This Shining Land

by Rosalind Laker

  “I want to see Edvard Ryen,” he said in Norwegian, crossing the threshold.

  “He’s ill in bed.”

  His dark brown eyes narrowed cynically. “How convenient. Where? Upstairs?”

  She moved quickly to block the foot of the stairs. “I tell you he’s ill. Really ill. Please don’t go up. What is it you want? I’m his daughter. I’ll answer for him.”

  “That’s impossible. He is to be arrested as a hostage.”

  She stared at him, baffled and appalled. “A hostage! Whatever for?”

  “You have a brother named Erik Ryen,” he stated with heavy impatience. “He has broken the law by leaving the country to make contact with the enemies of the Third Reich. Since he can’t be brought to justice at the present time, your father must stand assurance for him until he is.”

  Johanna was frantic. “But my brother is over twenty-one. My father is not responsible for anything he does.”

  “A new ruling has been recently introduced. As a result your brother’s age no longer comes into this. Don’t delay me, frøken!” With his elbow bent at his side, he made a sideways movement of his straight-angled hand to indicate she should step aside. Then he looked up as hurrying footsteps brought Gina to the head of the stairs.

  “What do you want here?” she exclaimed anxiously. “My husband is a sick man. He’s asleep and I don’t want him awakened.”

  “You and your daughter certainly have co-ordinated your attempt at protection,” he replied uncompromisingly to her complete bewilderment. Putting his hand on the baluster rail he began to mount the flight, the soldiers crowding Johanna out of the way as they followed him while he continued to address Gina. “No hysterics, frue. I’m here to collect your husband. He will not be alone. The fathers from the other two farms in the valley have already been taken as hostages for the men who accompanied your son across the North Sea.”

  Gina, to whose nature hysterics were as far removed as they could be, put a hand to the base of her throat, her pupils dilating with comprehension of what this visit meant. She remained resolutely at the head of the stairs to bar any access past her. “Take me instead. I’ll go in my husband’s place.”

  Johanna cried out from the bottom of the stairs. “No, Mother! I’ll go.”

  The sergeant was unmoved. He merely took Gina by the shoulders and moved her forcibly aside. “I’m here for Edvard Ryen, frue. Nobody else.”

  She rushed after him as he went into the bedroom and took a place defensively by her husband’s bedside. The sergeant checked his pace and came to a standstill. He had fully expected to find his quarry well able to be jerked out of bed, but the sick man opening his eyes from sleep appeared to be at death’s door, his face white and sunken, his eyes dark-rimmed.

  “What is the matter?” Edvard asked weakly, looking to his wife. “What does this soldier want? Is it cattle numbers?”

  She took his thin hand between hers. “I think he wants to ask you your name, Edvard,” she said falteringly.

  For the first time in his military life Sergeant Müller was at a loss. This was an unexpected change of situation that he considered to be beyond his jurisdiction. He even felt a loss of personal prestige at finding himself embroiled in it. Son of a veteran of the Great War, he had had instilled into him by his father some of the values and standards of the old school of the German Army, qualities he respected in certain of the older officers. He was a soldier first and foremost, his blooding having come during the blitzkrieg in Poland. It had been a bitter blow to him when he had been posted to annexed territory instead of to the Russian Front. His greatest regret was that he had once filled in an army form with the information that he spoke fluent Norwegian, having been one of the children of the Fridtjof Nansen plan. As a result he found himself doing little more than policing a persistently hostile people, a task that was unpleasant and tedious to him, something that anyone far less highly trained than he was could do. Taking prisoners in war was vastly different from dragging thick-headed farmers out of their homes and off the land to shove them into labour camps. He accepted that examples had to be made to subdue subversive activities of any kind, but he could not bring himself to drag a desperately sick man from his bed. These tactics were better suited to the Gestapo, for whom he had no liking. He glanced sideways at the wife. She had not shrieked or pleaded, merely offered herself as a substitute. He liked her courage. He admired courage above all else.

  “I can see the circumstances here have not been exaggerated,” he said to her. “Therefore I must get a final decision from our medical officer. I’ll be back.”

  The three soldiers were waiting on the landing. He detailed one to remain there and went back down the stairs and out to the truck, those on duty outside rejoining them. There was little doubt in his mind as to what the ultimate decision would be. With the order reinforced he would carry it out, but he would not like it any better. However, that was nobody’s business but his own. He made a check in the back of the truck where the two farmers—big, healthy fellows—who had already been taken into custody were being kept under guard. They sat with their hands tied behind their backs, glaring at him with impotent rage. Going to the front of the vehicle, he swung himself up into the seat beside the driver, “Back to Ålesund. Let’s go.”

  An hour later the truck returned, emptied of its previous passengers with the exception of Sergeant Müller beside the driver and two soldiers in the back to carry the stretcher propped between them. The truck followed in the wake of a grey military car carrying the medical officer in style. He was a lean, gaunt-faced man in horn-rimmed spectacles who had gained a reputation among the troops of being a skilled doctor while being merciless with malingerers. When the car stopped at Ryen Farm, his driver was quick to leap out to open the door for him. His mood was not amicable. He did not appreciate being brought from Ålesund on what he fully expected to be a wild goose chase. Experience had taught him that illness frequently appeared to be more drastic to a layman than it actually was, and he intended to make sure that Sergeant Müller thought twice before taking similar action in the future. He glanced sideways as the sergeant came running to him from the truck.

