Free The Drifters by James A. Michener

came from London. And when we heard no news from your father and Mr. Storness, we supposed they were dead too. Then, in early November, we got a message from London demanding that we advise them by radio as to whether the
Tirpitz
was still here. But with your father missing, how could we reply?
    ‘Late one night in November a brave little boy came to my house and gave me a message that read: “Go to the wife of Storness the electrician and pick up a package which she will have. Bring it this night to the cabin at the head of the fjord, for our radio is broken.” It was curfew, of course, extra strict because of the
Tirpitz
, but I slipped past the Germans and went to the Storness home, where Mrs. Storness gave me a small package wrapped in cloth and covered with hog’s fat, which was almost impossible to get. I tucked the package in my skirt, like this, and crept out of her house—and what do you think happened?’
    It was Britta who answered: ‘A police dog came at you. He smelled the hog fat and you rubbed some off on your finger and gave it to him and he went away.’
    ‘I sneaked through the German lines and got into the countryside and walked till morning. Then I hid in the forest and listened to the German planes passing over me, and the next night I got to the head of the fjord and delivered the package. I kissed your father and started right back to Tromsø—and what do you suppose I saw when I was hiding in the woods that third morning?’
    Britta supplied the answer: ‘You saw a hundred English airplanes fly over your head. And you saw one explosion after another lighting up the sky. And you heard great explosions echoing through the mountains. And when you slipped back through the German lines and went to the seashore where the others stood, you no longer saw the
Tirpitz.
’
    With the reading matter which Mrs. Bjørndahl had smuggled to her future husband hiding in the mountains had been a back issue of the
National Geographic
, picked up from some passing ship, containing a long story about Ceylon, and as Bjørndahl remained in the hills, cold and without food and constantly harassed by the Germans, he kept this magazine with him and in time developed a fixation about Ceylon, for it was everything that northern Norway was not: it had an abundance of fruit which you could pick right off the trees; it had sunshine every day of the year; you didn’t have to go about bundled in fur; and above all, it had a languid elegance in its palm trees, its slowly moving elephants and seductive music. If there was one spot on earth where a man could be happy, it would be Ceylon, and Bjørndahl determined that as soon as the war was over—for he trusted implicitly in an Allied victory—he would spend the rest of his life in Ceylon.
    He was reinforced in this decision by the peculiar nature of Tromsø. Even in peace Tromsø presented difficulties, for in the summer there was no night and men lived in a kind of never-never land of dreams and fantasies, while in the winter there was no day. In January the sun never rose above the horizon, and the frail light it provided was gray and ghostly. Of the long years he had remained hidden in the hills, hundreds of days were spent in total darkness, and their deep shadow had entered his soul.‘The day the Germans surrender, I head for Ceylon,’ he told his partners again and again.
    But with the coming of peace came responsibilities. He married the attractive girl who had fed him in the mountains, and now had to support her children—he always spoke of them as ‘her children.’ His job did not give him time for travel, nor would he have had the funds if it did. His four medals were hung on the wall in a plush-lined box and Ceylon receded into legend. It still existed in its perpetual sunlight beyond some distant horizon, but by the early 1960s he realized that he was not going to see it.
    This did not mean that he lost interest. Starting with the magazine his future wife had