The branches cut into her arms and her legs, and the ground became treacherous. This must be what it is like, Silje thought, to live your life in eternal darkness. She wondered how Freya did not spend every waking moment screaming.
She pressed on, whispering Freya’s name, hoping her words would carry softly on the wind. She stumbled, picked herself up and continued to walk with greater care. Perhaps the child had foolishly injured herself; the copse was home to four sudden and steep drops; three of them would result in broken bones, the fourth began fifty feet above an outcrop of razor-sharp rocks. The branches grew more dense, the cuts grew deeper. Silje wondered how a blind girl could move so quickly in the dead of night.
But you live in the dead of the night, don’t you? It all suddenly seemed so very unfair. Silje cursed Freya’s name just as her right foot stepped onto empty air.
She froze, feeling a new, harsher breeze caressing her skin. She moved her foot back and placed it on the ground, then made a half turn and took a step forward. Her foot searched uselessly for something solid. She tried to remember the shape of the ledge; the approach was narrow, very narrow, and then it grew from its stem into a platform that was over ten feet wide. She made another quarter turn and slowly sank to her knees, reaching out, searching for the stem. Had she turned again? Which direction was she facing? And now she cursed herself for not bringing a lamp. How quickly she lost her senses wherever that girl was concerned. She thought she should perhaps wait for daybreak, but realised she would not survive the cold for very long. She could shout for help, but her father was in the village and Magnus… She had no clue where Magnus would be at this hour. She felt the first ripple of panic seize her, the first thought that she would die out here and people would think it a very careless and silly way to lose her life.
‘Take my hand.’
Silje could not remember being so overjoyed to hear a human voice. She forced down her pride in a single, painful swallow. ‘Freya, I think I am lost.’
‘Then I will lead you home.’
She said, ‘I have been foolish,’ as Freya’s cold thin hand slipped into her own. She held her fingers tightly.
‘You should pay more attention to the winds,’ said Freya. ‘The easterly winds sound more hollow than the winds of the west. The winds from the north are colder than those of the south.’
Silje felt herself being pulled along at an alarming speed; she dug in her heels, lest Freya lead them over the ledge.
‘Trust me, it’s this way.’
The child was strong and very assured for one who appeared so frail.
‘I thought you were the one who needed to be looked after and protected,’ said Silje. ‘And you have saved me from a most undignified end. I am sorry, Freya.’
‘You do not need to apologise, Silje; just know me better.’
‘I will, I promise. You may light the street lamps if you wish.’
Freya laughed from somewhere in the darkness. ‘I do not think you could have stopped me.’
‘Perhaps you are right,’ Silje said; she suspected there was no ‘perhaps’ about it, but saying it kept her humiliation from being absolute.
Freya walked quickly; Silje stumbled to keep up.
‘You will not tell anyone about this, will you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘And you will teach me how to find my way around the mountain, blindfolded.’
‘Why would you want to know how to do that?’
‘So that I may know you better.’
Freya was silent, so Silje squeezed her hand to make sure she was still there.
‘Then you will do something for me.’
‘Anything,’ said Silje.
‘You will teach me to kiss boys.’
‘Think of something else.’
‘That is what I want,’ Freya said firmly, ‘and in return, I will teach you how to see the mountain as I do.’
The copse separated, revealing the lights of the cottage beyond.
‘You can let go of my hand now,’ said Freya.
‘I’ll keep it, if you don’t mind.’
Once inside, Silje had to stop Freya from clearing up the soup spilt on the floor. She ordered her charge to bed and was most surprised when Freya climbed the stairs without a word of protest.
‘You can teach me when you’re finished down here, yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Silje wearily.
Freya smiled and hurried upstairs.
