Per Petterson

“But I enjoyed the feeling of 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 realize 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.”

“Soon only the street lamps rose clear and shone down on a mass that devoured everything, people and houses, we could not see more than three meters in front of us. The lights around us were hard to make out and Jesper stayed where he was; stretching out his arms like a blind man he said:'This is what it must have been like when the Man from Danzig was shipwrecked. He must have been frightened. He thought he knew where everything was, and then it was all sheer chaos. Put your hand in front of your eyes, Sistermine, and spin around three times, then tell me which is the way home.'I did as he said, I spun around so I almost fell down, I opened my eyes and peered in all directions.'I don't know.''Then anything can happen.”

“I have putt the change in the till, I have cleaned and made room for new bottles in the cooling sink, for butter and cheese in the icebox. Now I am standing in the shop waiting by the open door without switching the light on. I like this early half-light, the mild air from the sea, standing inside looking out without being seen, and there are almost no sounds from the street, and I can think and remember who I am before anything new comes along. Everything happens so fast it's easy to forget, everything is exploding and burning. But now it is quiet.”

“Sometimes when I think of Jesper all I can see is his dark back on the way across the white sea to Hirsholmene. It gets smaller and smaller and I stand at the edge of the ice feeling empty. Why didn't he ask me to go with him? I have a will of my own but if he had asked, I wouldn't have hesitated. I always went with him. After all, I had to look after him and he had to look after me, and my father would be furious with us both. Staying there alone was meaningless.Sometimes I imagine he tells me everything, but I know that's not true. He never told me if he went all the way to Hirsholmene. I don't tell him everything either, but I feel he knows what I am thinking, and I know what HE thinks. I have taught myself to do that.And yet all the same I am not sure.”

“There are some things with alcohol you must never do. You must never drink alone, never drink on Sundays, never drink before seven o'clock and if you do, it has to be on a Saturday.”

“We ran back, he first and I following him, between the beds and downstairs, and we picked up an armful of wood from the pile by the wall and the knife for whittling and ran up again, we couldn’t be quick enough. He knelt down in front of the stove, and it wasn’t long before he had done the trick again. Outside the window it was night now, and the wind blew vaporous white milk against the panes, milk over the forest and the fjord, but in here there were just the two of us and the stoves and the sound of wood burning behind the black iron and sending waves of heat out into the rooms and into the walls and timbers that sucked it in. I smelt the scent of wood growing warm, and it made me as white in my head as the whirling night outside, and hungry. We stood in the kitchen with our coats on eating the contents of two tins with one spoon we took it in turns to use, and we laughed, I didn’t even notice what I was eating. Soon it was warm enough for us to take off some clothes, his overcoat and my coat, and while he hung his on a hook, I let mine fall to the floor. I took off the sweater I wore underneath and dropped that on the floor too, I unbuttoned my blouse and still felt the cold against my neck. But the heat rose to the ceiling and up to the first floor and there was another stove there. Then I calmly walked across the room and upstairs with his eyes on my back, and at first he stood still, and then he followed, and when he got to the top my blouse was off and my stockings on the floor. I slowly turned round and stood there, me inside my skin, while he was fully clothed, and I cleared my head of every thought I had ever had and let them sink out into my skin till it was painfully taut and shinning all over my body, and he saw it and did not know what it was he saw. I put my arms round my back and unfastened my bra and slid the straps over my shoulders, and I thought he might be going to weep, but his voice sounded hoarse as he whispered:“You’re lovely,” and I answered “Yes”, and didn’t know if that was true. But it did not matter, for I knew what I wanted and what to say, and his hands were as I’d thought they would be, his skins as soft and his body as hard, and it was so warm around us, and the whole time I smelt the dampness of the bedclothes like the ones at Vrangbæk, and then I just shut my eyes and floated away.”

“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.”

“I went up above the quay past the steps to the hotel. I saw a man through the window with a beer in his hand, and another man with a basket full of eggs. I was feeling heavy now, and tired, and I stood there leaning backwards with my hands crossed behind my back at the end of the breakwater before I walked on to the beach on the other side and some way along on the hard-frozen white sand. It had started to blow a bit, and it was still cold with no snow, so I took off my scarf and tied it round my head and ears and sat down in the shelter of a dune and blew into my hands to warm them before I lit a cigarette. Poker ran along the edge of the water with a seagull’s wing in his mouth, and I was so young then, and I remember thinking: I’m twenty-three years old, there is nothing left in life. Only the rest.”

