Shadow on the Mountain

by Margi Preus

  The others scrambled to their feet, grabbed their rucksacks, and followed.

  “We can do more than play illegal soccer games,” Stein said as he walked.

  “Ja!” Ole said. “Let’s kick some Nazi butt!”

  Everyone laughed.

  Then Leif said, “Do you mean, like saving Norway from the Nazis?”

  Stein turned back to face the others, and said quietly, “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “The five of us?” Espen asked. “Against all two hundred thousand of them?”

  “It might take a while. And I’m not saying it will be easy. Who’s in?”

  “Why not?” Ole said. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”

  “Sure,” Leif said. “I’d like to get rid of the Germans more than anything on earth.”

  Per agreed.

  The boys now turned to Espen. “Well?” Leif asked. “How about you?”

  “Me?” Espen was a little surprised to be included. He was the youngest and, despite his good grades, somehow considered to be the dumbest. “Four-eyes,” they called him, and also “numbskull” and “chowderhead.”

  But now they all turned to him expectantly.

  “You were brave yesterday, Espen,” Ole said. “The first to walk off the field after Stein.”

  Leif agreed. “I’m not sure I would have done it if you hadn’t gone first. To tell the truth, I was a little scared of those storm troopers.”

  So was I! Espen thought. He had felt Aksel’s eyes on him as he left. He wouldn’t be surprised if there were a couple of holes burned into the back of his jersey. “I was probably just too stupid to know better,” he mumbled, pulling at a nearby weed and shredding the dried flower with his fingers.

  “I doubt it,” Stein said. “So … are you in?”

  Of course he was in. He was in it already—although the other boys didn’t know that. Ever since the Germans had invaded, Espen had felt as if the whole world had gotten off-kilter. Tipped wrong. If the world were flat, he could imagine things—soccer balls, shoes, whole houses, maybe—sliding toward the edge. The uneasy sense that at any moment they all might slide off the edge of the world into the darkness of space made him feel weak with fear or crazy with anger. He would do anything—anything!—to set the world right again.

  “I’m in,” he said.

  “What are we going to do?” Leif asked.

  “Let’s blow up Gestapo headquarters!” Ole said.

  “Do you know anything about explosives?” Stein asked.

  “No.”

  “I thought not,” Stein said.

  “Even if we did know how, we can’t do that,” Per said. “The Nazis make reprisals for anything like that—they take random prisoners and execute them! What if they shot somebody because of something we did?”

  “There are other things we can do,” Stein said, “starting with …” He led them through a thick patch of woods and undergrowth into a small clearing. “Building ourselves a weapons depot.”

  “Whoa!” Ole said. “Really? Weapons? Where are we going to get those?”

  “We’ll see,” Stein said. “For now, it can be a hideout. You all brought what I asked you to, right?”

  Out of rucksacks came saws, a hammer, a hatchet, a rope, and a pailful of nails. The boys got right to work, clearing the area around a natural depression in the earth, dragging fallen trees into the clearing, sawing off the branches, and gathering moss.

  Per sang,

  “I’m off to Oleanna

  I’m turning from my doorway,

  No chains for me, I’ll say good-bye

  to slavery in Norway.”

  The other boys chimed in on the chorus.

  “Ole, Ole, Ole, oh! Oleanna!

  Ole Ole Ole, oh! Oleanna!”

  As they worked, they took turns singing verses about a place where roasted piggies offered you ham sandwiches, beer flowed from springs in the ground, the cows milked themselves, and hens laid eggs ten times a day.

  By the time their work for the day was done, the boys had a name for their hut: Oleanna. Espen wished like anything that Kjell could know about it. His friend would have loved to help build this secret place. When completed, it would have a heather-covered floor, log walls, and an earth roof. The whole thing would be camouflaged with moss and even a small tree or two planted on top.

  Stein drew a big circle on the mossy ground. “This is the magic circle,” he said, “and we are in this together. We keep each other’s secrets, and the circle will protect us.”