  “Lead the way, Sergeant,” he ordered.

  Upstairs in the house, Gina and Johanna awaited them at Edvard’s bedside. He was still awake and had been prepared for the medical officer’s coming. Ill though he was, he knew something was seriously wrong and was half prepared for the worst.

  “They’re entering the house,” Johanna said huskily from the window. She moved to stand by Gina and put her hands supportively on her mother’s shoulders as she sat in a bedside chair. They heard two pairs of jackbooted feet ascending the stairs. The medical officer gave them no more than a glance, shrugging off the leather coat he wore slung across his shoulders and tossing it to the sergeant. Sitting down in the chair placed ready for him, he leaned forward to pull down the lower lid of Edvard’s eyes in turn and then take his pulse. After initial questioning, he took a particular line of inquiry.

  “Pain in your bones? Depression? Legs heavy and seized up? Always cold? When did all this start?” He had to lower his head to catch Edvard’s answers and he shook his head dismissively. “Those injuries may have aggravated your condition, but it would have been already under way. How long have you been bedridden? As long as that? Hmm.” Rising from the chair again, he swept up his coat once more to swing it around his shoulders. “You did right to call me, Sergeant,” he admitted with a change of attitude. “To have taken this man would have landed you with a corpse on your hands in no time at all.”

  “Then he is to be left, sir?”

  The reply came with a callous indifference to the other three listeners. “Yes. He is going to die soon. It’s simply a matter of a steady deterioration.”

  He went from the room followed by the sergeant. Edvard gazed after them from his pillows. He felt no surprise at what he had heard, but he wished Gina could have had the news broken to her less brutally. As she be
nt over him he saw there were tears running down her cheeks. He could not remember seeing her cry since the early days of their marriage when she had been homesick for her valley and her own people and the bleakness of their relationship had first opened up between them. With effort he lifted his hand and cupped the side of her face. She covered it with her own.

  Karen, coming from the neighbour’s home, was in time to see the army car and truck leaving Ryen Farm. She drew back into the edge of the snowbank as the car shot past her and she waited for the truck to do the same. It came at a similar pace. She could see there was a sergeant seated next to the driver and as the truck thundered past he leaned out and looked full into her face. A stare of open recognition passed between them, their astonishment mutual. He leaned farther out to look back at her, only to see that she was running in the direction of the farmhouse and did not turn her head.

  She burst into the house. “What has been happening?” she cried out in agitation.

  Johanna, who had been on her own in the sitting room, needing some moments of quiet in which to gather her thoughts, rose to fetch her in there. “Come and sit down. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Karen, her expressive face reacting to every shade of the account, heard her through before springing up from the chair with fists clenched. “He’s not going to die. I won’t let him. For Erik’s sake I’ll make him hold on to life.”

  She would have gone flying up to the sickroom if Johanna had not reached forward in time to grab her by the wrist. “Wait! Don’t go up there yet. My mother is with him.”

  Although some of the vibrating tenseness went from the girl’s body, she remained straight-backed as she sat down again, her fingers entwining nervously. “I used to know the sergeant who was here today.”

  “You did?”

  “His name is Carl Müller. He came out to our village under the Nansen plan and stayed longer than most. I don’t think he would have left his foster home if his widowed father hadn’t remarried and made a home for him in Munich. He went back and joined the Hitler Youth when it was formed. For a while he wrote to me.” She gave a little shrug. “There was nothing romantic in his letters as I had hoped. Instead he gave long accounts of doing what the Führer wished for the greatness of Germany. Yet each letter had been opened and bore the censor’s sticker on the back. Those Nazis didn’t even trust their own people.”

  “How old were you when you last saw him?”

  “We were both fifteen.”

  “Did he recognise you?”

  “Yes. I’ve no doubt at all.” She pushed the flat of her hands to the ends of the chair arms and gripped them. “I hope he’s stationed far from here and I never have to see him again. I was fond of him once. Now I hate him for his uniform and all he represents.”

  Johanna had never heard Karen speak of hatred before. She shared the girl’s hope that they had seen the last of the sergeant. There was enough trouble in the house already without inciting more by antagonising any overtures of friendship on his part.

  Three days later, Carl Müller returned on a dispatch rider’s motorbike. Gina turned ashen when she discovered him on the threshold.

  “I’m not here on duty, frue,” he said quickly. “Is Karen at home?”

  “As you are not on duty you may not come into the house,” she replied. “If Karen agrees to speak to you, then it must be outside.”

  His expression hardened. “If Karen should refuse to see me, I would have to exert my authority after all.”

  Gina thought with despair that the enemy had power over everything and she was fearful for the girl’s well-being. “I’ll tell her you’re here.”

