Hanna #2
It was Erik’s father who came to tell us the news.
He rowed into the bay one afternoon in May, just a few weeks after we’d seen the train carrying the teachers leave Narvik for the north.
His face was ashen, and he could hardly speak as he hugged Liv to him.
He took a telegram from his pocket and handed it to her.
She seemed to be struggling to comprehend the short message, and then she handed it to me, as if I could interpret the words written there and make sense of them for her. ERIK TERLAND DEAD—KIRKENES CAMP.
As the waves whispered over the pebbles at our feet, Liv gave a single sob, which seemed to surge up and escape from somewhere deep within.
“Come,” I said gently. “Let’s go inside.” I took her arm and led her to the hut. Erik’s father sat down next to her at the table, holding her hand, telling her what little he knew.
“They say the teachers at the camp were deliberately given the most physical tasks, unloading cargo from the ships bringing in materials for building roads and extending the railway from Kirkenes. I suppose the Germans wanted to punish them, to force them to give in and submit to joining the new teaching union.”
He paused, swallowing hard before he could continue. “It was an accident, apparently. A crane was lifting huge bags of crushed stone onto the wharf, and one of the ropes snapped. Erik was underneath when the bag fell. He was badly injured. They tried, but they couldn’t save him…”
I looked on helplessly as they clung to each other and wept, grieving for the son and husband they’d lost. Another young man the victim of this cruel war. A teacher, a peace-lover, who had resisted in his own quiet way.
I clenched my fists so tightly that the nails dug into my palms, drawing blood.
I’d thought I could protect my sister, shielding her from the work I was doing and cocooning her from the worst of the brutal realities of life under an occupying force.
How mistaken I’d been. The war had reached its tentacles into the lives of every Norwegian citizen and gripped them in its stranglehold.
There could be no middle way. All choice had been taken from us. It was black and white, fight or flee.
My thoughts went to the wireless hidden in the sea barn.
I could send a message tonight, asking for passage for Liv.
For Mr. and Mrs. Terland, too, if they chose to leave.
But then Liv raised her tearstained face and met my gaze.
The despair I’d seen written there had gone, replaced by something else.
There was anger in her eyes, resolve in the determined set of her jaw.
I knew then that she felt as I did. She wouldn’t go, either.
She wanted to fight alongside me, with whatever it took, until Norway was free once more.
We’d each lost so much to the war: our mother, Per, Erik, our livelihoods, our home. Now, like so many of the Norwegians who were left behind, we felt we had nothing left to lose.
And do you know the most important thing about people with nothing left to lose? Well, they are the most dangerous ones of all.
*
I didn’t let Liv join me in the shed when I was using the wireless, but by then she knew exactly what I was doing on the nights when I’d pull on my coat and boots and slip out to the sea barn in the darkness.
I’d glance back, sometimes, and see her watching from the window of the hut, where a lighted candle cast its halo across the bay, helping me pick my way across the pebbles.
She was a great help in passing on the transcribed messages to the local resistance.
She could take the boat across to Fagernes or up to Narvik under the guise of visiting her parents-in-law and deliver the whispered instructions or hand over the slips of paper that we tucked into greaseproof wrappings around parcels of dried fish.
Things were easier for me, too, with an extra pair of hands to help tend the vegetable patch or take the boat out into the fjord to catch herring and mackerel.
One of the local fishermen—perhaps one of those who slipped in and out of the bay under cover of darkness to make the deliveries and collections—brought us a barrel of cod, which we gutted and split to replenish the supply hanging on the drying frame.
Not only were they important supplies to see us through the next winter, but also played their part in helping camouflage the aerial for the wireless set from any prying eyes.
I’d taken the boat out one day to travel up the fjord, delivering a message and checking the crab pots on my way back.
It was late summer, and the evening sun shone warm on my shoulders as I rowed back through the skerries at the entrance of the bay.
I was looking forward to showing Liv the day’s catch, and she’d said she was going to climb the hill to gather bilberries, so I was hoping there might be a pie for our supper, too.
