The Quisling Orchid

by Dominic Ossiah

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She is not your best friend.’ He pointed a small thin finger at Silje. ‘She has betrayed Fólkvangr. She will betray you.’

  ‘Jesper, that is a horrible thing to say.’

  ‘I do not care! It is true!’

  ‘I will tell your father, Jesper!’ Silje said, shaking her own finger in his face. ‘I shall tell him what a mean and hateful little man you have become. I shall tell him that you should join Quisling’s youth movement because that is where spiteful little men belong.’

  ‘Silje, he’s just a boy.’

  ‘I am not a boy!’

  ‘Why are you defending him? He follows us everywhere we go, spying on us.’

  ‘Because he is…’ Freya hunted desperately for the right word, ‘young!’

  ‘Junges Fehn was young once.’ Silje folded her arms and glared at Jesper. ‘And look how he turned out.’

  Jesper stood next to Freya for safety’s sake and announced again that he wasn’t afraid. ‘The others may fear you, Silje, but I do not.’

  ‘Others? What others?’

  Freya put her arm around Jesper and pleaded for calm, but young Jesper was having none of it. ‘The other boys. They know what you do to men in the village. We have seen you drag them into grain stores and barns, and when they emerge they look as though they have been mauled by mountain trolls! You are a witch and you leach the will from men as soon as they come of age! Mr Fehn told me and he would not lie!’

  If Silje could have done so without Freya knowing she would have struck him. Her rage grew, making her skin burn and setting needles in the soles of her feet. She let forth a barrage of profanities that would have made the most hardened men of the mountain blush. Jesper Bergström closed his eyes tightly to hide from the maelstrom, and despite what he whispered to himself he was very much afraid.

  Freya stood in front of him, shielding him, lest the love of her life should lose herself completely.

  Silje finished her tirade with a flourish. ‘… So fuck the Germans, fuck the men of Fólkvangr, and most of all fuck you and all your hateful little friends, Jesper Bergström!’ And finally she was spent and left gasping as her anger subsided.

  Jesper saw his chance; he pushed Freya away and ran from the barn.

  ‘That was cruel, Silje!’ Freya said. ‘It was cruel and spiteful! How could you say such things to a small child? Did you not see how frightened he was?’ She turned her back on her and Silje realised she could no longer taste cinnamon in the air.

  ‘And now you hate me.’

  ‘It is not that,’ Freya replied. ‘There are just sides of you I care not to know.’ She sniffed the air and found the entrance to the barn. She took three steps and then hesitated.

  ‘Go after him,’ said Silje, her heart scalded by Freya’s words, as it often was of late. ‘Tell him I’m sorry.’

  ‘We should tell him together.’

  ‘No, I must see to Magnus. He has been alone for too long.’

  ‘We stand a better chance of finding him if we go together.’

  Silje found her undergarments buried in the hay. She stared at them and wondered what she was doing with Freya – this blind Jewish girl whom she’d taken in as a sister.

  What is this thing that you think you are doing?

  ‘You do not need me to find one small boy, Freya; we both know that,’ she said, and left her alone in the orchid barn.

  * * *

  Silje walked the two-hundred-and-fifty steps back to the cottage, a distance she’d measured frequently since she was a child. Still two-hundred-and-fifty steps; perhaps the distance had lengthened over the years to keep pace with her stride.

  There was a time not so very long ago when the merest thought of Freya would parch her throat, set the blood pounding in her head. There was a time, not so very long ago, when they would make room in the barn so they could plunder each other to exhaustion and then lie still, dazed by the scent of orchids and cinnamon exuding from their skin.

  And now our love seems almost like a stage play, she thought, as mechanical as ploughing a meadow. She still enjoyed Freya, but the greyness of the war had spread to them, turned them to stone.

  She pushed open the cottage door and went to the pot on the stove. The pot was still full, which meant her father had not been home that day. Silje ladled four large spoonfuls into a bowl and tore two strips of bread from the roll. She carried them upstairs on a tray and knocked on Magnus’s door. After a few moments she knocked again and said his name gently.

