It had been oppressively warm for several days, and that day was particularly hot. There was something in the air, as they say, it was unbearably humid, our sweat running more freely than normal, and as the afternoon wore on clouds began to gather without any drop in temperature. Before evening the sky was entirely black. But by then we had carried Jon’s father across the river in one of the boats and then on to the doctor at Innbygda in one of the two cars in the village, which of course was Barkald’s car, and he himself sat at the wheel all through the long drive. Jon’s mother had to stay at home with Lars, he could not be left alone for such a long time, and I thought it must be lonely for her and wearisome to be waiting with only the boy and no other grown-up to talk to. What the two men in the car had to say to each other I could not imagine.
When the first flash of lightning struck, my father and I were alone at the table in the cabin looking out the window. We had just eaten, without exchanging a word, and it should really have been daylight, we were still in July, but it was as dark as an October night, and there was a flash and we could see the trees still standing after the felling and the piles on the river bank and the river itself and clear across to the other side. Immediately afterwards there was a crack that made the cabin shake.
‘I’ll be damned,’ I said.
My father turned from the window and looked at me quizzically.
‘What did you say?’ he said.
‘I’ll be damned,’ I said.
He shook his head and sighed. ‘Well, now, you should think of your confirmation,’ he said. ‘Mind you do.’ And then it began to rain, softly at first, but after a few minutes it beat on the roof so that we could hardly hear what we were thinking as we sat at the table. My father leaned back his face to the ceiling as if he could see the water through the panels and the beams and the slates and was hoping that maybe a drop of it might fall on his forehead. He closed his eyes, and it would surely have done us good after that day, to have cold water on our faces. He must have had the same thought because he rose from the table and said:
‘What about a shower?’
‘I wouldn’t say no,’ I said. And at once we were in a hurry and jumped up and started to tear our clothes off at full speed and kick them to right and left, and my father ran naked to the wash stand and dipped the soap into the bucket. He looked as odd as I did; sunburned brown from head to navel, and chalk white from the navel down, and he rubbed himself all over until his whole body was covered in whirls of lather, and then he tossed the soap to me, and I did the same as fast as I could.
‘Last man out,’ he shouted and made for the door. I sprang after him like an American football player to cut off his route and knock him off balance, and he grabbed me by the shoulder to hold me back, but I was so slippery he could not get a hold. He started to laugh and cried:
‘You slimy little bugger!’ And he could say that, for he had been confirmed a great many years ago, and we got there side by side close together, body to body through the narrow doorway each trying to be first man out and we stopped on the threshold under the eaves and saw water pounding the ground all about us. It was an impressive, almost intimidating sight, and for a moment we just stood there, staring. Then my father took a deep breath and like an actor he screamed:
‘It’s now or never!’ before he leaped out into the rain and started to dance stark naked with his arms in the air and the water splashing onto his shoulders. I ran after him out into the pouring rain to stand where he was standing, jumping and dancing and singing ‘Norway in Red, White and Blue’, and then he started to sing too, and in no time the soap was rinsed off our bodies and with it the warmth as well, and our bodies were smooth and shining like two seals and probably just as cold to touch.
‘I’m freezing,’ I called.
‘Me too,’ he shouted back, ‘but we can stand it a bit longer.’
‘OK,’ I shouted, and slapped my stomach and drummed on my thighs with the flat of my hands to beat some heat into the numb skin until I had the idea of walking on my hands, for I was quite frisky in that way and I shouted:
‘Come on you,’ to my father, and bent down and swung up into a handstand, and then he had to follow suit. And we walked on our hands in the wet grass as the rain beat our rumps in a way so icily weird that I had to get back on my feet very soon, but never did anyone have cleaner arses than ours as we ran into the house again and dried ourselves on two large towels and massaged our skin with the coarse cloth to get the circulation going and make the warmth come back, and with a cock of his head my father looked at me and said:
‘Well, so you’re a man now.’
