Hanna #2
“It’s okay. Nothing much new. I enjoy the excuse to hike, ski, do some target practice and call it work for a change. But all we’re really doing is making sure nothing happens here in Norway. Keeping our country out of Europe’s squabbles.”
He kept his tone deliberately light, but I knew him well enough to sense the deeper concern that lay beneath the surface. The training had been stepped up of late, taking over his weekends, and for a few weeks now he hadn’t been able to accompany the rest of us on our trips to the cinema.
We packed away our things, leaving the hut as we’d found it and fastening the catch on the door, then strapped on our skis. “See you at the bottom,” I called over my shoulder, as I set off downhill.
Per accepted the challenge, and we raced each other back to the Grouse Tree, our tracks crisscrossing to carve a plait of curves in the snow behind us. We arrived together and paused to get our breath back as we unbuckled our skis.
“A dead heat!” I said, laughing. “For all your training, I can still keep up with you.”
His expression was serious as his blue eyes met mine. “Actually, Hanna, it’s always been more a question of me trying to keep up with you.”
Then he leaned toward me, tentatively brushed his lips against mine, and suddenly our friendship turned into something else.
Perhaps it was that I’d started to see the man he was becoming, and perhaps he no longer saw me as just his little sister’s friend.
Perhaps the threat out there beyond our borders made us want to seek solace in the love and trust we held for each other.
Or maybe the mutual attraction had always been there, beneath the awkwardness and uncertainty of our youth, so I found myself responding.
I put my arms around him and pulled him close, feeling a rush of joy at this new sense of simultaneous familiarity and strangeness.
Our first kiss tasted faintly of sugar and cinnamon.
The snowy woods were silent around us, until a gust of wind made the Grouse Tree speak.
It seemed as if it quietly declared its approval.
We stayed there for a while, and in those moments—at once eternal and all too short—the troubled world couldn’t reach us, in the shelter of the trees and each other’s arms.
*
April arrived and, when I wasn’t busy in the bookshop, I spent my spare time tending our vegetable patch or accompanying Per on his fishing boat.
I loved being out there with him, working side by side as he pulled in his nets, the sunshine dancing on the water and my heart dancing in my chest whenever he kissed me.
He talked about his plans—plans that included me.
We’d save up to buy some land on one of the outlying islands that we could farm together one day, he said, where we’d be as free as the seabirds that soared overhead, spreading their wings wide to catch the wind.
I noticed, though, that the harbor was busier than ever that spring, and I started to eye the endlessly arriving and departing ships with apprehension.
Where were they taking that iron ore? And for what purposes was it being used?
We read yet more articles in the local newspapers that spoke of deportations and annexations, of what was happening in Austria and Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, articles criticizing the Nazi mentality of violence and oppression.
The distant rumblings of a new war were now increasingly threatening borders across the water in mainland Europe.
I remembered Per’s words at the hut. Keeping our country out of things… If only that were possible.
When summer came, the town filled up with German tourists.
We usually had a few, but that year there were hordes of them.
They had money to spend in our hotels and cafés, and when they came into the bookshop, some demanded to know why we didn’t stock more books in their language, particularly the two volumes of a bestseller written by their country’s leader, entitled Mein Kampf.
I’d learned some German at school—although I’d always preferred our English lessons—so Mr. Mosling would ask me to attend to their questions, as he spoke very little of their language.
They talked of a New Order, of a need for regulation and control to ensure peace and progress for all of Europe, eager to share their doctrines with anyone who’d listen.
Not that many of us did. We viewed their zeal with the same cynicism with which we heard the speeches of Vidkun Quisling, our homegrown right-wing extremist, whose National Gathering party had failed to gain much of a following here at home.
Our unease grew, but we still didn’t really believe in the possibility of war in Norway.
Just to be on the safe side, though, the government voted through additional funds for national defense, and several of our friends joined up.
Per was among them, graduating from home guard to a fully commissioned soldier in the Norwegian Army.
All those plans we’d been making for our future were put on hold, but we paid our ever-increasing taxes without complaint.
Secretly, though, we still believed our little world to be impregnable, surrounded as it was by the mountains and the sea.
As another winter came and went, slowly but surely the troubles infiltrated the walls of our natural fortress.
Per was away often now, on training exercises.
In 1940, Finland began to fight Russia, threatening the slim finger of land in the frozen north that was a buffer zone between us and the Soviets.
On her return from work one day, Mamma told us the mayor had agreed Narvik should give refuge to some of the Finnish children affected by that conflict.
There were other initiatives, too, born of the growing mood of apprehension that swept the country.
Mamma said she was going to a meeting that evening to help set up a local group of the organization known as the Bluebells, founded by some women in Oslo.
We’d read about it in the papers, and knew its aim was to provide training in first aid, which might be needed in case of air attacks.
“Would you like to come with me?” she asked. We both fetched our coats.
When we got to the town hall, the room was buzzing with talk of the arrest of a local representative of a German engineering company.
Herr Moller had been discovered to be a spy and had been transmitting details of the British iron ore transports leaving the harbor.
Some of those ships had mysteriously disappeared at sea without a trace.
We tried to concentrate on the talk about first aid, but I think we were all a little distracted by our growing sense of unease at the latest developments right on our doorstep.
Some days later, on an April evening when a fine mist shrouded the harbor, Mamma, Liv, and I were listening to the seven o’clock news on the wireless when suddenly an urgent command was broadcast. All Norwegian naval officers and crew were told to return to their ships, with immediate effect.
It was a little odd, but we tried to put aside the qualms we felt and went off to our beds as usual.
As Liv and I lay side by side in our room beneath the eaves, she must have realized I was struggling to fall asleep, just as she was. “What do you think it means, Hanna?” she whispered.
“Probably just a routine exercise,” I said. I was trying to convince myself as much as her. “Don’t worry, the harbor is well defended.”
I could hear her tossing and turning, though, while my own uneasy thoughts kept me awake well into the night.
We must have dropped off at last, because in the early hours, we were awoken by a series of almighty explosions rocking the house, shaking it to its very foundations.
With panic gripping my throat, I pulled back the curtains but could see nothing.
At first I thought perhaps the orange glow was the sunrise but then realized this was no dawn.
The harbor was swathed in thick fog, and the light I could see was the flicker of flames.
I pulled on my clothes, told Mamma and Liv to stay put, and ran toward town to find out what was happening.
At the bridge, I stopped short. Nazi soldiers stood on guard with machine guns.
And then I saw it, dimly at first through the fog.
I walked closer, hardly believing my eyes.
A huge flag bearing the stark outline of the swastika flew over the telegraph office.
Terrified, I ran toward the city hall. Another flag hung there, too.
One of the women who worked with Mamma in the mayor’s office came hurrying past, and I grabbed her arm. “What’s going on?” I asked.
She shook her head, her expression stricken.
“I don’t know. I heard the explosions…I came to the marketplace.
The Nazis were rounding up our boys there.
Some of the Norwegian guards broke ranks and made a run for it toward the church.
I heard rifle shots…” She shook off my grasp and disappeared into the building.
Per, I thought, my throat constricting with fear. He would surely have been one of those to try to escape. I couldn’t picture him submitting without a fight.
I glanced around, desperate, unsure what to do, where to go, whom to ask.
Then the ground beneath my feet shook as more explosions rocked the town.
They came from the direction of the harbor.
Torn by the conflicting desire to find Per and a surge of anxiety for Liv and Mamma, I turned and ran toward home, toward the sickening orange glow that was growing steadily brighter there.