Out Stealing Horses (20 page)

'I don't know what minnyture means,' said Lars softly.

I searched my mind. I didn't really know either, but I said:

'It's when something that's very tiny looks just the same as something that's big. It's just little, that's all. Do you understand?'

'Tsk. It's only a few twigs.'

'OK, fine,' I said. 'It's only a few twigs. Aren't you going to have some lunch?'

He shook his head. 'No,' he said, almost inaudibly. 'I'm not going to have any lunch.' He said 'have lunch' as I said it, and not just 'eat' as he would otherwise have done.

'Oh, well,' I said. 'That's fine, too. Suit yourself?' Carefully I stood up, my weight on my left leg.

'Well,
I'm
hungry,' I said, turning away and taking a step or two, and then I heard him say:

'I shot my brother, I did.'

I turned and retraced the two steps. My mouth went dry. I almost whispered:

'I know. But it wasn't your fault. You didn't know the gun was loaded.'

'No,' he said. 'I didn't know that.'

'It was an accident.'

'Yes. It was an accident.'

'Are you sure you don't want something to eat?'

'Yes,' he said. 'I'll stay here.'

'That's alright,' I said. 'You can come along later when you feel hungry,' and I looked at his hair and the little I could see of his face, he was only ten, for God's sake, and nothing moved, and he had no more to say.

I walked up to the bonfire where my father sat quite relaxed with his back to the river next to Jon's mother on one of the logs that was still lying there. They were not tight together as they had been on the jetty that morning, but still quite close, and those backs seemed so much at ease and almost smug, and they suddenly made me feel intensely irritated. Franz sat on his own on a tree stump opposite them with a tin plate in his hand, I saw his bearded face through the fire and the transparent smoke, and they had already started eating.

'Come here, Trond, and sit down,' said Franz, a bit awkwardly, patting a stump near his one. 'You need food now. There's a lot more work to do. To survive we'll have to eat.'

But I did not sit down on that stump. I did something I thought was unheard of then, and I still do, because I shoved my way up behind my father and Jon's mother and flung one leg over the log they sat on and pushed myself right between them. There really was not room enough so I pushed hard against the both of them and against her in particular and my aggressive movements were sharp against her softness, and it made me feel sad doing it, but I did it just the same, and she pulled away, and my father sat stiff as a board. I said:

'Now this is a great place to sit.'

'You think so, do you?' my father said.

'Sure,' I said. 'In such good company.' I looked straight into Franz's eyes and kept my gaze there, and his eyes started to shift and then, hardly chewing at all, he fixed them on his plate, making a peculiar face. I took a plate for myself and a fork, and I leaned forward to help myself from the frying pan that was nicely arranged on a rock at the fire's edge.

'This looks really tasty,'  I said, laughing, and I could hear my voice having a shrill tone to it and coming out much louder than I had meant.

14

I FLOUNDER MY WAY UP FROM THE DREAM
towards the light, and I do see the light above me. It's like being under water; the glimmering blue surface up there, so close and yet so out of reach, for nothing moves swiftly in the lilac-coloured levels down here, and I have been in this place before, but now I do not know whether I can get up in time. I stretch my arms as far as I can, dizzy with exhaustion, and suddenly feel the cold air on my palms, and I use my legs to make speed upwards and my face breaks through the topmost gauzy layer and I open my mouth for air. Then I open my eyes and it is not light after all, but just as dark as in the depths. The disappointment tastes like ash in my mouth, this is not where I want to be. I take a deep breath and close my lips tight and am about to dive back when I realise it's my bed I am in, under the duvet, in this room beside the kitchen, it is early morning and still pitch dark, and I do not need to hold my breath any longer. I let it go and laugh in relief into the pillow, and then I start to weep before I'm able to understand why. That is something new, I cannot remember the last time I wept, and I do weep for a short while, and then it strikes me: if one morning I do not reach that surface, does that mean I am dying?