Silje cleaned the spill and washed the pot. She scrubbed the floor and then attended to her cuts. There was one behind her left knee that was deep and stung each time she flexed her leg. She chastised herself again for being so foolish, and made more work for herself by reorganising the pantry. She knew she was procrastinating though she didn’t know why. She did not mind passing on her experience to others; she had taught Lisbeth Fehn how to kiss boys a few years before. Lisbeth was not a natural talent, as Silje recalled. Her lips were thin and rigid and her tongue unpleasantly wet, much like that of her father. Regardless, Silje had offered to her continue her instruction, and to her dismay the offer was spurned.
Because you bit me, Silje, Lisbeth had said, and it hurt.
Lies piled upon ingratitude…
Silje felt this was not the sort of thing she should be teaching an impressionable young Jewish girl. But a promise was a promise. Freya had saved her life after all.
And so an hour later, she went upstairs and knocked on Freya’s door. She pushed it open and said, ‘One kiss, that is all. And I advise you to take notes; we shall not be doing this again.’
In the darkness, she heard gentle snoring. Silje felt the skin of her cheeks warmed by a smile, though she had no idea what she had to smile about; perhaps it was because it was rare that someone would fall asleep while waiting for her. She shut the door and slid into the bed, too tired to undress. She whispered, ‘Good night’ and kissed the back of Freya’s head, taking in the smell of her hair.
Orchids.
She’d had even taken the family scent.
Freya groaned, took her hand and held it tightly – so tightly that Silje felt the bones of her fingers pressed together.
‘You can teach me another day,’ she said, and fell back to her slumber.
‘Yes, I think that would be best.’ Silje closed her eyes and succumbed almost immediately.
She awoke and turned away from Freya before falling asleep once again. The cold night wore on, and Freya, as was her habit, became a small unclothed furnace.
Silje dreamed a dream familiar to her of late: making love to Erik in his barn while the Jewess searched blindly for a way out. There was a new player in her dream this night; General Gruetzmacher watched from the loft, laughing while reciting the evils of Judaism, sitting astride Silje’s old rocking horse. As Erik climaxed, General Gruetzmacher, still laughing wildly, shot all three of them and scattered pages of The Quisling Orchid over their corpses…
She awoke once more, soaked in perspiration and her left hand in unbearable pain. She felt a familiar and unwelcome heat between her legs, and in horror remembered she was in Freya’s bed.
Silje tried to slide out to the floor and her horror blossomed when she found her hand trapped, crushed tightly between Freya’s thighs. She lay frozen, unsure what to do. The girl hadn’t woken, or so it seemed. If she moved slowly then she could perhaps extricate herself and depart, and her crime against nature would remain undiscovered.
Freya was facing the window, her breathing deep and hoarse, her tiny frame shivering.
She was very much awake.
‘Freya, I am so very sorry. I was dreaming, I think, and it was one of those dreams… My God, what must you think of me.’ But when she tried to withdraw her hand – swearing wretchedly she would hack the cursed thing off – Freya seized her wrist and whispered, ‘Don’t.’
‘I did not mean to.’
‘I mean – don’t leave.’ Freya entwined her fingers through Silje’s and pushed their hands deeper be
tween her thighs. The girl was inhumanly strong, and it was a moment before Silje realised that Freya’s quiet strength was only part of it, and that she herself was offering little resistance. Freya took Silje’s other hand, and pressed it against her breast. Her heart pounded against Silje’s palm; her skin felt slick to her touch, stretched tight over the sharp bones of her chest. She moved Silje’s hand, forcing her swollen nipple between her fingers.
‘Please stop this,’ Silje whispered.
Freya squeezed her legs together and Silje sighed in pain, her fingers crushed and pushed deeper still. Freya’s body tensed; she gasped and remained as still as a stone; she gasped again and the stillness escaped her.
The moment Freya’s body softened, Silje snatched her hand away, causing Freya to catch her breath. She lay beside her, seemingly unable to draw air. There was a sweet, cloying smell that clung to them both. Silje wiped her hands on the sheets and then used the sheets to dry her eyes. Whatever Freya secreted made her eyes burn.
