“But the dog must belong to Karine! Not to all the boys as well!”
“Yes. But we must ask Vetle and Hanne first. They must go along with the idea.”
Abel nodded. “Of course. Give them a call today!”
Meanwhile, Jonathan was working at the hospital. He soon became a seasoned porter and would convey the wounded and the dead. He prepared the wounded, making them fairly presentable for further procedures before their operations. He also taught himself to make the deceased look as nice as possible before the pathologist or the undertaker took over. It was tough work, but he gritted his teeth and did a good job of it. He got paid as well, which was a wonderful feeling. Just knowing that he had truly earned it paid dividends in his self-esteem.
As the months passed he was given more and more responsibility in the department. He did very well indeed because he always did his very best, and Grandfather Christoffer in Drammen was pleased.
His whole family was proud of him.
A whole year had passed since Tengel the Evil had vanished without a trace in Berlin. The Wanderer stayed there, searching day and night, but nowhere could he detect more than a tiny hint of Tengel the Evil’s presence. Heike and the other ancestors guarded Linden Avenue; they didn’t notice anything of Tengel the Evil. Of course, they were also in the Valley of the Ice People from time to time, which was where they could feel his spirit guarding the vessel with the water of evil in it. But he wasn’t present himself, which baffled them.
They reached the conclusion that his power wasn’t yet sufficiently strong. He was waiting somewhere. But where?
In April 1940, Germany occupied Norway.
During the following months, Jonathan continued working at the hospital. In his heart, he loathed the German insurgents and would have liked to join one of the resistance groups that he heard whispers about. But he knew nobody, and it was necessary to proceed with immense caution because there were informers everywhere. He knew that a few members of the hospital staff mixed with the Germans.
Jonathan had also heard rumours that the resistance movement wasn’t very well organized. It mostly consisted of small groups without any overall management. The groups didn’t know one another, everything was so disorganized. It was mostly passive resistance – for instance, go-slows, letters that weren’t passed on, orders that weren’t properly carried out, seeming puzzled or acting stupid towards the Germans. The insurgents felt as if they had bumped into a soft wall, and there was nothing they could put their finger on.
The worst thing was that, at first, the Norwegians didn’t really know who could be trusted. You always had to consider who you were confiding in.
There was so much Jonathan wanted. He was young and bold; you could say that he was foolhardy, but he didn’t know which group he should join or how to move forward without spoiling things for others. His one-man campaign seemed futile.
This was the stage he had reached by the summer of 1941, when something happened in the street in Oslo that was to have a decisive impact on him.
By now Jonathan had grown into a tall, handsome young man: blond with blue eyes and strong features like his father Vetle, but a lot more heavily built than him. He was an eye-catcher, also for German officers with Aryan features in mind.
His mother Hanne had sent him some new clothes that she had sewn herself. There was a bright red shirt in the parcel, because Hanne, who was French, was fond of colour. Jonathan loved the shirt immediately. He wanted to show it off on Karl Johans Gate, Oslo’s elegant main street. He wanted the girls to notice him. As yet, he didn’t have a girlfriend – after all, he was only seventeen – but he would look at them, of course. He liked it when they showed an interest in him, obviously a first sign that you’re thinking of the opposite sex. Later on, you adopt a more mature approach, so that you no longer bask in other people’s admiration but forget yourself in your genuine interest in the other person.
It never occurred to Jonathan that the Germans would be “agitated” at seeing him wearing a provocative red shirt.
Perhaps it wasn’t so much the Germans as their Norwegian sympathizers?
A group of four men stopped him, two SS soldiers and two of their Norwegian followers. All four of them were rather drunk.
The two Norwegians forced Jonathan to stop. They shouted that he should take off his shirt. When he didn’t do so, they waved their pistols in the air. Jonathan didn’t know what to do. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that passers-by were hurrying away from the spot.
The Germans said something, which he caught as “Bolschewik Schwein,” but they were more passive spectators than the Norwegians, who obviously wanted to impress their German friends. The two men tore his nice new shirt off him. Tore it so that it was ripped.
That fine shirt, that his mother had spent so many hours sewing! Jonathan’s anger was boiling in him, but fortunately he managed to control his temper. They took his name and address, wrote it down in a notebook, and then they ordered him to run.
A Bolshevik pig? Neither Hanne nor Jonathan had ever connected a shirt with politics!
There he stood with a bare torso, feeling the anger rise to dangerous degrees inside. He definitely wasn’t going to run, but he definitely mustn’t strike back at those horrible creeps, boasting behind their pistols.
“Run!” they shouted. “Run, run!”
They fired a few warning shots in the air.
Jonathan began to walk along the street.
“Run, run,” they commanded, pushing him forward all the time.
Jonathan walked as calmly as he could. They thumped his back, bawled and shouted, but he went on walking. Finally, the German soldiers told the two Norwegians to leave him alone and began to walk away. The Norwegians gave up and followed them. Jonathan vaguely understood that they tried to defend their behaviour and would have liked to continue, but one of the Germans said something that sounded like “arisch” and then they were too far away to hear.
On his way back to the hospital – with a bare torso and hot in the head – Jonathan pondered what he could have done differently. He reached the conclusion that he couldn’t have acted any differently. Silent opposition. That was the best method the Norwegians could use, because they knew the German method of reprisals. News from outside was reaching them, nobody could say how, but Jonathan knew that the other occupied countries might be having a much worse time than Norway. The resistance in, say, Czechoslovakia had many times resulted in the Germans taking revenge on innocent people. Now they had a terrible chancellor there, a true monster. His name was Heydrich. Norway might experience the same.
Jonathan didn’t want to his countrymen to suffer for his own thoughtlessness.
The hospital received the half-naked boy with horror, and he had to tell them what had happened. He did so plainly without admitting any political affiliation, because he knew that there were spies among the hospital staff.
The following day, something happened that he had long yearned for. A doctor and an administrator summoned him in private and spoke to him about the general situation of the war.
Jonathan replied cautiously, but his answers must have been good because he was finally asked the question he had been waiting for. Might he consider becoming a member of a small resistance group? They explained that they needed people like him – young, strong and cool-headed.
Jonathan wasn’t so sure that he was cool-headed; he had an unpleasant awareness of being foolhardy. Because of something his father had once said when he had boasted at home of the heroic deeds he would carry out against the Germans. But the fact that he had acted so correctly the previous day had impressed the others and himself. He accepted their flattering words and promised solemnly that he would be a worthy member of the group.
That was when Jonathan’s resistance work began. It was to be more complicated