Out Stealing Horses

  When all the stakes were standing in a jagged row across the field, the steel wire had to be stretched at thigh height between them with a loop alternately to the right and the left so the wire would lie straight in the middle. The two men from the village took care of that job; one was tall and the other was short, and that was plainly a good combination, because they had done it before and were brisk and efficient at getting the wire to stretch taut as a guitar string right down to the last stake and lashed securely around the peg that Barkald had knocked in at the other end. We others picked our rakes up and walked out fanwise with the right distance between us and started to rake the grass from all sides towards the rack, and it was obvious at once why the handles were so long. They provided radius enough for us to cover the whole space together, and not so much as a straw was left behind, but it was tough on our palms with the rake rubbing forwards and backwards a thousand times, and we had to wear gloves to save the skin from being torn and prevent burns and blisters after one hour only. And then we filled the first wire, some with hayforks and balance and great precision, others with their hands, like my father and I, who did not have the same experience. But that went well too, and the inner side of our bare arms turned slowly green, and the wire filled up, and we fixed up another one and filled that one too, and then another, until we had five wires crammed full one above the other, and the top one with a slightly shallower layer of grass hung down like a thatched roof on each side, so when the rain came it would just run off, and the rack could stand there for months and the hay would be just as good right under the outermost layer. Barkald said it was almost as good as having it dry in the barn, that is if everything was done properly, and as far as I could see nothing was wrong. The rack stood as if it had been there forever across the landscape and lit by the sun with its long shadow behind it, and in harmony with every fold of the field and finally turned into a mere form, a primordial form, even if that was not the word I used then, and it gave me huge pleasure just to look at it. I can still feel the same thing today when I see a hayrack in a photograph from a book, but all that is a thing of the past now. No-one makes hay this way any more in this part of the country; today there is one man alone on a tractor, and then the drying on the ground and the mechanical turner and wrapping machines and huge plasticwhite cubes of stinking silage. So the feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old.

  5

  I did not recognise him the first few times I saw him, so I just nodded when I passed by with Lyra, for my mind was not running on those lines, why should it be? When he was outside his cabin stacking piles of firewood under the eaves and I was on my way along the road thinking of other things entirely. Not even when he told me his name did it register. But after going to bed last night I began to wonder. There had been something about that man and the face I had seen in the wavering light of our torches. Now suddenly I am sure. Lars is Lars even though I saw him last when he was ten years old, and now he’s past sixty, and if this had been something in a novel it would just have been irritating. I have in fact done a lot of reading particularly during the last few years, but earlier too, by all means, and I have thought about what I’ve read, and that kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you’re reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine, they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it’s worth, and I take complete responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up precisely here.

  Not that it changes anything. It doesn’t change my plan for this place, doesn’t change how it feels living here, all that is as before and I’m sure he did not recognise me, and that’s the way I would like it to continue. But of course it does make some difference.

  My plan for this place is quite simple. It is to be my final home. How long that might be for is something I haven’t given much thought to. It is one day at a time here. And what I have to work out first is how I shall get through the winter, if there is a lot of snow. The road down to Lars’ cabin is two hundred metres long, and there’s another fifty on to the main road. With this back of mine it will not be possible to clear that stretch with a shovel. I could not have done it with my back as strong as it ever was. There wouldn’t have been time for anything else.

  Snow clearing is important, and a good battery in the car if it gets really cold. It is six kilometres to the district Co-op. And enough wood for the stove is important. There are two panel heaters in the house, but they are old and probably eat up more electricity than they give out heat. I could have bought a couple of modern oil-filled radiators on wheels, the type you can plug straight into the power point and pull around as required, but my idea is that the heat I cannot produce myself, I will have to do without. Luckily there was a large pile of old birchwood in the outhouse when I came here, but that is not nearly enough, and it’s so dry that it will burn up fast, so a few days ago I cut down a dead spruce with the chainsaw I bought, and my current project is to cut up the spruce and split it into usable logs and stack them all on top of the old wood before it is too late. I have already dug deep into that birchwood pile.

