Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Per Petterson
Dedication
Title Page
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part III
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Copyright
In the bitter cold of Danish Jutland, where the sea freezes over and the Nazis have yet to invade, a young girl dreams of one day going on a great journey to Siberia, while her beloved brother Jesper yearns for the warmer climes of Morocco. Their home, with a pious mother who sings hymns all day and a silent father, is as cold as their surroundings. But the unshakeable bond between brother and sister creates a vital warmth which glows in spite of the chill and the dark clouds that threaten to overtake their dreams.
Per Petterson, born in 1952, was a bookseller before publishing his first work, a volume of short stories, in 1987. Since then he has written five novels, which have established his reputation as one of Norway’s best fiction writers. Out Stealing Horses was awarded both the Norwegian Bookseller’s Prize, the Critics’ Award for best novel and won the 12th International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize in 2007. In the Wake (in Anne Born’s translation) was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Anne Born, poet, critic and historian, has translated many works from the principal Scandinavian languages into English, including two other novels by Per Petterson.
In The Wake
Out Stealing Horses
To Marit and Mona
WHEN I WAS a little girl of six or seven I was always scared when we passed the lions on our way out of town. I was sure Lucifer felt as I did, for he always put on speed at that very place. I did not realise until much later it was because my grandfather whipped him up sharply on the way down the gentle slope past the gateway where the lions were, and that was because Grandfather was an impatient man. It was a well known fact.
The lions were yellow and I sat at the rear of the trap dangling my legs, alone or with my brother Jesper, with my back towards Grandfather, watching the lions diminishing up there. They turned their heads and stared at me with yellow eyes. They were made of stone, as were the plinths they lay on, but all the same their staring made my chest burn and gave me a hollow feeling inside. I could not take my eyes off them. Each time I tried to look down at the gravelled road instead, I turned dizzy and felt I was falling.
“They’re coming! They’re coming!” shouted my brother, who knew all about those lions, and I looked up again and saw them coming. They tore themselves free of the stone blocks and grew larger, and I jumped off the trap heedless of the speed, grazed my knees on the gravel and ran out into the nearest field. There were roe deer and stags in the forest beyond the field, and I thought about that as I ran.
“Can’t you leave the lass alone!” bellowed my grandfather. I stopped running, there was dew on the grass and my ankles were wet, I felt stubble and stalks and rough ground under my bare feet. Grandfather pulled in the reins and shouted at the horse and the trap came to a halt; he turned round and out of his beard a stream of oaths as foul as the devil himself could utter poured over Jesper’s head. My grandfather was a man full of wrath and in the end I always had to stand up for my brother, for there was no way I could live without him.
I walked across the grass to the road again, climbed on to the trap and smiled at Jesper. Grandfather cracked the whip and Lucifer moved off and Jesper smiled back.
I walk the same road with my father. It is Christmas time. I am nine years old. It is unusually cold today, hoar frost and leafless poplars line the fields beside the road. Something grey moves at the grey edge of the forest, the thin legs of deer step stiffly and frosty mist comes in puffs from their soft muzzles, I can see it though I’m a long way away. You could touch the air, like glass, and everything seems very close. I am wearing my cap and scarf, my hands are thrust deep into my coat pockets. There is a hole in one, I can feel the lining on the inside. Now and then I look up at him. There’s a bulge at the top of his back, almost like a hump. He got that out in the fields and he is never going back there, he says. My father is a carpenter in town, Grandfather gave him a workshop when he left the farm.
He grits his teeth. He is bare-headed and he looks straight in front of him with red-rimmed eyes, his ears are white with frost and I can’t stop looking at them. They are like porcelain. His arm rises and stops before it gets right up, and he almost forces it down again. When we are halfway I take my hand out of my pocket to hold his, and he takes it without looking down and squeezes it lightly, but I am doing it because he is the one who is cold.
