A flicker of a smile from Mr Feinberg.
She held them out. ‘Some of the old ones they’ve banned. I took them from the rubbish bin at the back of the school. No-one will miss them and it will help you keep up.’ She put the books on the corner of the table and opened up the arithmetic textbook. She pointed. ‘We were here — Exercise 11. If you do the next four exercises, I’ll call in next week and mark them for you — that’s if it’s all right with your father?’
Sara nodded, blushing pink. ‘Thank you, Miss Dahl.’
Mr Feinberg looked doubtful. ‘She can take the books, as you can see, a few more will make no difference. But we don’t like people to know we’re still here, that’s why our lights are off. And you’ve done enough. We’re grateful you came, and I know you mean well, but we’d rather be left on our own.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interfere. I was only —’
‘We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous. So if you don’t mind, it’s better if you don’t come again.’ He looked as if it had pained him to say the words because his eyes shifted away. There was an aura of loneliness about him that set off the same ache in her.
Uncomfortable, Astrid took a few steps towards the door. ‘Of course. I didn’t mean to be a nuisance. But if you change your mind, and would like Sara to have some tuition, you can write to me at home.’ She wrote down the address on a piece of paper and handed it to him. ‘It must be hard for Sara cooped up without her friends.’
‘We manage,’ Mr Feinberg said, stiffly.
She realised it must sound like a criticism. With horror, she realised she had offended him again, and fumbled for the door. ‘Goodbye Sara.’
Sara looked up from the books on the table. ‘Could you please tell Sophie that I’m thinking of her, and I miss playing two-ball?’
Astrid’s chest contracted. Sophie was Sara’s best friend. It must be hard for them both to be separated like this. ‘I’ll tell her,’ she said.
Five minutes later she was outside the house, hearing Mr Feinberg shunt home the bolts on the front door. As she came out she almost ran smack bang into a patrol on the opposite side of the street.
One of the men turned to stare, and she saw it was Schmitt, the man who had been there when Sonja was executed. Even the sight of him made her legs turn to water. She pretended not to have seen him, but hurried on up the street. When she risked a look back, he was prowling the front of the Feinbergs’ shop.
She kept walking, her heart almost in her throat, hearing the crunch, crunch of her boots on the icy pavement.
CHAPTER 8
One morning a few days later Astrid got to the school gates to find Ulf, in a moth-eaten fur hat, waiting for her. He was almost leaping out of his shoes with excitement. ‘It’s working. One of my Resistance friends stopped me on my way here. More than eight thousand teachers have signed. Can you believe it?’
His nose was red with cold, but his eyes were bright.
‘No? That many?’
He pulled her over the side of the school, out of view of the headmaster’s office and the secretary. ‘We can ignore their crazy curriculum. We’ll damn well teach what we want to, even with no books. Quisling can do nothing about it.’
‘You mean we did it?’
His face was enough to tell her. She whooped and grinned.
‘What’s all the fuss?’ asked Mrs Bakke, coming up behind them.
‘Eight thousand teachers have sent letters,’ she whispered.
Mrs Bakke’s eyes widened. She was one of the first to agree to send the letter to the government. ‘That many?’
‘Sssh,’ Ulf cautioned. ‘We don’t know who might have joined us, and who hasn’t.’
By the time they got to Assembly, the news had spread, and many of the teachers were exchanging gleeful glances.
Pedersen swept up onto the podium to make the day’s announcements from the lectern as he usually did. Today his expression was even grimmer than usual. He glared round the room, his eyes coming to rest on Astrid and Ulf. ‘Due to the unfortunate actions of some misguided staff, this whole school is to suffer,’ he said. ‘From today, the government has ordered all schools will be shut. They will remain so, until such time as sufficient teachers decide to join the Nasjonal Samling Teachers’ League.’
The children erupted into a cacophony of excited noise.
‘Quiet!’ He thumped a fist on the lectern. ‘Furthermore, no teacher will receive pay or coupons during this time.’
