After an eternity, the feeling ceased. She opened her eyes to see Freya sitting next to her, staring ahead and waving a hairbrush.
‘Now me,’ she said cheerfully.
‘What?’
‘I washed your feet, just how you like it. Now you must brush my hair, how I like it.’
Without a word, Silje took the hairbrush and kneeled behind her. She unfastened Freya’s braid and spread her hair across her shoulders.
‘We should cut it,’ she said, brushing it through with long gentle strokes, watching the coarse threads pass through her fingers.
‘I do not want to cut it. Don’t you like my hair?’
‘I think your hair is beautiful,’ said Silje, surprising herself; the phrase sitting on her tongue was, I think your hair is perfectly nice. Beautiful, it seemed, had jostled past and forced itself from her lips. ‘But if it were shorter then perhaps it would be more convenient.’
Freya giggled. ‘I never thought Silje Ohnstad would be concerned with something so trivial as convenience.’
‘Well then, there is much you do not know about me.’
Silje continued, slowly brushing her hair, silently praying that Freya wouldn’t say Enough. Not yet, she hoped, not for a little while…
‘Do you think Magnus likes my hair?’
She put down the brush. ‘Enough. It is time for bed.’
‘He is very brave,’ Freya said, scratching her lip. ‘Killing all those Germans.’
‘I do not think he said how many Germans he killed.’
‘I’m sure it is lots.’
‘I’m sure it is a perfectly average amount for an inexperienced Resistance fighter.’
‘He spoke of the bravery of his friends. He did not speak of himself at all.’
‘That is what good men are like.’
‘Do you know a lot about men?’
‘Enough to keep most of them at an arm’s length, yes.’
‘So you do not like men.’
‘If you ask too many questions you will not be able to sleep.’
‘So if you do not like men then who do you like?’
‘I like men, Freya.’
Freya hopped off the bed and began stripping off her clothes. Silje tried to look away but found she could not. Does she think that because she cannot see others, others cannot see her?
‘Then I do not understand. You are quite old. Why are you not married? Erik Brenna likes you. He told me so. Why have you not married him?’
‘I am not… old!’ said Silje, pointlessly making a face.
‘I am sorry. I did not mean to—’
‘Men are like fruit: they grow, they ripen, they wither, they spoil. You pluck them too early and they are hard and bitter, pluck them too late and they are too soft and their richness has gone. There is a small space in time when they are just right, when you will gain the most enjoyment before the rot sets in.’
Freya stared glumly in her direction. ‘So you are waiting for Erik to ripen.’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
‘I think that is a sad way to look at things.’
‘When you are older you will agree with me.’
‘Do you think Magnus is ripe?’
‘It would be improper of me to say so.’
Silje averted her eyes as Freya pulled back the covers and threw her thin, unclothed body onto the bed. She realised, with sudden and inexplicable alarm, that the Jewess slept naked.
‘You suddenly care what is proper,’ Freya said, drawing the covers to her chin.
Silje thought, It is the mead talking. She will be herself again tomorrow. ‘If you had asked me a month ago, then I would have said no. But whatever he has done, whatever he has seen, it has changed him.’
‘So he is ready for marriage!’ Freya cried, her interest tediously reawakened.
Silje began removing her own clothes and folding them into a pile at the foot of the bed. ‘I would say he’s perhaps on the turn.’
‘Now you are being unkind.’
‘He is too old for you.’ She slipped on her nightdress, and then struggled into a second one to compensate for Freya’s lack of night attire.
‘I am eighteen. I am more than old enough for him!’
She sighed and wondered if Freya would ever be sober again.
‘And I assure you, Silje Ohnstad, I am perfectly ripe!’
‘That does not apply to women. We are eternally at our best; remember that.’ She climbed into the narrow bed and snatched some of the covers away from Freya.
‘Silje.’
‘What.’
‘Being with a man – what is it like?’
‘It depends on the mood and the man.’
‘His mood?’
‘Mine. Now go to sleep.’
‘I have never kissed a man,’ Freya said quietly.
I am sharing my bed with a night troll, Silje thought. Why will she not sleep? ‘Indeed, Freya, that is a tragedy.’
‘Silje.’
‘What is it.’
‘You will teach me to kiss men, yes?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Why won’t you—?’
‘Freya, go to sleep or I will hit you with something.’
Freya turned over and snatched back the covers. ‘You are very unkind, Silje Ohnstad.’
‘No, I am very tired, and you are very drunk.’
Silje waited for a rejoinder, but none came. Instead she heard the soft purr of Freya’s breathing; the child had exhausted herself and fallen into a deep sleep as soon as her head met the pillow. Silje decided her father’s mead was perhaps not so bad after all.
And so she lay waiting for her own slumber. She stared at the ceiling, watching a large spider making its way towards the light that shone from the gap above her door. Freya rolled onto her back and Silje lost interest in the spider. She bit her lip and raised herself so she could better see Freya’s face. So plain, she thought, but one day she will be… less plain. She watched the steady rise and fall of Freya’s chest and felt her own heartbeat slow to fall in step with her breathing. ‘But your hair is beautiful,’ she whispered, and felt the first of a thousand tiny hot pins pierce her flesh. She swallowed. Her throat was dry, and she felt a furnace light beneath her skin. It wasn’t just the second nightdress; it was Freya. Even asleep, the girl ran as hot as Junges Fehn’s printing press.
