The Drifters (8 page)

At this point each summer the children would stare down at the enormous hulk and shiver as they saw it
reaching out far beneath them, like a monster biding its time until it rose from the waves to destroy all things. When their mother resumed her story she always spoke in a lower voice, but this was the part they cherished, because it involved their parents. ‘As soon as the
Tirpitz
arrived, the German commander in Tromsø sent extra policemen to check on anyone who might have a radio. He sent airplanes to fire machine guns at spots in which your father might be hiding. And up the mountainsides went the patrols and the dogs. But what did your father do?’

‘He stayed where he was and sent the same message over and over again for five hours,’ Britta told the younger children. ‘He told the airplanes in London, “
Tripitz
arrived Tromsø this afternoon. Big hole forward deck. Probably stay here six weeks.” ’

‘When he finished his last message,’ Mrs. Bjørndahl said, the dogs were almost upon him. That’s when Mr. Gottheld was shot. He volunteered to stay behind so that the radio could be saved.’ At this point she stopped her story to recall Mr. Gottheld, a small man who had been afraid of storms and dogs and his wife, and everything except Nazis.

‘He was shot. They showed us his body in the Shipgate. And for a while it seemed that his sacrifice had been useless. Because no airplanes came from London. And when we heard no news from your father and Mr. Storness, we supposed they were dead too. Then, in early November, we got a message from London demanding that we advise them by radio as to whether the
Tirpitz
was still here. But with your father missing, how could we reply?

‘Late one night in November a brave little boy came to my house and gave me a message that read: “Go to the wife of Storness the electrician and pick up a package which she will have. Bring it this night to the cabin at the head of the fjord, for our radio is broken.” It was curfew, of course, extra strict because of the
Tirpitz
, but I slipped past the Germans and went to the Storness home, where Mrs. Storness gave me a small package wrapped in cloth and covered with hog’s fat, which was almost impossible to get. I tucked the package in my skirt, like this, and crept out of her house—and what do you think happened?’

It was Britta who answered: ‘A police dog came at you. He smelled the hog fat and you rubbed some off on your finger and gave it to him and he went away.’

‘I sneaked through the German lines and got into the countryside and walked till morning. Then I hid in the forest and listened to the German planes passing over me, and the next night I got to the head of the fjord and delivered the package. I kissed your father and started right back to Tromsø—and what do you suppose I saw when I was hiding in the woods that third morning?’

Britta supplied the answer: ‘You saw a hundred English airplanes fly over your head. And you saw one explosion after another lighting up the sky. And you heard great explosions echoing through the mountains. And when you slipped back through the German lines and went to the seashore where the others stood, you no longer saw the
Tirpitz.
’

With the reading matter which Mrs. Bjørndahl had smuggled to her future husband hiding in the mountains had been a back issue of the
National Geographic
, picked up from some passing ship, containing a long story about Ceylon, and as Bjørndahl remained in the hills, cold and without food and constantly harassed by the Germans, he kept this magazine with him and in time developed a fixation about Ceylon, for it was everything that northern Norway was not: it had an abundance of fruit which you could pick right off the trees; it had sunshine every day of the year; you didn’t have to go about bundled in fur; and above all, it had a languid elegance in its palm trees, its slowly moving elephants and seductive music. If there was one spot on earth where a man could be happy, it would be Ceylon, and Bjørndahl determined that as soon as the war was over—for he trusted implicitly in an Allied victory—he would spend the rest of his life in Ceylon.

He was reinforced in this decision by the peculiar nature of Tromsø. Even in peace Tromsø presented difficulties, for in the summer there was no night and men lived in a kind of never-never land of dreams and fantasies, while in the winter there was no day. In January the sun never rose above the horizon, and the frail light it provided was gray and ghostly. Of the long years he had remained hidden in the hills, hundreds of days were spent in total darkness, and their deep shadow had entered his soul.
‘The day the Germans surrender, I head for Ceylon,’ he told his partners again and again.

But with the coming of peace came responsibilities. He married the attractive girl who had fed him in the mountains, and now had to support her children—he always spoke of them as ‘her children.’ His job did not give him time for travel, nor would he have had the funds if it did. His four medals were hung on the wall in a plush-lined box and Ceylon receded into legend. It still existed in its perpetual sunlight beyond some distant horizon, but by the early 1960s he realized that he was not going to see it.

This did not mean that he lost interest. Starting with the magazine his future wife had brought him, he began to collect all things relating to Ceylon. He had maps, bills of lading addressed to Colombo, accounts of nineteenth-century voyages, bits of Singhalese cloth, and above all, a series of airline posters showing vivid scenes around Kandy and Ratnapura. At exciting intervals some traveler who had actually visited Ceylon would pass through Tromsø, and later, in the bar of the Grand Hotel, he would report: ‘That chap Bjørndahl knew more about Ceylon than I did, and I was there.’

His family made one concession to Bjørndahl’s mania: a small room was set aside for his mementos of the island. Its walls were lined with maps and decorated with the airline posters, but the salient feature was something which had come late, a phonograph on which he played repeatedly such fragments of Georges Bizet’s
The Pearl Fishers
as he had been able to collect from random sources. So far he had found one tenor aria, one duet with tenor and baritone, and an extraordinary passage in which the soprano prays to Brahma and Siva for the safety of the fishermen. When he sat in his Ceylon room and played this haunting music, he seemed to be not in Tromsø but in the land of his enchantment.

The tenor passage, technically a cavatina of almost childish simplicity, was one of the lushest compositions of the nineteenth century, a song so sweetly sentimental that modern tenors had grown afraid of it. Britta’s father owned it in three versions: by Enrico Caruso, who had loved it; by Beniamino Gigli, who had sung it better than anyone else; and by the incomparable Swede, Jussi Bjørling, whose voice was geared to the sustained notes. During
the long winter nights, which encompassed the entire day, the Bjørndahl children had grown accustomed to the ghostly tenors singing their complaint:

The selection that Britta preferred was the one in which the heroine prayed, for whenever the soprano pronounced the names Brahma and Siva, Britta could visualize their statues and the temple in which they stood. Thus Ceylon became almost as real to her as it was to her father, and while she did not share his sentimental craving to see the island, she did understand how it could preoccupy his imagination. In school she told her teacher, ‘I grew up in Ceylon,’ and when the teacher made inquiries and found that Britta had never been outside of Tromsø, she put the girl down as a little fibber, especially when Britta insisted that she had been there … with her father.

In Tromsø there were many who smiled indulgently at Bjørndahl and his dreams; suspicions grew that the long years in the mountains had touched his mind, but one crucial fact remained to silence adverse comment: of all the patriots who had fled into the mountains, including even Storness the electrician and Gottheld the chemist, he was the only one who survived the cold and the Nazis. Many had started with him, but most had been driven into Sweden; Storness had died of malnutrition and Gottheld had been shot.

So Britta never forgot that her father was an authentic hero, and her mother too. This was why she had kept silent when she saw her mother and ugly Mr. Mogstad with his dirty mustaches. It was also why she consented to sail with Mogstad each summer to see the sunken battleship, because when she peered into the silent waters and saw its grisly terror hiding there, she could honestly say, ‘My father and mother sank it.’

As she grew older she had to admit what an ineffective man her father had become; the cavatina was a dirge for the opportunities he had lost. Its long-drawn cries were laments for his vanished hopes, and others felt sorry for
him, but when Britta looked at him she could say compassionately: ‘I am the daughter of heroes.’

In her fifteenth summer Britta Bjørndahl was one of the most beautiful girls in Tromsø, an island noted for its handsome women, including those shy Laplanders who in their brightly woven garments came down from their reindeer herds in the north. The reader will understand that Britta did not tell me in so many words, ‘I was counted among the beauties in Tromsø,’ for she was modest, but I could see for myself. Also, some of the things she told me in our conversations in Spain could have happened only to a girl who was quietly sure of her attractiveness.

