The Quisling Orchid

by Dominic Ossiah

  And there she was again, the ever-present Silje Ohnstad. She was comforting someone, a young girl by the looks of it.

  I stood up and asked, ‘Where did you live?’

  The question seemed to throw him; I swear I heard him swallow and when he finally spoke his voice lacked the threat of intent it had carried since we’d first met.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘You said I should try to feel a sense of history. You’re part of the history here, so show me.’

  ‘Follow the main path to the farrier’s,’ Bergström said. ‘There’s a sign there that will tell you where the grocery store used to be.’

  ‘You’re not coming with me?’

  He shook his head and mumbled ‘I can’t’ under his breath.

  So I went on my own, along the path, just like he said. When I turned to see if he’d change his mind, he’d already gone.

  * * *

  The tablet read, The home and grocery of Fredrick Bergström who was taken, along with his wife Bente, his daughter Karin and his son Jesper, to Beisfjord Concentration Camp. All but Jesper perished there.

  There was nothing left of their cottage except a picture on the tablet. There were more plaques, left and right, that stretched to the edge of the village perimeter.

  I read every last one: every tablet and engraving, every picture and framed newspaper cutting. I walked the orchid paths, stirring ghosts that would haunt me until my last breath. Some of the memorials mentioned my father by name, cursing him on behalf of the lost.

  He couldn’t have done it.

  But I didn’t really know him. I just knew that I couldn’t share blood with anyone who’d caused this.

  I ran back to the Ohnstad Monument, leaving the path when people got in my way and ignoring the gasps of outrage as I trod the orchids under foot. There was something about the stones. Something that, through my anger, had edged its way into focus. When I reached the stone circle, someone was waiting there for me: short, bow-legged with sand-coloured hair that had faded to white at the temples. He had a rather large red nose, burned and peeling from the mountain sun. His stomach spilled over his belt and his teeth protruded slightly from between his lips. I didn’t recognise him at first because I’d only seen him from the back.

  Tobias, the coach driver.

  ‘I can’t stay long,’ he said. ‘I was due back in Bergen a half hour ago. Where the hell have you been?’ He glanced at his watch and took a stuffed envelope from his pocket. He said he’d lost track of me when he’d gone to use the toilet.

  ‘You’ve been following me?’

  ‘Keeping an eye on you; Mr Bergström’s orders.’ He handed me the envelope. ‘He figures you’ll have run out of money by now. There’s enough there to keep you going for a while. Now, is there anything else you need?’

  ‘A camera,’ I said.

  He looked doubtful.

  ‘Do you have one?’

  ‘I’ve got my own in the bus.’

  ‘That’ll do. Can I have it?’

  ‘Er… no.’

  I told him Mr Bergström would want me to have anything I needed. ‘So go get me the camera.’

  Tobias frowned, then dragged his feet back to the bus.

  I returned to the monument, looking at each of the stones around the edge, examining each photograph carefully. It was the one showing Jonas Kleppe’s final moments that intrigued me, though not so much the picture as the people in it: black-and-white, lost and faded into history.

  Silje Ohnstad – I’d read a lot about her, and I’d drawn my own conclusion that she was a caring, much-loved, manipulative bitch.

  Caring.

  Yes.

  In the picture she held the dark-haired girl as if she were her own child.

  ‘One camera,’ said Tobias, placing it on top of the monument. ‘I’d like to think I’ll get it back someday.’

  ‘I’m sure Bergström will replace it.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ he grumbled.

  I picked it up; it was large and heavy, and I had no idea how to operate it.

  ‘You have used a box camera before, haven’t you?’

  I tried not to look too sheepish.

  Tobias rolled his eyes and took the camera from me. ‘Tell me what you want photographed and I’ll do it for you.’

  We used a whole roll of film on the monument, mostly closeups of the photographs that featured Silje Ohnstad.

  ‘Get closer,’ I told him. ‘Make sure you get the front of her dress. I think that’s blood.’

  Tobias adjusted the lens and moved closer to the photograph. ‘It is blood. When old Mr Kleppe had his heart attack he hit his head on the monument, round about…’ He stood up and pointed to a slightly misshapen stone just above the photograph. ‘There. If the heart attack hadn’t killed him, the head injury would have done. Sad story. His wife killed herself, you know.’

  I told him I didn’t know.

  ‘Tell you what. Let’s go to the museum. They run films and they’ve got models of what the village used to be like.’

  ‘I thought you had to get back to Bergen.’

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘They’ll forgive me just this once.’

  And so we went to the Fólkvangr Museum where we watched a history of the village and the mountains and listened to potted biographies of some of the people who’d lived there. There was a whole wall devoted to Jesper Bergström, praising him as a hero and at the same time acknowledging him as a mass murderer. Fólkvangr was about genocide on both sides, it seemed.

  A whole wing of the museum had been devoted to my father.

  Erik Brenna was good with his hands; he could make anything from anything else. He was an accomplished painter and a poet, and he loved Silje Ohnstad more than life itself.