‘Not quite,’ I said, for I knew that things were going on around me that I did not understand, and that the grown-ups did understand, but that I was close to being there.
‘No, maybe not quite,’ he said.
He ran his hand through his hair and with the towel round his hips he went to the stove, tore an old newspaper into strips and twisted them and pushed them into the firebox, then arranged three sticks of firewood around the paper and put a match to it. He shut the door of the stove, but left the ash-pan open for the draught, and the old, tinder-dry wood started to crackle at once. He stayed close to the stove with his arms raised, half bent over the black iron plates and let the rising warmth seep up to his stomach and his chest. I stayed where I was. I looked at his back. I knew he was going to say something. He was my father, I knew him well.
‘What happened today,’ he said, still with his back turned. ‘It was completely unnecessary. The way we were carrying on, it was bound to end badly. I should have stopped it long before. It was in my power, not in his. Do you understand? We are grown men. What happened was my fault.’
I said nothing. I did not know if he meant that he and I were grown men, or if he and Jon’s father were. I guessed the latter.
‘It was unforgivable.’
That might be so, I could see that, but I did not like him taking the blame just like that. I felt it was debatable, and if he was to blame, so was I, and even if it felt bad being responsible for such things happening, he belittled me by leaving me out. I felt the bitterness coming again, but milder this time. He turned from the stove and I could read in his face that he knew what I was thinking, but there was no way of discussing it that would make it easier for us. It was too complicated, I could not even think about it any more, not that night. I felt my shoulders sinking, my eyelids dropping, I raised my hands to rub them with my knuckles.
‘Are you tired?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. And I was tired. Tired in body and tired in mind and weathered in the skin, and I wanted only to lie down under the duvet in my bunk and sleep and sleep until it was not possible to sleep any longer.
He stretched his arm out and tousled my hair, and then he fetched a matchbox from the shelf above the stove and went over and lit the paraffin lamp above the table, blew out the match and opened the door of the stove and threw it into the flames. Our brown-and-white bodies looked probably even funnier in the yellow light of the lamp. He smiled and said:
‘You go to bed first. I’ll be right behind you.’
But he was not. When I woke up in the night and needed to go out for a pee, he was nowhere to be seen. I walked, drunk with sleep, through the main room, and he was not there, and I opened the door and looked out, and it had stopped raining, but he was not outside either, and when I went back in his bunk was made and neat still in military fashion and looked just the way it had done since the morning before.
7
The dead spruce has been trimmed and cut up with the chainsaw into manageable lengths about half the size of a chopping block, and I have transported these chunks three at a time in a wheelbarrow and tipped them onto a heap on the ground outside the woodshed, and now they are stacked in a two-dimensional pyramid almost two metres high against the wall under the eaves. Tomorrow the work of splitting them will begin. So far, all is going fine, I am pleased with myself, but this back
of mine has had enough for today. Besides, it has gone five o’clock, the sun is down in what must be west, southwest, the dusk comes seeping from the edge of the forest where I was just working, and it is a good time to call a halt. I wipe off the sawdust and the petrol and oil mess sticking to the saw until it is more or less clean and leave it to dry out on a bench in the woodshed, close the door and cross the yard with the empty Thermos under my arm. Then I sit myself down on the steps and pull off my damp boots and rap the wood chips out of them and brush the bottoms of my trousers. I brush my socks, give them a good beating with my working gloves and pick the last bits off with my fingers. They make a nice little heap. Lyra sits watching me with a pine cone in her mouth, it sticks out like an unlit cigar of the really bulky type, and she wants me to throw it so she can chase after it and bring it back, but if once we start on that game she will want to go on and on, and I haven’t the energy left.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Some other time.’ I pat her yellow head, stroke her neck and gently pull her ears, she loves that. She drops the cone and goes to sit on the door mat.
