The Lifeline

by Deborah Swift

  It seemed Gus lived alone. By the time Jørgen had finished his bread and sausage he’d had Gus’s whole life history. About how his wife had died three years back, and he had two daughters both of whom were now in Trondheim with children of their own. ‘They don’t come home often,’ Gus said, his lined face creasing in regret. ‘I’d like to see their little ones, but no. They don’t come often. Summer afore last, was when I last saw Hilde.’

  Jørgen listened. He was dog-tired, and it was a relief not to have to speak. At the same time, he knew that Gus needed to talk. He was a man who needed an audience, living all alone, tending his few cattle.

  ‘How many head of cattle do you have?’ Jørgen managed to get in a word.

  ‘Sixteen cows for milk plus I try to keep a few bulls for beef, and I’ve twenty sheep, for slaughter or for wool. Keeps me busy. Always glad to have a hand if one comes by.’

  ‘I don’t mind helping with the milking,’ Jørgen said, ‘but I’ll need to be moving on, as soon as I can tomorrow.’

  ‘I know that. They always do. Here, have another beer, Olaf lad.’

  Gus continued to talk until Jørgen felt his eyes droop. The beer had taken its toll, and it was all he could do to stagger to the small room that Gus pointed to, next to the toilet. The room had once been a child’s bedroom, but now was stacked with copies of the farmer’s newspaper, tubs of cow nuts, and a laundry basket full to overflowing with rough shirts and woollen vests. The bed had a good thick quilt, and two old stiff sheepskins thrown on it. He didn’t even bother to undress, just threw his skis and his bundle under the bed and fell into oblivion.

  The light came early, with the crow of a rooster from the farm next door, and as he shaved, he heard Gus clanking about the kitchen making coffee. He flung open the door, inhaling the cold crisp air. The snow was still hard around the house, and icicles hung like teeth on the eaves. The cattle were turned out in a low pasture where the sun had begun to thaw the ground away from the trees, and he helped Gus bring them up for milking.

  To Jørgen’s surprise, the milking was not done by machine. ‘I don’t hold with these modern methods,’ Gus said. ‘Of course Hilde used to help me with the milking, and she’d take the cows up to the summer farm, leaving me to fish and string up the hay for drying.’

  They brought the herd into the cattle shed and began milking, the milk steaming in the pails. When it was done, he helped Gus fill the churns and stand them by the gate for collection by the co-op men, who took the milk from all the neighbouring farms.

  It was good to do physical work. He’d been so tense that he’d forgotten the pure pleasure of farming the land. This was what he was fighting for, he realised. For men like Gus, keeping the traditional Norwegian way of life alive. Gus never asked him about what he was running from, or to. Simply told him to shut the gate as they watched the cows roam back to their pasture.

  They went back into the house and Gus brought out the salt cod, and a box of soft brown goat’s cheese. He peeled off a few strips of cheese for Jørgen to have with his bread, and packed more for his onward journey. The taste of home.

  He was reluctant to leave, he liked Gus, and he’d been so hospitable. He felt bad leaving him there again with no-one to talk to.

  ‘Who helps you get the cows up to the summer farm when it’s time?’ he asked Gus.

  ‘My neighbour, if I give him a few fish. Keeps trying to persuade me to sell my grazing land to him, but even though it don’t profit me much, I want to keep it. I like the cows, see? They’re company. Thing is, I’m better at fishing than him; but he’s better at farming. Anyway, we rub each other’s backs. He’s not much of a talker though, keeps himself to himself. And I don’t like the way he hunts.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘He’ll take a deer, even with fauns. Shoot anything that moves, he will. Reads too many Westerns. I reckon he’s trigger-crazy.’ Gus shrugged; grinned under his moustache. ‘Comes of living way up here; I guess we’re all kinda weird.’

  Jørgen strapped his skis and poles to his pack. Gus was right. All humans were their own country inside. They had their own borders, their own rules, their own idea of how the world should work, and how to defend their view of it. He was no different himself. For him now, it was about always moving on. If he didn’t, he might have to look back, and that he didn’t want to do.

