They found him waiting for them in the salon where he had opened some of the glass display cases. His instructions were plain. He and Sonja would select the best of the furs and take them down to the storage room in the cellar where the most valuable were kept when not on display. Johanna was to list the details and attach a label to each coat-hanger that would show the furs were not for sale.
“Not for sale?” Sonja was puzzled. “Aren’t the furs just going down into the basement as a protection against air raids?”
“That is one reason. The second is more important in my opinion.” He looked intensely serious, almost strained. “Now that Oslo is no longer our own city we shall be getting a new kind of customer in the shop. Not the rich German tourists of the past, but the same nationals in uniform with money to spend. I do not intend to sell my choicest furs to any one of the enemy. They shall stay in the storage room until the King is back in the palace and the swastika gone forever.”
Johanna felt akin to him. She understood his feelings exactly and was encouraged by the stand he was making. It was similar to her having refused to give up the car without a struggle. Neither action carried any real substance in the present crisis and yet personally to each they were of vital importance. They had both asserted themselves in the face of the enemy. She had always liked him. Now that she knew him better she liked him even more.
“Well, ladies,” he said with a smile and a courteous gesture of invitation, “shall we get to work?”
For the next half an hour, sables and ermines and silver fox went swirling down the iron steps to the storage room in the basement. Those not in cotton covers, having been in the glass cases, were duly shielded and hung with room to “breathe.” Finally Leif padlocked the door on what were probably the most beautiful and valuable furs in the whole country. Stock left for sale was still of high quality, for it had never been his policy to sell goods below a certain grade, but the most fabulous garments of all would not be seen by German eyes.
Johanna and Sonja left the shop together. They parted on the corner, Sonja to go home and unpack the suitcase she still had with her and Johanna to search for some blackout material for the windows of the Alsteens’ house. A complete blackout and curfew had been ordered by the Germans throughout the city and in any area under their control. Already there had been a run on black material and it was in short supply. Johanna had to go into several stores before she was lucky enough to get the final length on the last bolt on the shelves there. She thought it should be enough for at least four rooms in the house.
It was when she was coming out of the store again with the heavy bundle in her arms that she saw a sight that was to become familiar over the next few days. Three German soldiers were dividing a block of butter between them and eating it on slabs of chocolate. Long deprived of such luxuries in Germany through Goering’s policy of guns before butter, they were seizing the chance to indulge a craving for sweet, rich food. Later she saw others with butter spread on cake and it became a frequent occurrence to see soldiers coming out of grocery shops with blue paper bags of coffee, which they opened to inhale the true fragrance, having known nothing but ersatz coffee for a long time in their own country.
That evening she hung one strip of the blackout material over the kitchen window while she began her task of making the curtains on Anna’s sewing machine. Before she went to bed she tried to phone Ryendal, but there was no contact.
Four days later an allied force of British, French and Free Polish troops landed in northern Norway and at Åndalsnes on Johanna’s home fjord. By that time the whole of the south had fallen to the Germans, and Johanna, who had been concerned for the Alsteens in that area, now had the further worry of how her family and friends in the neighbourhood of Ryendal would fare now that the war was on their doorstep. The Norwegian Army had rallied strongly and closed ranks under the inspiring leadership of Ruge, now promoted to general and commander-in-chief, and bitter fighting was taking place around Bergen and Trondheim and up the great valleys of Gudbrand and Øster where unusually harsh winter conditions still prevailed. Her brothers were particularly in her thoughts. Both had done their conscription service and would be in the conflict. Erik, who was an officer on one of the coastal steamers that plied the length of the coast from Bergen to Kirkenes on the Finnish border, had been at home on leave on the day of the invasion and it was unlikely he would have been able to reach a naval fighting unit. She fully expected to learn that he had gone with Rolf into military service somewhere. Perhaps they were with the King. He was still being hunted ruthlessly by the Luftwaffe, which continued to dominate the skies, and every small village or hamlet where he took shelter was razed to the ground in the general terror bombing aimed at killing him and subduing the population.
