Silje, who had not heard a single word beyond ‘woman’, said, ‘Who was she?’
Vildred shrugged. ‘I have no idea. I never knew her name or cared to ask. She seemed pleasant enough though, and Erik clearly adored her.’ The last remark she aimed squarely at Silje’s heart.
‘You are mistaken.’
‘If that is what you wish. It makes little difference to me.’
‘It is not possible. Erik would never betray me like this.’
‘Well, perhaps you did not know him as well as you thought.’
‘We should leave,’ said Jon Ohnstad. ‘Clearly he is not here.’
Freya, who had been standing motionless, deep in thought, asked, ‘What did this woman look like?’
‘Smaller than Erik, though many women are. Stout of build. She seemed to have known him for most of his life. I think I heard her say she’d travelled from Lillehammer.’
‘Lisbeth,’ said Freya. ‘Lisbeth Fehn.’
Silje felt as though she had just been dropped from a great height. ‘No, not her. He would never… not with her.’
‘Vildred, had he come here to see her before?’ Jon Ohnstad asked.
It was the question Vildred had been waiting for. ‘Why, yes! Three, maybe four times, mostly in the last two months.’
‘Bastard!’ Silje shouted.
‘Why do you care so much?’ Freya asked.
‘Yes,’ Vildred said, getting into the mood of things, ‘why do you care so much, Silje, after you and this Jew hussy—’
‘Enough!’ Jon Ohnstad said. ‘Freya, Silje, wait outside. I would speak to Miss Lunde alone. Do not argue with me! I have had enough from both of you today! Now do as I tell you!’
Murmuring protests under their breath, Silje and Freya did as they were told. Jon Ohnstad waited for Silje to slam the door and then turned to Vildred, who would not look him in the eye.
‘You have behaved poorly this night,’ he said.
‘What of your daughter and your charge! What of poor Erik!’
‘I do not believe you care so much for Erik.’
‘That is a lie.’
‘I believe that you are simply lashing out because you have nowhere else to place your grief.’
‘That is… not true.’
‘I will make this offer to you, Vildred, because you were almost family. Gather your things and make good your affairs. Do you have transportation?’
She nodded, her eyes filled with tears. ‘I have a cart.’
‘Good. Then pack everything you have and come to Fólkvangr in three days. You will stay with us. We will listen to stories of your sister and you can cry on our shoulders. Is this acceptable to you?’
She did not say anything, but looked at him as though she would kill him, as though the pain she’d suffered, the loss of her sister, her home, her livelihood, were all compressed and hidden inside the man standing before her.
‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘Why would you do this?’
Jon Ohnstad scratched his head. ‘If we do not reach out and help each other then we do not deserve our—’
He took a step back when she ran towards him, but instead of assaulting him, she threw her arms around his neck and began weeping against his throat.
‘That is settled then,’ he said, unsure what to do with his arms. ‘But at some point, I think you will need to apologise to my daughter and her – well, whatever she is.’
Chapter 50
The journey home to Fólkvangr – along dark, icy roads in the freezing cab of an old truck held together with fifth-hand parts and prayers to the Almighty – should have been unpleasantly cold. In fact, it was unbearably hot. Jon Ohnstad cranked down a window to let the outside air clear the windscreen. Beside him sat Silje and next to her, Freya – both fuming with rage.
‘I am just saying that I see a pattern in you, Father, and it is not a pleasant one. Is it to be that every time we run across an orphaned waif who takes delight in humiliating and insulting me, we invite her to live in our house?’
Jon Ohnstad sighed. ‘And what is your complaint, Freya?’
Freya had two.
‘That is what you think of me, is it, Silje? An “orphaned waif”?’
‘When we met that is exactly what you were! And you did insult me! You called me fat! But I forgave you and I grew to like you and I fell in love with you and—’
Jon Ohnstad coughed loudly.
‘And you,sir—’
‘Stop calling me “sir”.’
‘Why would you invite another woman to live under your roof?’
‘She was alone and frightened, as you yourself were when we found you. If I had turned my back on her then it would have been the same as turning my back on you. I wouldn’t have done it then, I will not do it now.’
There was a moment’s respite while Freya wept with gratitude and refused to accept Silje’s embrace.
‘I realise we are at war,’ Jon Ohnstad said wearily, ‘but must everyone weep quite so much?’
‘And what will you do with this Vildred Lunde when she is living with you?’
It was a moment before Silje realised Freya was addressing her. ‘Me? This has nothing to do with me! He invited her, not me.’
‘You will seduce her; I know you will!’
‘I see. You are jealous. She has not even left Voss, and you already think that I will bed her as soon as she drops her belongings in our kitchen.’
Jon Ohnstad coughed again.
‘And why should I not be jealous, Silje? Your broken men litter the village, and now you have discovered a taste for women, I daresay you will leave me much the same way.’
Silje’s jaw dropped open. ‘Father! Did you hear what she said to me?’
‘Unfortunately, I am hearing every word.’
Silje and Freya folded their arms and sat rooted and stiff as though nailed to their seats. Without the constant shrilling in his ears, Jon Ohnstad soon began to feel the weight of fatigue bearing down on him. He cuffed himself lightly on the cheek.
