This Shining Land

by Rosalind Laker

  He rolled away from her to yank off his fur-collared jacket and flung it aside as if it were on fire. The rest of his clothes followed with equal speed. With hers he took his time. She kept her eyes closed, feeling herself swallowed up by his ardour and her own, and large tears escaped one by one from her eyes to trickle down into the pillow. He cupped her face with his hands and smoothed the tears away from her cheekbones with his thumbs.

  “Don’t cry, Jo. Everything is all right now. Nothing shall ever come between us again.” He covered her face with kisses. “I never loved until I met you. You’re my reason for living, my love, my heart, my darling.”

  The vibrating tenderness in his voice and in his caresses was a foretaste of what was to come during the night hours that they were to spend together until dawn came.

  Chapter 8

  Packed into cattle cars, Rolf and his fellow teachers dozed and slept on the train’s journey north. Thirteen hundred of them had been arrested and distributed into concentration camps where the treatment had been unremittingly harsh. Only a small number had succumbed to the bullying tactics and obtained release by signing enrolment papers to the Teachers’ Nazi Association and those were mostly people with asthma or some other disability to whom the alternative was a complete breakdown of health.

  The train began to slow down. In the cattle cars the men stirred and yawned, getting to their feet to stamp circulation into cramped limbs, stomachs rumbling with hunger. Rolf tried to peer out through a crack of light at the suburbs of Trondheim. When he had left the city at the end of his student days, he had never expected to return in this fashion. With a jolt and crashing of bumpers the train came to a halt in a siding. There was a rattle as the bolts were pulled out of the door and it went sliding back, the bright light pouring in making people blink and shade their eyes.

  “Out! Out!” the guards shouted, rifles in their hands.

  Rolf leaped to the ground. Those who were slow were thumped with rifle butts. He took his place in the long line that was forming two abreast as men continued to pour out of the train. These were five hundred teachers who had been numbered off from the rest in captivity for transport by ship to a labour camp far north of the Arctic Circle. There had been no deference to age in the selection. An elderly headmaster, who had not been far from his retirement, took the place next to him in the line.

  “How are you today?” Rolf put the question to him in a mutter, for conversation was forbidden now as it had been during the punishing treatment in the camps.

  “Somewhat bruised, but otherwise unharmed, I’m thankful to say. Fortunately I slept all the way on some straw and that helped me to recoup my strength. It is most kind of you to enquire.” The older man spoke with dignity as if the two of them were in his own study from which, during his arrest, he had been ignominiously dragged in view of his terrified pupils. The previous day he had been among those ordered to run round and round the camp until they dropped, only to be kicked to their feet again.

  During the waiting, while the rest of the men continued to lengthen the line, Rolf thought about his sister and hoped once again that she had found the radio transmitter. The need for secrecy in the transmitting of specialised information had prevented him from giving her as much as a hint as to its existence. It had been essential that the Germans should not discover it during a routine search of his school. That was why he had trusted her to use her wits by shouting at her from the truck, committing her at last by his own will into subversive work that would endanger her. It would be her task to get in touch with someone in the Resistance about the transmitter, for although the hiding place was known to a few people, it was doubtful when or if any one of them would be able to collect it.

  At the head of the line came the barked command. “Forward march!”

  Rolf and his colleague moved forward with the rest. At the time of their arrest they had been issued with prison camp uniforms, drab garments of coarse cloth that flapped about their legs and bodies, and a kind of forage cap that unbuttoned to protect the ears in cold weather. That protection would be needed when they reached Kirkenes, which was located only a stone’s throw from the Finnish border. Spring would not reach there for another four or five weeks yet and polar conditions would prevail. Rolf’s only consolation was that at least they were being sent to another part of their own country and not to Germany, the fate of many Norwegians arrested on other charges. On the first day of captivity, a half-Jewish teacher had been pulled out of line, his identity card having shown the stamped J, and through the grapevine that springs up in any imprisoned gathering it was said that he had been sent to join a boatload of Norwegian Jews being shipped out of Oslo for a camp in Poland called Auschwitz.

  On the march to the harbour Rolf absorbed the sight of the mellow-hued city of Trondheim with its eighteenth-century houses like iced wedding cakes and the spire of Nidaros Cathedral dominating the skyline. Every broad and narrow alley was familiar to him from the days when he had charged about on a bicycle, sometimes with Solveig perched on the crossbar, her unruly hair tickling his face, her nearness arousing him as it always did. It had been sheer good luck that the girl he was in love with at the gymnasium throughout his higher education should have gained a place at the same college. Solveig was as ambitious as he, and they had worked hard, played hard and they had loved hard.

  The abortion ended everything. He had known nothing about it. Solveig came back to college after the last vacation before they took their finals and it had taken place during the short time they were apart. It had changed her completely—all the laughter and the fun and her exuberance for life snuffed out through an action she had taken on her own initiative without a word to him. He hated her as much for what she had done to herself as for making him feel shut out, rejected and humiliated. Their quarrels had been bitter and vituperative.

