The Quisling Orchid

by Dominic Ossiah

  ‘A bus,’ I said. ‘A bus and six MOSSAD agents.’

  She tried to look unimpressed. ‘Further than that.’

  ‘Sand then, lots and lots of fucking sand.’

  ‘He told me you were smarter than this,’ she said impatiently. ‘The Germans tried to wipe us out, erase us from history. Six million of us went to the chambers while the rest of the world looked on. And after the war, when we begged for a home of our own where we could live in peace, the rest of the world put us here, surrounded by countries who would happily finish the job the Nazis started. I look out there and I see our enemies hiding in the sand. We had to temper ourselves; force ourselves to do things that were against our nature.’

  ‘And that’s what you’re doing, is it? When you send animals like Bergström after old men?’

  ‘What we are doing is sending a message. We are showing the world that we are no longer sheep who will stand in line to be butchered. And Jesper Bergström is a hero, remember that.’ She stabbed a finger at me, and I could see something more than admiration. She was giving away more than she intended, so she changed path, turning my focus elsewhere. ‘Do you know why he left Norway?’

  I didn’t imagine I’d leave this bus without her telling me.

  ‘Because it sickened him. The Nazis violated your country, and what did you do? Nothing. You did nothing during the war and you did nothing afterwards. This… weakness nauseated him and so he came to us because he understood what we were trying to do. While Norway seeks to make itself into some kind of socialist utopia, we seek to make ourselves the most feared nation on earth. We will return hatred tenfold; we will do whatever it takes to protect our land. We will take power here and abroad so no one will dare wash their hands of us while our enemies exterminate us.’ She sat back in her seat and took deep breaths, apparently exhausted. I wondered if this was a daily mantra that Israeli agents recited to themselves, in place of their prayers.

  ‘Norway is not weak,’ I said. ‘We just chose not to let the war define us.’

  ‘A noble choice to make,’ Pasha snorted, ‘when you’re not surrounded by nations that hate you.’

  Chapter 59

  Pasha and I made a silent pact and didn’t utter another word until we reached Ein Geidi. The bus pulled into an unmarked area of flat sand in front of an archway made of white stone. It looked very much like the one that had once stood at Fólkvangr. Beyond the arch were rows of squat white buildings surrounding an area of tended grassland.

  ‘This is where we part company,’ Pasha said. She walked me to the front of the bus and down the steps where she checked that I had the address and a map.

  ‘Through the arch and keep the sun to your left; you’ll find her house. You can’t miss it.’

  ‘All the buildings look the same.’

  ‘Don’t worry; you’ll know it when you see it.’ She took off her hat and jammed it down tightly on my head. ‘You’re in the desert; you’ll need this.’

  I thanked her and she squeezed my cheek. ‘You came this far,’ she said, ‘so I suppose there must be something to you Norwegians after all.’ She climbed back on the bus.

  I watched it pull around and head back the way we’d come until it was lost in the sands. I looked at the map, and tried to decipher the address which was written in Hebrew. Classic Bergström; I was going to have to work hard for this.

  I think I understood the Israelis better, and Bergström’s attachment to them. They were bitter and vengeful – perhaps rightly so. They saw a necessity in what they were doing. They needed this land and they needed to become this thing they despise so they could hang on to it. This is why they did terrible things, and did them so openly that it attracted revulsion from the rest of the world. I wondered if they could see the irony.

  Still, there was a peaceful, clinical beauty in what they’d built here. An oasis of plants and wildlife, music and art living in and amongst the white stone buildings. I took the first street, listening to the musicians playing to a small group of tourists. The street opened out into a garden and a small circle of water. Beyond it, acres of lush green ran alongside a wide path of colours divided into smaller squares of perhaps a half-acre, each stocked with flowers of every hue.

  Orchids.

  Acres and acres of coloured orchids.

  But it wasn’t the flowers or the smell of cinnamon that held me paralysed; it was the man who stood in the very centre of the third square. One man of many, whose skin was paler and whose hair was long and blonde and whose arms had grown thick and heavy through years of penitent toil.

  Even with so much distance between us, I could see my own square jawline and high forehead; I could see the line of my neck and the angle of my chin.

  I didn’t walk around the pond; I just ran through it with the protests of the locals ringing in my ears. He heard the commotion and turned his head, seeing me running towards him. Tears clouded my vision making the colours of the orchids bleed into each other. The others working the field looked at him and he just shrugged back. He took a long handled scythe and came running towards me. The others followed, spreading out to form an arrowhead with my father at its point.

  They thought I’d come to take her, and then I remembered that I had.

  Chapter 60

  Silje stumbled from the copse and ran towards the sound of voices. She found the survivors of the first assault were erecting new barricades and making repairs to what remained of the old. Magnus and her father were sitting near the rubble that had once been The Mottled Goat. Magnus’s head was in his hands, and her father simply stared straight ahead. She knelt down and gathered them both in her arms.

  ‘We won,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ Jon Ohnstad said. ‘I suppose we did, for now.’ He struggled to his feet, using the length of a captured rifle to steady himself. Magnus followed, getting up and searching his pockets.

  He asked if she had found Freya.

