‘You should wait here,’ said Klein. ‘I will ask if he will see you.’
‘And why should I not wish to see her, Lieutenant?’
Klein snapped to attention so quickly Silje thought she heard his spine crack.
‘My General!’
‘You may stand at ease.’
Silje turned and curtsied slightly. The General spared them both the slightest of nods. There was a field dressing taped to his left cheek, and a bandage bound tightly about his left hand. He was flanked by two soldiers, each half as wide as they were tall.
‘It is good to see you again, Fräulein Ohnstad, though I wish it were under less dire circumstances. Walk with me. Klein, stay here.’ He strode back inside without waiting for her. Silje hurried after him. She hesitated when he entered a room just several yards beyond the hall entrance, but slipped inside as he began to close the door. The room was much the same as the others she’d seen in the town hall: ornate with a dizzyingly high ceiling. The shutters were closed and the only light came from a single lamp at the corner of a hand-carved writing bureau. The room hadn’t been plundered for its artworks so Silje assumed it was one of the General’s private offices.
‘My brother, General. You have him here.’
He opened the door to a side office and held it for her. Silje stepped through. Gruetzmacher beckoned her to take a seat before opening a box and taking out a wooden pipe.
‘I would rather stand if it’s all the same to you, General.’
‘As you wish.’
‘My brother—’
‘Do you remember my driver?’
‘I—’
‘A simple question, Fräulein. My driver, Sergeant Krause.’
‘Yes, Gerbald… Lieutenant Klein told me that—’
‘The shot went through the windshield and shattered her right eye.’
‘I am truly sorry for your loss, General.’
‘She died moments later. I could do nothing for her.’
‘General—’
‘I could not even bring myself to touch her.’
Silje decided to wait, to allow him to say what he needed to say. He tapped his finger on the brandy decanter, staring at it as though he could see a tiny Jew inside it. ‘She was Semite, you know. Partly, at least. On her father’s side… No, her mother’s. She did not attempt to hide this flaw and she did not seek to gain dispensation for it. I admired her because she accepted her inferiority and yet strove to become the best she could be. She was, and I dare to say it, a true German.’ He removed the glass stopper from the decanter, and laid it gently on the writing desk. ‘And yet, I could not bring myself to touch her. She lay dying before my eyes, and I could not comfort her because all I could see in front of me was a Jew.’ He poured himself a glass, looked at it and then poured the contents slowly on the floor, watching the stream until it was spent. Then he upended the glass and slammed it against the desk. ‘But she was a Jew in a German uniform, Fräulein, and the uniform alone means she was worth a thousand of your countrymen.’
‘General, please. My brother—’
‘Was seen by myself and my men struggling with the scum I have nailed to posts outside my headquarters.’
‘He was not part of this, I swear.’
The General stoked his pipe and lit it. ‘It happened very quickly, Fräulein. So quickly that I could not tell if the five men were wrestling the gun away from your brother or he was attempting to take the gun from them.’ He opened his mouth to allow a plume of blue smoke to cascade out. ‘Which left me with something of a dilemma.’
He is trying to explain himself, Silje thought. Dear God, what has he done? ‘Your actions seem decisive enough, General. You did not know who was innocent and who was guilty and you executed them all the same.’
‘But not your brother.’ His face split into a thin, humourless smile. ‘Your brother I have spared.’
‘Then take me to him!’
‘In good time, Fräulein Ohnstad. Whether he was attempting to save my life or take it, he knew of the attempt. And so I have to ask myself, what else does he know?’
‘He knows nothing! He just saw the gun as it was drawn and threw himself in harm’s way to save you.’
This amused the General, and he rewarded her with a smile more terrifying than any he’d attempted before. ‘But I have spared him,’ he said. ‘And I did this for you.’
‘Then I thank you for your kindness, General.’
‘I did not do it for nothing.’ His smile did not change, and Silje wondered if it was a hideous reflex or if it required an act of will to keep it fixed in place.
