Out Stealing Horses

  ‘Have you been out stealing those horses?’ He stopped and went stiff for a moment before he turned round and saw me hanging out the window, and when he realised I was only fooling he smiled and said loudly:

  ‘Get yourself out here on the dot.’

  ‘Aye, aye, chief,’ I shouted.

  I picked up my clothes from the chair and ran into the living room and got dressed as quickly as I could without stopping, and I hopped first on one leg and then on the other as I pulled my trousers on and barely stopped to step into my gym shoes before coming half blind out onto the steps with my shirtsleeves flapping above my head. When my face finally surfaced I could see him standing by the door of the shed staring at me and laughing heartily at what he saw, and in his arms he had another saddle.

  ‘This one’s for you,’ he said. ‘If you’re still interested, that is. You were before, I remember.’

  ‘Of course I’m interested,’ I said. ‘Are we going now? Where to?’

  ‘Never mind where to, breakfast comes first,’ said my father. ‘And then we have to make the horses ready. That takes some time, it has to be done properly, it’s not just a matter of going. We have them on loan for three days to the minute. You know Barkald, he doesn’t mess around with his possessions. I don’t even understand why he said yes.’

  But that was no mystery to me. Barkald liked my father and always had done, and according to what Franz had told me, the state of confidence between them was stronger than I had first imagined. Maybe my father had not even paid for our place, maybe Barkald had just let him have it because they were such great friends when the war was over on account of the things they had gone through together. Then everything was altogether different, wasn’t it, from when we came here for the first time, and the forest and the river were strange to me, and the yard by the shop was new, and the bridge was new, and I had never seen logs moving yellow and glittering on the current of a river, and Barkald was a man I looked on with suspicion because he had property and money, and we did not, and I thought my father felt the same way. But obviously he did not, and when he said what he said now, it must have been to make light of the situation or to throw a veil over the real state of things.

  In that case, it all seemed a bit dubious, but I could not dwell on it now, because summer would soon be over, at least for us. And the heaviness I felt inside on the timber-launching day that weighed me down and almost ruined my knee was mysteriously lifted from my body and had vanished. Now I felt as restless as my father and was intent on squeezing everything possible out of the days we had left and out of the river and the landscape around it before we went back to Oslo.

  And that was what we set out to do: wring the last warmth from the paths through the forest and the high ridges in the sunshine on the Furufjellet and see the reflection of dazzling birch boles swirling through the trees like arrows shot from the bows of the Kiowas diving into deep green ferns swaying at the sides of the narrow gravel path like palm leaves on Palm Sunday in the Sunday School Bible. We walked the horses down the path from our cabin, past the old wooden barn I had spent a night in not long ago and suddenly felt the heat in my body, now being the heat from the horse’s flanks against my thighs, and against my face the warmth of the wind from the south. We rode to meet it on our own east side of the river, and we had had breakfast and packed the saddle-bags and rolled up rugs to keep us warm sleeping outdoors, and the anoraks were tied up with the rugs, and the horses were groomed and their manes shining. Above the ridge to the west, banks of cloud were sailing along the top, but there would be no rain, my father had said, shaking his head and just swinging into the saddle.

  Down there outside the barn the dairymaid was washing her buckets and tubs in the stream with water and soda, and the sun flashed in the metal and in the icily clear water pouring into the buckets and splashing out again, and we waved to her, and she raised her hand and waved back, and a shining streak of water flew up in an arc through the air before it fell to the ground. The horses snorted and tossed their heads, and she laughed aloud when she saw who it was passing by, but there was no malice there, and I did not blush.

  She had a nice voice, and it might well have sounded like a silver flute for all I knew, and my father turned in his saddle and looked at me riding close behind him. I was still busy finding a way of sitting in the saddle that felt right. ‘Let your hips go loose,’ my father had said. ‘Let your hips be a part of the horse. You have a ball-bearing there,’ he said. ‘Use that,’ and I knew he was right, that my body was put together in such a way that it was good for riding, if I wanted it to be.