Small wonder she sleeps unclothed. Silje cursed all her misfortunes, rolled from the bed and curled herself up on the floor.
Chapter 16
‘Freya! What have I told you about leaving the upstairs doors open! The goats will eat the furnishings!’
‘She has already left for Fólkvangr.’ It was Magnus calling back from the meadow behind the cottage. ‘Glad to hear you are awake.’
‘Where is Father?’
‘He is here.’
And yet he had not said anything. Strange, Silje thought. She took a step towards the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed, and felt a soreness between her legs that gave her pause to stop and sit down.
‘Christ,’ she said through her teeth, and doubled over, realising that she had been very brutal with herself while she slept. She pressed her thighs together and tried to stand. Water, she thought, lots and lots of very cold water.
She cleaned her teeth and brushed her tongue which felt as though she’d licked the face of a goat, a feeling she knew because she’d tried it once as a child. She wondered if Baldur remembered.
She took off her night clothes and filled the sink with water; she scrubbed her flesh, as though punishing herself, and used a damp cloth to clean between her legs. She was sore to the touch, but the cold water helped. She thought of Freya lying asleep in the bed while she defiled herself on the floor. She left the cloth in the sink and got dressed. She passed Magnus’s room on her way to the stairs, and remembering that her brother was outside and out of earshot, took three steps back. Without a second thought she pushed open the door and went inside. It was important, s
he told herself, that he did not leave anything incriminating inside the cottage, though this reason for invading his privacy only came to her while she was searching under his bed.
In spite of Magnus being twenty-three years old, his room always smelled of boy, a scent of young pine that all the men of Fólkvangr carried to varying degrees of pungency. Magnus was different though, due to his insistence on using something he called ‘cologne’. Silje remembered that one of his lady friends from Bergen had given it to him on his seventeenth birthday, though she could not recall her name.
She turned her attentions to his wardrobe, sliding her hand around underneath it until her fingers came to rest on the old wooden box he kept against the wall. She tapped and swept at it until she could wrap three fingers around one of its corners and pull it towards her.
The box was locked, though the catch could be opened with little more than a few twists and turns of a hardened fingernail. It popped open, and in it Silje found Magnus’s most private things: letters to past loves; applications to various seminaries; his bible – both Old and New Testaments; the pocket knife Erik had made for him while he watched in wonder; and at the very bottom of the box, under a pile of unused paper, his collected works of Parisian erotica.
She sat upright, leaning against the wardrobe door with the book in her lap. It was as at least as heavy as both testaments put together and just as intricately bound. Years of use had loosened many of the pages, though Magnus was always careful to place them back in the proper order, as was she. Silje often wondered where he’d gotten it from; she suspected it was the same woman who had brought him the gentleman’s perfume, as he insisted on calling it.
‘What was her name?’ she mused. She rolled her dress to her thighs and slid her hand into her underwear, keeping a careful ear for her father or Magnus coming in through the kitchen door.
Most of the pictures were of women, sitting or squatting with their knees parted, displaying themselves for the artist or the camera, or lying with their legs splayed as though about to give birth. None of them were smiling; in fact, they all looked very serious. Silje supposed it was one of the intricacies of high art she would never understand.
There were very few pictures of men in the same poses, which she always thought something of a shame. She found comparisons interesting, if not entirely useful. Erik was not well-proportioned, but his care and attention to the minutiae of her pleasure was more than adequate compensation for this unfortunate shortcoming. On the other hand, God had constructed Junges Fehn with the girth and rigidity of a stallion’s fetlock; but in use, Junges would thrust and thrash it about like a whip over which he had no control. Silje believed that he was, in his heart, afraid of it.
She carried on turning the pages: women indoors, women outside, men with animals, women with animals, women with women, men with women, men with other men – there was no rhyme or pattern to the book, and Silje wished Magnus would spend a useful afternoon sorting the pages into sections. He was almost a man of letters now; surely such a minor clerical task wasn’t beyond him.
She came across a picture that took an entire page. It depicted a French soldier – an officer, Silje believed, from the time of Napoleon – and a woman on a balcony overlooking a vast and beautiful park. She was leaning over the railing, gazing into the distance, with her chin resting in the palm of her hand and her skirts pushed up to her waist. The soldier looked out over the same parkland, smoking a pipe, lost in magnanimous thought with his breeches about his ankles, impaling her from behind.
Silje swallowed and pressed her back against the wardrobe to anchor herself. She clenched her teeth and stared at the picture, moving her fingers like pistons. Aside from being the largest picture in the book, it was fairly unremarkable; it wasn’t even one of her most favoured, so it made little sense as to why it would affect her so on this most ordinary of days.
