It falls silent. No car engine, no footsteps in the house, only silence. Someone whispers. He’s locked them in. He is the only one with a key. Imagine. Håkon. What if it was Håkon who’d been shot? The baby cries again. His mother drapes the blanket over his head, holds him close to her. We are going to die. A woman speaks out. We’ll suffocate in here. She bangs at the door. A man slaps her.
The sound of a key in the lock. They all hold their breath. It’s not until they see that it’s him that it is released, a deep sigh of accumulated air. Håkon has blood on his overalls, snow up the legs of his trousers, his hair disheveled. They all tumble out of the box room, the light, it’s so bright outside. “You have to go, away from here,” Håkon says quietly, “now, right away.” He points across the room.
“Out the back door. The truck will pick you up. Stay in the forest and wait there for them to come for you.”
Outside, just by the path to the toilet, the two bodies piled on top of each other, their eyes open and vacant, the snow red. Ilse looks down, the feet of the person in front of her, her own boots, the tracks in the snow. Everything starts this autumn, she thinks suddenly, one, two, three, four, everything starts this autumn, one, two, three, four, it’s silent, afternoon, one, two, three, four, they stop at a ridge, the country road down below. Now all that’s left to do is wait.
They stand up as they hear the sound. The truck drives right up alongside the bank of snow, gray and looming, a tarpaulin over the flatbed of the vehicle. A man stands beside the truck, white anorak, woolly hat, “you can call me Håkon,” he says, “like the king.” He unties the ropes that keep the tarpaulin in place. “There are full burlap sacks in the back, hide as best you can.” The scent of wood from the sacks, Ilse crouches down on her haunches, feels the way the vehicle rattles as they drive, the draft blasting through the gaps in the tarpaulin. The scent from the sacks, from her woolly sweater, Maridalen, suddenly she’s there, inside the cabin, Hermann, he’s there too, where is he now? The vehicle stops.
“Are we at the potatoes now?” She whispers from behind a sack, the little girl; her mother doesn’t answer. The second man to go by the name of Håkon leads them through a forest, white trees, snowflakes sprinkling from them, resting on their eyelashes, melting, her tights wet. They stop by a body of water, a lake.
Håkon murmurs in hushed tones. “You have to spread out,” he says, looking from one face to the next.
“If any of you are discovered, the others can still make it across.”
The ice. Solid beneath their feet.
Everything around them is white. The light in the sky. The sound of the others. The snow. Fragments, like tiny scraps of paper.
The country just ahead of them. The thought of it. Sweden. Everything that awaits them there. Everything that has disappeared.
Everything that no longer exists.
Everything. Only white.
WINTER IS OVER.
Everything. Spring. It’ll soon be summer.
The leaves line the branches, forcing their way into the light. Green, lush. Resplendent, insistent. Like heart tissue. The air is soft and tinged with something, a scent, a rupture. The insects buzz, quiver.
The warmth of the sun falls on her face, scorching; it is as if she hasn’t been properly warm in a long time, her body under a thin layer of ice, still, in waiting. She has been in Sweden for two and a half years. Thirty months. Nine hundred and twelve days, she has counted each and every one. Thinking of this moment as she has gone to school and worked and eaten and dreamed and laughed and cried. Thinking about precisely this; coming here again, coming home.
Toftes gate lies before her like an avenue; all it takes is for her to walk over, up and along. On the corner of Biermanns gate she stops. She stands there motionless for a few minutes. All the time she’s waited, the images in her mind. The dreams a little while ago. Everything she never dreamed, the dreams she forgot, those yet to come. Those that ask. Those that answer. Those that make it round the corner on Toftes gate and go no farther. No farther than this.
The light falls at a diagonal through the gate. The backyard is bathed in bright sunlight. An empty shell, four floors, a wall of bricks and open windows. The gate is open. The passageway just inside.
The rubbish bins are still pushed up against the wall, no stench from within them anymore. She can see the lilac tree at the back of the yard, the bench beneath the branches; it has changed color. There’s someone there, in the backyard, she can hear laughter, a rippling sound, a little boy running around with a ball, a man on a chair. He sits with his back to her, but even so, she recognizes him. He turns as she walks into the yard, remains in his seat and looks at her for a moment before his face breaks into a smile.