When we pass the lions we don’t turn to look at them, he because he is just looking straight ahead anyway and I because I do not want to. We are going out to the farm. My mother is there already, and my uncles and Jesper are there, and my father walks stiffly and does not hurry. We have come three kilometres from town, it is the 24th December and then I turn round after all. The lions lie on their plinths covered with greyish white shining ice. Yesterday it rained and then came the frost, and now they are caged and look like my father’s ears, two porcelain lions on guard before the avenue leading to Bangsbo Manor where Hans Christian Andersen stayed when he came as far north as this, the tall hat in the low rooms, a black streak of a man who always had to bend his head, on his way in, on his way out.
I try to walk faster, I am worried about his ears, I have heard they can fall off, but he keeps on at the same speed. I pull him by the arm and then he gets cross.
“Stop that, can’t you!” he snaps and pulls me back in place roughly and this is the first thing he has said since we stepped out of the door in Asylgade. My father is fond of Jesper. I am fond of my father. Jesper is fond of me, but he likes to tease me, frighten me in the dark with death’s heads, pull me under water in the summer. I can stand it, it makes me feel like him. I am walking alone with my father, it is Christmas and his ears are made of porcelain. I’m afraid they will fall off and he does not touch them the whole five kilometres to the farm.
There are four farms in Vrangbæk and they are all called Vrangbæk, it is quite a small village. There are some children there, they go to Vangen School in Understed. I might have been one of them, but I’m not, and “You should be glad about that,” Jesper always tells me. We turn down left at the crossroads where the road straight ahead winds across the fields to Gærum and the one to the right goes up to North Vrangbæk. We pass the first barn of stone and brick, my father walks if anything still slower and more stiffly and keeps a firm hold on my hand. The road takes a sharp bend with a steep slope on one side paved with round stones at the lowest point, it looks like a stone wall but is there to stop the earth sliding on to the road after rain and barring the way. We are going to the last farm, they are close together and near the road, so you can just walk straight into the big cobbled yard with the dung heap in the middle. Everything is glazed with a layer of shining ice. The cobblestones leading to the door are slippery.
The first person I catch sight of is Jesper, he has seen us from the window. He stands waiting at the living-room door. Behind him I see the Christmas tree and the window on the opposite side with frost flowers halfway up the panes. It looks pretty. I hear my mother’s voice. She is a Christian, her voice is Christian. She has one foot on earth and one in heaven. Jesper smiles as if we share a secret. Maybe we do, I do not remember. My father goes straight over to the big tiled stove. It is rumbling, I can see it is hot because the air around it quivers and I feel it on my face and he goes so close I’m afraid he is going to press his forehead to the tiles. I take off my coat and he lifts his arms like a puppet on a string and presses his hands to his ears. In the living room my mother sings “Chime ye bells”, and Jesper gazes at me and over at the man standing in front of the stove. I hold my coat in my arms and see his crooked back and jutting jawbones and the white frosty vapour running out between his fingers.
The attic at the farm was icy cold and usually in half darkness with only one paraffin lamp I had to turn off as soon as I had gone up the stairs. There was a small window on the east side and the bed was under the window and kneeling on it I could talk to Jesper in the evenings when it was summer time and look out at the stars in winter and a spruce hedge and a Chinese garden from another world and then just rolling fields right out to the sea. Sometimes in the night I would wake up under the coarse heavy duvet thinking I had heard the sea filling the room, and I opened my eyes and it was just as dark as when I shut them again. The darkness lay close to my face and I thought, it doesn’t make any difference whether I can see or not. But there was a difference, and I would be frightened, for the darkness was big and heavy and full of sounds and I knew if I did not shut my eyes quickly I would be smothered. But when I wasn’t frightened it was like being lifted up to float in space with a wind through my heart.
I lie in bed looking into the dark and everything is black and then it turns grey, for the moon has come out. I can’t hear the sea. It is frozen like everything else, frozen and quiet. I do not think I am dreaming any more.
Someone is knocking. That is why I woke up, I remember now. I wait and the knocking comes again and I get up from under the duvet which has warmed through at last and walk across the cold floor in my nightdress to where I know the door is. More knocking. It is not the door, it’s the window. I turn round and see a shadow moving against the moonlight in front of the window. It is Jesper. I know it’s Jesper.