‘You need to rest,’ said Silje. ‘I can drive for a while.’
‘We do not have far to go,’ he replied. ‘I can make it.’
‘Not on the mountain roads. Stop the truck.’ The night was as cold as any she’d known, and Silje feared that without the engine running they would freeze very quickly. Freya was trembling and the silly girl’s habit of not wearing shoes now made her worry for frostbite.
‘Stop,’ Freya said.
‘We will not,’ said Jon Ohnstad.
‘Please stop. Can you not hear that?’
Silje glanced at her father to make sure he could not hear anything either. He shrugged his shoulders and applied the brake. As soon as the truck came to a halt, Freya jumped out and walked to the edge of the road where she stood with her toes over the precipice.
‘Freya, come away from there!’
‘I hear voices’ – she listened to the sounds carried on the winds – ‘lots of voices, all German. And machinery. Tanks and personnel carriers, I think.’
‘I cannot hear anything,’ Silje said.
‘Stand next to me, close your eyes, and block out everything. Just concentrate on the wind.’
Silje did as she was told, holding Freya’s hand and smothering all thoughts of Erik and Lisbeth and Fólkvangr and General Gruetzmacher. It was more difficult than she could have imagined, and she realised how much noise she carried inside her head: things she’d done in the past, the myriad possibilities for the future.
Freya squeezed her hand. ‘Forget everything.’
And so Silje concentrated on the snow, pure and white – an eternal nothingness.
Just the snow and the wind.
Yes, she could hear the machinery, less than a mile away. And there were voices, so faint she could barely distinguish them from the sound of the air.
Jackboots on snow on gravel.
Orders being shouted.
Rifles inspected and loaded.
Tanks r
olling; diesel engines breathing the frigid air.
She felt the urgency, the anticipation.
‘I cannot hear what they’re saying,’ she whispered.
Freya did not reply, so Silje returned to the sound of the wind. She opened her ears and picked out the echoes from the surrounding hills. The hills whispered ‘Fólkvangr’.
Chapter 51
I can’t say I hated every moment of the quest.
Was I frightened? Most of the time I was almost paralyzed with fear.
And even when we were miles apart, Bergström’s cadaverous stench clung to me like a shroud cut from human skin.
Then there was the separation from my mother, who’d kept me alive – or so she said – through my hideously extended childhood. I was on my own now, being prodded and pushed along a road I was sure would end badly for me and my father.
But beyond the fear and the isolation, I found myself.
For one thing, I learned the importance of personal hygiene. I washed obsessively, three times or four times a day if I could, making up for the years I’d spent walking around layered in grime and dried sweat.
I liked to read. I was slow at first, but the more I studied café menus, bus timetables and tram schedules, the faster the symmetry of letter forms twisted and shaped themselves into meaning. At the hotel, I took to watching old films with subtitles; I even tried a book or two.
And I had a flair for languages, German especially, after spending every day for three months at Dresden’s library, poring through the documents, papers and journals that travelled with me. The first piece I translated on my own was from General Gruetzmacher’s journal. It was perhaps the only entry where he expressed something akin to emotion – a rare occurrence for a man who would have been driven mad if he’d had the courage to look inside himself a little more often. Gruetzmacher despaired of his fall from grace when it was discovered he’d raped a young Jewish girl, the daughter of his housekeeper:
My shame is without end, my humiliation is all-consuming. My former wife has vowed I will never set eyes upon my children again. I have been stripped of my command and the privileges it afforded me. My friends and colleagues have, understandably, turned their backs on me. I disgust them. My unholy union with this child made all the worse because she is a Jew. In the eyes of my peers, my crime is one of bestiality, nothing less.
And yet, after all she has done to me, all she has cost me, the child haunts my every thought. When I close my eyes she is there, this creature of evil. She has made me what I am, and God help me, I know I will love no other.
I mean… Jesus. He blamed her; that’s how he lived with himself until Bergström found him.
And speak of the demon, he came to see me after my fourth week hidden away inside the library. He was walking with a cane, supporting himself on an arm wrapped in a plaster cast. He winced as he moved, and the bruising around his right eye was so bad I doubted he could see out of it. He gave me a large envelope full of money, and told me I should spend some of it on vegetables.
‘And now you’re worried about my diet?’
‘You need to stay healthy.’
‘So you can kill me.’
‘Find your father and I won’t have to.’
I was starting to believe that he wouldn’t kill me no matter what, but I imagine Gust must have thought the same at some point. I asked him if he’d managed to smooth things over with his employer.
‘More or less,’ he said, ‘mostly less. But I seem to have survived the first few debriefings at least.’
‘Right,’ I said, trying not to stare at the white tape stretched over his broken nose.
‘And your mother is missing,’ he added without taking a breath.
‘What did you say?’
‘Your mother is—’
‘I heard you!’ My voice echoed around the oak cavern. ‘When?’
‘Two nights ago.’
‘How did you—?’
‘I stay in regular contact with Doctor Nese. She likes to be kept appraised of your progress. She seems to worry about you a great deal. She says “hello” by the way.’