Gasps, quickly stifled.
‘No lessons will be taught today until we are sure those lessons fulfil the required standard of our Minister-President’s advice. Students will read one of the prescribed texts until such time as they can go home or be collected. Please proceed to your classrooms and remain there until further notice. I will visit each class in turn to ensure order is maintained.’
Nobody spoke. Nobody knew what to say. This was Quisling’s government stamping its foot down hard. It was bad enough existing on coupons, but if those stopped, how would they manage? It just wouldn’t sink in, that this could be happening.
By the time Astrid got to her classroom, there was already uproar. She had no sooner gone through the door when Pedersen arrived with a sheaf of forms.
‘Miss Dahl,’ he said. ‘You’ll be needing one of these, when you decide to return to work.’
Before she could object, he’d thrust one into her hand. She glanced down. It was the Nasjonal Samling Teachers League Membership Form.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We teach our children not to be bullied, and to stand up for each other if bullies should try to force them to do something they don’t want to do. The time has come for teachers to practice what they preach, Mr Pedersen.’ She tore the form in two, and placed the two halves on the desk. ‘I won’t be needing this form, no matter how much you bully me.’
‘That was a mistake. You cannot see what’s good for our nation because you lack vision, Miss Dahl. It is probably why you are so mediocre at your job. You need to educate yourself. Perhaps this time away from school will enable you to do just that.’
‘I will never educate myself in the Nazi way,’ she said, her words growing more heated. ‘One of your best teachers was shot for no reason, and you simply brush it under the carpet as if she never existed. Do you wonder why we rebel?’
He raised his chin, and tapped the rest of the papers in his hand. ‘You’ll change your tune when you’re hungry and can’t afford food or fuel. No teacher will work unless they join the League. Minister-President Quisling’s orders. The form will be available at reception when you decide to sign.’ With that he strode away.
At lunchtime she approached the staffroom with trepidation. Would the others have signed? She put her head through the door and was met with a sea of enquiring faces. ‘I didn’t sign,’ she said.
A cheer.
‘Then that’s all of us,’ Ulf said. ‘We’re all going home now. I refuse to watch some poor child reading their skewed propaganda.’
Everyone stood and went to get their coats from the hooks, and put on their outdoor boots.
‘What about the pupils?’ Astrid asked. ‘I’m supposed to be supervising Class 4.’
‘Leave them,’ Mrs Bakke said. ‘Let Pedersen sort it out. It was his idea the school should shut, and if I’m not being paid, I’m not staying.’
‘And let’s take those textbooks from the locker; the old ones,’ Ulf said. ‘It will remind us what we’re fighting for.’
Fifteen minutes later the staff had all collected their belongings from their desks, and crammed the old textbooks into their briefcases. They were just about to leave when Pedersen shot out of the secretary’s office near the front door.
‘What d’you think you’re doing?’
‘Leaving,’ Ulf said. ‘As your school no longer trusts our experience, we will go and teach elsewhere. Besides, you told us the school is shut.’
‘You ca
n’t do that. Not until tomorrow! I’ll report you to Sveitfører Falk, the district police commissioner. He’ll have something to say about this.’
‘We aren’t your pupils, Mr Pedersen,’ Astrid said. She turned her back on him and walked away, immediately followed by the rest of the teachers.
Behind them she heard Pedersen shout, ‘Staff! Come back at once.’
It gave her great pleasure to carry on walking.
The next day Ulf called in, to tell her that news of their solidarity against Quisling’s regime was all over Oslo, and he wouldn’t be surprised if it hadn’t spread all over the country. Every school was shut. The capital was in chaos. People were late for work, parents had to suddenly mind their own children, and feed them, which was no small task in these days of reduced imports and rationing.
‘It’s working to our advantage,’ he said, ‘rather than theirs. If we can just hold out a few weeks; it will really affect all the Nazi factories if the women aren’t able to work.’