“Let me in,” he whispers loudly, breathing warmth on the glass. I run over to the bed and jump up on to it knees first and open the window. A cold gust rushes in, it chills my chest and stomach and my thoughts turn sharp at the edges. I remember everything, the porcelain lions and porcelain ears and Grandmother’s straight neck and Grandfather and my mother’s frail voice fluttering in the room like a thin veil we all tend to ignore. Jesper hangs on to the eaves with one hand and has one foot on the window sill. He has my boots around his neck with the laces knotted behind his head.
“Get dressed and come with me,” he says.
“All right,” I say.
I have a will of my own, I do not do everything I’m told, but I want to be with Jesper. He does things that are original, I like that and I am wide awake now. He swings himself in and sits on the bed waiting and he smiles the whole time. I hurry to put my clothes on. They are lying on a chair and they’re very cold. The moon shines in through the open window and makes silver circles on the bedposts, on a pitcher, on an alarm clock whose hands have always stood still.
“What’s the time?” I ask.
“Haven’t a clue.” He smiles so his teeth shine in the semi-darkness. I start laughing, but then he puts his finger to his lips. I nod and do the same and then I find my woollen underwear and pull it on and the heavy skirt and a sweater. I have brought my coat up to my room with me, it hangs over the chair back. Jesper hands me my boots, and when I am ready we climb out.
“Don’t be scared, just do what I do,” he says.
I’m not scared, and I just do what he does, it is not difficult when we do it in time with each other, he goes first and I follow, it is like a dance only the two of us know and we dance along the roof until we come to the end where a birch reaches up with strong branches and there we climb down. Jesper goes first, and I follow him.
We keep away from the road and the wing where the grown-ups’ bedrooms are and go through the Chinese garden in the moonlight to get out into the fields. There are narrow paths and frozen shrubs and dead flowers in the garden and a winding artificial stream with frozen water, and there are several little wooden bridges across the stream. Carp swim in the stream in summer and maybe they are still there, underneath the ice. As we cross the bridges the woodwork creaks so loudly I am afraid it will wake the people in the house. When the moon goes behind a cloud I stop and wait.
“Jesper, wait,” I call softly, but he does not wait before he is through the garden and into the first field. Then he turns round and there is moonlight again and I catch up with him.
We walk across the fields, at first we wind upwards and then down on the other side till we can see the sea and we throw shadows as we walk. I have never been outside like this, never had a shadow at night. My coat is lit up in front by the moon and Jesper’s back is completely dark. When we stop and look out over the ice it is white at first and then shining and then just the open sea.
Jesper takes something from his pocket and puts it in his mouth and lights a match. And then he blows out. There is a scent of cigar. He says:
“It won’t be long before I’m going to do what Ernst Bremer did. Get hold of a fast boat and go to Sweden and come back with enough booze for everyone who wants to to get really drunk. I shall make money and smoke cigars. But I shall only drink on Saturdays. And then only two glasses.”
Jesper is twelve. Ernst Bremer is a smuggler. He is the greatest of them all and everyone knows who he is. A short man from Gothenburg who has a house in the street beyond ours where he stays when no one is after him. I have seen him walk past in a grey coat, with his dark hair parted in the middle and sometimes wearing a beret. He has been in the papers lots of times, once with a drawing by Storm Petersen showing him cocking a snook at the customs officers, and when the boys are out in the evening they do not play cops and robbers, but Ernst Bremer and customs men. He is better than Robin Hood. My father bought a bottle off him one summer, but when my mother realised where it came from she made him pour it out on to the flower bed. None of the flowers died, although she said it was poison.
Jesper blows grey smoke at the sea, and then he coughs and spits.
“Phoo!” he says, “but I’ll need some practice first.”
My mother is velvet, my mother is iron. My father often stays silent and sometimes over dinner he picks up the burning hot pan by its iron handle and holds it until I have filled my plate, and when he puts it back I can see the red marks on his hand.