  The boys stood inside the circle and placed their hands on top of one another’s.

  “We shall work tirelessly to save Norway from the Nazis,” Stein said.

  The others repeated it.

  Espen felt that the day, which had seemed so gray, flat, and dull just a few hours earlier, had brightened. His friends looked strong and brave. If anyone can do this, it will be us, he thought. And if we can’t save all of Norway from the Nazis, maybe we can save this one corner of it.

  At the very least, Espen mused as he shouldered his pack for the hike home, I can save Kjell.

  here would be moonlight but not too much, Espen thought, hiking up the hill with his skis on his shoulder. After a few kilometers, there was enough snow, and he stepped into his skis and slipped his hands into the straps of his poles. The snow was good: newly fallen and soft. That was important, because it would be quiet. Now his skis whispered over it—“shhh, shhh, shhh,” they said—while Espen’s heart could not seem to be quiet at all; it pounded away in his chest as if Thor himself were wielding it.

  “Are you a good skier?” Tante Marie had asked before giving him this, his first real assignment as a courier.

  “I ski well enough,” Espen had answered.

  “You know there is snow in the mountains,” she’d said matter-of-factly. “So you will have to use your skis.”

  Espen nodded.

  “It’s not a difficult assignment,” Tante Marie said. “It’s only to retrieve something from a cabin.”

  “Where?” Espen asked.

  “Hulringen,” she said.

  Espen had almost choked on his waffle.

  “There’s just one problem,” Tante Marie continued.

  Espen already knew what she was going to say: “The place is crawling with Germans.”

  Hulringen was a winter resort, and the whole area was known to be Zutritt Verboten, Access Forbidden. The Wehrmacht had taken over almost every available building. The ski lodge, the nearby farms—even family cabins and huts—had been requisitioned. But not the lonely little cabin where a revolver had been left behind and now must be retrieved.

  Espen could hardly help feeling as if he was being watched. Not by deer or moose or fox, as he’d sometimes felt when he skied through the forest. This time, the eyes he felt on him were German.

  He shouldn’t be so worried, he told himself; they were terrible skiers. Some of them may have tried Alpine skiing in Germany, which involved shussing downhill and then being carried uphill by a lift. But most didn’t have experience with Nordic skiing: trekking long distances over all kinds of terrain, up and down. He and his schoolmates had often laughed at the German soldiers learning to ski. There was a small hill near the school where they practiced. It was such an easy slope that even the kindergartners could manage it. It had been the scene of many wild episodes of one-ski races and jumping contests when they were younger. Kjell had won everything, as he usually did.

  Now, schoolchildren would line up outside the school and laugh as the soldiers tumbled and tried to pick themselves up—often only to fall again—or have their skis carry them sideways or backward down the hill. Watching them trying to go uphill was even more comical. Even Kjell had laughed when a plump young soldier trying to herringbone up a hill ended up sliding down backwards, flailing the whole way.

  Why weren’t he and Kjell doing this together? Kjell should be on this mission. He would have been able to out-ski anyone. Kjell was
the brave one; he would have been in the lead, and Espen would be much less scared at this moment. It probably would even be fun!

  The cabin was just as Tante Marie had described it to him. Espen stepped out of his skis and went inside. Right away, he wished he was back outside and on his skis. He felt as if the walls of the cabin were a trap—a wooden box—and he was the rabbit. All it would take was for someone to pull the string and the box would collapse, and he would be trapped inside.

  “Just stay focused,” he told himself out loud, and he went to retrieve the revolver. It was where Tante Marie had said it would be, under a loose floorboard beneath the bunk.

  So this is what a Colt .32 feels like, he thought. Heavy. Solid. Dangerous. He checked to see that it was unloaded, as he had been shown how to do, then stuffed it into his jacket pocket. After glancing out the window to make sure it was safe, he went out, slipped on his skis, and pushed off.

