This Shining Land

by Rosalind Laker

  All that week Gunnar, except when acting as male nurse and taking his share of night watch, kept tactfully away from Johanna and Steffen as much as possible. She sat for hours holding his hand and when he was awake they talked in low and loving tones, laughed softly at private jokes and had eyes only for each other. Once when Gunnar came into the room unexpectedly, Steffen’s hand was on her breast. He decided the patient was well on the way to recovery.

  At dawn on Friday morning he and Steffen prepared to leave. They were taking one of the row-boats. Once they were farther up the fjord there were contacts ashore where they could get long-delayed medical attention for Steffen, who was still unable to walk without support. He and Johanna shared a long farewell kiss while Gunnar ostentatiously busied himself with the boat.

  She stood on the bank and watched the boat with their two silhouettes disappear into the mist that lay like a veil over the cold bright water.

  For a while in the office Johanna was more cautious than ever before, not knowing how far Tom’s suspicions were aroused. Then gradually she saw he did not suspect her of engaging in subversive work herself, simply because it had not occurred to him that the simple facts recorded through his office could matter in the least to the Resistance. That she should be supplying tiny and important sections of an all-over pattern put together by Intelligence slipped by him completely. He had accepted that her meeting with Steffen had been inevitable in the circumstances and hoped she would never see him again.

  Tom flatly refused to find out where Karen had been taken. Any reference to that weekend made him brusque. “It’s an army matter. Nothing to do with me. It’s not healthy to show interest in those incarcerated in punishment camps.”

  Later, by chance, he did discover Karen’s fate. A baby farm had been started in a converted domestic science building not far from Oslo. Golden-haired, blue-eyed girls were being mated there with young soldiers of Aryan looks and colouring in the furtherance of Hitler’s aim towards a master race. Karen had been selected and Tom thought her fortunate to have escaped the conditions of the concentration camps, for she would be well looked after as a surrogate mother for the Third Reich. Nevertheless he chose not to tell Johanna. He did not think she would view the girl’s fate in the same light as himself, for Karen would have had no choice in the matter.

  Johanna did not like the new housekeeper, who did not like her. She found herself barred from the kitchen and projected completely into the role of social hostess, which suited her since Karen was no longer there to chat and laugh with while they shared the chores. In conversation with Astrid she had mentioned the silver fox skins that Axel was to bring for her inspection.

  Excitedly, Astrid put the palms of her hands lightly together. “Why haven’t I thought about it before? I have a fur coat that you can wear. Since you are to give advice on furs you must look the part.”

  She had three splendid fur coats. The fourth had not seen the light of day since the winter before the invasion, for she had kept it for special occasions. It was blue fox with a huge “Greta Garbo” collar deep enough to drown in. Wrapped in it, Johanna crossed her arms and stroked the sleeves sensuously, her chin tilted, her eyes half closed. “I feel like purring. Mm! What a glorious coat.”

  She looked beautiful in it. Astrid, watching her as she twirled about in it, decided that she herself would never wear the coat again. It had always been too young for her. It belonged to youth and beauty. “It’s yours. Keep it. No arguments. It never suited me. Wear it to Oslo when you go, like a banner for times to come.”

  Johanna wore it for the first time when the snows came, the flakes softly powdering the fur, her hair and her lashes. Not for the first time Tom thought what a waste it was that she should be pining for a man likely to end up before a firing squad when she could have had her choice among the top ranks of the Wehrmacht.

  The following weekend at Tom’s she learned from Axel that the lieutenant who had upset Karen and annoyed his fellow officers with his drunken talk had been killed in an Allied bombing raid on the Vemork hydro plant in Telemark. The air raid indicated to her that the Allies had become concerned again with the plant’s heavy water production. There was talk about the raid among the other military present until Axel removed the lid from the box of furs he had brought with him. Then everyone gathered around to watch.

  Taking the skins out in turn, Johanna held each one by the head and smoothed it down to the tail before blowing on it lightly to divide the fur, checking for colour and quality. Many a time she had watched Leif Moen examine skins and knew what to look for in a good one. These would never have made his salon in the days of luxuriance, but they would pass muster for her purpose.

  “You have enough skins here,” she said, putting one over each shoulder to display them to him. “They’re not top quality, but as you can see for yourself they’ll still make up into a nice coat. What about measurements?”

  “I’ll send for them.”

  “And the design?”

  “I’d like to leave that with you. Could it be made locally?”

  “Not as far as I know. If you are going to let me see to everything for you, I should like to take them to my former boss in Oslo. He’s a genius with furs.”

  From the start Axel had had a bargain in mind. The furs had cost him nothing and the making up would be a mere pittance compared with the price of such a coat from a rack, even if such a garment had still been available. He would not have considered having the coat made otherwise. It was not his custom to indulge the women in his life.

  “There’s no difficulty there,” he assured her. “I’ll ask Major Ryen to let you have a couple of days away from the office to do this for me.”

  She was quick to seize her chance. “It would take more than one trip.”

