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everything. And that a good advertising campaign can do wonders for sales. He instinctively understood, long before the media researchers got round to formulating the concept, that we do not buy goods but experiences, stories. He was also quick to spot the organic trend and latch on to that. He was the wealthy member of the family. We came of age just as consumerism was really taking off and we were doing very nicely, thank you. A pretty ordinary story, really, when told in a few words.
    I must have become lost in my own thoughts, she seemed to be repeating a question:
    ‘Could I have a glass of water?’ she said.
    ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said, as if I were a bad host neglecting an invited guest. And not some strange woman who had knocked on my door in the middle of the night in Bratislava. ‘Can I offer you something else, perhaps? From the minibar? A glass of wine?’
    ‘Wine would be lovely,’ she said.
    There was a small bottle of red wine of dubious quality in the minibar. It was also very cold. Nonetheless, I poured two glasses for us and set them down on the ugly, little modern tile-topped table between the two armchairs. I was no longer feeling the effects of the alcohol I had consumed earlier in the evening. I was tired, but my head was clear. I think that already at that point I had subconsciously accepted her story as being true, even thoughmy analytical super-ego still regarded the whole thing as absolute rubbish, a pack of lies.
    I offered my cigarettes to her and she took one.
    ‘I’ve actually given these up,’ she said.
    ‘Haven’t we all?’ I said, giving her a light before firing up my own. I picked up my glass of red wine, raised it wryly to her.
    ‘What should we drink to, madame?’ I said. ‘To death?’
    She winced, but her eyes remained empty of expression. They were remarkable eyes: green as a sunlit lake. But it was the glacial green of a mountain tarn.
    ‘I was actually very fond of him,’ she said.
    ‘Sorry, that was too flippant,’ I said. ‘To life, then? Or to the past?’
    ‘To the past, may our lives not be ruined by it.’
    So we drank to that and gently set down our glasses.
    ‘Might I hear the whole story from the very beginning,’ I asked in my best university lecturer tones.
    So she told me. Presenting the facts as dispassionately as if she were delivering a lecture herself, or making a statement to the police. Even so, it took quite a while. At my age one is past the stage of breaking in with a ‘Really!’ or ‘You don’t say!’ every time something surprises you, and her story did surprise me. It did not really upset me, though. As I say: I never knew my real father. If she had been talking about my step-father, Poul, it might have been a different matter, and the story might have caused me greater mental and emotional upheaval than it did at that moment.
    ‘My father came to Croatia at the beginning of September 1943. He was just a sergeant with the Danish Regiment. His company made camp at the village of Sisak, fifty kilometres outside of Zagreb. My mother told me that the Danish soldiers’ nerves were in a bad state, they were thin and exhausted. They drank too much of the excellent Croatian brandy. As if the alcohol could chase away their memories. The Danish Regiment had been formed in part by soldiers from the Danish Legion, which had been disbanded bythe SS along with the other foreign legions. The men were angry about this, but that was not what drove them to drink. No, it was the memory of the bitter fighting in Russia, at a place they called the Demjan Cauldron. It was the memory of returning home on leave to a Denmark where they were not welcomed as heroes, but spat on and denounced as traitors. My mother was twenty and worked as a secretary at the local town hall. Croatia was a free country, though possibly fascist. Or so it was said after the war. The country was not occupied, but cooperated with Germany in order to remain a sovereign nation. We