by Margi Preus
So he kept his eyes averted as he reached for the ball, and he almost had his hand on it when he noticed that the water was wiggling. The fjord was teeming with jellyfish! Since he was familiar with the sting of jellyfish, he carefully used an oar to scoop the ball out of the water and into the boat.
Danger averted, he relaxed and rowed back to the dock. He tied up the boat and reached for the ball, but his hand shot back in pain. The ball was covered in stinging, poisonous jellyfish tentacles. How was he going to carry it up the mountain?
He could hear Aksel shouting at him. “Hurry up down there. We’re all waiting for you!”
“Aksel doesn’t have to carry a jellyfish-covered soccer ball,” Espen grumbled. There was no other way to carry it, so he took off his jersey, wrapped it around the ball, and ran back up the mountain to the soccer field.
“Throw me the ball!” Aksel shouted several times, mixed with complaints about how long it had taken Espen to retrieve the ball.
Espen looked at Aksel. His face was flushed, as if he had been the one who had run down to the fjord and back. Fine, Espen thought, if he wants the ball so badly, he can have it. He carefully unwrapped the ball and, without touching it with his bare skin, tossed it to Aksel.
“It took you long e—Aaugh!” Aksel screamed as his hands touched the ball.
e won!” Espen hollered, flinging open the front door to his house. “We beat the Tigers, two to—” He stopped, dropping his rucksack at his feet.
A nicely dressed man stood just inside the entryway to the house. An agent for the Gestapo? Or a plainclothes Quisling policeman? Out of the corner of his eye, Espen caught a glimpse of a squat little local man he knew as the town laughingstock. He was practically prancing around their living room. His mother stood in the hall, a laundry basket resting on her hip. As the man touched one item after the next, her eyes stared red-hot daggers into his back.
The newspapers, Espen thought. His eyes strayed to the living room floor. Nothing there.
“Mor?” Espen said.
She glanced at him, the fire in her eyes melting into a mixture of relief and warning. “They’re here for your scout uniform,” she said. She shifted the clothes basket on her hip, and her eyes darted back to the pudgy little man. This was the fellow who made lewd comments to girls and kept company with the town drunks. Espen’s friends had often teased him; the man was no doubt delighted at this opportunity to get back at Espen and his scouting friends.
“You look angry, madam,” said the man at the door. “Please don’t worry. We are not here to trouble you.”
She turned to the policeman. Espen imagined he saw sparks flying from her eyes.
The man now turned to Espen. “You have been involved in Boy Scouts?” he said.
It was not really a question, Espen knew. Gestapo or Nazi policeman, it didn’t matter: you didn’t contradict these people.
He nodded.
The policeman glanced down at his clipboard and read, “You will turn in your shirt, trousers, cap, tie, and any badges you may have earned, whether they are attached to the uniform or not. All scouting activity is prohibited, any future outings are canceled, and scouts are not allowed to assemble in any way.”
Espen went upstairs to retrieve his uniform, clenching his teeth against the bitter taste that rose in his throat.
Ingrid was standing in the hallway. “Espen,” she whispered.
Espen mouthed the word, Newspapers? then nodded for her to follow him into his room.
“I don’t know!” Ingrid whispered. “Mor made me come up here before she answered the door. What’s going on?”
“Another stupid confiscation,” he said, rummaging in his dresser drawers for his scout uniform. He glanced up at her pale face. “Don’t worry. They’re not collecting diaries. Not yet.”
Espen delivered the uniform, the policeman deposited it in a bag, and the men gave obsequious little bows and backed out of the house. Espen turned to see his mother in the living room, wiping the furniture with a damp cloth.
“Mor?” he said.
“In the laundry basket,” she told him.
Espen found the newspapers under the dirty clothes in the basket. “I’ll get rid of these,” he said, and he stuffed the remaining papers under his shirt and into his stockings.
“Take a ration card, and get some bread!” she said, as he went out.
spen left some of the papers on the bus, dropped several off at friends’ houses, and had just a few left when he took his place at the end of the line outside the bakery. He wanted to stop thinking about what had happened at home. He wanted to think about the game.
We won! He mouthed the words, trying to retrieve the feeling of excitement he’d had after the game.
After a series of stupid moves in the early part of the match, they had pulled it together and beaten the Tigers, 2–1! Aksel and Stein had each scored a goal, and Espen had actually made some good saves after missing that first shot by the Tigers.
“Can you believe it?” Stein had said when the game was over and they were walking to the ferry. “We’re on our way to the championship!”
Espen grinned.
“By the way, pretty good trick with the jellyfish ball,” he said.
“It was kind of mean, I guess,” Espen said.
“Anybody other than Aksel would have laughed,” Stein said. “It would have been a good joke. You know he wasn’t really hurt—it just ‘stung’ his pride a little.”
Espen shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.
“Aksel is the kind of fellow who will hold a grudge,” Stein went on. “He’ll try to get back at you. So what you did was either brave or stupid.”
Espen laughed. “Probably stupid,” he said.
The line moved ahead, and he was almost inside the bakery when he saw Kjell walking up the street. He had to tell him about the game! He bolted away from the line and raced up the hill.