  ‘Wait, I am not ready!’ He sounded alarmed, anxious, which surprised her; she had grown accustomed to not hearing him speak at all.

  ‘Do not be silly, Magnus.’

  ‘Just wait, damn you!’

  Silje stepped away from the door and put the tray on the floor. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m not ready!’

  She could hear him turning over his room. He’s lost it again, she thought. She promised herself she would get Freya to make him two more.

  She waited, worrying that the soup would grow cold. ‘I’m coming in, Magnus.’

  ‘No! Not yet!’

  She opened the door and dipped her head to avoid a vase thrown from the other side of the room. It sailed out into the hallway and shattered against the wall.

  ‘I told you to stay out!’

  Magnus stood in front of her, naked, covering his face with both his hands, his thin, grey body crossed through with scars and burns. When she looked at his hands, at the scarred and puckered remains of his right thumb, her heart broke.

  ‘I will help you find it,’ she said. ‘Just stay there.’

  ‘No! Get out!’

  He would have thrown something else, his chamber pot perhaps, but he would need to remove his hands from his face to do so. She got down on her knees and ran her hand under the bed. On her fourth sweep she felt a thin leather strap beneath her little finger. ‘Ah! I have it!’ She got to her feet and offered the eyepatch to him. ‘Here, take it.’

  ‘Just leave it on the bed and get out.’

  ‘No. You must take it from me.’

  ‘Do you not have better things to do than torment me? There must be a man in this village you have not whored yourself out to. Why not hunt him down and leave me in peace?’

  He was cruel these days, without pattern or reason. His self-loathing cast outward, engulfing all those he had once loved.

  ‘Take it from me.’

  ‘I hate you.’

  ‘I know. Now take it from me.’

  He snarled and lurched towards her, reaching for the eyepatch with his fingers clawed. Silje grabbed his wrist and pulled his mutilated hand away from his face. He fought, but his weakened limbs were no match for her.

  ‘Is this what you want to see, dear sister?’ he said.

  Silje breathed deeply and swallowed back her revulsion. It is still with me, she thought, and it is so long since he was returned to us.

  His single eye swivelled wildly in its socket. Silje forced herself to stare into the scarred hole where his other eye had been. It had been been a paler blue, she remembered; an aberration – much like her own.

  His face, like his body, was sectioned by scars cut deep with the point of a combat knife, a smaller, broken Doctor Lomen had said. He had treated many such injuries since Magnus had been taken outside the Nazi HQ in Bergen. The Resistance stung and bit the invaders like hornets, picking their targets and then escaping into the night. Casualties mounted, the doctor had said; fathers and sons lost, and the invaders venting their anger on the people of Norway.

  While she stared, Magnus snatched his eyepatch from her and slipped it into place. ‘Why must you do that?’ he asked. ‘It serves neither of us.’ He used his first and second finger where he would have used his thumb. He becomes more adept, Silje thought, though he tries not to.

  ‘If you were stronger,’ she said, ‘then you could take your things from me without such a fuss.’

  He sniffed
and turned away from her to look at the field outside his window.

  ‘I will leave the soup and the bread here; please eat it. If not for yourself then for me.’ Magnus remained frozen on the spot, his hands clasped and trembling behind his back, his soul shrouded in despair.

  ‘Who is that?’ he snapped. Silje listened but heard nothing.

  Magnus reached under his pillow, and when Silje turned to face him again he was holding a Luger in his hand.

  There was a creak on the staircase and a voice, quiet and fearful, said, ‘It is just me, Magnus. I have come to see you.’

  ‘Go away, Freya; I wish to see no one.’ As he said this he looked sternly at Silje. ‘No one.’

  The staircase creaked again and Magnus roared, ‘Just fuck off! Both of you!’

  Silje chewed her lip and looked at the pistol. He could fire it, she thought. Between the weakness in his limbs and his missing thumb, the shot could go anywhere; even if he did not mean to hit Freya, he could. She hurried from the room, closing the door behind her. She met Freya in the hallway and took her by the elbow to lead her downstairs.

