Out Stealing Horses (15 page)

When my father decided to take that route, across the bridge, past Franz's house and down the narrow gravel track on the east side of the river, he stopped first for a chat with the German guard, for he was quite good at German, many people were in those days, it was a language you had to learn at school whether you wanted to or not until well into the Seventies. It was not the same guard every time, but they all looked so much like each other that few could see any difference, and anyway not many were interested and instead tried to act as if they did not exist, and what German the people had learned was suddenly forgotten. But my father soon found out where each of them came from, whether they had wives in Germany, whether they preferred football or athletics or maybe swimming, whether they missed their mothers. They were ten or fifteen years younger than him and sometimes more, and he talked to them in a considerate way, something not many others did. Franz could see from his window my father standing in front of the man in the grey-green uniform, or the boy almost, and they offered each other a cigarette, and one lit up for the other according to which of them was treating and held the match in his hollowed hand even when there was no wind, and they bent their bodies in an intimate arc above the small flame, and if it was evening their faces were lit with a yellow shine and they stayed there on the gravel in the still air talking and smoking until their cigarettes were down to the butts and stubbed out on the gravel each beneath his boot, and then my father raised his hand and said
'Gute Nacht'
and was given a grateful
'Gute Nacht’
in return. He walked across the bridge smiling to himself and on down the road to the cabin with the shabby bag on his back and what was in that bag. And he knew that if he did something unexpected, like suddenly turning and starting to run, the German boy would quite certainly snatch his machine gun quick as lightning from his shoulder and shout: 'Halt!', and if he did not stop then he would have a salvo of bullets coming at him and perhaps be killed.

At other times he walked along the main road with a slightly fuller bag and turned into the meadows along Barkald's fence and rowed across the river. He waved to people he saw, either German or Norwegian, and no-one stopped him. They knew who he was; he was the man who was putting Barkald's cabin back in shape, they had asked Barkald and he confirmed the assignment, and they had been out to the place three times and found a quantity of tools and two books by Hamsun,
Pan
and
Hunger,
which they could happily accept, but they never found anything suspicious. He was the man who at regular intervals took the bus out of the village and stayed away for a good while, for he was working on several similar projects, and there was nothing wrong with his certificate of border residency nor his other papers.

My father kept the line going for two years, through summer and winter, and when
he
was not at the cabin someone from the village made the final leg across the border; Franz once or twice, and Jon's mother when she could get away, but there was considerable danger involved, for everyone in the district knew each other and each other's routines, and anything out of the norm was observed and taken down for later use in the log book we keep of each other's lives. But then he came back, and those who were supposed to be ignorant of the traffic still were. Myself, among others, and my mother and my sister. Sometimes he fetched the 'mail' himself straight off the bus, or from the shop both before and after closing time, at other times it was Jon's mother who picked it up and took it with her when she rowed up the river with food that Barkald often asked her to cook, because the handyman must be fed or so it had to appear, as if he could not cope with a cooking stove on his own but had to have a woman's assistance. It was a bit strange, I thought, that he would need help with that, when he could turn his hand to most things. He was really just as good a cook as my mother, when the need arose, I knew that, I had seen it and tasted it numerous times, only he was slightly lazier over that sort of thing, so when he and I were on our own we ate what we called 'simple country food'. Fried eggs, most often. I had nothing against that. When it was my mother in the kitchen we were served what she called 'proper meals'. When we had money, that is. It was not always so.

But Jon's mother rowed up the river once or twice a week, with food or without it, with 'mail' or without it, to act as some kind of cook for my father so he could dig in to some proper meals and not fall ill and weak because of the unbalanced diet men who live alone generally swear by and not be fit enough to carry out the work he was meant to do. At least that was the way Barkald told it when he was at the shop.

Jon's father did not take part. He was not against what they were doing, he had never said as much that anyone heard, at least Franz had not, but he would have nothing to do with the 'traffic'. Every time something was about to happen he looked the other way, and he looked the other way when his wife went down to the river carrying her basket and stepped into the red-painted boat to row up to my father. He even looked the other way when a strange man with his arms around a tightly lashed suitcase and a city hat on his head was silently shown into his barn at twilight to sit there alone on a cartwheel, confused and silent in his inappropriate clothes, waiting for dark. And when the same man was taken by boat upriver in the night, all without a sound, first across the yard and then down to the jetty where not a word was uttered, not a light lit, he did not comment on that either, neither then nor later, even if the man was the first of several, for now not only 'mail' passed through the village on its way across the border to Sweden.

And it was late autumn and there was snow, but no ice on the water anywhere, and you could still row on the river. And that was a good thing, because early one morning before the rooster fell off his perch, as Franz put it, a man in a suit was dropped off on the main road in the dark and walked with his bag on his back through the snow up the farm road and straight into Jon and his family's yard. The man wore summer shoes with thin soles, and was half dead with cold in his wide trousers, his legs shaking, making his trouser legs roll and sway from his hips down to the light shoes when Jon's mother went out onto the doorstep with a shawl round her shoulders and a blanket under her arm. It was an odd sight, she told Franz when she came back from Sweden in May of '45, almost like a circus act. She gave him the blanket and showed him over to the barn where he had to stay in the hay through all the hours of the white day until evening came, for about twelve hours, because the light was all gone around five o'clock, and it had been five when he came walking up the road. But the man could not take it. He went nuts in there, Jon's mother said, at two o'clock he cracked and went berserk. He started yelling the strangest things, picked up an iron bar and struck out and pounded around him so that flakes showered down off the roof poles and several of the lathes in the haycart were knocked straight off. He could easily be heard from the yard outside, and maybe they heard him upriver, for the air was still and carried his cries clearly across the water, or they heard him right down on the road where the Germans drove by at least two or three times a day trying to be as alert as they could. And then the animals in the byre alongside grew restive. Bramina whinnied and kicked out at the walls of her stall and the cows mooed in their stalls as if spring had come and they longed to go out to pasture, and something had to be done pronto.