“Hans Christian Andersen stayed at Bangsbo,” I say although I know Jesper knows this and he says:
“I know,” and we walk beside the water for a while and up a steep dune and back again across the fields. We have the moon on our backs and the shadow is in front and that is worse straight away. I don’t like it even though I see the house clearly when we get to the top. It is dark down the slope. The wind is getting up, I keep my hand on one cheek, for it is freezing, then some clouds start to gather and I can barely see. We go round the garden instead of through it and come up to the house where the barn stands at an angle, and Jesper goes right across to the barn alongside the spruce hedge and puts his face to the nearest window. The whitewashed walls are as murky as fog, and he shades his eyes with one hand as if there were reflections and sunlight outside, but it is dark and I can’t see what he is looking at and he says:
“Jesus Christ, Grandfather has hanged himself in the cowshed.”
“No!” I cry and cannot think why he chose to say just that, but I have often thought about it since, in all the years that have passed until now.
“Yes,” he says, “come over and see.” I don’t want to see, I feel sick even though I know it is not true, but still I run over and put my face beside his. It’s completely dark, I can’t see anything.
“I can’t see anything. You haven’t seen anything, it’s all dark.” I press my face to the pane, there is a smell of cowshed in there, there is a smell of cold and Jesper starts to chuckle. Suddenly I feel how cold it is.
“I’m freezing.”
“We’ll go in then,” he says, and stops laughing.
“I don’t want to go in yet. It’s colder inside. I won’t be able to sleep either.”
“I mean into the cowshed. It’s warm there.”
We go round the barn over the cobbles as far as the cowshed door. It creaks when we open it and I wonder if Grandfather is hanging there, perhaps I shall walk straight into his legs, perhaps they’ll swing to and fro. But he is not hanging there and it’s suddenly warmer, the smell is a smell I know. Jesper goes in among the stalls. There are a lot of them, there are twenty-five cows, it is not a small farm, they have labourers. Grandmother had worked in the kitchen before she was married to Grandfather. She wore a white apron then but she has never done so since. She is mother to my father, not to his brothers, and no time was wasted before that wedding once Hedvig was in her grave, so my mother told us. Grandmother and Grandfather are hardly ever in the same room together, and when they are Grandmother holds her head high and her neck stiff. Everyone can see it.
I stand there getting used to the heavy darkness. I hear Jesper’s steps inside and the cows shifting about in the stalls, and I know without seeing them that most of them are lying down, they’re sleeping, they’re chewing, they bump their horns against the low dividing walls and fill the darkness with deep sounds.
“Come on then,” says Jesper, and now I can see him right at the end, and I walk softly down the middle past the stalls, careful not to tread in the muck along the sides of the walkway. Jesper laughs quietly and starts to sing about those who walk the narrow path and not the broad road towards the pearly gates in the blue, and he mimics my mother’s voice and he does it so well I would have burst out laughing, but dared not in the presence of all these animals.
“Come on now, Sistermine,” says Jesper, and then I step all the way up to where he is and he takes hold of my coat. “Are you still cold?”
“A bit.”
“Then you must do this,” he says, enters one of the stalls and pushes his way in between the wall and the cow lying there. He squats down and strokes her back and talks in a low voice I do not often hear him use, and she turns her head and edges nervously towards the far wall, but then she quietens down. He strokes her harder and harder and then cautiously lies down on her back, quite stiff at first and when he feels it is safe he goes limp and just lies there like a big dark patch on the patched cow. “Big animals have a lot of heat,” he says, “like a stove, you try it.” His voice is sleepy, and I do not know if I can manage, but now I’m sleepy too, so sleepy that if I don’t lie down soon I shall fall over.
“Try the next stall,” says Jesper, “that’s Dorit, she’s friendly.”
I stand in the walkway and hear Jesper breathing calmly and look in at Dorit in her stall until her broad back stands out clearly and then I take a big step over the gutter but not quite big enough, but now I don’t care, I’m too sleepy. I bend down and stroke Dorit’s back.
