Out Stealing Horses (16 page)

'I have a couple of cans of petrol in my shed,' says Lars. 'So we can go on until we're finished. No sense in breaking off to drive into the village when there is a job to be done.'

'No sense at all,' I say and have no wish to do so; going into the village now. There is nothing I need from the shop, and this is not the day for social profligacy. I start the Jonsered, and luckily succeed at the first try, and we attack the birch, Lars and I, from two angles; a pair of slightly stiff men between sixty and seventy with earmuffs on their heads against the deafening howl from the saws when they eat into the wood, and we bend over them and hold our arms well away from our bodies to make sure the dangerous chain is an extension of our will and not the other way around, and we deal with the branches first and cut them off close to the trunk and saw them into suitable lengths and cut away everything I cannot use for firewood and gather all that into a heap I can put a match to later and have a bonfire in the November darkness.

I like watching Lars work. I would not call him brisk, but he is systematic and moves more elegantly up to the birch trunk with the heavy saw in his grasp than he does out on the road with Poker. His style infects my style, and that is how it usually is for me; the movement first and then the comprehension, for gradually I realise that the way he bends and moves and sometimes twists around and leans is a logical way of balancing against the supple line between the body's weight and the tug of the chain as it takes hold of the trunk, and all this to give the saw the easiest access to its goal with the least possible danger to the human body, exposed as it is; one moment strong and unassailable, and then a crash, and suddenly ripped to shreds like a doll can be, and then everything is gone and ruined forever, and I do not know whether he thinks like this, Lars, as he wields the chainsaw with such aplomb. Probably he does not, but I do, several times over, cannot stop myself when it first comes to mind, and it does not brighten my spirits. It's of no consequence though, I am used to it, but I am sure his mother's mind was full of thoughts like that when she rowed for her life upriver that day in the late autumn of 1944, Lars rolling around on the kitchen floor merrily mock-fighting his twin brother

Odd, not knowing what was going on around him, what it could lead to, not knowing that three years later he would shoot the life out of that very twin Odd with his big brother Jon's gun and tear his body to shreds. No-one could know that, and outside it was day still with a steel-grey light on the snow-covered fields, and on the water his mother tried to make it look like any of her numerous trips up to the summer cabin.

I can picture it well.

Her blue mittens gripping the oars and her boots braced against the bottom planks and her misty-white breath coming out in hoarse gasps, and the stranger in his summer shoes between her legs on the bottom of the boat, his arms clutching the grey bag he would not let go of, and he was no warmer now in his thin trousers. He really was shaking violently, thumping on the woodwork like a two-stroke motor of some yet undiscovered make; she had never seen anything like it and was afraid that on land they would hear this new engine of hers.

I can picture it well.

The German motorcycle with the sidecar calmly driving up the main road lately cleared of snow, and then turning into the yard of precisely that farm, with no apparent motive, no-one ever understood what the rider was actually looking for. Maybe he was just lonely and longing for a person to talk to, or wanting badly to smoke a cigarette, and then finding his last match had been used when he was about to light up and so came to borrow a box of matches and have someone stand with him as he smoked, looking at the landscape and the river, and there was no-one else that he wanted to be just then than one of two men from two different countries fraternising over an innocent cigarette, distant from all evils of war, or else there was some other reason that no-one could guess at, either then or later. Whichever, he stopped the motorbike in the yard, dismounted and walked unhurriedly towards the door of the farmhouse. But he never reached it. He suddenly came to a halt and stared at the ground, and then he started to walk back and forth, and then in a circle, and he squatted down, and finally he walked down past the house to the river and right onto the jetty. What happened to him there was that a light was lit in the huge darkness of his mind. The coin dropped into the machine in the right place, and a 'click' could be heard. Now everything was clear to him. And he was short of time. He ran back and threw himself onto his motorbike and immediately stamped hard on the start pedal, but damn it the motor would not start, and he tried again and again and then once more, and it suddenly came to life like a shot, and he bent over the handlebars and roared down the farm road and swerved onto the main road with the empty sidecar rattling on the outside in a spray of snow. Coming round that very bend was Jon, on his way home from school with his school bag under his arm, and he heard the motorcycle, and only just managed to throw himself into the ditch to avoid being run over and maybe injured for life. In the fall the buckle on his bag broke, and his books sailed out in all directions. But the soldier could not have cared less, he just gave it more throttle and vanished towards the crossroads where the shop and the church were, and the bridge crossed the river.