But here we are, she thought, at last.
She walked to the centre of the room and unfastened her dress. She let it fall to her waist and clasped onto it tightly so that it would fall no further.
‘For the life of my brother,’ she said, ‘I am yours.’ She breathed in to lift her breasts.
General Gruetzmacher swallowed, such a sound that it echoed around the room. He came to stand over her. Silje looked to the floor and felt his breath on the back of her neck. He placed a hand on her shoulder. She closed her eyes and rooted her feet firmly to the floor, her heart pounding in terror. She felt his hand on her breast, his fingers squeezing and releasing in short bursts. He exhaled and took her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, pulling and twisting until Silje found herself gritting her teeth from the pain. He started to use his thumbnail, and as she tried to pull away, he increased the pressure on her shoulder, holding her fast. He told her to look up so he could see her face, and when she did not he stopped to raise her chin before quickly resuming his attentions: twisting and grinding while staring at her eyes – not into them, Silje marvelled, just at them.
‘Just take me,’ she murmured, remembering the words of her father, ‘and leave Fólkvangr in peace.’
And then he stopped, slowly taking his hands from her, shifting his gaze elsewhere. ‘Cover yourself, Fräulein.’ His breathing laboured. ‘You embarrass us both.’
He took the pipe from his mouth and looked at it, disappointed. He tried to light it again while he walked back to his desk. ‘Your brother did not respond favourably to questioning.’
‘You mean torture, I think.’ Silje refastened her dress and did not feel any less naked.
‘I will return him to you,’ the General said evenly, ‘and in return for my generosity, you will talk to him, find out whatever he knows.’
‘If he knows anything, he will not tell me.’
‘Pray that he does, soon, or I will have him brought back here.’ He sat down and began searching the bureau drawers. ‘I am showing you a kindness, Fräulein Ohnstad. Perhaps we would kill him before he broke, perhaps not; it makes no difference to me. This way we may both benefit.’
‘Have I not done enough for you?’
He picked up a fountain pen, tapped it on the desk and then waved it towards the door. ‘You may leave now. I have much to do.’
He took the second sheet from a pile and began to write. Silje waited for him to say something else. A few moments later she realised she’d slipped from his world and no longer existed.
* * *
They escorted her to the town hall’s side exit and left her there. The door slammed shut, leaving her cold, defiled, and still without her brother. She made her way out of the courtyard, keeping her head low to avoid the inquiring looks of her fellow Norwegians.
Darkness had fallen and the crowd had yet to disperse. A thousand people, perhaps more, stood at the barricades, neither advancing or falling back. It was the sombre inaction that made the Germans wary, fearful – a passive violence to which they could not respond.
Silje decided to walk to the entrance and try to speak with Lieutenant Klein again. She was sure he would not see her but had to try all the same.
As she turned and began to walk back, dim headlights flashed from a narrow passageway close to the barricades. She stopped and peered at the shadow beyond the crowd. If it w
as a signal then whoever sent it would not dare do so again. She turned her eyes without moving her head; the German soldiers did not appear to have noticed.
The crowd had begun to stamp its feet to keep warm, but after a time the stamping fell into a rhythm. Ten by ten they fell in step until a thousand Norwegians marched on the spot, staring defiantly at their oppressors. The Germans looked to one another and brought their weapons to bear. An officer raised his hand and yelled for the crowd to stop.
Silje could not remember ever feeling so proud.
‘You would be best to wait for the crowd to disperse, Fräulein,’ one of the soldiers said to her. ‘There is no telling what they may do.’
‘I am Norwegian,’ she said.
‘Fräulein, if you—’
‘They may hate me for what I have done, but I will stand with them, always.’
She walked to the barricade, and refused any soldier who offered her aid. Four Norwegians came forward and began tearing at the barbed wire with their bare hands, ignoring German calls for them to desist. They hoisted Silje across the threshold and placed her amongst the crowd.
