We Die Alone

by David Howarth

  But in the same thought which made it seem so likely, he knew it was fantasy and he was still determined not to die, and to this end he must keep going, on and on, until something happened: something. He could not remember what it was that he had hoped would happen.

  As he was going through the woods, he came to a trapdoor in the snow, and he tried to open it by the iron ring. But he was feeling very weak, and it was too heavy for him. It was a pity, because of the warm fire inside it, but he had to give it up. But whenever he turned his back on it to go away, somebody slipped out of the forest and opened it and got inside and shut it again before he had time to stop him. It was unfair that they kept him shut out in the cold and darkness while they all enjoyed the lights and gaiety inside. They always waited till he turned away, and then they were too quick for him. They must have been watching him and waiting for their chance.

  It was the same when he found the mountain with windows in it, except that that time he never saw them go in. But they all climbed up to the door at the top so easily. Nobody would help him, and he tried and tried but always slipped down again to the bottom so that he was the only one left who could not do it. But perhaps it was nobody’s fault; perhaps the explanation was that they could not see him. That would be logical if he was dead. But he shouted, “I am still alive and alone out here in the snow, it’s all a mistake.” The windows went away and the mountain turned into a little mound of snow, and he was scrabbling feebly at its sides.

  It was the same too when he came to the log cabin. Stupidly, he was not looking where he was going, and he hurt himself again when he blundered into it. But as soon as he put out his hands and felt the rough logs he knew what it was although they never told him, and he started to feel his way along the wall, round the corner, hoping they would not see him before he found the door. It seemed a long way to the door, but he found it, and felt for the latch. But that time it opened, and he fell inside.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MARIUS

  HANNA PEDERSEN was having dinner with her two boys, Ottar and Johan, when the door burst open and the dreadful thing stumbled into the room and groped blindly towards the table. They jumped to their feet and backed away in horror. She nearly screamed, but she put her hand to her mouth and stifled the impulse because of the children. She managed to whisper “Ottar, go and fetch your uncle,” and the elder boy slipped out of the room.

  “What do you want?” she said. “Who are you?” But Jan’s answer was incoherent, and he collapsed on the floor. She overcame her terror and revulsion enough then to creep near him and look at him closely to see if he was somebody she knew.

  It would have been hard to tell. When he lay still like that on the floor, one would have thought he was a corpse dug out of the snow. He was caked with ice and frozen dirt and dried blood. His hair and his beard were solidly frozen and his face and hands were bloated and discoloured. His feet were great balls of compacted snow and ice. His eyes were tight shut, screwed up with the pain of snowblindness. He tried to speak again as he lay there, but she could not understand anything he said. Distracted with fright she took the smaller boy and ran to the door to meet her brother.

  Her brother’s name was Marius Grönvold. He lived in the next house, and when he heard the boy’s anxious frightened story he ran across to see what had really happened. He pushed past his sister and took a single look at Jan. It was enough to show him that they would have to take measures quickly, whoever this man was, if they were to save his life. He had two other sisters who lived nearby, Gudrun and Ingeborg, and he sent the children to fetch them. They both hurried in, and between them all they set to work to bring Jan back to life. They built up the fire, and fed him with hot milk from a spoon, and got off the worst of his clothes and wrapped him in blankets, and lifted him on to a bed. Marius took a sharp knife and carefully cut his boots to pieces and peeled them off. His socks also had to be cut up and taken off in strips, revealing horrible feet and legs in an advanced stage of frostbite, with the toes frozen stiffly together in a solid block of ice. Everyone there knew the first-aid treatment for frostbite: to rub it with snow. The three sisters started then and there to try to save his feet, taking the ice-cold limbs between their hands and kneading the brittle flesh. Jan paid no attention to what they did, because he could not feel anything in his legs at all. He seemed to be slipping off into sleep or unconsciousness.

  When the ice began to thaw on the jacket, Marius saw, to his amazement, that it was some kind of uniform, and he had also seen that Jan was armed with a pistol. That meant he was either a German or some sort of Norwegian Nazi, or else someone so actively anti-German that his presence in the house was like dynamite. Whether Jan was going to live or die, Marius simply had to know who he was: everything he did to try to save him, or even to dispose of his body if he failed, would depend on that answer. He asked him where he came from, and when he bent down to hear what Jan was trying to say, he heard the name Overgaard, which is a place at the head of the fjord. He knew that was a lie, because he had seen Jan’s tracks and they came from the opposite direction; and the fact that he tried to tell a lie was reassuring, because a Nazi would be too powerful to have any need to do so.

  Marius had heard about Toftefjord and suspected the truth already. He sent the women out of the room, and when they had shut the door he said: “Listen to me. If you’re a good man, you’ve come among good people. Now, speak out.” Jan told him then, in a halting whisper. Marius heard him out, and took his resolve at once. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll look after you. Go to sleep.” Jan asked him what his name was, and he told him Hans Jensen, which is the same as to say John Jones. He asked where he was, and this Marius told him truthfully: in the hamlet of Furuflaten, where the valley of Lyngdalen reaches Lyngenfjord. In the three days since the avalanche, all Jan’s wanderings had carried him seven miles. Marius also told him that it was the 8th of April, late in the afternoon.

