Out Stealing Horses

by Per Petterson

  On the other side of the wrecked bridge the guard lay headlong in the snow with his nose to the ground a good way from the place where Franz had last seen him. The motorcycle had not made it in time, and now it slowed down and moved almost tentatively towards the body in the snow and stopped. The rider dismounted, took his helmet off and held it under his arm as if he was going to a funeral and walked the last metres to the guard and stood over him lowering his head. A gust of wind pulled at his hair. He was just a boy. He sank down to his knees beside what might well be his best friend, but then the guard pushed himself up on his hands and was not dead. He stayed in that position and could be seen to be vomiting, and then he got to his feet with his machine gun as a support and the motorcyclist too got to his feet and bent forward and said something to him, but the guard shook his head and pointed to his ears. He could not hear a thing. They both turned and looked at the bridge, which was no longer there, and then they ran to the motorcycle, and the guard got into the sidecar and the driver onto his seat, and he got the motor running again and turned out of the square. Not towards the farm where they were billeted with the rest of the patrol, but back down the road he had just ridden up, and he gave it as much throttle as he dared, and the machine had to work harder now with a passenger in the sidecar, but then it picked up speed, and when they passed Barkald’s farm a few minutes later it was going really fast. Shortly afterwards they made a sharp turn off the road, and both leaned hard over as if in a sailing boat in a strong wind to make the turn without losing balance. The sidecar left the ground for a moment, and they roared out onto the snow-covered field and straight for the fence and the gate they did not bother to open but just drove right through with a crash that made the bars fly to all sides and hit their helmets, but they did not stop and there was only just enough room between the gateposts. And then they sped across the field close to the wire fence with the fence posts ticking past, and the machine bumping and swinging from side to side over the tussocks on its way down to the river along the path my father used to take when he was going to the shop to fetch ‘the mail’, and where I too used to go, only four years later, with my friend Jon who one day just disappeared out of my life because one of his brothers had shot the other out of his life with a gun that he, Jon, had forgotten to unload. It was high summer then, he was his brothers’ keeper, and in one instant everything was changed and destroyed.

  On the other side of the river Jon’s mother had just landed her boat beside the one my father used, and jumped ashore to haul it far enough up for the current not to pull it back and then perhaps take it over to the other bank where it had better not be, and the man in the suit got up impatiently and stupidly tried to jump out before she had finished. It was no success. He fell forward as she jerked the bow and because he kept his hands tightly round the bag he fell and banged his head against a thwart. She was on the verge of tears then.

  ‘Goddamn it, can’t you do anything right?’ the woman yelled, she who had hardly uttered a single swearword in her life, and though she knew it was a mistake to shout, she could not help it, and she took hold of his jacket and with a violent jerk hauled him like an unresisting sack out of the boat. As she straightened herself she both saw and heard the motorcycle roaring across the field on the opposite side, and my father came storming out of the shed beside the cabin, because he too had heard it and immediately realised something was wrong. He could see them at the end of the path by the water, Jon’s mother in her cap and mittens and the stranger in his suit on all fours beside the boat, and the motorcycle, which had stopped just before the last slope covered with gravel and boulders on the edge of the bank.

  ‘Get to your feet!’ screamed Jon’s mother into the suited man’s ear, pulling at his jacket, and the boy in German uniform shouted:

  ‘Halt!’ as he rushed down the slope with the guard at his heels, and is it true he also called out an imploring ‘please’ in German? Franz said so, he was sure of it: ‘Bitte, bitte,’ he had shouted, the young soldier. In any case, they stopped at the water’s edge, not wanting to jump in. It was too cold, it was too deep, and if they swam across they would be helpless targets and would certainly reach the other bank much further down on account of the current, which was not particularly strong at that time of year yet strong enough. On the top of the slope behind them the motorcycle was chuntering away like an animal out of breath, and they pulled their machine guns from their shoulders, and my father shouted:

  ‘Run like hell!’ and started to rush off himself, towards the river through the trees no-one had sacrificed to the logging yet, and he zigzagged between them using the wide trunks for cover, and right then the soldiers on the other side began shooting. Warning shots first, above the heads of the two making their way all too slowly up from the boat, and they heard the bullets strike the tree trunks with a splintering force and an alien sound she would always remember, Jon’s mother later said. Nothing had ever made her so terrified as that particular sound, it was as if the pine trees groaned, and then they shot for real, and immediately hit the suited man. His dark jacket was an obvious target against the white bank, and he dropped his bag, fell flat into the snow and said to himself so quietly that Jon’s mother could barely hear the words:

  ‘Aaah. I knew it.’

