It took Nordstrum six hours to make it back down. A squall picked up on the way and he had to ski through snow so thick and blinding he could barely see his hand in front of his face. If it hadn’t blown through quickly, he would have had to shoot his own food and make a camp to survive. Hours later, in darkness, Nordstrum finally trudged back to the house—exhausted, frozen, so spent and cold his skis just fell out of his hands and he collapsed to his knees inside the door. Furious, his mother scolded his father for what he had done, but the old man just told her to shush and waved to Nordstrum. “Come here, Kurt.” Wet and famished, and a little angry too, Nordstrum did. His father picked him up and held Nordstrum’s blue face close to his chest and said, “‘In the Northlands, a true man goes on until he can go no further—and then he goes twice as far.’ Remember that, boy. One day, you may be called on to give a lot more than you think you have. Now you know you have it in you. In the meantime…” He put Nordstrum back on his feet and mussed his hair. “Tonight, you sit here.” He lifted Nordstrum into his own chair at the head of the table. “You’ve earned it.” As the biting wind cut through him on his miserable journey home, Nordstrum had cursed his father the whole way, but now he felt proud and knew the old man was right. He had been called on to do more. More than he knew he could. And while other children doubted themselves as they grew into men, Nordstrum always had this strength he could count on. He knew what he had inside, and others felt it.
On the road now, a beer truck clattered by, carrying Ringnes to the taverns in Rjukan. And shortly after, two Germans zoomed by on motorcycles. It was March and the wind was still sharp and brisk, and Nordstrum watched the house in his woolen jacket, huddled against the chill. He knew it wasn’t wise to go inside—he was a known conspirator and the NS could easily be watching—but as it grew dark he thought, What the hell, and looped around back from the neighbor’s property, through the fence, past the cow sheds and tractor stall, and snuck inside through the storage room door, which they always kept unlocked. He knew his father had been sick, though he was helpless to do much for him. This might well be the last time he would see him for a while. Perhaps for good. In the hearth, the fire was low. He saw his father’s reading glasses on a table by a book. The Master Builder, by Ibsen. Nordstrum smiled. The drama was one of his favorites. His father always saw himself as kind of an uncompromising figure himself. Growing up, Nordstrum had heard about the hubris of Halvard Solness and the wanderings of Peer Gynt a hundred times.
“Father!” he called out in the empty house.
No one replied.
Nordstrum knew that sometimes after work his father would head off to the Ox and Wheel in town for a couple of beers and a game of checkers. He picked up a photo on the table: his parents in front of the Royal Palace in Oslo, before Nordstrum was even born. And there was also one of him and his sister, Kristin, with whom Nordstrum had shared a room until he was twelve. She had married a professor and was living in Trondheim now. There was the familiar smell of tobacco about, his father’s pipe left in its ashtray, a smell from his youth that brought his childhood back as soon as it met his nostrils, and made him visualize his father as if he was sitting in his chair with a book on his lap, or sanding down wood for a sled, his pipe clenched between his teeth. Nordstrum opened the Ibsen, placing the ashtray on the book’s spine to spread it wide. He placed something in it, something that would let his father know he had been here.
Then, knowing the more time he spent here the more dangerous it became, he headed back out through the storage room and left.
From across the street, he kept an eye out until it grew late and cold. His father had never wanted Nordstrum to go off and fight. He wanted him to come back to Rjukan, to the farm, and wait out the storm here. His old man wasn’t a political person in any way; he thought the whole thing would all blow over quickly. “A fuss about nothing,” he insisted at first. “What do we even have here but snow and ice? By winter, the bastards will all have numb fingers and leave.” By then, Nordstrum was in his second year in engineering school in Oslo. Watching the house, his mind drifted to Anna-Lisette, his fiancée, in her last year of economics, with a face like a picture of the Sognefjord in May but a will of steel. In Oslo, many of the students donned the blue and yellow colors of the king. Patriotism raged like wildfire. Many looked to Nordstrum, who was strong and could handle himself in a fight and so was regarded as a kind of leader. “What about you, Kurt?” his fellow students asked. “You’ll be joining up as well, won’t you?”
“I don’t know,” he would reply. “Have you ever even shot a gun? Don’t be so quick to jump into uniform.”
Then the German flagship Blucher was sunk in the Oslofjord, and what was merely a threat became a full-out war.
Anna-Lisette went back to her home up north in Lillehammer. The Nazis weren’t anywhere near there yet. Nordstrum took her as far as he could on the train on his way to Narvik to fight.
“Please be safe, Kurt.” She held him close. “And smart. You always put others before yourself. In a war, that’ll only get you killed.”
“I promise,” Nordstrum said, making a little fun of her. “I will let the others do all the fighting for me.”
“I mean it, Kurt,” she said reprovingly, in her red and green reindeer sweater, her blond hair in braids. The Nazis had run easily through Poland, France, and the Netherlands. No one knew what was ahead of them. A ring of worry pooled in her blue eyes.
“Anna-Lisette, don’t be afraid.” Nordstrum brushed his hand against her cheek, more serious. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“It’s not just me,” she said. She sat next to him and kissed him, and pressed the baptism cross she wore around her neck into his hand. And then she was off the train at Lillehammer and he went on, leaning out between the cars and waving to her from the hand rail as it took him away, like some red-cheeked boy heading off to a soccer match, not to war. “I’ll be back for you!” he shouted, holding up her gift. They exchanged a few letters. By June she said the fighting was coming close to her; already there were Germans in the Gudbrandsdalen valley. It was August when he got word that a gruppenfuhrer’s car had been blown up on the road into town. Anna-Lisette was at the market when the German truck troop pulled up in the square. Soldiers jumped out, selecting townspeople at random. “You there! And you. Yes, miss, you.” Until they numbered forty. A proclamation was read aloud, then Anna-Lisette was put against a wall and shot, alongside thirty-nine of her townspeople. It was part of the new response to acts of sabotage against the Reich. And this time it was an act Nordstrum’s own unit had set up. He only found out what had happened much later.
Now, back on the road from Rjukan, Nordstrum saw lights coming toward him and then weave to the other side of the road. His father’s truck—the coughing old Opel that somehow continued to run, for even in war, it defied imagination how something so beat up could still be moving. Nordstrum’s heart sped up. The truck slowed, and Nordstrum almost made a move to follow it. It turned through his father’s gate and bounced along the rutted, unpaved road to the house.
From far away, Nordstrum watched the old man climb out. He looked older, of course, stooped a bit, maybe a bit wayward from the beer. In two years, he looked as if he’d aged ten. A man who once could ski thirty kilometers with barely a stop for water, and who could drop a reindeer from a hundred meters with a single shot. Nordstrum watched him collect some wood and load it into a kindling strap, push with his shoulder against the heavy wooden door to their house, which stuck for a moment as it always had, and head inside.
The coast seemed clear. Nordstrum stepped out of the shadows of his hiding place, about to cross the street.