Cold War Kids: Copenhagen 1963 By Marc Hess

Lee Coursey CC




Cold War Kids: Copenhagen 1963


My big brother, Ted, and I were a couple of pimple-faced, American teenagers who didn’t know much. We were in Copenhagen, which we knew was in Denmark. The place where our father had left us was a was a five-story, warehouse-type building that had been re-fitted with bedrooms and one shared bedroom on every floor. Neither a hotel nor a dormitory the place was full of young women who were hopping in and out of taxi cabs throughout the day and even more so at night.
    There was no reception area. To get in and out of the building we had to walk past a surly, dog-faced man in a green visor cap who sat at a battered, old desk under a single light bulb that dangled from a frayed electric cord. Every morning when we went out searching for chocolate éclairs for breakfast, the man would be busy counting stacks of Danish Kroner notes into small piles and stuffing them into envelopes. When we came back he would be shouting into one or two of three rotary telephones that, when they rang, leaped around on his desk like trained frogs. Every time we passed by he gave us a canine snarl as if we were the next ones to be eaten.
    The ladies were kind to us. They would sit with us on the front steps while waiting for their rides. Younger than my mother but older than my cousins, they seemed eager to practice their English with us, asking us where we were from and offering us cigarettes. I would have liked to linger, practice my Danish, peek down their blouses, and, maybe, scrounge a cigarette, but my big brother was all twisted up in a fret because we hadn’t heard from our father in five days.
    Ted dragged me outside to talk because, he said, our room was bugged. 
    “Who would want to bug our room?” I asked. “And why . . .”
    “To get him, stupid.” My brother’s acne flared into a Pepto Bismol pink when he was frustrated. I hoped that wouldn’t happen to me. “We have to get to the American Embassy.”
    “Is he there?”
    “No, you idiot. He’s gone into hiding. Or he’s missing in action!” Ted’s pugnacity got the attention of the ladies on the steps. He grabbed my shoulder and turned the two of us down the sidewalk. “We’re American citizens. They have to protect us.”
    “Should we call Mom?”
    He never listened to me. “You have the map. Don’t you?”
    “Yeah. It’s up in the room. Uh. I think.”
    He steered me down the street by the scruff of my neck and spoke in whispers. “You’re the map man. Your job is to locate the American Embassy and determine the optimal route.”
     “Sure. I’ll just ask one of those friendly ladies to show us,” and maybe get a cigarette, too.
    “Damn it all, Marc! What have you done with your brain!” He sounded just like Dad. I was used to that. He grabbed me like he was going to hit me. “They’re Danish,” he pressed the words out through his teeth. “They might be with them.”
    “Who’s them?”
    He jumped back as if I had electrocuted him, gathered himself, widened his eyes and stuck his nose in my face. “The clandestine operators who might try to kidnap us.”
    Clandestine operators! I knew he got that word from one of the Ian Fleming spy novels he had been immersed in since we’d left home. 
    “Uh, you probably told me already, Ted, but I forgot.” I was trying to weasel my way out of a potential thrashing. “But why do these clandestine operators want to kidnap us?”
    He stood upright, took a deep beath, and started to count to ten—our mother taught him that. He got to about four before he turned on me. “To torture us!”
    “Whaaa?”
    “They will to use us to get to Dad.”

This was 1963. In January of that year the greatest spy of the Cold War, a man by the name of Harold “Kim” Philby, a high-ranking member of MI6 and holder of the Order of the British Empire, snuck home to the Soviet Union. It cannot be said that he’d defected because he had been a Soviet deep penetration agent from the get-go, working for the other side since the outbreak of World War II. Ted, of course knew all about this stuff—all about how MI6 was working with the CIA in order to counter the KGB and something called The Stasi and the Communists, who had a microphone in every bedroom in Central Europe, and where James Bond fit in, and how the future of the world hinged on all this because the bad guys had the atomic bomb.
    Uh-huh.
    I was in on it, too. Kind of. But my attention was on Christine Keeler. I got to know her as well as my brother knew James Bond. Her picture was on the cover of every newspaper and magazine in every country we traveled through. She was the leggy call girl who, apparently, was sharing her bed with the British minister of foreign affairs, one Lord John Profumo, as well as a Soviet naval attaché named Yevgeny Ivanov. The newspapers said she was just nineteen years old—a teenager like me. I was hoping that she would defect to Denmark where I might have a chance to see more of her . . . perhaps on the nude beaches at Tisvideleje Strand, which Ted and I had visited by accident earlier that week.
     
