At other times he walked along the main road with a slightly fuller bag and turned into the meadows along Barkald’s fence and rowed across the river. He waved to people he saw, either German or Norwegian, and no-one stopped him. They knew who he was; he was the man who was putting Barkald’s cabin back in shape, they had asked Barkald and he confirmed the assignment, and they had been out to the place three times and found a quantity of tools and two books by Hamsun, Pan and Hunger, which they could happily accept, but they never found anything suspicious. He was the man who at regular intervals took the bus out of the village and stayed away for a good while, for he was working on several similar projects, and there was nothing wrong with his certificate of border residency nor his other papers.
My father kept the line going for two years, through summer and winter, and when he was not at the cabin someone from the village made the final leg across the border; Franz once or twice, and Jon’s mother when she could get away, but there was considerable danger involved, for everyone in the district knew each other and each other’s routines, and anything out of the norm was observed and taken down for later use in the log book we keep of each other’s lives. But then he came back, and those who were supposed to be ignorant of the traffic still were. Myself, among others, and my mother and my sister. Sometimes he fetched the ‘mail’ himself straight off the bus, or from the shop both before and after closing time, at other times it was Jon’s mother who picked it up and took it with her when she rowed up the river with food that Barkald often asked her to cook, because the handyman must be fed or so it had to appear, as if he could not cope with a cooking stove on his own but had to have a woman’s assistance.
It was a bit strange, I thought, that he would need help with that, when he could turn his hand to most things. He was really just as good a cook as my mother, when the need arose, I knew that, I had seen it and tasted it numerous times, only he was slightly lazier over that sort of thing, so when he and I were on our own we ate what we called ‘simple country food’. Fried eggs, most often. I had nothing against that. When it was my mother in the kitchen we were served what she called ‘proper meals’. When we had money, that is. It was not always so.
But Jon’s mother rowed up the river once or twice a week, with food or without it, with ‘mail’ or without it, to act as some kind of cook for my father so he could dig in to some proper meals and not fall ill and weak because of the unbalanced diet men who live alone generally swear by and not be fit enough to carry out the work he was meant to do. At least that was the way Barkald told it when he was at the shop.
Jon’s father did not take part. He was not against what they were doing, he had never said as much that anyone heard, at least Franz had not, but he would have nothing to do with the ‘traffic’. Every time something was about to happen he looked the other way, and he looked the other way when his wife went down to the river carrying her basket and stepped into the red-painted boat to row up to my father. He even looked the other way when a strange man with his arms around a tightly lashed suitcase and a city hat on his head was silently shown into his barn at twilight to sit there alone on a cartwheel, confused and silent in his inappropriate clothes, waiting for dark. And when the same man was taken by boat upriver in the night, all without a sound, first across the yard and then down to the jetty where not a word was uttered, not a light lit, he did not comment on that either, neither then nor later, even if the man was the first of several, for now not only ‘mail’ passed through the village on its way across the border to Sweden.
And it was late autumn and there was snow, but no ice on the water anywhere, and you could still row on the river. And that was a good thing, because early one morning before the rooster fell off his perch, as Franz put it, a man in a suit was dropped off on the main road in the dark and walked with his bag on his back through the snow up the farm road and straight into Jon and his family’s yard. The man wore summer shoes with thin soles, and was half dead with cold in his wide trousers, his legs shaking, making his trouser legs roll and sway from his hips down to the light shoes when Jon’s mother went out onto the doorstep with a shawl round her shoulders and a blanket under her arm. It was an odd sight, she told Franz when she came back from Sweden in May of ’45, almost like a circus act. She gave him the blanket and showed him over to the barn where he had to stay in the hay through all the hours of the white day until evening came, for about twelve hours, because the light was all gone around five o’clock, and it had been five when he came walking up the road.
But the man could not take it. He went nuts in there, Jon’s mother said, at two o’clock he cracked and went berserk. He started yelling the strangest things, picked up an iron bar and struck out and pounded around him so that flakes showered down off the roof poles and several of the lathes in the haycart were knocked straight off. He could easily be heard from the yard outside, and maybe they heard him upriver, for the air was still and carried his cries clearly across the water, or they heard him right down on the road where the Germans drove by at least two or three times a day trying to be as alert as they could. And then the animals in the byre alongside grew restive. Bramina whinnied and kicked out at the walls of her stall and the cows mooed in their stalls as if spring had come and they longed to go out to pasture, and something had to be done pronto.