Every morning Johanna had to wait to let military traffic with its black crosses pass along the main road out of Oslo before she could dart across to catch the tram. Armoured vehicles and every kind of mechanised weaponry and supplies were pouring in at all the captured ports. More than once a whole panzer division went past, the peculiarly hollow rattle of the tanks disturbing the quiet morning like mad, discordant music. She turned her face resolutely away when the soldiers waved, called out to her and whistled appreciatively. Sadly one day she saw Norwegian prisoners of war being marched along. Hundreds of them. Mostly they were youths doing their conscription service who had been caught up in a war far beyond anything for which they had been trained. Their faces were drawn with misery and fatigue.
At the shop, Sonja had come to terms with the realisation that it could be a long time before she saw her husband again. Quisling’s order for Norway’s merchant shipping in foreign waters to hand itself over to Germany had been defied. Not a single ship of the world’s fourth-largest merchant fleet had obeyed the order. Every one of them had put into the nearest Allied or neutral port, a contribution of inestimable value to the cause of the Allies.
As yet there had been no German customers in the fur shop. The officers who could have afforded to purchase were too much engaged in military matters, either by moving flags on a map or in the front line itself. Neither did civilian customers come, many people being still out of the city, either through choice or because their return had been cut off by the Germans’ advance.
Johanna observed changes taking place every day. Several of the young men who had been fellow passengers on the bus or tram each morning had gone, some from the first day of the call to arms. Due to the curfew, friends no longer dropped in during the evenings and at weekends people kept to the vicinity of their homes. In the food shops an impromptu form of rationing had been imposed, any deliveries shared out by the shopkeepers, who tried to be fair with the goods at their disposal. When Johanna had finished making the black-out curtains and had hung them, her leisure hours settled down to a curiously lonely routine. Thoughts of Steffen were inevitably always at the forefront of her mind.
It was as if the kiss he had given her had awakened something tender and cherishing within her that she had never been aware of before. She could not recognise it as love, believing that she was too sensible and level-headed, too much a girl of her own mind, to be caught up in romantic fancies. Yet the feeling was there, impossible to dismiss or ignore, and at times it seemed to warm her whole heart.
In a rational way, she considered his relationship with Delia Richmond. From what Anna had said it was obvious there had been something between them for a considerable time. As if in proof of that was the fact that Delia had called specially to say goodbye to him when fleeing from the Germans, showing how much she had wanted to see him once more. There was no reason to suppose that they would not come together again when the war was over.
For the first time ever, Johanna experienced a virulent twinge of a second emotion that was new to her, and she suspected it of being what she had always despised, jealousy. She hoped it would not be her downfall, for she knew her own faults and although she did not lose her temper easily, it was as devastati
ng to herself as to anybody else when it flared.
April gave way to May and warmer weather. The seventeenth of May, normally an annual holiday for the rejoicing of independence, went unmarked for the first time in a hundred and twenty-five years. At home, Johanna ate her supper with the national flag on the table. Made of silk and mounted on silver, it was the only item she had retrieved from the cellar. The house looked bare without its fine ornaments, but she thought it best for the precious objects to remain where they were, and her box of evening dresses stayed in the cellar too.
When she put the flag back in a cupboard, unable to risk leaving it on display since any show of it was banned by the Germans, she wondered if Steffen had had a chance to give thought to this special day. As she had so often before, she wished that she had some idea where he might be in the battle zone. He could be anywhere in Norway for all she knew. She still had no contact with her family either and her anxiety about them was constant. Mails were disrupted and held up in the most unlikely places, some wherever the postbags had happened to be on the day of the invasion. Telephones were likely to remain out of action in many areas for a long time to come, many exchanges being in the German war zone or damaged by bomb blast. The desperate fighting and the Luftwaffe’s terror bombing in central and northern Norway continued without respite. The Allies had failed to supply the air cover that had been deemed necessary.
In early June when the glorious weather was making up for the late spring, the Allies actually had some success in northern Norway. But just when the vitally important port of Narvik had been recaptured by the Allies, France fell and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force took place at Dunkirk. It changed the whole situation. The Fuhrer’s most outspoken and virulent enemy, Winston Churchill, ordered the withdrawal of the Allied forces from Norway to strengthen Britain, which now stood alone as a last bastion of freedom against the total might of the Third Reich.
The first Johanna knew of this disaster for Norway was when she was summoned by one of the younger saleswomen to Leif’s office just after the day’s work had begun. When she went through the salon she saw it was deserted and the street door had been closed against the entry of any customers. She found all her fellow employees gathered together in front of Leif’s desk while he himself stood, his face grave, on the far side of it.
“Now that we are all here,” he said as she took a place beside Sonja, “I have some bad news. To prepare you, I will say that this is surely the darkest day our country has ever known. After eight weeks of fierce fighting from the very day of the invasion, which must have been far beyond anything the Germans anticipated, the battle of Norway is lost. Yesterday evening the King and the Crown Prince and the true government went aboard a British ship to sail into exile in England. They were at Narvik, the site of the victory that we hoped would prove to be the turning point, but sadly events far beyond our shores have changed our destiny.”
By now most of the saleswomen were in tears; Johanna alone was dry-eyed with shock. He looked at them all compassionately. “Go home and be with your families for the rest of the day. Remember that we have been defeated in the field but not in our minds or in our hearts.”
The women began to file out of the office, comforting each other. Sonja, who would have taken hold of Johanna’s arm, saw she had no intention of leaving yet and went out of the office with the rest. Leif, half-heartedly sorting some papers on his desk, was surprised when he looked up and saw Johanna still standing there.
“Yes, Johanna?”
The question burst from her on a vibrating note of anguish: “What can we do?”
He understood her meaning and came around to perch his weight on the desk, facing her. “I don’t know. I honestly have no idea. All I do know is that as long as there are men and women with the will to retain freedom, there is hope. Hold on to that hope. It could be the salvation of our country in time to come.”
In her office, Johanna put the cover on her typewriter, her movements automatic. Then she reached out to change the date on the calendar in preparation for the next day, another part of her routine, and the significance of the date went home to her. Yesterday evening, when the King left Norwegian soil, must have been a particularly poignant departure for him in more ways than one. Long before she was born and on the same date, June 7, the King, born a Danish prince, had arrived in Oslo to be enthroned, voted unanimously into his new role as monarch of Norway by a national referendum of its people. His first words upon stepping ashore with the baby Crown Prince in his arms, his wife beside him, had been a dedication of his life to the service of his new country. “All for Norway!” Now she made the same vow herself. Anything she could do for the return of freedom she would do. She did not know where or what would lie within her power, but wars could be fought in many ways and by individuals as well as armies.
The shame of defeat caused a terrible despair to settle over the whole population like a dank mist in the weeks that followed. It was reflected in faces, and people found it hard to smile. It was strange that there should be such a sense of disgrace since everything possible had been done in a rallying of forces to curb the enemy; nevertheless it was there, sapping the spirit of the nation, and aided by the new humiliations and regulations being meted out by the German conquerors.
In the midst of it there came one bright spark of encouragement, which was to have an extraordinary aftermath like a tiny pebble thrown into a still pool and creating ripples that turned into waves. The BBC began special broadcasts in Norwegian from London, and from there the King spoke out stirringly to his people in their hour of despair, telling them to hold fast and that freedom would be regained. Within a few days thousands of copies of his speech began to flood the country, printed clandestinely in cellars and offices and basements. Johanna found one wound into her typewriter. She did not ask how it came there. Instead, she simply tucked it away in her purse for safekeeping. That evening she put it into her neighbours’ mailbox, doing her part in spreading the royal message.
Everybody had to register for a ration card and an identity card, taking a photograph along for the latter. As if to emphasise each individual’s subjugation to the Third Reich, the identity cards were printed in German with the Norwegian translation underneath as the minor language. There were only about eight hundred Jews—men, women and children—in Norway. Their cards were stamped with a red “J” and in the same week they had to surrender their radios, a harsh restriction that followed an earlier outrage in the desecration of the main synagogue in Trondheim.
Strict curfew continued to be imposed and any violation of the blackout regulations was punished with increased severity. An enterprising manufacturer began making venetian blinds of strong black paper, wood products being in plentiful supply from the vast forests, and these were in great demand by those for whom black fabric for windows had proved unobtainable. Johanna bought some and completed the black-out of the house where some rooms had remained unprotected.
All public gatherings were banned. There was to be no stopping to talk on the streets, not even if a man met his own brother; everybody was to keep moving. Listening to the BBC was strictly forbidden on pain of punishment, and the press came under the full pressure of German censorship. Travelling from place to place or changing address beyond a restricted area in any part of the country was not allowed without a special permit. Johanna began to wonder whether the Alsteens would get home again or would have to remain where they were for the time being. She had been looking forward to their return.
One relief was that the Germans had been stopped by their own high command from buying comestibles from civilian sources. The enemy forces were drawing off most of the country’s food supplies in any case—meat, dairy and farm produce being diverted to military establishments. It soon became obvious to all that feeding a large army of occupation would become a heavy yoke on the rest of the population.
Tragedy struck locally in Grefsen when a youth, enraged at seeing his sister on th
e arm of a German soldier, tried to snatch her away and was bayoneted in the stomach. People came in great numbers to attend the funeral. His sister did not attend. She had been seized by some of his friends and had her hair shaved from her head. It was happening to girls and women elsewhere who associated with the enemy.
Another section of the population had begun to accept the German presence. The collaborators and the opportunists and those ready to take an easy chance at getting what would never have been theirs in other circumstances had begun to stand out from the rest. They were not many but they were there, and from the start they were contemptuously labelled Quislings by everybody else. It was a new name for “traitor” that had taken root in the language from the evening of April 9 and Quisling’s infamous broadcast.
To Johanna, the whole regime of the Occupation was somehow associated with the ring of German metal heels in their continual marching, a sound that Norwegians everywhere had come to abhor. In a way she hated it more than their singing when they gave voice to “We March Against England,” which was their favourite almost to the exclusion of anything else.
She wrote to her parents as soon as the mail began to move again, begging for all the family news, and also to her landlady, Anna Alsteen. By chance both replies came with the same post. She opened the one from home first. Her mother, thankful to have heard from her, wrote that all was as well as it could be in the present circumstances. Her brothers, as she had expected, had both been in the fighting. Rolf, who had suffered a minor wound, was helping on the farm until he received confirmation of a new teaching appointment, and Erik had been recalled to service in the coastal steamers by the Germans, who were using them for their own transport. Folding the letter, Johanna experienced a longing to see them all again in a wave of homesickness she had not experienced since leaving to work in Oslo.
Anna Alsteen’s letter was a disturbing one. She was most anxious to get home again and wrote that if her dear husband had not been Jewish there would have been no problem, since they would be returning to their own residence. Unfortunately Jews were being allowed no privileges and travelling was barred to them. Her brother-in-law was hoping to get a permit for Viktor on medical grounds, but so far the German officials in that district were not considering any special cases, being too busy organising themselves into the routine running of the area. She thanked Johanna for continuing to look after the house and hoped with all her heart that she and Viktor would be returning sooner than could be expected at the present time. It was easy to read between the lines and recognise an underlying fear in Anna’s carefully worded phrases that possibly Viktor might be in some special danger from the authorities. Maybe she had seen a warning in the confiscation of the Jews’ radios. Johanna hoped she would be proved wrong.
This Shining Land Page 5