  ‘She is safe,’ Silje assured him. ‘I found someone who will take her to the higher mountains.’

  ‘We need to prepare ourselves,’ said her father. ‘They will be back soon and we must be ready. Magnus, help with the barricades, and I will strip the dead for anything we can use.’

  ‘And what should I do, Father?’ It was the first time she’d seen him as anything other than a farmer, a cultivator of fine flowers and a goatherd to their small holding of livestock. But here he was, the man before her birth, a soldier: calm, deliberate, ruthless.

  ‘Do whatever you can, Silje.’

  And so she did much as she had when Fólkvangr was whole. She moved from one place to another, helping here and there without feeling she was making a difference.

  She missed Freya terribly.

  And whenever she found labour, bandaging a wound, or helping mount a machine gun to a barricade, her mind wandered and filled itself with images so horrifying she could barely draw breath.

  Freya standing at the right hand of General Gruetzmacher, wearing an SS uniform.

  Freya standing over the bodies of the Lomen boys.

  Freya standing before a firing squad.

  ‘You did well today,’ Gunther said.

  She stopped applying axle grease to the machine gun and turned to face him. He was covered in grime, sweat and blood. He assured her the blood, at least, wasn’t his.

  ‘But you are hurt,’ she said, looking at the bandage wrapped around his forearm.

  ‘A flesh wound,’ he said. ‘It is nothing.’

  Silje smiled. ‘And how long have you waited to say something like that?’

  Gunther grinned back. ‘My whole life, I think.’

  They sat down and shared the last of his bread and an apple which he cut into pieces with his combat knife. They chewed slowly and looked for the sun to appear from behind a cloud that Gunther swore was shaped like a goat.

  ‘You have been in Fólkvangr too long,’ Silje teased. ‘You are seeing goats everywhere.’

  He laughed loudly, perhap
s just to hear the sound, Silje thought.

  ‘We are not going to survive another assault, are we?’

  Gunther’s smile faded. He turned his eyes to the ground.

  ‘You should go,’ she said. ‘You, your men; you can still make the mountains.’

  He was silent for a moment; he slowly flexed his fingers, cracking each knuckle under his thumb. ‘I am insulted, Silje Ohnstad,’ he said. ‘You will make no such suggestion again.’

  ‘Your bravery does you credit, Gunther. But the time for noble gestures is long past. You should escape while you can. To stay would be to waste yourselves when you can survive to fight the Germans in a battle that can be won.’

  ‘Then you should come with us.’

  ‘This is my home. I cannot live anywhere else but here.’

  ‘You have not tried.’

  ‘I do not need to try. I only need to know.’

  Gunther sighed and scratched his cheek. ‘I never thought I would hear you speak like this, Silje. I thought that you would sacrifice anything to protect your village.’

  ‘The village is lost, and now that I have seen the godlessness of our enemy I know the world is far larger than Fólkvangr.’

  Gunther stared at her and shook his head. ‘Silje, what is the purpose of resistance?’

  ‘To fight them.’

  ‘But why do we fight? Why not surrender? Surely that would be far easier.’

  ‘Then we fight for freedom.’

  ‘We fight for Norway. We fight for the Norwegian people: their freedom, their lives. If we were to abandon you then that is simply surrender without formality. I will hear no more of it.’

  At the sound of raised voices Gunther was on his feet and running towards the remains of the archway with Silje at his heels. They arrived to find Magnus already organising the men and women into groups. Barthold was with him, doubled over, clutching his knees.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Silje demanded.

  ‘The Germans,’ he gasped before Magnus could open his mouth to answer. ‘They have regrouped; they are on their way back. We have ten, perhaps fifteen minutes at the most.’

  Silje locked her knees to prevent herself from falling. She felt empty, as though everything inside her had been suddenly clawed out.

  ‘That is not possible,’ Gunther said. ‘That is not enough time for reinforcements.’

  Still gasping for air, Barthold said, ‘No reinforcements. It is the same group that attacked before.’

  Magnus and Gunther exchanged glances and that was enough to tell Silje that something was wrong. ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘It makes no sense,’ said Gunther.

  Magnus agreed. ‘He has very few men left, and we have more weapons now. To attack us without reinforcements…’

  ‘Perhaps he seeks to hold us at bay until his secondary force arrives.’ Barthold stood straight and accepted his machine gun from Magnus.

  ‘It is a poor strategy, and nothing about this man suggests an officer who makes poor choices.’

  Silje disagreed. ‘He made an uphill assault on a village that lies at the end of a road too narrow for his troops and his tanks to travel in anything other than single file. That sounds like a poor choice to me.’

  Magnus tapped his front teeth with the stump of his thumb. ‘He wasn’t expecting to fight. This was supposed to be a show of strength.’

  ‘Then why did he come here?’ said Gunther. ‘What is it that makes him so desperate?’

  Silje answered quickly. ‘It doesn’t matter. All that matters now is that he came, and now he is coming back.’

  ‘You are right. We have much to do, far too much to waste time talking.’

  Silje said she would hasten the evacuation of the injured; Gunther said he would move his men into a half-circle – they would attempt to ensnare the returning troops and finish them before they reached the pass to the higher mountains.

