Out Stealing Horses (8 page)

Next day at the shop I told them about the lynx. It was most likely a dog, they said. No-one believed me. No-one I saw that day had ever seen the lynx, so why should I, who had lived there barely a month, be blessed with such a thing? If I had been one of them I might have thought the same, but I saw what I saw, I have the image of the big cat somewhere inside me and can call upon it whenever I like, and I hope that one day, or just as good, one night, I shall see it again. That would be great.

I park in front of the Stat Oil station. The broken indicator. I still have not replaced the glass, or changed the bulb for that matter, but have managed without it. It is starting to get a bit too dark in the evenings to do without, besides it's illegal to drive without one. So I go in and talk to the man in the workshop. He glances out the window in the sliding door and says he will change the bulb at once and order the new glass from a car scrapyard.

'No sense in spending money on something new for an old car,' he says. And that's true, no doubt. The car is a ten-year-old Nissan station wagon, and I could easily have bought a new car, I can afford that, but in addition to the house purchase it would have eaten into my resources quite a lot, so I opted against it. In fact I had plans for a car with four-wheel drive, it would have been useful out here, but then I decided that a four-wheeler was a bit like cheating and a bit new-rich, and I ended up with this one, which has rear-wheel drive like everything else I've driven. I have already been to the mechanic with various problems, a worn-out dynamo among other things, and he says the same thing each time and orders from the same scrap dealer. It costs a fraction of new parts, and I also think he charges too little. But he whistles as he works and has his radio in the workshop tuned to the news channel, and the price policy is obviously deliberate. He is so friendly and obliging it bewilders me. I had actually expected some resistance, especially as I don't drive a Volvo. Maybe he's an outsider too.

I leave the car at the petrol station and walk past the church and over the crossroads to the shop. That is unusual. I've noticed that everyone here gets into the car and drives regardless of where they are going or how far it is. The Co-op is a hundred metres away, but I am the only one who
walks
outwith the parking place. I feel exposed and am happy to get into the shop.

I exchange greetings to right and left, they are used to me now and realise I am here to stay and that I am not one of the holiday cottage crew who pile out here in their mammoth cars every Easter and summer to fish by day and play poker and swig sundowners in the evening. It took some time before they started to ask questions, cautiously, in the queue for the check-out, and now everyone knows who I am and where I live. They know about my working life, how old I am, that my wife died three years ago in an accident I only just survived myself, that she was not my first wife, and that I have two grown-up children from an earlier marriage, and that they have children themselves. I have told them all that, including how when my wife died I did not want to go on working, and I pensioned myself off and started to look for a completely new place to live, and when I found the house I live in now I was really happy. They like hearing that, although everyone says I could have asked anybody round here and they would have told me what a state the house was in, that many people had wanted the place on account of its lovely situation but none of them felt like taking it on because of the work that was needed to make it fit to live in. Then I say it was just as well I didn't know, for then I would not have bought it, and not found out it is quite possible to live in if you do not demand too much at once, but just take one step at a time. That suits me fine, I say, I have plenty of time, I'm not going anywhere.

People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know
about
you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to. You only have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay, because they will talk about you no matter how much you squirm, it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.

There is not much I want, just a loaf of bread and something to put on it, and that's soon done. I'm surprised at how unfilled my shopping baskets have become, how few things I need now I am alone. I suffer a sudden onset of meaningless melancholy and feel the eyes of the check-out lady on my forehead as I search for the money to pay,
the widower
is what she sees, they do not understand anything, and it is just as well.

'Here you are,' she says quietly in a voice soft as silk, as she gives me my change, and I say:

'Many thanks,' and I am on the verge of tears, for Christ's sake, and go out quickly with my purchases in a bag and across to the filling station. I have been lucky. They do not understand a thing.

He has changed the bulb for the indicator light. I put my bag on the passenger seat and walk between the pumps and into the shop. His wife is smiling behind the counter.

'Hi,' she says.

