Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, Anne Born Page A

rub them with my knuckles.
    'Are you tired?' he said.
    'Yes,' I said. And I was tired. Tired in body and tired in mind and weathered in the skin, and I wanted only to lie down under the duvet in my bunk and sleep and sleep until it was not possible to sleep any longer.
    He stretched his arm out and tousled my hair, and then he fetched a matchbox from the shelf above the stove and went over and lit the paraffin lamp above the table, blew out the match and opened the door of the stove and threw it into the flames. Our brown-and-white bodies looked probably even funnier in the yellow light of the lamp. He smiled and said:
    'You go to bed first. I'll be right behind you.'

    But he was not. When I woke up in the night and needed to go out for a pee, he was nowhere to be seen. I walked, drunk with sleep, through the main room, and he was not there, and I opened the door and looked out, and it had stopped raining, but he was not outside either, and when I went back in his bunk was made and neat still in military fashion and looked just the way it had done since the morning before.

7

    T he dead spruce has been trimmed and cut up with the chainsaw into manageable lengths about half the size of a chopping block, and I have transported these chunks three at a time in a wheelbarrow and tipped them onto a heap on the ground outside the woodshed, and now they are stacked in a two-dimensional pyramid almost two metres high against the wall under the eaves. Tomorrow the work of splitting them will begin. So far, all is going fine, I am pleased with myself, but this back of mine has had enough for today. Besides, it has gone five o'clock, the sun is down in what must be west, southwest, the dusk comes seeping from the edge of the forest where I was just working, and it is a good time to call a halt. I wipe off the sawdust and the petrol and oil mess sticking to the saw until it is more or less clean and leave it to dry out on a bench in the woodshed, close the door and cross the yard with the empty Thermos under my arm. Then I sit myself down on the steps and pull off my damp boots and rap the wood chips out of them and brush the bottoms of my trousers. I brush my socks, give them a good beating with my working gloves and pick the last bits off with my fingers. They make a nice little heap. Lyra sits watching me with a pine cone in her mouth, it sticks out like an unlit cigar of the really bulky type, and she wants me to throw it so she can chase after it and bring it back, but if once we start on that game she will want to go on and on, and I haven't the energy left.
    'Sorry,' I say. 'Some other time.' I pat her yellow head, stroke her neck and gently pull her ears, she loves that. She drops the cone and goes to sit on the door mat.
    I leave the boots on the doorstep with their heels against the wall and walk through the hall in my socks to the kitchen. There I rinse out the Thermos in piping hot water from the tap and leave it on the worktop to dry. It is barely two weeks since I had the boiler installed. There had never been one here before. Only a sink on the wall under a cold water tap. I called a plumber who knew my place well, and he told me to dig down to the water pipe in a trench two metres long starting from the outside wall so he could change the angle of the pipe into the kitchen beneath the foundation wall to get it right. And I would have to get on with it, he said, like a bat out of hell, before the frost took hold. The plumber would not do the digging himself, he was not a labourer, he said. I did not mind, but it was heavy work, nothing but gravel and stone all the way down. Some of the stones were really big. It turns out I live on a moraine ridge.
    Now I have a dishwashing sink like everyone else. I look at myself in the mirror above the sink. The face there is no different from the one I had expected to see at the age of sixty-seven. In that way I am in time with myself. Whether I like what I see is a different question.