He had to leave that barn. He had to be sent upriver without a moment's delay. But it was daylight still and easy to see far across the fields and through the bare trees with the snow on the ground making everything visible in clear silhouette, and along the first stretch you could see the river from the road. But he had to go. Jon had not yet come back from school and the twins were playing in the kitchen. She heard them laughing and rolling on the floor, having mock fights as they always did. She quietly put on warm clothes, cap and mittens and went down the steps and across the yard to the barn as her husband woke up on the divan and rose to his feet, and I may be laying it on a bit here and cannot be sure of this, but still I am convinced that a strange creature like a ghost had come into the house that pulled him up and jerked him out into the hall where the naked bulb hung that was never turned out so it would shine out of the small window to help people find their way through the dark of the night, and the picture of his father hung there with his long beard in a gold frame above the coat pegs, and on his shoeless feet he stood there dazed, where the door opened outwards as it was meant to do so the snow would not beat in when the weather was wild, and
now
he did not want to look any other way at all but instead was staring after her. Behind her back she sensed him standing there and it surprised her in an intimidating way, but she did not turn round, merely pulled the bar off the lock and opened the big barn door and went in and stayed there for an eternity. He stood where he was, staring. She came out at last with the stranger in tow, she had her warm boots on and her jacket and he was wearing the suit and his summer shoes, with the grey bag on his back. He had a jumper on now under the suit, and it made his jacket too tight and bulky and he looked pretty inelegant. He no longer had any weapon, and she practically led him by the hand, as he was humble now, and almost limp and loose-jointed and maybe exhausted after an outburst he had not expected. Halfway across the yard on the way past the house towards the jetty she suddenly turned and looked back. Their footprints were obvious in the snow, first the stranger's tracks up the farm lane, and then her own from the house, and finally both sets from the barn to the point where they were standing now. The impressions of the urban summer shoes were striking and unlike any others you would see in those parts at this time of year, and she looked down at the ground, thinking hard and biting her lip, as the man grew restive and began to pull at her sleeve.

'Come on/ he said in a low piping voice. 'We have to get going,' and he sounded like a spoiled child. She looked up at her husband still standing in the doorway. He was a big man, he completely filled that doorway, no light could get past him. She said:

'You must walk in his footprints. You have no choice.'

Something in his face stiffened when she uttered those words, but she did not see that, for the man in the suit was impatient and had let go of her arm and was already on his way down to the jetty, and she hurried after him, and then they vanished round the house and were out of sight.

He stood there in his stockinged feet, looking out at the yard. Through the silence he heard them get into the boat and the oars being put in the rowlocks and the muffled splash when they hit the water the first time and the rhythmic creak of iron on wood as his wife started to row with those strong arms he knew so well from countless embraces during the nights and years that lay behind him. Yet again she was on her way upriver to visit the man from Oslo who lived in the cabin there. Every time something was wrong she had to go there, every time something important was in the offing she had to go there, and now she had a trembling halfwit in the boat who was probably from the same town, and it was the middle of the day with a harsh light on the snow, and he threw a last glance over the yard and made a choice he would come to regret, and then he closed the door and went into the living room and sat down there. The twins were still playing in the kitchen, he could hear them plainly through the wall. To them everything was still the same.

11

I SIT ON THE BENCH FOR A LONG TIME
gazing OUt Over the lake. Lyra is running about. I don't know what is happening. Something slides off me. The nausea has gone, my thoughts are clear. I feel weightless. It is like being saved. From shipwreck, from obsession, from evil spirits. An exorcist has been here and left, taking with him all the mess. I breathe freely. There is still a future. I think of music. Most likely I will buy a CD player.

I come up the slope from the bridge with Lyra at my heels and see Lars standing in my yard. He is holding a chain-saw in one hand, the other grips one of the birch branches. He rocks the tree, but as far as I can see it does not budge. Only the branch gives a little. The sun has more yellow now, with a sharper light in my face. Lars wears a peaked cap he has pulled well down over his eyes, and when he hears me coming he turns and almost has to lean his head backwards to look out from under the brim to meet my gaze. Poker and Lyra play tag around the house as well as they can with the birch blocking the yard, and then they rush together in a mock fight, growling and whining and rolling around on the grass behind the shed, having a good time.

Lars grins and shakes the branch again.

'Shall we deal with it?' he says.

'Yes, please,' I say, giving my most enthusiastic smile. And I mean it. It is a relief. It may well be that I like Lars. I have not been quite sure, but it may well turn out that way. I would not be surprised.

'But then you'd best cut that branch,' I say, pointing to the one that has torn the gutter down and now presses against the door of the shed. 'Because my saw is in there.'

'We'll soon see to that,' he says, pulling out the choke on his saw, which is a Husqvarna and not a Jonsered, and that too is a relief in a comic sort of way, as if we were doing something we are not in fact allowed to do, but which is certainly really fun, and he pulls the cord once or twice and slams the choke back in and then gripping the cord firmly he lets the saw sink as he pulls and it starts up with a fine growl, and in a trice the branch is off and cut into four parts. The door is unblocked. It is an encouraging sight. I push the overhanging gutter aside and go in to fetch my saw, which is still on the bench where I left it, and take the yellow can of two-stroke petrol out with me. There is a little left. I put the saw down on the grass on its side and squat down to unscrew the petrol tank and pour, and it fills right up and then the can is empty. I do not spill any of it, my hand is steady, and that is a good thing when someone is watching.