‘As long as we can survive without pay or coupons. But I had an idea; we can do a barter system, any teacher with anything spare can offer to swap it. And I thought we could each do some private tuition somehow. We could see if the churches would let us use their community halls.’
‘Good idea, let’s write it all down, get a proper plan. I’ll get the word out, and we’ll see what we can do.’
A week later, one of many ramshackle classes had established itself in St Luke’s tiny community hall. All churches were closed already because the Lutheran Bishops refused to sanction the new Nazi service. Churches had been almost universally supportive of their campaign, and Revered Foss was no exception. Like all the clergy, he was keen to do what he could to foster community spirit against the Nazis, and his hall hadn’t been requisitioned like some of the bigger ones. Astrid told children to come separately, and at different times, partly because of lack of space and partly so as not to arouse suspicion from the quisling authorities, who would almost certainly shut it down if they knew it existed.
To her delight, Astrid was able to drop a note to Sara Feinberg, who was able to walk to the hall and be reunited with her friend Sophie. It pleased her greatly to see the two girls sitting side by side on the hall chairs, sharing the same textbook.
Being inside the church grounds itself led to a feeling of protection, with the high stained glass windows of the neighbouring church visible through their iron-framed windows, and shielding them from the road, and the plain white walls giving natural light. Of course it was cold, and there was no heating. Some children brought heated bricks wrapped in a blanket, and all were muffled against the cold with knitted balaclavas, scarves and mittens.
The children treated it like an adventure in a book, and the teachers themselves found new friendship in their efforts to do the best for their classes. They met often, many of them overlapping, for with only one classroom, they had to make do with what they could.
Of course only parents they could trust were told of the school. It was too risky to expose it to anyone they felt might report it. Ulf told Astrid it was going on all over Norway. Schools were in every available space, in shop basements, in private houses, and in halls like this one, and they both took pride in the fact they were part of a National revolt against Nazi indoctrination. But every day felt like a pressure building, and she knew the Nazis would be planning some other political move that would force them to their way.
CHAPTER 9
In the Police Headquarters on Victoria Terasse, Falk was pacing his office floor, thinking. The man they’d brought in from the tram more than a month ago turned out to be a man called Bjørn Lind, whose brother had shot a Nazi officer on the Swedish border. Not Nystrøm at all. They’d executed Lind, of course. But now, after no trace of Nystrøm for over five weeks, they’d finally got some intelligence, and he, Falk, must decide what to do about it.
An informant on a farm at Tessand in the Frisvoll area, had sent in a report that his neighbour had taken in a lone skier late at night. He’d seen the stranger help his neighbour with the cows before he’d gone on by boat across the fjord in the direction of Geiranger. This was the fourth stranger he’d seen at his neighbour’s farm; all had been young men, and all had stayed only one night. It had all the hallmarks of a safe house.
When he had asked for a description of the skier, there was no doubt it was Nystrøm. The man had watched him through binoculars and seen the scar on his eyebrow. He asked his aide, Blix, to assess the time it would take to get there — one man on skis, and the time tallied, give or take a day or two for bad weather.
The location had surprised him though. He had expected Nystrøm to head for Sweden, but it seemed he was headed for the coast, and probably then back to England. He got on the telephone straight away to his secretary.
‘Selma, I need an excellent long-distance skier. Not just a good skier, but one who can cover many miles quickly. And I need him now. Ask around; see if there’s anyone in the ranks who’ll do. He needs to be self-sufficient and to be able to handle himself in a fight.’
‘Shall I make a shortlist?’
‘No time. Just find the best there is, and send him up to me. He needs to be on the road to Lillehammer as soon as we can get him there.’
By the evening, nobody had appeared, so he got onto Selma again.
‘Yes sir,’ she said. ‘Someone’s on his way, but he’s coming by train from Bergen. I think you’ll be pleased. The man’s an Olympic skier. Got a reputation as a bit of a daredevil. He was supposed be on our team for Helsinki, but as you know, everything was cancelled when war came.’
