Out Stealing Horses (24 page)

I heard the river before I could see it, and we rounded a small hill and there it was, almost white through the trees, and something in the air changed which made it easier to breathe. I could see straightaway that it was our own river, just further south and well inside Sweden, and even if it's not possible to recognise water from the way it flows, that was precisely what I did.

Soon we were down at the bank and moving the horses southwards as well as we could, and my father scanned up and downriver and across to the other side, and at first we saw only one single log rammed against a bed of rushes, and then several that were stuck on a shoal further down. My father fetched his axe then and cut some strong poles from two small pine trees, and we waded out in our shoes; I in my gym shoes and my father in his heavy lace-up boots, and we used the poles for timber stakes and sent the logs back into the current. But I could see he was worried now, for the water level was not much to boast about, and certainly not for rafting timber, and he wanted to get further down the river at once. So we mounted the horses and rode off with the long poles like lances pointing to the sky at the horses' sides like Ivanhoe and his knights must have held their lances going to a tournament or a decisive battle against the treacherous Normans in the England of old. I tried to keep my imagination in check, but it was not easy on horseback, riding through the thickets alongside the bank, because the enemy could appear at any moment. We came to a bend in the river, and once round it there was a stretch of rapids where a log had wedged itself right in midstream between two large rocks that were bare and dry in the sinking water, and more and more logs had come drifting and piled up against the first one. Now there was a large stack out there, firmly wedged. That was not what my father wanted to see. He seemed to collapse in his saddle, and it pained me to see him like that, and it made me uneasy, so I jumped off my horse and ran down to the water and gazed out at the tangle of timber, and I ran some way along the bank still staring out into the river and ran back again, and then even further, and I hopped about unable to stand still and studied the jumble from every possible angle. Finally I called to my father:

'If we get a rope round that log there'—I pointed to the one that held the key to the problem—'and haul it just a
little
way from the rock, it will break loose from the jam, and then the rest is sure to follow.'

'It won't be easy to get out there,' he said, and his voice now was flat and unenthusiastic. 'And we won't be able to haul that log one millimetre,' he said.

'That's right, we won't,' I shouted. 'But the horses will.'

'OK,' he said, and I felt a surge of relief. I ran over to my horse and untied the rope from the saddle, and then my father's rope, and tied the two together and put a slipknot at one end and pulled it tight and eased it over my head and under my armpits across my chest, and tightened it a little behind my back.

'You have to look after the other end,' I shouted without turning round to see whether he would accept a direct order, and then I ran up the bank as far as I thought was enough, and there threw myself straight in to get the shock over with. At first I almost crawled along the bed, and then it suddenly grew deep and I began to swim out to the middle of the river. The current was not strong here, but it pulled me with it all the same, and then I was all the way out and at once moving faster. I let myself drift until my hands met the first log, and I felt it to see if it held and hoisted myself up, and the soles of my gym shoes found a foothold on the trunk. I stood there swaying until everything felt right, and then I began to jump from log to log, holding the rope high in one hand, jumping up and down the tangled timber and across to the other side and back again, and I took a few quite unnecessary leaps to get the rhythm in my legs, and to feel if it was still inside me, and some logs spun round when I landed on them and shifted their position, but I had already moved on and did not lose my balance, and my father called from the bank:

'What are you doing out there?'

'I'm flying!' I shouted back.

'When did you learn to do that?' he shouted.

'When you weren't looking,' I called, and laughed and leaped right forward to the log that was causing the trouble and there I saw that the end that I wanted the rope round was well under water.

'I'll have to go down there,' I shouted. And before my father could say anything, I had jumped in and let myself sink until I stood on the riverbed. There I felt the current punch me in the back and pull at my arms, and I opened my eyes and saw the end of the trunk straight in front of me, got the loop over my head and fastened it where I wanted it to be. It all went so well I felt I could stand there a long time almost weightless and just hold my breath and keep my hands around that log. But then I let go and rose to the surface. My father tightened the rope, and all I needed to do was haul myself in to the bank. I stood up dripping on dry land, and my father said:

'Goddamn it, that was not bad,' and then he smiled and tied the rope to the harness with a makeshift measure he had constructed while I was out in the river, and picked up the reins and stepped in front of the horse and shouted Pull! And the horse pulled as hard as it could, and nothing happened. Again he shouted Pull! And the horse pulled, and then we heard a scraping sound out from the rapids, and it was as if something broke, and the whole pile of timber tipped forwards. Log after log slid off and was seized by the current on the lower side of the rapids. My father looked almost happy then, and I could see by the way he looked at me that I did too.

Ill

17

I
t was as if a curtain had fallen,
hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But the difference in the-.way I was frightened and the way I was happy.

And I was happy from time to time, even in those first weeks after I left the cabin by the river. I was happy and full of expectation when I got on my bike and coasted down the steep Nielsenbakken, past Ljan Station and on to Mosseveien to ride the seven kilometres into central Oslo, but at the same time I was restless and might laugh out loud for no reason, and found it hard to concentrate. Everything I saw along the road and the fjord were things I had always known, yet nothing was the same. Not Nesodden or the Bunnefjord in towards the beach at Ingierstrand and the Roald Amundsen house, not Ulv Island with the nice bridge from the road across the narrow sound, or Malm Island immediately behind it, not the grain silo on Vippetangen Pier or the grey walls of the fortress on the other side of the harbour basin where the liner for America tied up. Nor the late August sky over the city.

I can see myself cycling all the way to the Ostbane Station in the almost white sunlight; grey shorts and open shirt, fluttering past Bekkelaget; the railway line to the left here and the fjord to the left and the steep rocky hillside of the Ekeberg ridge on the right; the scream of gulls, the creosote scent of the railway sleepers and the raw scent of salt water in the quivering air. It was still hot at the end of August although the summer was really over, a heatwave almost, and I could pedal at my top speed with the burning air pouring against my bare chest where sweat was running or just sail dry-skinned along under the sun and sometimes hear myself sing.