“I'm sorry I laughed...I know it isn't funny for you. It was incredibly stupid of me to laugh. Does it hurt a lot anywhere?'Not really,' I said.'Only a bit in your soul?''Maybe a bit.''Let it sink,' he said. 'Just leave it. You can't use it for anything.”

“...I thought about how it must feel to lose your life so early. Lose your life, as if you held an egg in your hand, and then dropped it, and it fell to the ground and broke, and I knew it could not feel like anything at all. If you were dead, you were dead, but in the fraction of a second just before; whether you realized then it was the end, and what that felt like. There was a narrow opening there, like a door barely ajar, that I pushed towards, because I wanted to get in, and there was a golden light in that crack that came from the sunlight on my eyelids, and then suddenly I slipped inside, and I was certainly there for a little flash, and it did not frighten me at all, just made me sad and astonished at how quiet everything was.”

“I distinctly heard the blackbird from the top of a spruce tree, and clear as glass I heard the lark high up and several other birds whose song I did not know, and it was so weird, it was like a film without sound with another sound added, I was in two places at once, and nothing hurt.'Yahoo!' I screamed, and could hear my own voice, but it seemed to be coming from a different place, from the great space where the birds sang, a bird's cry from inside that silence, and for a moment I was completely happy.”

“...I opened my eyes as if to a new beginning; nothing I saw was familiar to me, my head was empty, no thoughts, everything quite clean and the sky transparently blue, and I didn't know what I was called or even recognize my own body. Unnamed, I floated around looking at the world for the first time and felt it strangely illuminated and glassily beautiful...”

“...I see the shape of the wind on the water...”

“Light in every lamp, light in every mind.”

“I was perfectly calm, I was the anchor of the world.”

“She turns her head and looks at me, and there is a trustfuless in that look I probably do not deserve. But maybe that is not the point, to deserve it or not, perhaps it just exists, that trust, disconnected from who you are and what you have done, and is not to be measured in any way.”

“There is nothing I need from the shop, and this is not the day for social profligacy.”

“But that's life. That's what you learn from; when things happen. Especially at your age. You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and not forget and never grow bitter.”

“But life had shifted its weight from one point to another, from one leg to the other, like a silent giant in the vast shadows against the ridge, and I did not feel like the person I had been when this day began, and I did not even know if that was something to be sorry for.”

“You decide for yourself when it will hurt.”

“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.”

“...that if I let myself go, did not always slow me down by thinking so much beforehand I could achieve many things I would never have dreamt possible!!”

“A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.”

“...when it came to dying, I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore really nothing to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.”

“...and we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt.”

“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.”

“Then she turns to me. 'Tell me. How are you really?' she says, as if there were two versions of my life, and now she is not on the verge of tears at all, but sharp-voiced as an interrogator.”

“One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence.”

“...the young swans as big as their parents now, but still grey and it looks peculiar, like two different species swimming in a line, alike in all their movements, and no doubt they think they are the same, while everyone can see that they are not.”

“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.”

“[H]alf blinded you embraced your own body, and with the warmth still under your jacket, you walked up the pavement along the square, moving through the grey light, and let your thoughts seep softly in, undisturbed, on the way up to the station, but also walking as one of many in the chill of December. I liked the feeling being a we, being more than myself, being larger than myself, being surrounded by others in a way I had never experienced before, of belonging, and it made no difference if those who walked to the left or the right of me, in front or behind me on this street, did not share the same feeling.”

“But what I found out that summer . . . was that I could swallow whatever hit me and let it sink as if nothing had happened. So I mimicked a game that meant nothing to me now, I was going through the motions, and then it looked as if what I was doing had a purpose, but it did not.”

“...everything felt fine at that moment; the suit was fine, and the twon was fine to walk in, along the cobblestone street, and we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt.”

“Oh, well, we did have a good day out together, you and I, that doesn't happen every day, does it?”

“But I was not quite with him in my thoughts, and I wonder whether that is how we got to be after living alone for a long time, that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking outloud, that the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversations we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one form the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. Is this how my future looks?”

“She looks at me, this is not what she had expected, she sniffs at the food and only slowly starts to eat, swallows each mouthful with demonstrative gloom, and then turns to look at me again, a long look, with those eyes, sighs and goes on, as if she were emptying the poisoned chalice. Spoiled dog.”

“Time is important to me now, I tell myself.Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but only be time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by. so that it grows distict to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.”

“If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it....”

“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.”

“I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.”