  Freya protested. ‘I want to see him!’

  ‘He does not wish to see you and we will do as he wishes.’ Silje sat her down at the kitchen table. She ladled soup into two bowls, and placed a spoon in Freya’s left hand and a strip of bread in the right.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Yes you are. Eat your soup.’ Silje swallowed a spoonful and chewed slowly on the bread. They ate in the kind of silence she hated: the absence of words born not of fatigue or anger, but of a slow, creeping resentment. After a such short time together they had run dry of things to say. It is the war, Silje told herself; it is just the war.

  ‘Did you find Jesper?’

  Freya nodded. ‘He had not gone far. He was waiting at the copse near the foot of the path.’

  ‘And how was he?’

  ‘Upset.’

  ‘I will apologise.’

  ‘I think you should.’

  And then silence fell upon them again. Silje ladled more soup into Freya’s bowl just to hear the spoon rattle. ‘Did he see us?’

  ‘Did he see us what?’ Freya asked plainly.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, we both know what you mean, and still you cannot bring yourself to say it, can you?’

  ‘Why is it you are so set on hearing it all the time?’

  ‘Because you never say it at all.’

  Silje looked to the stairs. She wondered if the door to Magnus’s room had opened and that perhaps she had missed it.

  ‘You are looking for Magnus, aren’t you?’ Freya said. ‘You are afraid he will hear us.’

  ‘I am not afraid of anything.’

  ‘We both know that is not true.’

  And now Silje found herself longing for the silence.

  ‘I shall say it for you, shall I? You want to know if Jesper saw us making love in your father’s barn.’

  Silje chewed savagely at her lower lip and nodded.

  ‘If you nod or shake your head I will not know what you are saying.’

  ‘Yes! For God’s sake! Did he see us?’

  Freya pushed her bowl to the centre of the table. ‘He did. He thought you were torturing me.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I told him you had a rash and you’d asked me to examine it.’

  ‘You told him…’

  ‘I said it was a rash.’

  ‘What kind of rash?’

  ‘I did not say. Is it important?’

  ‘Did he believe you?’

  ‘I think he wanted to.’

  Silje decided that there were worse lies she could have told, though the idea of the village thinking she’d contracted some sort of skin disease… Yes, there were worse lies but also some that would have been far, far better. Perhaps Freya had meant to punish her. ‘Are you angry with me?’

  ‘No.’

  Then she is, Silje thought. She pushed her own bowl aside and took Freya’s hands in hers. ‘If there is something I have done that makes you hate me then tell me and I will make amends. If there is a part of me that you dislike then tell me and I will change. And please don’t tell me that it is Jesper or the war. I am not the war and neither are you.’

  Freya drew her hand away. ‘When will you tell Erik?’

  An angry sigh escaped Silje’s lips in spite of her best effort to prevent it.

  ‘He still believes that you and he are to be married.’

  ‘Yes, he does, I know. And I will tell him when the time is right. And do not ask me when that will be because I do not know.’

  Freya stared over Silje’s left shoulder with tears in her pale eyes, and in a moment of yearning Silje wondered why God would grant her such beautiful eyes and then steal from her the blessing of sight.

  ‘I promised I would never ask,’ Freya said quietly.

  ‘But you still want to know.’

  She nodded. ‘So that I know that one day we can be together.’

  ‘We are together.’

  ‘You are hiding behind clever words.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘You are.’

  She will not be swayed. ‘Soon, Freya; very soon. I should have told him on your birthday but since then I have had so much to think about: looking after Magnus, the newsletter…’

  ‘Yes, always the damned newsletter.’

  ‘It is important, Freya. Gunther says it is vital to the Resistance effort.’

  ‘I am sure,’ Freya said plainly.

  ‘Do not be like this.’ Silje reached across the table and tried again to take her hand. ‘It is still warm outside. We can go back to the orchid barn.’

