When The Gods Are Paying Attention Bheka Pierce   © Copyright 2025 by Bheka Pierce

Image by beauty_of_nature from Pixabay

It was only by chance that I was here on the sidewalk in Copenhagen. Hard rain during the night had drowned my plan to mow the backyard. Instead, I cycled to the bank to get a hundred-dollar bill for each of my kids back in America. I'd tell them--as always--not to spend it all in one place.

Halfway to the bank, cycling along happily, no hands on the handlebars, just like when I’d been a kid, I discovered I had no pen in my shirt pocket. When had that last happened? Normally, there were two or three there, at least one being red for correcting the essays of my students at the international school in Copenhagen. Any of them could be used in case some snatch of a poem or idea for a short story meandered into my mind.

I used to tell the kids in my classes I might be among the very best 100 unpublished American novelists in all of Denmark. Perhaps I've not done much with my life, other than to teach kids a bit of grammar and invite them to take a seat on the raft with Huck and Jim. Perhaps that's enough, I thought, pedaling along.

Years ago, back in America, I sold a few poems to newspapers and scholarly quarterlies. When I was sixteen, a wonderful English teacher, Miss Krastin, made me submit a short story for a national contest for teenagers. One of the judges had written a pleasant letter saying they were publishing a dozen entries. Had they decided on thirteen, my fine story would have made the cut. Maybe that judge had written that to a lot of kids, but I kept the letter, and made sure I always had at least one pen in my breast pocket, just in case.

While my own son and daughter were growing up I made up stories to tell them at bedtime, but didn't write much. Now that the children live in America, and my wife is a decade dead, I've written a couple of novels to keep myself company during the long darks of Danish winters. What would it be, I sometimes wonder, to write one novel or even one poem that would last, that would redeem all the things I’ve failed to get right in his life? Cycling lends itself to such introspection in a way that driving never does.

When I reached the shopping area, I headed not for the bank, but for the stationery store across the street.

“You are not,” said my late wife in my head, “going in there to buy yet another pen!”

“Of course not,” I replied, “just a little innocent browsing.”

“You and pen shops,” she said, the old smile in her voice, for this was a tried-and-true topic shared throughout the twenty-eight years of our marriage.

For the pleasure of prolonging the memory, I said, “Can I help it if I feel naked without a pen in my pocket?”

“As if you don’t have eight hundred and thirty-seven pens littering every bookshelf and flat surface in our house.”

It pleased me she had said our house, but when I asked if anyone could ever have enough pens she wouldn’t answer.

The green-ink roller-ball pens I now prefer are two for forty kroner, roughly eight dollars. Instead, I got one that wrote in crimson with a fine point, the kind that lets one write copiously down the margins of student essays, usually a mix of suggestions and praise, sometimes writing longer end comments than the length of the essay itself.

You never knew, after all, if you might be tutoring a future Nobel Laureate. And--having finally admitted that this particular prize might elude me--I'm prepared to settle for one of my students standing tall in Stockholm and telling the world he or she owed it all to a high school English teacher, may the old warthog rest in peace.

The small detour meant that I reached the heavy glass outer door of the bank as an African woman stepped through the inner door. Not a European Black, nor an African American, but by her dress and facial features a southern African, possibly even from Swaziland, where I worked when in the Peace Corps so many years ago. Swaziland, where I met and married the daughter of Scandinavian missionaries, where we lived for six happy years before the tug of Denmark had pulled her home.

Caught in a memory, I opened the outer door. In the space between the outer and inner door, the African woman had turned around to talk to a small child, perhaps four years old, who was pressing her small palms against the inside of the inner door. The woman was saying to the child in siSwati, “You must stay this side. I am coming just now.”

The small girl, her lower lip turned down and her eyes unblinking, watched her mother turn and pass me. I followed the little girl’s eyes looking after her mother crossing the street. The girl tried to push the inner door with her small palms, but the thick glass was too heavy. I'd bet she was a handful. Her mother had braided her hair into twenty or thirty short spikes each with a ribbon that matched her dress.

When a tall Danish man inside the bank reached the inner door and pushed the handle above the girl’s head, she was through it before him and a second later rushed past me, still holding open the outer door. I reached down and took her by the hand, saying, “Sorry, little buttercup, your mother, she is coming back just now.”

The girl looked up at me with huge eyes before her lower lip began to curl down again.

“Are you from Ngwane?” I asked in siSwati, using the Swazi name for their country.

She nearly smiled to hear her language coming from the mouth of this old and large-as-an-ox European man, but her eyes looked down, for she must have remembered a child must not look directly into the eyes of an adult. She murmured to her shoes, “Yebo, baba,” which in English meant, “Yes, old father.”

Bending over slightly, I led her by the hand back into the bank and sat her on a chair in the corner. I asked in siSwati if she could like a good laying hen sit there quietly until her mother returned 'just now'. With her head down, the girl murmured, “I must try, old father.”

As I was walking towards the only teller available at the other end of the long room I realized that several of the bank’s other customers had been giving me odd looks. I knew why. In Denmark, no adult male would dream or dare to take the hand of an unattached little girl and lead her anywhere. But I had been momentarily back in Swaziland, back in a culture where every child was the child of every adult and as such was looked after and watched over.

