WAS wearing all the clothes he possessed.
Nevertheless, his teeth were still chattering and he
had lost the sensation in his fingers and toes. The
worst was his legs. He had bound new rags around
his feet, but that didn’t help much.
He stared out into the dark. They hadn’t heard
much from the Ivans that evening. Perhaps they
were celebrating New Year’s Eve. Perhaps they
were eating well. Lamb stew. Or ribs of lamb.
Gudbrand knew, of course, that the Russians didn’t
have any meat, but he couldn’t stop thinking about
food nevertheless. As for themselves, they hadn’t
had much more than the usual lentil soup and
bread. The bread had a green sheen to it, but they
had become accustomed to that. And if it became
so mouldy that it crumbled, they just boiled the
soup with the bread in it.
‘At least we got a sausage on Christmas Eve,’
Gudbrand said.
‘Shh,’ Daniel said.
‘There’s no one out there this evening, Daniel.
They’re sitting eating medallions of venison. With
a thick, light brown game sauce and bil-berries.
And almond potatoes.’
‘Don’t start talking about food again. Be quiet and
see if you can spot anything.’
‘I can’t see a thing, Daniel. Nothing.’
They huddled together, keeping their heads down.
Daniel was wearing the Russian cap. The steel
helmet with the Waffen SS badge lay beside him.
Gudbrand knew why. There was something about
the shape of the helmet which caused the eternally
ice-cold snow to pass under the rim and create a
continual, nerve-grinding whistling sound inside
the helmet, which was particularly unfortunate if
you were on duty at the listening post.
‘What’s wrong with your eyes?’ Daniel asked.
‘Nothing. I just have quite bad night vision.’
‘Is that all?’
‘And then I’m a little colour blind.’
‘A little colour blind?’
‘Red and green. I can’t tell the difference. The
colours seem the same. I never saw any berries,
for example, when we went into the forest to pick
cranberries for the Sunday joint . . .’
‘No more talk about food, I said!’
They were quiet. In the distance a machine gun
chattered. The thermometer showed minus twenty-
five. Last winter they’d had minus forty-five
several nights in a row. Gudbrand consoled
himself with the thought that the lice were less
active in this cold. He wouldn’t start itching until
he went off duty and crept under the woollen
blanket in his bunk. But they tolerated the cold
better than he did, the beasts. Once he had carried
out an experiment: he had left his vest out in the
snow in the biting cold for three consecutive days.
When he took the vest into the bunker again, it was
a sheet of ice. But when he thawed it out in front of
the stove, a teeming, crawling mass came to life
and he threw it into the flames out of sheer disgust.
Daniel cleared his throat.
‘How did you go about eating your Sunday joint
then?’
Gudbrand needed no second bidding.
‘First of all, Dad carved the joint, solemnly, like
a priest, while we boys sat completely still,
watching. Then Mum put two slices on each plate
and poured on gravy, which was so thick that she
had to take care she stirred it enough so that it
didn’t set. And there were loads of fresh, crisp
Brussels sprouts. You should put your helmet on
Daniel. What if you got shrapnel in your cap?’
‘Imagine if a shell hit my cap. Carry on.’
Gudbrand closed his eyes and a smile played
around his mouth.
‘For dessert we had stewed prunes. Or brownies.
That wasn’t such usual fare. Mum had brought that
tradition from Brooklyn.’
Daniel spat in the snow. As a rule, watch was an
hour during the winter, but both Sindre Fauke and
Hallgrim Dale were in bed with temperatures, so
Edvard Mosken had decided to increase it to two
hours until the section was back to full strength.
Daniel put a hand on Gudbrand’s shoulder.
‘You miss her, don’t you? Your mother.’
Gudbrand laughed, spat in the same place in the
snow as Daniel and gazed up at the frozen stars in
the sky. There was a rustling sound in the snow and
Daniel raised his head.
‘Fox,’ he said.
It was unbelievable, but even here, where every
square metre had been bombed and mines were
closer than the cobblestones in Karl Johans gate,
there was animal life. Not much, but they had both
seen hares and foxes. And the odd polecat.
Obviously they tried to shoot whatever they saw.
Everything was welcome in the pot. But after one
of the Germans had been shot while he was out
catching a hare, the top brass had got it into their