  ‘Why?’ Freya snatched her hand away. ‘So you can fuck me in darkness where you cannot see me?’

  ‘Freya!’

  ‘Do you look at me, Silje? When you put your tongue in my mouth and your hand between my legs? Do you look at me or do you close your eyes so you do not have to bear witness to our sin?’

  Though she opened her mouth to speak Silje took far too long to reply.

  ‘Yes, that is what I thought.’ Freya stood up. ‘I said I would love you, even if you put Erik and others—’

  ‘Why do you keep saying “others”? There are no others!’

  ‘—even if you put Erik and others before me. I meant it, Silje; I will always love you, but if you are ashamed of what we do, of what we are, then that is something I cannot bear.’

  ‘I will tell Magnus this very night if that is what you want.’

  Freya closed her eyes. ‘My father,’ she began. ‘My father did not give me away. They tortured him. They cut his fingers from him one by one, and still he did not betray me while I lay snivelling a few inches below his feet.’

  ‘He loved you,’ said Silje, ‘as I love you.’

  ‘They kept shouting at him. “Do you know if there are any other Jews? Tell us and we will kill you quickly! Where will we find more of your filth. That is what you are: a filthy Jew. Say it! Say that you are a filthy Jew.”

  ‘But he did not, Silje. He did not give me up and he would not dishonour himself before our God. There are thousands, millions, of us who will be called to stand proudly before the Star of David before we are cut down. Do you understand?’

  Silje nodded, cursed herself and said yes, she understood. When she looked again Freya was opening the door. ‘I will wait my place, behind Erik, but I will not live in shame; I will not hide away. I am going home, Silje. Do not come after me.’

  ‘I will not.’

  Freya smiled in a way that seemed cold and pitying to Silje; she did not care for it, or the feeling of shame and helplessness it brought with it.

  Freya closed the door, and Silje heard herself whisper, ‘You are home.’

  Chapter 38

  At night, Magnus Ohnstad screamed.

  His torment had begun on the ev
ening of Freya’s birthday, the same night they’d brought him home to the care of Doctor Lomen.

  Doctor Lomen who tended Magnus’s ruined eye and broken fingers, while Magnus wept and told him that his sons had been killed during an attempt to assassinate a Nazi area commander.

  Doctor Lomen who salved his burns, saved his left thumb and treated the remains of his right.

  Doctor Lomen who set his shattered bones and wept as he repaired his torn flesh.

  Doctor Lomen who sent his wife back to her family and shut his door on the world.

  Doctor Lomen who could do nothing to restore Magnus’s shattered mind, much less his own.

  And so at night, Magnus Ohnstad screamed, while Silje sat in her room making copious, tear-stained notes.

  ‘He said nothing.’ She slid the notepad across the table. ‘The same as last night, and the same as the night before.’

  Gunther smiled at Grette who watched them intently from behind the bar. ‘This is not me,’ he said. ‘It is London.’

  ‘They think my brother is a traitor.’

  ‘They think no such thing. We just need to know if he—’

  ‘Broke?’ Silje said without taking her eyes from his.

  ‘No one would blame him, Silje, but we need to know what he told them.’

  ‘And Gruetzmacher wonders what he knows about you. How special he must feel.’ She tapped a fingernail on the stack of papers. ‘It is all there: every cry of agony; every plea for mercy. He endured, Gunther. He did not betray you or the Resistance. Do you think you we would be sitting here if he had?’

  Gunther ducked his head as though a pistol had been fired. He looked around the tavern; it was empty save for a woman and two men playing cards in the far corner, and Grette at the bar, pretending she did not hear.

  ‘Silje, please. Lower your voice!’

  ‘He did not betray you, Gunther, so it is time to decide.’ She said nothing more, unwilling to push him one way or the other. She watched Grette set two jars of ale on the table and then quickly return to the bar, keen to escape the cloud of misfortune that followed the Ohnstad name.

  ‘And you are sure,’ Gunther said.