“You have to say something, you must talk to her,” says Jesper from behind the wall, but I do not know what to say, all the ideas I think of are things I cannot say aloud. It is cramped in the stall, if Dorit turns round I shall be squeezed against the wall. I stroke her neck and lean forward more and start to tell the story of the steadfast tin soldier into her ear, and she listens and I know Jesper is listening behind the wall. When I reach the end where the tin soldier bursts into flames and is melting, I lie down on her and put my arms around her neck and tell her how the puff of wind comes in at the window and lifts up the ballerina and carries her through the room into the fire where she flares up like a shooting star and dies out, and when I have finished I dare not breathe. But Dorit is amiable, she hardly moves, just chews and the warmth of her body spreads through my coat, I feel it on my stomach and slowly I start to breathe again. It is Christmas Eve 1934 and Jesper and I lie there each in our stall each on our own cow in a cowshed where all things breathe and perhaps we fall asleep, for I do not remember anything very clearly after that.
THE TOWN WE lived in was a provincial one at that time, in the far north of the country, almost as far as it was possible to travel from Copenhagen and still have streets to walk along. But we had earthworks going back two hundred years, and a shipyard with more than a hundred workers and a lunch-break siren that could be heard all over the town at noon. We had a harbour for fishing boats where the throbbing of the trawlers’ motors never stopped, and boats came in from the capital, from Sweden and from Norway. If you took the swaying wooden staircase to Pikkerbakken up from Møllehuset and stood by the viewpoint at the top, you could see the sea like an enormous painting when the big boats turned in towards the two lighthouses on the breakwater. From the height of Pikkerbakken the sea looked as if it hung rather than lay.
I remember how we stood on the quay watching the swells go down the gangway from the Copenhagen boat. They had travelled first class and now they were going to Frydenstrand health resort for the bathing or further on to Skagen by train to rent holiday houses or stay at hotels for the summer weeks. The men wore straw boaters and the ladies’ dresses were bright in the sunshine. The upper-class people of Copenhagen had just discovered Skagen and a special railway line ran from the harbour to take them to the station although it was only a few blocks away. I watched porters in uniform carrying their suitcases over to the train, and I thought it might be an aim in life, to have someone to carry your suitcases for you.
When the boats came in we could hear them hooting from a long way away, and then my father would take off his carpenter’s apron and hang it on a nail behind the workshop door and walk through the streets to the harbour to see them arrive. He always walked at the same pace and never hurried, he knew exactly how long it took. He would stop a few metres from the edge of the quay, and there he stayed in the long coat he always wore when it was windy, with his hands clasped behind his back and his brown beret on his head, but it was not possible to see what he was thinking, for his face was so calm and he only went there when the boats came in and never when they left, unless there was someone on board he knew, and that was seldom the case.
When I was not at school we both stood there. I too had my hands behind my back and the wind pulled at his coat and the wind pulled at my hair and whirled it around so it whipped both him and me. It was a mass of brown hair with ringlets that bounced against my back when I ran. Many people in town said it looked nice, even dashing, but I felt it just got in the way, and when I suggested cutting it short my mother said “No, for it’s your best feature and without it you’d look like an Eskimo because of your round face.” According to her the Eskimos were a race who lived at the North Pole and worshipped gods of blubber and bone and unfortunately Denmark ruled over them. But everyone has their cross to bear, and I had not the strength in those days to defy her, so I used to pull my hair back tightly with a rubber band at the neck so I could take part in all Jesper’s projects. The latest one was Great Discoveries. He would get together with some friends and they would roam the roads and the forests of the neighbourhood and in the evenings they would meet in a cellar on the other side of the Plantation where one of them lived and make plans for The Great Journey. I was the only girl allowed to be with them now and then.
But I enjoyed the feeling of the wind in my hair, and I knew my father liked to see it blow straight out when we stood on the quay and watched the boats come in. And after all it was my only pride.
The train waited behind us, puffing and hissing through its valves, and even though it was only an hour’s journey to Skagen, I had never been there.
