Out Stealing Horses

by Per Petterson

  ‘Yahoo!’ I screamed, and could hear my own voice, but it seemed to be coming from a different place, from the great space where the birds sang, a bird’s cry from inside that silence, and for a moment I was completely happy. My chest swelled up like an accordion’s bellows, and each time I breathed there were notes coming out. And then I saw something sparkle through the trees in front of me, it was the barbed wire, we had galloped right across the clearing and were approaching the fence on the other side at great speed, and the horse’s back beat hard against my crotch again, and I clung hard to the mane and thought: We’re going to jump. But we did not jump. Just before the fence both horses turned sharply and the laws of physics tore me from my horse’s back and sent me kicking and flailing on in a straight line through the air and right over the fence. I felt the wire tear at the sleeve of my sweater and a smarting pain, and then I was lying in the heather, and the impact knocked the air out of my body.

  I think I was unconscious for a few seconds, because I remember I opened my eyes as if to a new beginning; nothing I saw was familiar to me, my head was empty, no thoughts, everything quite clean and the sky transparently blue, and I didn’t know what I was called or even recognise my own body. Unnamed, I floated around looking at the world for the first time and felt it strangely illuminated and glassily beautiful, and then I heard a whinny and the thundering of hooves, and it all came back like a whirring boomerang and hit me on the forehead with a crack, and I thought, shit, I’m paralysed. I looked down at my bare feet sticking out of the heather, and they had no connection with me.

  I was still lying there flat out when I saw Jon on horseback with a rope round the horse’s muzzle come up to the fence. With the rope he could control it. He stopped just on the other side by pulling the rope, and the horse halted almost sideways to the fence. He looked down at me.

  ‘Lying there, are you?’ he said.

  ‘I am paralysed,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said. I looked down at my feet again. And then I stood up. It hurt, in my back and along one side, but nothing inside was damaged. Blood was running from a cut on my forearm and out through the sweater, which had a big tear in it just there, but that was all. I tore off what was left of the sleeve and tied it round the wounded arm. It smarted good and hard. Jon sat there calmly on his horse. Now I saw that he held my shoes in one hand.

  ‘Are you going to get on again?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘My arse hurts,’ although that was not where it hurt the most, and I thought Jon smiled a bit, but I was not sure, because the sun was in my face. He slid off his horse and loosened the rope round its muzzle, then sent it off with a wave of his hand. It was happy to leave.

  Jon came out through the fence the same way he had gone in; light on his feet, not a scratch anywhere. He came over to me and dropped my shoes in the heather.

  ‘Can you walk?’ he said.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. I pushed my feet into the shoes without tying the knots, so as to avoid bending down, and then we walked on into the forest. Jon first with me at his heels with a tender crotch, my back stiff, one leg dragging slightly and one arm held firmly against my body, still further in among the trees, and I thought perhaps I might not manage to walk all the way back when the time came. And then I thought of my father’s asking me to cut the grass behind the cabin a week ago. The grass had grown much too tall and would soon just bend down and stiffen to a withered mat nothing could grow up through. I could use the short scythe, he said, which was easier in the hand for an amateur. I fetched the scythe from the shed and set about it with all my strength, trying to move the way my father moved when I had seen him do what I was doing now, and I worked until I was suitably sweaty, and it really went pretty well even if the scythe was a tool completely new to me. But alongside the cabin wall there was a big patch of stinging nettles, growing tall and thick, and I worked my way around them in a wide arc, and then my father came round the house and stood looking at me. He held his head aslant and rubbed his chin, and I straightened up and waited to hear what he would say.

  ‘Why not cut down the nettles?’ he said.

  I looked down at the short scythe handle and across at the tall nettles.

  ‘It will hurt,’ I said. Then he looked at me with half a smile and a little shake of the head.

  ‘You decide for yourself when it will hurt,’ he said, suddenly getting serious. He walked over to the nettles and took hold of the smarting plants with his bare hands and began to pull them up with perfect calm, one after the other, throwing them into a heap, and he did not stop before he had pulled them all up. Nothing in his face indicated that it hurt, and I felt a bit ashamed as I walked along the path after Jon, and I straightened up and changed gait and walked as I normally would, and after only a few steps I could not think why I had not done so at once.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said.

  ‘There is something I want to show you,’ he said. ‘It’s not far.’

  The sun was high in the sky now, it was hot under the trees, it smelt hot, and from everywhere in the forest around us there were sounds; of beating wings, of branches bending and twigs breaking, and the scream of a hawk and a hare’s last sigh, and the tiny muffled boom each time a bee hit a flower. I heard the ants crawling in the heather, and the path we followed rose with the hillside; I took deep breaths through my nose and thought that no matter how life should turn out and however far I travelled I would always remember this place as it was just now, and miss it. When I turned round I could see across the valley through a lattice of fir and pine, I saw the river winding and glittering below, I saw the red-tiled roof of Barkald’s sawmill further south by the river bank and several small farmsteads on the green patches beside the narrow band of water. I knew the families who lived in them and knew how many people there were in each house, and if I did not see our cottage on the far bank I could point out exactly behind which trees it lay, and I wondered if my father was still asleep, or if he was walking around looking for me and without worrying wondering where I had gone, whether I would come home soon, whether perhaps he should start making breakfast, and I could suddenly feel how hungry I was.

