Yesterday was Mother’s Day. Mine was (is) in the hospital, having suffered a “little” heart attack a few days earlier. She’s got her iPad on her lap as she sits propped up in a vinyl recliner. We discuss the latest news from the homeland as she scrolls through Aftenposten online. Inevitably - because it always does - the talk circles round to the ghosts of her childhood (and by extension, mine) - to Nikolas and the war prisoner camp across the street and the parking lot that replaced it and to his final day when he walked out a free man and promptly took his last breath.
She asks me again whether I ever got an answer from that professor who was supposedly working on cataloging all the camps about this particular camp. I tell her I am still waiting, but no, not yet. Then I suggest Nikolas was better off dying a free man than being repatriated to Russia given the treatment former prisoners of war received. She looks at me blankly as if this were news. And it is in a way. Nobody in Norway wants to talk about what happened after the prisoners went home. I suspect it has something to do with not wanting to come face to face with the reality that it was slave labor that built the roads and railways that the Germans left behind. Nikolas’s labor.
But the ghosts remain, the landscape as haunted as Flannery’s.
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