by Lily Graham
Trine would have to somehow be a mother to a young woman at the hardest time in the girl’s life.
Over the course of the next few days, on a diet of Lisbet’s soup, Trine’s concern and Bjørn’s boundless, dogged love and adoration, Asta became more lucid, and yet more withdrawn.
Trine found it difficult to get more than a few sentences out of her, and days after her arrival, she still didn’t know the full story of what had happened. Just the small snippets that she had supplied, between coughing fits. Trine didn’t push her. Asta was far from well, and was easily tired. The one thing that brought her comfort, however, was Bjørn, and Trine was grateful to him.
Speaking about the dog was a safe topic, and when they did it was, for a brief moment, like the clouds parted, and she saw a glimpse of the little girl that had captured Trine’s childless heart from the moment she’d met the twins with their irrepressible grins at age five, eleven years before – before they had any idea what the future held.
‘I’ve never had a dog before,’ Asta had said, when she’d been with Trine for a week. ‘Papa—’ she started, then looked away.
‘He wouldn’t allow it,’ supplied Trine. ‘He was always afraid of them, even as a boy.’
Asta was surprised. Papa had always made out that the reason was the size of their apartment, which hadn’t always gone down particularly well with Asta, considering that four of their neighbours had dogs. She was also allergic, but that didn’t stop her wanting one.
‘Perhaps it was just as well,’ said Asta, as a large coughing fit overtook her, and she wheezed into a handkerchief. Her thin chest felt battered and sore. She sighed, and lay down, wiped out.
‘You know, a friend of mine said that was one of the other “laws” they were looking to change, that we wouldn’t be allowed to keep pets?’
‘Who?’ asked Trine. ‘The landlords?’
Asta shook her head. ‘The Nazis. They’re thinking of forbidding Jews from keeping them.’
Trine blinked. ‘I can’t believe it.’
Asta was right; by 1941 Jews would be forbidden from keeping dogs, cats and birds.
Asta looked up at her then, and raised a brow. ‘That’s what you can’t believe?’ Just as another cough tore through her chest and she doubled over, fighting for air.
And Trine felt as if she were the child, Asta the adult.
It was during Asta’s second week that she ventured out of the bedroom to the kitchen, on her weak, unsteady legs.
‘Asta!’ Trine cried, seeing her in the doorway. ‘You’re still very sick, you shouldn’t be out of bed!’
Malthe had come to check on her that morning, and said that he was worried; she wasn’t recovering as he would have hoped.
He’d patted her on the shoulder, his eyes kind behind a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘She will get better, it will just take time. She is young and healthy, there’s no reason to fear.’
But fear Trine did. Especially seeing her looking half-faint and deathly pale in the doorway.
‘Please, Aunt Trine,’ she wheezed. ‘I just have to be anywhere besides that room, just for a little while. While I’m there… I don’t sleep, not unless I take the medicine that the doctor gave me… and if I don’t sleep, well, then…’ She shuddered. ‘Then I see him, oh God.’
Trine helped her to take a seat at the kitchen table, her own eyes filling with tears.
Asta blew her cheeks out, determined not to cry. Suddenly, she smiled, and Trine looked at her in surprise.
‘I was just thinking that Jürgen would have told me to pull myself together, to stop being such a girl.’ She laughed. ‘Though, really, he was more the girl,’ she said with a watery smile. ‘If he got a papercut he’d scream, and the first time he hit his funny bone he started to cry.’ She bit her lip, tears leaking down her face. She dashed them away. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t keep talking about him…’
Trine cupped Asta’s face in her roughened hands. ‘Oh, darling, no, speak about him – I want to hear, and you cry if you need to cry, scream if you have to—’
‘Scream?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Scream.’ Trine nodded.
So Asta did, and Trine joined in. The sound was wild and feral. There was barking, and then Bjørn came rushing to the kitchen.
For a moment, it seemed like Bjørn understood.
The young forest ranger from the Danish-German border, Kalle Blomkvist, who had saved Asta, went over his mental notes. Keep it simple, he reminded himself, don’t elaborate.
When they called his name, he waited a moment – be too casual and it could come across as unprofessional, too eager, and that could seem like he was jumpy, had something to hide.
He had one goal – and that was to convince the interviewing panel that he had been nowhere near the red-haired officer Smidt and the girl who had disappeared, seemingly into thin air. The girl they’d spent the past week combing every inch of the forest for.
The door opened and Kalle’s eyes widened for a moment. Jesus, he thought. They’ve assembled an army.
There were six people seated across a table, each with a serious expression. He reminded himself that he wasn’t German, and that he was employed by the Danish border control. Technically he wasn’t under their command.
‘Take a seat,’ said a man with short black hair and a thin moustache. ‘As you are aware, a few nights ago, a group of Jewish refugees attempted to cross the border into Denmark.’
Kalle frowned. ‘Did they succeed?’
