Shadow on the Mountain

by Margi Preus

  “It’s very difficult to shovel snow off the roof from down there. You should try it!” She stopped and leaned on her shovel.

  “I’ll try from up there if you’ll come down here,” Espen said. “Let me do it.”

  “Ja, ja,” Tante Marie said.

  Espen held the ladder while she climbed down, wheezing the whole way.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “No hurry.” He helped her over to a snowbank to sit down and said, “You shouldn’t be doing things like that.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she puffed. “I just need a minute to catch my breath.”

  Espen climbed up the ladder and surveyed the situation on the roof. “You must have had quite a storm.”

  “Ja.” Tante Marie practically gasped the word. “It’s a good thing you came to see me.”

  “So I could shovel the snow off your roof?” Espen asked.

  “That was just a lucky thing,” she said. “Actually, I have to tell you—” She stopped abruptly and waved one hand at him while holding the other to her chest.

  Espen clattered down the ladder and knelt beside her. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked.

  “The truth is … ” Tante Marie’s face was ashen. “… I don’t know how much longer I’ll last. It’s a race now to see who gets me first: the Gestapo or my bad heart.”

  Espen’s own heart raced. No! he thought. Not Tante Marie! “We’d better get you to a hospital,” he said.

  “No,” she said, waving his concern away. “It’s not that bad. Let’s go inside.”

  He helped her into the house, and she sat down at the kitchen table. When her breathing and color had returned to normal, she gestured to a stack of crispy flat bread and a block of brown goat cheese. Espen shaved off long curls of the sweet cheese to place on top of big squares of bread. He gave one to her and took one for himself.

  “What did you have to tell me?” Espen asked.

  “Why don’t you tell me first why you came to see me,” Tante Marie said.

  “Something’s gone wrong,” he said between bites. He told her about Leif and Ole and about the box of blood-spattered documents. Per and Gust had been beaten up and, he supposed, arrested. He could feel his face getting hot with anger as he told her that in the midst of all this, he had risked his life to deliver a love letter to Leif.

  Tante Marie held out her hand.

  Espen gave her the crumpled letter. She glanced at it, then said, “Let’s take this out to the barn.”

  In the barn, she motioned for him to move a bale of straw and then to lift the trapdoor underneath. From a hole in the floor he hoisted up a box. He opened the lid to find an assortment of small vials and bottles.

  She held the letter up to the shaft of sunlight that streamed in through the window, turning it this way and that. She smoothed the paper and set it on the straw bale, then chose a vial from the assortment and dabbed some of the liquid on the page.

  Espen watched in amazement as pale blue writing appeared between the dark black sentences of the letter.

  “Invisible ink!” he gasped, then read the words aloud as they appeared: “Your group has been compromised. Someone has a shadow.” He thought for a moment and then said, “A shadow?”

  “A spy,” Tante Marie said. “Someone in your group is being followed.”

  Espen and Tante Marie looked at each other. “Maybe you,” she added.

  “Me?” Espen whispered.

  “Do you think there’s an informer in your group?” Tante Marie asked.

  Espen shook his head. “No. Not possible.”

  “Someone from outside, then,” Tante Marie said. “Possibly someone who knows you.”

  The pounding of Espen’s heart seemed to fill the barn. Someone he knew? Someone he trusted? His head spun. That must explain how Per and Gust were discovered on that deserted road and why the Gestapo had found out about Leif.

  “I have more bad news,” Tante Marie said. “Sit down. I think I will, too.”

  They sat down together on the bale of straw.

  “It’s about Stein …” Tante Marie paused, then finished quietly. “He’s been killed.”

  Everything seemed to stop for a moment. The silence of the barn roared in Espen’s ears. He thought of the documents, their edges curled with dried blood. Stein’s blood? He felt his hands clench into fists. He didn’t blame Per and Gust. Everyone knew the Gestapo’s methods could be impossible to withstand. They beat prisoners with steel springs, broke their bones, battered their faces, held their heads underwater until they passed out, over and over again. Who knew how he himself would stand up under torture? No, he blamed the informer, the spy. If he ever found out who it was …

  “Perhaps you should disappear for a time,” Tante Marie said. The white strands in her red hair caught the light and glinted like silver threads.