At that time my father, Theodore Delos Hess, was a major in the United States Marine Corps. He was a lifer. A career officer. A stand-up Iowa farm boy who had signed up for World War II and stayed on. During the war his job was to load young boys dressed in combat gear into small boats called LSTs and send them chugging off toward scenic but unfriendly tropical beaches where they got shot up in droves.
    “You boys are pussies!” We would often hear about that war when he had a scotch in his hand. “I laid down my life for my country. And you runts can’t even wipe your own asses!” He would actually thump on his chest. “I was ready to die for what I believed in while you boys just sit around eating Pop-Tarts!”
     After the war my father stayed in occupied Japan serving in something called G-2, a military intelligence unit. Then he was in Korea. He never said what he did there. We were now living in Alexandria, Virginia, where my father went to work in the highly secured Naval Annex building near the Pentagon. Nobody was allowed to talk about what went on in there. This “don’t ask questions” environment gave my father the opportunity to increase the space between the man we thought he was and the man that he wanted to be. My father wanted to be the American James Bond. He started dressing different and grew out his mustache.
     “But why do you need to take the boys?” my mother protested before we left. “They’ll miss half the school year.”
     “It will be good for them.” My father bulldozed past her. “It will make men out of them.”
     Taking children along on an overseas Temporary Duty Assignment was unheard of in the Marine Corps. But, on my father’s orders, we went, Ted and I.
     Another thing that we knew before we left the States—or Ted knew and explained to me—was that the Marine Corps had the task of providing security for American Embassies. After an intelligence breach like Kim Phibly (and maybe Christine Keeler) security protocols had to change, so it made sense that a major from the Naval Annex would be dashing from one Embassy to another doing some kind of inspections or checking the new locks or putting up new signs in the parking lot.
     “I think he’s taking us as cover,” Ted whispered to me one night after we arrived in Europe.
     “Cover for what?”
     “You have to be the stupidest brother on the planet. He’s taking us so no one will suspect his true mission. That’s the way it works.”
     “What works?”
     Ted waved one of his James Bond paperbacks in my face and yelled, “Espionage!”
     To be honest I wasn’t really paying much attention to the international spy scene, or to the family intrigue. I just couldn’t seem to take my eyes off all these ladies in mini-skirts who were everywhere. Unabashedly everywhere. 