That spring, when we talked so often, she was eighteen, not overly tall, superbly proportioned, with large white teeth, a flawless northern complexion and exquisite hair in a pageboy bob, not platinum as is so often found in Finland and northern Norway, nor honey-colored as occurs in the southern areas, but a soft white with a touch of amber champagne. She laughed easily, had passed the stage of embarrassment and was constantly being touched and approved and even kissed by the free-and-easy patrons of the bar in which she worked. The American sailors, who were obviously charmed, referred to her as ‘our Viking,’ and she did indeed have a quality of composure and robust good nature which must have characterized those daring people. Also, like most educated Scandinavians, she spoke English without a heavy accent but with just enough peculiarity to add to her winsomeness. But when I have said all this, I have missed the essential quality of this lovely girl. She gave the impression of largeness; she was neither tall nor plump, but her shoulders were broad and so were her hips. She walked with assurance and had about her countenance an openness that was disarming and a cleanliness that caused all men to be attracted to her. She was big in spirit.

In this fifteenth summer her mother arranged once more for Mr. Mogstad to take the children out to visit the sunken
Tirpitz
, and although Britta had seen it often, she went along, and when she found below her the shadowy monster she appreciated for the first time the courage it must have taken to oppose this dreadful force, and tears might have come to her eyes, except that she used her fists to push them back. Mr. Mogstad saw this and said a few comforting words, which Britta rejected. When the
launch docked and Mrs. Bjørndahl took the other children home, Britta stayed behind to help stow the gear, and as she carried a set of cushions to the sail locker, she suddenly found Mr. Mogstad behind her, grabbing at her and forcing her down onto the floor.

She was so startled she did not cry out, a fact which Mr. Mogstad interpreted as coyness, and before she knew what was happening, he had her mostly undressed and himself as well and was forcing himself upon her. She had discussed sex with her schoolmates and knew a good deal about it, but was quite unprepared for this assault and in a kind of dumb panic allowed him to have his way, not certain what other course might be available to her. It was a messy business, clumsy, frightening and totally disgusting, with Mr. Mogstad’s dirty mustaches and fetid breath adding to the ugliness. When it was over, the shipbuilder leered: ‘We won’t tell anyone, will we?’ She was so perplexed by his behavior that she merely looked at him and went home.

Frequently that summer Mr. Mogstad approached her with invitations to the sail locker, and now that she had an opportunity to study him more carefully, she found him to be a fat man in his middle forties even more objectionable than she had thought, with gray teeth and a nervous twitch. He was really quite repulsive and she found it distasteful even to acknowledge his unctuous civilities. As to his invitations for additional sex, which he said he was willing to pay for if she preferred, they were preposterous, and one day she snapped, ‘Go away! You’re disgusting!’

In mid-July she struck up a serious friendship with a neighbor boy, a good-looking fellow of seventeen named Haakon, and together they located various dark corners where others would not expect to find them. There they had mutually satisfying explorations, so that her memory of her first disgusting experience with sex was pleasantly erased. She found she liked men and the sexual games they made possible, so in August she and Haakon began associating with an eighteen-year-old couple who were more or less living together, and this older pair would sometimes find an available room which the four of them could share in a kind of respectful intimacy. As Britta said one night when they were separating for their various homes, ‘The thing I like about sex is that no matter how
it starts, you know how it’s going to end.’ When in the course of time the foursome broke up, Britta started going with the other boy, so that the rooms he had engineered for his first girl he now got for Britta. His name was Gunnar; he had a job; and it seemed likely that one day he and Britta would drift into a standard Tromsø marriage.

As her eighteenth birthday approached, Britta had to go to work, since there was no money in the Bjørndahl household for further education. Her father continued to peck away at his trivial job with the fish exporter and to spend his nights dreaming of Ceylon. Home was still filled with the sound of Beniamino Gigli singing ‘I hear as in a dream’ or the great Luisa Tetrazzini playing the role of a priestess in the temple of Brahma. Her father loved to tell the children not only of Ceylon but also of the singers: ‘Mr. Gigli, this fine artist, turned out to be a Fascist and said dreadful things about America, where he had earned his living for many years. He was a hateful man, but he could sing. As for poor Miss Tetrazzini, when she was a fat old lady her children hauled her into court and asked the judge to take away all her money because she was spending it so recklessly and they were afraid she wouldn’t leave any for them. They said she was nutty, but before the whole court she sang this song, and the judge said that anyone who could sing like that—and remember the words too—was certainly not nutty.’