  “But,” Espen said, “Leif and Ole are gone, and Per and Gust are out of commission. And Stein …” He felt his chest tighten, then finished by saying, “Who is left to do the work?”

  After the box had been returned to its hiding place under the floor and Tante Marie was back in her warm kitchen, Espen climbed up onto the roof and commenced shoveling. As he scooped up shovelful after shovelful of blindingly bright snow, he wondered who the “shadow” could be. Who was the spy?

  Someone from the train station? Or one of the fellows who worked with Ole in the radio shop? Or—Espen stopped to watch a scoop of snow fly off the roof in an explosion of glittering confetti—perhaps someone who worked with Leif in the fish factory? With each shovelful of snow, he thought of another possibility. A neighbor? A friend of the family? One of his old school chums? And with each shovelful, he felt himself digging down closer to the truth, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to get there.

  Perhaps he had not been “watching with both eyes,” he thought. “One eye to see; the other to make sense of it,” Tante Marie had once said.

  Another scoop of sparkling snow flew off the roof. What had he seen that he hadn’t made sense of? He’d seen something sparkling, like this, he remembered. Recently. Yes, it had been when he and the other boys were preparing for the airdrop. He’d seen something winking on the far hillside, reminding him of diamonds set against the dark spruce trees. He remembered that he had wondered what it was, but then it had slipped his mind.

  What else? What else had he missed? When he’d gone to see Snekker, after the ski race at school, he had heard a noise, like a branch snapping. He hadn’t paid enough attention to that, either.

  What else? Per had said he’d felt as if he was being watched. What else?

  Espen began shoveling with increasing ferocity, digging ever deeper into the core of his memory. Stein was dead. Per and Gust beaten up. Leif and Ole on their way over the mountains. Who was responsible for this? Espen was going to find out. He would find out, and he would even the score.

  Back in the house, Espen said, “I’m going to stay.”

  Tante Marie looked at him, her eyes hot pinpricks on his cold skin. “No matter who the shadow turns out to be,” she said, “don’t let it eat you up. You must not let bitterness take hold of you.”

  “How do you keep from being angry and bitter?” Espen cried. “When it doesn’t seem to matter what we do? Nothing ever gets better! It just gets worse and worse.”

  “Anger, hatred, bitterness, fear—those are the emotions that drive the Nazis,” Tante Marie said. “That is what has made them the way they are. Don’t be swallowed up into their darkness. Whatever else you do, my boy, move toward the light.”

  ove toward the light. How was he supposed to do that? Espen wondered, as he sped down the hill into the enveloping darkness. His mood was as dark as the mountains, which tonight seemed to loom over the valley and its winding river like hungry trolls. Coasting down the road on a borrowed bike, he could see only darkness and shadows: his own shadow riding a shadow bicycle through the shadows of the tall trees that lined the road. And, perhaps, some shadow he could not se
e.

  He hunched his shoulders against the cold and looked behind him. Was he being followed now?

  Why, Espen wondered, of his group, was he the only one who was not in prison or on his way to Sweden? Or dead, he thought, feeling the cold course through him as if through his very veins. He remembered how he had been warned away from Leif’s house when the Gestapo had been there. He had also been warned to stay away from Levin’s shop when he was carrying the radio. It had been Kjell both times. Why had Kjell been there just then, standing in the shadows as if he’d been waiting for Espen? If Kjell—his friend—had been responsible for what had happened to Stein and Per and Gust but had somehow spared Espen … that made him angrier than anything!

  The idea of Kjell being the spy dogged him, pedaling after him like the devil on a bicycle.

  “Are you worried about the spy?” Tante Marie had asked him as she jiggled the key in the shed door.

  “Of course,” he’d said, “but I’ll be careful. I’m more worried for my family.” His father was taking risks. Even his sister. She’d been feeding prisoners. And she kept a diary, he explained, and he was worried what she wrote in it. Why did she have to do something so frivolous that didn’t help anyone yet was still so dangerous?