'Hi,' I say. 'That bulb. How much is it?'

'Not much. It can wait. How about a cup of coffee? Olav is taking five minutes/ she says, gesturing with her thumb towards the open door of the room behind the shop. It's hard to refuse. I walk to the open doorway, a bit uncertain, and look in. There sits Olav the mechanic on a chair in front of a computer screen with long shining columns of figures. None of them is red, as far as I can see. He has a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a chocolate bar in the other. He must be twenty years younger than I am, but I'm no longer surprised when I realise that mature men are well below my own age.

'Sit down and relax for a bit,' he says, pouring coffee into a plastic mug and placing it on the table in front of a spare chair and waving me forward as he leans back heavily in his chair. If he gets up as early as I do, and I have a feeling he does, he has been at work for a long time and must be tired. I sit down on the chair.

'Well, how's it going then at The Top?' he says. 'Are you settled in?' My place is called 'The Top' because it has a view over the lake.

'I have been there twice myself,' he says. 'Looking round, and wondering whether to put in an offer. There's plenty of room for car repairing there, but there was so much to be done on the house I thought better of it. I like working on cars, not houses. But maybe it's the other way round for you?' We both glance at my hands. They don't look like the hands of an artisan.

'Not exactly,' I say. 'I'm not much good at either, but given time I will put the house in order. I might need a spot of help now and again.'

What I do, which I have never let anyone know, is I close my eyes every time I have to do something practical apart from the daily chores everyone has, and then I picture how my father would have done it or how he actually did do it while I was watching him, and then I copy
that
until I fall into the proper rhythm, and the task reveals itself and grows visible, and that's what I have done for as long as I can remember, as if the secret lies in how the body behaves towards the task at hand, in a certain balance when you start, like hitting the board in a long jump and the early calculation of how much you need, or how little, and the mechanism that is always there in every kind of job; first one thing and then the other, in a context that is buried in each piece of work, in fact as if what you are going to do already exists in its finished form, and what the body has to do when it starts to move is to draw aside a veil so it all can be read by the person observing. And the person observing is
me,
and the man I am watching, his movements and skills, is a man of barely forty, as my father was when I saw him for the last time when I was fifteen, and he vanished from my life forever. To me he will never be older.

All this would probably be hard to explain to this friendly mechanic, so I merely say: 'I had a practical father. I learned a lot from him.'

'Fathers are great,' he says. 'My father was a teacher. In Oslo. He taught me how to read books, riot much else. He wasn't practical, you could not call him that. But he was a fine man. We could always talk. He died a fortnight ago.'

'I didn't know that,' I say. 'I'm sorry to hear it.'

'How could you know? He had been ill for a long time, it was probably the best for him to have it over with. But I miss him, I really do.'

He is just sitting there, and I can see he misses his father, quite simply and straightforwardly, and I would wish it was as easy as that, that you could just miss your father, and that was all there was to it.

I get to my feet. 'I'd better get going,' I say. 'There's this house of mine waiting. I have to keep on with it. Winter's on its way.'

'That's true,' he says, smiling. 'If there's anything you're puzzled about, say the word. We're always here.'

'There is something, in fact. The road up to my house. It's a fair length, you know. When the snow comes it won't be easy for me to keep it clear by hand. And I don't have a tractor.'

'No problem. You can ring this man,' says Olav the mechanic, writing a name and a number on a yellow Post-it—'he's your nearest neighbour with a tractor. He clears his own road and he can easily do yours as well. He is a farmer, and he doesn't have anywhere to go in the morning but down the road and up again. I don't think he'll mind the extra stretch, but he'll likely want something for his trouble. Fifty kroner a time, I would guess.'

'That's reasonable enough. I'll be glad to pay it. Thanks a lot, for your help and the coffee,' I say.

I walk out into the shop and pay for the indicator light bulb, and the mechanic's wife smiles and says, 'Have a good day,' and I go all the way out and get into the car and drive home. The little yellow note I have stuck in my wallet has made the immediate future much less complicated. I feel easy and well and think, Is that all it takes? Anyhow, now winter can come.