  ‘Here it is,’ Jon said. ‘There.’ He pointed out a big spruce a little way from the path. We stood still.

  ‘It’s a big one,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Jon said. ‘Come.’ He walked over to the tree and started to climb. It was not difficult, the lowest branches were strong and long, hung heavily down and were easy to get hold of, and in no time he was several metres up, and I followed. He climbed quickly, but after about ten metres he stopped and sat there waiting until we were at the same height, and there was plenty of room, we could sit side by side each on our thick branch. He pointed to a place further out on the branch he sat on, where it divided into two. A bird’s nest hung down from the fork, it was like a deep bowl or almost an ice-cream cone. I had seen many nests but never such a tiny one, so light, so perfectly formed of moss and feathers. And it did not hang. It hovered.

  ‘It’s the goldcrest,’ said Jon in a low voice. ‘Second brood.’ He bent forward, stretched out his hand towards the nest and put three fingers down in the feather-covered opening, then brought up an egg that was so little I could only sit there staring. He balanced the egg in his fingertips and held it towards me so I could look at it closely, and it made me dizzy to see and to think that in just a few weeks this tiny oval would be transformed into a living bird with wings that could take off from the high branches and dive down and yet never hit the ground but with will and instinct shoot upwards and nullify the force of gravity. And I said it aloud:

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘It’s weird that something so little can come alive and just fly away,’ and maybe it was not that well put and certainly far less than the rushing, airy feeling I felt inside me. But something happened at that moment that I had no way of understanding, for when I raised my eye
s and looked up at Jon’s face it was strained and totally white. Whether it was the few words I had uttered, or the egg he was holding, I shall never know, but something made him change so suddenly, and he looked me straight in the eye as if he had never seen me before, and for once he did not squint, and his pupils were big and black. And then he opened his hand and dropped the egg. It fell along the trunk, and I followed it with my eyes and saw it hit one of the branches further down and break and dissolve into little pale fragments that swirled around on all sides, and they fell like snowflakes, almost weightless, and gently drifted away. Or that is the way I remember it, and I could not recall anything ever making me so desperate. I looked up at Jon again, and he had already bent forward, and with one hand he tore the nest free of the split in the branches, held it out at arm’s length and crushed it to powder between his fingers only a few centimetres from my eyes. I wanted to say something but could not utter a word. Jon’s face was a chalk-white mask with an open mouth, and from that mouth came sounds that made my blood run cold, I had never heard anything like it; throaty noises like an animal I had never seen and had no wish to see. He opened his hand again and slammed his palm against the tree trunk and rubbed it on the bark, and small flakes fluttered down, and finally all that was left was a smear I couldn’t look at. I closed my eyes and kept them shut, and when I opened them again Jon was a good way down. He almost slid from branch to branch, I looked straight down at his unruly brown hair, and he did not once look up. For the last few metres he just let himself drop, and he landed on firm ground with a thud I heard right up where I was sitting, and then he fell on his knees like an empty sack and beat his forehead on the ground, and stayed there huddled up for what seemed an eternity, and for the whole of that eternity I held my breath without stirring. I didn’t understand what had happened, but I felt it was my fault. I just didn’t know why. At last he stood up stiffly and started to walk down the path. I let my breath out and drew it slowly in again, there was a whistle in my chest, I heard it clearly, it sounded like asthma. I knew a man who had asthma, he lived just up our street in Oslo. It sounded like that when he breathed. I’ve got asthma, I thought, shit, that’s how you get asthma. When something happens. And then I started to climb down, not as fast as Jon, more as if each branch was a landmark I had to hold on to a long time so as not to miss one single thing that was important, and the whole time I thought about breathing.

  Was it then the weather changed? I think it was. I stood on the path, Jon was nowhere to be seen, vanished down the way we had come, and suddenly I heard a rushing sound above me in the trees. I looked up and saw the tops of the spruces sway and whip against each other, I saw tall pines bend in the wind, and I felt the forest floor sway beneath my feet. It was like standing on water, it made me dizzy, and I looked around me for something to hold on to, but everything was moving. The sky, which just now had been so transparently blue, was steely grey with a sickly yellow light over the ridge on the other side of the valley. And then there was a violent flash over the ridge. It was followed by a crash I could feel all over my body, I sensed the temperature dropping, and my arm began to hurt where the barbed wire had cut it. I started walking as fast as I could, almost running, down the path we had come up, towards the horse paddock. When I was there I looked over the fence and in through the trees, but there were no horses that I could see there now, and for a moment I thought of taking the short cut across the clearing, but then instead I went along the fence on the outside, for the full circuit until I met the path to the road. I turned left there and started to run down, and the wind had stopped, the forest was breathlessly still, and the newly discovered asthma had my chest in a fierce grip.

  Then I was standing on the road. The first drops hit my forehead. I caught sight of Jon further down. He had not been running, he was too close for that, and he was not walking fast, he was not walking slowly either. He just walked. I thought maybe I should call to him and ask him to wait, but I was not sure I had the breath in me. Besides, there was something about his figure that made me hold back, so I started to walk after him and kept the same distance between us the whole way, up past Barkald’s farm where now the windows were brightly lit against the dark sky above, and I wondered if he was standing inside watching us and knowing where we had been. I looked up in the air hoping that the few drops I had felt would be just that, but then there was another flash above the hills and a crash at the same moment. I had never been afraid of thunder, and I wasn’t afraid now, but I knew that when lightning and thunder came so close together it could strike anywhere close to me. It was a special feeling to walk along the road without any shelter at all. And then the rain came at me like a wall, and suddenly I was behind that wall and wet right through in a few seconds, and if I had been naked it would not have made any difference. The whole world was grey with water, and I could hardly glimpse Jon walking a hundred metres ahead of me. But I didn’t need him to show me the way, I knew where I had to go. I turned off onto the path through Barkald’s meadow, and if I hadn’t already been wet, the tall grass would have made my trousers sticky and heavy. But that didn’t matter now. I thought, now Barkald will have to wait for several days before mowing the grass, to let it dry. You can’t cut wet grass. And I wondered if he would ask my father and me to help with the haymaking as he had the year before, and I wondered whether Jon had taken the boat and rowed across the river alone or if he was waiting for me on the bank. I could walk back up the road towards the shop and down again on the other side through the forest, but that was a long, hard way. Or I could swim across. The water would be cold now, and the current strong. I was freezing in my wet clothes; it would be better without them. I stopped on the path and started to pull my sweater off and my shirt. It wasn’t easy, they stuck to my body, but eventually I managed to get them off and I rolled them into a bundle under my arm. Everything was so wet it was almost ridiculous, and the rain beat down on my bare torso and warmed me up in some strange way. I ran my hand over my skin, and felt hardly anything at all, both skin and fingers were numb, and I was tired and sleepy. How good it would be, I thought, to lie down just for a bit and close my eyes. I walked on a few steps. I wiped the water from my face with my hand. I felt dizzy. And then I was right beside the river, and I had not heard it. Jon sat in front of me in the boat. His hair, which usually stood on end in stiff tufts, was wet through and plastered to his skull. He looked at me through the rain as he backed the oars to keep the stern of the boat towards the bank, but he did not say anything.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, and walked clumsily down the last few metres over the smooth round stones. I tripped once, but didn’t fall, and I got into the boat and sat down on the rear thwart. He started to row as soon as I was aboard, and it was hard, I could see that, we had the current against us and we moved slowly. He was going to row me all the way home even though he must have been tired. He lived downstream himself, and I wanted to say it was not necessary, he could just row me straight across, I could walk the last bit myself. But I did not say a word. I couldn’t.

  At last we were there. Jon turned the boat with a valiant effort and edged it close enough for me to step straight onto the bank. And I did, and stayed on shore looking at him.

  ‘So long,’ I said. ‘See you tomorrow.’ But he didn’t reply. Just lifted the oars free of the water and let the boat drift as he stared back, his eyes with a narrow look I knew already then I would never forget.

  3

  We had come out two weeks earlier, my father and I, by train from Oslo, and then on the bus from Elverum for hours and hours. That bus worked a stopping routine I never understood, but it certainly did stop often, and sometimes I slept on the hot seat in the baking sun, and when I woke up again and looked out the window, it seemed we had not gone a millimetre further, for what I saw was the same view I had seen before I fell asleep; a winding gravel road with fields on both sides and farms with white-painted homesteads and red-painted barns, and some were small and some were larger, and the
cows behind barbed-wire fences next to the road lay in the grass chewing the cud with half-closed eyes in the sunshine, and almost all of them were brown and only some had patches of white on brown or black, and then the forest behind the farms with its shades of blue rising to an unchanging ridge.

  That trip took all day more or less, and the odd thing is that I did not get bored. I liked looking out the window until my eyelids grew heavy and hot, and I fell asleep and woke up again and looked out the window for the thousandth time or more, or I turned round and looked over to where my father sat through the whole trip with his nose in a book on something technical, something about house building or machines, about motors, he was mad about such things. Then he would raise his head and look at me and nod and smile, and I smiled back, and then he dived down again, back into his book. And I slept and dreamt about warm things, soft things, and when I woke up for the last time it was because my father was shaking my shoulder.