Kjell turned and smiled at Espen, his light blue eyes twinkling in their usual amused manner.
Espen stopped, caught his breath, and said, “We won! If only you had been there! We’re going to the championships! Isn’t that great?”
“Ja,” Kjell said. “That’s great.”
“You’re going to play, right?” Espen asked.
“We’ll see,” Kjell said.
“We really need you!”
“I have other things to do.”
Espen glanced at the package his friend was carrying under his arm.
“Bestemor’s medicine,” Kjell explained, patting it.
“Ah,” Espen said. “How’s your grandmother doing, then?”
“She’ll be better once she gets this.”
“It’s the championship, Kjell!” Espen said.
“I said, ‘We’ll see.’”
Espen stared at him. He was suddenly acutely aware of the crinkling of the papers under his shirt.
“One thing …,” Kjell said. “It’s about Aksel.”
“What about him?” Espen asked.
Kjell moved closer to him. “I know you don’t like him, but be careful. Don’t cross him, Espen.” His voice had lowered to a whisper and taken on an intensity that gave Espen goose bumps.
Espen rubbed the palm of his hand where the jellyfish had stung him.
“He …” Kjell hesitated. “He could make trouble for you … if he wanted to.” He turned quickly and continued up the hill.
Espen headed back toward the bakery, his head swimming. Aksel could make trouble for him? What did that mean?
rom inside the café, Aksel watched as the scrawny goalie left the line outside the bakery and jogged up the hill to meet his friend. Although he couldn’t hear what they said, he could tell they were happy to see each other.
He glanced down at his hands, at the red stripes still visible on his palms. If he thought about it, they still stung a little. That stupid kid and his stupid joke could go to the devil!
As he watched the two boys talking, Aksel replayed the ga
me in his head. It had started out well enough, when nobody had challenged his right to give them their positions, even though he wasn’t strictly the captain. He should be the captain! He would make a much better captain than Stein. What the team needed was discipline: someone to whip them into shape. They could be so much better if they had a stricter captain. It was mostly luck that they had won the game.
It was true, he had missed a couple of shots that he maybe should have had, but, really, it was the fault of the others on his team. None of them took the game seriously enough, the way he did. They were all jokers. And lazy, too. After the jellyfish episode, he had watched from the sidelines, furious at their lazy passes and the way they laughed and talked on the field. The game had been almost over before Stein had put Aksel back in.
When Aksel had run back onto the field, the other boys’ smiles had faded. They played with him because they had to. Aksel knew they didn’t like him. But he didn’t care anymore. Because he knew something they didn’t know.
Now he watched from the café window as the two boys parted and went their separate ways. He smiled. Soon, very soon, he knew that he would have a chance to get back at all of them, including that one walking slowly toward the bakery, who now had to take his place at the end of the line again. What a dunce he was—too stupid to keep his place, even, and too young to play on their team, anyway, that kid who had thrown him the jellyfish ball, the one whose name he had never bothered to learn.
hat good was a code name if you didn’t ever get to use it? For the umpteenth day in a row, Espen had not heard a peep from anyone, hadn’t been given any more newspapers to deliver or anything. He had kept himself busy by helping his father at the train station, but the anticipation was killing him.
“I wish I was doing something!” Espen blurted out, carrying an armload of packages and bundled letters into the mail car.
His father paused in his writing and looked at him over his glasses. “Aren’t you doing something now? Turn that package this way, would you?”
Espen turned the package so the address faced his father. “Yes, but I mean, I wish I was doing something to fight the Nazis!”
“You should be a little more careful about what you say out loud,” his father said. He scribbled something on his clipboard.
“Sorry,” Espen said. “There just seem to be more and more of them every day! Look at all these packages they are sending and receiving. Coming from Germany to somewhere in Norway. Going from Norway to somewhere in Germany.”
He placed the parcels in the car, and his father, pen in hand, looked at each one and recorded something on his clipboard. What was he writing? Espen wondered.
Espen was still wondering when he arrived at soccer practice. He sat on the sidelines, putting his soccer boots on slowly and carefully so that the tape that held them together wouldn’t rip. Stein dashed up and said, breathlessly, “Remember Jotunheimen?”
“Our Jotunheimen?” Espen said. “Ja.”
“Meet up there tomorrow. Bring a hand saw.”
A hand saw? Espen wondered. He glanced up, but Stein was gone, back on the field with the other boys.
Espen got out onto the field in time to hear Per say, “… they’re going to be required to join the NS, the Norwegian Nazi party.”
“Will they?” Leif said.
“Who?” Espen asked.
“The teachers,” Ole told him. “Our teachers! They’re supposed to sign a declaration of loyalty to the new regime.”
The boys began to complain about all the new rules instituted by Quisling and his “NS,” the Nasjonal Samling party. Like the stupid uniforms the NS had said they were going to require students to wear to school.
Espen practiced his dribbling techniques, bouncing the ball from his foot up to his knee and back down.
Leif said he had heard a rumor that there was going to be a Nazi sports association—mandatory, of course. “Nobody would join otherwise,” he added.
