Out Stealing Horses (25 page)

At the 0stbane Station I knew at once which platform every train arrived at, I knew when every train was leaving, and I walked my mother to the correct platform and found the correct coach and to my right and my left I greeted people I had talked to before; porters and conductors and the lady in the kiosk and two men who hung about in there only to drink something revolting, unrecognisable, from a bottle they shared, and every day they were chased out, and every day just as regularly they came back.

I sat in the compartment by the window facing backwards, because my mother could not sit that way without feeling sick, she said, and lots of people have the same problem but it did not worry me in the least. The train sped along the Glomma, and the poles ticked past outside by Blaker Station and by Arnes; ping and ping and ping, and the wheels beat against the rail joints; dungadung, dungadung, dungadung, and I slept where I sat with a flickering light on my eyelids; not sunlight, but a greyish-white light from the sky above the water, and I dreamed I was going to the cabin by the river, that it was actually the bus I was sitting in.

I woke up and looked blearily out at the Glomma and knew it was still within me; I was friends with water, with running water, it was a call from the big river that was swelling away in the opposite direction from the one that we were travelling in, for we were going north, and the river ran south towards the towns of the coast, flowing heavily and wide as great rivers always do.

I turned my gaze from the Glomma to my mother sitting opposite me, and to her face where the light flickered on and off with the masts and poles beside the rails and with small bridges and with trees. Her eyes were closed, and the heavy eyelids rested on the round cheeks as if everything save sleeping was unnatural to this face, and I thought; for Christ's sake, he just disappeared and left me with her.

Oh, I did love my mother, I am not saying I didn't, but what future I could read in the face before me was not what I had imagined. Merely to look at that face for longer than three minutes made the world push at my shoulders from both sides. It made me short of breath. I could not sit still. I got up from my seat, pulled the door open and went out into the corridor to the windows on the other side of the train where the fields rushed past and had been harvested already and stood bare and brownish-yellow in the dull autumn light. A man was there looking at the landscape. There was something about his back. He smoked a cigarette and was far gone. When I came to the window he turned as if in a dream and nodded in a friendly way and smiled. He did not look like my father at all. I walked up the corridor alongside the compartment doors to the end of the carriage and turned round at the big water container on the wall and went back again, past the man with the cigarette, and I stared at the floor and went right on to the other end, and there I found an empty'compartment. I went in and closed the door and sat down by the window facing the way we were travelling and looked out at the river that came flowing towards me now and disappeared behind my back, and maybe I did cry a little with my face against the pane. Then I closed my eyes and slept like a stone until the conductor wrenched the door open with a crash and said we had arrived at Karlstad. We stood shoulder to shoulder on the platform. The train on the rails behind us was not moving now, but soon it would start up again and hammer away on its journey to Stockholm. We heard snarling from a ventilator, we heard the wind singing in the cables running between telegraph poles alongside the station, and a man on the platform yelled at his wife: 'Come on, goddamn it!' in Swedish, but she stood where she was, surrounded by their luggage. My mother looked lost, her face swollen with sleep. She had never been to another country before. Only I had, but that was in the forest. Karlstad was different from Oslo. They talked differently here, we heard that at once, and not only the words but the intonation sounded foreign. The town seemed better arranged than Oslo, viewed from the station, and it looked much less shabby. But we did not know where to go. We had only one bag with us, as we had no intention of spending the night there or of making any long excursions. We really only wanted to get to the bank, the Warmlandsbank, as it was called, which was somewhere in the centre of this town, and then we would want something to eat. We thought we could just about afford that; to eat in a cafe just for once after we had been to the bank to collect the money my father left us, but I knew my mother had made a packed lunch and put it in the bag for safety.

We went over to the station building and through it across the tiled floor and then over the road outside that ran alongside the railway. We walked up Jarnvagsgatan and to the town centre. We looked at the houses on either side for the nameplate of the bank, whose address was on a letter in the bag, but we could not find it, and we kept asking each other at intervals: 'Can
you
see it?' And then we said 'No' the one to the other.

I was the one carrying the bag under my arm as we walked the whole length of the street until it came to a halt at the Klara river, which came flowing from the north and from the great forests there and here was divided by a spit of land. We were standing on that spit now, and the river swept down through Karlstad splitting the town into three before finally flowing delta-like out into the great Vanern lake.

'Isn't it lovely?' my mother said, and I guess it was, but it was cold too, with a current of icy air from the river. I was frozen through, having slept on the train and then gone straight into the autumn chill and the wind, and I felt like getting it over with, what we had come for: the settling of the account once and for all, and someone to draw two lines under the columns: this much you had. This much you gave away. This much you have left.

We turned from the river and went down another street parallel to the one we had walked up.

'Are you cold?' my mother said. 'There's a scarf in the bag you can have. It's not a lady's scarf or anything, so you needn't be ashamed.'

'No, I'm not cold,' I said, and heard an impatient and irritated edge in my voice. I have been criticised for that later in life, by women especially, and that is because it is women I have used it against. I admit it.

A moment later I pulled it out of the bag. It had belonged to my father, but I just put it round my neck and tied it under my chin and pushed the long ends flat down inside my jacket so they covered most of my chest. I felt immediately better and said firmly:

'We have to ask someone. We can't just wander round the streets like this.'

'Oh, we're sure to find it,' my mother said.

'Sure we will, in the end, but it's stupid to take so much time over it.'

I knew she was afraid people would not understand her if she asked them, that it would confuse her and make her look helpless, like a peasant woman in the city, she had once said, and she wanted to avoid that at all costs. To my mother, country folk were a backward segment of the population.

'Then I will ask someone,' I said.

'You go ahead if you want to. But we'll soon find it in any case,' she said. 'It must be somewhere hereabouts.'

