The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  There they were, safe from mice and other vermin and prying eyes, pressed flat and dry, and with a little sawdust on top. Twenty or so letters in which Einar explained what had happened in 1943 and thereafter. He had written in French, with even margins and on both sides. Just as they had begun to fill out both sides of my blank page, because now I understood Mamma’s responses to him.

  She had been hateful when Einar showed up at the farm in 1967. Perhaps she had suspected that his plan during the war had been to get his hands on the walnut. And it emerged from Einar’s letters that he, by asking some remarkably detailed questions, had needed proof that Mamma was in fact who she claimed to be.

  I recognised myself in both his and Mamma’s manner of speaking. I finished reading the letters and straightened up, feeling the same certainty that Mamma and Einar had been blessed with.

  Einar had been my grandfather.

  I fiddled with the cabinetmaking tools, looked at his proud handwriting. It was as though he were standing in front of me, opening a direct line to the year 1943.

  5

  WHEN EINAR FIRST ARRIVED IN AUTHUILLE, HE HAD been gruffly rejected by my great-grandfather. Einar had told Edouard Daireaux about his mission, about the sapper’s map, and had handed him an envelope from Winterfinch with the final amount due for the timber.

  Edouard had asked him to leave. “The money is as agreed,” he said. “But that’s the least of it. The actual deal was for the woods to be cleared of shells, but instead he’s set up a minefield in there. When the timber goes, it’ll be impossible to get anyone to clear them. You should get out before the Germans see your documents. And keep the money. I don’t want a nitwit with a fake name in my woods.”

  Einar slowly began to realise how meaningless his task was. On his journey through the country he had run into German patrols and witnessed the emaciated population, but what of the effects of the war? He had witnessed little of that. Only now did he understand that the country he so admired had become impoverished, enveloped in a sadistic darkness.

  He accepted the envelope, went on his way and contemplated how far from reality he had been. The flight to Shetland was provoked by a concern for his brother, for as he wrote: I knew that once I had left Hirifjell, Sverre would not enlist with the Germans again. He had a farm to run. And I had no intention of becoming an allied soldier. I just wanted to get away. Until that point, whenever I heard the word “German”, I just pictured Sverre in uniform.

  When his skills as a boatbuilder had become superfluous, he had met Winterfinch, the first man in many years with whom he could discuss fine cabinetmaking and woodwork. Einar made several pieces of furniture for Quercus Hall, and when he completed an armchair with an ebony frame, Winterfinch began to call him by his first name. Then one evening he told me about a consignment of walnut trees that were of great sentimental value to him.

  Winterfinch had bitterly regretted not felling the trees before the war. From 1941 onwards he became more and more desperate, having heard reports that the Germans were gradually moving further into the country and felling timber – whether the landowners allowed it or not – for the massive fortifications along the Atlantic coast. The agreement was that Einar was to fell the trees, hide the shipment wherever he thought best, and await further instructions.

  Now in Authuille, and faced with the reality, all those plans were discarded. His life was meaningless, he would be useless as a soldier, and the only thing he could do well – decorative cabinetmaking – was not exactly sought after in a war. But he had not gone far before he heard the crunching of gravel behind him. A scrawny girl was following him on a bicycle. She wore worn work clothes and a kerchief over her blue-black curly hair. Bony and bedraggled, like many others at the time, but with the gaze of a bird of prey and fleet movements. She was the farmer’s daughter, Isabelle Daireaux. He had seen her at the house while he had been talking to Edouard.

  “Are you a good Frenchman?” was the first thing she said.

  He wanted to answer that he was as good a Frenchman as a Norwegian could be, but instead he simply nodded.

  “Do you have the sapper’s map?” she said.

  Einar stared at her.

  “I’ve heard told that the resistance movement needs explosives,” she said. “And the shells from 1916 are intact.”

  “But they’re extremely dangerous,” Einar said.

  “That’s why they’re needed,” Isabelle said.

  “Have you just come up with this idea now?”

  “No. On the bike ride here.”

  “That’s not a long trip.”

  “I’m a quick thinker.”

  “And your father?”

  “He’s too cautious,” Isabelle said, and led him off the road. Einar cut open the lining of his jacket to show her the sapper’s map, which had been hidden there for his entire journey as Oscar Ribaut.

  “The worst thing about hearing shots,” she said, “is when there’s only one. They murdered my schoolmistress the day before yesterday. Buried the baker alive because he was in the resistance. Our crops were confiscated even before we got them back to the house. We’re fattening up soldiers who are shooting our countrymen.”

  She asked Einar if he had noticed the girl who stood by the henhouse on the farm. “That’s my sister,” she said. “How old do you think she is?”

  Einar shook his head. “Twelve?”

  “She’s fifteen,” she said. “She’s not growing properly because we are starving. Even though we live on a farm.”

  *

  Isabelle had persuaded her father to let Einar stay, in exchange for his travel money from Winterfinch and helping out with the farm work. Later they had taken the map and gone carefully into the woods. The ground was pocked with craters from shell strikes. In some places young conifers sprouted between charred, broken trunks, in others the forest floor had simply lost all life. Here and there, hidden by undergrowth and dead grass, they could see how rusted artillery shells had been positioned in a perimeter to prevent illegal felling.