“Oh my goodness, it’s you!” Ole Rustad says, standing up. “You’re a young lady now!”
He walks her way, opens his arms, an embrace without embracing as he looks at her without looking. The little boy starts to cry. His ball has become trapped beneath the bicycle rack.
“What’s his name?” she asks, nodding in the direction of the little boy.
“This is little Ole. He turned two at Christmas.”
The boy walks toward them. He stands behind his father, clutching at his trouser leg.
“We’ve another on the way.” Ole pats the boy on the head. “Tell her your name, Ole,” he teases.
“Ole,” the little boy says, thrusting his finger up his snotty nose.
Ole Rustad stands there beaming.
“Well well well,” he says, glancing out over the backyard. “Well well well.”
Her window up there, open, a white curtain fluttering through the gap, flapping in the light breeze.
“There are others living there now,” Ole says. “They moved in a while after you … ”
He stands for a moment, simply nodding.
The apartment, she can picture every room so clearly. The narrow hallway, coats and jackets and hats, the kitchen, her mother over the stove, the smell of roasting meat, baking, the scent of her mother. The living room with the round table, the candles lit, her father in the armchair by the window, whistling, humming, the mirror hanging between the two windows.
“It’s been good,” Ole says, lighting a cigarette. “Lately, I mean. We went down to see the king when he came. You should have seen it, Ilse. What a celebration.”
He blows the smoke out through his nostrils, looks at her, uncertain.
The windows to the right. Hermann’s windows, they’re closed.
“You should go up and knock, you know,” Ole says, throwing away his cigarette, stepping on it, picking up his son and walking to the door. “It was good to see you,” he smiles, opening the door and going inside.
The backyard, so quiet. Yet so full of sound. Birds. A bee. The clanking of cooking pots from one kitchen or another. The tram from Vogts gate on its way downtown. Breathing. And then. A window opening. The third floor.
“Ilse Stern!”
His head up there. His thick, fair hair. A hand that waves, that lovely hand. A smile.
Hermann Rød. She says. Inside.
“Wait for me, Ilse,” he calls, closing the window.
The sun on the rooftop. A big yellow circle. Long beams reaching outward. The grass smells fresh and dry. Before long the backyard will be filled with yellow, rotting leaves, before long the wind will blow again, and the rain will pour down, hammering against the asphalt, creating deep furrows in the gravel. Before long everything will become white and cold, a hard shell forming over everything that is dead.
But now.
The thud of the door. He’s coming. Out of the door. Out into the sunlight. Out of the apartment block. From the outside it looks like any other building.
AFTERWORD
On April 9, 1940, Norway was occupied by Germany and remained under German control until May 8, 1945. Even though there were no battlefields in Norway during the Second World War, such as there were in France or Belgium, these five years und
er occupation left their mark on the Norwegian population. There was a shortage of food, and goods were rationed. People were subjected to strict controls and censorship. Many joined the resistance movement, working against the Germans by taking part in illegal intelligence work, sabotage, and various other types of action. Some joined the Germans by allying themselves with the Norwegian fascist party, Nasjonal Samling (NS). For the large majority, daily life was characterized by uncertainty, fear for the future, food shortages, and a fight to make ends meet, yet there was also a strong solidarity and sense of belonging among those affected.
The Norwegian Jews were subjected to a steadily increasing stream of harassment from the NS and the Germans from the very start of the occupation. In 1942 this further intensified, with all Jews having their identification papers stamped with a red letter J and being required to fill in a form with information about themselves. The information gathered as part of this campaign offered German and Norwegian authorities a greater overview of the Jews in Norway, which proved crucial to the mass arrests that took place in the autumn of 1942.
The persecution of the Jews in Norway was systematic, carried out on specific dates and at specific times. On the morning of October 26, 1942, male Jews over the age of fifteen were arrested. Exactly one month later, on the morning of November 26, 1942, women and children were taken. The German ship Donau sailed from Oslo on the afternoon of that same day with 532 Norwegian Jews on board. Only nine of those were to survive Auschwitz.
The characters in Almost Autumn are fictional, but the story is based on real events that took place in Oslo in the autumn of 1942. My starting point for this book was to investigate the notion of chance. It struck me that the persecution of the Jews was so systematic and time-specific in its enforcement that chance must also have played some part in events. What if someone wasn’t at home on that particular morning of November 26? What if, by some twist of fate, one member of the family wasn’t there to be taken? And how significant would the consequences be? I read several stories about people who escaped arrest, purely through chance, managing to make it to safety in neutral Sweden. I wanted Almost Autumn to build on this notion of chance.
