Out Stealing Horses: A Novel
by Per Petterson
I
Early November. It’s nine o’clock. The titmice are banging against the
window. Sometimes they fly dizzily off after the impact, other times
they fall and lie struggling in the new snow until they can take off
again. I don’t know what they want that I have. I look out the window
at the forest. There is a reddish light over the trees by the lake. It
is starting to blow. I can see the shape of the wind on the water.
I live here now, in a small house in the far east of Norway. A river
flows into the lake. It is not much of a river, and it gets shallow in
the summer, but in the spring and autumn it runs briskly, and there are
trout in it. I have caught some myself. The mouth of the river is only
a hundred metres from here. I can just see it from my kitchen window
once the birch leaves have fallen. As now in November. There is a
cottage down by the river that I can see when its lights are on if I go
out onto my doorstep. A man lives there. He is older than I am, I
think. Or he seems to be. But perhaps that’s because I do not realise
what I look like myself, or life has been tougher for him than it has
been for me. I cannot rule that out. He has a dog, a border collie.
I have a bird table on a pole a little way out in my yard. When it is
getting light in the morning I sit at the kitchen table with a cup of
coffee and watch them come fluttering in. I have seen eight different
species so far, which is more than anywhere else I have lived, but only
the titmice fly into the window. I have lived in many places. Now I am
here. When the light comes I have been awake for several hours. Stoked
the fire. Walked around, read yesterday’s paper, washed yesterday’s
dishes, there were not many. Listened to the B.B.C. I keep the radio on
most of the day. I listen to the news, cannot break that habit, but I
do not know what to make of it any more. They say sixty-seven is no
age, not nowadays, and it does not feel it either, I feel pretty spry.
But when I listen to the news it no longer has the same place in my
life. It does not affect my view of the world as once it did. Maybe
there is something wrong with the news, the way it is reported, maybe
there’s too much of it. The good thing about the B.B.C.’s World
Service, which is broadcast early in the morning, is that everything
sounds foreign, that nothing is said about Norway, and that I can get
updated on the position of countries like Jamaica, Pakistan, India and
Sri Lanka in a sport such as cricket; a game I have never seen played
and never will see, if I have a say in the matter. But what I have
noticed is that ‘The Motherland’, England, is constantly being beaten.
That’s always something.
I too have a dog. Her name is Lyra. What breed she is would not be easy
to say. It’s not that important. We have been out already, with a
torch, on the path we usually take, along the lake with its few
millimetres of ice up against the bank where the dead rushes are yellow
with autumn, and the snow fell silently, heavily out of the dark sky
above, making Lyra sneeze with delight. Now she lies there close to the
stove, asleep. It has stopped snowing. As the day wears on it will all
melt. I can tell that from the thermometer. The red column is rising
with the sun.
All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when
everything was going well, as it often did. I can say that much. That
it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the
middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to
hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was
only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that
does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and
it is almost exactly as I had imagined it.
In less than two months’ time this millennium will be finished. There
will be festivities and fireworks in the parish I am a part of. I shall
not go near any of that. I will stay at home with Lyra, perhaps go for
a walk down to the lake to see if the ice will carry my weight. I am
guessing minus ten and moonlight, and then I will stoke the fire, put a
record on the old gramophone with Billie Holiday’s voice almost a
whisper, like when I heard her in the Oslo Colosseum some time in the
50s, almost burned out, yet still magic, and then fittingly get drunk
on a bottle I have standing by in the cupboard. When the record ends I
will go to bed and sleep as heavily as it is possible to sleep without
being dead, and awake to a new millennium and not let it mean a thing.
I am looking forward to that.
In the meantime, I am spending my days getting this place in order.
There is quite a lot that needs doing, I did not pay much for it. In
fact, I had been prepared to shell out a lot more to lay my hands on
the house and the grounds, but there was not much competition. I do
understand why now, but it doesn’t matter. I am pleased anyway. I try
to do most of the work myself, even though I could have paid a
carpenter, I am far from skint, but then it would have gone too fast. I
want to use the time it takes. Time is important to me now, I tell
myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time,
be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities
that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does
not vanish when I am not looking.
Something happened last night.
I had gone to bed in the small room beside the kitchen where I put a
temporary bed up under the window, and I had fallen asleep, it was past
midnight, and it was pitch dark outside. Going out for a last pee
behind the house I could feel the cold. I give myself that liberty. For
the time being there is nothing but an outdoor toilet here. No one can
see anyway, the forest standing thick to the west.
What woke me was a loud, penetrating sound repeated at brief intervals,
followed by silence, and then starting again. I sat up in bed, opened
the window a crack and looked out. Through the darkness I could see the
yellow beam of a torch a little way down the road by the river. The
person holding the torch must be the one making the sound I had heard,
but I couldn’t understand what kind of sound it was or why he was
making it. If it was a he. Then the ray of light swung
aimlessly to the right and left, as if resigned, and I caught a glimpse
of the lined face of my neighbour. He had something in his mouth that
looked like a cigar, and then the sound came again, and I realised it
was a dog whistle, although I had never seen one before. And he started
to call to the dog. Poker, he shouted, Poker, which was the dog’s name.
Come here, boy, he shouted, and I lay down in bed again and closed my
eyes, but I knew I would not get back to sleep.
All I wanted was to sleep. I have grown fussy about the hours I get,
and although they are not many, I need them in a completely different
way than before. A ruined night throws a dark shadow for many days
ahead and makes me irritable and feel out of place. I have no time for
that. I need to concentrate. All the same, I sat up in bed again, swung
my legs in the pitch black to the floor and found my clothes over the
back of the chair. I had to gasp when I felt how cold they were. Then I
went through the kitchen and into the hall and pulled on my old pea
jacket, took the torch from the shelf and went out onto the steps. It
was coal black. I opened the door again, put my hand in and switched on
the outside light. That helped. The red-painted outhouse wall threw a
warm glow across the yard.
I have been lucky, I say to myself. I can go out to a neighbour in the
night when he is searching for his dog, and it will take me only a
couple of days and I will be OK again. I switched on the torch and
began walking down the road from the yard towards where he was still
standing on the gentle slope, swinging his torch so that the beam moved
slowly round in a circle towards the edge of the forest, across the
road, along the river bank and back to its starting point. Poker, he
called, Poker, and then blew the whistle, and the sound has an
unpleasantly high frequency in the quiet of the night, and his face,
his body, were hidden in the darkness. I did not know him, had only
spoken to him a few times on the way past his cottage when I was out
with Lyra most often at quite an early hour, and I suddenly felt like
going back in again and forgetting all about it; what could I do
anyway, but now he must have seen the light of my torch, and it was too
late, and after all there was something about this character I could
barely make out there in the night alone. He ought not to be alone like
that. It was not right.
From Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. Translation copyright 2007 by Anne Born. All rights reserved.
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