The lights from the alleyway flashed again; she knew they would not signal a third time.
She thanked her countrymen for their manners and generosity and then made her way through the gathering. Once out of sight she slipped into the alleyway and approached her father’s truck. He sat grimly in the front seat, staring ahead.
‘Get in the back,’ he said. ‘Help Gunther with your brother.’
Gunther’s motorcycle was secured to the side of the truck, and in the back Gunther held Magnus in his arms.
‘He needs help but he would not let us leave without you.’
‘You should have, you silly boy,’ she said, wiping her eyes. Magnus had been beaten almost beyond recognition. His head had been shaved, his fingers broken, and they had tried to carve a swastika into his face. He was swathed in blankets; the blood soaking them had already begun to dry.
‘Dear Christ.’
And his right eye had been gouged out.
Their father started the truck and pulled out of the alleyway. ‘We must get him to Doctor Lomen.’
‘Father, no. We must find a doctor in Bergen.’
Magnus shook his head.
‘We must go back to Fólkvangr, to Doctor Lomen,’ Gunther said quietly. ‘He can treat Magnus and we can tell him.’
‘Tell him? Tell him what?’
But Gunther and her father remained silent.
‘Tell him what?’
‘Did you not see them, woman?’ her father cried. ‘Butchered and shot in front of their countrymen?’
Silje looked back to the town hall, shrinking away in the darkness, the five executed men already lost from view.
‘Doctor Lomen’s sons,’ Gunther whispered. ‘All of them.’
Chapter 31
I was almost out of money. There was some left from the Strande extortion and some from the work at the museum. The museum job didn’t pay much, but I’d had no luck anywhere else. There are these tests they like you to do, even for cleaning work, and since school had passed me by, I always did badly at the tests. And of course, there was my family history.
You’re lovely, Brigit, not what I was expecting at all, but we can’t hire you. One of our delivery drivers/cooks/waitresses – his/her grandfather/uncle/brother died at Fólkvangr. It just wouldn’t be fair…
Sometimes they took one look at me and asked me to leave. One woman, a manager of something or the other, was halfway through a question when she finally remembered where she’d heard my name before. She stopped talking and just started to cry. I got up to leave and she started throwing things: pens, her typewriter, ledgers, and a hefty personnel management text book. It was the paperweight that did the most damage; I needed four stitches just behind my hairline.
While she was sewing my head shut, Doctor Nese wondered aloud if it might be a good idea to change my name.
But most of the time I was turned down because I could barely read. I’d lost interest in being a journalist by then, imagining that all chief editors were going to turn out like Oscar Strande.
Doctor Nese came through for me in the end; she found me some admin work at the hospital. Nothing too taxing: errands, filing – lots of menial work that wouldn’t result in someone dying if I misread a label or put notes in the wrong folder. She arranged to have me tested for dyslexia, and I think we were both disappointed when the results came back; I wasn’t dyslexic, just uneducated.
‘Well,’ she said airily, ‘that’s actually good news. All we need to do is get you into an adult literacy programme.’ And the following day she enrolled me in one.
She offered me a place to sleep for a few weeks. Her apartment was a five-minute walk from the hospital. It had a single bedroom and huge lounge-diner, part of which she’d converted into a library for her text books. While I was there I tried to read every spine on her bookshelves. The last shelf, closest to the kitchen door, was reserved for the six or seven books she’d written herself. Cookery books, which was something of a surprise, and a book on learning the harp, which for some reason wasn’t.
She lived alone, had no children, few friends, and didn’t like asparagus; that’s pretty much all I learned about her during the month I slept on her couch. There was a harp in her bedroom which she never played, and a cooker in the kitchen that had enough buttons and dials to launch a rocket. She did enjoy cooking, and I ravenously consumed everything she laid in front of me. I often had to stop myself from licking the plate.
She could answer any geography question on any quiz show and she liked to read books on the apartment balcony, even when the outside temperature hit zero.