  “‘Frivolous’?” Tante Marie wheeled her bike out of the shed. “‘Not helping’? Did I hear that from you—Odin?” She stressed his code name. “Do you not remember that your namesake had two ravens whose names were …”

  “Hugin and Munin,” Espen said. “Thought and Memory.”

  “Very good,” Tante Marie said. “Every day, they flew to the four corners of the earth to spy for Odin, and they came back at evening to perch on his shoulders. Then they would whisper into his ears all they had learned. You know what Odin said about them?”

  “No, but I have a feeling you are going to tell me,” Espen said.

  “Hugin and Munin fly each day,

  Over the spacious earth,”

  Tante Marie recited.

  “I fear for Hugin,

  That he come not back,

  Yet more anxious am I for Munin.”

  “So, what that means is that Odin was more worried about memory than thought?” Espen asked.

  “That’s the way I’d interpret it,” Tante Marie said.

  Memory! Espen thought now. What was so great about it? Why would anyone want to remember any of this: the food shortages, the confiscations, living in dread of the knock at the door? Nacht und Nebel, the Gestapo called it, Night and Fog. The knock came in the middle of the night; people disappeared in fog.

  Hundreds of people in Oslo had been arrested just for carrying flowers on the king’s birthday. A fishing village in the north had been burned to the ground, eighteen of its young men executed and its entire male population sent to concentration camps in Germany. The Gestapo took its wrath out on Milorg and other Resistance groups. Arrests, torture, murders, and executions were happening all over Norway. Many groups had unraveled, including his own.

  Nothing he or the larger Resistance movement did seemed to make any difference. Did it matter what he did or didn’t do? He couldn’t even remember why he had even gotten involved in the first place.

  Suddenly, something moved on the road ahead of him. It was so unexpected, it made his heart jump. He slammed on his brakes. There, moving about in the glow of his bike light, were four big black grouse—capercaillie, they were called.

  Espen climbed stiffly off his bike and stood watching the elegant birds, with their tail feathers fanned into a regal display, as they calmly pecked gravel by the side of the road. The night was so quiet, he could hear the low chuckling sound the birds made and the scratching of their feet against the gravel. They seemed unconcerned about his presence. They seemed unconcerned about anything. There was no war for them, no war here. For them, all was tranquil.

  They didn’t even seem cold, Espen thought, shivering. He shoved his hands under his armpits and jumped up and down, trying to get warm.

  “Be stronger than the cold,” his gym teacher had once said, as Espen and his classmates stood shivering in their gym shorts one early spring day. Tante Marie had once told him he had to be “smarter than the Nazis.” Then, recently, she had told him that it wasn’t enough to be smarter. “You also have to be better,” she’d said.

  Stronger. Smarter. Better. Why couldn’t he just be? Like these birds, pecking away at the side of the road.

  He inhaled, gulping in the frosty mountain air as if it was an elixir that could make him stronger, smarter, better. There was a folktale he knew, about a boy who drank from a troll’s flask and became as strong as the troll himself, strong enough to slice off the troll’s many heads in one blow. He supposed Tante Marie would say that it wasn’t enough to be stronger—the boy would also have to be smarter. And better. Otherwise, by drinking the troll’s brew, perhaps he had just become a troll himself.

  Espen swallowed a few more draughts of the cold air, until his heart felt like it had turned to ice. He would get even with Kjell, he decided. He pulled his collar up against the cold and climbed back onto his bicycle, the wheels ticking like the wheels in his mind, spinning out a plan as he plunged into the darkness.

  very knock on the door now made Ingrid jump. Some of Espen’s friends had been arrested, tortured, and sent to a prison camp. One of his old soccer teammates had been killed—shot through the chest by a Gestapo agent. Two others had escaped to Sweden.

  Where, Ingrid wondered, was Espen? She had not seen him for weeks, and if their parents knew where he was, they weren’t saying.