  ‘Take you. You don’t look like an agent,’ Gus continued. ‘You look like a lumberjack. Last man who came through here looked that white I thought he can never have seen the outdoors.’

  Jørgen heaved up his pack and eased his way into it, but he didn’t answer. Best not to encourage talk about what he did. Better for Gus not to know about German U-boats or their plans for Bergen harbour.

  Gus seemed to understand his reticence, and walked him down to the boat by the ramshackle jetty. Gus climbed in and Jørgen gave it a push before joining him, and they slid away from the shore with just a slight tinkle of ice as the bow broke the surface. For an old man, Gus was a fast rower; his sinewy arms pulling rhythmically on the oars, his breath steaming in the morning light. Across the narrow strip of water towards the soaring mountains behind, dark near the base, but rising to snow-topped peaks.

  Jørgen glanced up and down the fjord. The only other sign of life was a kestrel hovering over the hillside, and another fisherman way down the fjord. Here, it was as if the Nazis had never existed. He sighed, let his stomach relax, before taking the map from his trouser pocket and examining it. Only another hundred miles to go, but hard going through rugged terrain. He’d have to avoid the towns and cities, and food and shelter would be hard to come by.

  ‘Thanks Gus,’ he said, as the boat scraped onto the shingle at the shore. ‘You’ve no idea how welcome it was to spend a night on your farm. Thanks again for your hospitality.’

  ‘Happy to oblige. Can’t stand that Quisling fellow. Nearly throw a brick at the wireless when he comes on. And good luck. Hope you get to where you’re going.’

  They shook hands. As he walked away and up into the pines and the snow line, he turned to see Gus still watching him. He waved, and Gus waved back like an old friend.

  By the time he had reached the ridge, he saw the boat was almost back to the other side. From here, he could also see the grey shadows of Nazi submarines further up the fjord near the passage out to sea. Resolutely he strapped on his skis, turned away from the coast and headed up the pass.

  Gus was sad to see the young man go. Olaf, he said he was called, but that was probably an alias. He looked like he’d stand more of a chance than the last one. Last one’d been shot in Lillehammer when he tried to get food. How they’d tracked him there, he’d no idea. You had to be careful who you spoke to.

  A knock on the door, and it swung open. ‘You got help?’ It was his stringy neighbour, Hemming. Hemming pushed his cloth cap back on his head, and leaned against the doorway. ‘Saw you bringing your cattle in.’

  ‘My cousin’s boy,’ Gus said. ‘Just passing through.’

  ‘Didn’t know you had no cousins,’ Hemming said.

  Gus rubbed his moustache as Hemming looked about for evidence of his visitor. He knew Hemming had seen the other boy, the thin bookish one, only a few weeks ago, when Hemming called in to borrow a hacksaw. Then he’d told him it was a man come to talk about buying a cow. Afterwards he knew it had been a feeble excuse. Anyone could see the boy didn’t know a cow from his elbow. He’d driven that boy to the town in his Packard; which in itself was suspicious — he hardly ever used it, even though he’d fitted it with a charcoal burner at the back. The last time he’d used it was to take a sheep carcase to market before the winter set in.

  ‘He’s on his way to Trondheim,’ he said, uncomfortable, corralling his thoughts into order.

  ‘You taking him in your wagon?’

  ‘Nope. He’s already gone.’ Anxious to avoid any more questions, he went to the big barrel of dried salted cod, and took off the wooden lid. ‘How many fish d’you want?’<
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  ‘Two,’ he said. ‘Or maybe four. Just in case I get guests too.’ He placed an unpleasant emphasis on the word ‘guests.’

  Gus was flustered. There was some sort of threat in Hemming’s words. Had he imagined it, or not? Hurriedly, he took out four of the stiff, flat fish and wrapped them in a piece of brown paper.

  ‘You’ve a telephone here, haven’t you?’ Hemming said. ‘To talk to your daughters.’

  Gus nodded, wondering where this was leading.

  ‘Me too. Ever wondered why we’re the only two places for miles around with a telephone?’

  Gus was silent.

  ‘While we’re talking cousins, the head of the Hird in Trondheim is my cousin. He thought I should have a telephone fitted, didn’t like me living here alone. Could be dangerous, he thought.’