A tall man with piercing blue eyes leaned forward in his seat. ‘They didn’t get that far. But let’s not play games and pretend that they were there for their health – three have been captured: a man by the name of Goran and his wife, Sofie, and an Orthodox Jew named Esther, who all admitted as much… the other three were shot and killed.’
Kalle had to school his face to hide the horror of the man’s words. That is not how they dealt with refugees.
‘What we are interested in is what happened to the two youths that were accompanying the adults, who chose to run off,’ continued the tall man.
‘Well, I couldn’t say.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because when the young ones started to run, so did the others. There was an older man and a woman who was nearest me – and when they started to run, I went after them.’
The tall man frowned, then consulted his notes.
Kalle knew that they would have spoken to the other officer, a blond one with a thin moustache called Krill, who would have been best-placed to remember what he’d done as they’d almost run together after everyone started to flee. It was only when Kalle heard a girl’s scream that he began to run in the opposite direction. He was sure that Krill was occupied with the old man and woman and hadn’t seen, but he couldn’t be sure.
‘I heard a scream, you see, and I decided to investigate. I saw a young woman running, and I went after her.’
Kalle made up a lie about deciding to track her but falling in a ditch. ‘Knocked myself clean out. I woke up half a day later.’
Thankfully, he had a really large bruise on his forehead from a similar accident that had happened not long after he’d got home from delivering Asta to his father; he’d slipped and tripped, hitting his head on a rock, punch drunk with fatigue.
‘And no one saw you – people were combing the forest?’
‘Not well enough, obviously.’
One of the other men laughed. ‘Well, apparently, you are the best tracker in the forest – pity you couldn’t find yourself.’
Kalle offered a weak smile and the other man continued. ‘Or the girl.’
Kalle resisted tugging at the unfamiliar and uncomfortable shirt and collar he was wearing; it was stiffer than his usual ranger’s uniform, and pressed against his throat.
‘Me too – perhaps I could have avoided this headache,’ he said, pointing to his scalp.
‘Or ours,’ said one of the others.
‘But no matter
. We will rectify that now.’
‘Sir?’ asked Kalle, confused.
‘We need you to work with an artist – get a sketch drawn up that we will begin to circulate in all the border towns.’
‘But I didn’t see her—’
‘Oh, that’s fine – there’s someone else who will help, against their will obviously. Her twin, I believe – the spitting image of his missing sister.’
Kalle tried to hide his shock. ‘I thought – well, I’d heard that he was dead.’
‘Almost. Took two bullets. Well, one just grazed his ear, really… but anyway, he’s alive. He doesn’t want to talk to us, of course, but maybe you can convince him – tell him you’ll find her – as you can imagine, he’s most distressed.’ Then he smiled, as if that amused him.
20
‘You’re lucky,’ said a male nurse with thin lips, and penchant for cruelty, ‘for a filthy little Jew bastard.’
Like most bullies, his taunts weren’t particularly clever, or original. And this one was beginning to grate, as it was the third time he’d said it this week.
Jürgen turned his face to the wall. He hadn’t said anything, not yet. They wanted to know what had happened to his sister. They wanted to cut a deal, they said…
They could try all they liked; there wasn’t a deal to be had that would make him betray his twin.
The thin-lipped nurse bustled over with a glass of water. It was filthy, the edges rimmed in bits of food, and stained with grease. Despite this, Jürgen licked his cracked, parched lips. The bastard was trying to force it out of him any way he could. He wasn’t an ordinary nurse – but someone employed by the hospital prison, where Jürgen was being kept until he recovered. For the time being there was at least the pretence of humanity, though it was very thinly veiled.
‘But that luck is coming to an end…’ said the nurse, his eyes shining. ‘Attempted murder – that’s what they’re charging you with, along with attempting to illegally cross a border – that might be life in prison. But don’t worry, I think if you make it they’ll send you to a camp. Who knows, you might even get to help build one of the new ones they’re talking about… you’ll like it there, filth, with all your own kind.’
Jürgen stared at the ceiling. He knew the nurse was waiting for him to grab the water. Jürgen knew he liked it when he did, because he saw the look of satisfaction when Jürgen winced in pain as he tried to sit up, how he gasped, the look of revulsion as his lips touched the dirty glass, yet he couldn’t help gulping down the liquid. He wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Not today.
He closed his eyes, though he hated doing that too. Whenever he did, he saw that huge oaf, that ranger carrying Asta away, while she screamed… and screamed.
‘I’ll just take this… if you aren’t thirsty,’ said the nurse, with a small greedy smile.
Jürgen gritted his teeth. He opened his eyes, then looked at him through narrow slits. ‘Stop.’
The nurse paused, and Jürgen took the glass, a small shudder tearing through him. He tried to block out the nurse’s look of triumph.
He swallowed the greasy, dirty water, along with his pride. The latter wouldn’t keep him alive, and that was his only priority – to stay alive – so that he could find the bastard that had taken his sister.
21
No one told you how exhausting it was to grieve. How all-consuming. How the only escape was sometimes sleep – when for just a moment you were you again. As a young girl, Asta couldn’t even fall asleep without the sound of his snoring, who’d once broken down in sobs at the idea of having a wall between them, while they slept in separate beds.