  Her diaries were spread out in front of her on the floor. They had been gifts, given to her each Christmas by her mother, a new one for every new year. Each came in a beautiful leather case with the year printed on the spine. She had loved looking at them all lined up in her bookcase. It made her feel very grown-up.

  Ingrid slid each diary into its case and then into an old pillowcase. She hoped her mother wouldn’t mind that she was using the pillowcase for this purpose. The latest one, 1943, went in, then ’42, ’41, and ’40. At last, she held her very first diary in her hand. This one, she thought, didn’t need to be hidden. This one was from before.

  She opened it and slid her hand over its smooth pages, pressed her face against the cool interior, held it to her nose and inhaled. Could she smell it—those days gone by? The Christmas goose in the oven? The cardamom bread? The spiced gløgg simmering on the stove? The midsummer feasts of crayfish and shrimp? Butter. Milk. Cream. She ran her tongue around her mouth, trying to remember the thick, sweet, buttery taste of cream, but she could not.

  Without her diaries, would she have forgotten everything?

  In these pages there were memories of summer days at her grandmother’s farm, of crisp fall days when the yellow leaves drifted out of the sky and piled into shining heaps of gold. She remembered how Espen and Kjell had sometimes—

  Kjell! She set her book in her lap. She could still picture him as he was then. His confident, easy stride. His kindness to her. Once, she had accidentally dumped her entire basket of strawberries out onto the ground, and he had poured his own into her basket.

  When Espen had teased her about a draug snatching her out of their rowboat, Kjell had played along with him, but then he assured her with a wink and a shake of his head that there was no draug. She had decided then and there that she would marry him when she grew up.

  She set aside this one diary and looked at it thoughtfully. She looked, too, at her new 1944 volume, the one her mother had given her just this Christmas, not yet even out of its case. Smiling, she set these two aside. Then she tied a knot in the top of the pillowcase. The ground in the garden was still soft where they had recently dug up some potatoes. She would bury the pillowcase there.

  ksel sat at the breakfast table. He was in a foul mood. There had been more sabotage by Norwegian troublemakers. They hadn’t blown up a bridge or a ship or a munitions factory. They hadn’t blown up anything at all, but
this one still hit hard.

  “What’s troubling you?” his mother asked.

  “The German command finally figured out how to get the lazy Norwegians in line. To get them to sign up for the Labor Service—which, of course, they all should do—they have to get hit where it hurts.”

  “And where is that?” she asked.

  “Their stomachs,” Aksel said. “Wer nicht arbeitet, soll auch nicht essen.”

  “You know I don’t understand German,” his mother said.

  “‘Those who don’t work shall not eat,’” Aksel translated. “That’s a quote from Reichskommissar Terboven. The idea is, if they don’t register for the Labor Service, they won’t be able to eat: no ration cards.” He tore off a chunk of bread and chewed it angrily. “They should sign up. It’s the law.” How were the Nazis going to keep order if nobody obeyed the law? The country would fall into chaos.

  “I take it something went wrong,” his mother said. She set her coffee cup in its saucer.

  “Somebody hijacked the ration card truck,” he said.

  “How on earth did that happen?” she asked.

  Aksel almost thought he saw a slight smile flicker on her lips, but he must have imagined it.

  “The hijacking …,” he began bitterly. He could imagine how it had happened …

  It would only take a handful of fellows, most of them hiding in the woods or behind boulders, a car stopped in the middle of the road, with two fellows peering under the hood. The driver of the ration card truck stops, waves at them to move their car. They shrug and gesture to the car—“broken down!”—and so the driver gets out and goes over to them to see if he can help … while the men hiding in the woods creep out and rush the guard still sitting in the truck. Other men overpower the driver. Both men are tied up.

  The Milorg men take the boxes of ration cards out of the truck and load them into their car and drive off to some secret location in the mountains. The boxes of ration cards are then unloaded, and the car is driven away by a single driver, straight into someone’s barn, where it is repainted, to reappear later as an entirely different car. In the meantime, the cards are used to buy food for the men hiding in the mountains, the “Boys in the Woods,” as they were known.