She made sure I visited Monica at least three times a week, and she would fuss with the tubes and drips while Monica and me stared glumly at one another.
She cried when Monica discharged herself.
I didn’t.
Sometimes she would tap my shoulder and tell me to breathe in her face. Mortified, I’d do as I was told and she would say, ‘Good, much better. Keep it up.’ She believed all the world’s ills could be cured by good dental hygiene.
She helped me make sense of Mr Klein’s notes. She said she’d had student doctors who couldn’t write a thesis as well as he could. And according to her, that’s what he’d been doing – writing a thesis.
‘On one General Gruetzmacher,’ she said, ‘who, according to this, served as a high-ranking officer even though he was a known paedophile.’
I had to tell her that I didn’t know what that was. When she told me I thought she was making it up.
Klein had been obsessed with this General Gruetzmacher since he’d been released from prison. He’d traced the General’s life and career from his days as a trainee botanist, up until his death at the hands of Jesper Bergström.
When she said Bergström’s name I swallowed and turned to look behind me, expecting to see him standing over us holding a carving knife, reminding me of my obligation, telling me he owned me. I broke down, and it took the rest of the evening to explain why.
Over the next few days Doctor Nese became obsessed with Klein’s notes, so much so that I actually began to feel a little jealous.
‘This is amazing, Brigit, it really is.’ She turned the page and popped an olive into my mouth. ‘Watch for the stone,’ she said, and turned the page again. She could take in a sheet full of words faster than I could take in a photograph. She carried on reading while slicing artichokes and dropping them into a pan of boiling water. I followed her around the kitchen, trying to remember everything she was doing. ‘It says here that he was a friend of Adolf Hitler. After his fall from grace, the good Führer made him his personal assistant, promoted him, put him back on track.’ She turned the page, then turned it back. ‘Mmm. Seems the General’s life was a blank page under Hitler’s tutelage, except for this.’ She showed me the page. Klein had written a single word on it.
‘Iscari
ot,’ I said promptly. She liked to test me. ‘Question mark.’
She seemed pleased. ‘Very good.’
‘I can read, you know. I’m just not very good at it.’
‘Do know who Judas Iscariot was?’
I shrugged – something she hated. ‘A friend of Jesus, wasn’t he?’
‘Not exactly.’ She put the notes down on the kitchen table. ‘And after Iscariot – whatever that is – Gruetzmacher requested a transfer back to combat duty. He specifically requested Norway, which seems a little odd.’
I bit into an apple and asked what was so odd about it.
‘Well, he distinguishes himself during the invasion of Poland, falls from grace, is saved by Hitler himself, and when he’s given the chance of a high-ranking position in the Nazi party, he takes command of his old unit and brings them to Norway. Thousands of battle-hardened troops – for Norway.’
‘I think we put up a pretty good fight.’
‘Yes, but the Germans weren’t expecting one when they invaded. He wanted to be stationed here, far from the frontline, far from Berlin. Why?’
I shrugged again. ‘Skiing?’
Doctor Nese didn’t really have a sense of humour. She stayed with Klein’s notes for the rest of the night. I spent the evening watching quiz shows.
Doctor Nese – Dagrun – had a number tattooed on her arm. I saw it when I ran into her as she was leaving the bathroom. It was stretched and horribly distorted; it had been scored into her when she was young. She let me stare at it for a moment and then pulled on the sleeve of her robe to cover it. I opened my mouth to say something, I can’t remember what, and she simply said ‘No’ and disappeared into her bedroom.
We never talked about it, and for days after that I sometimes heard her screaming in the night.
‘I think I need you to leave, Brigit,’ she announced suddenly over breakfast. It was a week after the tattoo incident and neither of us had had a full night’s sleep since. ‘I am sorry.’
I said that I understood while feeling like I’d been kicked in the stomach.
The Quisling Orchid Page 31
