The news came on a Tuesday.
It came the way most important things came during the occupation — not in a single dramatic moment but as a slow accumulation of signals. The German patrols thinning over the preceding week. The checkpoints unmanned on roads that had been controlled for five years. A particular quality of silence from the garrison in Bodø that Eriksen, who had developed a near-instinctive understanding of German administrative behaviour over four years, described simply as the silence of men who had received orders they did not yet know how to process.
Then the radio.
The BBC broadcast that we had been monitoring illegally since 1940, through static and German jamming and the rotating battery problems of three successive radio sets, spoke the words we had been waiting five years to hear.
Germany had surrendered. The war in Europe was over. It was the eighth of May, 1945.
Dahl heard it before any of us. He came to find me in the woodshed where I was doing the same work I had been doing when Shepherd’s first message arrived four years earlier — splitting firewood, the axe and the block, the ordinary maintenance of a life conducted in the mountains. He stood in the doorway for a moment without speaking. Just looked at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before and could not immediately classify. Not relief, exactly. Not triumph. Something more complicated than either, the expression of a man arriving at a destination he has been moving toward for so long that the arrival itself has become strange.
“It’s done,” he said.
I set down the axe.
We stood there in the pale May sunlight — both of us, apparently, uncertain what one was supposed to do with the end of the thing that had organised every waking hour of the past five years. The mountains looked the same. The birch trees at the edge of the clearing had leafed out overnight, the way they did in May with the particular sudden insistence of northern spring, indifferent to the significance of this particular morning.
After a while, Eriksen appeared from the farmhouse. Then Nielsen. Then Bergmann, who had survived everything and had at some point in the previous year stopped cleaning his rifle in the corner and started cleaning it beside the fire with everyone else, a small migration nobody had remarked on but everyone had noticed. They came out into the clearing one at a time and stood in the sunlight.
Nobody cheered.
I had expected cheering, or something like it — the discharge of five years of tension in a single overwhelming moment. What I had not expected was this: eight people standing in a mountain clearing in the early morning of the eighth of May, 1945, not quite knowing what to do with themselves. The sun on the birch leaves. The silence that was different from all the other silences we had occupied, because this one was not the silence of waiting or the silence of concealment but simply silence — the absence of a thing that had been present for so long its absence was itself a kind of sound.
I looked at the people around me. Eriksen, standing very still with his hands at his sides, his face doing something it almost never did — nothing, absolutely nothing, a complete suspension of the careful neutrality he wore as a working expression, as though the news had temporarily dissolved the habit. Nielsen, who had joined us in the summer of 1940 with his naval officer’s precision and had spent five years applying it to problems naval officers were not trained for, was looking at the mountains with the expression of a man reviewing an account and finding it to balance. Bergmann, who had never told anyone why he had stayed in the eastern forest rather than surrendering and had showed no sign of starting, stood with his hands clasped in front of him and his head slightly bowed, which was either prayer or something that looked enough like it from the outside that the distinction didn’t matter.
Ingrid was looking at me. When I met her eyes she offered a small nod — the resistance fighter’s acknowledgment, the one that said: we did it, the thing we said we were doing is done. There was more than that in it. There was also everything we had not yet had the conditions to say directly, which was a conversation for later when the conditions existed.
Dahl said: “I’ll make coffee.” He went back inside, and this broke something, and the others began to talk. Small things at first, practical things — where they would go, what route down from the mountains, who would need to send word to family. The large things could wait. The large things had been waiting for five years and could wait another hour.
I walked to the edge of the clearing and looked at the mountains and gave myself a few minutes that were not practical.
Somewhere in them — in crevices and caves and long-abandoned shepherd’s huts and the holds of boats now returned to fishing — the equipment of resistance was distributed across the landscape. Rifles. Radio sets. Codebooks. The physical residue of five years of a different kind of war. It would be found and collected and catalogued, eventually. Or not found, and weathering into the mountains alongside everything else that disappeared.
I thought about Kristian.
Not for the first time that morning — I had been thinking about him since before Dahl appeared in the doorway, in the half-conscious way you think about people who are permanently present at the edges of your attention. But with more deliberateness now. The particular quality of a thought you owe to someone: here is the news. Here is the thing we said we were doing it for.
