We Die Alone

by David Howarth

  In the meantime, Marius had moved Jan from his sister’s house and hidden him in a corner of his barn. He knew it would not make any difference where he put him if the Germans came up to his farm to search, but at least the barn was safer from casual visitors and family friends. These were a constant worry. Jan had come to the house on a Saturday. On a fine Sunday in spring the people of Furuflaten are in the habit of ski-ing a little way up the valley by way of a constitutional; and that Sunday the valley was full of Jan’s tracks, which led in the end, plainly enough for anyone to see, up to Hanna Pedersen’s door. For anyone to go about on foot was unheard of, and foot tracks instead of ski tracks were the very thing to set people talking. To forestall inquiries, Marius went out and inspected his farm early that Sunday morning, leaving his skis at home, and mixed up his own footsteps with Jan’s. He thought out some story to explain why he had done such an eccentric thing. It was a thin story, but good enough to put people off the idea that the tracks had been made by a stranger. They would merely think that the man of the house had taken leave of his senses.

  At that stage, the Grönvold family were the only people in Furuflaten who were in the know: Marius, his three sisters and the two small boys, and Marius’s mother. Hanna’s husband was away at the fishing, and Marius had the added worry of having no other man in the family to talk to. His sisters never relaxed their efforts to nurse Jan back to health; but women in the far north are not often consulted by men in matters of opinion, and Marius could not help being aware that Jan’s sudden arrival had been a serious shock to them all. His mother, in particular, was far from strong, and he was seriously troubled by the strain which it put on her. In fact, it must be a terrible thing for an elderly woman to know that her family is deeply involved in something which carries the death penalty for them all if they are caught. At one moment near the beginning she was inclined to oppose the whole thing, though of course she had no clear idea of the only alternative; but Jan had told Marius by then about his father and sister in Oslo, and Marius put it to her from Jan’s father’s point of view. “Suppose I was in trouble down in Oslo,” he said, “and you heard that the people there refused to help me.” In these simple terms she could see the problem better. It made her think of Jan as a human being, a Norwegian boy very much like her own, and not just as a stranger from a war which she had never quite understood. She gave Marius her consent and blessing in the end. Yet it is doubtful whether she ever quite recovered from the nervous tension of the years after Jan arrived there: for the strain did not end when Jan finally went away. Till the very end of the war the risk remained that some evil chance would lead the Germans to discover what she and her children had done. In the upside-down world of the occupation, the Pharisee was rewarded, and the good Samaritan was a criminal. People who acted in accordance with the simplest of Christian ethics were condemned to the life of fear which is only normally lived by an undiscovered murderer.

  The two boys were a further worry. To send them to school every day when they knew what they did was a heavy responsibility to put upon children. Some children often can play a secretive role in a matter of life and death as well as anyone older; but to go on doing it for long will wear them down.

  Jan lay for nearly a week in the barn. For four days he was never more than semi-conscious; and that was just as well, because he could not have moved in any case, and when he did rise out of his drugged sleep the pain of his feet and hands and his blinded eyes was bad. But he was certainly getting better. Towards the end of the week his eyesight was coming back. He began to see the light of the barn door when it was opened, and then to recognise the faces of the people who came to feed him. By that time, also, it looked as if his feet would recover in the end, though he was still a long way from being able to stand on them or walk. Most important of all, his brain had got over the concussion, and his power of thought and his sense of humour had come back: he was himself again. He and Marius began to find they had a lot in common. Their experience and background could hardly have been more different within a single nation: one the arctic farmer and country-bred philosopher, the other the town technician; one cut off from the war, the other entirely immersed in military training. But Jan’s sense of comedy was never far away, and Marius, though he was a serious-minded man, was irrepressible when he was amused. He listened to Jan’s stories of England and the war with the greed of a starving man who has an unexpected feast spread out in front of him, and when Jan told him about the many ridiculous aspects of army life, it made him laugh. When Marius laughed, it was as if he would never stop. It was an odd infectious falsetto laugh which started Jan laughing too; and then Marius, squatting beside him in the hay in the darkened barn, would rock with renewed merriment and wipe away the tears which poured down his cheeks, and they had to remind each other to be quiet, in case anyone heard the noise outside.

  But although there were these moments when Marius enjoyed Jan’s company, he remained a most serious danger as long as he stayed on the farm. There was an alarm every time someone was sighted climbing the hill from the village, and every time the Germans in the schoolhouse made some slightly unusual move. He had to be taken away from there as soon as he was fit enough to go, and Marius had thought of a place to put him.

  The opposite shore of Lyngenfjord is steep-to and uninhabited. There had once been a farm over there: just one in a stretch of eight miles. But it had been burnt down a long time before, and never rebuilt. One small log cabin had escaped the fire and was still standing. It was four miles from the nearest house, either along the shore or across the water, and so far as Marius knew, nobody ever went there. If any safe place could be found for Jan, that seemed the most likely. The name of the farm had been Revdal.