He had to leave that barn. He had to be sent up river without a moment’s delay. But it was daylight still and easy to see far across the fields and through the bare trees with the snow on the ground making everything visible in clear silhouette, and along the first stretch you could see the river from the road. But he had to go. Jon had not yet come back from school and the twins were playing in the kitchen. She heard them laughing and rolling on the floor, having mock fights as they always did. She quietly put on warm clothes, cap and mittens and went down the steps and across the yard to the barn as her husband woke up on the divan and rose to his feet, and I may be laying it on a bit here and cannot be sure of this, but still I am convinced that a strange creature like a ghost had come into the house that pulled him up and jerked him out into the hall where the naked bulb hung that was never turned out so it would shine out of the small window to help people find their way through the dark of the night, and the picture of his father hung there with his long beard in a gold frame above the coat pegs, and on his shoeless feet he stood there dazed, where the door opened outwards as it was meant to do so the snow would not beat in when the weather was wild, and now he did not want to look any other way at all but instead was staring after her. Behind her back she sensed him standing there and it surprised her in an intimidating way, but she did not turn round, merely pulled the bar off the lock and opened the big barn door and went in and stayed there for an eternity. He stood where he was, staring. She came out at last with the stranger in tow, she had her warm boots on and her jacket and he was wearing the suit and his summer shoes, with the grey bag on his back. He had a jumper on now under the suit, and it made his jacket too tight and bulky and he looked pretty inelegant. He no longer had any weapon, and she practically led him by the hand, as he was humble now, and almost limp and loose-jointed and maybe exhausted after an outburst he had not expected. Halfway across the yard on the way past the house towards the jetty she suddenly turned and looked back. Their footprints were obvious in the snow, first the stranger’s tracks up the farm lane, and then her own from the house, and finally both sets from the barn to the point where they were standing now. The impressions of the urban summer shoes were striking and unlike any others you would see in those parts at this time of year, and she looked down at the ground, thinking hard and biting her lip, as the man grew restive and began to pull at her sleeve.
‘Come on,’ he said in a low piping voice. ‘We have to get going,’ and he sounded like a spoiled child. She looked up at her husband still standing in the doorway. He was a big man, he completely filled that doorway, no light could get past him. She said:
‘You must walk in his foot
prints. You have no choice.’
Something in his face stiffened when she uttered those words, but she did not see that, for the man in the suit was impatient and had let go of her arm and was already on his way down to the jetty, and she hurried after him, and then they vanished round the house and were out of sight.
He stood there in his stockinged feet, looking out at the yard. Through the silence he heard them get into the boat and the oars being put in the rowlocks and the muffled splash when they hit the water the first time and the rhythmic creak of iron on wood as his wife started to row with those strong arms he knew so well from countless embraces during the nights and years that lay behind him. Yet again she was on her way upriver to visit the man from Oslo who lived in the cabin there. Every time something was wrong she had to go there, every time something important was in the offing she had to go there, and now she had a trembling halfwit in the boat who was probably from the same town, and it was the middle of the day with a harsh light on the snow, and he threw a last glance over the yard and made a choice he would come to regret, and then he closed the door and went into the living room and sat down there. The twins were still playing in the kitchen, he could hear them plainly through the wall. To them everything was still the same.
11
I sit on the bench for a long time gazing out over the lake. Lyra is running about. I don’t know what is happening. Something slides off me. The nausea has gone, my thoughts are clear. I feel weightless. It is like being saved. From shipwreck, from obsession, from evil spirits. An exorcist has been here and left, taking with him all the mess. I breathe freely. There is still a future. I think of music. Most likely I will buy a CD player.
I come up the slope from the bridge with Lyra at my heels and see Lars standing in my yard. He is holding a chainsaw in one hand, the other grips one of the birch branches. He rocks the tree, but as far as I can see it does not budge. Only the branch gives a little. The sun has more yellow now, with a sharper light in my face. Lars wears a peaked cap he has pulled well down over his eyes, and when he hears me coming he turns and almost has to lean his head backwards to look out from under the brim to meet my gaze. Poker and Lyra play tag around the house as well as they can with the birch blocking the yard, and then they rush together in a mock fight, growling and whining and rolling around on the grass behind the shed, having a good time.
Lars grins and shakes the branch again.
‘Shall we deal with it?’ he says.