  Within this area of fire and destruction stood the walnut trees. Disfigured and charred, on land broken up by the digging of the sappers. The trunks were so enormous that they could not reach all the way around them. Small branches, like stunted arms, had developed, but the foliage was yellow and wilting. A peculiar, dead smell hung in the silence.

  Isabelle had never been into the woods before, and she shared her parents’ disdain for Winterfinch’s indeterminate plans to clear them. The woods had been valuable before the war, as building material and as firewood, not to mention the rich crop of plump walnuts. The ancient trees had seen both Napoleonic wars and revolutions before the gas bombardments had made them die out.

  Einar just stood there imagining how this place must have been before the first war, a spacious, peaceful parcel of land with lush green trees that touched their neighbours. It resembled his own woods in Hirifjell, apart from the fact that back home it was he who had inflicted the wounds on the trees. Then Einar had noticed something by its absence. Birdsong. The place was absolutely still.

  The Germans had probably suspected that someone might collect the explosives in this way. The Daireaux woods were surrounded by patrolled roads, but they were situated on a slope that led down towards the Ancre, and with the help of the map they could sneak unseen through the thicket and follow the secure path to the walnut trees. When they got there, they found everything neatly arranged; behind the perimeter the sappers had gathered shells in large mounds, and had even removed the detonators.

  In silence they took the shells apart, removed the T.N.T. and placed it near the water. Einar had no idea how they were transported from there, but by the following day they were always gone.

  In the woods they kept stumbling upon scrap metal from the previous war: tin plates, helmets, rifle casings, military boots with the remains of a leg inside. That this place was a mass grave did not appear to affect the two particularly. But Einar, who had come from the
barren and treeless Shetland Islands, could not spend long near a tree without feeling the cabinetmaker in him come to life. One day, when he was alone, he dug down to the roots of one of the trees and felled it with an axe. Only when the tree was toppling did it occur to him that the impact could set off explosions. He threw himself to the ground, the earth shook, but no explosions came.

  With a rack saw he cut out a block of the wood and moistened it. Immediately it brought to life an extraordinary interplay of colours. Powerful black rings on a reddish-orange background which appeared to glow. From his purchases for Ruhlmann’s he recognised the quality grades of walnut; it did not take him long to calculate that, in peacetime, the timber would be worth an enormous fortune.

  Isabelle had been furious that he was so distracted from the task of collecting shells.

  One night she appeared at his shack holding something behind her back. An old burial cross, its paint peeling, still damp and blackened at the base.

  “You don’t want to know where this came from,” she said, placing the cross on the floor. “Just make two more which look the same. And carve in these names.” She handed him a piece of paper.

  The names were Jewish. The years of death were 1938 and 1939.

  “But Jews don’t use crosses,” Einar said.

  “Please, just do it,” Isabelle said. “Prove that you really are a cabinetmaker.”

  By the light of a candle he took two old planks, inserted a crossbeam and carved in the names with a chisel. He splashed on some white paint and rubbed the crosses with dirt and old engine oil to give the impression of age. That night they went back out, she taking him by the hand now and then to guide him through the fields. There was bombing in the vicinity that night, and they heard shots not far away as they slipped towards the churchyard. They took crosses from two graves and replaced them with fake ones, patting the earth around the base.

  As they sneaked back she told him that the Germans had arrested a Jewish family. Since the occupying forces traced Jewish ancestry back two generations, the fake crosses would carry the names of the family’s grandparents. The next day a priest would lead the Germans to the churchyard and point to the crosses to show that the family had been buried according to Christian tradition.

  *

  Einar wrote about this incident so that Mamma could verify his story. You can visit these families yourself and have the story confirmed to you, and the address of a man by the name of Staniszewski was also written there. When his letter came to the circumstances of the arrest, his writing grew more shaky, and I read a sentence which sent shivers through me:

  Isabelle owned a pretty blue dress she had made before the war. A few days before the Germans came she had worn it, and it was a sight which would later haunt me each night.

  For when the Daireaux family was taken, Einar had not fled straight away. He was suspected of having informed on them by others in the resistance movement, yet still he recklessly went to the Daireaux farm to obtain some memento of Isabelle. All the farm sheds had been burned to the ground, the Gestapo’s means of driving out any children who might be hiding. Everything had been razed, and their dog lay in a pool of dried blood. Inside the barn he found the blue summer dress, trodden into the hay and filth.

  I took it as a memento and as proof, he wrote, that I was no informer. But I was in mortal danger and had to flee. I had a friend in the area, a skilled cabinetmaker who had worked with me at Ruhlmann’s workshop in Paris. His name was Charles Bonsergent, he came from a fishing village a day’s journey away, and had, like me, moved home with the onset of war.

  Einar had remained in hiding with Bonsergent until D-Day. He discovered that Isabelle was in Ravensbrück, and when the telephone lines were re-opened, he contacted Winterfinch and asked him for money for travel and pay-offs so that he could bring her home as soon as Berlin fell.