  To get Jan across there was more than Marius could manage with only the help of his sisters, because he would have to be carried all the way down to a boat and out of it again at the other side; and so at this stage he began to bring in other members of the organisation from the village. He chose them on the principle that no two men from one family should be mixed up in the affair, in case something happened and another family besides his own was entirely broken up. In the end, he let three of his friends into his secret: Alvin Larsen, Amandus Lillevoll and Olaf Lanes. All of them had known one another since they were children. When he told them about it, one by one, they all offered eagerly to help.

  They agreed to make the move on the night of the 12th of April. In the fortnight since Toftefjord, the nights had got quite a lot shorter: uncomfortably short for anything illegal. To avoid disaster, the first part of the journey would have to be planned with care and carried out without the least delay. This was the half-mile from Marius’s barn to the shore.

  Marius had lived there all his life, but it was a new experience for him, as it would be for most law-abiding people, to plan a way out of his own home which he could use without being seen. It was extraordinarily difficult. Jan would have to be carried on a stretcher, and the two sides of the valley set limits to the routes which could be used, because they were both too steep to climb. On the other hand, the triangle of gently sloping ground between them was in full view of the houses, and the paths which crossed it led from door to door. There were two principal dangers, the German garrison in the school and the sentry who patrolled the road. But what worried Marius almost more than these was the thought of meeting a series of neighbours and having to stop to give endless explanations. To carry a man on a stretcher through one’s village in secret at dead of night is a thing one cannot explain away in a casual word or two.

  Marius made a reconnaissance, looking at his home from this unfamiliar point of view. There turned out to be only one possible route, and that was the river bed. The river, which is called Lyngdalselven after the valley, runs down through the middle of the village and under the road by a bridge about two hundred yards from the shore. It has a double channel, one about fifty feet wide which carries the normal summer flow, and another much wider flood cha
nnel which only fills up during the thaw in spring. That mid-April, the thaw had not yet begun, and the whole of the river was still frozen. The flood channel has banks about fifteen feet high, and Marius found that close below them, on the dry bed of the river, one was fairly well hidden from view. There was one snag about it. The nearest of all the houses to the channel was the schoolhouse where the Germans lived. It stands within three or four paces of the top of the bank. But even so, it still seemed that this was the only way. Looking out of the schoolhouse windows the troops could see almost every inch of the valley mouth. The only place they could not see was the foot of the bank immediately below their windows.

  When dusk began on the night which they had chosen, they all assembled in the barn. Two men were to go with Marius and the stretcher. His sister Ingeborg had volunteered to go ahead of it to see that the way was clear. Another man was to climb to the top of a high moraine on the other side of the river, where he could watch the sentry on the road. A rowing-boat with a sail had already been hauled up on the beach at the river mouth. Jan had been wrapped in blankets and tied to a home-made stretcher, and they had a rucksack full of food and a paraffin cooker to leave with him in Revdal. They waited nervously for the long twilight to deepen till it was dark enough to go. It was after eleven when Marius gave the word.

  It was a breathless journey. For once, they could not use their skis. To ski with a stretcher down steep slopes among bushes in the dark could only end in disaster, at least for the man on the stretcher. But to carry his weight on foot in the deep snow was exhausting work, even for such a short distance. They started by climbing straight down to the river, and when they got to the bottom of the bank without any alarm they put Jan down in the snow for a few minutes and rested. The lookout left them to cross the river and go up to his point of vantage, and Ingeborg went ahead to see what was happening at the school, and to tread out a path in the snow. It was very quiet, but there was a light southerly breeze which hummed in the telephone wires and stirred the bare twigs of the bushes; it was not much, but it helped to cover the sound of their movements. When they had got their breath they bent down and picked up the stretcher and set off down the channel towards the school.

  It soon came in sight. There were lights in some of the windows which cast yellowish beams on the trodden snow outside it. One of them shone out across the river channel, but close in, right under the wall of the building, the steep bank cast a shadow which looked like a tunnel of darkness. The stretcher bearers approached it, crouching as low as they could with their burden, keeping their eyes on Ingeborg’s footsteps in front of them in case they should stumble, and resisting the impulse to look up at the lights above them. When they came to the fence of the playground, they crept closer in under the bank. In an upward glance they could see the edge of the roof on their right, and the beam of light lit up some little bushes on their left, but it passed a foot or two over the tops of their heads. The troops in the school were not making a sound, and the men were acutely conscious of the faint squeak and crunch of the snow beneath their tread. The silence seemed sinister. It made the thought of an ambush come into their minds. But in thirty seconds they passed the school: and there was the road, fifty paces ahead of them.

  This was the place they had feared. With the school behind them and the road ahead, there was nowhere for four men to hide themselves. It all depended on luck: how long they would have to wait for the sentry, and whether a car came past with headlights. But Ingeborg was there, behind a bush at the side of the road, where she had been lying to watch the sentry, and she came back towards them and pointed to the right, away from the river bridge. That was the way they wanted the sentry to go, the longest leg of his beat. At the same moment, there was a tiny spark of light on the top of the moraine; the watcher there had struck a match, and that was the signal that the sentry was nearly at the far end of the beat and would soon be turning round. It was now or never: they had to go on without a pause. They scrambled up on to the road. For a few seconds they were visible, dark shadows against the snow, from the school and the whole of the beat and a score of houses. Then they were down on the other side, among bushes which gave them cover as far as the shore. The worst of the journey was over.

