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Mother was suddenly standing in the kitchen screaming,
‘Was tust du?!’
What had I done? She was staring with wild eyes at the spoon clenched in my hand – I had scraped the bottom so as to leave nothing behind – and only then did I realize what I had done. My horror and remorse knew no end, but there was no going back. What was done was done. I smiled an apology with
Gullasch
plastered across my face. I looked at my mother, looked at the spoon and then, praying for her forgiveness, opened my mouth for the final spoonful.
    M y father shot up. He was tall and thin, and when I clambered up on his shoulders I could look across the hedge to the far horizon. He was too big to take in all at one go, so I knew him only in bits – he had a large nose and large ears and large feet. His boots, he would say, had been built in a boatyard. No matter where we were – in a restaurant, a cinema – he would complain about the lack of leg room, and we’d leave again. His arms reached to his hands, no further, and those hands were a long way off and kept the world at a distance. His forehead increased in height as his hair fell out – and Mother thought he was the handsomest man in the world.
    Father was as kind as the day was long and his eyes warmed you like the sun. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, he was early to bed and early to rise, and I never heard him utter a swearword. He was always on time, always conscientious in his work, always paid his taxes. And 100 metres before a traffic light he would slow down, so that, even if it was green, by the time we reached the junction it would be sure to have turned red. He stood up automatically if he was talking to someone in authority on the telephone and would never put a plug in a socket without first having read the instructions. He was correct through and through, from top to toe, his conscience as clean as his shirt, and his tie was tied, his shoes were polished and his suit so crisply pressed it could stand on its own two creases.
    Father was an insurance man, and every day he made sure that nothing would happen. The alarm went off at half-pastsix. Father got up, drank his coffee, ate his breakfast roll, kissed Mother goodbye – and then drove to work along the same route he had taken for fifty years. He worked at Danish Building Assurance in the town square, and his first question when he came through the door was ‘Has anything happened?’ Nothing had, and Father heaved a sigh of relief, went into his office and got on with insuring everything there was to insure on Falster. He dealt with the church and the town hall, with man and beast, while houses, cars and bicycles were all covered for theft and fire and water and rot and storm and any accident that could conceivably strike the planet. Father always assumed the worst would happen, pre-empting damage, wrestling with the unforeseeable and finding no peace until everything was safely secured. He sighed with satisfaction when he opened
The Falster Times
in the morning, and there was nothing in it. The paper could just as well have been blank. Nothing happened, nothing whatsoever. The days repeated themselves without even a leaf falling to earth, and surely and steadily life ground to a halt.
    It was a task that could have no end. Father bore the world on his shoulders – there was always something or other to worry about – and his moods rose and fell with the barometer that hung on the wall in the living room. Arranging his face into earnest furrows, he would tap the glass. When the needle showed fair, his face lit up, but it wouldn’t be long before he was tapping again and thinking about low pressure and rain and lightning strikes. He spoke of the October storm in 1967 as though it was anepisode from the Bible. Summer brought the danger of fire – he hoped it would be wet – and winter awoke anxiety about frost damage and snow, and he never wanted a white