Out Stealing Horses (18 page)

But then there is Lars, whom I probably cannot avoid liking, there is Lars; who gets up from the table and pulls his cap back and forth over his hair until it finds the right place, but outside there is twilight now and certainly no sunshine any longer, and he thanks me for the meal in an awkward, formal manner as if we had just finished Christmas dinner and he was the guest wishing he were ten miles away. He probably feels more at ease outdoors with an axe in his hands or a saw than here in my house, and that's fine by me, I can understand that. I would have felt the same way if I had been the guest in his home.

I go into the hall and open the door for Lars and follow him out onto the doorstep, and there Poker sits waiting. And when I say good night and thanks for the help, and he says, we made a good job of that birch, and we'll deal with the root tomorrow with the chains, the dog pushes between us and sits down and stares hard at his master and starts growling, but then Lars just turns his back without a glance down and walks straight past Poker and down the two steps and on across the yard and down the hill towards his cottage. Poker stands there, confused, his tongue hanging out and he looks up at me where I lean against the door waiting, not uttering a word of command to set him free, and then he suddenly lowers his head and slinks after Lars with an unwilling air and almost shuffling steps, and if I were him now I would mend my manners double quick.

There is a thin layer of snow in the yard. I did not notice when it began to settle, but the temperature has dropped, it is still snowing, and I cannot see it letting up. I go in and close the door behind me and turn off the outside light. Lars has forgotten his working gloves, they are lying where he put them down on the shoe rack, and I pick them up and open the door and am about to call after him, but there is no point, he can get them tomorrow, he won't be starting any work where gloves are needed.

Lars. Who says he did not think of his brother during the years Jon was at sea but remembers the towns and the harbours he visited and what was printed on the envelopes he sent home and the names of the ships he signed on with and signed off from, and who followed with his finger in the atlas the routes the ships took. Already thin and slouching, Jon stands on deck close to the bows of M/S
Tijuka
grasping the rail tightly, peering defiantly with narrowed eyes at the coast they are nearing. They come from Marseilles, and Lars' finger has followed the boat past Sicily and the tip of Italy's boot, and diagonally past the Greek islands, and southeast of Crete something new is in the air, with a different consistency from only a day ago, but Jon does not realise yet that this new element in the air is Africa. And then Lars goes with him on the way in to Port Said in the innermost Mediterranean where they will discharge and load up again before the voyage takes them slowly through the Suez Canal with the desert on both sides for long stretches and a strange yellow light from billions of glittering grains of sand in the shining sun, and then lengthways across the Red Sea first to Djibouti in blazing heat and then on to Aden on the other side of the narrow strait that divides one world from another, all the time in the wake of the young poet Rimbaud, who sailed here nearly seventy years earlier to be another person from the one he was before and put everything behind him like a desert diver on his way to oblivion and later death, and I know this because I have read about it in a book. But Lars does not know, sitting with his atlas in front of him on the kitchen table in the house by the river, and
Jon
does not know, but in Port Said he sees his first African palm under the low and violently blue sky. He sees the flat roofs of the town, and he sees bazaars and markets down every street and right out on the wharfs and alongside the quay where the M/S
Tijuka
is moored. There is nothing but bazaars in that town, and voices shouting in every language wanting to sell you something, wanting you to come down the gangway, you standing up there with your hands gripping the rail so tightly and eyes like narrow slits, you come down and buy something you just have to own if you know your own good, it will make your life so happy you won't even recognise it, and there is
special price for you today,
and it is deafening and bewildering, there are cymbals and kettledrums, and smells that almost make him faint; a mixture of overripe vegetables and indefinable meat he had no idea existed in this world. And there are spices and herbs and something from a fire he can glimpse at the very end of the quay, and he does not know what they are burning there, but it has a sharp smell, and he will not leave the ship. He does his work on the cargo, and sets to with all his youthful strength, but he does not walk down the gangway. Not on his watch below or on any other watch, and when darkness abruptly falls he stays there on deck watching life go on at a more subdued tempo in a blend of electric and other lights, and it all seems more alluring now than in the garish light of day, but more sinister too, with its flickering shadows and narrow alleyways. He is fifteen years old and he does not leave the ship in Port Said, nor in Aden nor Djibouti.

I wake in the night and sit up in bed to look into the darkness outside the window. It is still snowing, there is a high wind whirling out there, hurling snowflakes against the panes. Where the road leads down towards the river there is nothing but a huge white blanket without contours of any kind. I crawl out of bed, go into the kitchen and light the small lamp above the cooker. Lyra raises her head from where she lies in her place by the black stove, but there is nothing wrong with her inner clock, she knows we are not going out now, it's only two in the morning. I go into the bathroom, or actually the cubbyhole off the hall, where I keep a wash-bowl, a pitcher of water and a bucket on the floor for when the weather is so bad I do not feel like going out behind the house. I pay a call there, then put on a sweater and a pair of socks and sit down at the kitchen table with a very modest dram and the final pages of
A Tale of Two Cities.
Sydney Carton's life is coming to an end, blood running all about him, through a red veil he sees the guillotine working rhythmically; heads falling into the basket until it is full and then is replaced, and the women knitting in the stalls are counting: nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and he kisses the woman standing in front of him in the queue and says farewell until we meet in a land where no time exists and no sorrow as in this, and soon he is the only one left, and he says to himself and the world: 'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done . . .' It is not easy to disagree with him in such a situation. Poor Sydney Carton. Really entertaining reading, I must say. I smile to myself and take the book into the living room with me and put it in the bookshelf in its place among the other books by Dickens, and back in the kitchen I down the little dram in one swallow and turn off the light above the stove and go into the bedroom and lie down. I am asleep before my head hits the pillow.

At five o'clock I am woken by the drone of a tractor and the scraping, rattling sound of a snowplough on its way up the road towards my house. I see its lights through the window and realise at once what it is and just turn over and fall asleep again, without having the time to think one single sceptical thought.

13

After my morning with Franz
the valley looked different. The forest was different, and the fields were, and maybe the river was the same, yet somehow altered, and that, too, was how my father seemed to me when I thought of the stories Franz had told me about him and just as much after what I had seen him do on the jetty in front of Jon's house. I did not know whether he was more distant now or maybe closer to me, whether he was easier to understand or harder, but he was certainly different, and I could not talk to him about it, for
he
was not the one who had opened that door, and so I had no right to enter in, and I did not even know if I wanted to.

Now I could see how he was impatient. Not that he was brusque or short-fused in any manner, he was just the way he had been since we arrived on the bus, and though it was true I felt a great difference inside myself thinking of him, I could not
see
any difference. But now he was tired of waiting. He wanted the timber on its way. Regardless of what we had been doing during the day, gone to the shop, or rowed upriver to the rapids by the bridge to fish from the boat on the way back down, or worked on carpentry in the yard or walked around in the felling waste wearing gloves and clearing up the tangled chaos and hauling branches onto a bonfire we could light up later when the weather would allow, he did not want to leave a mess behind him when the future time arrived, he had to go down to the two piles of timber by the river at least twice every evening to push at them and thump the timber and calculate the angle and the distance to the water to see whether the trunks would land correctly when they took off and then go through it all once more. This was actually quite unnecessary, if you asked me, for everyone could see that the trunks would slide straight into the river and would not get hooked up in any obstacle on the way down, and he probably knew that too. But he could not keep away. Sometimes he stood there a long time just sniffing the wood, even pressing his nose against the bare timber where the bark had been stripped off and the resin was shining still, and breathing it deeply in, and I did not know if he did that because it was something he liked to do, which I did, or whether his nose could read some information from inside it to which we other mortals had no access. If so, whether this information was good or bad I had no way of knowing, but it did not make his impatience any weaker. Then it rained heavily for two days, and the next evening he went up the road to Franz to talk to him, and he stayed there a long time. When he came back I was in the top bunk reading by the light of a small paraffin lamp, for the evenings were darker now, and he came into the room and leaned against my bed and said: 'We're going to take a chance on it tomorrow. We're sending the timber downriver.'

I could tell at once from my father's voice that Franz had not shared his view. I placed the bookmark in my book and leaned over the edge, and with my arms dangling I dropped the book onto the chair beside the bed and said:

'Good. I'm looking forward to it.' And that was true, I was. I looked forward to the physical side of it, to the pressure on my arms, to the trunks resisting me and then feeling them give way at last.

'That's good,' said my father. 'Franz will come down to help us. You'd better go to sleep and build up your energy for tomorrow. It won't be child's play, that's for sure, for there will only be the three of us, and there's a lot of timber. Now I'll just have a quick walk down there to do a bit of thinking. I'll be back in an hour.'

'That's alright,' I said.

He was going to the river to sit on a rock and gaze in front of him, and I was used to that, so I did not doubt he was telling the truth, for he often went to that rock.

'Shall I put the light out?' he said, and I said yes please, and he bent down and put his hand behind the top of the lamp and blew into the glass pipe so the flame went out and turned into a small red strip along the wick, and then that too was gone and it was dark, but not completely dark. I could see the grey edge of the forest outside the window and the grey sky above, and my father said 'Good night, Trond, see you tomorrow,' and I too said 'Good night and see you tomorrow,' and then he went out, and I turned towards the wall. Before I fell asleep I put my forehead against the coarse timbered wall sniffing the faint scent of forest it still held.

I was up once that night. I climbed cautiously down from the bunk and looked neither to the right nor left so as not to miss the door, and then I made a visit out behind the cabin. I stood there barelegged in only my pants with the wind in the trees high above me and the leaden clouds which I imagined were full of rain and soon would burst, but then I closed my eyes and lifted my face to the sky, and there was nothing coming down that I could feel. Only cool air on my skin and the scent of resin and timber, and the scent of earth, and a bird whose name I did not know hopping around in a thicket rustling and crackling and sending out a steady stream of thin piping sounds from the dense foliage a few paces from my foot. It was a strange, lonely sound out there in the night, but I did not know whether it was the bird I thought was lonely or if it was me.

When I went back inside my father was in bed sleeping as he had said he would be. I stayed there in the semidarkness looking at his head on the pillow: his dark hair, the short beard, the closed eyes and his face far off in a dream somewhere that was not in this cabin with me. There was no way I could reach him now. His breathing sounded peaceful and content, as if he did not have a care in the world, and perhaps he did not, and neither should I have, but I was uneasy and didn't know what to think about anything at all, and if breathing was easy for him, for me it was not. I opened my mouth wide and sucked the air in hard three or four times before my chest opened up, and I must have been a weird sight panting away in that half-dark room, and then I climbed up past my father and pulled the duvet round me. I did not fall asleep at once but lay staring at the ceiling, studying the patterns I could just about glimpse and all the knot holes that seemed to be moving back and forth like tiny creatures with invisible legs, and I was stiff all over at first and then more relaxed as the minutes passed, or maybe it was hours. It was difficult to say, for I had no sense of time passing or the room I was in, everything just moved slowly around like the spokes of a huge wheel to which

I was strapped, with my neck to the hub and my feet to the outer rim of the circle. It made me dizzy and I opened my eyes wide so as not to be sick.

The next time I woke up it was already morning with light flooding the window-sill, and I had slept too long and felt tired and weary and had no urge to get up at all.