Back at The Top I park the car facing my courtyard tree, an ancient almost hollow birch that will come crashing down if I don't do something about it soon, and I go into the kitchen with my shopping bag, fill the kettle for coffee and switch on the percolator. Then I go and get the chainsaw from the shed and a small round file and a pair of ear protectors that were included in the price of the saw. I fetch petrol and two-stroke oil from the garage and place everything on the flagstone in front of the door in the sunlight that feels almost warm now at its height at midday and go in again and find the Thermos and stand by the worktop waiting for the percolator to finish its cycle. Then I fill up the Thermos with steaming coffee and put on warm working clothes and go out again and sit on the flagstone and start to sharpen the saw with the file as gently and systematically as I can until the edge of each tooth in the chain is sharp and shining. I don't know where I learned to do this. Presumably I have seen it on film; a documentary about the great forests or a feature film with a forestry setting. You can learn a lot from films if you have a good memory, watch how people do things and have done them always, but there is not much real work in modern films, there are only ideas. Thin ideas and something they call humour, everything has to be a laugh now. But I hate being entertained, I don't have any time for it.

Anyway, I did not learn how to sharpen a chainsaw from my father, have not watched him doing it and cannot copy him no matter how hard I search my memory. The one-man saws had not reached the Norwegian forests in 1948. There were only a few heavy machines which took five men to carry or had to be transported by horses, and no-one could afford them. So when my father was going to fell the timber on our land that summer so many years ago, it was done in the way it had always been done in those regions: several men at work with a crosscut saw, and a hatchet, and the air so clean to breathe, and a horse that was trained and a chain-tow to the river where a stack of logs lay on the bank ready and waiting and drying out and the owner's symbol cut into each log, and when all was down that had to be felled and the bark stripped off as good as could be, the logs were rolled out into the water with pike poles by one man at each end of the pile, and then a shout of farewell across the river in words so ancient that no one knew their meaning any longer and the flat splash of water and then gently out into the current, picking up speed and then finally: Bon voyage!

I get up from the flagstone with the newly filed saw in my hand and put it on its side and unscrew the two caps and pour in petrol and fill up with oil and screw the nuts tightly back again. I whistle for Lyra, who comes running at once from some serious digging work behind the house, and with the Thermos under my arm I walk over to the edge of the forest where the dead spruce lies long and heavy and almost white in the heather with no trace of the bark that once covered the whole trunk. After two quick tugs I get the saw going, adjust the choke and let the chain run in the air, there is a howl through the forest, I put the earmuffs on, and then let the saw blade sink into wood. Sawdust spatters my trousers, my whole body vibrates.

6

T
here was the scent
of new-felled timber. It spread from the track-side to the river, it filled the air and drifted across the water and penetrated everything everywhere and made me numb and dizzy. I was in the thick of it all. I smelled of resin, my clothes smelled, and my hair smelled, and my skin smelled of resin when I lay in my bed at night. I went to sleep with it and woke up with it and it stayed with me all the day long. I
was
forest. Carrying my hatchet I waded knee-deep in spruce sprigs and cut the branches off in the way my father had shown me; close to the trunk so that nothing would stick out and get in the way of the shaving tool or get caught up in or injure the feet of the man who might have to run on the logs when the floating timber got tangled up and blocked the river. I swung the hatchet to my left and my right in a hypnotic rhythm. It was heavy work, it felt as if everything struck back from every side and nothing would yield by itself, but that did not bother me, I was worn out without realising it, and I just went on. The others had to restrain me, they took me by the shoulders and sat me down on a tree stump and said I had to sit there and rest for a while, but there was resin on the seat of my trousers, and a prickling in my legs, and I rose from the stump with a tearing sound and picked up my hatchet. The sun was baking, my father was laughing. I was like a man intoxicated.