But that is not why I am weeping. I could have gone outside and laid myself down in the snow until the cold made me numb, to get as close to death as possible, to find out what it feels like. I could easily have made myself ready. But then it is not death I fear. I turn to the small bedside table and look at the shining face of the clock. It says six. It's my time. I have to get going. I sweep the duvet aside and swing myself up. This time my back feels fine, and I sit on the edge of the bed with my feet on a rug I have put on the floor so that the shock to my soles will not be so terrible in the cold season. I ought to lay a new floor with insulation. Maybe in the spring I will, if I'm not skint. Of course I won't be skint. When will I stop worrying about that? I switch on the bedside light. I feel for my trousers hanging over a chair and get my hands on them and take hold, but then I stop there. I don't know. I am not ready, it seems. There are things I must do. There are floorboards to replace on the doorstep before someone falls through and breaks a leg, that was what I was going to do today. I have bought impregnated boards and three-inch nails, that should do it, four-inch ones would be too long, I think, and then there's the splitting of the chunks from the fallen spruce into firewood sizes, that remains to be done still and it goes without saying should not be postponed now that winter is coming in earnest. That's how it looks, anyway, and then Lars is coming up later, and we will haul the big root off with chains and a car. It will be good fun, I reckon, to deal with that. I look out the window. It has stopped snowing. I can faintly see the outlines of the piled-up snowbank down the road. Perhaps working outdoors will not be so easy today.

I let go of my trousers and lie down again. There was something about that dream which was disturbing. I know I can work it out if I try, I'm good at that, I used to be anyway, but I don't know whether I want to. It was an erotic dream, I often have them, I admit it, after all they are not reserved for teenagers. Jon's mother was in it, as she was that summer of 1948, and I as I am now, sixty-seven years old and more than fifty years later, and maybe my father was in it somewhere, in the background, in the shadows, it seems he was, and if I so much as touch the dream there is a tension in my gut. I think I must let it go, let it fall back and sink down to rest among the others I have had and do not dare to touch. That part of my life when I could turn the dreams to some use is behind me now. I am not going to change anything any more. I am staying here. If I can manage. That is my plan.

So I get up. Six fifteen. Lyra leaves her place beside the stove and goes to the kitchen door to wait. She turns her head and looks at me, and there is a trustfulness in that look I probably do not deserve. But maybe that is not the point, to deserve it or not, perhaps it just exists, that trust, disconnected from who you are and what you have done, and is not to be measured in any way. That's a nice thought. Good dog, Lyra, I think, good dog. I open the door and let her out into the hall and then onto the doorstep. I switch on the outside light from inside and follow her out and stand there, looking. Lyra jumps straight out into the yellow-lit snow lying in huge drifts except where Aslien has shovelled the yard so expertly in a big circle and avoided my car by a few centimetres only and pushed the big root back and forth with the ploughshare as it must have been in the way the whole time, and finally moved it to the side of the yard settled where it is now; ready and accessible for later removal. He has even cleared a strip alongside one wall of the house where I usually go for a leak at the edge of the wood when I don't want to over-use the outdoor lavatory. Maybe he was suggesting

I should leave my car there in the future so it will not be in the tractor's way, or perhaps he has an outdoor lavatory himself?

I leave Lyra in the yard to sniff around on her own in the new white world and close the door and go in to make a fire in the stove. No problem with that today, soon it is crackling away with a crisp and reassuring sound behind the black iron plates, and I don't switch on the ceiling light at once but leave the room in twilight so the yellow flames in the stove flicker brightly over the floor and walls. The sight of them slows my breathing down and makes me calm as it must have done for men through thousands of years: let the wolves howl, here by the fire it's safe.

I lay the table for breakfast still without the light on. Then I let Lyra in from the cold so she can lie beside the stove a while before we go out together. I sit down and look out the window. I have turned the outside light off again so only the surface of things themselves will shine, but it is too early still for daylight to come, only the faintest tinge of pink above the trees towards the lake; vague streaks like the marks of a hard crayon, and nevertheless everything stands out more distinctly than before, because of the snow; a clear line between sky and earth, and
that
is something new this autumn. And then I eat slowly, not thinking of the dream any more, and when I have finished I clear the table and go out into the hall and put my tall boots on and the warm old pea jacket and a cap with earflaps and mittens and the woollen scarf I have worn round my neck for at least twenty years, which someone knitted for me when I was a single and divorced man, and now I cannot recall her name, but I remember her hands from the time we spent together; they were never still. Apart from that she was still and discreet in her ways; only the click of her knitting needles could be heard through the silence, and it was all too low-key for me, and the relationship dwindled quietly into nothing.