  The moon had risen above the far peaks, and in the white moonlight everything—a rock, a stump, a distant tree—looked like a German soldier. Espen’s heart whizzed, thumped, rattled, and banged around in his chest. He was jumpy, and his skiing was clumsy. At least it was downhill, he thought. But the farther down the mountain he went, the patchier the snow became until, finally, in the valley, it dwindled to nothing. Well, he thought, he was through the worst of it.

  He stopped to take off his skis and walked the rest of the way into town. He would have to hide the gun at his house and take it to the fox farm the next day. So he hurried through the dark streets, ready to be home and safely in bed.

  It was stupid, he knew, but he found himself walking right past Kjell’s house. He burned with the desire to tell Kjell what he had done. What fun was it to do these things if you couldn’t tell your best friend? If Kjell had been with him, then right now they would be crowing about how they had sneaked a gun out from under the Germans’ noses—it would be as thrilling as stealing troll gold.

  His steps slowed as he approached Kjell’s house.

  What would he say if Kjell came out right now? He shoved his hands into his pockets and curled his fingers around the revolver. If Kjell knew what he had done, he couldn’t help but be impressed. Maybe he would want to join up with Espen and his friends.

  Should he knock?

  He glanced at Kjell’s bedroom window. It was dark, of course—the blackout shades were pulled shut. Or perhaps nobody was home.

  No. He knew he could not tell anyone what he’d done. Not his sister, not his friends, and least of all Kjell. This was not a game. He was really in it.

  efore opening her brand-new diary for 1942, Ingrid paged through her diary from the previous year. So much had happened!

  Almost every kind of food is rationed now, one of her entries read. That is, if you can get it at all. Even potatoes are hard to come by for a lot of people. Mor dug up her flower gardens and planted potatoes instead. So we have potatoes and rutabagas and kohlrabi. Ish, ish, and ish. I am so sick of them all!

  Any books that the Nazis don’t like (books that “damage national and social progress”) are banned. Concerts, song lyrics—all censored. Dancing in public—now that’s illegal, too. We aren’t even allowed to celebrate our biggest holidays. May 1 and May 17 have been decreed “normal working days.”

  A few entries farther on she had written in big, bold letters, GERMANY HAS ATTACKED RUSSIA!!! Far says, “Now Hitler has bitten off more than he can chew!” We can only hope.

  You’d think the teachers would ease up on us, what with all the hardships people are facing, but no. Not one bit of it. It’s as if they are desperate to impart to us everything—everything they know, everything there is to know. Mor says they are “arming us with knowledge” before the Nazis take over the schools, which they are definitely trying to do.

  There’s a curfew now, and radios have been confiscated. If you are a member of the NS, then you can have your radio so you can listen to the propaganda stations. Some people have them, anyway, of course, hidden in clever places, even though the penalty is death. Death! For owning or listening to a radio. The same for possessing underground newspapers. Death!

  A chill ran up Ingrid’s spine. She had noticed Espen’s skis leaning up against the house some mornings, still wet from melting snow, or his bicycle parked outside, spattered with mud. She knew he had been delivering newspapers, but she suspected that was not the only thing he’d been doing. He was not out all night delivering papers.

  Sometimes he came into the house with his sweater damp and the smell of the mountains on him, his cheeks red from windburn.

  “Don’t ask,” Ingrid’s mother said, quietly laundering his mud-caked clothes, putting his filthy socks to soak in a tub in the basement. If Ingrid had come home with such dirty clothes, there would be some questions asked—she could be sure of that! But never a word was said to Espen.

  What was he up to?

  spen could hear the bell long before he reached the school. He had overslept—another late night. There had been a lot of them recently.

  The janitor stopped him as he dashed into school and without a word handed him a piece of paper. So Espen came staggering into class, trying to struggle out of his jacket while still clutching the piece of paper in one hand.

  “Place your essays on your desk …,” Mr. Henriksen was saying.

  The strap of Espen’s rucksack snagged on his jacket sleeve, so he set the paper on his desk in order to get himself untangled.

  “… and pass them forward,” Mr. Henriksen went on.