  When they had hauled the boat down the beach and bundled Jan on board it, they rowed off quietly for a couple of hundred yards, and then set the lugsail and got under way, with the breeze on the starboard beam and a course towards the distant loom of the mountains across the fjord, under which was the cabin of Revdal.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE DESERTED FARM

  WHAT JAN came to know as the Savoy Hotel, Revdal, was not very commodious, but the first two days he spent there were the happiest and most peaceful of the whole of his journey, a short fool’s paradise: if one can use the word happy about his state of mind, or the word paradise about a place like Revdal. The hut was ten feet long and seven feet wide, and you could stand upright under the ridge of the roof. It was built of logs, and it had a door but no window. The only light inside it when the door was shut came through chinks in the wall and the roof, which was covered with growing turf. On one side, it had a wooden bunk, and the rest of the space in it was filled with odds and ends which seemed to have been salvaged, long before, from the ruins of the burnt-out farm. There was a small, roughly hewn table, and some pieces of a wooden plough, and some other wooden instruments which Jan could not imagine any use for, and an elaborate carved picture frame without any glass or picture. Everything was made of wood, unpainted, even the latch and hinges on the door, and it was all worn with years of use, and white and brittle with age.

  As they carried him up there from the boat, he had had a glimpse of its surroundings. It stands about ten yards back from the shore, in a small clearing which slopes up to the forest of little twisted trees which clings to the side of the mountain. He had seen posts and wires in the clearing, which looked as if someone still came there to cut and dry the crop of hay, which is a precious harvest in the north. But there was no sign that anyone had been there for the past eight months of winter, and it was very unlikely that anyone would come for another three months, until July. Under the towering masses of snow and rock the solitary deserted little hut looked insignificant and forlorn, and even smaller than it really was. From a distance one would have taken it for a boulder, three-quarters covered by snow. There was no landing-place to draw attention to it, only the lonely beach. A stranger might have sailed along the fjord ten times and never seen it.

  They put Jan in the bunk, and put the food and the paraffin stove on the table within his reach. Marius hesitated a little while, as if there should have been something else he could do for Jan, but there was nothing. He promised to come back two or three nights later to see him, and Jan thanked him, and then he went out and shut the door and left Jan alone there in the dark. For a few minutes Jan listened, hoping to hear the crunch of the boat on the beach as they pushed it off; but inside the hut it was absolutely silent. When he was sure they had gone away, he spread out his meagre belongings round him, and settled down on the hard boards of the ancient bunk. He was as contented as he could be. He had everything he wanted: time, and a little food, and solitude. He could lie there as long as he liked, not much of a burden to anyone, until his feet got all right again. Very soon he drifted off to sleep.

  He had had a capacity for sleep, ever since the avalanche, which seemed to have no limit, and there was nothing to wake for in Revdal except to eat. Sometimes when hunger did wake him there was daylight shining through the holes in the roof: sometimes there was not, and he groped for his matches and ate by the dim blue gleam of the paraffin cooker. But whether it was day or night outside no longer had any interest for him.

  When he was awake, he daydreamed, about Oslo before the war, his family, his football club at home where he had been president, the adventures which he had packed into the three years since he left home, and about his friends in the training camp in Scotland, and about hi
s own ambitions and hopes for the time when the war was over. It had been a long journey and a very strange one all the way from his home and his father’s instrument makers’ workshop to this bunk and this hut and this desolate arctic shore; but he never thought then that it would end there. Some time, he would get up and go out of the door and begin all over again. And meanwhile, time was passing, and that was all that mattered; because time, he believed, was the only thing which could cure his feet and give him the strength to tackle the last twenty-five miles to Sweden.

  But Marius, back in Furuflaten, was not so optimistic. He felt troubled in his mind at having left Jan all alone: he would much rather have hidden him somewhere where he could have kept an eye on him day and night. But he consoled himself by thinking that he had done it more for his family’s sake than for his own, and also that it was in Jan’s own interest to be in a place which the Germans were very unlikely to search. He believed, just as Jan did, that in time he would get fit again, but he thought it might be a very long time; and he knew, although Jan did not, how difficult it was going to be to keep him supplied with even the barest necessities of life across at Revdal. He would never have grudged him anything, neither time nor danger, nor money while his savings lasted out; but he was very much afraid that keeping things secret, which was so difficult already, would become impossible if it had to go on very long. If people noticed him going off two or three nights a week in a boat towards the uninhabited side of the fjord, there was no credible explanation he could give; and besides, there was always the chance that the Germans might yet make some sudden swoop which would prevent him from crossing at all. They might come and arrest him, and in case they did, he would have to find somebody who could not be connected with the affair but who could take over his responsibilities when he was gone. Otherwise, Jan would be left there till he starved. What it came to, in fact, was that there might be a crisis at any time; and therefore there ought to be a plan to get Jan over the frontier if the crisis came before he could go on his own feet.