by Margi Preus
He also had to think of a good joke, because she was winning their joke competition. He reviewed the one he had heard earlier that day so he could tell it to her: Responding to a loud knock on the door, a Norwegian asked fearfully, “Who is it?” “It is the Angel of Death,” came the ominous reply. “What a relief!” responded the Norwegian. “I thought it was the Gestapo.”
That was a good one, he thought, as he wheeled his bike through the garden gate. Now, if he could just come up with a nice cake, with cream on it—even ersatz cream would be a treat.
He’d gone up the stairs and was just reaching for the door knocker when a loud hiss stopped him.
“Psst!”
Espen stopped. His hand fell away from the knocker.
“Don’t go in there,” the voice whispered.
Espen turned. “Kjell?”
“Go down the steps and back the way you came,” Kjell said. “Nice and quiet.”
Espen stared at him.
“Now!” Kjell said between clenched teeth.
Espen hesitated.
“It’s full of Gestapo in there,” Kjell said before disappearing between the houses and into the darkness of the backyards.
Espen had no reason to trust Kjell anymore. None at all. But he had to decide: Knock on the door and go inside, possibly into a trap? Or turn around and go out to the street, possibly into a trap? His throat tightened, but he knew he was going to trust Kjell. Maybe for no good reason.
Breathe, he told himself. He hopped down off the steps and pushed his bike toward the front gate. All right, he thought. So far, so good. Just go on calmly. It began to look as if he would make it to the street without being noticed, and he began to breathe again.
But just when he thought he was free and clear, a car screamed to a halt in front of the house, and three Gestapo officers emerged, then raced toward him, pistols drawn.
It had begun to snow, the flakes softly thumping all around him like a thousand tiny heartbeats. Out of the corner of his eye, Espen saw sheets on the neighbor’s clothesline. It was too gentle a night for gunfire, too sweet-smelling. What if he died right here, right now? Without saying good-bye to anyone? His parents. Ingrid. Why hadn’t he ever managed to work up the courage to talk to Solveig? If he lived, he would do it. He would not hesitate.
He was painfully, poignantly aware of the fresh scent of clean laundry and—abruptly—the perfumed shaving soap of the officers as they rushed past him.
… As they rushed right past him!
For a moment he felt as light as a feather, as if he were not standing but floating. Perhaps he had suddenly become invisible, because the officers ran up the stairs and into Leif’s house without a glance in his direction.
Espen continued walking his bike past the Gestapo car. Then he noticed a second one, parked farther down the street. How had he not noticed it when he first arrived? He didn’t know what made him do it, but he glanced inside as he passed by. There, on the backseat, was a box, a bakery box, tied with string. About the size of a cake.
The window was rolled down, and, feeling a little giddy, he reached in and snagged the box.
Somehow, Espen found himself seated on his bike. Somehow, his legs began to pedal. Slowly, as if he had not a care in the world, he steered his bicycle down the street. Slowly, the roar in his head subsided. Slowly, his stomach unclenched, and feeling returned to his limbs. The cool breeze ruffled his hair as he picked up speed, squeezing the tears from his eyes as he sped down, down, down the hill.
He was flying now, the cake box dangling from the handlebars, his mind racing in time to the whirring of the chain. Go! Go! Go! he thought. But go where? Leif would try to hold up under torture for as long as he could to give the others time to go underground. He was sure of that. Even so, he might reveal Espen’s name, or, if he didn’t, someone else might. Who knew how many people the Gestapo were in the process of finding and arresting? Espen knew a lot of people. He knew too much. Right now he knew one thing for sure: He couldn’t go home.
Riding his bike through alleys and quiet side streets, Espen thought about what to do next. He couldn’t go to any of his friends’ houses. That was risky for him and for them. His bicycle chain ticked away, reminding him of the time passing. Curfew had come and gone, and he was still out on the street. Where could he go? Where could he go that would be safe?