‘I don’t need a sport skier. I need a man with a brain; a tough man, who won’t give up.’
‘Sorry sir, but it was all we could find, within our police ranks. He’s been vetted and he should be all right. His father was President of the Norwegian Fatherland League. ’
Ah. The Fatherland League was an organisation seeking racial purity for Norway, and favoured by Hitler. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Karl Brevik.’ She placed a photograph on his desk.
He’d heard of him, so his name must have been in the papers. He sighed. The last thing he needed; some kind of celebrity. He pulled the photograph of the man towards him. A man in an advertisement for cigarettes, handsome, urbane, smiling out at the camera. The only distinguishing mark was a small mole just above his upper lip.
He stared at the picture weighing it up. Nystrøm was getting nearer and nearer his target, and the information he had about his contacts was getting further and further away.
‘He’ll be here tomorrow sir,’ Selma said.
The next morning, though he was early, he was surprised to see a man already waiting for him outside his office. He took up most of the space in the lobby; he must be about six foot five inches tall, with broad shoulders like an American footballer.
‘Mr Falk? Karl Brevik.’ He held out a hand and they shook. Brevik’s grip was firm.
Falk led him through to the office, slightly annoyed he’d not even had time to order coffee.
‘I need a man good on skis,’ he said, as Brevik slid himself into the seat opposite, and pulled off his ski cap to reveal thick, light-brown hair.
‘Didn’t they give you my resumé?’ Brevik asked. He had an intent look about the face.
Falk nodded. ‘The man you’ll be chasing is an agent, Jørgen Nystrøm, trained in England, who survived eighteen months as a W/T. So he’s no fool. Not only that, but he’s a mountain man, with excellent snow skills. Now he’s on his way back to England, but we need him tailed. We need to know every contact he has, every single thing he does, and we need you to follow him to England if necessary. ’
Brevik leaned in, eyes sparked with interest. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Heading for the coast. Ålesund. But we think this is a pursuit better done by one man, someone who can track him, befriend him, and get the names not only of his contacts here in Norway, but of his whole network
that are in training in England. It goes without saying, we want to eliminate the safe houses if possible, and prevent others following in his tracks. Nystrøm likes to operate alone, and out of range of our men, out on the vidda. Our city men can’t get near him.’
‘That won’t be a problem for me.’ His expression was matter-of-fact. ‘I was practically born on skis. And I can handle most situations.’
Falk didn’t doubt it. The man in front of his desk was powerfully built, and oozed a lazy self-confidence. ‘You’ll have back-up of course. I’ll arrange a chauffeur to drive you to Lillehammer, and we’ll give you maps with Nystrøm’s last tracked location. After that, it’s up to you.’
‘You said I’d to follow him to England. Then what?’
‘We suspect he’ll try to take a fishing boat from the coast. The British are well-organised at ferrying Norwegian refugees to the Shetland Islands, and he’s familiar with their methods. We know he trained in England. So you’ll tail him there, just like another refugee, and find out all you can about this operation. We’ll supply you with a transmitter.’
‘It’s not the usual police work, then, is it? Leaving Norway, I mean.’
‘Are you a bad sailor?’
He laughed. ‘No. But I know a risk when I see one. And it’s people, not the sea. I’ll need your assurance it will just be one trip. Repeating any spying activity triples the risk.’
So, Brevik was not just a sportsman after all; he sounded very knowledgeable about undercover police work. ‘Of course,’ Falk replied. ‘You have my word. One trip — out and back. And gather as much intelligence as you can.’
‘What about a cover story?’
‘Yes, there’s a man working on it now. It’ll be watertight.’ He made a mental note to get Blix to do the leg-work and devise something.
‘So what’s it worth to you?’ Brevik asked.
‘What d’you mean?’ The question caught Falk short. He had assumed that Brevik would do it for the good of the party, or for promotion.
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