To Siberia

by Per Petterson

  “I’ve seen them before,” I said. We were almost at Lodsgate, and I felt like stopping or walking past. It was confusing.

  “Yeah, of course you have,” said Klara.

  We turned up the street and walked past the Færgekroen which was dark and closed and then on to the sign which should read: Herlov Bendiksen—Glazier, but it did not. It read: Konrad Mortensen—Everything in glass and frames, and it came so abruptly that it almost made me cry. It was dark in the dairy shop, and dark in the little room beside it, but there was light in the living room on the first floor. I stood still for a moment, Klara looked the way I was looking, and then I went on up to Danmarksgate and stopped on the corner and pointed:

  “The railway station is five blocks that way and then up to the left onto Kirkegate. You’ll see it at once. I’m not going any further now.”

  Klara put down her suitcase on the sidewalk, clasped her arms around me and gave me a big hug. She had perfume on. After a few weeks of cleaning fish that would change.

  “I don’t really want to leave you,” she said, “you suddenly looked so sad.”

  “I’m fine. Now I’m going home and all that.”

  “Of course you are.” She laughed. “I’m not, luckily. Maybe we’ll meet again. We’re in the same country, at least.”

  “We probably will,” I said.

  “Thanks for the schnapps. They gave me a real buzz.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She walked backward up the street for a few steps waving one glove, and I waved back, took a firm grip of the suitcase handle, and went down Lodsgate again and into the entrance to Number 2.

  It was quiet on the staircase. I put the suitcase beside the door leading into the dairy shop. I pushed it ajar and looked in. It was still dark in there, but I saw the clock on the wall. It was past eight. That was odd. The light should be on now and early customers with rolls in paper bags on their way in to buy milk for breakfast coffee. The door of the room at the other end was closed, and no sounds came from it. I took a few steps into the shop and stood there behind the counter on the black and white tiles. I looked at the door for a long time, then I went back again. I left the suitcase standing there and went and sat down on the step in front of the shop and lit a cigarette. It didn’t taste good, but I stayed there until it was finished. A man cycled past, he stared at me and went on staring until his head had turned right around and he almost fell off and had to put one foot down. I stubbed out the cigarette on the edge of the step, stood up and went in again and up the steep winding stairs without the suitcase and without making too much noise, but I did not tiptoe either. It smelled of coffee and faintly of cigar as it had always done. The door of the living room was open but it was silent in there. I heard the tick of the pendulum clock. I put my head in to look. They both sat in their chairs by the window, and between the chairs was the lighted lamp and the small table in dark wood and glass where the missionary journals lay in piles. But neither of them was reading.

  “Hi, it’s me,” I said. “You’re so quiet in here.”

  They turned and looked toward the door where I stood. I had only been home once in almost three years, but they looked at me as if I were either a total stranger or had just been down for a couple of minutes to fetch a bottle of milk. At length my father tried to smile, and that was strange too, he hardly ever smiled, and anyway he didn’t manage to, and my mother’s eyes were blue, blue, blue.

  “Where’s Jesper?” I asked.

  “Jesper is in Morocco,” my mother said in a low voice.

  “That is not right. I had a letter two weeks ago and then he was about to come home, and that letter had been on the way for just as long. So that isn’t right.”

  My father took hold of both armrests to push himself up, his back was as curved as a half moon and his jaws protruded and his gray hair was combed back hard. How come it was gray? It was not like that before. Then he changed his mind and sank down again. He said:

  “What she means is that Jesper is in Morocco because he is dead. He never came home.”

  I did not understand. We had made an arrangement. He was taking a boat to Nice and then the train from there with the last of his money. A child could manage that.

  “It isn’t possible,” I said and took out the letter I had kept in my pocket for two weeks, but my father had a letter too. He leaned forward and passed it to me. It had been on top of the missionary journals. I opened the envelope. It was a brief notice on official paper. At the top it said Tangiers, November 15. The rest was in Spanish or French, but I could not focus, and I understood nothing. At the bottom on the white part a few lines were penciled in Danish. I read them.

  “We had it translated,” said my father.

  I gave him back the letter, and he took it as if it were glass.

  “It isn’t true,” I said.

  He looked down and sat like that until he finally raised his eyes and then they were different, he clenched his lips, the skin was taut around his eyes. I had been home for fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty, and they had been sitting in those damned chairs the whole time, and I had been standing on the floor leaning against the dining table he had made in the workshop. He had made everything in this room, table and chairs and the cupboard by the wall, he had even rebuilt the piano. The lid of the keyboard was open with the hymn sheets out. She must have kept on with her playing and singing in the evenings and far into the night, and my father had either gone out of his mind or submitted and been saved. And then everything disintegrated into small pieces with sharp edges, I could hear it splitting and crashing around me, it cut into my numb palms when I stroked my stomach, and my mother who had said nothing for a long time looked at my hands, rose from her chair and said coldly:

  “Are you expecting a child?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And can you show me your wedding ring?” The blue gaze met mine, and I looked into hers, but there was nothing there.