Every Marine officer I ever knew of was hell-bent on “making men” out of their young sons. None of these fathers had the foggiest notion of what that meant. They were always off on deployment, or working late, or out carousing around with their regimental buddies. They had little time for their families and, with the exception of their first names and the birth order, they weren’t too familiar with their kids.
    Having committed to this curious mission with his two sons, Major Hess went about the “making men” part by barking orders at us and then disappearing. Everywhere we went he found odd places for us to stay. Sometimes all three of us, sometimes just us boys. Sometimes backpacker hostels, sometimes obscure gasthauses. Before he disappeared he’d issue rendezvous instructions:
    “You are to meet me outside the train station. Friday. 14:00 hours sharp. Or I’m leaving without you!”
    Every time he parted he gave us a handful of money in the local currencies. Against the ill-fated arguments of my older and wiser brother, my father usually got his exchange rates screwed up. There were always pounds sterling to convert to Deutsch marks and French francs to convert into Dutch guilder. I couldn’t keep track of any of it but I knew that in Belgium we made out like bandits. We could buy bicycles if we wanted. But in West Germany we ended up with a lousy forty bucks for the week and Denmark we only had enough krona for about three chocolate éclairs. 
    Dad always gave the money to Ted—the heir apparent. That always set us up for fights. I would only get one of those chocolate éclairs and Ted would get one plus the extra one. Always. Besides eating pastries, my brother and I meandered down picture postcard boulevards, visited dusty museums, gawked at street performers, and ogled at chic European ladies. In Darmstadt we rented bicycles and got lost—almost missed our rendezvous with Dad. But he didn’t show up anyway and we went back to our gasthaus and watched German TV while waiting for him. 
    We weren’t always on our own. The three of us stayed together in a youth hostel in Molle, a Swedish fishing town on the North Sea. Ted whispered “Dad is on the lam.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. They had good hamburgers and a sandy beach up the coast with an area reserved for topless sunbathing that we could spy on from behind the dunes. The hostel was barracks-like with rows of bunkbeds in a large, open hall; perfect for hikers, itinerate seamen, and Nordic trolls. There was a curfew, though. When the doors locked at 22:00 hours, Dad was already gone. 
    Dad had a car in Sweden. He bought (procured might be a better word) a red MGB from a man at the British Customs Office in Jutland. When Dad took off he left my brother with a fresh infusion of Swedish krona, which was a fraction of the value of a Deutsch mark but probably good for a couple of hamburgers. There were no chocolate éclairs to be found in Molle. 
    A couple nights later, lights out in the barracks, snores up and down the line, I was awakened by a fellow camper shouting something that must have been the Swedish version of “Shut up!” or “Go away!”
    After a moment I heard a rapping on a window from the outside, and again, some Nordic curses. Then at a different window I heard the rapping again. Eventually it came to a window closer to my bunk and I sat up when I heard my father’s voice. 
    “Boys? Boys. You in there? Open the window.”
    My brother in the bunk below kicked my mattress. “Stay still. It might be someone pretending to be him.”
    Over the low grumbling and curses in several different languages, the window banging got louder. My brother had his blanket over his head, so I, the youngest guy in the barracks, got up and opened the window and my father clambered through it.
    The next day, out at the dockside hamburger shack Dad offered up yet another life-lesson for his sons. He’d driven his new MGB up the coast to Gothenburg where they had a casino—imitating James Bond in Casino Royale—and spent the night raking in a lot of Swedish krona.
     “Swedish men are pussies. They hold their cards like a banker’s whore and bet like they’re stealing their grandmother’s pralines.”
    I didn’t know what any of that meant.
    “I had those shitbirds shaking in their seats.”
    Shitbirds? That was a new one.
    “Half the time I was bluffing their asses. Just look at this.” He tossed a stack of 100-krona notes on the table between our hamburgers.    “Look. They even have a girl’s picture on their bills. That’s just to remind them who wears the goddamn pants in this country.”
    (The Swedish 100-krona note bears an image of Greta Garbo, the Swedish-born American film star.)
    “B-but . . .  but, Dad.” Ted always stuttered when talking to our father. “That’s not even worth $10 in America. P-probably closer to, to . . .”
    “You’re missing the goddamn point, son!” My brother flinched when Dad snatched the bill from the pile and leaned into Ted’s face. “Remember this, son.” 
     We held our breath. 
     “You’d never want to be a Swede.”
    I spoke up just to deflect my father’s attention away from my brother. “I don’t know, Dad. They look pretty happy to me. We were just down on the beach and . . .”
    “Happy?” His fist on the table drew the attention of those around us. “Sure, they look happy. Goddamn happy shitbirds all of them. And they have everything they want. Do you know why?”
    I wasn’t going to answer.
    “Because they are a bunch of panty-waisted socialists sucking off the tit of their goddamn mama-government!” He held up the 100-krona note, the one with Greta Garbo. People from other tables turned their heads to us. Ted was staring down at his shoes and wishing he were invisible.
    “Oh, they look happy but, boys, I’ll tell you something.” He leaned into us and spoke more softly—which was scarier than when he was yelling. “When a Swedish man goes home at night. And sticks his hands into his pants. And feels around there . . .” He blasted out his punch line: “. . . he can’t find his fucking balls!”
    I was getting an image that would stay with me forever.
    “Do you know why?” He came back with a roar. “Do you know why!”
    A squeaky “No” came from one of us.
   “Because goddamn socialists got no balls!”
    Now everyone in the hamburger joint was staring. Ted pressed himself hard against his chair. I was trying my best not to laugh. 
Now that my father had everyone’s attention, he wasn’t about to stop. “Sure, the floozies here have great knockers but the men are a bunch of shitbirds that can’t even get a hard-on. Then . . . then they’re always crying to us, the good old USA, to come in and save them from the goddamn Soviets.” He fell back in his chair quite proud that he’d cleared the air on that topic.

