Britta Bjørndahl was born more than two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle on the island of Tromsø. During World War II her father had been a notable patriot. For three perilous years he had resisted the German occupation, hiding out along the fjords and in the mountains to send wireless signals to London or flashlight codes to British ships as they hovered off the Norwegian coast. At the end of the war four nations decorated him, and in the summer of 1957 the entire crew of a British destroyer flew to Tromsø to relive with him the excitement of those gallant days.
The medals had done her father little good; in peace he returned to Tromsø and earned a frugal living as a clerk in a company that shipped fish to Bergen. He married the girl who at much risk to herself had brought him food and magazines during his long years of hiding from the Nazis, and soon they had three children.
Each summer Britta’s mother would scan the sky for a certain kind of day, and when it arrived, she would gather the children and lead them to Holger Mogstad’s boatyard, so that he might take them in his sailboat into the channel that separated Tromsø from a westward island which protected it from the Atlantic. Britta’s father did not accompany them on these trips because he held Mr. Mogstad in low esteem: ‘Dirty mustaches and bad breath,’ was all he would say about the boatbuilder, but Britta guessed that their enmity stemmed from the war days, when her father had gone into the forests to fight the Germans while Mr. Mogstad had stayed in Tromsø to build boats for them.
Britta wanted, of course, to side with her father, especially after one evening when she had caught Mr. Mogstad trying to kiss her mother in the sail loft after the cruise was ended; she said nothing about this incident, which she did not fully understand but from which her dislike of Mogstad arose. Nevertheless, she accompanied the others on the yearly cruise because of the miraculous thing they were to see in the channel.
She would sit with the other children in the bow of the sailboat, peering down into the dark ocean while her mother and Mr. Mogstad sat in the stern, triangulating the craft according to landmarks on various headlands, and after many false starts everyone would agree, ‘This must be the place,’ and they would lean over the side of the boat and gaze into the water.
And gradually, emerging from the shadows like some monster deposited there in primeval time, the outlines of a mighty battleship would slowly take form. If the sun was right, and if the waves were placid, the children would sometimes see the entire ship asleep in its tomb, stretching so far in all directions that it seemed larger than Tromsø itself. It was mysterious, awesome, an overwhelming message from the past, and the children never tired of seeing it, this gigantic warship sunk in their harbor.
Nor did they tire of their mother’s recitation of how it had got there. Britta could repeat the story almost as well as her mother, but she loved to hear it from one who had taken part in the sinking of this mighty ship:
‘It was in the winter of 1943 when the fate of the whole world was in the balance. England was starving. Russia was about to collapse for want of arms. We Norwegians? We had nothing to eat, for each autumn the Germans took all our crops. Yet we knew there was a chance if each man and woman resisted every day. When you grow up and face difficulties, you must remember your father and mother in the winter of 1943.
‘Your father hid in the mountains up there. Others like him had fled to Sweden, and I don’t blame them, because the Germans hunted them with dogs and airplanes, so they had to leave Norway. But your father stayed. He and Mr. Storness the electrician and Mr. Gottheld the chemist—and how they survived, no one will ever know. Do you know why they stayed in the mountains, dodging the Nazi airplanes and killing the police dogs when they got too close? Because they had to send messages to the airplanes in England. Your father had a radio, not a good one, and Mr. Storness cranked it by hand, hour after hour—and do you know what? Every time they sent a message to London, telling the airplanes where to bomb, German headquarters in Tromsø got the message too. Because they could listen on the radio, couldn’t they? So as soon as your father started to speak on his radio, the Germans would send out their patrols with dogs, and we would wait to see what they had when they came back.
‘What do you suppose your father was telling London? On most days not much. But the wise men in London … you remember I told you that Mr. Halverson the banker was one of them? These wise men knew that someday, strange as it might seem to us, the great German battleship Tirpitz would sneak into Tromsø harbor, right here, and hide from Allied airplanes until it was time to rush out and destroy all Allied ships. If the Tirpitz did enough damage, the Germans might win the war, and you would now be speaking German. And when you grew up you would have to marry Germans. It was as close as that. So we kept watch for the Tirpitz.
‘For nearly two years … can you imagine how long a time that is? For two years your father stayed in the mountains and told London what was happening in Tromsø. If a destroyer hid in our waters, he would tell the airplanes in London, and next day we would have bombs falling on the destroyer, and our houses too, but we didn’t care about that because we knew there was still a chance.
‘And then one day, in September of 1944, can you guess what appeared around this headland?’
‘The Tirpitz,’ said the children.
‘It was so big we could not believe it would fit between the islands. I remember running down to that pier over there and seeing how high it soared into the air. You couldn’t believe it. Where the captain stood was much higher than any building in Tromsø, and its guns were so enormous they terrified you even to look at them. We didn’t have to be told that if this fierce thing got free in the Atlantic it would sink every Allied ship. It was a hideous weapon to have hiding in your harbor. Look how menacing it is, even when it lies asleep.’
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 a
nswered: ‘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:
‘I hear as in a dream
Drifting among the flowers
Her soft and gentle voice
Evoking songs of birds.’
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!’