Lyra wags her tail at the door, alert and ready, and I take the torch from its shelf and unscrew one end and exchange the old batteries for the new ones waiting on that same shelf, and then we're off. I go first and she follows when she is told. I am the boss, we both know that, but she is happy to wait because she knows our system too and smiles as only a dog can smile and jumps a good metre into the air straight up and out over the whole flight of steps when I quietly say: Come on! She lands almost in my arms, standing. She still has the puppy inside her.

I switch on the torch and we start walking down the slope where Aslien has cleared the snow into sharply edged banks in an elegant curve over to the bridge across the little river and Lars' cottage on the other side and pretty certainly on to the highway right through the spruce trees, and then we stop and I point the torch at the path we usually take along the stream to the lake. There is a lot of snow there now and I don't know whether I can cope with trudging that way. But then there is only one other direction I can choose, and that is straight ahead. We have never before been that way together, the last stretch to the main road and then along it, because it means I have to put Lyra on the lead on account of the traffic, and it is not very satisfying for either of us. In that case I might as well have stayed on in the city, plodding up and down the same dreary streets I had walked for three years thinking there must be an end to this, now something will have to happen, or I am finished. So I say to myself: why should I not get tired, what else is there in my life I am saving my strength for? And I stride over the snowbank and the first drifts and start to walk with my torch on, and in some places the path has been blown clear of snow and feels nice and hard to walk on, while in others the snow lies in high drifts, and it was really smart to put my tall boots on, I lift them well and swing one leg before the other in front of me, the right leg first and let it sink, and then the left one and let it sink, and then the same movement over again, and in that way I am toiling through the worst places. The sky above me is clearing and some stars can be seen, rather pale now at night's end, but there will be no more snow for now. When it is fully light the sun will come out, if not as blazing or as vibrantly hot as a day it suddenly occurs to me to think back on now, one day in late June 1945, when my sister and I stood at the window on the first floor with a view over the inner Oslo fjord and of Nesoddlandet and the Bunnefjord, and it was summertime with a dazzling light on the water and hysterical boats zigzagging from shore to shore, cruising on with all sails set in the brilliance of liberated Norway and they almost tacked with enthusiasm and never grew tired, and they sang, those who were on board, and were not ashamed, and that of course was fine for them. But I was tired of it all already, worn out with waiting, I had seen those people so many times, on Karl Johan Street in town and on Ostmarksetra in the woods, at Ingierstrand baths and at Fagerstrand when we went out there in a borrowed boat and many other places where they hollered and yelled and never realised the party was over. That was why we were not gazing out to the fjord that day, nothing came from that direction worth waiting for. What we did, my sister and I, was to peer down the road where my father came slowly walking up the steep Nielsenbakken from Ljan Station on his way home from Sweden after the war, much delayed, with much caution, in a worn grey suit and a grey sack on his back from which something poked up that looked like a fishing rod, and he did not drag his foot, he had no limp, he was not wounded that we could see, but still he came so slowly up, as if inside a vast silence, inside a vacuum, and why we stood there at the window and had not been to the station well before the train arrived or down in the road to meet him and greet him, I cannot today remember. Perhaps we were shy. I know at least I must have been, as I always was shy, and my mother stood in the open doorway on the ground floor biting her lip and twisting the soaking handkerchief in her hand, unable to control her feet. She was hopping up and down as if she had to go to the bathroom, and then she could not hold herself back any longer and pulled herself free of the door-frame and ran down the road, and witnessed by spectators in several gardens she threw herself at my father. That was what she was supposed to do, of course, what she had to do, and she was still young then and light on her feet, but the way I remember her is the way she became later. Bitter, marked and much heavier.