The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  *

  “This was right after the war?” I said, squirming in the chair.

  “Yes, late 1945,” Agnes Brown said.

  So this couldn’t have been about Mamma and Pappa, I thought, mulling over the discrepancy between what Agnes Brown had told me and what I had heard from Gwen. Agnes said that he had got a family killed. Gwen said that he had killed someone.

  In the mirror I watched the hazy reflection of a car’s headlamps on St Sunniva Street. A beam of light swept through as it turned, and I saw that my hair had been given a strange side parting.

  “Did Einar ever talk about a woman named Isabelle,” I asked.

  “Isabelle, yes.” Agnes laughed bitterly. “Isabelle Daireaux. Yes. I can promise you that he talked about Isabelle Daireaux.”

  *

  One Saturday in 1945, around closing time, Agnes was sweeping the floor of the salon, and looking forward to dinner and a relaxing weekend with a novel sent to her by her sister in Måløy. Her attention was drawn to a gaunt face at the window, and she soon recognised the Norwegian whose hair she had cut two years earlier. His hair was tangled, his clothes filthy and he hardly seemed to notice the people around him. After everyone had left, he came inside and stared at the floor. Pointing at the telephone on the counter, he asked if Agnes could take a message for him.

  “What kind of message,” Agnes said.

  “Isabelle,” he said. “I have to get hold of Isabelle again.”

  “I’m not running a telephone exchange,” Agnes said, putting down the broom, and then she told him about the rumours swirling in Lerwick that he had betrayed Duncan Winterfinch.

  “No,” Einar said, “Winterfinch betrayed them.”

  Agnes stared at the broom, and then at Einar, and thought that he both looked and smelled like someone she ought to sweep away. “My name is Einar Hirifjell,” he said. “But if anyone rings, they might ask for Oscar Ribaut.”

  It was his desperation, intense and sincere, that Agnes gave in to. But she could not know that it was the beginning of a fatal, lifelong pact between the two of them. Einar explained, how during the war, he had travelled to the north of France via Spain under the alias of Oscar Ribaut. The aim was to carry out a secret, civilian mission for Duncan Winterfinch. Just what the mission entailed, he would not say. But the renumeration was to be a generous sum of money and the right to live on Haaf Gruney in perpetuity.

  In France he had decided not to execute the plan, but his reasons for that remained just as diffuse to Agnes as the mission itself. Instead he joined the resistance movement, La Résistance; he spoke perfect French after his years in Paris, and was accepted as though a born Frenchman. The resistance group, based in Authuille near the old First World War battlefields, was chronically short of explosives and so had made a reckless plan to procure more. They proposed to go into some fenced-off woods, gather undetonated shells from the previous war, remove the explosives – which are almost imperishable – and use them against the Germans.

  This was how Einar met Isabelle Daireaux, my maternal grandmother. She was the oldest surviving child of a family of six. Two of her brothers had been in the same infantry platoon when the Germans broke through the Ardennes, and were shot within a day of each other. Einar moved into a shack on their farm, pretending to be an unemployed relative who had been a cabinetmaker in Paris.

  As Agnes retold the story, it was unclear whether it was Einar or Isabelle who had suggested that they dig up the explosives, and thus bore the responsibility for the fatal events that later took place.

  After the First World War, some time in the 1920s, the fields around Authuille had been ploughed up and cleared of skeletons and shells during a far-reaching campaign led by the French authorities. Several million tonnes of explosives were excavated, and the work was as dangerous as soldiering. Gradually the fields became tillable again.

  But the battles in the woods had been so intense that there was no possibility of clearing them. There were more corpses and shells here than in any other place. Soon the groves were seen only as burial sites, best known by the nicknames the soldiers had given them. In this way, Bois d’Elville became known as Devil’s Wood.

  The occupying power knew of the remaining shells, but could not station a guard in the area at all times. Somehow Einar and Isabelle had found a safe path into one of the woods, and began to gather explosives.