  ‘Do you know her as well?’ my father said now.

  ‘Sure I do, we know each other well,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to see her several times,’ which was not strictly true, but I didn’t know who else he was referring to when he said ‘her as well’, whether it was Jon’s mother he meant, and the way he said it made me wonder if he was still angry with me after the day we sent the timber off, and then he said:

  ‘What about someone your own age?’

  ‘There isn’t anyone here,’ I said, and that at least was true. In two summers I had not seen a girl of my age for several kilometres around, and that was fine by me. I had no time for someone my own age, what did I want with her? It was fine as it was, and I heard my voice getting stiff and hostile, and he looked me straight in the eye and then he smiled.

  ‘You’re damn well right there,’ he said and turned back, and I heard him laugh.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ I shouted and felt myself getting mad, but he did not turn round, just said into the air:

  ‘I’m laughing at myself.’ At least I think that’s what he said, and it may well have been true. He could certainly do that, laugh at himself. Something I was no good at, while he often did. But why he should do so just now, I did not understand. Then he gently touched his horse’s sides with his heels and it picked up speed to an easy trot.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he called, and riding behind him I had plenty to take care of, making the ball-bearings in my hips roll correctly in the saddle when my horse too broke into a trot and followed, and the barn disappeared among the trees behind us, and the dairymaid stayed there in the yard with her shining brown knees under her skirt and her strong brown arms in the air.

  We went on down the road until it narrowed into a path, but we did not follow the bend across the straight near the river and the jetty in the rushes where I had walked one night in a strange light and seen my father kissing Jon’s mother as if it was the last thing he would ever do. Instead we went on along another path that soon turned eastwards and gradually shrank into no more than a zigzagging moose track through tall old birches with great swishing crowns when you put your head back and gazed up through the foliage, and I did that until I had a crick in my neck and tears in my eyes, and we crossed a deep stream whose water looked icy cold. And it was cold when it splashed up between the horses’ legs and over my thighs immediately soaking my trousers, and a few drops even hit my face when we splashed over at a trot, and the horses liked that; the terrain changing as we came closer to the Furufjellet. The spruce forest was dense and untouched by loggers on the steep mountainsides, and we followed the track to the top of the ridge and stopped for a moment at the highest point and turned the horses to look back, and the river wound a dull silver through the treetops between newly mown meadows, and the cloud banks lay above the ridge on the other side of the valley. It was grand to look at, better than the fjord at home. I did not really give a damn about the fjord, to tell the truth, and now was the last time for ages I would be able to look out over the valley here like this, that I knew, and it did not make me melancholy as you might think, but irritated almost, and a little angry. I wanted to go on. I felt my father was sitting there longer than necessary, facing west, and then I turned my horse with its back to the valley and said:

  ‘We can’t stay hanging about here.’

  He looked at me and smiled faintly, and then
he too turned his horse and started to move straight for the east where I knew Sweden was. When we got there it would all look exactly as it did on this side of the border, but it would feel different, I was sure of that, because I had never been in Sweden. If that was where we were going. My father had not said anything about it. I just assumed we were.

  And I was not mistaken. We came down from the ridge on the other side through a narrow pass with our view blocked to all sides, and the horses stepped cautiously down the path, picking their way through the pebbles and loose stones that covered the slope, and it was steep too. So I leaned back in the saddle keeping my legs straight and my feet pressed hard down in the stirrups so as not to tumble over the horse’s neck and down the slope, and the noise of the iron-clad hooves rang between the rocks on both sides of the pass and there were echoes too, so you would not say we moved quietly along. But it did not matter, I thought, for there was no-one chasing us now, no German patrol with machine gun and binoculars, no border police with tracker dogs, no lean and thin-lipped U.S. Marshall on an equally lean horse did follow us, day in and day out, keeping his distance, no closer, no further away, patiently waiting for the moment when our nerves were worn to shreds and we for a moment forgot to be on our guard. Then he would strike. Without hesitation. Without mercy.

