Out Stealing Horses

Trond recalls felling the spruce forest with his father in the summer of 1948. Jon’s mother and father are helping, along with a man named Franz. They work all day, and Trond falls asleep each night exhausted but content. He continues to admire Jon’s mother and notices his father does as well.

Franz tells Trond that his father is taking a big risk felling timber in the summer; the logs will be heavy with sap and more likely to get caught in the shallow waters of the river before making it down to the mill. But Franz says Trond’s father is the boss, so what he says goes.

One day, Jon’s father and Trond’s father are especially competitive about stacking the timber high, challenging one another to be the first to quit. While Franz, Jon’s mother, and Trond watch, Trond puts his arm around Jon’s mother; this action surprises both fathers, who break their concentration on the log pile. Jon’s father tumbles and breaks his leg; Trond recognizes that this has somehow changed everything.

Barkald drives Jon’s father to the hospital, and Trond returns to the cabin with his father as a lightning storm darkens the sky. Trond’s father tells Trond that he is a man now, but Trond knows this is not quite true because there are things happening around him he does not understand. His father turns serious, telling him that what happened to Jon’s father was Trond’s father’s fault. Trond dislikes hearing his father take all the blame onto himself.

They go inside, and his father tells him to go to bed, saying he’ll be right behind him. When Trond wakes in the middle of the night, his father is not there.

In the present narrative, Trond is satisfied with his work chopping wood for winter and goes inside to make dinner. He is setting the table, thinking it is important not to get careless about supper when one lives alone, when Lars knocks on his door. He invites Lars to share his dinner, and they make small talk before Lars abruptly tells Trond that he knows who he is. Trond was in a photograph in the newspaper after the car accident that killed his wife; he briefly thinks that maybe this is where Lars knows him from but knows that Lars has remembered his friendship with Jon. Trond says he knows who Lars is too, and they finish the meal in silence.

After Lars leaves, Trond takes Lyra for a walk in the woods, observing the lights from Lars’s cabin. Trond sits on a bench near the lake, wishing Lars had not acknowledged their past aloud since it forces him to shine a light on events that happened more than 50 years ago.

Trond clearly remembers waking that night in 1948 in the cabin when his father was not in his bed. In his memory, he gets dressed and goes out into the still-dark morning to look for him, realizing their boat is not in its place on the riverbank. He walks down the gravel path to a dairy, where he falls asleep on a milking stool, later waking to the milkmaid stroking his cheek. Trond looks at her bare arms and legs as she milks the cows and is surprised and uncomfortable when he suddenly becomes aroused. He forces himself to think about jumping into the freezing cold Bunnefjord by their home in Oslo with his sister; after the German occupation had begun, the two of them had decided they needed something daring and uncomfortable to do. Trond recalls that it was not long after that, when he was seven, that his father went away for the first time.

The milkmaid offers Trond a sip of fresh milk, and he takes it even though fresh milk nauseates him, still feeling guilty for his sexual thoughts about her. He thanks her and goes out into the road, where he vomits. Continuing up the road, he sees his father and Jon’s mother sitting together on a bench near the river. He tries to convince himself his father is comforting a mother grieving the loss of her child but knows this is not right because they are kissing “as though it was the last thing they would do in this life” (118). Trond retreats to Franz’s house, seeking breakfast and company.

In the present narrative, Trond sleeps poorly due to a storm and wakes up later than usual. Sore from his exertions chopping wood, he gets up to let Lyra out and start the woodstove. He recalls that his wife and his sister used to laughingly call him “the boy with the golden trousers” (122) because he was so lucky, and then he thinks about how they died within one month of each other. He looks out the window and sees that a large birch tree has fallen in his yard, just missing his car and his woodshed, and feels a momentary panic. He goes to lie down, and his memory returns again to 1948.

In his memory, Trond and his father say goodbye at the bus station; Trond is going home to Oslo, and his father is giving him instructions about where to get the train. His father says he will finish up what he has to do here and be right behind him, but Trond has heard this phrase before, when he said he would go right to bed, and he was not there. It is the last time they ever see each other, and Trond wonders whether his father had ever meant to come home, or if it had been planned all along.

Trond wakes from his memories and feels dizzy and sick. Ignoring this, he takes Lyra into the woods for a walk. Sitting again on the bench by the lake, he suddenly remembers that he had been dreaming about his first wife telling him he was only one of many lovers, and the disgust he had felt. He says this is his greatest fear: to be the man in Magritte’s painting who stares into a mirror only to see the back of his head.