  Winterfinch refused, simply asked where his timber was.

  And that was when Einar took the walnut wood hostage. He and Charles Bonsergent travelled back to Authuille, where they felled the remaining trees, dug up the roots, and transported everything to a safe hiding place. He considered the walnut to be Daireaux family property, and refused all of Winterfinch’s subsequent offers. Only Isabelle could decide the price, he said – or, later, Isabelle’s child.

  *

  In later letters Einar mentioned that the inheritance was in the same place, but without saying where, for reasons we both know well – rumours travel fast on Shetland. It seemed that it might be in France.

  Mamma had visited him out on Haaf Gruney. He must have given her Isabelle’s dress there, for in a letter he wrote How good it is to see it filled with life again. Einar insisted that the inheritance should go to Mamma, and that he would help her assert her claim to it. But in the first years after I was born she was unwavering. It was not until I read the second to last letter from Einar, written in the summer of 1971, that I saw their plan in black and white:

  I have met with Mr Winterfinch. It’s the first time we have spoken in a long while. We have glared at each other now and again, I must say, because he has been looking for the inheritance all these years. He even bought a summer house near Authuille. I’ve felt sorry for him, I really have, not least when I’ve seen him on Unst with his grandchild, a little girl. But it would be wrong if he simply took the goods, even though I grant he has some right to them. He once said, “Why clear the woods of shells when the family no longer exists?” Since there is now an heir, I told him, the most suitable arrangement would be to give her enough money to buy her family farm back. “She is an imposter,” was his response. Ugh, this whole affair has become an evil assortment of events that ought never to have taken place. Your mother will never be returned to us. But now we can have the matter settled, and then I will move away from here. I leave it to you, Nicole, to choose what you think best.

  Winterfinch spends September in the Somme every year. The closest hotel is in the nearby city of Albert. I forget what it’s called now, something to do with a basilisk? I am staying at a cheap guest house on the outskirts, I cannot bring myself to stay near Authuille itself. There is a good restaurant there, by the way. If you and Winterfinch were to dine together, you could hear his story and would be able to discuss a fair price. Yes, it’s worth a fortune, a proper fortune. But do what you want. If you come to an agreement, you could either tell him where the wood is, or let me know how to deliver it. Remember that he can be volatile and difficult; he changes his mind constantly.

  Listen, let’s talk through the details on the telephone. It’s good of Sverre to lend you the car. Don’t tell him I’ve written.

  Another thing: if you two want some time alone, I wondered whether I could look after Edvard? I’ve never looked after a child, but I know him better now after the last time. I’ve made him a little dog out of beech wood. It can wiggle its ears and shake its tail. When I finished it I just sat there, lost in thought. After all these years of working with wood, it’s the first toy I’ve ever made.

  My very best wishes to you, and pass on my greetings to Walter. And yes, do call me. The telephone box by the ferry terminal. Sunday as usual. Six o’clock, also as usual. I’ll be there. As usual.

  E.H.

  6

  GWEN SAT ON THE STOREHOUSE STEPS WITH GRUBBE. He was lying on his back in her lap, curled up, her fingers in his long fur.

  “He smells so good,” she said, burying her nose in his stomach.

  “That’s where he can’t reach to clean himself.”

  “Mmmm, lovely. I’ve never had a pet, not even a dog. Even though we had so much space.”

  I sat beside her on the stone steps. It was getting colder each day. “Autumn is here,” she said. “When do we bring the sheep down from the mountain?”

  I did not answer straight away. And perhaps she had got to know me too well, could recognise the look which suggested a difficult conversation was on its way. Why bring up the body when the flowers on the grave are in bloom? />
  “Oh well,” she sighed. “I knew this day had to come. You want to go to France, don’t you?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Your hesitation. The way you walk. You’re distracted, you don’t listen to half the things I say.”

  Grubbe must have sensed the unease in her, for he leaped off her lap.

  “You want to go now,” she said, and plucked a hair from her sleeve, “because when the sheep are back down, you can’t leave, is that it?”

  “I found letters,” I said. “An exchange between my mother and Einar. In French. You can read them.”

  “Why would I want to read their letters?”

  “It says that they went to France in 1971, to meet your grandfather.”

  She got up and walked a couple of steps away. “I see, so that’s it. If we go to France together, it’s over between us.”

  She knows something, I said to myself. She’s trying to keep something secret.

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  Gwen picked up a stick and threw it into the nettles.

  “Are you so stupid? Isn’t it obvious that Grandfather had something to do with their accident? And it won’t be a pleasant discovery.”

  I was going to say that I knew about their summer house, but instead I asked, “So you’ve never been to Authuille?”

  “Me? No, never.”

  I shrugged, and she began to lose her temper.

  “What is it you’re trying to say? I told you, we’d drive down through Europe every summer in the Bentley. But it was always a straight line to Dover, across to Calais, and then on to Paris. He even accelerated when we passed the turn-off for the Somme.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t you believe me? Well, man up and decide, Edward, do you want me or not? You don’t trust me, do you. You think I know something about your disappearance.”