  He gestured nonchalantly. “There’s no problem. I’ll give you an open travel permit valid for three months with my personal stamp and endorsement.”

  Once she had not wanted a permit signed by him. Now, in different circumstances, it was hard not to catch her breath at her swift success. “Then your wife shall have a coat to please her.”

  Someone on the outskirts of those standing around edged his way to the front. “Is there any chance that this man you’re going to see will have any skins tucked away somewhere? My fiancée would go crazy over a fur coat.”

  “So would mine,” said somebody else.

  She sank her chin into the soft fur she had drawn across her neck, her thoughts busy. Her original aim had been to establish three or four legitimate trips to Oslo in order to act as courier for the Resistance. Since Steffen had first asked her if she ever got the chance to travel with Tom, she had remembered all he had said and watched for such an opportunity. Now she saw that these trips might be stretched out indefinitely. It would depend on whether she could persuade Leif Moen to part with the precious furs he had in his vault.

  “I can’t make any promises. All I can say is that if it’s possible to locate any furs for you when I get to Oslo, I shall do so.”

  Throughout the rest of the weekend she had more inquiries. All the officers had accumulated funds, there being nothing to spend money on beyond mess bills and minor expenses, the shops being totally bare of anything worth purchasing. The chance of furs interested every one of them.

  When she met Gunnar in the cellar to pass on the news of this development, he gave her some rare praise for what she had arranged and hoped to organise. “Well done! Let me know when you’ve fixed the first journey.” He thought there was something else she wanted to say, although she already knew that Steffen had made a good recovery. “Yes?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. That’s all.” There was no point in saying that she hated more and more her enforced association with the enemy. It had come to a point, at times, when her flesh crawled at the duplicity she was compelled to use, the smiles she had to return. All that stabilised her was the hope that through it she contributed, no matter how indirectly, to the saving of li
fe somewhere, whether it was that of a sailor on a British ship or a Resistance fighter evading an area into which more troops had been posted. Maybe Gunnar saw something in her eyes of what she was feeling at that moment.

  “I believe the new year will be an important one for us, Johanna—1944 has to be a turning point. Since the Allied invasion didn’t come to Norway last year when we had high hopes for it, it can only mean that their forces are being saved for a main attack somewhere along the French coast. That’s where it has to come now.”

  “I hope it comes soon,” she exclaimed vehemently. “I’m tired of being patient.”

  “We all are. And we’re not alone. Every other occupied country must be as sickened as we are of the Nazis and their brutality.” Knowing she was under immense strain, he did not add that the great fear of the Resistance was that the Germans, having made Norway into a fortress, might hold out against the Allies long after other occupied lands were liberated.

  When Johanna arrived in Oslo early in the new year of 1944 she could have wept for the city where she had known so much happiness in the past. It had been stricken by privation on her last visit, but now a war weariness lay like a cloud over it, dragging at the faces of the people. As in Ålesund and elsewhere, she saw civilian pedestrians thrust off the pavements by sauntering soldiers who savoured this petty and arrogant display of power. Owing to restrictions on the use of electricity, there was no heating in the shops. The assistants were wrapped in coats and mufflers and the people waiting outside food shops became white as snowmen in the thickly falling snow. The shabbiness of everyone’s clothing after four years of occupation was apparent everywhere. She had become accustomed to the same conditions in her own part of the country, but somehow seeing Oslo gripped by them tore at her anew. On her journey her fur coat had drawn no envy, only angry eyes. She had felt shame at travelling first class in the company of Nazis instead of taking a place with the civilians herded together into a few coaches at the rear of the train. At Østbane station a military car organised by Axel was waiting to take her and the box of furs to the fur shop. When she alighted she saw there was nothing in the windows. Leif was waiting for her, for she had telephoned him in advance. He was wearing his overcoat as a protection against the bitter chill of the unheated premises, and for this reason he did not offer to take her coat from her.

  “It’s good to see you, Johanna.” He was thinner and greyer than when she had last seen him. When the driver had put down the box of furs and she had told him at what time to return, Leif bolted the door and took her into his office. “What a splendid coat! When you came into the shop I thought the clock had turned back to the days when my customers bought such garments from me.”

  “If only that could be.” She made an unhappy grimace. “Everyone thinks I’m a Nazi collaborator. If looks could kill, I would never have reached here.”

  His face was full of sympathy as he pulled up a chair to sit opposite to her. “One day the truth will come out.”

  “Not before we’re free, I hope,” she joked uneasily. “I hardly go home any more. Local people cut me. As a precaution my father, who is in much better health by the way, always meets me and sees me on my way again. For my parents’ sake, it’s really better if I stay away.” She switched from the subject, inquiring about his wife, people they both knew, and finally how he was able to keep the shop open with nothing for sale in the windows.

  “It’s surprising how much work comes my way, and you would be even more amazed at the skins that are brought in to be made up in the sewing room. Calf skins, plenty of reindeer skins, some seal from time to time, and there’s quite a black market trade in rabbit skins, particularly white ones. I have nothing to do with that side of it. Racketeering is not for me.”

