taken her to stand on the sidewalk so that she could wave to King Christian. Sometimes he had waved back to the two of them, and smiled. "Now you are special forever," Lise had told her once, "because you have been greeted by a king."