  The chainsaw is a Jonsered. Not that I think Jonsered is the best brand, but they only use Jonsereds round here, and the man I bought it from at the machine workshop in the village said they wouldn’t touch any other make if I brought him a broken chain and wanted it repaired. It’s not a new saw, but it has been overhauled recently and has a brand new chain, and the man seemed quite determined. So Jonsered rules here. And Volvo. I have never seen so many Volvos in one place; from the latest luxury models to old Amazons, more of the latter than the former, and I saw an old PV model too, in front of the post office, in 1999. That ought to tell me something about this place, but I’m not sure what, except that we are quite close to Sweden, and to inexpensive spare parts. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

  I get into the car and drive off. Down the road and across the river, past Lars’ cottage and out onto the main road through the forest, and I see the lake sparkling through the trees on the right until suddenly it is behind me, and then it’s across an open plain of yellow, long-since harvested fields on both sides. There are large flocks of crows flying over the fields. They make no sound in the sunlight. At the other end of the plain a sawmill lies beside a river, wider than the one I can see from my house but flowing into the same lake. Formerly it was used for rafting, which is why the sawmill is situated where it is, but that is long ago, and the sawmill could have been anywhere, because timber is all transported by road nowadays, and it’s no joke to meet one of the heavily laden trucks with trailers on a bend in a narrow country road. They drive like the Greeks do and use the horn instead of braking. Only a few weeks ago I had to drive into the ditch, the colossal brute thundered past me well into my lane, and I just wrenched the wheel over, and maybe I closed my eyes for a second for I thought my hour had come, but only the glass of my right indicator was smashed on a tree-stump. I sat there a long time, though, with my forehead against the wheel. It was almost dark, the engine had stopped, but my lights were on, and when I lifted my head from the wheel, I saw the lynx brightly outlined only fifteen metres in front of the car. I had never seen a lynx before, but I knew what it was that I was looking at. The evening was perfectly still around us, and the lynx turned neither to right nor left. It just walked. Softly, not wasting energy, filled with itself. I can’t recall when I last felt so alive as when I got the car onto the roa
d again and drove on. Everything that was me lay taut and quivering just beneath my skin.

  Next day at the shop I told them about the lynx. It was most likely a dog, they said. No-one believed me. No-one I saw that day had ever seen the lynx, so why should I, who had lived there barely a month, be blessed with such a thing? If I had been one of them I might have thought the same, but I saw what I saw, I have the image of the big cat somewhere inside me and can call upon it whenever I like, and I hope that one day, or just as good, one night, I shall see it again. That would be great.

  I park in front of the Stat Oil station. The broken indicator. I still have not replaced the glass, or changed the bulb for that matter, but have managed without it. It is starting to get a bit too dark in the evenings to do without, besides it’s illegal to drive without one. So I go in and talk to the man in the workshop. He glances out the window in the sliding door and says he will change the bulb at once and order the new glass from a car scrapyard.

  ‘No sense in spending money on something new for an old car,’ he says. And that’s true, no doubt. The car is a ten-year-old Nissan station wagon, and I could easily have bought a new car, I can afford that, but in addition to the house purchase it would have eaten into my resources quite a lot, so I opted against it. In fact I had plans for a car with four-wheel drive, it would have been useful out here, but then I decided that a four-wheeler was a bit like cheating and a bit new-rich, and I ended up with this one, which has rear-wheel drive like everything else I’ve driven. I have already been to the mechanic with various problems, a worn-out dynamo among other things, and he says the same thing each time and orders from the same scrap dealer. It costs a fraction of new parts, and I also think he charges too little. But he whistles as he works and has his radio in the workshop tuned to the news channel, and the price policy is obviously deliberate. He is so friendly and obliging it bewilders me. I had actually expected some resistance, especially as I don’t drive a Volvo. Maybe he’s an outsider too.

  I leave the car at the petrol station and walk past the church and over the crossroads to the shop. That is unusual. I’ve noticed that everyone here gets into the car and drives regardless of where they are going or how far it is. The Co-op is a hundred metres away, but I am the only one who walks outwith the parking place. I feel exposed and am happy to get into the shop.

  I exchange greetings to right and left, they are used to me now and realise I am here to stay and that I am not one of the holiday cottage crew who pile out here in their mammoth cars every Easter and summer to fish by day and play poker and swig sundowners in the evening. It took some time before they started to ask questions, cautiously, in the queue for the check-out, and now everyone knows who I am and where I live. They know about my working life, how old I am, that my wife died three years ago in an accident I only just survived myself, that she was not my first wife, and that I have two grown-up children from an earlier marriage, and that they have children themselves. I have told them all that, including how when my wife died I did not want to go on working, and I pensioned myself off and started to look for a completely new place to live, and when I found the house I live in now I was really happy. They like hearing that, although everyone says I could have asked anybody round here and they would have told me what a state the house was in, that many people had wanted the place on account of its lovely situation but none of them felt like taking it on because of the work that was needed to make it fit to live in. Then I say it was just as well I didn’t know, for then I would not have bought it, and not found out it is quite possible to live in if you do not demand too much at once, but just take one step at a time. That suits me fine, I say, I have plenty of time, I’m not going anywhere.

  People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to. You only have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay, because they will talk about you no matter how much you squirm, it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.

  There is not much I want, just a loaf of bread and something to put on it, and that’s soon done. I’m surprised at how unfilled my shopping baskets have become, how few things I need now I am alone. I suffer a sudden onset of meaningless melancholy and feel the eyes of the check-out lady on my forehead as I search for the money to pay, the widower is what she sees, they do not understand anything, and it is just as well.

  ‘Here you are,’ she says quietly in a voice soft as silk, as she gives me my change, and I say:

  ‘Many thanks,’ and I am on the verge of tears, for Christ’s sake, and go out quickly with my purchases in a bag and across to the filling station. I have been lucky. They do not understand a thing.

  He has changed the bulb for the indicator light. I put my bag on the passenger seat and walk between the pumps and into the shop. His wife is smiling behind the counter.

  ‘Hi,’ she says.

  ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘That bulb. How much is it?’

  ‘Not much. It can wait. How about a cup of coffee? Olav is taking five minutes,’ she says, gesturing with her thumb towards the open door of the room behind the shop. It’s hard to refuse. I walk to the open doorway, a bit uncertain, and look in. There sits Olav the mechanic on a chair in front of a computer screen with long shining columns of figures. None of them is red, as far as I can see. He has a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a chocolate bar in the other. He must be twenty years younger than I am, but I’m no longer surprised when I realise that mature men are well below my own age.

  ‘Sit down and relax for a bit,’ he says, pouring coffee into a plastic mug and placing it on the table in front of a spare chair and waving me forward as he leans back heavily in his chair. If he gets up as early as I do, and I have a feeling he does, he has been at work for a long time and must be tired. I sit down on the chair.

  ‘Well, how’s it going then at The Top?’ he says. ‘Are you settled in?’ My place is called ‘The Top’ because it has a view over the lake.

  ‘I have been there twice myself,’ he says. ‘Looking round, and wondering whether to put in an offer. There’s plenty of room for car repairing there, but there was so much to be done on the house I thought better of it. I like working on cars, not houses. But maybe it’s the other way round for you?’ We both glance at my hands. They don’t look like the hands of an artisan.

  ‘Not exactly,’ I say. ‘I’m not much good at either, but given time I will put the house in order. I might need a spot of help now and again.’

  What I do, which I have never let anyone know, is I close my eyes every time I have to do something practical apart from the daily chores everyone has, and then I picture how my father would have done it or how he actually did do it while I was watching him, and then I copy that until I fall into the proper rhythm, and the task reveals itself and grows visible, and that’s what I have done for as long as I can remember, as if the secret lies in how the body behaves towards the task at hand, in a certain balance when you start, like hitting the board in a long jump and the early calculation of how much you need, or how little, and the mechanism that is always there in every kind of job; first one thing and then the other, in a context that is buried in each piece of work, in fact as if what you are going to do already exists in its finished form, and what the body has to do when it starts to move is to draw aside a veil so it all can be read by the person observing. And the person observing is me, and the man I am watching, his movements and skills, is a man of barely forty, as my father was when I saw him for the last time when I was fiftee
n, and he vanished from my life forever. To me he will never be older.

  All this would probably be hard to explain to this friendly mechanic, so I merely say:

  ‘I had a practical father. I learned a lot from him.’

  ‘Fathers are great,’ he says. ‘My father was a teacher. In Oslo. He taught me how to read books, not much else. He wasn’t practical, you could not call him that. But he was a fine man. We could always talk. He died a fortnight ago.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

  ‘How could you know? He had been ill for a long time, it was probably the best for him to have it over with. But I miss him, I really do.’

  He is just sitting there, and I can see he misses his father, quite simply and straightforwardly, and I would wish it was as easy as that, that you could just miss your father, and that was all there was to it.

  I get to my feet. ‘I’d better get going,’ I say. ‘There’s this house of mine waiting. I have to keep on with it. Winter’s on its way.’

  ‘That’s true,’ he says, smiling. ‘If there’s anything you’re puzzled about, say the word. We’re always here.’

  ‘There is something, in fact. The road up to my house. It’s a fair length, you know. When the snow comes it won’t be easy for me to keep it clear by hand. And I don’t have a tractor.’

  ‘No problem. You can ring this man,’ says Olav the mechanic, writing a name and a number on a yellow Post-it, ‘he’s your nearest neighbour with a tractor. He clears his own road and he can easily do yours as well. He is a farmer, and he doesn’t have anywhere to go in the morning but down the road and up again. I don’t think he’ll mind the extra stretch, but he’ll likely want something for his trouble. Fifty kroner a time, I would guess.’