  When he was satisfied that he had got the truth, Marius called his sisters in again and told it to them in whispers. They went to work again, looking at Jan with new pity at what they had heard, but with a desperate anxiety for themselves and the children. Nobody whatever must hear of it, Marius had said; and they could hear him saying the same thing, again and again, to the boys.

  He came back to the bed when he had made sure that the children understood him, and looked down at the ghastly face on the pillow. He was trying to think ahead. He was also beginning to see the explanation of some strange events which had happened since the storm. The Germans had suddenly searched every house in Furuflaten. They had been through his own house and his sister’s from top to bottom. They were looking for radio sets, they had said; but everyone had thought at the time there was something more behind it, because the place had been searched thoroughly enough for radio sets before. And for the first time, in the last few days, there had been motor-boats patrolling on the fjord, which did not fit in with the radio story. Now, Marius knew what they were searching for. There was the object of all the activity, lying at his mercy on his sister’s children’s bed.

  Jan’s luck was still good when it took him to that door. Marius Grönvold was a very unusual man. He was in his early thirties then, still a bachelor, a short strong stocky man with the face of a peasant and an extraordinarily alert and well-stocked mind. His occupation in those days was typical of this contrast: he ran a small farm, and also wrote for the Tromsö paper. His hobbies were politics and Norwegian literature. He knew the Norwegian classics well, and could recite in verse or prose for hours together, and often did so to entertain himself or anyone else who would listen; and he was already a leading member of the local Liberal party, and well on his way to becoming the most prominent citizen in those parts: the sort of man, one might say, who was destined from birth to become a mayor or the chairman of the county council. With these politics and his love of Norwegian history and culture, it went without saying that he was a member of the local resistance group in Lynge
nfjord, which was a branch of the one in Tromsö.

  To speak of a resistance movement in a place like Lyngenfjord might be a little misleading. There was an organisation, but there was hardly anything it could do. There had never been time when Norway was invaded to call up or train the people in those far-off northern areas. The battle had been fought and lost before they had had a chance to go and take part in it. Ever since then, they had been entirely cut off from the world outside the German orbit. Their radio sets had been confiscated, and the papers they read were censored by the Germans. All that they ever heard of the fight that was going on from England was in occasional whispered scraps of clandestine news passed on from mouth to mouth from somebody who had hidden a radio somewhere or seen a copy of an illegal newspaper. Yet men like Marius resented their country’s enslavement as deeply as anyone: even more strongly perhaps because they had not done anything themselves to try to stop it. It lay heavily on their consciences that they had not been soldiers when soldiers were needed so badly, and that brave deeds were still being done while they could not find any way to test their own bravery. Their organisation was really a kind of patriotic club. None of its members had any military knowledge; but at least they could talk freely among themselves, and so keep up each other’s resolution, and help each other not to sink into the belief that the Germans could win the war and the occupation go on for ever; and they knew they could count on each other for material help as well if it was ever needed.

  This was the background of Marius’s thoughts while he worked on Jan’s feet and fed him and kept him warm. The problem which Jan had brought with him was not a mere matter of a night in hiding and a little food. Probably Jan still thought, if he thought at all, that after a good sleep he would get up and walk away; but anyone else who saw him could tell he would be an invalid for weeks, and that walking was the last thing he would do. Marius, turning things over in his mind, could see no end to the problem in front of him, except capture. Furuflaten was a tiny compact community of a few hundred people; and it was on the main road and convoys of German lorries passed through it day and night, and it had a platoon of Germans quartered in its school. He could see the German sentries on the road when he looked out of his sister’s window. He could not think how he could keep Jan’s presence secret. Even to buy him a little extra food would be almost impossible. Much less could he see how he could ever nurse him back to fitness and start him off on his journey again. But there was never the slightest doubt in his mind that he was going to try: because this was his challenge; at last it was something which he and only he could possibly do. If he could never do anything else to help in the war, he would have this to look back on now; and he meant to look back on it with satisfaction, and not with shame. He thanked God for sending him this chance to prove his courage.

  Jan was restless and nervous. He kept dozing off into the sleep which he needed so badly, but as soon as he began to relax, he roused himself anxiously. It was a symptom of his feeble mental state. He felt terribly defenceless, because he could not see. He was afraid of being betrayed; but if he had been in his right mind and able to see Marius’s honest worried face, he would have trusted him without the slightest qualm.

  Marius, in fact, was watching over him with something very much like affection: the feeling one has towards any helpless creature which turns to one for protection. He had already promised his protection in his own mind, and in the best words he could think of, and it upset him that he had not succeeded in putting Jan’s fears to rest. He wanted to find some way to soothe him and make him believe in his friendship; and on an impulse, when the women were not listening, he took hold of Jan’s hand and said very emphatically and clearly: “If I live, you will live, and if they kill you I will have died to protect you.” Jan did not answer this solemn promise, but its sincerity had its effect. He relaxed then, and fell asleep.