  This was something Gus didn’t know. He licked his lips; his mouth had gone dry.

  Hemming’s eyes were sly. ‘He’d be interested to hear how my neighbour’s got so many visitors, this time of year when the snows are hardly gone.’

  Gus swallowed. ‘Don’t see how it’s any business but my own, Hemming,’ he said.

  ‘Except that it’s against regulations to help known Resistance men, isn’t that right? You know, we could still negotiate a good price for your land, and then I could pretend I’d never seen any visitors at all.’

  CHAPTER 7

  The day Jørgen started his journey out of Oslo, Ulf told Astrid he had passed the letter to his printer friend, and over the first week of February, after getting the Teachers Union dossier of addresses, they met at his tiny apartment to address all the mail. It was a risk of course, but finally it was all done. Ulf took it by several bicycle trips to another friend, a member of the Resistance who worked in the Post Office, who agreed to get it all sent out. Then all they could do was wait.

  After two more weeks they had still heard nothing. Astrid passed Ulf in the corridor, and he shook his head. The other thing that worried her was that she had heard nothing more of Sara Feinberg. She called at Mr Pedersen’s office to ask if she had been withdrawn from school.

  ‘The Nasjonal Samling has decided to open special schools for Jews,’ Mr Pedersen said, with an offhand wave. ‘I expect she’ll have gone there. In any case, our education plans for the future would not have suited someone like her.’

  ‘Can you let me have her address? I’d like to check she’s attending school somewhere.’

  ‘I’ll look it out later. I’m too busy right now.’ His lips tightened. He stood up and held open the door for her to go. ‘And you’d do best to focus on the rest of your class, rather than this girl. She was never going to amount to anything.’

  He was wrong. Sara was easily the most hard-working in the class, despite the fact she had to cope with yet another language since her flight from Germany. Pedersen’s short-sighted dismissal of Sara Feinberg seemed to epitomize everything that was wrong with the new Nazi regime. It made her angry inside, the injustice of it.

  The next morning, she waited until Pedersen had gone into Assembly, and then hurried along to his office. She knew where the files were kept, in the green metal filing cabinet behind the door. In the distance she heard the children singing the old Lutheran hymn, ‘Lord God, thy Wondrous Name’ to Mrs Bakke’s strident piano accompaniment.

  She slid the drawer open, and fingered her way through all the ‘F’s until she got to ‘Feinberg’. Bingo. There it was. Hastily she copied the address on the inside of her arm with her fountain pen, and pulled her sleeve down to hide it.

  Suddenly the door banged into her arm, and she was confronted by Mrs Helland, the headmaster’s secretary.

  ‘Oh! You didn’t half make me jump!’ she said, clutching a register to her chest. Mrs Helland was young and flighty, and reminded Astrid of a startled owl.

  Astrid pulled her sleeve hastily over her arm. ‘I was just getting out last year’s exam results. I needed to check something. I’ve finished now.’ She gave a radiant, confident smile and hurried away. When she glanced back, Mrs Helland was staring after her in a bemused way.

  Gosh, that was close. Astrid prayed she wouldn’t tell Pedersen. To be caught pilfering in the headmaster’s office would be hard to explain. She slipped into the back of the Assembly as everyone had eyes closed for the Lord’s Prayer, and took a place next to Ulf. His presence was reassuring.

  Class continued as it had for the last few weeks, in uncomfortable friction with the Nazi rules. Today she was supposed to be setting the class a series of problems from a new textbook. All the old textbooks had gone, and new ones had appeared in their place. One of the arithmetic problems read, ‘What is the cost of the hereditary sick?’ It showed pictures comparing one group of people in hospital with another, and claiming that sick people cost the State too much to maintain. The inference was clear; that these people were a drain on Norwegian society, and that only productive, healthy people mattered.

  At lunchtime, the weather was blowing a bitter gale, so she kept watch whilst Ulf hurriedly retrieved some of the old textbooks from the rubbish wagon that had appeared at the back of the school and crammed them into an empty locker.