I glanced over my shoulder as I rounded the final rocks at the entrance to the bay, and the blood froze in my veins, the boat slowing as my oars flattened against the water. For drawn up alongside the jetty was another boat. A metal motor launch, with a German cross emblazoned on the side.
Since there had been no visits from Captain Stolz for many months, I’d relaxed my guard.
I hadn’t told Liv about him. There had been no need.
But now she was in the hut, and someone was with her.
Was it him? Had he brought others with him this time?
Had the Direction Finders somehow managed to pick up on one of my transmissions and located the wireless station here in the bay?
I thought quickly. I needed to keep quiet, to wait until I knew for certain who the visitor was.
But I couldn’t leave my sister in danger.
Silently, I rowed up to the jetty, made fast the boat, and hurried across the pebbles to the sea barn.
I pushed open the door and took the loaded pistol from its hiding place in the sack behind the coal heap, my hands shaking as I released the safety catch with a click.
I hesitated, standing in the doorway of the barn.
Perhaps they were simply sitting at the table drinking coffee, and it would be safer for Liv and me if I didn’t show myself.
If he was alone, might Captain Stolz think she was me?
Could she carry off the charade, though?
Would it even matter if he realized she was my twin sister?
My mind was racing now. Did he suspect we were operating a clandestine wireless station here?
What if he’d come to confront me? How would Liv respond to that?
My agony of indecision was swept aside when I heard a muffled scream from the hut and my sister cry, “No!”
I ran to the door and flung it open. He had her pinned to the floor, her skirt pushed up, her blouse torn, her eyes wild with fear and revulsion.
At the sound of my entrance, he scrambled to his feet, yanking up his trousers.
The look on his face as he turned and saw me was of complete astonishment.
Then, in just those few seconds, I saw the realization dawn in his eyes.
He hadn’t known there were two “Miss Kristiansens” living in the hut.
We had deceived him. And if we had deceived him today, how else might we have deceived him in all the time he’d been coming here?
He might not have known the full picture, but I could see he was suddenly suspicious.
We were not who he’d thought we were, and that would be enough to condemn us both.
I knew then that I had no choice. He would take us both in for questioning, wanting to know more about our movements, piecing together exactly what we were doing there.
And even if we managed to withstand the techniques they’d surely use on us to try to pry out the information they wanted, he would find a way to punish us, for the deception and for refusing him.
I felt no fear, only a cold, hard fury at what he’d done to my sister. I knew what I had to do next. I pulled the trigger. And in that single moment, before the horrifying cascade of emotions at taking a life overwhelmed me, I felt nothing other than the calm clarity of relief.
He fell to the floor, and Liv shrank back against the wall, pulling her legs out from beneath the weight of his body.
I ran to her, holding her as she buried her face against my coat and sobbed.
Waves of shuddering pulsed through her. Suddenly she turned away and threw up violently, gasping and retching as her body trembled uncontrollably.
I got to my feet, went to the sink, and brought back a wet cloth, tenderly wiping the tears from her face where, I realized, a bruise was blossoming around one eye.
“It’s all right, I’m here, it’s okay.” I repeated the words over and over, trying to make them true as I held her again, rocking her like a child. “He can’t hurt us now.”
When at last she was calm enough to speak, she said, “What do we do?” I turned my head to follow her wide-eyed gaze toward the body of Captain Stolz.
A pool of bright blood was soaking into the rug from the back of his head, the single bullet hole a dark circle between his eyes, which stared, unseeing now, from behind the veil of death.
“We need to get rid of him. We’ll take him out to sea, make it look like he must have had an accident in his boat and been lost.”
I was in a state of deep shock, I think.
I still felt strangely calm as we set about rolling the body in a blanket, half carrying, half dragging it to the jetty and heaving it into his boat.
Then a thought occurred to me. I drew back the edge of the blanket and reached into his tunic pocket.
Sure enough, he still carried the sketch Per had made of my face.
I pulled out the slip of paper and then, before I carefully folded the blanket back into place, I filled his pockets with stones from the shore.