Revolver
Page 11
“Why you let Wolff have the gun. When you knew he had more bullets.”
“Ah, that,” said Sig. “Well, it was what you said to me, as you left the cabin. I suddenly saw what I had to do. I wanted to be true to our mother, but I didn’t want to let our father down either. And I saw a way to do both, to make them both happy.”
“But you risked your life to do it.”
“Maybe,” said Sig.
“Or were you trusting in God’s intervention?”
Sig stopped for a moment. He shrugged.
“I was trusting in what our parents taught us, in their own different ways. Luckily for me, it worked.”
Anna smiled.
“You know, I understand it now. There’s always a third choice in life. Even if you think you’re stuck between two impossible choices, there’s always a third way. You just have to look for it.”
Sig said nothing, but nodded and walked on, and Anna with him.
That night, as Sig went to sleep with the music of Mahler still drifting around his head, two thoughts came to him.
The first thought was this: that he was a foolish old man, because all his life he’d been looking for something, and it was only when Anna joined him in the bar that evening that he realized that home is not something you find outside yourself; home is something you carry inside you, and it’s made from the memories of the people you love, and the people who have loved you.
As this thought left his head, it took with it a small burden that he’d carried for almost sixty years; as he connected to the child he’d been before Wolff stalked into his life, and in the space of little more than thirty-six hours, had stopped being a boy and started being a man. Was it Wolff who’d killed that boy? Or had Sig just been waiting for the right moment to start the rest of his life? It didn’t matter anymore.
The second thing he thought of was something the young soldier had said to him. He’d said that a story like theirs was too good to be forgotten, and that what Sig ought to do was to write it down. Sig had replied that he couldn’t do it. Or rather, not that he couldn’t, but that it wouldn’t feel right, writing about himself.
So the young soldier, who was himself hoping to be a writer, explained that Sig could write the story as if he was writing it about someone else, about some other family.
Sig understood.
So one day, I picked up a pen, and a small black notebook, and that’s just what I did.
And now it’s finished, I hope you liked my story.
Sigfried Andersson
New York City
Author’s Note
When I decided to make a revolver and the Arctic Circle the central themes of my novel I thought I had better know what I was writing about, and once again I must thank my wonderful publisher for her belief in and support for the book I hoped to write.
It was in sub-zero temperatures in Northern Sweden that I got a sense of the cold and the landscape and walked on frozen lakes. It was there, in Swedish Lapland, that I came across the story of a revivalist preacher, the model for Nadya’s preacher, and though this thread in the book has been greatly reduced in the writing, I’d like to thank Lina Moet for her history of the Swedish-Finnish border at the turn of the last century.
For a technical discussion on the revolver, I am greatly indebted to Peter Smithurst of the Royal Armouries, the UK’s leading expert on Colts. He carefully explained the history and workings of the Colt, took a 44-40 to pieces for me to show how it works, and did it all with great enthusiasm.
Thanks too to Gunilla Carlsson for checking my Swedish. I will, in turn, try harder to be a better student!
Finally, I decided I should know what it’s actually like to fire a live weapon. Since this is not something easily done in the UK, I traveled to Estonia, where retired policeman Tonu Adrik showed me the ropes one January day in sub-zero conditions.
If I had expected firing a gun to be frightening or difficult, I was wrong. The only scary thing about firing a gun is just how easy it is. Too, too easy. I was also struck by the strong desire I had to do it again, which is also a chilling thing to realize.
I think it’s up to each of us to decide whether guns are good or bad, just as it is for Sig in the book. Many people argue that a gun does nothing without someone deciding to pull the trigger, but the arguments are too involved to discuss here properly. All I would like to say is that I believe there’s always a third option in life, it’s just that sometimes it takes a little while to find it.
Marcus Sedgwick
Christmas Day, 2008
Stockholm
Copyright © 2009 by Marcus Sedgwick
All rights reserved
Published by Roaring Brook Press
Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings
Limited Partnership
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
First published in 2009 by Orion Children’s Books, London
eISBN 9781429987004
First eBook Edition : February 2011
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress
First American Edition April 2010