  And then he started to slide, back down the slope towards the boat, past the crooked pine that leaned out over the river, and he did not stop until one of his summer shoes touched the water. They hit him again, and then he said nothing more.

  My father had stopped just up the path, sheltered by a spruce. He called:

  ‘Pick up his bag and run over here!’ and Jon’s mother grabbed the bag in her blue mitten and ran bent over, zigzagging upwards, and maybe it was because they had never killed anyone before that the two soldiers were suddenly no longer shooting so intensively, or because the runner was a woman. Now the shots they fired were only meant to frighten, and Jon’s mother came running up the path unscathed and along with my father right up to the cabin. They rushed inside and picked out their most important things and the documents my father had hidden. Through the window they saw two cars cross the field at high speed from the road, and soldiers jumping out and running down to the river. My father stuffed everything they needed into the suited man’s bag and wrapped a sheet around it. Then they climbed out the window at the back, and with my father’s long white underwear over their clothes they fled, hand in hand, more or less, to Sweden.

  The sun had moved on, the blue kitchen turned shadowy, and the coffee in my cup was cold.

  ‘Why are you telling me these things when my father will not talk about them?’ I said.

  ‘Because he asked me to,’ said Franz. ‘When the opportunity arose. And it did, now.’

  12

  While Lars and I have been busy with the birch it has gradually turned colder, the sun is gone and a wind is rising. A grey layer of cloud floats across the sky like a duvet, the last strip of blue is being pushed against the eastern ridge and eventually disappears. We take a break, straighten our stiff backs and try to look as if it does not hurt. I am not very successful, I have to support my spine with a hand to stay just about upright, and for a moment we both look away. Then Lars rolls a cigarette and lights up, he leans against the outhouse door and smokes peacefully. I recall how good it was to have a smoke after a spell of work, in the company of the partner you had toiled with, and for the first time in many years I miss it. Then I look at the heap of logs where just now a large part of the tree lay spread. Lars looks at it too.

  ‘Not bad,’ he says calmly, smiling. ‘We’re halfway there.’

  Lyra and Poker are exhausted too. They lie panting side by side on the doorstep. The chainsaws have been turned off. Everything is quiet. And then it starts to snow. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon. I look up at the sky.

  ‘Shit,’ I say aloud.

  He follows my gaze. ‘It won’t settle, it’s too early, the ground isn’t cold enough,’ he says.

>   ‘You’re probably right,’ I say, ‘but it worries me all the same. I don’t quite know why.’

  ‘Are you fearful of being snowed in?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, feeling my face flush. ‘That too.’

  ‘Then you should get someone to clear it for you. That’s what I’ve done. Åslien, a farmer up the road here. He always shows up, no matter when, he has cleared for me for several years now. It doesn’t take him long once he’s out. It’s only a matter of going up our road and then down again with the snow plough. Takes him a quarter of an hour at most.’

  ‘Right,’ I say, clearing my throat and then going on: ‘He’s the one, I called him yesterday from the kiosk by the Co-op. That was no problem, he said, 75 kroner a time. Is that what you pay him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lars says. ‘That’s it. So then you’re on the safe side. This winter will be alright. But all that up there,’ he says almost ominously, leaning backwards and looking up at the sky. ‘Let it come down.’ He smiles with a reckless air.

  ‘How about it, shall we go on?’ he says.

  His attitude is contagious, I do feel like going on. But it surprises me, too, and worries me that I should depend on someone else to give me the strength to take on such a simple and necessary job. It’s not as if I didn’t have the time. Something inside me is changing, I am changing, from someone I knew well and blindly relied on, called ‘the boy with the golden trousers’ by those who loved him, who came up with an endless supply of shining coins whenever he put his hand in his pocket, into someone much less familiar to me and who really has no idea what kind of rubbish he has in his pockets, and I wonder how long this change has been under way. Three years, perhaps.

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ I say. ‘Let’s do that.’

  Afterwards I ask him in, I do have to after all he has done. It is snowing quite hard, but not really settling on the ground. Not yet anyway. We have stacked some awesome piles against the outhouse wall, beside the logs from the dead spruce, and the yard is swept clean apart from the huge root we have decided to pull away with chains and a car in the morning. The chains are down in Lars’ garage. But it will do for today, we are worn out and pretty hungry and thirsty for coffee. Considering the kind of start my day has had, I wonder how bright it was to work so hard, but my body feels good, it really does, and I am tired in a pleasant way, apart from my back, and that feels no different than it would normally have done, and I could not very well have let Lars clear my yard on his own.