An arc of car lights made him pull his bike behind a row of spruce trees. He listened to the purr of the auto’s petrol engine: German. While the car slowly passed by, he peeked through the branches. The Gestapo car. He turned and looked through the backyards and could just see the rear of Solveig’s house. Nobody, not even Ingrid, knew about his crush on Solveig. Even Solveig didn’t know! But could he go to her house late at night and ask to stay there? It certainly wasn’t what he had envisioned as a first date.
The car had turned and was slowly coming back toward him. Move! he thought. Do it now!
Espen pushed his bike through the yards and parked it in the shrubs behind Solveig’s house. He stared up at the dark windows. Because of the blackout curtains, it was impossible to tell if any lights were on or not. It would be terribly rude to wake everyone. He walked in tight circles, trying to work up the courage to knock on the door. He laughed when he realized his heart was beating as hard as it had when the Gestapo had come racing at him at Leif’s house. Hadn’t he just vowed to talk to Solveig if he lived through that episode?
Quickly, before he lost his nerve, he put his hand to the door and knocked.
window on the second floor slid open, and a familiar face appeared. “Espen!”
It was Solveig. At least she hadn’t called him “chowderhead,” he noted. That was encouraging.
Moments later, he heard the side door being unlatched. “Hello!” she said, brightly, as if he was just coming to pay a casual visit. “What brings you by?”
Espen opened his mouth but found himself speechless. “I … uh … that is …,” he stammered.
Solveig grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside. “Sit down,” she said.
What could he say? He couldn’t tell her everything. “I am … uh … I have to avoid the Labor Service,” he blurted out.
Solveig’s parents came down the stairs, her mother wrapping her robe around her. “Hello,” she said. “Is there trouble?”
“You remember Espen,” Solveig said. “Ingrid’s brother? He has to stay out of sight for a while. The Labor Service is looking for him.”
“Ah,” her father said. “Well, you’d better stay here, then. You can sleep on the couch, close to the basement door. If you hear anybody knocking, take all your things and run down into the cellar right away. Be sure to take your shoes, too.”
He led Espen down the stairs. “We can handle whoever might come,” he said. “There’s the storm door that takes you out the back, if necessary.”
Espen tried the latch and saw it would open easily.
When they returned upstairs, Solveig’s mother said, “You must be hungry. Let me see if I can find something for you to eat.”
Espen remembered the cake box, and even though he’d meant it as a gift for Ingrid, he held it out to Mrs. Dahl. “Here’s a little something,” he said.
“My goodness!” she said. “That’s very kind of you! What is it?”
He shrugged. “A surprise?” he said.
“You don’t know what’s in it?” Solveig laughed.
“Not really,” Espen said. “Haven’t you heard the joke about the lady who came out of a store carrying a paper bag, and all the others standing in line asked her what it was? ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but it was only one krone!’”
The Dahls laughed at the joke, and Solveig said, “I’ll fix some tea, Mama. You sit down.”
Mr. and Mrs. Dahl sat at the kitchen table with Espen, and they talked while Solveig put a kettle on the stove and took out cups and saucers. Espen heard the pleasant rattle of teaspoons being placed on saucers, and then Solveig’s sharp in
take of breath when she opened the bakery box.
“Espen?” she said.
He got up, went to the counter, and looked into the box. There was no cake. He saw at a glance that the box was full of letters and documents, and that at least some of them were in code. And they seemed to be spattered with … yes, blood.
He shut the box quickly. It had been stupid of him not to look! He stole a glance at Solveig, and she signaled to him with her eyes: Don’t say anything to my parents.
Espen replied with a small nod of agreement and set the box under his chair.
“Sorry!” he said. “My mistake. Nothing to eat.” As he sat back down at the table, his limbs felt jellylike. What had he done? Now he had introduced dangerous papers into the Dahls’ house, containing who knew what kind of secret information.
With great concentration, he returned to the conversation. “It has begun to snow,” he said.
“Has it?” Mrs. Dahl said. “It’s so hard to tell with these drapes shut.”