My father had given me that bicycle the year before when you could not find a single new one anywhere in the country. He had had it for years, but had left it in the basement for long periods of time because he was hardly ever at home, and he had no use for it any more; the times were new, he said, with new plans, and the bicycle was not part of those plans. It was probably just something he said, but I was glad to have it and looked after it well. It gave me a freedom and a range I would not have done without. I had several times taken it to pieces and reassembled it the way my father had shown me. It was washed and polished and oiled in all its joints and cogwheels, and the chain ran smoothly round and round without a sound from the crank with the pedals to the hub in the back wheel and back again in the brightly polished chain guard, from the moment I got on and free wheeled down the hill from home until just as soundlessly I turned in on the sea side of 0stbane Station and parked it there in a cycle rack and once again walked through the tall doors out of the sharp sunlight and into the dim, dust-filled air of the concourse to study the arrivals board. I walked along the barriers among a crowd of other people looking at the signs in front of the various platforms where the soot-laden glass roof arched high above the people and the trains, but probably I was the only one who pulled at the sleeve of a uniformed conductor and asked in detail about every single train arriving in Oslo by way of Elverum. He gave me a long look, he knew me, I had asked him before, many times, and he only pointed up to the signs I had already seen. No secret information was available, no sign mislaid anywhere.

As usual I was too early. I took up my position beside a pillar to wait in the strange half-light that was the same at all times of the day in the huge station concourse and yet never quite right for any of them; not for day or evening, not for morning, and not for night either; and there were echoes from people's shoes and people's voices, and most of all there was a great silence high up under the roof where the pigeons sat in long rows, grey and white and pied brown, looking down at me. They had nests everywhere between the iron girders and made their homes there all their lives.

But.of course he did not come.

I do not know how many times I made that journey during the late summer of 1948 to wait for the train from Elverum. And each time I felt as tense and expectant, indeed almost happy when I got on my bike and set off down the Nielsenbakken and all the way in, to stand there waiting.

But of course he did not come.

And then came the long-awaited rain, and I went on cycling into Oslo almost every other day to see if he was on the train from Elverum
that
particular day. I wore my sou'wester and my oilskins, I looked like a fisherman from Lofoten in my yellow outfit, and I had Wellingtons, and the water splashed out on either side of the wheels. It came gushing down the hillside under the Ekeberg ridge and onto the railway line on the right side of the road before the rails vanished into a tunnel and popped out again on the left side a little further on, and all the houses and buildings were greyer than they had ever been and vanished in the rain, with no eyes, no ears, no voices, they told me nothing any more. And then I stopped. One day I did not go in, nor the next day, or the day after that. It was as if a curtain had fallen. It was like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey, but the difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy.

Late that autumn a letter arrived. It was postmarked Elverum, and my mother's name was on the envelope, and the address on the Nielsenbakken was there, but on the sheet of notepaper inside all our three names were written, our surname too, although we had the same one. It looked odd. It was a short letter. He thanked us for the time we had spent together, he looked back on it with happiness, but times were different now, and it could not be helped: he was not coming home any more. In a bank in Karlstad, Sweden, there was money due for the timber we had felled that summer and sent downriver. He had already written to the bank, and he now enclosed an authorisation for my mother to draw that money by going to Karlstad with proof of her identity. Best wishes. End. No special greeting to me. I don't know. I really thought I had earned one.

'Timber?' was the only thing my mother said. She was already showing that heaviness in her body she would keep for the rest of her life, not merely a heaviness in arms and hips and the way she walked, but a heaviness in her voice and her whole bearing, even her eyelids had grown heavy, as if she were falling asleep and not fully conscious, and the thing was that I had never said a word to her about what we had been up to, my father and I, that summer. Not a word. Only that he would come home as soon as he could, when what he had to sort out was finished.

My mother borrowed money from the brother who had not been shot by the Gestapo while trying to escape from a police station on the south coast in 1943. We called him Uncle Amund. The one who was shot was Uncle Arne. They had been twins. They had stayed together through everything, gone to school together, gone cross-country skiing together, gone hunting together, but now Uncle Amund was a lonely hunter. He lived in the flat he and Arne had shared in the city, in Valerenga. He had not married. He could not have been more than thirty-one or two then, but there was a smell of old man in his flat in Smalensgata, at least I thought so when I went to visit him there.

With the money she borrowed she bought tickets to. Karlstad on the Stockholm train. I had studied the route: departure early in the morning from Oslo 0st, up along the Glomma river to Kongsvinger, then sharply to the south across the border to Sweden and Charlottenberg and down to Arvika by the Glafsfjord and on in the same direction towards Karlstad, the capital of Warmland district, beside the great lake Vanern, so big in fact that

Karlstad was a port. Return the same afternoon. My mother wanted me to go with her, while my sister stayed at home. Typical, my sister said, and she was right enough, but that was bloody well not my doing.

This time it was not a bicycle ride along Mosseveien to the 0stbane Station, but the local train from Ljan beside the fjord, and on the fjord it was no longer summer but a low grey sky almost touching the tops of the waves and a violent wind that whipped the water into white lace between the islands. I stood on the platform and watched a lady's hat come flying high above the railway line, and the tall pine trees which were so plentiful out where we lived swayed in the wind and bent eerily down in the worst gusts. But they did not fall. Many times when I was small I thought they would, that they would tumble right over with their roots in the air, as I sat by the window on the first floor gazing nervously at the slim reddish-yellow trunks being harried everywhere by the wind among the houses in the hills above the fjord, and they leaned perilously, but they never fell.