I leave the boots on the doorstep with their heels against the wall and walk through the hall in my socks to the kitchen. There I rinse out the Thermos in piping hot water from the tap and leave it on the worktop to dry. It is barely two weeks since I had the boiler installed. There had never been one here before. Only a sink on the wall under a cold water tap. I called a plumber who knew my place well, and he told me to dig down to the water pipe in a trench two metres long starting from the outside wall so he could change the angle of the pipe into the kitchen beneath the foundation wall to get it right. And I would have to get on with it, he said, like a bat out of hell, before the frost took hold. The plumber would not do the digging himself, he was not a labourer, he said. I did not mind, but it was heavy work, nothing but gravel and stone all the way down. Some of the stones were really big. It turns out I live on a moraine ridge.
Now I have a dishwashing sink like everyone else. I look at myself in the mirror above the sink. The face there is no different from the one I had expected to see at the age of sixty-seven. In that way I am in time with myself. Whether I like what I see is a different question. But it is of no importance. There are not many people I am going to show myself to, and I only have the one mirror. To tell the truth, I have nothing against the face in the mirror. I acknowledge it, I recognise myself. I cannot ask for more.
The radio is on. They talk about the coming millennium jubilee. They talk about the problems that are bound to crop up in the transition from the solid 97, 98 and 99 to 00 on all the computer systems, that we don’t know what is going to happen and must safeguard ourselves against potential catastrophes, and Norwegian industry is staggeringly slow to take preventive measures. I cannot make head nor tail of this, and really it does not interest me. The only thing I am certain of is that a whole pack of consultants not one of whom has a clue what is going to happen are out to make a buck. Something they will definitely do and have done already.
I get out my smallest saucepan, scrub some potatoes and put them in, fill up with water and set the pan on the stove. I feel hungry now, working with the wood has sharpened my appetite. I have not felt this hungry for days. I bought the potatoes at the shop, next year I will have my own from the old kitchen garden behind the shed. It is quite overgrown and needs digging up again, but I am sure I can manage that. It’s just a matter of putting in the time.
It is important not to be careless about supper when you are alone. It is easily done, boring as it is to cook for one person only. There must be potatoes, sauce and green vegetables, a napkin and a clean glass and the candles lit on the table, and no sitting down in your working clothes. So while the potatoes are boiling I go into the bedroom and change my trousers, put on a clean white shirt and go back to the kitchen and lay a cloth on the table before putting butter into the frying pan to fry the fish I have caught in the lake myself.
Outside, the blue hour has arrived. Everything draws closer; the shed, the edge of the wood, the lake beyond the trees, it is as if the tinted air binds the world together and there is nothing disconnected out there. That’s a good thing to think about, but whether it is true or not is a different matter. To me it is better to stand alone, but for the moment the blue world gives a consolation I am not sure I want, and do not need, and still I take it. I sit down at the table feeling well and start eating.
And then there’s a knock at the door. The knock as such is not so odd as I do not have a bell, but no-one has put a hand to that door since I moved here, and when people have come to call I have heard the car and gone out onto the steps to greet them. But I have not heard a car, nor have I seen any lights. I get up and leave the meal I have just started, a little annoyed, and go into the hall and open the front door. It is Lars, and behind him in the yard sits Poker, still and for once obedient. The light outside seems almost artificial, as in films I have seen; blue, staged, the source of light invisible, but each thing distinct, and at the same time seen through the same filter, or each thing made of the same substance. Even the dog is blue, it does not move; a clay model of a dog.
‘Good evening,’ I say, although it is really afternoon still, but in this light it is not possible to say anything else. Standing there, Lars seems embarrassed, or there is something else, something about his face, and with the dog it is the same; a stiffness of the body which they share, and neither of them looks me straight in the eye, they wait, saying nothing, until finally he says:
‘Good evening,’ and then he goes quiet again, saying nothing about what he wants, and I do not know how to help him.