He had been certain, even at the end. He had taken a sniper’s bullet in the soft light of an early morning outside Narvik and had spent his last conscious minutes telling me to continue, which was the same thing he had always been telling me. Norway will not fall. Go on.
Norway had not fallen. Germany had.
He would have had something to say about it. Something dry and precisely aimed, the way he had when he was pleased about something and didn’t want to show it too openly. I could hear the tone without being able to fill in the words, which was perhaps the most honest account of grief available at this distance: the rhythm of a person preserved, the content no longer recoverable.
I went inside for the coffee.
“Haugen,” I said, when we were sitting at the table.
Dahl set down his cup.
We had learned in February what most of us had suspected since his capture. He had died in Grini, the German detention camp outside Oslo, in the winter of 1943. The camp records, when they were eventually obtained, would show the cause of death as illness. The men who had been there with him would later describe something more deliberately administered than that.
The knowledge had arrived in February with the careful neutrality of confirmed intelligence — a fact, sourced and corroborated, slotted into the understanding we already had of how these things tended to go. I had noted it and continued. There was nothing else available to do in February of 1945 with the war still running. You noted the fact and continued.
Now the war was no longer running.
“He knew what he was doing when he walked out of that tent,” Dahl said. “He always knew.”
This was true. Haugen had understood what choosing resistance meant and had chosen it anyway, from the first night in the eastern forest when twenty-three men stepped out of the dark and he spread his maps on a door balanced on ammunition crates. He had been a man who carried the weight of other people’s choices as though they were his own, and he had done it without complaint or self-pity, and the Germans had eventually found a way to make him pay for it.
“He was a good officer,” Eriksen said. He said it in the flat way Eriksen said most things, which meant he had thought about it carefully before saying it.
Nobody offered anything more. We sat with Haugen for a while, in the way you sit with the dead when there is no body to sit with and the sitting has to happen inside you instead.
Later, when the others had gone to begin the practical business of coming down from the mountains, I sat alone at the table and allowed myself what I had not been able to allow in February: the actual weight of it. The briefings in cold farmhouses. The way he had absorbed difficult intelligence without showing anything but the steady determination to act on it correctly. The specific dignity with which he had stood at the edge of the surrendering men at the end of the Narvik campaign and made space for whatever they decided, because the men in front of him were the thing he was responsible for and he knew it.
He had been thirty-four years old when the Germans took him. His wife was in Bergen. I did not know if they had children.
There were too many people I did not know well enough, and would not have the chance to know better, and this was the cost the war had collected from the living as well as from the dead: all the time and all the knowing that had been spent on other things and could not be recovered.
I sat at the table for a while, in the morning of the day the war ended, and let this be what it was.
The two days between the eighth of May and the tenth passed in a particular strangeness.
The war was over but the mountains were the same mountains. The farmhouse was the same farmhouse. The routines that had governed five years of resistance life — the watch rotations, the radio schedules, the operational security that had become as automatic as breathing — did not dissolve immediately. They dissolved slowly, each person abandoning them at their own pace, sometimes catching themselves performing a habit that no longer had a function and having to consciously set it down.
Eriksen dismantled the radio set on the afternoon of the eighth, working with the same methodical care he brought to everything. He did not dismantle it because it needed to be dismantled immediately. He dismantled it because it was a task with a clear procedure and a definite end point, and this was what he needed that afternoon.
Dahl spent most of the eighth sitting at the table with the maps spread in front of him, not looking at them so much as allowing the familiar objects to occupy the space around him while he thought whatever he was thinking. Once I came in from outside and found him simply sitting, hands flat on the table, not asleep and not reading, in the particular stillness of a man who has arrived at something and is not yet ready to move away from it.
I did not disturb him.
We cooked a proper meal on the evening of the eighth, using the stored provisions that had always been maintained with the operational discipline of people who could not afford to run short. There was enough for something almost lavish by the standards of the past five years — proper soup, real bread, the last of the coffee. We ate together around the table and talked without the low-level monitoring of the conversation for operational content, which produced a quality of conversation I had almost forgotten was possible.
Bergmann told a story about his life before the war. It was the first time I had heard him volunteer personal information of any kind, and the story itself was unremarkable — he had worked on a fishing trawler out of Ålesund, had a sister in Bergen, had been engaged once to a woman who had moved to Sweden in 1938. He told it in the flat, factual tone he told everything, without apparent awareness that it was the first such story he had told, and nobody commented on this either. It was simply what the evening made space for.
We moved down on the tenth.
The Germans in Norway laid down their arms over the following days with the organised thoroughness that had characterised everything they did. Columns of soldiers moved through the streets of Norwegian cities, some still in full kit, all of them wearing an expression I recognised from my own low points during the resistance years — the look of a person who has arrived somewhere they cannot quite believe and does not yet know how to inhabit.
We came down from the mountains on the tenth of May, moving in daylight for the first time without the constant calculation of patrol schedules and sightlines. The sensation was peculiar. After five years of treating every open space as a potential exposure, walking openly along a road felt less like freedom and more like a reflex the body had lost and was slowly, tentatively attempting to recover.
Ingrid walked beside me. We had not spoken much since the capitulation announcement — there was a great deal to say and no particular pressure to say it immediately, which was its own form of relief. The relationship that had formed between us over five years of shared work and shared danger had never been adequately named, in part because the conditions had not permitted the naming and in part because we had both understood that naming it might make it fragile in circumstances that required it not to be fragile. Now the circumstances had changed. We were both discovering that peace required different kinds of attention than war, and that the adjustment was not automatic.
“What does it look like?” she asked.
“What does what look like?”
“Everything. When you imagine going back. What does it look like?”
The question required more thought than it might have, because I had spent five years training myself not to imagine going back. Hope of that specific variety was a liability in resistance work. You kept your mind on the current operation, the immediate problem, the next eight hours. The future was an abstraction that could wait.
“The fjord,” I said finally. “The smell of it in the morning before the fishing boats go out. Salt and cold and something green underneath.” I considered. “My mother’s voice. I can still hear it, but I’m not certain I’d recognise it on the street.”
Ingrid’s hand found mine. She had become adept at these gestures over the years — present enough to register, measured enough not to claim more than the moment contained. I had learned to receive them in kind.
“What about you?” I asked.
“The university,” she said without hesitation. “History. I applied before the invasion and was accepted. Then the Germans came.” She said it without bitterness, which I found remarkable. “I assume it will reopen properly.”
“It will.”
“You could teach,” she said. “Languages. You mentioned it once.”
“That was a different person’s idea.”
“The idea survived. Even if the person changed.”
Narvik from a distance looked smaller than I remembered.
Cities often did, coming back to them after years away — the childhood version of any place occupies a larger space in the imagination than the actual geography warrants. But what surprised me was not the smallness. It was the degree to which it simply looked like itself. I had half-expected the occupation to have left something structural behind, some visible residue in the buildings or the layout of the streets, and instead the town from the approach road was just Narvik: the fjord the same grey-blue, the mountains above holding their shapes against the May sky exactly as they always had.
The German signs were being taken down from the building facades. The flags were gone from the civic buildings. Evidence of the practical work of ending an occupation, which turned out to look a great deal like municipal maintenance.
I did not go to my family’s house immediately.
I had sent word through resistance channels that I was alive and returning, but the message was weeks old and the channels it had travelled through were not reliable for nuance. My parents knew I was coming. They did not know when, and I did not know what five years of occupation would have done to them specifically — what version of not-knowing their son was alive would be legible in their faces when I knocked on the door.
There are reunions that need a moment’s preparation. Not to rehearse what you will say, because nothing you can rehearse will be adequate, but to settle into the reality of the thing before the thing actually happens. To give yourself the time to understand what you are about to receive.
I walked the harbour instead.
The wharves had been used heavily for German supply operations throughout the occupation, and there was evidence of this in the condition of the dock infrastructure — the wear patterns, the modifications to the loading equipment, the particular arrangement of structures that had served a different purpose for five years. But the fishing boats were out on the water. This fact was more steadying than anything I could have told myself.
At the far end of the main wharf, a group of people were gathered around someone’s portable radio. As I drew closer I heard what they were listening to: an announcement that King Haakon would return from London. The date was not yet fixed, but it was coming. The King was coming home.
I thought of the photograph on the wall of the first resistance hideout, the winter of 1940: Troskap. Loyalty. Someone had pinned it up as a statement of intent in a cabin full of men who had walked into a forest rather than surrender, and it had functioned as one for everything that followed.
Norway had kept faith.
My mother opened the door before I reached the step.
She had been watching from the window — a habit, I understood later, that she had maintained for years. Standing at the window at intervals through the day. Not waiting specifically — she had no way to know when I was coming, only that I was alive and on my way — but a body’s way of keeping itself oriented toward something it needed.
She was smaller than I remembered. Not diminished, exactly — she had the same precise bearing, the same quality of economy in her movements, the same face. But the scale of her had shifted in my memory over five years in the way things shift when you carry them a long distance without being able to put them down: they are real when you finally hold them again, but the dimensions are not quite what you had been carrying.
She looked at me for a long moment without speaking. Verifying, I thought — the way you verify something you believe to be true but need to confirm with more than just the mind before you allow yourself to act on it.
Then she took my face in both hands, the way she had on the morning I left, and looked at me directly with an expression that contained several years’ worth of things she had not been able to say to anyone.
“Come inside,” she said.
My father was in his chair by the radio. He had lost weight and moved with the careful deliberateness that suggested his leg had worsened over the years — the old war shrapnel that had always bothered him in the cold, now evidently bothering him more broadly. He looked at me from the chair with an expression that was not quite the one my mother had worn. Where she had verified, he assessed: taking inventory of who had come back and what he had brought with him from the years he had been gone.
“You could have written,” he said, at last.
“The postal system was unreliable,” I replied.
A pause. Then he made the sound that was approximately a laugh — the one that acknowledged a fair point without entirely conceding it — and I crossed the room and put my arms around him carefully, minding the leg, and he held on with a strength that surprised me.
My mother made coffee. Real coffee, somehow obtained in the general reordering of supply lines that followed capitulation — the smell of it was so specifically itself, so precisely the smell of that kitchen in the mornings before everything changed, that it required a moment before I could speak.
We sat at the kitchen table.
Outside the window, Narvik was doing what it was doing: coming back to itself in stages, the occupation being dismantled piece by piece while underneath it the ordinary life of the town reasserted its patterns. I could hear the street from here. People moving, talking at a volume that was already different from the occupation’s careful quiet.
The coffee was real and the cups were the same cups and the table was the same table and the window gave onto the same view it had always given onto, and all of this was true simultaneously with the fact that the people sitting around it had been through five years that had not left any of these things the same.
My mother’s hair had gone fully grey. She had been going grey before the invasion — I had noticed it the year I left for my military service, the particular way it had changed her colouring — but it had completed itself now, and it looked right on her, settled, the way things look when they have become what they are rather than what they are becoming. She held her cup in both hands the way she always had and asked her questions with the directness she always had, and she was entirely herself, and the five years showed in none of the ways I had feared and in certain ways I had not anticipated.
She wanted to know about the resistance specifically. Not the operations — she did not ask about the operations — but the structure of it, the people, how it had been organised. She had a professional interest in how things worked, my mother, applied to everything she encountered, and she applied it now. Who had led the cell after Haugen. How the intelligence networks had communicated with London. What the British drops had contained and how they had been used.
I answered as fully as I could. My father listened and occasionally asked a question of his own — more strategic in nature, larger in frame, the questions of a man who had been trying to understand the shape of a war he could only see pieces of.
“Your English was useful,” he said at one point. Not a question.
“More than I expected.”
“I assumed it would be.” He looked at me with the expression that was his version of saying more. “I always thought you underestimated how much it was worth.”
I did not tell them everything. Some of it was mine to carry, and some of it belonged to people who were not there to speak for themselves, and some of it would require more distance than five days had provided before I could speak of it in a way that conveyed what it had actually been rather than just the surface facts of what occurred.
I told them about Kristian.
My mother was quiet for a moment, and then said that she already knew. Through the networks that had persisted even in occupied Trondheim — the informal systems by which Norwegians had maintained knowledge of each other through the official silence. She had known since late 1940, through a chain of people she named carefully, each one a small piece of what had passed between a sniper’s bullet outside Narvik and this kitchen table.
“I didn’t want to be certain,” she said. “Knowing through networks isn’t the same as knowing from you.”
“I know,” I said.
She listened anyway. I told her what I could of who he had been in the war — not the fighting, but the person. How his optimism had changed into something quieter and more durable without losing its essential character. How he had been absolutely certain, even at the end, that Norway would not fall.
“He was a good boy,” she said. The simplest possible statement and the most accurate available.
“He was,” I said.
We sat with that for a while. My father refilled the coffee cups and did not say anything, which was his way of giving space to something that needed space.
After a time, he said: “I understand you were useful to the British.”
“In some ways.”
“Blackwood?”
I looked at him. “You know about Blackwood?”
“I know various things.” He set down his cup with the manner of a man who has information he has been holding for some time and is considering how much of it to release. “He sent a letter in late 1942 through channels I still don’t entirely understand. Said you had been an asset to Allied operations and that he hoped you were still alive and that if you weren’t you should know your father was proud of you.” He paused. “I thought that was a well-constructed sentence.”
I thought of Blackwood on the transport ship in the evening light of the Narvik fjord, a small figure at distance. Whether he had seen my raised hand I had never known. Apparently he had been thinking about me regardless, and had thought about my father too.
“I should write to him,” I said.
“You should.” My father looked at me with the direct look that was his equivalent of something most people would have expressed differently. “You should write to everyone. You’ve apparently had quite a few years.”
This was the closest he came, that afternoon, to saying what the five years had cost them in the specific sense — not the occupation, not the war, but the not-knowing. The weight of it had lived in this kitchen while I had been in the mountains, and it had made my mother smaller and my father’s leg worse and had turned a window-watching into a habit sustained through years of not knowing whether the next arrival at the door would be news of another kind.
I stayed for dinner and for the first night. My old room was unchanged in the deliberate way of things left preserved rather than merely untouched — the books on the shelf in the same order, the desk clear in the way it had been when I used it for studying. My mother had maintained it as a fact about the world she intended to keep true.
I lay awake for a long time in the quiet of a room that had no patrols to listen for, no radio schedules to maintain, no operational requirement governing the allocation of sleep. Just the sounds of Narvik at night in May, and the knowledge that the door at the end of the hall was not a tactical position but simply a door.
King Haakon returned to Norway on the seventh of June. I watched him come ashore in Oslo on a small radio set in a café in Narvik, surrounded by people I did not know, all of us listening to the same broadcast. The commentator’s voice was unsteady in a way that broadcast voices were not supposed to be, and nobody in the café commented on this.
When it was over, a man at the next table — older, fisherman’s hands, the look of someone who had spent the occupation in this same harbour — raised his coffee cup in a brief, private gesture. Not a toast to the room. Just an acknowledgment, offered to no one in particular, of a thing that had been completed.
I understood it precisely. After five years, you developed a particular relationship to ceremony. The internal marking of a moment, without requirement for audience or confirmation, became habitual. Resistance had been full of such moments — operations that succeeded in silence, arrivals and departures with no one to witness them, decisions made in mountain shelters while the country slept. You became accustomed to the work mattering without the mattering being visible.
The return of the King was not mine to celebrate publicly. I had done the work. The work had contributed to this outcome in ways too diffuse to trace and too small to catalogue. That had always been sufficient, which was part of why it had been possible to keep doing it.
In July a letter arrived from England.
The handwriting on the envelope was unfamiliar, but the name above the return address was not. Private — now Mister — Thomas Cooper, of Wakefield, Yorkshire.
He had found me through Captain Blackwood, who had apparently maintained a list of Norwegian contacts from the campaign and had been quietly checking on them as circumstances permitted. Cooper wrote that he had thought about writing for a year before actually doing it, and that he was sorry it had taken so long, and that he still owed me a tour of his hometown if I ever found myself in the north of England, which he acknowledged was unlikely but wanted the offer to stand regardless.
He had survived. France, North Africa, Italy. Made it home to Wakefield in the summer of 1945, most of himself intact — his words. He was working in his father’s hardware shop. He had recently become engaged.
I read the letter twice, then set it on the table beside the window. Outside, a Norwegian street in July, the long northern light making the afternoon last in the way it always had. Somewhere in Wakefield, Yorkshire, a former private with harmonica-playing hands was working in his father’s shop and had thought carefully for a year about whether to write a letter to a Norwegian soldier he had met once for a few weeks in 1940.
I got out paper and wrote back the same evening. I told him I was glad he had survived, that Norway was finding its way back to itself in the way that places do when given enough time and stubbornness. I told him the offer of the tour was noted and that I might one day take him up on it.
I did not tell him about Kristian. That story belonged to people who had been there for it, and Cooper had been twenty years old and far from home in the spring of 1940 and had done what he could, which was enough. Some debts are not the kind that require acknowledgment to be real.