  But not one sculpture, painting, faded news article or photo caption could tell me why he did it.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Tobias said over a mug of coffee. We’d made our way to the Ohnstad cottage, which was a mile north of the village itself and the only structure the Germans had left standing. ‘No one does. Anyone who says they know is a liar. Remember that.’

  ‘If he loved Silje so much then why would he betray the entire village? He would have known that would destroy her.’

  Tobias stopped stirring his coffee so he could shrug. ‘Maybe he wanted to destroy her. Maybe she did something that hurt him so badly he couldn’t think straight.’

  It seemed unlikely, or perhaps I just wanted it to seem that way.

  The coffee shop was little more than six tables and chairs arranged in front of a large green tent. We were the only customers, though there were half a dozen people across the path, peering in through the windows of the Ohnstad cottage. There were two security guards posted front and back. Anyone attempting to gain entry was politely and firmly discouraged.

  ‘It was her,’ I said firmly. ‘I know it was her.’

  ‘Silje Ohnstad? Have a care, young lady; she’s a national hero.’

  ‘Do you think as a national pariah I don’t know that?’

  He glumly buttoned his mouth and looked down into his coffee.

  ‘Why are you working for a man like Bergström anyway?’

  He sipped at his mug so he could think a while. ‘I’m not sure anymore. Our families are tied by blood; his grandfather was a cousin to my grandfather. We’ve helped him whenever we can. Sort of like a legacy from birth, I suppose.’

  ‘You know Bergström threatened to kill me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tobias said as though I’d told him Bergström had stepped on my foot. ‘If you deliver Erik Brenna to him then you’ll never hear from him again.’

  ‘And what if my father is innocent?’

  ‘Erik Brenna is not innocent. He confessed.’

  It always came back to the confession.

  ‘Look,’ said Tobias. ‘I can’t imagine the kind of life you’ve had, but think about this: if your father answers for his crimes then you and your mother will have a chanc
e to breathe again.’

  ‘And by “answering for his crimes” you mean being murdered by your psychotic cousin? That’s not justice, not as far as I can see.’ I sat back in my seat, suddenly feeling very tired. ‘Besides, I think our chance to breathe has long gone.’

  For a moment Tobias looked as if he cared something for what I was feeling. Then he remembered he was here to do the bidding of my jailer. He nodded and drained his mug. ‘We should be getting back.’

  Chapter 33

  A coach party of English students arrived at the hostel so I decided to go. I don’t like sharing my space with anyone except my mother. When I said I was leaving, the man behind the desk looked slightly relieved.

  The hotel I chose was little more than two hundred yards away, an austere grey guest house that went by the unlikely name of The Sunshine Inn. I think it was meant to be ironic.

  The woman behind the desk, who would have been a young girl during the war, didn’t look up as she handed me the key to my room. She did look up when I pushed a palmful of cash across the desk. She counted it and told me that breakfast was served between seven and nine.

  The room was like the rest of the hotel: spartan and small. I didn’t really care though; to be honest I don’t like large rooms. They carry the echo of people, lots of people, and years on the run have left me with an aversion to echoes.

  I spread my things out on the floor and made a space on the desk for Klein’s notes. I counted the money that Bergström had given me, trying not to think that I’d taken blood money to betray my own family.

  No.

  I was going to use Bergström’s money to prove Erik Brenna innocent.

  Even though there was still the confession.

  I lay on the bed and tried to think of the reasons someone would confess to something they hadn’t done.

  Madness? It seems to run in the family so it was certainly a possibility.

  Money: someone paid him to confess. I couldn’t imagine anyone being paid enough to confess to being a traitor. Besides, if it was money then where was it? My mother had never seen it.

  No, he didn’t do it for money. I picked up a notepad and started drawing absently on the first page.

  There was always love.

  What if someone he loved had betrayed Fólkvangr? What if he’d confessed to protect them? I didn’t have to think long to come up with a name, someone he’d lay down his life for without hesitation or regret; someone for whom he’d sacrifice his future and his family. I looked at the pad. There was an outline of a swastika drawn on the centre of the page. I blinked at it, unsure if I’d drawn it, or it had always been there. As I tore out the sheet and ripped it to shreds, the phone rang.

  ‘Settling in?’

  I wasn’t even surprised. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m calling to see if there’s anything you need.’

  ‘I’m fine. Thank you.’

  ‘Tobias seems to think you’re straying from the path, as it were.’

  I said nothing. This was his conversation; he only needed me to agree.

  ‘Are you straying from the path, Miss Fossen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. That’s very good. Now, is there anything else we can do for you?’

  ‘I need information,’ I said. ‘I need to know everything you remember about the people of Fólkvangr.’

  ‘There are libraries in Bergen,’ he replied.

  ‘I need to know what you remember. You were there; you knew them better than anyone else alive today.’

  ‘And you need to know this because…?’

  ‘If I understand the people better, I can work out who knew him; who would be most likely to help him. He didn’t escape Norway on his own, and I think the same person is helping him stay hidden now.’

  I could almost hear him thinking.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll start with the Ohnstad family and work outwards.’

  I folded my legs underneath me and waited eagerly with pencil poised.

