Out Stealing Horses (17 page)

'Aaah. I knew it.'

And then he started to slide, back down the slope towards the boat, past the crooked pine that leaned out over the river, and he did not stop until one of his summer shoes touched the water. They hit him again, and then he said nothing more.

My father had stopped just up the path, sheltered by a spruce. He called:

'Pick up his bag and run over here!' and Jon's mother grabbed the bag in her blue mitten and ran bent over, zigzagging upwards, and maybe it was because they had never killed anyone before that the two soldiers were suddenly no longer shooting so intensively, or because the runner was a woman. Now the shots they fired were only meant to frighten, and Jon's mother came running up the path unscathed and along with my father right up to the cabin. They rushed inside and picked out their most important things and the documents my father had hidden. Through the window they saw two cars cross the field at high speed from the road, and soldiers jumping out and running down to the river. My father stuffed everything they needed into the suited man's bag and wrapped a sheet around it. Then they climbed out the window at the back, and with my father's long white underwear over their clothes they fled, hand in hand, more or less, to Sweden.

The sun had moved on, the blue kitchen turned shadowy, and the coffee in my cup was cold.

'Why are you telling me these things when my father will not talk about them?' I said.

'Because he asked me to,' said Franz. 'When the opportunity arose. And it did, now.'

12

While Lars and
I
have been busy
with the birch it has gradually turned colder, the sun is gone and a wind is rising. A grey layer of cloud floats across the sky like a duvet, the last strip of blue is being pushed against the eastern ridge and eventually disappears. We take a break, straighten our stiff backs and try to look as if it does not hurt. I am not very successful, I have to support my spine with a hand to stay just about upright, and for a moment we both look away. Then Lars rolls a cigarette and lights up, he leans against the outhouse door and smokes peacefully. I recall how good it was to have a smoke after a spell of work, in the company of the partner you had toiled with, and for the first time in many years I miss it. Then I look at the heap of logs where just now a large part of the tree lay spread. Lars looks at it too.

'Not bad,' he says calmly, smiling. 'We're halfway there.'

Lyra and Poker are exhausted too. They lie panting side by side on the doorstep. The chainsaws have been turned off. Everything is quiet. And then it starts to snow. It's one o'clock in the afternoon. I look up at the sky.

'Shit,' I say aloud.

He follows my gaze. 'It won't settle, it's too early, the ground isn't cold enough,' he says.

'You're probably right,' I say, 'but it worries me all the same. I don't quite know why.'

'Are you fearful of being snowed in?'

'Yes,'  I say, feeling my face flush. 'That too.'

'Then you should get someone to clear it for you. That's what I've done. Aslien, a farmer up the road here. He always shows up, no matter when, he has cleared for me for several years now. It doesn't take him long once he's out. It's only a matter of going up our road and then down again with the snow plough. Takes him a quarter of an hour at most/

'Right,' I say, clearing my throat and then going on: 'He's the one, I called him yesterday from the kiosk by the Co-op. That was no problem, he said, 75 kroner a time. Is that what you pay him?'

'Yes,'  Lars says. 'That's it. So then you're on the safe side. This winter will be alright. But all that up there,' he says almost ominously, leaning backwards and looking up at the sky. 'Let it come down.' He smiles with a reckless air.

'How about it, shall we go on?' he says.

His attitude is contagious, I do feel like going on. But it surprises me, too, and worries me that I should depend on someone else to give me the strength to take on such a simple and necessary job. It's not as if I didn't have the time. Something inside me is changing,
I
am changing, from someone I knew well and blindly relied on, called 'the boy with the golden trousers' by those who loved him, who came up with an endless supply of shining coins whenever he put his hand in his pocket, into someone much less familiar to me and who really has no idea what kind of rubbish he has in his pockets, and I wonder how long this change has been under way. Three years, perhaps.

'Yes, certainly/ I say. 'Let's do that.'