  “Stop saying we could have married!” she had screeched at him, her curly mop dancing about her enraged, tear-stained face. “I don’t want to marry you. I’ve never wanted to marry you. It could never have lasted the way it was. Why can’t you see that?”

  He had not been able to see it. They had taken their finals side by side without an exchanged glance either before or after the examinations, their silence towards each other cruel and stony. The last he saw of her had been at Trondheim railway station when they were all going home. Somebody else had his arm about her waist. She looked dull and dejected. The hurt she had inflicted was still too painful for him to speak the few words to her that might have mended at least friendship between them. Her train went in the opposite direction from his and after it had steamed out of the station, giving him a last glimpse of the pale oval of her face at one of the windows, misted by raindrops, he had never seen her again. She emigrated to the States that same summer, going first to stay with relatives in North Dakota. He was glad she had escaped the Occupation.

  At the quay a small wooden ship lay alongside. In its heyday it had been on the coastal line, but was long since out of service. Rolf recognised the name, Skjaerstad. Erik had done some of his cadet training aboard. In her coastal days she had taken a complement of one hundred and fifty passengers. Now she had to accommodate five hundred, and in addition, fifty guards.

  “I think we’re in for a rough trip,” Rolf commented wryly to his colleague. It was not a reference to the weather.

  It was worse than anything he could have imagined possible. Prisoners were crowded in together until it became impossible for those in the hold to move in any direction. Within a matter of hours the clean-scrubbed ship stank like a cesspit. Rolf was wedged into a part of the dark hold where there was not enough room to stand up or lie down, the blackness unrelieved except by a glimmer of light showing around the hatches overhead. He was not seasick but many were, for the wintry seas had been gale-lashed from the moment the steamer had nosed out of the harbour. At one port of call a local Quisling doctor came aboard. A look of helpless incredulity stamped itself on his face as he made a perfunctor
y round of the ship and viewed the scene with the groaning sick in the hold. He threw up his hands at the uselessness of attempting anything while such a lack of hygiene was allowed to prevail and left again to send an angry report on this treatment of professional men to headquarters in Oslo. It was ignored. The ship continued on her way with a steady deterioration of weather, rations and treatment by the guards, many of whom were seasick themselves. It took thirteen days for the vessel to make a journey that normally took four, and when the hold was opened in Kirkenes harbour Rolf thought the stench must be rising as it had done from the old prison ships arriving in Botany Bay.

  The arctic air, sharply clean and cold, met his face like a benediction as he disembarked, helping ashore his elderly colleague from the original line-up, who was barely able to walk. Rolf had never been to the little mining and fishing town of Kirkenes before and, after the dim light of the hold, it looked as bright as an Astrup painting, its colours stark against the snow hiding the great fertile valley that yielded forth so much in its brief summer. In peacetime tourists who voyaged north to see the midnight sun were welcomed ashore here from the coastal steamers, a point of return for the voyage back to Bergen. Today the townspeople stopped to stare in shock and sympathy at the bedraggled procession of men coming from the steamer, those too weak to walk alone supported by others.

  Near a corner, a woman darted forward and dropped a winter-stored apple into Rolf’s pocket before scurrying away at a soldier’s angry shout and raised rifle. Somebody else received a rolled cigarette of home-grown tobacco and another a piece of dried fish. The townsfolk had little to spare, but they wanted to share what they had. To Rolf it was a forewarning. These people knew what awaited them and wanted to give some aid while the chance was available.

  His misgivings proved to be right. In spite of what had already been inflicted on them during the voyage north, he would never have believed such hell could have been created in his own land. Everything about the camp was grey, from the guards’ look-out posts to the bleak compounds and electrified wire fencing that kept them penned by night in long huts where they were crowded together in fetid conditions, sanitary arrangements being totally inadequate. Some found themselves housed in cardboard tents due to over-crowding, which were poor protection against the bitter arctic chill. By day they were put to heavy manual labour that was often beyond the strength of the older men—road-building and cleaving out rock for concrete pillboxes and shoving mining wagons down to the harbour. The food was often no more than a bowl of watery soup and a slab of stone-hard black bread. Yet, bad as it was for the teachers, it was still worse for the Russians and East Prussian prisoners-of-war they worked alongside. With less food and harsher punishment, some were little more than walking skeletons, their faces cadaverous and covered with sores. While road-building, one was shot for breaking away to catch a yellowed cabbage leaf drifting along in a ditch, starvation overcoming all other fear. Rolf and a fellow teacher carried the emaciated body back to camp for burial. The man’s compatriots showed no emotion. Death had become too commonplace.

  At Ryendal in the spring sunshine, Gina walked slowly home from Sunday service. She wore her church-going clothes—an unfashionably long black coat over one of her best dresses with a lace collar. Her hat was black straw, slightly misshapen through age. It had not suited her when it was new and it suited her still less now; the fact she had made a mistake with her purchase did not mean that a perfectly good hat should be discarded. Her appearance had ceased to be important to her long ago, except that everything she wore must be spotlessly clean, well pressed, and neatly mended. She carried a small bunch of lilies-of-the-valley which she had picked at the wayside. They powdered the valley like a new fall of snow, the delicate scent rising in the still air. There had been some in a glass vase on the altar that morning. Although the clergy had been denied all authority by Quisling since their resignation en bloc in protest against the Nazi regime, people still filled the churches when services were held. It was only where dubious Nazi replacements had been appointed that the pews stayed empty, only one or two collaborators attending.