  “What wedding ring?” I said, but she did not reply. She walked around me until she stood with her back to the piano. Above the piano Jesus was sitting by the light of the moon on the Mount of Olives, deep in thought, tortured in his hour of doubt. The moon was on its way behind a cloud. Soon it would be dark. Shall, shall not, he thought. My mother took off her spectacles and put them on the table, and her eyes grew even bigger. She said:

  “How dare you come into the house of sorrow in this way? Have you no shame?” Her hands were clasped in front of her, and I saw the flaming sword. I felt it grow within me, an emptiness like ash in the mouth. I licked my lips, but it did not help.

  I turned to my father. He still sat in his chair looking down at his lap. I stared at him until he had to raise his eyes, and he shook his head like an old man and turned away and looked into the wall. He had nothing to give, and I would not beg. I went out of the room and down the stairs, picked up my suitcase from beside the door and went out through the entrance and away from that house.

  I had lived in that town for twenty years and never been out to Læsø. Few of us had. In our family only our father had been there that once when he had been looking for work as a carpenter, and he did not tell us anything about it when he came home. But Læsø was easy to get to once you had decided on it, and at the same time it was invisible from the mainland.

  The first thing that struck me when I went out there by boat was that I could look over the water back at the town. Not only Pikkerbakken, but the line of rust red roofs and the church tower and all the high points even on a day when the weather was not completely clear. And I who wanted to get away, now it seemed as if someone was keeping an eye on me, and I could not see who it was. But after a few weeks that ceased to matter. Nothing mattered.

  Marianne’s uncle was her father’s brother, and he agreed that I should stay with him until the child was born, and I was welcome to stay on as long as I was useful. He was a carter too. One of two on Læsø. He also kept sheep. Twenty ewes that were out in the summer and
near the buildings in winter, and it was Ingrid’s job to look after them. Ingrid was his wife. I was to help her. There wasn’t much snow that winter, but it was cold and there was not much for them to eat on the heather-covered moorland, so the sheep needed hay twice a day and water. The water had to be carried in buckets from the house, and it often froze in the trough and then you had to carry more that was hot to thaw the first lot. We took hot water from a big kettle on the wood-burning stove in the kitchen, and we could keep the fire going in that stove for days on end if it was necessary. That is how we did it, but it was all right. I was glad to have plenty to do so I could not think so much, and Ingrid saw to it that I did not work too hard. The ewes would lamb in April, and that was not long to wait. I would be a good midwife, Ingrid thought, for I was going to lamb too and could understand how they felt. I smiled when she said that, because that was how it was meant. As a friendly joke.

  I dreamed at night, but when I woke up I remembered nothing except that I had dreamed. I got up in what I called my lair, it was a little attic room facing east, and then I went to the window and looked out at the flock standing close together waiting and gazing up at the house. When they caught sight of me they all began to bleat at once.

  They had a sheepdog on the farm called Poker. He was black and white with a diamond on his forehead, and he hadn’t much to do in the winter when the sheep were so close to the buildings. We made friends, Poker and I, and we went for walks together. Long ones sometimes. Once we went out to the point where the Man from Danzig had all his goods plundered and went down with his ship and was drowned. It was early in March. From the outermost point we could see the Vistula setting off northward on its way to Oslo.

  Another time we went out to Hvidebakker over the moors and back again along the beach and all the way to Vesterø. It took several hours. The little village had a ferry harbor and a small fishing harbor with a breakwater around it, and on the hill behind the harbor was the Carlsen Hotel where Ernst Bremer gave parties outside the claws of the customs men many years ago. Once the police chief of our town went out to negotiate with Bremer, and Bremer was in a good mood and invited the police chief to a celebration at the restaurant. The best brands of spirits flowed, and they both got roaring drunk and walked arm in arm to the beach and out into the water with their trouser legs rolled up to the knee and sang: Beside the sea, beside the sea, there will I reside! A fisherman told me that story. I wish Jesper could have heard it.

  I went up above the quay past the steps to the hotel. I saw a man through the window with a beer in his hand, and another man with a basket full of eggs. I was feeling heavy now, and tired, and I stood there leaning backward with my hands crossed behind my back at the end of the breakwater before I walked on to the beach on the other side and some way along on the hard-frozen white sand. It had started to blow a bit, and it was still cold with no snow, so I took off my scarf and tied it around my head and ears and sat down in the shelter of a dune and blew into my hands to warm them before I lit a cigarette. Poker ran along the edge of the water with a seagull’s wing in his mouth, and I was so young then, and I remember thinking: I’m twenty-three years old, there is nothing left. Only the rest.

  PER PETTERSON is the author of four previous novels, including Out Stealing Horses and In the Wake, which have established him as one of Norway’s best fiction writers. Petterson was born in Oslo to a working-class family. He has worked as a manual laborer, is trained as a librarian, spent twelve years as a bookseller, and was a translator and literary critic before becoming a full-time writer. His novel Out Stealing Horses won the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the largest international prize for a work of fiction written in any language and published in English. Out Stealing Horses was also named one of the best books of 2007 by the New York Times Book Review and Time.

  ANNE BORN, poet, critic, and historian, has translated many works from the principal Scandinavian languages into English, including three novels by Per Petterson.