  The explosives were to be used to blow a hole in the southern wall of a prison in the city of Amiens; the Germans had a number of central resistance figures imprisoned there. It was a decisive campaign, coordinated with the Allies and given the code name “Operation Jericho”, for obvious reasons.

  It was not long before Isabelle and Einar had fallen in love. Intensely, as Agnes had understood it, an impression gleaned from the few words Einar had used to describe her. The war made everyone quick to act, and greedy, because life could come to an end at any moment. Einar had acquired an audacity, and Isabelle too, and in that way they drove each other to be ever more daring. Soon Einar regretted not having transferred the farm to his brother. He considered it likely that he would die in France, and remain listed as missing in Norwegian records for years to come.

  Only one other person knew that Oscar Ribaut was actually Einar Hirifjell, and that was Gaston Robinette, the leader of the resistance group. He was the head clerk at the agricultural bank – before the war an authority on counterfeiting, during the war an expert in creating false identity papers. Einar had kept his Norwegian passport hidden in the lining of his jacket, and had shown it to Robinette to gain his trust.

  Einar found an unsentimental solution to the problem of the allodial right, which was to advance his own death. Robinette placed his Norwegian passport on the battered corpse of an informer, and in that way the message arrived in Norway which placed the farm in Sverre’s hands.

  The day of Operation Jericho arrived. The blasts were heard across Amiens, Allied planes dive-bombed the northern and eastern walls of the prison, enabling hundreds of prisoners to escape.

  The Germans took their time with the reprisals and spent the following months rounding up La Résistance. People later believed that there must have been an informer at the centre of the resistance group, because one night, in the early summer of 1944, the Gestapo visited Authuille and the neighbouring towns. In a well-orchestrated raid with nearly four hundred German soldiers taking part, they apprehended most of the resistance members. Only a few, among them Gaston Robinette, managed to get away.

  Einar was holed up in the woods that night, and he too got away. The Daireaux family was not so lucky. Isabelle, her sister, her parents and grandparents were locked up in that part of the prison that was still intact. The day after the raid Einar ran into Robinette and another resistance fighter in Authuille. They suspected him of having informed on the others, since he had so conveniently been elsewhere at the time. Robinette had pulled out a knife and asked whether the trick with the Norwegian passport had in fact been a signal to the enemy. Then, at the approach of a German patrol, Einar had made use of the commotion to flee. He left Authuille and called on a friend from his time in Paris, a man who now lived in a remote corner by the coast, and he remained in hiding there until the liberation of France.

  Later Einar learned of the fate of the Daireaux family from a fellow prisoner. After being interrogated under duress for nineteen days, they were tethered to posts in the parade ground of the fortress, visible from the prison cells. The youngest girl, Pauline, was fifteen. For a long time nothing happened, the square remained empty, and then after an hour an audience arrived. Fellow prisoners forced by the Germans to watch. A soldier went to Isabelle’s mother Nicole, and cut her loose, only to hang her with a noose suspended from a meat hook. When she stopped kicking they released the rope, took the noose from her neck as her body lay on the ground, and hung her husband, Edouard, with the same rope.

  The rest of the family, the two grandparents and a cousin, were shot one by one. Pauline was
spared, as was Isabelle, who was cut loose and tortured all over again. Some days later the sisters were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

  Einar was never free again. The worst of his torments was that Isabelle had gone to the camp believing that he had betrayed her. Directly after the capitulation he travelled to Germany and arrived at Ravensbrück, but could find no trace of her.

  Winterfinch had smashed the window back then because Einar had telephoned to say that the mission had failed, and at the same time had asked for money to search for Isabelle.

  To anyone but Einar it would have sounded like an illogical and illegitimate request, since he had failed to execute Winterfinch’s mission. But when Agnes pressed him on this, Einar refused to say, until the day he died, what the original mission had been.

  “So what do you actually want?” Agnes had asked Einar the day he visited the salon.

