The Sword and the Net полностью

He went down to breakfast, very determinedly Nils. Uncle Axel was there now, and all four of them sat down to the meal, Aunt Kirsten and Gertrud sharing the work of serving. It was a very good meal, despite the prevailing shortage, at which Axel grumbled unceasingly, in some things like butter and preserves. Nils ate largely and did not talk. Axel buried himself behind the Stockholm newspaper, passing sheet after sheet to Aunt Kirsten as he finished them. Gertrud made a tentative remark or two, mostly to Nils; then gave up as he merely smiled in her direction without replying.

The meal was nearly over when Aunt Kirsten exclaimed in horror at something she was reading. Everyone looked at her curiously, even her husband lowering the page he was intent upon.

“Oh!” said Aunt Kirsten. “Oh, it’s . . . it’s dreadful! Dreadful!”

She had chanced upon a description of the plight of some Norse families in the bitter country around Narvik; families who, in the fighting months before, had been bombed out of their homesteads and then decided, with more bravery than sense, to stay where they were and remake something of what was left rather than join the swelling tide of refugees to the south.

She began to read aloud the passages that had moved her to horror—and then was stricken with remorse as Nils, with a mumbled apology, pushed aside his coffee, unfinished, and hurriedly left the kitchen.

“Tchk, tchk!” muttered Axel, and went back to his reading.

Gertrud’s brown eyes glistened with tears. “How could you!” she said to her mother. “How could you be so callous! To remind the poor boy like that!”

Kirsten shook her head. She said sadly:

“I don’t know what I can have been thinking of! . . . And not a twelvemonth since the poor laddie’s own parents were struck down in their own house. . . .”

Otto went straight to the workshop. He was pleased with himself. That had been very Nils-like behaviour: he believed, when he came to think it over, that he had even felt, as he left the kitchen, like a man whose beloved parents have recently been slaughtered in an accident of war.

He rolled up the sleeves of his blouse and began to set out his tools. He paused suddenly, smitten by self-criticism: ‘an accident of war’! That was not the right thought for Nils. If there were a Nils, and his parents had been killed by a necessary German bomb, Nils would not think of this as any ‘accident’—he would inevitably see this personal and unavoidable disaster as a fiendish crime, sadistically planned and executed by brutal barbarians. . . .

It was cold in the workshop, and Otto shivered. He came out of the immobility of thought and went to work. He must be careful to repair immediately this mental attitude of Nils: it was, after all, only what he had been told—first in the upper room of the Berlin suburban house, latterly and all the time by Axel Christensen. While he worked upon a slab of pine with the big plane, warmth creeping back to his body with the powerful strokes, he pondered upon the subject of Axel. A remarkable person! Who was he? Of course, in some way, in the service of the Reich—but exactly in what way? And in what standing? And what, really, was his nationality? And were Kirsten and her daughter Axel’s wife and daughter? And, whether they were or not, did either or both of them know what Axel’s real work was? Did Axel have the power to pass finally upon the ability of Otto Falken to perform, in the shape of Nils Jorgensen, the work for which he had been selected? What, exactly, was this work? Granted that it must be in England, what did it entail? And what would be its effect at the end? . . .

Axel came in as the planing was nearly done. He nodded to Otto, and crossed to his own private bench, where he stood, looking down at his tools in his habitual, somehow minatory silence. He was a tall, solid, stoop-shouldered man with a dense thatch of grey-brown hair, his eyes dark and unreadable and staring behind thick-lensed, iron-framed spectacles.

Otto, wrapping himself in Nils, got on with his work. He did not see that Axel had left the bench and moved over on quiet feet to stand just behind him. He did not know this until Axel spoke—very calmly, very casually and in his ‘workshop’ as opposed to his ‘duty instructional’ voice. And he asked a simple, ordinary, every-day question; a question which he had probably asked of his new apprentice five or six times in the past ten days. But he asked it in German. He said, in German:

“Where is the small finishing plane?”

Otto, wrapped up in his work—as Nils should be wrapped up in his work—replied without looking up. But he replied, instinctively, in the language in which he had been addressed; in his own language. He said, in German:

“On your own bench. I put it back last night.”