I sealed the letter and left it to post in the morning.
I went back to Narvik’s harbour on a morning in late September, five months after the war ended.
The fishing fleet was in, the catch being unloaded with the organised noise of an industry that had resumed its rhythms. The smell was the same as I had described to Ingrid on the road down from the mountains — salt and cold, and the green undertone I had never found a more precise name for, the smell of the fjord in the morning before anything else was underway.
I stood at the edge of the wharf and let the smell be what it was.
Somewhere below the surface of the fjord, the wreckage of the Blücher lay distributed across the seabed, along with the equipment of five years of occupation — supplies and weapons and the material residue of a project that had run its course. Above it, Norway was reassembling itself. The process was not neat and was not without bitterness in places where bitterness had been earned. But it was underway.
I thought of what Dahl had said once, in the darkness outside a resistance cabin in the first autumn of occupation: that Norway endured. That the land was ours before there was a Germany and would be ours after their flags were taken down. He had offered it as certainty, and I had received it as something between comfort and performance. Standing in the cleared dark outside a mountain cabin, I had not been sure whether he believed it entirely or whether he simply knew that I needed to hear it.
Standing at the edge of the harbour now, I found that the distinction had stopped mattering. The outcome was the same either way.
A voice called from somewhere along the wharf. Two fishermen arguing about the allocation of dock space, the particular grooves of a dispute that had clearly been ongoing for some time and would continue regardless of any external resolution. The ordinary business of a harbour reasserting itself.
I turned away from the water and walked back up through the town.
The street that ran from the harbour to the centre was the same street it had always been, and I had walked it several hundred times, and none of the previous times had felt like this one. The buildings to either side were familiar in the specific way of things you have not seen for a long time and assumed you remembered accurately and then found, when you stood in front of them, that you had remembered correctly after all. The post office. The ironmonger where my father had bought boat hardware for as long as I could remember, its window currently in the process of removing a German notice that had been fixed to the glass. The bakery that had operated under occupation with flour allocations and substitutions and whatever creativity was available, and was now apparently operating with somewhat better flour, or at least flour that smelled better.
I walked slowly.
Past the café where I had sat in the early days after the liberation and listened to the broadcast of the King’s return, surrounded by people I didn’t know and the particular collective quiet of a room full of Norwegians receiving news they had been waiting five years to receive.
Past the church where Kristian’s family had held a service in 1941, for the absence of him, after the word came through. I had not been there. I had been in the mountains, doing the next thing, and I had found out about the service months later through resistance channels. I stopped in front of the church for a moment. It had nothing to offer me now that I couldn’t find in memory, but standing outside it felt like an acknowledgment of something I owed.
Past the street corner where, on an April morning five years earlier, I had heard the first distant sounds of German aircraft over the fjord and understood that the life I had been living was finished and a different one beginning.
I was twenty-nine years old. I had spent five years conducting a war in the only way available to me, had lost people I could not replace, had done things I would be a long time making sense of, and had come out the other side into a country that was still Norway — battered and beginning the long work of repair, but continuous with what it had been before the flags went up and the boots came down.
In my jacket pocket was a letter from Ingrid. She was in Oslo, enrolled at the university, living in a flat in Majorstuen that she described with the same economy of expression she had brought to everything for five years. She was studying history. She was asking, carefully and without making it into more than the question it was, whether I had thought about Oslo.
I had thought about Oslo.
I had thought about a school in Frogner where they needed someone to teach languages. I had thought about the particular version of myself that had wanted to stand in front of a classroom and do something with words that built things rather than protected against them. I had thought about the fact that this person had survived the war, more or less, and was apparently still available.
And I had thought about Ingrid on a Tuesday morning in a flat three streets from mine, reading over coffee, and what it would mean to have the time to find out what we were for each other in conditions that permitted names.
The town climbed up the hill ahead of me, Narvik in September, the pale northern light lying across the rooftops the way it had lain across them since before anyone living could remember. The mountains above were the same mountains they had always been. The fjord behind me was the same fjord.
The war had made me. I would spend the rest of my life finding out what it had made.
I walked up through the town, toward home, in the pale northern light of a September morning, with the fjord at my back and the mountains above.
That seemed, for now, enough to be going on with.