  “To borrow your telephone number,” he said. “So that she can get hold of me. Because I’m going to be travelling.”

  Einar would continue to search for Isabelle Daireaux, spreading the word that he could be contacted on Lerwick 118. At a well-run hair salon where someone was always available to take a message.

  “But how will you fund your search?” Agnes protested.

  “I’m going to help lift Our Saviour back on the cross,” he said.

  *

  For Einar had a skill which came to be fully utilised and which provided him with shelter and the help he needed; a skill he had discovered in April 1940 when he pieced together the great crucifix in Saksum: he could repair church artefacts. Throughout the post-war period he travelled to war-ravaged cities around Europe visiting bombed-out churches, and offered to rebuild altarpieces and wooden sculptures that had been destroyed during the devastation. His only request was that the priests would look for any information about a prisoner named Isabelle Daireaux. He slept in the sacristies, repaired shattered furniture and ornaments, and in the evenings he wrote, with the help of the priests, letters to ex-prisoners of Ravensbrück, to the Red Cross, to the Allied offices, to the national registry offices.

  Einar’s one obsession was to find her, and he was far from alone; at that time tens of thousands were searching for their missing loved ones. Einar scraped together money for an old car, examined prisoner lists as soon as they were brought to light, and was met with a sad look of recognition when he visited the offices of the Red Cross. He told all of them that he could be reached on a Shetland number: Lerwick 118.

  The same message was sent to Hirifjell in a short letter stating that he was alive, that he was relinquishing his allodial rights and had no wish to be contacted by the family unless someone died.

  In the flat above the hair salon, Agnes soon made Einar’s loss her own. She had his name entered into the directory with her number, as though they lived under the same roof. He called every week, from France, from Czechoslovakia, from the regions bordering the Soviet Union, and asked if anyone had come forward.

  Before long Agnes began to hope that Einar would call just to speak to her. Whenever she picked up the receiver, she held out a flicker of hope that it was someone with the message that Isabelle was dead.

  And so it went on, until Einar telephoned one day just before closing time. He did not hurry to ask the usual question, just said simply: “It’s me.”

  Agnes had asked him to repeat himself, because his voice had completely changed. In a strangled voice he managed to convey that the Red Cross had found some documents from Ravensbrück; Isabelle had been sent on a death march, had frozen to death and was believed to be buried somewhere in eastern Germany.

  For a brief moment, like a beacon of light through the hopelessness, Agnes was ashamed of the relief she felt. She hoped that Einar would now be able to forget Isabelle and return to Shetland. But that was not to be. Because Einar’s despair was intensified by a piece of information given to him by the Red Cross, namely that Isabelle Daireaux had given birth to a daughter in Ravensbrück in January 1945.

  *

  As Agnes Brown cut my hair, strands kept slipping down my neck and my back and an itch had set in. At the same time an unease had grown inside me, an itch that could not be scratched.

  At first I put it down to the certainty that the shells they had both collected were linked somehow to the incident in 1971. But then I felt an incredulity that ran much deeper, I felt it here and now as I sat in the barber’s chair.

  According to Agnes, Einar had not known if he was the father of Isabelle’s child, or whether the child had been conceived as a result of rape. Since my grandfather had been fighting for the Germans, I could hardly deplore that fact alone; I could deplore the act of rape but not the uniform, because it was the uniform Bestefar had worn.

  But my doubt soon evaporated.

  Agnes had almost finished cutting my hair and was tidying up, mirroring her work in 1943 when she gave Einar Hirifjell a coupe Lyon and turned him into the man I recognised from the counterfeit passport.

  At first I put it down to the hairstyle, the fact that the face in the mirror was no longer mine. But then I realised that the man staring back at me was Oscar Ribaut.

  6

  HIS SCYTHE WAS STILL SHARP. TWO STROKES OF THE whetstone and the rust the sea air had left on the blade was gone. I took it outside and cut the grass around the buildings on Haaf Gruney. Blue and black peat smoke billowed from the chimney. I had lit the kitchen stove and considered whether I should have soup or fried sausages for dinner.