‘I was just about to eat,’ I say. ‘But that doesn’t matter, come in for a bit.’ I open the door wide and invite him in, certain that he will refuse, that what he wants to say will be said there on the steps, if he can only get the words out he is struggling with. But then he makes up his mind and takes the last step towards the door, turns to Poker and says:
‘You sit here,’ and points to the doorstep, and Poker walks over to the step and sits down, and I move aside to let Lars into the hall. I go ahead into the kitchen and stop by the table where the candles are flickering in the draught as he follows and closes the door.
‘Have you eaten?’ I say. ‘There’s enough here for two,’ and that’s more or less true, I always make more than I need, misjudging my appetite, and the extra portion usually goes to Lyra, and she knows this and is more than happy when I sit down to eat. She lies by the stove then, watching me attentively, waiting. Now she gets up from her place to stand, wagging her tail, sniffing at Lars’ trousers. They could do with a wash, no doubt about it.
‘Sit you down,’ I say, and without waiting for an answer fetch a plate from the corner cupboard and lay it with cutlery, napkin and glass. I pour him a beer and help myself too. A few snowflakes on the window and it would look like Christmas. He sits down, and I can see him stealing a glance at my white shirt. I do not mind what he is wearing, the code I follow is for me alone, but I realise that whatever it was he had come to say, I have not made it any easier for him. I sit down and urge him to help himself, and he takes a piece of fish and two potatoes and a little sauce, and I dare not look at Lyra, for that was just about what she would have had. We begin to eat.
‘That’s good,’ Lars says. ‘Did you catch it yourself?’
‘I did,’ I say. ‘Down by the river mouth.’
‘There are plenty of fish there. Perch in particular,’ he says. ‘But also pike just by the reeds, and sometimes trout if you are lucky.’ And I nod and go on eating, patiently waiting for him to get to the point. Not that he would need a special purpose to come here and have supper. But finally he takes a big gulp of his beer, wipes his mouth on the napkin before laying his hands in his lap, and then he clears his throat and says:
‘I know who you are.’
I stop chewing. I think of my face as it was in the mirror just now, does he know who that is? Only I know who that
is. Or does he remember the newspapers from three years ago with me in a big photograph, standing in the middle of the road in the icy rain, and blood and water running from my hair and my forehead and down my shirt and tie, and the glassy, bewildered expression in my eyes facing the camera, and right behind me, barely visible, the blue Audi with its rear end in the air and the front well down the rocky slope. The wet, dark mountain wall, the ambulance with its back doors open and a stretcher carrying my wife; the police car with its blue light flashing, the blue blanket round my shoulders, and a lorry as big as a tank across the yellow centre line, and rain, rain on the cold, shining asphalt where everything was reflected double as I was seeing double of everything in the weeks that followed. All the papers carried that picture. Perfectly framed by a freelance photographer who sat in one of the cars that were queueing up in the half-hour after the crash. He had been on his way to some boring assignment and instead won a prize for the picture he took in the rain. The low grey sky, the splintered barrier, the white sheep on the hill behind. All of that in one shot. ‘Look this way!’ he cried.
But that is not what Lars means. Maybe he has seen one of those pictures, it is entirely possible, but that is not what he means. He has recognised me, as I have recognised him. It is more than fifty years ago, we were just children then, he was ten and I still fifteen and still frightened of everything that went on around me, which I did not understand even though I knew I was close enough to reach out my hand as far as I could, and then maybe reach the whole way and know the meaning of it all. That at least was how it felt to me, and I recall running from the bedroom with my clothes in my hand that summer night in 1948, realising in a sudden panic that what my father said and how things really were, were not necessarily the same, and that made the world liquid and hard to hold on to. A void opened where I could not see over to the other side, and out there in the night, a mere kilometre downriver, maybe Lars lay awake and alone in his bed trying to keep hold of his world, while the shot whose trajectory he could not possibly grasp still filled each cubic metre of air in the small house until he could not hear anything but that shot when people talked to him no matter what they said, and it was the only thing he would hear for a long, long time.
Out Stealing Horses Page 8