  Anna, the girl who sat in front of Espen, turned around and picked up the paper on his desk. “Is this your essay?” she asked.

  Espen reached out for the paper.

  “There’s nothing on it at all!” She flipped it over, looked at both sides, then held the page out to Espen. But it was snatched up by a different hand, and the two of them looked up to see their teacher looking down at them.

  “Please face forward and pay attention,” Mr. Henriksen said, and he marched back to the front of the class, paper still in hand. “As I was saying …,” he began, but he stopped when the door to the classroom swung open and a Gestapo officer and two armed soldiers entered.

  Espen watched as Mr. Henriksen’s face went pale, and he saw his teacher’s fingers curl tightly around the clean sheet of paper.

  “Mr. Henriksen?” the officer said.

  “Yes,” the teacher answered. He stood ramrod straight and looked the officer in the eye, but Espen noticed the paper in his hands quiver; his hands were trembling.

  “You are under arrest,” the officer said.

  The room had grown deathly still when the soldiers walked in. Now it was so still, it seemed that no one was even breathing—or could breathe.

  Why? Espen imagined the students asking themselves. Why are they arresting our teacher? His gaze fell again on the paper. Throw it away, he willed Mr. Henriksen. Throw the paper away.

  But Mr. Henriksen clung to the page as if it would save him.

  “You will please come with us,” the officer said, gesturing to the door.

  Mr. Henriksen turned to the class and said in a steady voice, “Read chapters twelve and thirteen. You can have an extension on your essays until next week.”

  Then the soldiers took him by his arms and began to escort him out.

  Although his knees felt as if they might buckle under him, Espen stood up at his desk. “Please,” he said. “May I have my paper back?”

  The officer snatched the crumpled page out of Mr. Henriksen’s hands. “This is your essay?” He waved it at Espen.

  Espen nodded slowly.

  The officer held the paper out, and Espen walked with trembling legs to the front of the classroom.

  “It is good to see you are so concerned with your academics,” the officer said. Behind his thick lenses, his eyes were eerily huge.

  Espen wished those lenses would somehow concentrate the sunlight coming through the window and cause the paper to catch fi
re.

  The officer handed him the page with a terse smile, and Espen went back to his desk, sitting down in time to see the man absently rubbing his fingers together. The officer didn’t seem to notice the white powder that drifted from his gloves to the floor.

  spen walked to the train station with his head down. It was crazy. His teacher hadn’t been arrested because he was involved with the Resistance. Instead, he and many others had been taken away just because they were teachers. Is that what Mr. Henriksen would call “irony”?

  It was, at least, fortunate that Espen had gotten the paper back; being caught with it would only have made things worse for Mr. Henriksen. The message had probably been written in something simple, like baking soda. Any heat source would make the writing show up. The Gestapo would certainly know an easy trick like that. It was just lucky the officer had not noticed the white powder that rubbed off on his gloves.

  Passing notes by tossing them into a wastebasket and relying on the janitor to distribute them to the right people had worked for a while, but it couldn’t go on much longer. Espen supposed he didn’t have to worry about it for now, anyway. School had been canceled.

  He looked up to see Kjell coming toward him on the street. He hadn’t seen Kjell for months. Surely he couldn’t still think of the Germans as friends! Kjell had always liked Mr. Henriksen. Espen would tell him what had happened, and that would make Kjell change his mind.

  “Hei,” Espen said.

  “Hei,” Kjell replied.

  “You haven’t been in school.”

  “No,” Kjell said. “I’m going to the Rikshird school.”

  Involuntarily, Espen took a step backward. “The hird school?”

  “You should join up,” Kjell said.

  “Nei!” The word shot out of his mouth so quickly, there was no way he could stop it. He should probably be more cautious, he realized, so he finished with, “My mor would never allow it.”

  A corner of Kjell’s mouth twitched. “Your mama … ?” he said, a little sarcastically. Kjell had never been sarcastic before, and it made Espen feel unsettled, like being on a boat that suddenly pitched the wrong way.