She pressed her face into Bjørn’s soft fur as she sobbed. ‘I couldn’t even face that. How do I learn to live without him?’
As the days passed, it was clear that Asta’s condition had worsened, along with her mental health.
Trine called for Malthe, who looked in upon her, and delivered the bad news, a worried look on his face, as Asta fell into a deep sleep, utterly exhausted just from the examination. She was heavily flushed, and suffering from fever.
‘It’s turned to pneumonia, I am afraid,’ he said, setting aside the stethoscope, which he’d used to listen to the girl’s lungs.
Trine gasped, feeling her knees buckle slightly. Pneumonia was serious.
Malthe stared at her, his eyes full of sympathy.
‘I’d like to take her to the hospital, run some X-rays, and get her started on a relatively new treatment – something we’ve been doing since the start of the thirties. I don’t know if you have heard of it – it is called sulphonamide therapy and has been shown to greatly reduce fatality rates.’
Trine blinked, listening but not listening to his words about this new and important discovery, about bacteria and how it worked, but all she could focus on right then was this illness that took so many lives, which might not be quite as deadly as a result, and she clung on to that small hope.
She couldn’t lose Asta – not now after everything the poor child had been through.
Asta spent six weeks in the hospital, being treated by Malthe. Trine visited her every day, before work and after but she was always the same. Tired, weak, and very ill. Worst of all was how little she spoke. She seemed to be suffering from a depression too. Trine brought her books and magazines in German, anything to help lift her out of herself for a while, but they lay untouched.
‘She doesn’t seem to be improving,’ Trine whispered to Malthe, from the doorway. Watching as her niece coughed even as she slept, her brows furrowed.
‘It’s slow, but I think there’s progress. We just have to give her time.’
Finally, Asta was allowed to come home, to continue her recovery. ‘I think she’s over the worst but it will still be many months before she is well again,’ said Malthe.
Trine helped her niece into bed, grateful that she was at least able to care for her again. ‘It will be better now that you’re here, you’ll see,’ she said.
Asta gazed at her, not knowing what to say. She felt so lost, so empty. She couldn’t imagine ever feeling like herself again. She felt guilty, wishing she could just magically make herself recover, not just physically but mentally too. She hated that she was causing her aunt pain, but every day was like being in a constant nightmare, with a body that wasn’t able to do even the smallest things – just getting up to go to the bathroom felt like she had performed a marathon, and sometimes she was so weak that even lifting a hairbrush was a task. Then there was the pressing weight of her depression, that made everything feel dull and dark.
All she wanted to do was sleep. While she slept she could pretend that she wasn’t ill, and her dreams took her back to her family, to her twin.
She couldn’t face being awake.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ admitted Trine, as spring turned to summer. The days had turned warm, the rapeseed fields were in full bloom, and the countryside was awash with colour and life. It was hard to envision hardship on a day like that, as the impossibly blue sea sparkled in the sunshine, and the boats swayed in the harbour, but across the border in Germany, things were getting even worse, with the news that boats full of Jewish refugees were being returned. It seemed like things were only getting harder for the Jews, and the threat of war seemed inevitable. But her concerns were more for the young, silent girl with haunted, violet eyes that refused to leave her sick room, back home.
She sat at Lisbet’s kitchen table, and accepted a second glass of wine from her friend, and rubbed her tired eyes. ‘She’s so withdrawn. I’ve tried my best to not push her – I mean, what she’s been through at such a young age, well… I can never imagine, but at the same time, it’s clear that she is in some deep depression.’
Lisbet nodded, then took a seat opposite her, cutting another sliver of gherkin and putting it on top of some crisp rye bread with cottage cheese.
‘You can’t push her, you’re right,’ she said, speaking wisely from her experience of being a schoolteac
her for over forty years. ‘But what you can do is bring in a catalyst.’
Trine paused, sipping her wine. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, maybe someone else can try. Like Oliver? You said it yourself when she first arrived, she will need a friend.’
Trine nodded. ‘Will he be up for that? I mean, he’s a sweet boy… but she is very troubled.’
‘He has the patience of a saint. You saw what he did with that mare of yours.’
This was true. Oliver had trained the horse to come on a whistle, to let him ride her without a saddle, and to gallop as if she were a young foal, not an aged mare who had spent most of her life helping to power Trine’s ex-husband’s smithy before he’d finally joined the new century and went mechanical. To be fair, Uwe hadn’t ever mistreated the animal – in fact, he’d treated the horse better than his own wife, but it hadn’t been the most pleasant life for either of them…
‘I’ll put it to Oliver tonight,’ promised Lisbet. ‘He’s been asking after her anyway.’
The first time Oliver came to visit, Asta was wrong-footed. He made himself at home in the wicker armchair by the window, with its view outside of the sea, and no amount of giving him pointed looks that he was intruding in her private space seemed to penetrate.