  He waited where he was in the porch, stamping his feet. It had been a cold ride from Ålesund and it would be an even colder one back in an hour or two in the already fading January daylight. In the past he would never have been kept waiting on any Norwegian doorstep. He had been one of the community in Karen’s village, going to school with her and knowing her home as well as his own foster home. But all the time he had wanted to go back to Germany. That was his place of birth, and it had come to mean more to him through his being away from it than it might have if he had remained there to see his mother die during the dire conditions and mad inflation of those terrible days. Maybe then he would have wanted to emigrate as so many others had done, particularly before the Führer changed everything and made Germany a great nation again, capable of making the rest of the world tremble. He was proud of the Third Reich and of the Nazi crusade to end all wars by bringing every nation, either by justifiable coercion or by force, under the Führer’s inspired leadership. As a soldier he held reverence for such an aim.

  He turned his head sharply as Karen appeared from the house, warmly wrapped against the cold. A pinched look to her face suggested she was chilled inwardly for a reason that had nothing to do with the weather, and her lustrous eyes were wary and watchful. Yet nothing could detract from her beauty.

  “You haven’t changed, Karen. I knew you at once.”

  Her expression remained stony. “What do you want?”

  He could have replied simply that he was lonely, that he was wearied of almost unrelieved barracks companionship, and that he wanted agreeable female company that he did not have to purchase by some means or another. To renew a relationship with her would be the answer to everything, for in her he would find a woman to welcome and value him for his own sake. “I only want a chance to talk to you again.”

  “What about?”

  “Old times would do for a starting point. We used to be good friends. Surely that’s reason enough for wanting to ask how you are and about everyone I knew in the village.”

  “You could have written to your foster parents after you left if you had wanted information.”

  “I did write a few times, but life became fairly exciting for me when I got back to Germany. There never seemed to be any time.” He held out a hand as if to take hers. “Shall we walk? You’ll get cold standing there.” When she ignored his hand and went on down the porch steps he followed quickly to catch up. As they began to walk side by side, he leaned forward to see her profile that was half hidden by her turned-up collar and the muffler into which she had buried her chin. “There’s no need for you to be annoyed. I wrote to you.”

  She stopped and faced him with blazing eyes. “Annoyed? Do you think I care anything about what you did or did not do all that time ago? It’s what you and your kind are doing here now that makes me hate you as I do!”

  A sick disappointment filled him. He had come full of pleasurable anticipation, believing that the friendship that had been between them in the past would bridge any present differences. He had also expected in his own mind to find her grateful for what he had done for the old farmer in the house where she was living, especially since he had not known about her connection with the family until afterwards when he had consulted the civilian files. “Are you crazy?” he retorted indignantly, pushing his face towards her. “I’ve done you no harm, nor am I likely to. You should know that. I tell you that if anyone else had come in my place the other day, the old farmer in that house would have died in the back of an army truck.” He flung a pointing finger in the direction of the farmhouse and then closed his hand to prod his thumb against his chest, still thrusting towards her. “You have me to thank for that!”

  He saw by the fleeting change in her expression, subtle and sensitive as a cloud-blown sky on a windy day, that he had scored in his own favour. Always fair-minded, she could not reject the truth of what he had said, even though her attitude did not change.

  “No one should have come for him in the first place. For a man with such a bad heart condition the upset of your suddenly appearing might have been too great a shock for him to withstand.”

  He answered impatiently, almost without thinking. “There’s nothing wrong with his heart! You can’t throw everything at me.”

  She had become very still, her head tilting to one side as she scrutinised h
is face. “Why did you say that? About his heart I mean.”

  “I should know what’s wrong with him. I had to fill it in on my report.” His eyes narrowed at her. “Do you have some doubt about it?”

  “I’ve had doubts all along about his doctor, who is old and should have given up years ago. Would you tell me what was written on the report?”

  He saw he had suddenly gained an advantage. She was appealing to him for information that she could never get from any other source. “It would make no difference to the outcome,” he warned her.

  “I realise that, but maybe Edvard could be given some different medication to ease his pains. The old doctor is too stubborn to listen to me or anyone else in the family, but he might take notice of the district nurse if I could pass on whatever it is you know and we don’t.”

  Hope had returned to him. In her eagerness to discover what he knew, her face had lost its look of hostility. The temptation to bargain with her was great, but he decided he would gain more simply by telling her outright what she wanted to know. “All right. He’s suffering from pernicious anemia. Maybe that’s affecting his heart.”

  It was not what she had expected and it was a disease she knew nothing about. “I appreciate your telling me. I don’t suppose it will change anything, but I’ll still tell the district nurse.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Farther down the valley.”

  “Shall we walk there now?” He said it before he remembered what he was asking her. She had led him up the valley away from any other habitations, and to go in the other direction would be for her to be seen by friends and neighbours in the company of a German soldier. Quickly he tried to recapture the earlier advantage he had gained, seeing she was about to refuse him. “I only asked on the basis of having proved I have complete goodwill towards you and the family with whom you are living.” He took a step away from her, lifting his hands and then letting them drop again. “But naturally I understand. I think you’re misguided, but I understand.”