  Ulf shivered in his suit as they padlocked the locker. ‘We’ll have to smuggle these out somehow,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll take some home,’ she said to him. ‘I never thought I’d live to see the day when they banned perfectly harmless books.’

  ‘I’d like to ban theirs. I flipped through the official science book for twelve-year olds this morning, and it had an exercise referring to “thieving Jews”. They’re putting value judgements on everyone.’

  She thought of Sara Feinberg, glad she didn’t have to read these. It made her all the more determined to find out what had happened to her. Sara reminded her of herself; and her heart had gone out to her on her first day when she was standing all alone in the playground. She almost cheered when Sophie Hermansdatter went to ask her to play.

  By the end of the afternoon the trash wagon had gone, taking with it their long-cherished copies of science primers, and Norwegian novels that were now banned.

  After school, she put some of the banned books in her briefcase, rolled up her sleeve, and deciphered the Feinbergs’ rather smudged address. A rudimentary map at the bus terminal, designed for Germans who didn’t know the city, showed her where the street was. The weather was still bitter, and the pavements slick with ice, so she wrapped her scarf further around her nose and mouth as she battled her way against the icy wind.

  The house was in fact a shop, Feinberg’s International Bookshop the sign said, although the shop itself was closed, a lopsided blind pulled down over the window. The whole street was grey and bleak, except that someone had painted a six-sided star on the Feinbergs’ window in dripping grey paint. As soon as she saw this, she realised that just to knock on the door would probably cause the family great alarm. There was a letterbox on the door, so she scribbled a note on a page ripped from a notebook, saying she was from the school, and enquiring after Sara’s health, and that if they were there, she would wait across the road by the tram stop. She didn’t sign it. Instead she knocked hard on the door and pushed the note through, letting the letterbox slam hard.

  She waited across the road, eyes fixed on the building. Had they gone already? If so, her note might be found and cause trouble. A few minutes went by, but there was no sign of life. She was about to go home when she saw a small twitch at the upstairs curtain. She smiled up at the window and lifted her hand. So they were still in Oslo. Hopefully, she crossed the street, and just as she got to the shop door, it opened and Mr Feinberg beckoned her in, locking the door securely after him with two bolts.

  ‘Sara’s upstairs,’ he said.

  Today he was dressed in a threadbare dark suit. She’d never seen him without his overcoat before. She followed him up to a cramped sitting room where Sara was doing a wooden jigsaw puzzle at a table by the window. The floor was piled with books in different languages.


  ‘Sorry about the mess. I had to salvage these. They took everything from the shop that wasn’t in German, but I managed to save a few.’

  A few. More like a few thousand.

  Sara stood up shyly to greet her. ‘Hello, Miss Dahl.’

  ‘I couldn’t let her go to school any more,’ Mr Feinberg said defensively. ‘I was worried they’d take her to one of their institutions.’

  ‘Pappa says we must stay together,’ Sara said.

  ‘I understand. It’s just, I was worried when you didn’t come. I wondered why you weren’t in class.’ She turned to Mr Feinberg. ‘When I last talked to you, you said you might be leaving. I thought you might have gone already but I wanted to wish you well, and tell Sara how well she’s doing.’

  Sara looked shyly at the ground, but Astrid could tell she was pleased.

  ‘We can’t get out of Oslo,’ Mr Feinberg said. ‘I keep trying friends and neighbours, but no-one can help us.’ He looked away, embarrassed. ‘Nobody knows what to do. Going to the train station is too much of a risk. So we just sit here day after day, contacting friends, writing letters, hoping a solution will come. We never thought the Nazis would want Norway.’

  ‘Nor us,’ Astrid said. ‘We’ve new regulations at the school, and to be frank, the Head, Pedersen, is just a puppet of the Nazis. None of the staff know how to oppose him without losing their jobs. It’s like mass intimidation.’

  ‘So, you Norwegians see now, how it is for us,’ Mr Feinberg said. ‘I am one man. I can’t fight them, much as I’d like to. All I can do is try to keep Sara safe.’

  Sara leaned on the back of her father’s chair. ‘I like it here with Pappa, but I miss school.’

  ‘I’ve brought you some school textbooks,’ Astrid said. ‘Though I see that you have rather a large collection already.’