“Can’t we go to Skagen one day?” I asked. Being with Jesper and his friends had made me realise the world was far bigger than the town I lived in and the fields around it, and I wanted to go travelling and see it.
“There’s nothing but sand at Skagen,” my father said, “you don’t want to go there, my lass.” And because it was Sunday and he seldom said my lass, he took a cigar from his waistcoat pocket with a pleased expression, lit it and blew out smoke into the wind. The smoke flew back in our faces and scorched them, but I pretended not to notice and so did he. With smarting eyes we watched the passenger boat Melchior approach the opening in the breakwater full steam ahead, tears streamed and I squeezed my eyelids into narrow cracks. All along one side of the deck the passengers hung over the rail waving their handkerchiefs, the Melchior swung round and slackened speed, and there came the tugboat, fixed the hawser on board and moved off with engines roaring and the hawser snapped out of the water so the spray leapt up and the drops sparkled in the sun. The big boat turned gently in towards the quay where people stood waiting in groups, and someone on land called:
“Have you been seasick?”
“YEEES!” yelled the whole row in chorus.
When all the passengers had landed and the ones who were going by train were settled and the train had left, we turned away from the wind, dried our eyes and went back into town. Then we crossed the street leading from the cobbled jetty towards the Cimbria Hotel and round the hotel to Lodsgade with Consul Broch’s house on the right and Færgekroen, the Ferry Inn, on the left and right along Danmarksgade to the corner where our street, Asylgade, joined it. We stopped there, and he said:
“That’s all for the two of us today. Go home to your mother now.” He was strict about not having me along too much although he knew I would rather be with him. But I had to go home and soon I would hear all about the priest’s sermon that day and about the whole service, while my father went on to Aftenstjernen, the Evening Star, to play billiards with his friends as it was Sunday.
The first time I do remember us going to Skagen was in autumn. Grandfather at Vrangbæk had just turned sixty-five, and everyone had been out to the farm, the whole family with uncles and aunts and people from the neighbouring farms. The sun came in through the windows, the rooms were full of people, and some were out in the farmyard and among the shrubs in the Chinese garden, yet all the same the day was filled with clinking silence and stiff necks. Grandmother walked about in her white apron for the first time in forty years, she served drinks from a tray and smiled in a way that made Grandfather sit in his chair as if paralysed and my father stand up all day long, and not once did their eyes meet. My mother’s voice was more fluting than usual and even though there were many guests, hers was the one I kept hearing.
But at Skagen we found the tourists had gone back to Copenhagen for the winter. Not a fine dress to be seen in the main street, not a straw hat or parasol, and even though I knew we were making this trip for my sake, I was disappointed. My father was right, there was not much there except sand. The wild wind swept right down among the low yellow houses whose owners stayed inside behind closed doors, my mother held on to her hat and Jesper walked sideways with his back to the wind, and it was blowing so hard out at Grenen, where the two seas meet at the tip of the sand spit, that we could not go out there with horses as we had planned, and sand and salt stuck in my hair, my clothes, my mouth when I wanted to speak and it was difficult to walk without feeling it smarting between the thighs.
What I liked was the train ride. It took an hour and that was enough for me to be able to lean backwards against the seat with closed eyes, feel the joints in the rails come up and thump through my body and sometimes peer out of the windows and see windswept heathland and imagine I was on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I had read about it, seen pictures in a book and decided that no matter when and how life would turn out, one day I would travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on that train, and I practised saying the names: Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, they were difficult to pronounce with all their hard consonants, but ever since the trip to Skagen, every journey I made by train was a potential departure on my own great journey.
Jesper was heading for Morocco. That would be too hot for me. I wanted open skies that were cold and clear, where it was easy to breathe and easy to see for long distances, but his pictures were mysterious and alluring in black and white with barren mountains in the far distance and sun-scorched faces and sun-scorched towns behind battlemented walls and fluttering tunics and palm trees that suddenly rose out of no-man’s-land.