  I measure coffee into the filter and pour cold water into the jug and switch on the percolator, and then I cut some bread and put it in a basket and get butter out and meat and cheese from the fridge onto plates and fill a small yellow jug with milk for the coffee and put everything on the table with glasses and knives for two.

  Lars sits on the woodbox by the stove. He looks young in his stockinged feet, as in fact everyone does sitting like that with their feet barely reaching the floor. Unlike mine, his hair is dry because he has had his cap on, and he has not said anything since he came in, just gazed musingly at the floor, and neither have I said anything and have been happy with that, as I am not used to small talk any more, and then he says:

  ‘Shall I light the fire?’

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Do.’ For it is true it’s getting cold in here, and at the same time I’m a bit surprised that he should take charge in my house and in that way have an opinion about how I do things, I would never have done that myself, but he did ask first, so I guess it is alright. Lars slips off the woodbox, lifts the lid and picks out three pieces of firewood and a couple of pages of last week’s Dagbladet, which I keep in the box for that purpose, and in no time he has the fire kindled, much faster than I usually manage; he has done this all his life, and then the percolator on the worktop starts to crackle and spit; good old coffee-maker I have had so long, and moments later I go over and pour the coffee into a Thermos. Holding it in my hand I stand there for a minute trying to think of the one I used to have coffee with every morning for many, many years, but she eludes me and I cannot see her face. Instead I look out the window at the cleared yard where nothing but small heaps of golden sawdust lie around the big root and the heavy snowflakes silently sail down and stay for a few seconds on the ground before mysteriously vanishing. If it goes on like that all through the night it will certainly settle by morning.

  Did I have breakfast this morning? I do not remember, it seems so long ago. All kinds of things have happened since then. But I am certainly hungry now. I turn from the window to Lars, open my hand towards the table and say:

  ‘Do tuck in, it’s all yours.’

  ‘Many thanks,’ he says, having closed the woodbox, and we sit down, a little shy both of us, and start to eat.

  We do not say anything for the first few minutes. The food tastes surprisingly good, and I have to go and look in the bread bin to see if the loaf I bought is different from the kind I usually get at the shop, but it’s the same old thing. I sit down again and go on eating and I must say I do enjoy it. I try to slow down to make it last, and Lars too goes on eating with his eyes on his plate. That’s fine with me, I have no need for conversation, but then he raises his head and says:

  ‘Of course, I was supposed to take over the farm.’

  ‘Which farm was that?’ I ask, although there can be only one farm in question. But I was not quite with him in my thoughts, and I wonder whether that is how we get to be after living alone for a long time, that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking out loud, that the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. Is this how my future looks?

  ‘The farm at home. In the village, of course.’

  There must be a hundred thousand villages in Norway, we’re in one of them now, but of course I know where he means.

  ‘You’ve probably wondered why I live here and not up in the village where I come from?’ he says.

  In fact I have not, not in the way he means, but perhaps I ought to have done. What I have wondered is how we can end up in the same place after all these years. How such a thing is possible.

  ‘Yes, you could say I have,’ I say.

  ‘It was mine to take over, I was the only one at home. Jon was at sea, Odd was dead, I had worked on that farm all my life, every single day, I had never gone away on holiday, as people do now. And my father never came back, he fell ill. No-one ever knew what was wrong with him. He broke his leg and he broke something in his shoulder and was taken to the Innbygda hospital, in 1948 that was, you remember that year, I was just a boy then. But he never came back. And then the years went by, Jon came home from the sea. I did not recognise him. It had been as if they no longer existed, any of them. I didn’t think about them. And then one day Jon came walking up the road from the bus and in at the door and said he was ready to take over the farm. He was twenty-four years old. It was his right, he said. My mother made no objection, and she did not interfere and speak up for me, but I remember her expression then, how she did not look straight at me at all. That farm was the only work I had ever done and knew anything about. Jon was tired of the sea, he had seen it all, he said. That may have been so. He had sent a few postcards through the years, from Port Said and such places, Aden, Karachi, Madras, the sort of places you don’t know a thing about or where in the world they are until you look them up in your school atlas. M/S Tijuka one of the boats was called, I remember the envelopes well, they had the name of the boat stamped on the front, and it was a name like none I had ever seen. Jon did not seem well, if you ask me. He was thin, with a slouch, he couldn’t run a farm, I thought. He looked like a druggie, those you see on the streets of Oslo nowadays, he was nervous and tetchy. But there was nothing I could do. It was his right.’