I have grown up with stories of the Second World War. My grandfather Einar spent three years in a concentration camp in Japan, while my grandfather Edvard was active in the intelligence organization XU. Uncle Ole secretly kept a pig in his cellar that they slaughtered for a traditional Christmas dinner. Uncle Kolbjørn helped fugitives make it over to Sweden. My grandmother Randi had to leave her home when the Germans occupied the property, while my grandmother Astrid was a midwife who became unpopular after helping some German women in labor.
They told me about their lives during the war, and I found their stories exhilarating. It felt as if the distance created by time had been erased, as if I had been through these experiences myself. I recall my grandfather’s identification tag, kept in a drawer of my grandmother’s bureau, and I remember sitting there, holding it in my hand, feeling the fabric, smelling it, looking at his identification number, and imagining all that he must have experienced while he was imprisoned in Japan. It was only by chance that he survived. Perhaps the idea of exploring chance the way that I have in Almost Autumn is connected to my own history. If my grandfather hadn’t survived those three years in Japan, then I wouldn’t be here.
All the older members of my family are dead now. Soon there will be nobody left to talk about their own experiences of the Second World War. I feel as if it is important that our stories of the war are passed on to the next generation. Almost Autumn is my small attempt to do just that.
Marianne Kaurin
Nesodden, Norway
March 8, 2016
For more information on World War II and the Holocaust in Norway:
Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities
http://www.hlsenteret.no/english/
Oslo Jewish Museum
http://oslojewishmuseum.no/
MARIANNE KAURIN was born in 1974 in Tønsberg, Norway. She studied at the Norwegian Institute of Children’s Books, and her debut novel, Almost Autumn, received the Norwegian Ministry of Culture prize, and was named Young People’s Book of the Year in a vote by students from all over Norway. Marianne now lives just outside of Oslo in Nesodden with her husband and three children, and is an editor of educational literature for high school students.
ROSIE HEDGER was born in Scotland and completed her MA (with Honors) in Scandinavian studies at the University of Edinburgh. As part of her undergraduate studies, Rosie spent a year at the University of Oslo, and later lived and worked in Sweden and Denmark before returning to the UK, where she is now based. Find Rosie online at www.rosiehedger.com.
Originally published in Norwegian in 2012 as Nærmere høst by H. Aschehoug & Co.
Text copyright © 2012 by H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard), Oslo
English translation copyright © 2017 by Rosie Hedger
All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920, by arrangement with H. Aschehoug & Co., Oslo, Norway. SCHOLASTIC and the LANTERN LOGO are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kaurin, Marianne, 1974– author. | Hedger, Rosie, translator.
Title: Almost autumn / Marianne Kaurin ; translated from the Norwegian by Rosie Hedger.
Other titles: Nærmere høst. English
Description: First American edition. | New York, NY : Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., 2017. | “Originally published in Norwegian in 2012 as Nærmere høst by H. Aschehoug & Co.”—Copyright page. | Summary: As autumn approaches Ilse Stern is thinking about her infatuation with Hermann Rød, and whether his determination to be a painter will interfere with their romance—but the reality of being Jewish in occupied Oslo is about to turn her whole world upside down, as the deportation of the Norwegian Jews begins. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016025310 | ISBN 9780545889650 (jacketed hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Jewish teenagers—Norway—Oslo—Juvenile fiction. | Antisemitism—Norway—Juvenile fiction. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)— Norway—Oslo—Juvenile fiction. | Norway—History—German occupation, 1940–1945—Juvenile fiction. | Oslo (Norway)—History—20th century— Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Jews—Norway—Oslo—Fiction. | Antisemitism— Fiction. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Norway—Oslo—Fiction. | Norway— History—German occupation, 1940–1945—Fiction. | Oslo (Norway)— History—20th century—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.K38 Al 2017 | DDC 839.823/8 [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025310
First American edition, January 2017
Jacket image © 2017 by Tim O’Brien & Elizabeth B. Parisi
Jacket design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
e-ISBN 978-0-545-88966-7
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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