Blah, blah, blah, I thought, and went over to the first man coming along the pavement and asked if he could help us find the Warmlandsbank. He looked perfectly normal and certainly was no drunk; he was well dressed and his coat fairly new. I am sure my choice of words was plain and clear and properly pronounced, but he only looked at me with his mouth open, as if I had come from China and had a pointy hat and slanting eyes, or maybe just one eye in the middle, right above my nose, like the Cyclops I had read about. Suddenly I felt anger shooting up like a blazing column in my chest, my face turned hot, and my throat hurt. I said:

'Are you deaf, or what?'

'What?' It sounded like a dog barking.

'Are you deaf?' I said. 'Don't you listen when people talk to you? Is there something wrong with your ears? Can you tell us where to find the Warmlandsbank? We have to find that bank. Don't you see?'

He did not understand. He did not understand what I said at all. It was ridiculous. He simply glared at me as he slowly turned his face from side to side with a nervous look in his eyes as if the person in front of him was an idiot escaped from the asylum, and the only thing now was to get through the time it took for the warders to come and drag him back before anyone got hurt.

'Do you want a punch on your mouth?' I said. If he wasn't going to understand what I said I might as well say whatever crossed my mind. Besides, I was as tall as he was and in good shape after that summer, for I had used my body for all kinds of things. I had stretched it and bent it in all directions and lifted and pushed just about everything and hauled and tugged at stone and wood and rowed the boat both up and down the river, I had pedalled the distance between the Nielsenbakken and the 0stbane Station countless times through the late summer. Now I felt strong and in a way invincible, and this man did not exactly look an athlete, but he may have understood the last sentence better than the first ones, because his eyes grew round as saucers and were suddenly on their guard. I repeated the offer:

'If you want a punch on your mouth you can have it now, because I certainly feel like giving you one,' I said. 'You've only got to say.'

'No,' he said.

'No what?' I said.

'No,' he said, 'I
don't
want a punch on my mouth. If you hit me, I'll call the police.' He spoke very clearly, like an actor. It made me wildly irritated.

'We'll soon find out,' I said and felt one hand clenching automatically. It felt warm and good and tight in all its joints, and I did not know where they came from, the words I heard myself say. I had never said anything like them to anyone, not to people I knew and certainly not to people I did not know. And it dawned on me that from that small patch of cobble stones I stood on there were lines going out in several directions, as in a precisely drawn diagram, with me standing in a circle in the middle, and today, more than fifty years later, I can close my eyes and clearly see those lines, like shining arrows, and if I did not see them quite as clearly that autumn day in Karlstad, I did know they were there, of that I am certain. And those lines were the different roads I could take, and having chosen one of them, the portcullis would come crashing down, and someone hoist the drawbridge up, and a chain reaction would be set in motion which no-one could stop, and there would be no running back, no retracing my steps. And if I hit the man standing in front of me I would have made that choice.

'Bloody idiot,' I said, and immediately knew I had decided to leave him be. My right fist relaxed itself painfully, and a distinct wave of disappointment crossed the face in front of me. For reasons I did not grasp he would probably have preferred to call the police, but at the same moment I heard my mother call out:

'Trond!' from further down the street, 'Trond! I can see it, it's here. The Warmlandsbank is here!' she shouted, a bit louder than I thought was necessary. But luckily she had not cottoned on to what was happening in my life at my end of the street, and then I stepped out of the circle, the shining arrows stopped shining, and diagrams and lines melted away and ran down the gutter in a thin grey stream and vanished into the nearest drain. There were red marks from my nails in my right palm, but the choice was made. If I had punched the man in Karlstad, my life would have been a different life, and I a different man. And it would be foolish to maintain, as so many men do, that it would have come to the same thing. It would not. I have been lucky I have said that before. But it's true.

I didn't want to go into the bank, so I waited outside between the windows with one shoulder against the grey brick wall and my father's woollen scarf round my neck; October slapping my face, a clear feeling of the Klara river not far behind me and all that it carried with it, and a shiver in my stomach, as if I had been on a long run and had got my breath back, but the effort was still within me. A light someone had forgotten to put out.

My mother went into the bank with the authorisation from my father in her hand; defiant and ready to get the task accomplished, but also burdened with shyness about her Norwegian. She was gone for almost half an hour. Goddamn, it was so cold out there in the street, I was sure I was going to get sick. When my mother came out at last with a confused, almost dreamy expression on her face, I felt as if the chill from the river had laid a film of some unknown material round my body and made me a fraction more aloof, a fraction more thick-skinned than I had been before. I straightened up and said:

'How did it go in there? Could they not understand what you said, or wouldn't they give you any money? Or maybe there wasn't an account?'

'Oh, no,' she said. 'It all went smoothly. There was an account, and they gave me the money that was in it.' Then she laughed a little nervously and said:

'But there was only 150 kroner. I don't know, don't you think that seems very little? Of course I know nothing about it, but how much can you really make on timber like that, do you think?'

I was no expert about that at the age of fifteen, but no doubt it should have been ten times as much. Franz had never concealed the fact that log running was not done the way my father wanted to do it, that it was a desperate project, and the only reason he joined in to help was because they were friends, and he knew why my father was so desperate. And even though my father and I had freed a jam from those rapids before we had to turn back and I had to go home, that was not enough. The river must have put its brakes on quite mercilessly; the water level sinking at full speed to its normal level for July after the rainstorms, and the timber crashed and turned over and piled itself up in huge tangles that only dynamite could loosen when the time came, bored itself into stony banks or sunk pathetically to the bottom in the low water and had not budged, and only a tenth of the timber landed at the sawmill before it was too late. And that for a price of no more than 150 Swedish kroner.