Free The Drifters by James A. Michener Page A

brought him, he began to collect all things relating to Ceylon. He had maps, bills of lading addressed to Colombo, accounts of nineteenth-century voyages, bits of Singhalese cloth, and above all, a series of airline posters showing vivid scenes around Kandy and Ratnapura. At exciting intervals some traveler who had actually visited Ceylon would pass through Tromsø, and later, in the bar of the Grand Hotel, he would report: ‘That chap Bjørndahl knew more about Ceylon than I did, and I was there.’
    His family made one concession to Bjørndahl’s mania: a small room was set aside for his mementos of the island. Its walls were lined with maps and decorated with the airline posters, but the salient feature was something which had come late, a phonograph on which he played repeatedly such fragments of Georges Bizet’s
The Pearl Fishers
as he had been able to collect from random sources. So far he had found one tenor aria, one duet with tenor and baritone, and an extraordinary passage in which the soprano prays to Brahma and Siva for the safety of the fishermen. When he sat in his Ceylon room and played this haunting music, he seemed to be not in Tromsø but in the land of his enchantment.
    The tenor passage, technically a cavatina of almost childish simplicity, was one of the lushest compositions of the nineteenth century, a song so sweetly sentimental that modern tenors had grown afraid of it. Britta’s father owned it in three versions: by Enrico Caruso, who had loved it; by Beniamino Gigli, who had sung it better than anyone else; and by the incomparable Swede, Jussi Bjørling, whose voice was geared to the sustained notes. Duringthe long winter nights, which encompassed the entire day, the Bjørndahl children had grown accustomed to the ghostly tenors singing their complaint:
    ‘I hear as in a dream
    Drifting among the flowers
    Her soft and gentle voice
    Evoking songs of birds.’
    The selection that Britta preferred was the one in which the heroine prayed, for whenever the soprano pronounced the names Brahma and Siva, Britta could visualize their statues and the temple in which they stood. Thus Ceylon became almost as real to her as it was to her father, and while she did not share his sentimental craving to see the island, she did understand how it could preoccupy his imagination. In school she told her teacher, ‘I grew up in Ceylon,’ and when the teacher made inquiries and found that Britta had never been outside of Tromsø, she put the girl down as a little fibber, especially when Britta insisted that she had been there … with her father.
    In Tromsø there were many who smiled indulgently at Bjørndahl and his dreams; suspicions grew that the long years in the mountains had touched his mind, but one crucial fact remained to silence adverse comment: of all the patriots who had fled into the mountains, including even Storness the electrician and Gottheld the chemist, he was the only one who survived the cold and the Nazis. Many had started with him, but most had been driven into Sweden; Storness had died of malnutrition and Gottheld had been shot.
    So Britta never forgot that her father was an authentic hero, and her mother too. This was why she had kept silent when she saw her mother and ugly Mr. Mogstad with his dirty mustaches. It was also why she consented to sail with Mogstad each summer to see the sunken battleship, because when she peered into the silent waters and saw its grisly terror hiding there, she could honestly say, ‘My father and mother sank it.’
    As she grew older she had to admit what an ineffective man her father had become; the cavatina was a dirge for the opportunities he had lost. Its long-drawn cries were laments for his vanished hopes, and others felt sorry forhim, but when Britta looked at him she could say compassionately: ‘I am the daughter of heroes.’
    In her fifteenth summer Britta Bjørndahl was one of the most beautiful girls in Tromsø, an island noted for its handsome