  Her prayers that day had been for her absent sons and her thanksgiving for the signs in Edvard of a slow and steady recovery to better health, if not to the ox of a man he had once been.

  She looked about her as she wandered along, savouring this quiet time to herself and observing everything. Being country-bred and country-raised, she took as keen an interest in the fertile state of her neighbours’ fields as she did in her own. Apart from feeding the animals and milking, no other chores of husbandry were carried out on the day of rest and the Sunday peace lay over the valley, almost tangible in the stillness broken only by the sea gulls wheeling in from the fjord. She wished the tranquility could reach out to the many in need of it in the heat of war.

  Ahead of her she saw Johanna coming from the farmhouse, swinging along with her long-legged stride as if the ground had springs beneath the surface. So much vibrant youth and energy made her feel dry and withered, worn out by the years, and yet at the same time she drew warmth from the sight of the young as from the sun. She had been expecting to meet Johanna on the way, for the girl was off to see Astrid Larsen on an afternoon visit. At the service, Gina had prayed for her daughter as well as her sons. Since the day of Rolf’s arrest, Johanna had been preoccupied and at times quite absent-minded, only half listening when others spoke to her. It would do her good to have a pleasant outing in her elderly friend’s company.

  “You’re off then,” Gina said to her as they came within earshot.

  “That’s right. I don’t expect to be late home.”

  “Give Frøken Larsen my kindest regards.” There was no relaxation in the severe expression that was normal to Gina. Nothing to show that she was as much concerned for her daughter as for her sons.

  “I will. ’Bye, Mother.”

  As Johanna went to walk on, Gina reached out unexpectedly and caught her sleeve between black-gloved fingers. “Here,” she said brusquely, pushing the lilies-of-the-valley into her daughter’s hand. “I know these are your favourite flowers. Wear them today.” She turned back her own coat revers to remove a pin and hold it out.

  “Thank you.” Johanna gave her a speculative sideways glance as she pinned on the flowers. It was always impossible to define how much her mother knew intuitively or guessed.

  “Get along with you then.” Abruptly Gina stepped forward up the slope to the farmhouse, the encounter closed.

  Johanna inhaled the scent of the tiny blooms as she went on down the lane, every one of them a blessing to take with her to what might be the most important meeting of her life. The Resistance had summoned her. At last she was to be absorbed into full-time work for them.

  Gina, with her hand on the farmhouse door, was seized by a hollow quake of premonition and she struggled against a longing to call back the disappearing figure of her daughter. Straightening her shoulders and stifling the anxiety she had experienced in the lane, she refrained even from looking back. Weakness did nobody any good.

  Sunday afternoon was quiet in Ålesund. Couples strolled along pushing baby carriages. There were fathers out alone with their children, carrying fishing-rods and bait. Outside Astrid’s house there was the usual complement of parked cars and yawning drivers. Some of them knew Johanna by sight now and had told newcomers that she was not one of the inhabitants of the officers’ section of the house, as had been at first supposed. This meant she was spared the previous lewdness. Some bade her a polite Guten Tag. On principle she could not return the greeting and at the same time, in the midst of hatred for their alien presence, she pitied them. So many were ordinary men starved for friendship beyond that of their own kind.

  Astrid, her silvery-grey hair dressed as always in immaculate waves, her dress a silk print with the pleated inlets of a mode belonging to the early thirties, opened the door.

  “Come in,” she invited serenely. Her composure was completely genuine. The fact that she
was virtually living on a time bomb did not disturb her sleep at night on her own behalf. She was grateful for the riches life had given her, not least for being of some use to her country in her old age when she might have been expected to resign herself to the pastimes of dotage. When she worried it was for younger lives put in jeopardy, and it was her earnest hope that nothing she ever said or did would give any clue to their whereabouts. With the Gestapo’s sustained onslaught against the Resistance in an attempt to eliminate it once and for all, many secret meeting-places had been given away by informers and those under severe torture. At times there had been days of agonising suspense. Fortunately the very site of her living quarters was insurance against suspicion falling on her property unless deliberately betrayed. The fact that her cellar was kept exclusively for the most secret meetings of the highest leaders of the Resistance reduced its chances of discovery, while at the same time making it a prize the Germans would be glad to seize. At the present moment she had two of the Resistance fighters most wanted by the Gestapo in that area in her underground retreat. “Keep your jacket on until after the meeting,” she advised Johanna, who had been about to remove it. “It’s always chilly in that cellar.”

  “Am I to go down straightaway?”

  “Yes. They’re waiting for you.”

  She knew Steffen would be there since it was he who had summoned her by a coded message. “Who is with your nephew?” she asked. “Do you know?” Although she no longer saw Delia as a threat, it was her hope that their paths would not cross.