  I turned round cautiously in the saddle and glanced back to make sure he really was not there on that skinny grey horse of his, and I listened as hard as I could, but the sound of our own horses was far too loud in that narrow cleft to allow us to hear anything else.

  At the end of the slope we came out on a plain, and with the shadow of the ridge behind us and the sun on our backs the horses began to trot with sheer relief, and my father pointed at a hillock with a solitary and crooked pine on its top, and he shouted:

  ‘Can you see the pine up there?’

  There was not much else to see just here, so I shouted back:

  ‘Of course I can see it.’

  ‘That’s where Sweden begins!’ and he still pointed at the pine as if it was hard to make out.

  ‘Alright,’ I yelled. ‘Then it’s first man to the pine tree!’ and dug my heels into the horse’s side; it immediately changed pace and threw itself forward, and I lost hold of the reins and fell almost straight backwards out of the saddle from the sudden jerk, rolled over the horse’s rump and crashed onto the ground. Behind me my father shouted:

  ‘Fantastic! One more time! Da Capo!’ then he set off at a gallop and passed me by with a loud laugh, chasing the runaway horse. After only a hundred metres he caught up with it, and he bent forward and seized the reins at full speed and made a big semicircle on the flat ground and came pacing back in a way that told the whole world this too was something he could do. But the whole world was not there, it was only me lying flat like an empty sack in the tall grass seeing him come towards me with the two horses, and it did not hurt much anywhere just then, but I stayed down on my back all the same. He dismounted, came right up and squatted in front of me and said:

  ‘I’m sorry I laughed, it just looked so damn comical, like something in a circus. I know it wasn’t funny for you. It was incredibly stupid of me to laugh. Does it hurt a lot anywhere?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘Only a little bit in your soul?’

  ‘Maybe a bit.’

  ‘Let it sink, Trond,’ he said. ‘Just leave it. You can’t use it for anything.’

  He stretched out a hand to pull me up, and I took it, and he squeezed it so hard it almost hurt, but he did not pull me up. Instead he suddenly sank to his knees, threw his arms round me and pulled me close to his chest. I didn’t know what the hell to say, I was really surprised. Of course we were good friends, had been anyway, and no doubt would be again. He was the grown man I looked up to most of all, and we did still have a pact, I was convinced we did, but we were not in the habit of hugging. We could have mock fights and hold round each other doing that and roll back and forth like two idiots over the hillock on the farm where there was room enough for such childish play, but this was not fighting. On the contrary. He had never done such a thing before that I could remember, and it did not feel right. But I let him hold me while I wondered where I should put my hands, for I did not want to push him away, but neither could I hold my arms around him like he did around me, and so I just left them hanging in the air. But I didn’t have to think about it for long, because then he let me go and stood up and took my hand again and pulled me onto my feet. He was smiling now, but I didn’t know if it was for me, and I had no idea what to say. He just gave me the reins of my horse, tidily brushed some dirt off my shirt, and was quite his usual self again.

  ‘We’d better get ourselves into Sweden,’ he said, ‘before the whole country sinks and is lost to us, and then there will just be the Gulf of Bothnia left and Finland on the other side, and we haven’t much use for Finland just now.’ I did not understand a word that he said, but then he put his foot in the stirrup and swung himself up, and so did I. I did not even try to look elegant, feeling stiff and sore all over, and we climbed at a walk up to the crooked pine that looked like a sculpture and across the border and into Sweden, and it was right what I had expected, that it felt different although everything looked the same after we had crossed.