The woman in the picture wore a hat. It was dark, with a narrow brim and a profusion of coloured plumage set around its band. It sat at an angle on the woman’s crown, and though it appeared to be pinned in place she used her free hand to hold it steady against the soldier’s ministrations.
It was a very fine hat, and Silje felt sure that if she found the material and the feathers, Freya could make one just like it.
She closed her eyes and plunged her hand still deeper. God in heaven, she thought, will I ever grow out of this?
* * *
‘Heh.’ Jon Ohnstad tried to light his pipe in the ferocious morning cross-wind. ‘Still worse for the mead, I see. You can barely walk.’
Silje leaned against the cottage. A hundred yards away, Magnus struggled to work a large double-handled saw across a felled oak tree. ‘I had something of a difficult night.’
The wind blew out Jon Ohnstad’s match. ‘I am sorry, but it is for the best, and it is only for a short while. And I understand why you do not want me to put Freya in your mother’s—’
‘The sooner we move her there, the better.’
He struck another match. The wind blew it out. ‘You have certainly changed your story since last night.’
‘She is a young woman,’ said Silje. ‘She should have her own room.’
He struck another match and the wind blew it out. He dropped his pipe back in his pocket. ‘That is very noble and understanding of you, Daughter.’ He put his arms around her. His embrace was, as always, strong to the point of hurtful, yet still it made her feel cosseted and loved.
‘When Freya leaves us, I will restore the room to exactly how it was.’
Magnus cursed loudly when the saw became trapped in the wood. He pulled and pushed, falling over as he tried to free it.
‘What do you mean, when she leaves us?’ said Silje.
Jon Ohnstad furrowed his brow as though he were not sure what he meant.
‘Father, who else will look after her if not us?’
Magnus got to his feet and glared at his father. He took hold of the saw and slowly began to work it free of the oak.
‘He is angry with me,’ said Jon Ohnstad. ‘I forbade him to return to the Resistance, and now he hates me.’
‘He does not hate you. And who will look after Freya if we—’
‘I tried to tell him that the Germans are watching us. He cannot keep slipping away to God knows where and expect that there will not be consequences.’
‘I will talk to him,’ said Silje. ‘And what of Freya?’
‘When the war ends, for better or for worse, Freya will have to leave us, Silje. Surely you can see that.’
‘I see nothing of the sort.’
‘And I have seen nothing that tells me she cannot look after herself.’
Silje glared at him.
‘I have deliveries to make this morning. I will return soon. Speak to your brother; he will listen to you.’
He strolled past Magnus without so much as a word, and left through the side gate. Silje waited until she heard the truck drive away before approaching her brother, who was again sawing angrily at the wood stump. She took the other saw handle, and helped him work the blade back and forth. She said nothing, waiting until he began to smile.
‘Stupid old fool,’ Magnus said.
Still, she said nothing.
‘Oh, so you agree with him do you? You think I should just stay in the village while others fight the invaders.’
‘I never said that.’
‘You don’t have to say it.’
The blade caught for a second time so they changed direction, rocking the saw up and down. When it had worked itself free they continued, back and forth.
‘So what do you think?’ Magnus asked.
‘I think that there are other ways to be a hero.’
‘Would you care to share them?’
‘You could save the lives of your family and Freya by not exposing us to the scrutiny of the Nazis.’
‘I would never—’
‘They know you did not return to your studies, Magnus.’
�
�I know, but—’
‘The Lieutenant has given you – given us – a chance. One chance. Stay in the village. That is how you can become a hero. No one will remember you, no one will raise a glass to you, no one will write songs about you. You will be like the thousands of other heroes that will be forged in this war: nameless. But you will save us, Magnus. You will save all of us. That is the truth of it.’ Exhausted, Silje stopped. She wiped her brow. ‘Do not bring the enemy to our door, Brother.’
Magnus let go of the blade and picked up his tankard. ‘But Sister, you have already done that.’ He walked back to the cottage with Silje in his wake. ‘Thanks to you and your damned newsletter, the Nazis are infesting our home like they infest Bergen. I did not bring them to our doorstep; it was you.’
‘And what would you have me do? Refuse them?’
He stopped to look at her, and if it had been anyone else then Silje would have said it was a look of hatred. ‘I would have had you do anything else, Silje. Anything other than write their anti-Semitic filth for them.’
‘I do not write it!’
‘Anything except try to convince our people to lie down and surrender.’
‘Magnus, please—’
‘Anything but fornicate with the enemy under our own roof!’
Silje caught her breath and pressed her mouth shut.
‘I am sorry. I did not mean that.’
‘I think you did.’
‘No, I am just angry.’
‘With me?’
‘With everything.’
Silje pushed against the door and went inside. ‘You would never have been so cruel before,’ she said. ‘Not to me.’
‘And I said I was sorry.’ Magnus sat at the table. He rested his head in his hands and seemed to shrink before her eyes.
‘What is wrong, Magnus?’
He stared at a knot in the table, tapping gently with a gnawed fingernail. ‘Freya thinks I am a hero.’
‘It’s one of the very few things she is right about. You are a hero.’
The Quisling Orchid Page 15