  He slept so deeply that even the massaging of his hands and legs did not disturb him. His legs were the worst. Marius and his sisters worked on them in turns for the whole of that night and the following day, trying to get the blood to circulate. Quite early, they invented a simple test to see how far up they were frozen. They pricked them with needles, starting at the ankles and working upwards. When they began, the legs were insensitive up to the knees. Above that, the needle made them twitch, although even this treatment did not disturb Jan’s sleep. But as they rubbed the legs, hour by hour, they came back to life, inch after inch, and showed a reaction lower and lower down. Jan did not wake at all during the first night and day after he came in. When he did, even his feet were alive, and he woke with a searing pain where they had been numb before. Hanna Pedersen gave him a little food, and then he went to sleep again.

  Although their efforts seemed to be succeeding, Marius and his sisters were all afraid that there might be some better treatment for frostbite which they had never heard of; and so it happened that the first time Marius invoked the organisation was to ask for a doctor’s advice. He went first of all to Lyngseidet: a journey of twenty minutes by bus, which covered the whole of the distance which had taken Jan four days. His object there was to talk to the headmaster of the state secondary school, whose name was Legland. There were two reasons for seeing him: one was that he was the member of the organisation who had direct contact with the leadership in Tromsö; and the other was that most of the people of Lyngenfjord were in the habit of going to him when they were perplexed or in trouble. Herr Legland was a patriarch, revered by all his neighbours. The more intelligent of them, in fact, had all been his pupils, for he was an old man by then, and his school served the whole of the district. It was from him that Marius had learned his love of literature as a boy, and he regarded him as the wisest man he knew. Besides, he was a patriot of the old uncompromising school of Björnson and Ibsen. To him, the invasion of Norway was a barbarous affront, a new dark age. His school buildings in Lyngseidet had been requisitioned as a billet for German troops: a symbol of the swamping of the nation’s culture by the demands of tyranny.

  When Marius sought out this shrewd old gentleman and told him his story, he gave his approval of what Marius and his family had done, and he agreed with what he proposed to do. It went without saying that he would give his help. At the bottom of all the ideas which Marius had thought of up to then was the difficulty, and the necessity, of keeping Jan’s presence secret from the people of Furuflaten. It was not that there was anyone really untrustworthy there; but there were plenty of gossips. As soon as it leaked out at all, the whole village would know about it as fast as exciting news can travel; and then it would only be a matter of time before the Germans found out about it too. Nobody would tell them; but living right in the centre of the place, in the school, they had a good idea of what went on there. They only had to keep their eyes open; it was a most difficult place for keeping secrets. The houses are widely spaced on each side of the river which runs out of Lyngdalen, and along the road which runs close beside the shore. There are hardly any trees, and from the middle one can see almost every house and most of the ground between them. It would only need a few too many neighbours calling at Marius’s house, out of curiosity or with offers of help, for the Germans on watch at the school, or patrolling the road, to notice that something unusual was happening.

  From this point of view, to get a doctor to come and look at Jan would be very risky. Marius’s house was the farthest up the valley, and the farthest away from the road. The doctor would have to leave his car on the road and go on skis for half a mile, all among the houses; and of course as soon as he had gone, they would have everyone up there kindly inquiring who was ill. If the worst came to the worst, they would have to try it; but at present all they needed was advice and some medicine, if there was any medicine that was any good.

  This meant sending a message to Tromsö. If they asked the local doctor, or got a prescription made up at the local dispensary, they would have to say whom it was for, and have two or three outsiders in the secret; but
in Tromsö inquiries like that could be made without anyone knowing exactly where they came from.

  Luckily, the road to Tromsö was still open, though as soon as the spring thaw set in it would become impassable for two or three weeks. To send a private car would be difficult, because the driver would have to give a good reason for his journey at every roadblock he came to; but people had noticed that the Germans never bothered much about a bus. If it was one which ran a regular service on the road, so that they knew it by sight, they usually let it through without questioning the driver. One of the local bus drivers was a member of the organisation. Marius and Legland asked him to do the job and he agreed. One of the bus company’s buses was put out of action, and the driver set off in another to fetch a spare part to repair it.

  The arrival of this man in Tromsö was the first indication the leaders had had that there was any survivor from Toftefjord. Legland sent the driver to Sverre Larsen the newspaper editor, whose right-hand man Knudsen had been deported. Naturally, his message was only verbal. Larsen did not know the driver, and the organisation was still more than usually wary and on edge. Larsen refused to commit himself, and told the driver he could come back later in the day. But as soon as he had gone, he set about checking the man’s credentials through the organisation’s chain of command; and by the time he came back he had made sure that he was not a German agent, which he very well might have been, and had already consulted a doctor and a chemist about frostbite. Both of them said there was nothing to be done which had not been done already except to alleviate the pain, and the chemist had made up a sedative. Jan got the first dose of it that evening.