“Ha-ha,” Ole said. “Nobody will join, anyway. Just like the farmers and the fishermen haven’t joined those Nazi organizations they were told to join, either.”
“Like the whole merchant marine fleet didn’t come back to Norway when the Nazis told them to,” Gust said. “One thousand ships, now in the service of the Allies—take that!”
Espen wondered if the troll’s heads that Tante Marie had been talking about had been a metaphor for all these new Nazi organizations everyone was supposed to join.
“Quisling and his Nasjonal Samling party really like to tell everybody what to do, don’t they?” Leif said.
“And if you don’t do it, they have the storm troopers from the group of Nazi thugs they call the hird come and beat you up,” Ole said. “Did you hear about that boy in Oslo who got beaten up for tearing down a Nazi poster?”
Then Espen saw Aksel, sitting nearby, pulling on his soccer boots. His new soccer boots, Espen couldn’t help but notice. How had he come by them? And how much of the conversation had he heard? Aksel seemed to be smiling smugly and glowering at the same time.
Then Leif said, “Hey, speaking of thugs, where’s Aksel?”
Espen winced. The other boys, having by now noticed Aksel sitting on the side of the field, were silent. Then Leif turned and saw him.
A car pulled up and stopped, and an official-looking man wearing a brown shirt and black tie emerged from it. He walked to the edge of the playing field where Aksel now stood.
“Brown shirt,” Ole muttered. “That’s a bad sign.”
Next, three boys, also in hird uniforms, got out of the car.
“Young men!” the man called to the team. “This football club has been reorganized under the auspices of the Norwegian Sports Association. You’ll be pleased to know that one of your teammates, Aksel Pedersen, will be your new captain.”
Espen glanced at the other boys, all standing frozen in their positions.
“Athletes!” the officer continued. “It is now appropriate to cheer for your new captain.”
The response was silence.
Finally, Aksel said, “Stein, you can stay on the team, playing defense. I’ll put you into play when I can.”
Stein walked to the edge of the field, picked up his jacket, and continued walking away without a word or a backward glance. Espen wondered what the other boys intended to do. Would they stay and be on a Nazi team? He knew they didn’t want to, but there were those storm troopers … Who knew what kind of trouble his teammates might get into if they protested?
“Shall we play, gentlemen?” Aksel said. “We have a big game to prepare for.”
Espen felt his heart pressing painfully against his ribs. He, along with all the other boys, wanted so badly to play for the championship. But to play as a Nazi team? Impossible!
Wouldn’t the older boys do something? He was the youngest one. Surely he wouldn’t have to be the first.
Looking at Aksel, so self-satisfied right now, believing he had finally won, Espen felt something like poison rush through his veins. He wanted to slug him and the storm troopers right in their smug faces. He felt his hands ball up into fists at his sides.
A taste, bitter as juniper berries, rose into his mouth as he thought of every humiliation he and his family had suffered lately: Watching that perverse little man snooping around their house. Having to turn in his scout uniform. How they all had to live in constant fear—even if you hadn’t done anything wrong, you still had to worry that you might be doing something the Nazis wouldn’t like. Wearing the wrong color, or not sitting next to a German soldier if there was an empty seat, or the million offenses they dreamt up while you were sleeping.
And now they’d taken over his soccer team! It was too much; it had to stop! Someone had to do something!
he bitter taste still lingered in Espen’s mouth the next day when he hiked up to meet his friends at “Jotunheimen”—The Land of the Giants. It was just a huge flat rock they had discovered on a summer hike and had claimed as their own.
; Ole flung himself down onto the rock. “Do the Nazis have to take over everything? We were so close! So close to playing for the championship!”
“We still can,” Stein said.
“Oh, no,” Leif said. “I’m not playing on any Nazi team.”
“Me, neither,” Espen agreed.
“No, of course not,” Stein said. “But the game is still on.”
The boys cocked their heads to look at him. Leif said, “Go on ….”
“Turns out the other teams wouldn’t join the Association, either,” said Stein. “Our opponents are looking for a field where we can play in secret. The game is still on!”
The boys whooped and threw their caps into the air. Per danced a jig.
Espen smiled. The Boy Scouts were meeting in secret, too, in a shop that made caskets, which was much more exciting than where they’d met before. They had to stagger their arrival times and go in the alleyway door so as to avoid suspicion. The Boy Scouts had gotten a lot more interesting all of a sudden. And attendance at meetings had dramatically improved.
“We’re short players for the game, though,” Per said.
“Maybe Kjell will play,” Espen offered.
There was an uncomfortable silence.
Finally, Espen said, “I could ask him …”
“No,” Stein said. “He’s … we think he’s ‘striped.’”
The others mumbled their agreement.
“He’ll come around,” Espen said. “You’ll see.”
“No, he’s changed,” Leif said. “You’d better not mention any of this to him.”
“And anyway,” Ole said, “I know a couple of guys who’ll be happy to play an illegal game of soccer.”
“Enough of this banter,” Stein said. “Follow me.” Without a word of explanation, he struck off down the rock, across the trail, and toward the woods.