‘Yes, please,’ I say, giving my most enthusiastic smile. And I mean it. It is a relief. It may well be that I like Lars. I have not been quite sure, but it may well turn out that way. I would not be surprised.
‘But then you’d best cut that branch,’ I say, pointing to the one that has torn the gutter down and now presses against the door of the shed. ‘Because my saw is in there.’
‘We’ll soon see to that,’ he says, pulling out the choke on his saw, which is a Husqvarna and not a Jonsered, and that too is a relief in a comic sort of way, as if we were doing something we are not in fact allowed to do, but which is certainly really fun, and he pulls the cord once or twice and slams the choke back in and then gripping the cord firmly he lets the saw sink as he pulls and it starts up with a fine growl, and in a trice the branch is off and cut into four parts. The door is unblocked. It is an encouraging sight. I push the overhanging gutter aside and go in to fetch my saw, which is still on the bench where I left it, and take the yellow can of two-stroke petrol out with me. There is a little left. I put the saw down on the grass on its side and squat down to unscrew the petrol tank and pour, and it fills right up and then the can is empty. I do not spill any of it, my hand is steady, and that is a good thing when someone is watching.
‘I have a couple of cans of petrol in my shed,’ says Lars. ‘So we can go on until we’re finished. No sense in breaking off to drive into the village when there is a job to be done.’
‘No sense at all,’ I say and have no wish to do so; going into the village now. There is nothing I need from the shop, and this is not the day for social profligacy. I start the Jonsered, and luckily succeed at the first try, and we attack the birch, Lars and I, from two angles; a pair of slightly stiff men between sixty and seventy with earmuffs on their heads against the deafening howl from the saws when they eat into the wood, and we bend over them and hold our arms well away from our bodies to make sure the dangerous chain is an extension of our will and not the other way around, and we deal with the branches first and cut them off close to the trunk and saw them into suitable lengths and cut away everything I cannot use for firewood and gather all that into a heap I can put a match to later and have a bonfire in the November darkness.
I like watching Lars work. I would not call him brisk, but he is systematic and moves more elegantly up to the birch trunk with the heavy saw in his grasp than he does out on the road with Poker. His style infects my style, and that is how it usually is for me; the movement first and then the comprehension, for gradually I realise that the way he bends and moves and sometimes twists around and leans is a logical way of balancing against the supple line between the body’s weight and the tug of the chain as it takes hold of the trunk, and all this to give the saw the easiest access to its goal with the least possible danger to the human body, exposed as it is; one moment strong and unassailable, and then a crash, and suddenly ripped to shreds like a doll can be, and then everything is gone and ruined forever, and I do not know whether he thinks like this, Lars, as he wields the chainsaw with such aplomb. Probably he does not, but I do, several times over, cannot stop myself when it first comes to mind, and it does not brighten my spirits. It’s of no consequence though, I am used to it, but I am sure his mother’s mind was full of thoughts like that when she rowed for her life upriver that day in the late autumn of 1944, Lars rolling around on the kitchen floor merrily mock-fighting his twin brother Odd, not knowing what was going on around him, what it could lead to, not knowing that three years later he would shoot the life out of that very twin Odd with his big brother Jon’s gun and tear his body to shreds. No-one could know that, and outside it was day still with a steel-grey light on the snow-covered fields, and on the water his mother tried to make it look like any of her numerous trips up to the summer cabin.
I can picture it well.
Her blue mittens gripping the oars and her boots braced against the bottom planks and her misty-white breath coming out in hoarse gasps, and the stranger in his summer shoes between her legs on the bottom of the boat, his arms clutching the grey bag he would not let go of, and he was no warmer now in his thin trousers. He really was shaking violently, thumping on the woodwork like a two-stroke motor of some yet undiscovered make; she had never seen anything like it and was afraid that on land they would hear this new engine of hers.
I can picture it well.