  That night we slept under an overhanging cliff, where fires had been made before. We found the remains of two heaps of spruce twigs made into beds to lie on, but all the needles had turned brown and dropped off a long time ago, so we cleared the old ones away and cut new branches from nearby trees with the little axe I had used earlier with such eagerness, and we made up the branches and twigs into two soft beds under the cliff, and it smelled good and strong when you lay down with your face almost buried in it. We fetched our blankets and lit a bonfire in the stone circle and sat on each side of the flames to eat. We had tied our ropes together into a single long one and tied it round four spruce trees with enough distance between them to make a corral, and there we turned the horses loose. From where we sat by the fire we could only just hear them moving around on the soft forest floor and then quite clearly when their hooves struck a stone, and in their throats they made soft sounds to each other, but we could not see them clearly, for it was August now and the evenings were darker. The flames made reflections in the rocky ceiling above me that coloured my thoughts far into sleep and made my dreams more intense, and when I woke in the night I did not remember anything at first about where I was or why. But the fire was still burning and there was glow enough and light from the flames and the coming day to get up and carefully walk down to the horses and then recover my memory, all in one slow stream while roots and pebbles scraped the soles of my feet, and I talked to the horses over the rope very quietly about quiet things I forgot the moment I had spoken them, and I stroked up and down their powerful necks. Afterwards I could smell their scent on my fingers and feel in my chest how calm I was before going off to do behind a boulder what I had woken up to do. On my way back I was so sleepy I stumbled several times, and under the overhang I quickly pulled the blanket over me and was gone at once.

  Those days were the last days. When I sit here now, in the kitchen of the old house I have planned to make into a liveable place in the years left to me, and my daughter has gone after a surprising visit and taken with her her voice and her cigarettes and the orange lights from her car down the road, and I look back to that time, I see how each movement through the landscape took colour from what came afterwards and cannot be separated from it. And when someone says the past is a foreign country, that they do things differently there, then I have probably felt that way for most of my life because I have been obliged to, but I am not any more. If I just concentrate I can walk into memory’s store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it and still feel in my body that ride through the forest with my father; high above the river along the ridge and then down on the other side, across the border into Sweden and far into what was a foreign country, at
least for me. I can lean back and sit by the bonfire under the overhanging cliff as I was that night when I woke up a second time and saw my father lying with his eyes open, staring up into the rock above him; quite still with his hands under his head and a red light from the embers on his forehead and stubbly cheek, and although I should have liked to I was not awake long enough to see if he actually did close his eyes before the morning came. Nevertheless he was up long before me and had watered the horses and groomed them both, and was keen to get going; he moved around tensely, but there was no sharpness in his voice that I could hear. Then we packed up and saddled the horses before the dreams had left my mind and were on our way before I could think anything apart from very simple thoughts.

  I heard the river before I could see it, and we rounded a small hill and there it was, almost white through the trees, and something in the air changed which made it easier to breathe. I could see straightaway that it was our own river, just further south and well inside Sweden, and even if it’s not possible to recognise water from the way it flows, that was precisely what I did.

  Soon we were down at the bank and moving the horses southwards as well as we could, and my father scanned up and downriver and across to the other side, and at first we saw only one single log rammed against a bed of rushes, and then several that were stuck on a shoal further down. My father fetched his axe then and cut some strong poles from two small pine trees, and we waded out in our shoes; I in my gym shoes and my father in his heavy lace-up boots, and we used the poles for timber stakes and sent the logs back into the current. But I could see he was worried now, for the water level was not much to boast about, and certainly not for rafting timber, and he wanted to get further down the river at once. So we mounted the horses and rode off with the long poles like lances pointing to the sky at the horses’ sides like Ivanhoe and his knights must have held their lances going to a tournament or a decisive battle against the treacherous Normans in the England of old. I tried to keep my imagination in check, but it was not easy on horseback, riding through the thickets alongside the bank, because the enemy could appear at any moment. We came to a bend in the river, and once round it there was a stretch of rapids where a log had wedged itself right in midstream between two large rocks that were bare and dry in the sinking water, and more and more logs had come drifting and piled up against the first one. Now there was a large stack out there, firmly wedged. That was not what my father wanted to see. He seemed to collapse in his saddle, and it pained me to see him like that, and it made me uneasy, so I jumped off my horse and ran down to the water and gazed out at the tangle of timber, and I ran some way along the bank still staring out into the river and ran back again, and then even further, and I hopped about unable to stand still and studied the jumble from every possible angle. Finally I called to my father: