Out Stealing Horses (14 page)

'Good dog,'  I say without feeling stupid. 'Now we'll go out.'

And that's what we do. I go into the hall, my legs shaking slightly, and put my jacket on and button it up without too much trouble and go out onto the doorstep with Lyra at my heels and put on my boots. And with great attention I listen to my own body to find out if anything has gone amiss in the finely tuned machinery which even an old body is, but it's not easy to know for sure. Apart from a faint feeling of sickness and a sore shoulder, everything seems normal. Maybe a little more light-headedness than usual, but that's probably not so strange now I am on my feet after having been out for the count.

I try not to look at the birch, and that is difficult, as there are not many other places to fix my gaze whichever way I turn, but I squint and walk close to the house wall avoiding the longest branches and have to bend one out of the way and then another one, and slip through to the drive and with my back to the yard I start out on the road down to the river and Lars' cabin with Lyra in a yellow dance in front of me along the road. I turn into the path by the bridge and walk along the stream until I stop on the bank close to the river mouth. November, and I can see the bench where I sat yesterday evening in the windy darkness and two pale swans on the grey water of the bay and the bare trees against a pale morning sun and the dull green forest on the other side of the lake in a milky mist to the south. A quite unusual stillness, like Sunday morning when I was small, or Good Friday. A snap of the fingers like a pistol shot. But I can hear Lyra breathing behind me, and the pale sunshine cuts my eyes, and then I suddenly feel really sick and stand bent over on the path throwing up onto the withered grass. I close my eyes, my head is spinning, I am not well, dammit. I open my eyes again. Lyra stands looking at me, and then she comes up to sniff at what I have got rid of.

'No,'  I say, unusually sharp. 'Back off,' and she turns quickly and runs on along the path, and she stops and looks back with her tongue lolling.

All right,' I say. 'All right. We'll go on.'

I start walking again. The nausea has lessened, and if I take it easy I will make it round the lake. Or will I? I am not sure. I wipe my mouth with a handkerchief and the sweat from my forehead and go right on to the edge of the reeds and slump down on the bench. So I'm sitting here again. A swan comes in to land. Soon there will be ice on the lake.

I close my eyes. Suddenly I remember a dream I had last night. That is strange, it was not there when I woke up, but now it is perfectly clear. I was in a bedroom with my first wife, it was not our own bedroom, we were in our thirties, I am sure of that, my body felt that way. We had just made love, I had performed as well as I could, which was usually more than good enough, at least I thought so. She lay in bed and I stood by the chest where I could see my whole body in the mirror except for my head, and I looked good in the dream, better than I really did. She flung the duvet aside and was naked, and she looked good too, really beautiful, almost unfamiliar in fact, and not quite like the woman I had just made love to. She looked at me the way I had always feared and said:

'You're only one of many, of course.' She sat up, naked and heavy in the way I knew, and she filled me with disgust right up into my throat and at the same time with terror, and I shouted:

'Not in
my
life, I'm not,' and then I started to weep, for I had known that this day would come, and I realised that what I was most afraid of in this world was to be the man in Magritte's painting who looking at himself in the mirror sees only the back of his own head, again and again.

II

_________

10

Franz and
I
were in the kitchen
of his small house on the rock by the river. The sun came in through the window shining whitely down on the table where we sat each with a white plate and a white cup of brown coffee poured from the brightly polished kettle on the stove he always kept burning, both summer and winter, he said, but in summer he had the windows open. The kitchen was painted the blue colour which was customary out here, it kept the flies away, was the saying, and that was probably right, and he had made all the furniture himself. I felt good in that room. I picked up the jug and poured a little milk into my cup. That made the coffee smoother and more like the light and not so strong, and I shut my eyes into a squint and looked across the water flowing past below the window, shining and glittering like a thousand stars, like the Milky Way could sometimes do in the autumn rushing foamingly on and winding through the night in an endless stream, and you could lie out there beside the fjord at home in the vast darkness with your back against the hard sloping rock gazing up until your eyes hurt, feeling the weight of the universe in all its immensity press down on your chest until you could scarcely breathe or on the contrary be lifted up and simply float away like a mere speck of human flesh in a limitless vacuum, never to return. Just thinking about it could make you vanish a little.

I turned round and saw the red star Franz had on his forearm. It was glowing in the sunlight and waving like a flag each time he moved his fingers or clenched his fist. He often did. He was probably a communist. Many lumberjacks were, and with good reason, my father had said.

This is what Franz told me.

It was 1942. My father came from the north through the forest, searching for a place where he could take cover close to the border when he had to go to Sweden with papers and letters and sometimes films for the Resistance, and later return to when his mission was completed and his tracks obliterated, a place he could use numerous times. He was in no hurry. He was not on the run then, or he did not behave as if he was. He made no attempt to hide and was open and friendly to everyone he came across. What he needed was a place where he could think, he said, and for some reason no-one doubted that explanation. He came from
inthere.
Have you been
intherel
they said, when someone came home and on rare occasions had been to the capital. People were different there. Everyone knew that. So it made sense. He wanted to have a place where he could think. Others could think where they happened to be at the time. Nothing to make a fuss about.

Only Franz had any idea of what he really wanted the place for. The two of them knew about each other from earlier, but they had not met until the day my father walked up the steps to Franz's door and knocked and spoke the pre-arranged words:

'Are you coming? We're going out stealing horses.'

I turned from the window and stared at Franz and said:

"What
did you say he said?'

'He said: "We're going out stealing horses." I don't know who thought that up. Your father himself, probably. Not me, anyway. But I knew what he was going to say. The message had come by bus from Innbygda.'