The German motorcycle with the sidecar calmly driving up the main road lately cleared of snow, and then turning into the yard of precisely that farm, with no apparent motive, no-one ever understood what the rider was actually looking for. Maybe he was just lonely and longing for a person to talk to, or wanting badly to smoke a cigarette, and then finding his last match had been used when he was about to light up and so came to borrow a box of matches and have someone stand with him as he smoked, looking at the landscape and the river, and there was no-one else that he wanted to be just then than one of two men from two different countries fraternising over an innocent cigarette, distant from all evils of war, or else there was some other reason that no-one could guess at, either then or later. Whichever, he stopped the motorbike in the yard, dismounted and walked unhurriedly towards the door of the farmhouse. But he never reached it. He suddenly came to a halt and stared at the ground, and then he started to walk back and forth, and then in a circle, and he squatted down, and finally he walked down past the house to the river and right onto the jetty. What happened to him there was that a light was lit in the huge darkness of his mind. The coin dropped into the
machine in the right place, and a ‘click’ could be heard. Now everything was clear to him. And he was short of time. He ran back and threw himself onto his motorbike and immediately stamped hard on the start pedal, but damn it the motor would not start, and he tried again and again and then once more, and it suddenly came to life like a shot, and he bent over the handlebars and roared down the farm road and swerved onto the main road with the empty sidecar rattling on the outside in a spray of snow. Coming round that very bend was Jon, on his way home from school with his school bag under his arm, and he heard the motorcycle, and only just managed to throw himself into the ditch to avoid being run over and maybe injured for life. In the fall the buckle on his bag broke, and his books sailed out in all directions. But the soldier could not have cared less, he just gave it more throttle and vanished towards the crossroads where the shop and the church were, and the bridge crossed the river.
I can picture it well.
Jon in the ditch, picking books out of the snow while his mother is still on the river with the man in the suit flattening himself against the bottom of the boat. It is hard work rowing against the current with two people on board even though it is not so strong at this time of year, and they make slow progress. It is a good way up to the cabin yet where my father bends over a table in the outhouse doing some carpentry, totally unaware that she is on her way. The man in the boat trembles and gabbles to himself, and then he weeps a little and gabbles again, and the woman at the oars pleads with him to be quiet, but he clutches the straps of his bag and is lost in his own world.
Franz stood in his kitchen with the window open, for he had stoked up his fire when he came home from working in the forest, and now it was so hot in the room that he had to let some air in. It was still daylight, and he stood there smoking and trying to work out why he had never married. It was something he brooded on every year at the time when the cold came creeping in, and he kept it up until Christmas and after, but at the beginning of the new year he threw it off. The lack of offers was not the reason, but when he stood there smoking by the open window, he just could not remember what the reason had been, and it seemed an absurd situation just then, to be living alone. And then he heard a motorcycle approaching up the road at great speed on the other side of the river. The bridge was fifty metres from his house, and a further twenty metres along on the opposite side stood the guard in his long grey-green overcoat with the sub-machine gun sticking up behind his shoulder, and he was cold and bored. He too heard the motorcycle, and he turned towards the rising volume of sound and took a few steps in that direction. Now Franz could just see the helmeted head of the rider appearing from behind a thicket over there, and then the whole motorcycle came into view with the rider bent over the handlebars to minimise the air resistance, and he had just a few hundred metres left before the crossroads. It had been misty and overcast all day, and now just before the sun was about to go down there it suddenly was in the southwest, throwing a golden light through the valley at a low slant, and it lit up the river and all that was on it and sent a dazzling ray into Franz’s eyes and woke him from his thoughts about a possible marriage and the long line of blonde and dark-haired candidates he suspected would have queued up for him, and then it came to him what it was he was actually looking at up there on the road. He hurled his cigarette out the window, whipped round and ran out into the hallway, pulling a knife from his belt, and fell to his knees and rolled up the rag rug. There was a crack in the floorboards which he stuck the knife into hard and bent it upwards, and four boards that were fastened together tilted up, and he put them aside and put his hand into the space underneath. He had always known that this day would come. He was prepared. There was no time for hesitating, and not even for a moment did he hesitate. From the small space he brought out a detonator, quickly checked that the leads were in place and had not become tangled, and he placed it levelly between his knees, drew a deep breath as he took a firm hold of the handle, and then slammed it down. His house shook and the windows rattled, and he breathed out again and put the detonator back in its small space, laid the floorboards into the square opening and tapped them into place with his clenched fist and rolled the rag rug over the spot so that everything looked the way it had just a moment before. He rose to his feet and ran to look out the window. The bridge was shattered and parts of the wooden structure still whirled in the air in slow motion, on their way back down in the sudden silence after the explosion, and some of the planks hit the stones on the bank in a strangely soundless way and some fell in the water and started to drift with the current, and it seemed to Franz he saw it all through glass even though the window was open.
Out Stealing Horses Page 12
