The Drifters (7 page)

They walked up the hill that led from the seafront to the center of Torremolinos, and there, on a side street, an old motion-picture hall had been converted into a ballroom consisting of a tiny raised floor, scores of small tables and much standing room. It was dark and lined with velvet so that the tremendous volume of sound which erupted from the electronic system came forth clean and hard, without reverbrating echoes. The lights were stroboscope, flashing on and off four times a second, but everything was subordinated to the marvelous beauty of the patrons. By the score, girls who had won honor grades at the Sorbonne and Uppsala and Wellesley came through the big doors, peered into the darkness, and were picked off by keen-minded young men who had won equal grades at Tokyo
University and Heidelberg. At any table of six you might find four nationalities, languages flowed more freely than the Coca-Cola which most of the dancers were drinking, and always there was the incredible volume of sound, louder than a score of the bands that the parents of these young people had listened to in the 1940s.

‘I really dig this music,’ Joe said as the hurricane of sound enveloped him in its metallic cocoon. Regardless of which nation the young people had grown up in, they accepted this throbbing music as an integral part of their culture and were at home with it; to them the ear-shattering sounds were as essential as pipes and cymbals had been to the ancient Greeks when they were evolving the theory of aesthetics.

‘This is my home,’ Ingrid shouted above the noise as they elbowed their way to a table. There Suzanne closed her eyes, leaned her head back, and invited the sound to flow over her. They were scarcely seated before two German students who had met them at their bar approached and ordered some drinks. They spoke good French, which left Joe isolated, but after a while one of the Germans said in fluent English, ‘Are you having trouble with the draft?’ When Joe nodded, the German clapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Very curious. One of my great-great-grandfathers ran away from Germany to the United States to escape his draft, and now you run away from the United States to Germany to escape yours.’ Joe was about to say that he wasn’t in Germany, but the young man interrupted, ‘Perhaps you know his family? Schweikert in Pennsylvania. One boy was all-American football at Illinois.’

‘Before my time,’ Joe said.

He walked back alone to Jean-Victor’s while the two girls reported to their bar, and he found Sandra waiting. Jean-Victor was out somewhere, but he had told her of the newcomer and she showed him how to spread the tartan sleeping bag. Joe watched her proficiency in handling things, and asked, ‘What did you do in London?’

‘Nothing. Father’s a banker and he’s always let me have a little bread. He was keen on camping and taught me how to cope.’

‘You been here long?’

‘Like the others. Came down for fifteen days. Wept when the airplane arrived to fly me back. Jean-Victor was
at the airport and he said, “Why go back?” So I’ve been here for almost a year.’

‘Who is Jean-Victor?’

‘Parents are Italian. Lugano—the Italian city at the southern end of Switzerland. His real name’s Luigi or Fettucini or something. He finds the French name involves less explanation. Gets a little money from home … keeps his hand in many things down here. We’re not sure how he makes his bread. Probably selling marijuana. I know he has connections in Tangier. You care for a joint?’

‘I’m not big on grass.’

‘Neither are we. If there’s a good party we pass the stuff—to be sociable. If not, we forget it for weeks.’

Joe unrolled the German sleeping bag and watched as Sandra knowingly adjusted newspapers and old blankets under it to ensure a better bed. ‘I slept in this for three weeks before Jean-Victor allowed me in his bed,’ she said. ‘Of course, he was sleeping with a Belgian girl at the time and I had to wait my turn.’ Joe climbed in and almost immediately fell asleep, but he was vaguely aware that when Sandra went to bed she kissed him lightly on the forehead, as a mother might, and sometime toward dawn he was awakened by Ingrid and Suzanne returning from their work. They undressed casually, prepared for bed, and when they saw he was awake, paused to chat. ‘It’s good to have a man in the room,’ Suzanne said.

Joe pointed to where Jean-Victor slept, and she said, ‘He’s taken. You’re for us,’ and they knelt down to kiss him goodnight.

‘I’m going to like Torremolinos,’ he said drowsily.