---------------

Afterwards I ask him in, I do have to after all he has done. It is snowing quite hard, but not really settling on the ground. Not yet anyway. We have stacked some awesome piles against the outhouse wall, beside the logs from the dead spruce, and the yard is swept clean apart from the huge root we have decided to pull away with chains and a car in the morning. The chains are down in Lars' garage. But it will do for today, we are worn out and pretty hungry and thirsty for coffee. Considering the kind of start my day has had, I wonder how bright it was to work so hard, but my body feels good, it really does, and I am tired in a pleasant way, apart from my back, and that feels no different than it would normally have done, and I could not very well have let Lars clear my yard on his own.

I measure coffee into the filter and pour cold water into the jug and switch on the percolator, and then I cut some bread and put it in a basket and get butter out and meat and cheese from the fridge onto plates and fill a small yellow jug with milk for the coffee and put everything on the table with glasses and knives for two.

Lars sits on the wood box by the stove. He looks young in his stockinged feet, as in fact everyone does sitting like that with their feet barely reaching the floor. Unlike mine, his hair is dry because he has had his cap on, and he has not said anything since he came in, just gazed musingly at the floor, and neither have I said anything and have been happy with that, as I am not used to small talk any more, and then he says:

'Shall I light the fire?'

'Fine,' I say. 'Do.' For it
is
true it's getting cold in here, and at the same time I'm a bit surprised that he should take charge in my house and in that way have an opinion about how I do things, I would never have done that myself, but he did ask first, so I guess it is alright. Lars slips off the woodbox, lifts the lid and picks out three pieces of firewood and a couple of pages of last week's
Dagbladet,
which I keep in the box for that purpose, and in no time he has the fire kindled, much faster than I usually manage; he has done this all his life, and then the percolator on the worktop starts to crackle and spit; good old coffee-maker I have had so long, and moments later I go over and pour the coffee into a Thermos. Holding it in my hand I stand there for a minute trying to think of the one I used to have coffee with every morning for many, many years, but she eludes me and I cannot see her face. Instead I look out the window at the cleared yard where nothing but small heaps of golden sawdust lie around the big root and the heavy snowflakes silently sail down and stay for a few seconds on the ground before mysteriously vanishing. If it goes on like that all through the night it will certainly settle by morning.

Did I have breakfast this morning? I do not remember, it seems so long ago. All kinds of things have happened since then. But I am certainly hungry now. I turn from the window to Lars, open my hand towards the table and say:

'Do tuck in, it's all yours.'

'Many thanks,' he says, having closed the woodbox, and we sit down, a little shy both of us, and start to eat.

We do not say anything for the first few minutes. The food tastes surprisingly good, and I have to go and look in the bread bin to see if the loaf I bought is different from the kind I usually get at the shop, but it's the same old thing. I sit down again and go on eating and I must say I do enjoy it. I try to slow down to make it last, and Lars too goes on eating with his eyes on his plate. That's fine with me, I have no need for conversation, but then he raises his head and says:

'Of course, I was supposed to take over the farm.'

'Which farm was that?' I ask, although there can be only one farm in question. But I was not quite with him in my thoughts, and I wonder whether that is how we get to be after living alone for a long time, that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking out loud, that the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. Is this how my future looks?

'The farm at home. In the village, of course.'

There must be a hundred thousand villages in Norway, we're in one of them now, but of course I know where he means.

'You've probably wondered why I live here and not up in the village where I come from?' he says.

In fact I have not, not in the way he means, but perhaps I ought to have done. What I
have
wondered is how we can end up in the same place after all these years. How such a thing is possible.

'Yes, you could say I have,' I say.

'It was mine to take over, I was the only one at home. Jon was at sea, Odd was dead, I had worked on that farm all my life, every single day, I had never gone away on holiday, as people do now. And my father never came back, he fell ill. No-one ever knew what was wrong with him. He broke his leg and he broke something in his shoulder and was taken to the Innbygda hospital, in 1948 that was, you remember that year, I was just a boy then. But he never came back. And then the years went by, Jon came home from the sea. I did not recognise him. It had been as if they no longer existed, any of them. I didn't think about them. And then one day Jon came walking up the road from the bus and in at the door and said he was ready to take over the farm. He was twenty-four years old. It was his right, he said. My mother made no objection, and she did not interfere and speak up for me, but I remember her expression then, how she did not look straight at me at all. That farm was the only work I had ever done and knew anything about. Jon was tired of the sea, he had seen it all, he said. That may have been so. He had sent a few postcards through the years, from Port Said and such places, Aden, Karachi, Madras, the sort of places you don't know a thing about or where in the world they are until you look them up in your school atlas. M/S
Tijuka
one of the boats was called, I remember the envelopes well, they had the name of the boat stamped on the front, and it was a name like none I had ever seen. Jon did not seem well, if you ask me. He was thin, with a slouch, he couldn't run a farm, I thought. He looked like a druggie, those you see on the streets of Oslo nowadays, he was nervous and tetchy. But there was nothing I could do. It was his right.'

And then Lars falls silent. It has been a long speech coming from him. He starts to eat again, he has not kept up with me, but he too enjoys the food. I give him some more coffee and offer him milk, and he takes the little yellow jug and helps himself to a few drops on the top of his coffee and stays silent while he finishes his meal, and when his plate is empty he asks if he can have a smoke indoors here, and I say:

'Yes, of course you can,' and he rolls a fag from his packet of Red Mix and lights up and takes a drag, and sits gazing at the glowing cigarette, so then I ask:

'Then what did you do?' Lars raises his eyes from the cigarette and puts it back in his mouth to take a deep drag, and while he slowly blows out he makes a grotesque grimace as if to hide himself behind a halfwitted mask, and it is so unexpected that I am taken by surprise and sit there peering, I have never seen him like this before. It's really a comical sight, like a circus clown who can make everyone weep a second after they have all died of laughter or like Chaplin in some frightful dilemma, or some other of the old stars of the silent movies, like the one who was always squinting, and he has a rubber face, Lars, but there is nothing there for me to laugh at. He compresses his mouth into a thin line and squeezes his eyes tightly together, then he twists his whole face forty-five degrees to the right and down past his ear, or at least that's what it looks like and the features I have barely become familiar with shrink into wrinkles, and he freezes it in that position for a while before opening his eyes and letting each part of his face fall back into place while the smoke goes on seeping out past his lips, and I do not have the slightest idea what kind of performance I have just witnessed. He breathes heavily in and out and his eyes are moist when he looks straight at me and says:

'I left. The day of my twentieth birthday. I haven't been home since. Not for five minutes.'

It grows silent in my kitchen, Lars is silent and I am silent, then I say:

'I'll be damned.'

'I haven't seen my mother since I was twenty,' he says.

'Is she still alive?' I say.

'I don't know,' says Lars. 'I never tried to find out.'

I look out the window. I don't know whether I want to know about this. I feel a huge fatigue settling over me, covering me, and pulling me down. I only ask because I feel I ought to, because it obviously is important to Lars to tell me these things, and of course in a way they do interest me, if he only knew, but then I do not know whether I really want to know about them. They take up too much room. It has become hard to concentrate, my meeting with Lars has thrown me off balance, has made my plan for being here seem obscure, almost unimportant when I do not put my mind to it, I have to admit that. My mood takes me up and down like in a lift, from attic to cellar in a couple of hours, and now my days have turned out differently from what I had imagined. The slightest thing goes wrong and I build it up into catastrophic dimensions. Not that the birch tree was a small thing, that is not what I mean, and not that it hasn't turned out well either, because in fact it has, with Lars' help, but I really wanted to be alone. To solve my problems alone, one at a time, with clear thinking and good tools, like my father probably did those times at the cabin, took on one task after another, assessing it and putting out the tools he needed in a calculated order starting at one end and working his way through to the other, thinking and using his hands and enjoying what he did, in the same way I want to enjoy what I do, to solve the daily challenges that may be tricky enough, but within clear limits, with beginnings and ends to them that I can foresee, and then be tired in the evening but not exhausted, and wake up all rested in the morning, brew my coffee and light the stove and look out at the light that comes pink over the forest towards the lake and get dressed and walk the paths with Lyra, and then get on with the tasks I have decided shall fill that day. That is what I want, and I know I can do it, that I have it in me, the ability to be alone, and there is nothing to be afraid of. I have seen so many things and been part of so much in my life although I will not go into details now, for I have been lucky too, I have been 'the boy with the golden trousers', but it would be nice finally to have some rest.