I can picture it well.

Jon in the ditch, picking books out of the snow while his mother is still on the river with the man in the suit

flattening himself against the bottom of the boat. It is hard work rowing against the current with two people on board even though it is not so strong at this time of year, and they make slow progress. It is a good way up to the cabin yet where my father bends over a table in the outhouse doing some carpentry, totally unaware that she is on her way. The man in the boat trembles and gabbles to himself, and then he weeps a little and gabbles again, and the woman at the oars pleads with him to be quiet, but he clutches the straps of his bag and is lost in his own world.

Franz stood in his kitchen with the window open, for he had stoked up his fire when he came home from working in the forest, and now it was so hot in the room that he had to let some air in. It was still daylight, and he stood there smoking and trying to work out why he had never married. It was something he brooded on every year at the time when the cold came creeping in, and he kept it up until Christmas and after, but at the beginning of the new year he threw it off. The lack of offers was not the reason, but when he stood there smoking by the open window, he just could not remember what the reason had been, and it seemed an absurd situation just then, to be living alone. And then he heard a motorcycle approaching up the road at great speed on the other side of the river. The bridge was fifty metres from his house, and a further twenty metres along on the opposite side stood the guard in his long grey-green overcoat with the submachine gun sticking up behind his shoulder, and he was cold and bored. He too heard the motorcycle, and he turned towards the rising volume of sound and took a few steps in that direction. Now Franz could just see the hel-meted head of the rider appearing from behind a thicket over there, and then the whole motorcycle came into view with the rider bent over the handlebars to minimise the air resistance, and he had just a few hundred metres left before the crossroads. It had been misty and overcast all day, and now just before the sun was about to go down there it suddenly was in the southwest, throwing a golden light through the valley at a low slant, and it lit up the river and all that was on it and sent a dazzling ray into Franz's eyes and woke him from his thoughts about a possible marriage and the long line of blonde and dark-haired candidates he suspected would have queued up for him, and then it came to him what it was he was actually looking at up there on the road. He hurled his cigarette out the window, whipped round and ran out into the hallway, pulling a knife from his belt, and fell to his knees and rolled up the rag rug. There was a crack in the floorboards which he stuck the knife into hard and bent it upwards, and four boards that were fastened together tilted up, and he put them aside and put his hand into the space underneath. He had always known that this day would come. He was prepared. There was no time for hesitating, and not even for a moment did he hesitate. From the small space he brought out a detonator, quickly checked that the leads were in place and had not become tangled, and he placed it levelly between his knees, drew a deep breath as he took a firm hold of the handle, and then slammed it down. His house shook and the windows rattled, and he breathed out again and put the detonator back in its small space, laid the floorboards into the square opening and tapped them into place with his clenched fist and rolled the rag rug over the spot so that everything looked the way it had just a moment before. He rose to his feet and ran to look out the window. The bridge was shattered and parts of the wooden structure still whirled in the air in slow motion, on their way back down in the sudden silence after the explosion, and some of the planks hit the stones on the bank in a strangely soundless way and some fell in the water and started to drift with the current, and it seemed to Franz he saw it all through glass even though the window was open.