  Before he left to check the heavy machine guns, Magnus took hold of Silje’s arm.

  ‘I will see you behind The Mottled Goat,’ he said.

  Silje looked over her shoulder, at the smouldering pile of dust and stones that used to be Fólkvangr’s first tavern. She thought of Grette and how all the time that she’d known her now seemed shrunken, compressed into a single second, the time taken for a shell to reduce the tavern to rubble.

  ‘Behind the wall, Silje,’ Magnus said again. ‘I will see you there with Father when the battle begins.’

  Silje nodded and tried not to cry.

  ‘Have no fear, Sister,’ he said. ‘God will be with us this day.’

  They parted company as Barthold cried out from the remains of the arch. ‘They have returned!’

  Silje and Magnus ran towards the wall where their father waved frantically and shouted to them to keep their heads down. And as she ran, Silje felt the rumble beneath her feet.

  Another armoured car, she thought. Gruetzmacher had held one back.

  ‘An armoured car,’ she said as she slid to a halt and lay down flat between her father and her brother. She aimed the machine gun at the north road and felt herself swallow.

  Magnus cursed under his breath. ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘He held it back,’ Jon Ohnstad replied. He looked to his left and waved. Gunther signalled back, and the sound of dozens of rifles and pistols being loaded and cocked echoed around the village square.

  So few of us, Silje thought; so very few.

  Chapter 61

  Never let them surround you. The first rule – drilled into me since the day I could walk.

  I saw the circle forming, farmers armed with scythes and threshers coming in from all sides. Someone shouted ‘MOSSAD!’ and more of them came from behind.

  What if I’m taken? What then?

  I dropped to my knees and clasped my hands behind my back. I shouted that I wasn’t with MOSSAD.

  The circle drew tighter.

  ‘I need to speak to—’ What would his name be? Monica said they’d changed their names so many times it was hard to remember who they were when they first ran. ‘I’m looking for Rodrek Fossen!’

  My father stopped in his tracks and looked around as if he were waiting for someone else to come forward. I doubted he’d heard anyone speak Norwegian in years. Two of his companions spoke to him. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it sounded quite heated. One of them pointed an accusing finger at him and then took off in the direction of a large house at the edge of the orchid field. My father turned back to me.

  ‘If you are not MOSSAD then who are you?’ His Norwegian was stilted, the words jumbled and uncertain.

  I didn’t reply. He either trusted me or he didn’t.

  ‘I asked you a question!’

  I raised my head and tried to muster a look of defiance, something of my mother he might see in me. His companions watched as his face contorted its way through a cacophony of memories and impossibilities. One of his men tried to take hold of his wrist. He spoke softly to him; my father pulled his hand away. His eyes darted left and right, looking for some place he could hide from the truth slowly dawning on him. He dropped his scythe so he could cover his mouth with his hand. He looked as if he was going to stumble; he threw his weight onto his toes to steady himself and then he came towards me, slowly at first, before breaking into a slow ungainly run, limping slightly on his left leg. He slowed down when he was less than a yard away from me and his legs just seemed to give way. He staggered the last foot and fell to his knees, taking me in his arms.

  How can I say what I felt? As if there had been a hole in my life and I’d had no idea it was there. An emptiness, a blackness that I hadn’t realised had possessed me until he closed himself around me and wept.

  ‘What are you doing here? How did you—?’ He ran his hands through my hair, separating the strands, running each one through his fingers. ‘My God, you are beautiful.’ He crushed me to his chest, and I said nothing.

  What I could have told him
began a lifetime ago, a lifetime without him. I told myself I would hate him for it, hate him forever, and that promise I’d made to myself when I was ten years old, and cut myself with a stone to seal it in blood – that promise withered and died. And all it took for me to let it go was for him to hold me tighter.

  ‘Your mother. How is she? Is she back in the hospital?’

  ‘You smell of cinnamon.’ My voice sounded hollow and meek, like a child’s.

  He nodded, made a small swallowing sounding in his throat. ‘It’s the orchids,’ he said. I wasn’t sure it was.

  ‘You left us.’

  ‘To protect you; to protect both of you.’

  His men turned away from us. I could hear the sound of cars approaching from the west.

  Someone leaned over me and whispered into his ear as though I wasn’t there. My father nodded. He clipped instructions in broken Hebrew and his men began to disperse, taking positions on the paths leading to the orchid fields.

  The car engines grew louder. I could hear three of them, maybe four. It was Bergström; it had to be. My blood froze, but it wasn’t fear; it was understanding.

  ‘You knew.’ I was in awe at how quickly my father had forgotten me.

  ‘You knew Monica was sick. You knew she was dying and you never came.’

  His nostrils flared and he ran his tongue over his teeth. There was somewhere else he needed to be, other than here – with me.

  ‘I left to protect you both.’ He pushed me away so he could point back towards the archway. ‘To protect you from him.’

  Bergström limped through the arch, flanked by two men I’d never seen before. The three of them were dressed in brightly coloured tie-dye shirts and flannel trousers. I was starting to think everyone north of Ein Geidi was a MOSSAD agent.

  ‘Did you bring him here?’