“I’ll get there if I want to,” said Jesper. “And I do want to.” He looked at the pictures and maps in his book and read aloud:
“Marrakech, Fez, Meknès, Kasba.” He shaped his mouth to the vowels and held on to them and in his voice they turned into magic spells and we promised each other that this was something we would achieve. He fetched a knife and we made cuts in our hands and mixed the blood that had been mixed before, but now it would be like a circle, said Jesper.
We stood in the shed behind the house holding each other’s hands, it was almost too solemn, Jesper did not laugh as usual, my palm hurt, and I could hear the rain on the corrugated iron roof and in the trees outside and beyond the rain was a silence so huge it filled the whole of Denmark.
But at Skagen the wind was deafening and it thumped at everything out on the road where we walked huddled together like a family in a newspaper pictured fleeing from cannons. We had tried everywhere but there was nowhere to take shelter. The kiosks were closed because of bad weather, the cafés were never open on Sunday and in the harbour the waves were breaking on shore. And then it began to rain. It came from all directions at full speed and not on us, but against us with the wind right in our faces; we tried to turn away, walk sideways so as not to drown and Jesper gave up and ran out into the middle of the road and began to dance with his arms in the air.
“Come and see! Come and see! The people from heaven have come to conquer the new world. Come and see! Come and see!” he shouted, laughing for joy. The rain streamed from his hair and in several windows the curtains were drawn aside and there stood the occupants gaping out while they moved their lips at someone beyond them in the shadows and shook their heads.
“Come and see your superiors!” shouted Jesper. “We have pearls of glass and swords of steel!”
“Keep your mouth shut, boy!” roared my father, “get back to your place!” He had water in his eyes and water in his voice, and Jesper replied:
“Woof, woof,” and panted like a dog and joined the flock again, and we went on down the road to the railway station. We tottered into the station building where the man in the ticket office told us that our train would not leave for about three hours. He looked at us sideways under his cap, he was used to finer folk. The whole trip collapsed like a house of cards. We huddled together under the the platform roof, my father bit the inside of his cheeks until they bulged and gazed into the air and had nothing to say. He had planned it all and it had not turned out as he had intended and now we were trapped here. My mother pulled her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and I thought it did not matter that I was disappointed. After all, the only thing wrong with this journey was that it was too short.
When we walk down Asylgade on our way from the station Lucifer is standing in front of the house. I can still feel the train in my body, and the wind and the yellow houses, my long hair is done up in a plait my mother made and it feels sticky, full of sand and salt rain and stiff as a rope. I fiddle with it and try to loosen it, but it’s impossible without help. Lucifer is not tied up, he walks across the road and nibbles the grass at the edge of the gravel of a house on the other side, with the trap in tow. No one but Grandfather drives Lucifer, but Uncle Nils is sitting on the steps with his head in his hands, he is wearing his black Sunday jacket and working trousers covered with big stains and clogs on his feet. We are all cold and walking quicker than usual, and when Uncle Nils catches sight of us he gets up with his arms straight down by his sides and his fists clenched. He opens them and clenches them again. I see my father looking at his hands and he looks at the horse.
“Something’s happened,” says Jesper.
“Shut up, boy,” says my father.
My mother turns. “But Magnus!”
“Shut up, I say.”
I take his hand, but he doesn’t notice and does not hold mine. Uncle Nils is white in the face even though he works out in the fields south of Vrangbæk most of the year. “Grandfather is dead,” he tells us. “He has hanged himself in the cowshed.” We stand quite still. We should not be hearing this, Jesper and I, and I do not look at him, I see the cowshed with the stalls in a row in the half darkness and all the beams in there and Dorit lying in her stall chewing with her big warm body against my coat, and I get warm thinking of it even though the wind cuts icily down Asylgate and I am so freezing my teeth chatter, but all the same I don’t feel cold.
“Come on,” says Jesper, “we’ll go in.” He pulls me by the arm towards the door where my mother is already on her way inside. She sings a song quietly to herself and goes into the kitchen, lowers the blanket of hymn between herself and us, and Jesper and I go into the living room and stand at the window looking out on to the