On the other side of the wrecked bridge the guard lay headlong in the snow with his nose to the ground a good way from the place where Franz had last seen him. The motorcycle had not made it in time, and now it slowed down and moved almost tentatively towards the body in the snow and stopped. The rider dismounted, took his helmet off and held it under his arm as if he was going to a funeral and walked the last metres to the guard and stood over him lowering his head. A gust of wind pulled at his hair. He was just a boy. He sank down to his knees beside what might well be his best friend, but then the guard pushed himself up on his hands and was not dead. He stayed in that position and could be seen to be vomiting, and then he got to his feet with his machine gun as a support and the motorcyclist too got to his feet and bent forward and said something to him, but the guard shook his head and pointed to his ears. He could not hear a thing. They both turned and looked at the bridge, which was no longer there, and then they ran to the motorcycle, and the guard got into the sidecar and the driver onto his seat, and he got the motor running again and turned out of the square. Not towards the farm where they were billeted with the rest of the patrol, but back down the road he had just ridden up, and he gave it as much throttle as he dared, and the machine had to work harder now with a passenger in the sidecar, but then it picked up speed, and when they passed Barkald's farm a few minutes later it was going really fast. Shortly afterwards they made a sharp turn off the road, and both leaned hard over as if in a sailing boat in a strong wind to make the turn without losing balance. The sidecar left the ground for a moment, and they roared out onto the snow-covered field and straight for the fence and the gate they did not bother to open but just drove right through with a crash that made the bars fly to all sides and hit their helmets, but they did not stop and there was only just enough room between the gateposts. And then they sped across the field close to the wire fence with the fence posts ticking past, and the machine bumping and swinging from side to side over the tussocks on its way down to the river along the path my father used to take when he was going to the shop to fetch 'the mail', and where I too used to go, only four years later, with my friend Jon who one day just disappeared out of my life because’ one of his brothers had shot the other out of his life with a gun that he, Jon, had forgotten to unload. It was high summer then, he was his brothers' keeper, and in one instant everything was changed and destroyed.

On the other side of the river Jon's mother had just landed her boat beside the one my father used, and jumped ashore to haul it far enough up for the current not to pull it back and then perhaps take it over to the other bank where it had better not be, and the man in the suit got up impatiently and stupidly tried to jump out before she had finished. It was no success. He fell forward as she jerked the bow and because he kept his hands tightly round the bag he fell and banged his head against a thwart. She was on the verge of tears then.

'Goddamn it, can't you do
anything
right?' the woman yelled, she who had hardly uttered a single swearword in her life, and though she knew it was a mistake to shout, she could not help it, and she took hold of his jacket and with a violent jerk hauled him like an unresisting sack out of the boat. As she straightened herself she both saw and heard the motorcycle roaring across the field on the opposite side, and my father came storming out of the shed beside the cabin, because he too had heard it and immediately realised something was wrong. He could see them at the end of the path by the water, Jon's mother in her cap and mittens and the stranger in his suit on all fours beside the boat, and the motorcycle, which had stopped just before the last slope covered with gravel and boulders on the edge of the bank.

'Get to your feet!' screamed Jon's mother into the suited man's ear, pulling at his jacket, and the boy in German uniform shouted:

'Halt!' as he rushed down the slope with the guard at his heels, and is it true he also called out an imploring 'please' in German? Franz said so, he was sure of it:
'Bitte, bitte
/ he had shouted, the young soldier. In any case, they stopped at the water's edge, not wanting to jump in. It was too cold, it was too deep, and if they swam across they would be helpless targets and would certainly reach the other bank much further down on account of the current, which was not particularly strong at that time of year yet strong enough. On the top of the slope behind them the motorcycle was chuntering away like an animal out of breath, and they pulled their machine guns from their shoulders, and my father shouted:

'Run like hell!' and started to rush off himself,
towards
the river through the trees no-one had sacrificed to the logging yet, and he zigzagged between them using the wide trunks for cover, and right then the soldiers on the other side began shooting. Warning shots first, above the heads of the two making their way all too slowly up from the boat, and they heard the bullets strike the tree trunks with a splintering force and an alien sound she would always remember, Jon's mother later said. Nothing had ever made her so terrified as that particular sound, it was as if the pine trees groaned, and then they shot for real, and immediately hit the suited man. His dark jacket was an obvious target against the white bank, and he dropped his bag, fell flat into the snow and said to himself so quietly that Jon's mother could barely hear the words: