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Authors: James A. Michener
Tags: Fiction
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the breeze.
The Pearl Fishers
Everything I relate in this narrative I either saw for myself or heard about from those involved. For example, the flaxen-haired Norwegian girl of whom I now speak once spent several days enchanting me, like Scheherazade, with tales of her childhood in northern Norway.
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
The Pearl Fishers
Everything I relate in this narrative I either saw for myself or heard about from those involved. For example, the flaxen-haired Norwegian girl of whom I now speak once spent several days enchanting me, like Scheherazade, with tales of her childhood in northern Norway.
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
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