Second World War

The Second World War shapes the novel through invasion, clandestine Resistance work, and the long silence that separates those experiences from the next generation. Trond Sander remembers the German arrival in Oslo as a child, but he does not know the full extent of his father’s wartime role until Franz tells him about the courier route to Sweden. The war is therefore both a historical emergency and a family secret: it changes where Trond’s father lives and what he does, while leaving his wife and children without an account of the life he has made elsewhere.

The invasion as childhood memory

In 1940, when Trond was seven, German soldiers marched through Oslo in an unending column. The child remembers the cold and the street’s silence, broken by the coordinated crash of boots, followed by Messerschmitts sweeping low over the roofs from the direction of the fjord. His father said nothing. He took Trond by the hand, and the two left the crowd and walked towards Østbane Station to find out whether a southbound train or the bus on Mosseveien was still running. Trond cannot remember how they had travelled into town or precisely how they got home; he thinks they probably walked. The remembered scene is sharply visual and audible, but its practical details remain uncertain.

Not long after the invasion, Trond’s father went away for the first time. Trond and his sister began their annual swims in the cold water of Bunnefjord, jumping from the rocks at Katten and Ingierstrand. They used a rope so that the sibling left on shore could help if the swimmer cramped. The ritual had begun before the invasion as an exercise in doing something difficult enough to hurt; after their father’s departure, it became part of the children’s life without him. Years later, Trond recalls the freezing water and the invasion together, linking private family change to the public arrival of occupation.

The war also touches the family through an earlier death. One of Trond’s maternal uncles was shot by the Germans in 1943 while trying to escape from a police station in Sørlandet. Trond was not present, and he does not know whether the uncle had a funeral. This absent knowledge contrasts with the vividness of the invasion memory: wartime loss can be inherited as a fact while remaining inaccessible as an experience.

A hidden route to Sweden

In 1942, Trond’s father came north through the forest looking for a place near the Swedish border. He needed a recurring place to take cover when carrying papers, letters, and sometimes films to Sweden for the Resistance, and to return to after completing a mission and obscuring his tracks. He presented himself openly as a man seeking somewhere to think. In the village by the river, that explanation seemed plausible; people accepted his odd habits and did not know the purpose of his visits. Franz alone understood what he really wanted. The two men had known of one another before they met, and the agreed words at Franz’s door initiated their cooperation.

Trond’s father established himself at Barkald’s neglected small farmstead, repairing it while building a convincing ordinary presence. He cleared the byre, repaired the roof and windows, renewed boards, fixed the stove, swept the chimney, and made chairs. He crossed Barkald’s meadow with an empty bag on his way to the shop and returned with supplies, or sat by the river because, as he said, he needed to be close to water to think. These visible tasks furnished cover for the concealed work. After trips to Sweden, he often stayed longer to cut grass or repair the chimney masonry, gradually making a second life that his family in Oslo did not know existed.

The cover mattered because occupation was present in the landscape. German troops had requisitioned the farmhouse nearest the church and shop, displacing its occupants into an already crowded pensioner’s cottage. A guard was often stationed at the bridge approach, carrying a sub-machine gun; sometimes he sat smoking on a rock beside the river. Trond’s father crossed that route by talking to the guards in German. He learned about their homes and interests, making them individuals rather than an indistinguishable threat, while remaining aware that an unexpected move could provoke a shot. On other occasions he took a fuller bag through the meadows and rowed across the river. Searches of the farmstead found tools and two books by Hamsun, but nothing suspicious. His papers were in order, and the village knew him as the handyman restoring Barkald’s place.

Secrecy, risk, and ordinary routines

The courier line ran for two years, through summer and winter. When Trond’s father was away from the cabin, people from the village sometimes carried the final leg across the border. Franz did so once or twice, and Jon’s mother also carried it when she could get away. Mail might be collected from a bus or from the shop, before or after closing time. Jon’s mother could take it upriver with food she was ostensibly bringing because Barkald wanted the handyman fed. The ordinary errands and meals supplied plausible explanations for movement and contact.

That cover depended on local familiarity as much as on documents. Everyone in the district knew one another’s habits, and anything unusual could be noticed and recorded in the informal accounting people kept of each other’s lives. Repeated patterns could expose a courier even when no single act looked suspicious. The resistance work thus relied on making danger appear routine: repairs, shopping, cooking, visits, and crossings had to remain legible as village life. Trond and the rest of his immediate family were among those kept ignorant. His father went away and came home again, sometimes a week later, sometimes a month later; the family adapted to his absences without knowing where he had been or what he had carried.

The history disclosed after the war

In the summer of 1948, three years after the Germans had left Norway, fifteen-year-old Trond spends time with Jon and his family, yet the war is no longer something he and his father discuss. Trond’s father never speaks to him about his wartime activities. Franz supplies the missing account, explaining that Trond’s father had asked him to tell it when the opportunity arose. The disclosure is not a direct confession from the man whose actions it describes, but testimony from a collaborator who had known the secret at the time.

Trond recognizes the limits of what he can claim to remember. In recounting the shooting of Odd, he says that his father could not have told him every detail as it appears in his memory; he cannot tell whether he began filling in the scene immediately or reconstructed it over the years. He distinguishes the event’s undeniable facts from the remembered picture built around them. That same tension governs the wartime history: Franz’s account changes Trond’s understanding, but does not give him access to every thought or moment his father kept private. After hearing it, Trond finds that the valley, forest, fields, river, and his father all seem altered. He is unsure whether his father feels closer or more distant, and knows he cannot simply enter a history his father has not opened to him.

Significance

The war’s consequences persist beyond occupation and the end of the courier route. Trond’s father’s absences had divided his life between Oslo and the village by the river, while the family experienced those absences without knowing their cause. The delayed revelation makes the past something Trond must assemble from other people’s memories, practical traces, and acknowledged uncertainty. The novel sets the child’s remembered silence in Oslo beside the adult’s later knowledge of secret movement through forests, farms, and river crossings. In that contrast, wartime history is neither fully hidden nor fully recovered: it is a life lived by Trond’s father, withheld from his family, and disclosed to his son only after the danger has passed.