Free Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, Anne Born Page A

good, one night, I shall see it again. That would be great.
    I park in front of the Stat Oil station. The broken indicator. I still have not replaced the glass, or changed the bulb for that matter, but have managed without it. It is starting to get a bit too dark in the evenings to do without, besides it's illegal to drive without one. So I go in and talk to the man in the workshop. He glances out the window in the sliding door and says he will change the bulb at once and order the new glass from a car scrapyard.
    'No sense in spending money on something new for an old car,' he says. And that's true, no doubt. The car is a ten-year-old Nissan station wagon, and I could easily have bought a new car, I can afford that, but in addition to the house purchase it would have eaten into my resources quite a lot, so I opted against it. In fact I had plans for a car with four-wheel drive, it would have been useful out here, but then I decided that a four-wheeler was a bit like cheating and a bit new-rich, and I ended up with this one, which has rear-wheel drive like everything else I've driven. I have already been to the mechanic with various problems, a worn-out dynamo among other things, and he says the same thing each time and orders from the same scrap dealer. It costs a fraction of new parts, and I also think he charges too little. But he whistles as he works and has his radio in the workshop tuned to the news channel, and the price policy is obviously deliberate. He is so friendly and obliging it bewilders me. I had actually expected some resistance, especially as I don't drive a Volvo. Maybe he's an outsider too.
    I leave the car at the petrol station and walk past the church and over the crossroads to the shop. That is unusual. I've noticed that everyone here gets into the car and drives regardless of where they are going or how far it is. The Co-op is a hundred metres away, but I am the only one who walks outwith the parking place. I feel exposed and am happy to get into the shop.
    I exchange greetings to right and left, they are used to me now and realise I am here to stay and that I am not one of the holiday cottage crew who pile out here in their mammoth cars every Easter and summer to fish by day and play poker and swig sundowners in the evening. It took some time before they started to ask questions, cautiously, in the queue for the check-out, and now everyone knows who I am and where I live. They know about my working life, how old I am, that my wife died three years ago in an accident I only just survived myself, that she was not my first wife, and that I have two grown-up children from an earlier marriage, and that they have children themselves. I have told them all that, including how when my wife died I did not want to go on working, and I pensioned myself off and started to look for a completely new place to live, and when I found the house I live in now I was really happy. They like hearing that, although everyone says I could have asked anybody round here and they would have told me what a state the house was in, that many people had wanted the place on account of its lovely situation but none of them felt like taking it on because of the work that was needed to make it fit to live in. Then I say it was just as well I didn't know, for then I would not have bought it, and not found out it is quite possible to live in if you do not demand too much at once, but just take one step at a time. That suits me fine, I say, I have plenty of time, I'm not going anywhere.
    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