‘We all do,’ Ingrid cried happily as she crept into bed. ‘My God, this is heaven.’

‘Today I’m going to find a job,’ Joe said.

The daughter of a lion is also a lion.

When the Germans invaded Norway, I was able to adjust to their occupation. When the British were defeated in our waters, I never doubted that they would someday return to rescue us. When food was cut off, we survived; when fuel was in short supply, we shivered and made do; and even when Germany seemed triumphant on all fronts, we masked our feelings and never lost hope for an eventual victory. But when Knut Hamsun, our great novelist who won the Nobel Prize, turned his back on all that Norway stood for and openly propagandized on behalf of Nazi Germany, we not only lost heart but experienced a lasting shame, as if one of our family had done this dreadful thing, for if you cannot trust the great writers, on whom you have lavished your highest rewards, who in God’s name can you trust?

The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.

For God’s sake, give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.—Stevenson

The curtains of the First Act open on a wild and savage
beach on the Island of Ceylon. To the right and left, some huts of plaited bamboo. In front, two or three palms overshadowing giant cactus trees, twisted by the wind. Below, on a rock which overlooks the ocean, the ruins of an ancient Hindu pagoda. In the distance, the ocean, illuminated by a blazing sun.

The Pearl Fishers

Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.—Joel

The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything.—Voltaire

Ah, for some retreat

Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat,…

Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,

Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster knots of Paradise.

Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag, Slides the bird o’er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag;

Droops the heavy-blossom’d bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree—

Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.

—Tennyson

This Scandinavian flew down from Stockholm four times each year. No matter what the temperature, he dressed in his swim suit and went right out to lie on the sand, whether the sun was out or not. We asked him about this, and he said, ‘I paid a lot of money to get down here. I’m supposed to be here on the beach and the sun is supposed to be there in the sky and if it doesn’t know its job, that’s not my fault.’ And you know something? He always went home sunburned.

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 dogs and airplanes, so they had to leave Norway. But your father stayed. He and Mr. Storness the electrician and Mr. Gottheld the chemist—and how they survived, no one will ever know. Do you know why they stayed in the mountains, dodging the Nazi airplanes and killing the police dogs when they got too
close? Because they had to send messages to the airplanes in England. Your father had a radio, not a good one, and Mr. Storness cranked it by hand, hour after hour—and do you know what? Every time they sent a message to London, telling the airplanes where to bomb, German headquarters in Tromsø got the message too. Because they could listen on the radio, couldn’t they? So as soon as your father started to speak on his radio, the Germans would send out their patrols with dogs, and we would wait to see what they had when they came back.

‘What do you suppose your father was telling London? On most days not much. But the wise men in London … you remember I told you that Mr. Halverson the banker was one of them? These wise men knew that someday, strange as it might seem to us, the great German battleship
Tirpitz
would sneak into Tromsø harbor, right here, and hide from Allied airplanes until it was time to rush out and destroy all Allied ships. If the
Tirpitz
did enough damage, the Germans might win the war, and you would now be speaking German. And when you grew up you would have to marry Germans. It was as close as that. So we kept watch for the
Tirpitz.

‘For nearly two years … can you imagine how long a time that is? For two years your father stayed in the mountains and told London what was happening in Tromsø. If a destroyer hid in our waters, he would tell the airplanes in London, and next day we would have bombs falling on the destroyer, and our houses too, but we didn’t care about that because we knew there was still a chance.

‘And then one day, in September of 1944, can you guess what appeared around this headland?’

‘The
Tirpitz
,’ said the children.

‘It was so big we could not believe it would fit between the islands. I remember running down to that pier over there and seeing how high it soared into the air. You couldn’t believe it. Where the captain stood was much higher than any building in Tromsø, and its guns were so enormous they terrified you even to look at them. We didn’t have to be told that if this fierce thing got free in the Atlantic it would sink every Allied ship. It was a hideous weapon to have hiding in your harbor. Look how menacing it is, even when it lies asleep.’