  If only we could have eaten together, Einar and I. We could have pottered about, become the realities of each other’s assumptions. No need for grand declarations. The smoke of Early Morning Pipe in the air.

  Even after Einar and Mamma had met, the uncertainty over who was her father must have ached inside them. But the truth had emerged last night – to Agnes and me – the answer to the most burning question of all. But it came twenty years too late.

  They took hold of me, as though my entire life I had envisaged a living-room wall with the marks and hooks of pictures which had once hung there. Now their faces filled the frames: Isabelle Daireaux, Einar and Mamma; Alma, Sverre and Pappa.

  My parents had been cousins. I felt no conflict, no shame, just a closeness. I knew that I would never tell anyone about it. Apart from the old priest, perhaps. Nobody else deserved to know, nobody else needed to know. It was not an issue; on the contrary, I was proud to have a bloodline connecting me to the altarpiece in Saksum, to Ruhlmann’s Parisian workshop. But people would interpret it differently, I had seen that happen. Hateful people with long beaks hacking at the point where one was most vulnerable, the core of one’s dignity.

  Bestefar may have had an inkling that Einar was Nicole’s father. He saw me grow up to resemble the brother he could not stand. Yet never a hurtful word. He just kept on with his seed potatoes, which were not related to each other, but were each other.

  *

  As I cut the grass I could feel Bestefar’s presence, the man who taught me to wield the scythe. His warm hands over mine. The straight swing, my grip on the weather-bleached wood, the steel that left the grass lying in straight rows.

  They were with me, all of them, I felt they were watching over me. Could I think of Isabelle Daireaux as my grandmother? There was a place inside me for that word. So far Einar was just Einar, even though there was another place for him too.

  I had some food, kibbled Irish sausages, and tidied up, and by evening the house was warm and cosy. I put new batteries into the radio and listened to N.R.K. on a crackling long wave.

  Persistent rainfall was expected across much of Østlandet. An unease lodged itself in my body. Too much moisture and the entire potato harvest could fail. As an additional reminder, a hard rain began to fall, so hard that the drops appeared to be coming out of the sea. The view of Unst was gone, and I feared that rain would be just as heavy back home.

  The following morning I was up at the crack of dawn. The sea was flat and calm. I r
owed across to Unst, sat on a hill and looked down on Gwen’s stone cottage. At around nine I saw movement behind the curtains. She opened the front door, stretched in the fair weather and went back inside.

  I checked the time and decided to go down, but was not sure how to explain my visit. Because I had learned something from Agnes Brown that suggested Gwen was not who she said she was.

  *

  When Agnes had finished cutting my hair we went upstairs to her living room. She gave me the set of keys to Haaf Gruney she had kept all these years, apparently relieved to be rid of them. She told me that Einar had searched for the child, whose name he did not know, for many years. He took no heed of how hopeless it was, nor did he know for sure that the child was his – even though this was now clear to us. Almost a thousand children had been born in Ravensbrück during the war, but the Red Cross estimated that perhaps ten or fifteen had survived.

  I pictured him spending his days with C-clamps and wood glue, face to face with crucifixes, eye to eye with the apostles, hand in hand with the Virgin Mary. Driving out his demons. It must have been impossible not to become religious.

  He had used the same method as in his search for Isabelle. Grateful priests helped him to write letters, he visited orphanages and enquired about every child born in January 1945. It was a search he must have realised was impossible, because even if the child were still alive, in all likelihood it had been adopted and was unaware of its origins. In the fifties he became more and more disheartened. Because of the Cold War, entry permits were difficult to come by, borders were closed, and Einar began to spend more time on Haaf Gruney, always restless, haunted, and with a hateful eye on Duncan Winterfinch. He fitted out the cabinetmaking workshop and earned enough money to survive by making simple furniture for a small shop in Lerwick.