They talked about goings-on about town and about the new compulsory labor law.
“I’ve heard that Hitler is conscripting men ages sixteen to sixty to defend Germany,” Mr. Dahl said.
Espen told a joke about how Hitler was so desperate, he’d even conscripted Methuselah. “Yes, that Methuselah. Nine-hundred-year-old Methuselah from the Bible!”
Everyone laughed, and Espen thought how odd it was to be sitting in this kitchen telling a joke, as if life was going on as normal, when he knew that outside and all around him, things were spinning wildly out of control. He didn’t know what might have happened to whoever had been the intended recipient of these papers. Didn’t know what had happened to Leif and Ole or any of the others. He didn’t know when and if he himself might be discovered. Didn’t know whether if at his own home, right now, the Gestapo were waiting for him. Everything seemed very tenuous and uncertain. Yet here, around this kitchen table, in this small circle of light, he felt intensely alive. Was it because of the events of the evening or the dizzying proximity of Solveig, whose face shone as if in full sunlight? He was pretty sure he was falling in love, as crazy as that seemed. The thought almost made him laugh out loud.
They finished their tea and rose from the table, placing their dishes in the sink as if it had been just any evening, as if Espen had been a member of their family for years. Solveig brought him a down coverlet, and they all went off to their beds as if nothing unusual was happening outside these walls, as if things were not, as Espen knew they were, falling apart, or spinning out of control or, perhaps, sliding off the edge of the tilted earth.
Espen sat on the couch, listening to Solveig’s soft footsteps retreating up the stairs. Then he opened the box and went through the papers.
They were all in code. He had often carried papers very much like these. Had they reached their destination? Had they already been deciphered by the wrong people? And whose blood was this?
He shoved the papers into his rucksack, burned the box in the fireplace, and sat on the edge of the couch, trying to puzzle everything out.
He should leave now, he thought, before he brought the Gestapo to Solveig’s house. Or perhaps he should stay a little longer, to make sure the patrols were off the streets. He would just lie down for a few moments, he thought, and then he would go.
n the middle of the night, Espen woke. He couldn’t say what had awoken him, but he had been dreaming of the draug. The enormous gray beast circled, swimming just under the surface of the water, opening and shutting its mouth as if trying to tell him something. Espen opened his eyes to the darkness of the empty living room and sat up, suddenly remembering what Stein had said: “If anything goes wrong, go to Oleanna.”
He got up, slid into his jacket, picked up his rucksack, and then slipped quietly out the side door. The snow had stopped, and in the predawn hours the town was bathed in a milky blue light. Espen thought about the strangeness of the whole night: the Gestapo, his bicycle ride through town, the dreamy sight of Solveig at the window, the warmth of the down cover that had sent him so immediately to sleep, the dream of Kjell warning him to … But that had not been a dream. Kjell had been there, at Leif’s house, and had warned him about the Gestapo. Or had he dreamt that? The whole night seemed a mix of dreams and real-life nightmares.
At the edge of town, Espen stashed his bicycle and set off across snowy fields toward the forest. He paused for a moment. Should he worry about his tracks? If this was all a dream, did it matter? Was he dreaming still? he wondered, as the sun rose, turning everything a delicious, buttery yellow: the snow, the sky, and even the little hidden cabin … against which, glinting and gleaming in the morning sun, leaned three pairs of skis.
When next he blinked, Leif and Ole were emerging from the hideout.
Espen heaved a sigh. “You two are a sight for sore eyes,” he said. “Are Per and Gust here, too?”
“No,” Leif replied. “Apparently, they were picked up on the road to the airdrop.”
“The word is, they were badly beaten,” Ole added. “The Gestapo must have gotten something out of them. We don’t know what—or how much.”
“What happened?” Espen said.
Leif rubbed some wax onto the bottom of their skis while Ole explained his part of the story.
