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 Vänern 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 Wärmlandsbank. 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 Wärmlandsbank? 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 Østbane 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 Wärmlandsbank 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 ve
ry 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.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how much money you can make from timber. I have no idea.’
We stood on the pavement in front of the Wärmlandsbank looking at each other; I sullen and ungiving, as often I was towards her, and she confused and irresolute, but with no bitterness in her that day. She chewed her lip, suddenly smiled and said:
‘Oh, well, we did have a day out together, you and I, that doesn’t happen every day, does it?’ And then she laughed. ‘Do you know what the funniest thing is?’
‘Is there anything funny?’ I said.
‘We have to use the money here. We’re not allowed to take it into Norway just like that.’ She laughed out loud. ‘It’s something to do with currency restrictions, which I ought to have known about, of course. I’m afraid I haven’t paid close enough attention. I’ll have to do that from now on, won’t I?’
She really never did do that, she was too vague in her ways, too preoccupied with her own thoughts most of the time. But on that day she was all of a sudden wide awake. She laughed out loud again, grasped my shoulder and said:
‘Come on. I want to show you something I saw on the way up.’
We walked down the street together towards the station. I was not so cold now. My legs were stiff after standing still, and I was numb all over, but it felt better when we started to move.
We stopped at a clothes shop.
‘Here it is,’ she said, and pushed me in front of her into the shop. A man came from a room behind the counter and made a bow and was at our service. My mother smiled and said distinctly:
‘We want a suit for this young man.’ And of course it was not called a suit, it was called something quite different we had no means of guessing, but she parried it simply and with no embarrassment now; in a flash of elegance her heels clicked across the floor to where a row of suits were hanging, and she took one out and swung it round on the hanger and displayed it over her left arm and said:
‘One like this, for my son there.’ And she smiled and hung it up again, and the man smiled and bowed and measured me round the waist and from the crotch down and asked what size in shirts I took, something I had never thought about, but my mother had. Then he went over to the rail and took out a dark blue suit he thought would be the right size and pointed to a fitting room at the back of the shop, smiling all the while. I went into the cubicle and hung the suit on a peg and started to undress. There was a tall mirror there and a stool. It was so hot in the shop that the skin of my stomach started to prickle and it prickled down along my arms. I felt dizzy and drowsy and sat on the stool with my hands on my knees and my head in my hands. I had only my blue shirt on and my underpants and could easily have fallen asleep right there if my mother had not called:
‘Are you alright in there, Trond?’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I called back, stood up and started to put the suit on; trousers first and then the jacket over the blue shirt. It was a perfect fit. I stood there looking at myself in the mirror. I bent down and put on my shoes and straightened up and looked at myself again.
I looked like someone else. I buttoned the top two buttons of the jacket. I rubbed my eyes and my face with the backs of my hands, round and round, and ran my fingers hard back through my hair, many times, pushed the fringe to one side and the hair by my temples behind my ears. I rubbed my mouth with my fingertips, my lips were prickling, and the blood was prickling in my face, and I slapped my face several times. I looked in the mirror again. Peering and making my mouth tight. Turned to one side while I looked over my shoulder in the glass and did the same the other way. I looked a completely different person from the one I had been that day. I did not look like a boy at all. I combed my hair with my fingers several more times before going out into the shop, and I could swear my mother blushed when she saw me. She bit her lip quickly and went over to the man who was back in his place behind the counter, and she still walked briskly.
‘We would like to have that one,’ she said.
‘That will be exactly ninety-eight kroner,’ he said, and now he was smiling broadly.
I was still standing outside the cubicle. I saw my mother bending over the counter, I heard the sound of the till, and the man saying:
‘Very many thanks, Madam.’
‘Can I keep it on?’ I said in a loud voice and they both turned and looked at me and nodded as one.
I had my old clothes in a paper bag, which I rolled up and carried under one arm. When we were out on the pavement and walked on down to the station and to a café, perhaps, for something to eat, my mother put her arm in mine, and we went on like that, arm in arm like a real couple, light on our feet, our heights a match, and she had a click in her heels that day that echoed from the walls on either side of the street. It was as if gravity was suspended. It was like dancing, I thought, although I had never danced in my whole life.
We were never to walk like that again. When we came home to Oslo, she fell back into her own weight and remained that way for the rest of her life. But on that day in Karlstad we walked arm in arm down the street. My new suit fitted my body so lightly and moved with me every step I took. The wind still came icily down between the houses from the river, and my hand felt swollen and sore where the nails had pierced the skin when I clenched it so hard, but all the same everything felt fine at that moment; the suit was fine, and the town was fine to walk in, along the cobblestone street, and we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt.
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Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses
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