  “Then fur coats of any kind are greatly in demand?”

  “Never more so. With fuel and heating so hard to come by, people will wear anything to keep warm. If it’s possible to give the finished product some style, I see that it is done. Mostly, I’m afraid, it’s a question of simply trying to get enough out of the skins provided to get a finished garment.”

  “I’ve brought you some work. You won’t like making a coat for the enemy, but it’s enabling me to travel to Oslo in the cause we both support and I’m hoping you will enable me to make further trips in time to come.”

  “How may I do that?”

  “By releasing some of the lovely furs that you have in storage. On the pretext of getting them designed and made, I’ll be able to extend my courier work indefinitely.”

  His expression of regret told her at once that her hopes would come to nothing. “You should have had them if they had still been here. Let me show you what happened.” Leading the way, he took her down to the saferoom below the shop. The door had been broken open at some time and the vault was completely empty. “Black marketeers stole every garment. I had brought in a man I thought I could trust to build a brick wall across the door and wall to seal the furs away until the end of the war. Maybe he talked about what he believed to be inside the saferoom, because I hadn’t shown him. When I arrived the next morning, everything had gone.”

  “Were the thieves never traced?”

  He gave a wry smile, turning to lead her back up the steps to the shop again. “I did not report the theft. This would have been a matter for the quisling police and I should have found myself in dire trouble for hoarding goods. They would have judged me by their own standards and believed that I had kept the furs back to charge inflated prices at a time of my own choosing. If the furs had been recovered they would have been confiscated. Either way I’d have been the loser by being the one to serve the longest sentence.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “My chief regret now is that they’re not here to be of use to you. Let me see the skins you’ve brought to be made up. I promise to make as many visits as possible for you out of them.”

  There proved to be more than he would need for one coat if a simple design was decided upon. He thought he could get two short capes from the remainder.

  “Knowing Axel, I should think he would be prepared to sell those skins,” Johanna said. “Then if you said you had to finish the coat before making a start on the capes, that would extend my visits still further.”

  “That’s how it shall be done.”

  Together they settled on the style and he promised to deliver a pen sketch of the coat and one of each proposed cape at her hotel before she left Oslo again by the morning train. Never before in his career had it been necessary for him to skimp on silver fox skins and he had nothing in his books of designs to represent what he would now be making.

  Johanna’s hotel was a well established one. In peacetime it had been popular with British and American tourists. There were some civilians staying there, including a party of the Swiss Red Cross, who were probably in the country to view whatever the Germans had prepared for them to see and no more. Mostly the guests were German officers of all three services, either in transit on leave to Germany or making the most of shorter passes allowing them a few days in the city. For this reason some heating was allowed in the hotel. Johanna had not been long in her room when there was a knock on the door and a chambermaid entered with paper towels for the bathroom. Johanna had already noticed there were paper sheets and pillowcases on the bed, the paper quilt cover even embossed with a simple design. She hoped she would not prove to be a restless sleeper.

  “Is there anything else you require, frøken?” the chambermaid asked her.

  Johanna, seated in front of the dressing-table, looked at the woman’s reflection in the mirror and knew with some sixth sense that this was the contact she had been told to expect. “I would like to know where I can buy a flower to wear this evening.”

  “You would like a bloom that never fades.” Prearranged words.

  “I would indeed.”

  “I can recommend a red carnation.” Symbol of the Royal House and the coded message.

  “Then I think
we understand each other.” Johanna left the dressing-table and went to the fur coat in the wardrobe. From a secret pocket that she had sewn herself, she took out the paper she had to deliver. “What is the name of this carnation?”

  The woman completed the message. “Alt for Norge.”

  All for Norway. Johanna handed over the paper. Her courier assignment for this time had been fulfilled.

  While Johanna was sleeping in her paper sheets, Steffen was far away in Telemark, spending the night in a dug-out in the snow. He was south of Lake Tinnsjø where the forested slopes closed in upon the single railway track. North of the lake the Germans were moving a vitally important shipment of the remaining supplies of heavy water produced at the Vemork plant. The entire production of their new atomic weapon depended on it. Never had they used greater security. From the time it left the plant the day before, there had been troops riding with it and around it, guarding its slow and important progress by rail to the ferry where it would be shunted aboard for transit down the long lake.

  At dawn Steffen had seen a second train chug up from the distant port of Porsgrunn in readiness to meet the ferry and take on the load of heavy water for the final stage of its journey through the Norwegian countryside before shipment to Germany. As soon as it had gone past him he gave a signal. Down out of the forest came half a dozen men. Silently and swiftly they ran to allotted places along the track and began to fix explosives to the rails in readiness for the train’s return with its newly collected load. Theirs was the second stage of a three-point plan to prevent the heavy water from reaching Germany. During the night explosives should have been placed on the ferry. If that ruse was foiled there would be the charges on the rail track. Should those explosives be detected, the Royal Air Force would bomb the ship bearing the heavy water en route to Germany. All stops had been pulled out for this last great attempt to beat the Germans in the race for the new powerful bomb.