‘I thought…’ said Freya, still fighting to draw breath, ‘I thought you were just going to teach me to kiss.’
Without another word, Silje threw back the covers and fled from the room.
Chapter 19
Jesper Bergström was one of the very few who had survived the Fólkvangr massacre. He was the son of the local grocer. I don’t know why I remember that; maybe because it’s strange that the son of a grocer would grow into a butcher.
He’d been taken prisoner along with his family, and after a month of interrogation that had left his father without teeth or fingernails and his mother and sister near mute, they were transferred to Camp One at Beisfjord. His family died within two years of being sent there. Jesper was still a boy at the time, and how he survived is the stuff of nightmares.
I had learned a lot about Jesper Bergström since Monica had cast him as my very own monster under the bed.
Do as I say, Brigit, or he will come for you. In Monica’s mind, any childhood trauma worth inflicting should be inflicted deep.
So I knew all about Cleaver: how he had been liberated from the camp at the end of the war; how he survived by his wits on the streets of Oslo until he was old enough to join the army; how he was discharged two years later for causing the death of a recruit; how he travelled the world for seven years, dispatching Nazis-in-hiding on behalf of the fledging Israeli state; how he returned to Norway and plied his trade here, butchering collaborators and those who’d supported Quisling’s puppet government. It was the Israelis who called him Cleaver. It was a mark of respect. It was said that he could separate a man from his skeleton and leave him alive for close to eight minutes. It was said that Cleaver would question his victims while snapping the bones from their ribcages.
When I thought about this in the back of the taxi, I wet myself.
The man next to me said, ‘There’s a cleaning charge for that.’ No one laughed.
By the time Cleaver was caught, it was believed he’d killed eighty-six men and women in Norway alone, though only eighteen were proven beyond doubt. He still had a lot of support, especially from Fólkvangr survivors and their descendants. Offers had been made to fund his case being heard in an international court of law. Norway refused but it was too late; they already had a folk hero on their hands. Bargains were made, insanity pleas entered, pressure was exerted from Israel. Games of politics were played, and in the end Bergström was sent to a mental institution. Monica bought champagne on the day he was sentenced; it never occurred to me that she just as afraid of Cleaver as I was.
But I learned much more about Bergström while tied to a chair in a large, brightly lit room with a chequered floor, watching the man himself separate a cow’s carcass into slivers of meat, bone and fat. Unless challenged, he was a quiet and methodical man, nimble-fingered and quick-tempered.
He took great pride in his work.
My pleading for my life annoyed him; my demands for a change of clothes annoyed him more.
I learned he was a certified sociopath, of which he was very proud.
I learned he had five sons and three daughters, each by a different woman who had written to him while he was in the hospital, and considered it her patriotic privilege to sire him a child who would continue his work.
He must have been thirty-five though he seemed much younger; nothing maintains youth like psychopathy it seemed. His skin was dark and weathered and his tall frame was powerfully built. He had a moustache that grew grey and thick beneath a thin red nose. He may have had a cold. Every time I breathed, my own nose made a faint whistling sound; I’d broken it when I hit the concrete, but that was the least of my problems.
Bergström’s arms were tattooed. His right arm carried the mark of a swastika being cleaved in two with an axe. Six numbers had been scored into his left. The numbers were long, faint and distorted; there was an eight, a three and a nine. I couldn’t make out the others.
Monica had shown me pictures of such tattoos during the hideous ‘know your enemy’ phase she went through during my teens.
Pay attention to the size of the tattoo, she’d said. Look at how this one covers the whole forearm. This means it was applied when the victim was very young.
Children of the camps, she’d said, are the worst. They will hurt you the most because they are dead inside. They will kill you because they care for nothing. They will kill you because they can endure any consequence that would come of it.
My heart sank to my stomach, and though I’d been given nothing to drink for three hours, my immediate problem was a desperate need to pee.
‘Eight years old, to answer your question,’ he said.
I said I didn’t understand.
