Windows [antikvár]

foreword by the author's sonI never met my father. Men from the Gestapo came for him in April 1942, one month before my birth. Perhaps my mother's advanced condition had something to do with their not taking her away too. "It's a routine interrogation," they told her, but she knew that wasn't so, that she'd never see Father again. After the war, over a period of months, my mother questioned former inmates of the concentration camps where Danes were habitually sent, but no one had even seen him.Only years later, when I began asking my mother more specific questions about the man whose picture I had always had beside my bed, did I find out about the novel. In the months preceding his arrest and disappearance, really from the moment he knew for certain that someone like me was on the way, my father set out in his spare time to write a work of fiction. I'm told he joked about it, saying he'd already planted so many trees, and now that a child was about to bless our turbulent world the only thing lacking was to write a book, and in times like these it had to be done fast, because one never knew how much time was left. It appears that he managed to finish the first draft a few weeks before the Gestapo squadron came to get him, but my mother never read it and didn't even know where the manuscript had gone. She assumed, naturally enough, that it had been lost or had ended up in the possession of some obscure colonel of the secret police.Recently, however, we recovered the novel, after its being missing for some thirty-odd years. A cousin of mine found it in the bottom of a trunk full of old papers and periodicals, as she was preparing to move from the huge country house that was now too big for her family now that her children had married. We figured that my father