'Oh,' I said.

'I took to him at once, I did,' said Franz.

And who would not? Men liked my father, and women liked my father, I knew of no-one who did not like him, except maybe Jon's father, but that was about something else, and I imagined that under different circumstances they would really not have had anything against each other at all, and might well have been friends. And the strange thing is that it was not as I have seen it so many times later in life, that someone who is so well liked by so many people can often be a touch shapeless and unassuming and will go out of their way not to provoke. My father was not like that at all, it is true he smiled and laughed a lot, but he did that because it came to him naturally and was not something he did to satisfy anyone's need for harmony. Not mine, anyway, and I liked him a lot, although he sometimes made me feel shy and that was probably because I did not know him as a boy ought to know his father. During the past years he had often been away, and with the Germans in our country, months could pass when I did not see him, and when finally he came home and walked the streets like any other man, he was different in a way it was hard for me to pinpoint. But each time he came home he had changed a little, and I had to concentrate hard to hold on to him.

Nevertheless I never doubted my special place in his heart, nor my sister's, though mine maybe even more special than hers because I was a boy and he was a man, and it never occurred to me that I was not on his mind both often and long when we were not in the same place. As when he came to this village in 1942, and I was at home in the house we lived in beside the Oslo fjord and went to school every day and sat there dreaming of journeys we would make together once the Germans were beaten and had left for good, while he was out hunting for a place where he could think, as he put it, and use as a hiding place and a base for his trips across to Sweden with papers and sometimes films for the Resistance.

It was Franz himself who showed my father the summer cabin that was vacant after a foreclosure before the war and since then had been empty for four years. Barkald had stepped in and bought the smallholding it belonged to, for a song naturally, so he was in fact the owner of the property. It was of no use to him. He let it slide, the cow byre had collapsed already, but then there was no herd to fill it with, and my father took a liking to the place at once. Especially because it was on the east bank of the river with a twenty-minute walk to the nearest bridge, and because there was no other building behind the farmsteads, not even a hut, until you were way beyond the Swedish side of the border. But that was not all. Franz believed my father enjoyed being there. Enjoyed doing the things that were necessary to make everything he was doing look legitimate and had to be done anyway; cutting the grass, clearing up the remains of the byre and burning them, fixing the roof tiles, cleaning the scrub from the river bank, repairing the roof and renewing the gable boards on the house, exchanging new panes for the old broken ones in the windows. He mended the stove with oven-sealer. He swept the chimney. He made two new chairs. All these were things that came easily to him, which he never had the time nor the freedom to do in Oslo where we rented three rooms and a kitchen on the second floor of a large three-storey Swiss chalet next to Ljan Station with a view of inner Oslofjord and the Bunnefjord.

He had not intended his stays to be long, just enough to make people grow accustomed to seeing him on the other side of the river, climbing over the roof or pottering around the yard or sitting on one of the rocks by the river thinking, as he put it, because he had to be close to water to do that. That too was a bit odd, of course, but nothing to argue about either, and they could see him when he walked across Barkald's meadow with the empty bag over his shoulder on his way to the shop about the time the bus came from Innbygda and Elverum, or they saw him on the way back with his supplies and maybe other things. But every time he had been to Sweden to deliver what there was to deliver to the person expecting it, and came back across the border under cover of night, he found several more things he could put in order or improve on before he went back to Oslo. So then he stayed a bit longer and cut the grass once more or before leaving made good the masonry around the chimney, for it had cracked from top to bottom and might collapse and send some tiles flying onto someone's head, and in that way he made himself in a couple of years an alternative life that we, his family in Oslo, knew nothing about. Not that this was the way I thought about it when Franz and I sat in his kitchen, and he talked to me about my father, who had established himself in Barkald's decrepit small farmstead more than five years earlier to provide himself with a cover for the last link of a courier line to Sweden in the second year of the war in Norway, and started up what they called 'the traffic'. It was not until many years later I realised that this was what it must have been like for him. He spent as much time in the village by the river as he did with us beside the Bunnefjord. But that we did not know and were not supposed to know; that there was one place only and where that place was. We never knew where he was. He went away, and then he came home again. One week later, or one month, and we became used to living without him, from one day to another, from one week to another. But I thought about him constantly.

All this that Franz talked about was news to me then, but I had no reason to doubt anything he said. Why
he
should tell me about those times, when my father had never done so, was a question I sat pondering while he talked on, but I did not know whether I could ask him that and have an answer I could live with, for he must certainly have thought I knew all about it already and was merely amused to hear another version. I wondered too why my friend Jon or his mother or his father or the man at the shop I spoke to so often or Barkald or whoever the hell else had not mentioned to me that only four years earlier my father had been in the village so often, although on the other side of the river where the summer cabins were, that he could almost be considered a resident. But I did not ask that.

-------------------

There was a German patrol stationed permanently on the farm nearest to the church and the shop. They had just requisitioned the farmhouse and pushed the whole family out into the pensioner's cottage where it was crowded already and often but not always there was a guard on the gravel approach to the bridge over the river. He carried a sub-machine gun on a strap over his shoulder and a cigarette in his mouth when his officers were not watching. Sometimes he actually sat down on a rock with the machine gun on the ground in front of him, took his helmet off to give his flattened hair a long and good scratching, smoking and gazing down between his knees and his shiny boots until the cigarette had burned right down to his fingers, and he could barely bring himself to stand up again. Behind him the river rushed down the rapids, its tone unchanging, as far as he could tell, and they were bored here, nothing happened, the war was elsewhere. But it was better than the Eastern front.