  Bergström was less self-assured when talking about his past. Most of the people he only half-remembered, a previous life he’d swept away so he could become the man he needed to be: a judge, a killer. He talked breathlessly and without inflection, without any sense of nostalgia or sorrow. Fólkvangr no longer existed; that was all there was to it.

  The only time he came to life was when he talked about Silje Ohnstad. He described her from the knees upwards, oddly enough.

  ‘Sturdy,’ he said. ‘Sound mountain stock.’

  He made her sound like an alpaca, and he coughed constantly while he described the newsletter she ran with the blessing of the Nazis.

  ‘We called it The Quisling Orchid,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know any better. She was a magnificent woman, one of a kind.’

  ‘She collaborated with the Germans.’

  ‘She had little choice; I see that now. But as a child I was cruel to her, very cruel.’

  I could imagine Bergström meeting her for the first time, running his bicycle into her, gazing at her face while she berated him for not looking where he was going. A small boy meeting his very own Norse goddess. How disappointed he would have been, how utterly destroyed, when he discovered she was writing a newsletter with the blessing of the local area commander.

  ‘Then there was the girl of course,’ he said, relieved to leave Silje in the past. ‘The Jew. Her name was Freya. Don’t remember her second name.’ He sighed as though he were in pain. The effort of being the child again was taking its toll.

  ‘Dorfmann,’ I said. ‘Freya Dorfmann.’ Soon after Fólkvangr had fallen, it transpired the villagers had been hiding a young Jewish girl from the invaders. There was little written about her (the people of Fólkvangr were fastidious about keeping her existence to themselves), though it was known that she was dark-haired, truculent and quite blind.

  ‘Yes, that sounds right.’ Bergström said, and then did the oddest thing; he took two deep breaths in, as if inhaling from a scent bottle. ‘Inseparable, the pair of them. If they weren’t together it meant they were fighting, and then the village just stayed out of their way until they’d made up. My father said they were like an old married couple, only more so.’ He tried to laugh, found he’d forgotten how. ‘Walking hand in hand one day and then ignoring each other in the street the very next. They put the fear of women in me.’

  ‘They held hands?’

  ‘Not on purpose,’ he said. ‘They were close you see, like sisters. Their hands would just find each other.’

  I gave him a few moments to catch up.

  ‘Hah! I see what you are thinking. No, it was a different time then; women often held hands! So did men. They were sisters, Miss Fossen, in all but blood.’

  I was with him in Fólkvangr now, so I couldn’t stray too far from the orchid path.

  ‘Let’s just say for one moment,’ I began, ‘that Silje and this girl were… involved.’

  He sniffed loudly. ‘If you will.’ He’d almost rediscovered his childhood only to have a softer part of it taken away. I wondered which of the women he’d harboured a longing for: Silje or Freya. I would have guessed Freya; her blindness would have lent her an attractive vulnerability, especially to a seven-year-old boy.

  ‘If that is the case then well done, Miss Fossen,’ he said. ‘You have found something that historians have failed to uncover for almost thirty years.’

  I told him I didn’t understand.

  ‘Your father’s motive: betrayal.’

  Chapter 34

  He was overjoyed, if there was such a thing for someone like him. There had been speculation of course. Survivors, psychologists, historians, psychics and other assorted liars – all had weighed in on my father’s reasons for betraying the village. Mental illness, many believed, brought about by being separated from his parents at an impressionable age. One psychiatrist claimed that he may have suffered from an MPD – a multiple personality disorder – and may not have been aware of what he was doing.
One woman claimed that his stars were out of balance at the time of the betrayal and if he’d seen an astrologer then more than two hundred souls could have been saved.

  The survivors were the most heart-breaking. They appeared on television on each anniversary and wept, saying they didn’t understand; they’d known Erik Brenna since he was a child.

  And now, thanks to me, Norway had his motive: Silje Ohnstad, the love of his life, loved another.

  I lay on the bed staring up at the light. Even I had to admit that it was the most poetic and most likely explanation. Jealousy, plain and simple. Case closed. He’d been betrayed so he betrayed everyone else, including his wife and his unborn daughter.

  I stayed awake for most of the night, running through the notes again. There were gaps; I didn’t know very much about General Gruetzmacher, except that during his service in Norway he became a hopeless drunk.

  Freya Dorfmann was very much a mystery to me.

  Jon Ohnstad was a nice man even if he was a bigamist. Bergström said that was very common back then and that I shouldn’t judge yesterday by today’s values. He said this even though he clearly disliked the idea of homosexuality, or perhaps he didn’t enjoy his childhood memories turning round and scorning him.

  Klein had underlined the word Iscariot in his notes related to Gruetzmacher but had written nothing further about it.

  Iscariot, then Norway, then alcohol – that was the last thing I read before I finally fell asleep, only to be awoken twenty minutes later by a knock at the door. Ignoring everything Monica had ever taught me about knocks on doors, I opened it without checking the spy hole first.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, yawning. ‘It’s you.’

  ‘Good morning to you too.’ Tobias stepped inside without being asked.