The teller took my Visa card, ran it through the scanner, fetched two portraits of Mr. Franklin from a lower drawer, and slid the receipt across for me to sign. After I had done so with my new red pen and was folding the two notes to slip into my pocket, I glanced around to make sure the small African child was still sitting in the big chair.

She was not there.

I looked towards the heavy doors. A lavender-haired woman with a walker occupied the space between the outer and inner doors. The little girl stood beside the walker. When two teenage girls opened the outer door, the girl darted between them.

“Jesus, Bheka, go get her!” shouted my wife, just as if she were beside me, because she was still so alive in my head and because she had grown up in that other culture of watchful aunts and uncles.

I ran for the door, all 250 pounds of me, doing my best not to tip over or flatten the other bank customers as I dodged between them. I had no time then to wonder what they might be thinking, bank robber or something, but only hoped no heroic type might try to stop me.

As I squeezed past the woman and her walker and burst through the outer door, I grabbed the handle to make a tighter turn. The little girl was now about ten feet from the street. Another few steps would bring her to the curb. A maroon SUV on high wheels was rapidly approaching over the cobblestones. Surely, surely the driver must see the girl in her yellow dress and ribbons. But the vehicle did not slow. I realized the elderly driver was barely tall enough to see over the steering wheel.

The girl, having reached the curb, turned sideways, oblivious to the traffic, and was lowering a scuffed shoe, no thought of danger in her beribboned head. In some beautiful rural valley in Swaziland where she lived was there even such a thing as traffic?

Directly between me and the tiny girl stood two pedestrians, a woman with a straw basket and a man in a purple tracksuit. Neither moved, as if frozen by the accident about to take place in front of their eyes. A moment later, they could have been duckpins as I bowled myself between them.

The girl had stepped out onto the cobblestones, directly in the path of the SUV’s right headlight, now possibly twenty feet from her, the vehicle still coming at speed. Propelled by my own weight beyond my balance, I flung my right arm out and got hold of the girl’s right elbow, yanking her back and upwards as though—it occurred to me later—I were pulling a pickerel from the lake. I used my left hand to push back off the back door of the SUV and somehow managed to keep my balance.

The SUV kept right on going and went through the light on yellow. The woman with the straw basket and the man in the purple tracksuit stared at me as though I’d recently arrived from some far away planet. The little girl, now perched on my forearm, had eyes the size of Kennedy half-dollars.

“Come on, small darling,” I said to her in English, “let’s get you back inside and out of harm’s way.”

I was about to put the little girl onto a chair as far from the doors as I could when an African man in a bright dashiki emerged from a nearby office. The man could have been the brother or at least a cousin of the headmaster at the rural school where I taught while in the Peace Corps.

I asked the man partly in English, partly in siSwati, “This little intombizana wouldn’t be one of yours, would she?”

“Oh, yes, this one, she is my daughter,” he said, smiling at his daughter, who was now reaching her arms out to him.

Making the transfer, I said, “I found her footing outside.”

“Oh, this naughty one, she is always doing these things,” he said, not sounding surprised, as he gazed around the room. “I am thinking she was searching her mother.”

“She was thinking to cross the street.”

The man said, “Hawu,” the African expression for surprise.

“A very busy street.”

Understanding came into the man’s eyes. “Thank you, my friend,” he said, putting forth his hand.

I took his hand, and although we were thousands of miles from Swaziland we continued to shake for some time as is the Swazi custom. The Swazis, unlike the New Englanders of my youth, seemed unafraid of physical contact.

“May I tell you something, buti wami?” I asked. My brother. “I know that in Swaziland, where I, too, once lived, we are all careful of each other’s small ones, but here in Denmark it is unfortunately not so. Here in Denmark you must have extra looking eyes to watch this naughty little one of yours.”

The small girl put her arms around her father’s neck and hugged her cheek to his.

On an impulse, I removed the new red pen from my pocket and put it in the pocket of the man’s dashiki.

The man regarded me in surprise and asked, “Why are you giving me this pen?”

“I think it will bring you good luck,” I replied. “It has already brought me good luck.”

The man said, “Today, we have been lucky.”

Cycling home, I laughed and wondered. What were the odds? What if it had not rained during the night? What if I had mowed the grass and not gone to the bank that morning? What if I had not unaccountably left the house without at least one pen and then been delayed ten minutes to buy a new pen I did not need? Or if I had not lived in Swaziland and come to understand its compassionate culture? Or if my dead wife had not shouted at me to get a move on?

At the top of the last grade, about to begin the leisurely coast home, my wife said, “You did good.”

“I did only okay,” I said. “I am too fat without you, and I was almost too late.”

“You did way better than okay,” she said. “Forget the novels. This was better.”

I grinned and said, “Easy for you to say.”

In my mind's ear, I heard again her lovely and luminous laughter, and her saying, “Oh, boy, here we go again.”

I grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts, got a degree in English from Rutgers, went to Swaziland (now Eswatini) in 1970 with the Peace Corps, met my wife there, the daughter of Danish missionaries. We taught there as well as for many years here at the Copenhagen International School and raised two great kids. The piece I’ve attached is nonfiction. It all happened in the order related here. It may sound like fiction, but that’s because whatever I write sounds like fiction. Even my grocery lists sound like fiction.