These life lessons from our father were still ringing in our ears when Ted and I were making our way to the US Embassy in Copenhagen.
   “You don’t know where you are going, do you?” he accused. Our long walk had my brother frustrated, especially as we were crossing the Sortdams Sø bridge for a second time.
    “And you don’t know how to read a map, do you?” I sassed back.
    He bounced his fist off the back of my head and started grabbing at the map. I ducked to the bridge railing, pulling hard against the grip he had on my collar. Stretching my arms out over the Sø, I started ripping away sections of the map, dropped them over the railing and watched them flutter down into the water with the wafting grace of falling leaves. Ted stood aghast and I reveled in the look of horror on his face. But before I could complete my sabotage, I felt “the arm of Justice” (his words) around my neck and found myself thrown to the sidewalk as all those pleasant Danes drove calmly past us. He now had the map, or what was left of it, and was cocking his head from side to side as if trying to determine north from south. I whimpered and pretended to be hurt.
    “Shut up, you moron!” he shouted.
    As he squinted about for landmarks I snatched the tattered pages out of his hands and took off running, him hot on my heels. In a life-or-death sprint I made it to the busy boulevard end of the bridge and, with no other choice, I ran into the traffic. Cars swarming, claxons screeching, Danish profanities, and, above it all my brother’s voice: “Don’t lose the map!”
    He caught me on the far curb and I went down again. This time I wasn’t faking. Smashed my elbow hard. There was blood. Ted dragged me to my feet, ready to kill me—but there it was: the American flag so gallantly streaming over a set of broad black doors that stood above a short marble staircase just up the sidewalk.
    Dag Hammarskjölds Allé was a wide boulevard lined with courtly Neo-Classical buildings set back from the roadway by a wide, granite-slab sidewalk. The entire boulevard strip was shaded by a thick canopy of sweet-smelling linden trees, planted in tidy Danish rows to give drivers the impression that they were passing through the woods. We quickly found out, by studying the map together, that this was not the American Embassy, per se, but rather a residential annex to the Embassy. 
    “Yes!” We whooped in victory and skittered toward the door.
    At that moment a taxicab, a black one with a yellow sign mounted above the windscreen, coming from the opposite direction screeched to a dead stop right in front of the building where we were headed. The back door swung open and out stepped our father. The major himself! The cabbie, in his quintessential cabbie cap, stepped out on the street side. My father stuck his head into the backseat and seemed to be tugging on something back there. 
    I started to run to him but was stopped by the sage hand of my brother. Oh, yeah. This was spy stuff. He might be removing a body or a small nuclear device. We stood in the middle of that broad sidewalk and just watched.
    It was a large, shapeless object, a white bundle of something that Dad was working to extract from the back seat. Or a white sheet, large enough to be a body. But no. Something bright green got hung up on the door latch—that ugly green T-shirt that my mom made me pack. It was a heap of laundry that he was humping out of the car. An argyle sock dropped onto the sidewalk. Not mine. I didn’t wear argyles. 
    A motor scooter was buzzing down the sidewalk toward us—a red Lambretta with a monkey of a man hunched over the handlebars. Just as my father had wrestled his load free of the back seat, that red Lambretta smashed into the open door, launching my father up into the air, the great white bundle flying over his head. Coming down along with my father was all the dirty laundry that we had left piled in our room, now spilling out all over the tidy Danish sidewalk.
    While Ted and I were out searching for him he, apparently, had gone back to fetch our dirties.
    My father splayed out on the ground, the monkey-man still astride his red Lambretta swapping potato-mouthed profanities with the taxi driver who was flailing his arms like he was conducting Tchaikovsky, and my crumpled underpants were fluttering down the sidewalk on the stiff Baltic breeze.
    A high-pitched shriek turned our heads to the black doors that flew open under the valiant American flag that paddled at the air above. A tall, voluptuous blond woman scurried down the marble steps in the tightest and shortest skirt I had ever seen. As she wriggled her way across those perfectly set granite sidewalk slabs she called to our father, “Teddy! Oh, Teddy”.
    Nobody called our father Teddy. Ever.
    She dropped to her knees with the crisp sound of an unseen tear of fabric and pulled my father’s head to her breast with a determination that, I thought, might snap his neck. Taking his head in her hands, she put smears of lipstick all over his face.
    “Teddy. Oh, Teddy, min smukke.” Or something like that.
    I stared at my brother and he at me. 
    Managing, somehow, to extract his head from the copious bosom of this . . . this Danish laundry lady? Clandestine operator? Paramour? . . . we watched our father rise up onto his elbow and look directly at us.
    “Boys. Boys! Where have you been?” His tone lacked its usual bombastic ferocity. “I went back to the room and you were nowhere to be found.” He sounded almost apologetic.
    What he was was busted. Busted by his own sons. It was there—with our dirty T-shirts and rumpled skivvies laid out for the viewing pleasure of the entire Kingdom of Denmark—that we brothers found the authentic version of our father, the man who had been a mystery to us all our lives. I couldn’t help but crack up laughing at this slapstick routine. My big brother, Ted, on the other hand, stood beside me, benumbed in a shroud of humiliation from which he never emerged. 


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Raised in a Marine Corps family that moved around quite a bit, Marc Hess was exposed to a range of different cultures from an early age. Both his fiction and non-fiction explore differing interpretations of what’s real and what is not. He raised his family and writes from his home in Fredericksburg, TX.  His novel, The Gillespie County Fair, is an Amazon Best Seller in Southern Fiction.

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