“All we know is what happened to us,” he said. “It happened this way: Jens, who works at the bike shop and is a Milorg man, saw the Gestapo come in with a bicycle that he recognized as the one Leif had bought. Probably the one he intended you to have. So Jens slipped into the bathroom, out the window, and across the street to the radio shop to find me. I went straight to the factory to find Leif.
“I was just warning Leif when the Gestapo car drove up. The hooligans came toward the factory office, but the front man—honestly, I think it was Aksel Pedersen!—bent down to tie his shoe or something, and I went casually out the side door, and he didn’t notice me. I went straight home, got our skis, and came here while Leif … well, he can continue the story,” Ole finished.
“After Ole left,” Leif said, “I climbed a ladder to the loft above the factory office and slipped into an air shaft. The thugs searched all over the whole factory. One of them even climbed up into the loft with a factory watchman as a hostage. ‘What’s that?’ the Gestapo agent said, and the watchman answered, ‘An air shaft.’ Without even looking inside, the agent slammed the air shaft door shut, trapping me inside!
“I waited until I was sure they were gone, then shouted and hollered until the watchman found me. I didn’t go home—I was sure the Gestapo would have headed there next. Instead, I came straight here,” Leif finished.
“Now we’re headed to Sweden,” Ole said.
“Maybe you should come with us,” Leif said. “You can use Snekker’s skis and boots—”
“Hey!” Snekker came out, shouting and belching. “Who’s—aw, it’s you? Fine, then. Go ahead, take my skis. Someone will bring me another pair.”
Who would that be? Espen wondered. “Maybe Stein?” he said.
“No one’s heard from him,” Leif said. “We’re worried.”
“Do you think the Gestapo has my name?” Espen asked.
“Not from us,” Leif said.
“But until we find out everything that happened, we won’t really know who they know about.”
“And don’t forget, there’s the Labor Service, too,” Ole added. “If the Gestapo doesn’t get you, the Labor Service will.”
Espen wondered what to do. It would be safest to go with Leif and Ole, of course. He could always return when things settled down.
But their group was fractured now, and somebody had to stay to put the pieces back together. And then there was Solveig … Finally, finally, he had spoken with her. And now he was going to leave? He thought of the circle of warm light around her family’s kitchen table the previous night. He longed to sit there again, among those good people, with Solveig next to him, smiling. She had even laughed at his jokes!
And t
hen there were the papers, weighing heavily on his back.
“Let me borrow your skis, Snekker,” he said.
“You’re coming with us, then?” Leif asked.
“No,” Espen said. “Not yet.”
spen squinted into the sun and watched until Leif and Ole had disappeared among the crisp, windswept waves of snow. Then he turned and skied west, with the sun on his back. Tante Marie would know what to do with the papers he was carrying.
Suddenly, he remembered the document he was supposed to have delivered to Leif.
He glanced back over his shoulder. Leif and Ole were gone. Espen knew he wouldn’t be able to catch them now. He supposed he’d better take a look at the paper, so he pulled the envelope out of the secret pocket his mother had sewn into the inside of his jacket and opened it.
Darling, it began.
Hmm … that’s odd, Espen thought.
I miss you so much. How I long for your sweet kisses and embrace.
What was this? Espen turned the paper over, but the other side was blank.
Why must we be so far apart? Soon we will be together, and I will be in your arms. We will—
Espen skimmed the rest of the letter, but it just went on and on in the same vein. He tried to discern anything of importance but found nothing.
Had he just risked his life to deliver a love letter to Leif? He resisted the urge to crumple the paper and throw it as far as he could. Instead, he shoved it into his pocket. If he ever caught up with Leif, he would wave this evidence in front of him before he … before he punched him in the face!
He skied on, angrily jabbing his poles into the snow. He would show Tante Marie the letter. He hoped she would be angry, too. He also hoped she would be making waffles.
She was not. She was shoveling snow off her roof when Espen skied into the yard of the fox farm.
“Tante Marie!” Espen called up to her. “What are you doing up there?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” she said. “I’m shoveling.”
“You shouldn’t be up there!”