I didn’t imagine for a moment Doctor Nese had told him my mother was missing and then added, ‘And when you tell her, give her my love.’
She’d given him a hundred messages since I’d left, but Bergström only thought to mention it now.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d spoken with her?’
‘I didn’t have anything to report. Now I do. Your mother is missing.’
I would’ve thought a man like Bergström was more accustomed to delivering bad news. He scratched at his bruised jaw and looked around for an escape route.
‘I have to go back. I have to help find her. If she doesn’t carry on with the treatment, she’s going to die.’
He somehow managed to stop himself from saying, She’s going to die anyway; I could see the truth of it poised on his lips. ‘There is nothing you can do, Miss Fossen. I will have my men help search for her. You continue with your work.’
‘You won’t be able to find her. She’s used to hiding. She’s had us do it for years.’
He looked at me in amused disbelief. ‘You do know what I do for a living, don’t you? We will find her. Do not let this distract you.’
* * *
Of course I wasn’t going to be anything but distracted. I left the library early, and hurried back to the hotel. The woman on reception handed me my room key as usual, and as usual she looked over my shoulder as I signed in, expecting to see a war criminal standing behind me.
Safely inside my room, I picked up the phone, called the hospital and asked to be put through to the cancer ward. Doctor Nese would be on duty; she always seemed to be.
‘Brigit?’
‘Doctor Nese?’
Then a long silence, punctuated by her gasping and trying to breathe. I think she was crying.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. It’s just… I was just so worried, that’s all.’
There was something strangely comforting in the way she said it. She reminded me of being four years old again, curled into a ball, wrapped tightly in a woollen blanket. It was the first time I can remember being in a bed. Monica had found us a room in a motel, after years of sleeping on coaches or on trains, or on brittle grass. She was so proud of herself, having provided something resembling normalcy for herself and her little girl.
‘Are you still there?’ Doctor Nese sounded alarmed, and I felt as though I was being unfaithful.
‘Where is my mother?’
A pause, a deep breath, and then, ‘I… I’m sorry. I don’t know. I came in early a few days ago to look in on her, and she’d gone. Pulled out her lines, packed her things and left. She slipped past the nurses, the doctors…’
‘She’s good at that.’
‘She left a note. It didn’t say much, just that it was too dangerous for her to stay, that the “Friends of Fólkvangr” would find her. She said that I was to look after you.’
‘I don’t need anyone to look after me.’
‘Yes, I know that.’
‘How long can she go without treatment?’
‘Brigit, I can’t really answer that.’
‘Just try!’
I could hear her brain working; she came up with a number and cut it in two, thinking that a harsh reality was better than a slim hope. ‘She was responding well, showing signs of remission, which is extraordinary given the poor physical condition she was in.’
More than anything else, I needed a number.
‘Six more months, if she’s lucky, and that’s not to say she won’t seek treatment somewhere else.’
‘She won’t,’ I said flatly. ‘This is her endgame. This is her big “fuck you” to me and Norway.’
‘Brigit, we’ll find her. Your… friend, Mr Bergström said he will help.’
‘I think “friend” is stretching things a little far, don’t you?’
‘You should co
me home.’
‘I don’t have a home,’ I said, knowing how childish and obstinate I sounded.
‘Yes, you do, with me. Come home.’
Home. I rolled the word around the back of my tongue, feeling the shape of it, wondering if, after so long, it would ever fit. In Trondheim, I could hear Doctor Nese tapping the handset.
‘Brigit, listen to me for a moment, and please don’t say anything ’til I’ve finished, okay?’
I said I was listening and I was, barely; I was thinking where my mother would run: someplace new, or somewhere safe, familiar?
Doctor Nese said she’d been wrong to throw me out and she was sorry. She said that twenty years after being liberated from Camp Belsen, she was still a prisoner, trapped between her need for love and her revulsion of human contact.
‘Terrible things happened to women in those camps.’
‘I know.’
‘No, you don’t. People think they do, but they don’t; they fucking don’t.’
It was the first time I’d heard her swear.
‘I was pretty back then, if I can judge myself in such a vain way. Not that it mattered; I was a Jew and I was powerless, so like thousands of others, I became a camp favour, a reward for the kapos and the guards who’d pleased their officers. Every night, for six months until the Russians arrived. I fell pregnant twice, and the other women took care of it for me, as I often had to take care of them. As best we could, we tried to take care of each other.
‘Do you know what I thought while they were raping me? I thought, How can they even bear to touch us? We were filthy, emaciated and riddled with disease. We were Jews. But every night, they came shuffling through our doors. Dirty, paper-thin, infested with lice – just like us.’
She said the older women offered themselves first; those who were already near death from malnutrition, those who were already infected with syphilis, placed themselves on the front line to protect the younger ones from the worst of whatever came into the dormitory. She said the kapos would beat them to prove to the Germans how much they could hate their own kind.
Doctor Nese told me that she had left the camp with nothing worse than pubic lice and a womb that would never carry a child to full term – and she thought of herself as one of the fortunate.
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