‘You were looking at my mark.’ He showed me his forearm. ‘I was eight years old when I was taken to the camp. My parents and my sister died there. Only I survived.’ He wiped his brow with his numbered arm and slammed another side of beef onto the table. He began to carve, slowly, skilfully – a show for my benefit. ‘Do you know how I survived? Do you know how an orphaned child survived that final dreadful winter in a concentration camp?’
Someone standing behind me said, ‘Have a care, Bergström.’
It was one of the men in the taxi; I recognised his voice. He’d been in the room with me for the whole three hours, and until then had not made a sound. In that moment he became my best chance of survival. ‘Who else is here? Please, you’ve got to help me.’
There may have been others standing behind me, I wasn’t sure.
Cleaver said: ‘My father was a grocer, but his father was a butcher, a craftsman trusted by Fólkvangr’s community. A fine man. A respected man. He taught my father his trade, though the boy that he was had no real stomach for it. But he learnt it well, and he taught me with knives stolen from the camp kitchens. He taught me in that last winter that took so many of us.’
A shadow shifted; someone had moved behind me. It took Cleaver’s attention for a few seconds, and then he returned to the task at hand, his movements less fluid, his strikes against bone sending fragments and splinters flying into the air.
‘While the Russians and the Serbs, the gypsies and the queers were dying around us, my family came to a decision, a decision they made without me. They decided that as the youngest I would survive. Halfway through the winter of ’44, my family took what little food they had left and gave it to me. My mother and my sister kissed me and held me. They felt like bones in my hands.’ He pulled a rib and threw it away. ‘Their skin was like paper, and I remember their eyes, so full of love, so empty of hope. My father sent me outside, into the cold. And when I returned, he had smothered them both.’
‘God, not this again,’ said the voice. ‘Do we have to hear this?’
Whoever he was, he wasn’t going to be any help at all.
‘We dug a grave underneath our hut,’ Bergström continued as though his companion hadn’t spoken. ‘He cut his own wrists as we began, and he made sure that he bled into the hole. We lined the gra
ve with snow and ice and laid my sister and my mother inside. And then…’ The butcher paused and placed the carving knife on the table. He stared at it, waiting for it to come to life. ‘And then, before he succumbed, he taught his son the trade of his father.
‘If you ask me how I survived, Miss Fossen, then I will tell you. I survived because as a boy I turned my back on God.’ He began to carve again. His confession had exorcised him; the fluidity and flow returned to his movements.
‘Bergström, enough.’ Another voice.
‘It is enough when I say so!’ Cleaver roared so loudly that the knives hanging next to him rattled. He carried on separating bones from meat while we waited in silence. I would have been happy to let the silence sit because it was keeping me alive, but there was something I needed to know.
‘Klein told you I was here in Oslo, didn’t he?’ I’d had time to think about it: the phone call that had drained him; the finality of his goodbyes. He’d sent me out and told them where to find me.
‘He could not believe his good fortune when he saw you at the Resistance Museum. He knew that you would be worth much to me – eighteen months, perhaps more.’
I must’ve looked confused because Cleaver apologised and explained.
‘Years ago, the Department of Correction made something of an administrative blunder.’ He chuckled to himself and threw a handful of offal into a nearby bin. I was thankful that my sense of smell had left me. ‘Some paperwork or other was misfiled, and Klein, suffering from pneumonia, was sent to the wrong hospital – my hospital.’ He bared his teeth. ‘And before the error was uncovered, Mr Klein and I had already met and come to something of an agreement, a pact if you will. A pact I sealed when I carved out his stomach.’
‘Lev is right. Enough.’ A third voice. This had turned out to be something of a gathering. Perhaps they were there as witnesses, or perhaps this was some sort of initiation. Perhaps they would all take their turn with the knives.
Bergström ignored them. ‘For every Nazi soul, every collaborator he delivered to me, I would allow him time. Over the years he has delivered many, but the well has run dry and so his time has run out.’
The Quisling Orchid Page 19
