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

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. You only have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay, because they will talk about you no matter how much you squirm, it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.
    There is not much I want, just a loaf of bread and something to put on it, and that's soon done. I'm surprised at how unfilled my shopping baskets have become, how few things I need now I am alone. I suffer a sudden onset of meaningless melancholy and feel the eyes of the check-out lady on my forehead as I search for the money to pay, the widower is what she sees, they do not understand anything, and it is just as well.
    'Here you are,' she says quietly in a voice soft as silk, as she gives me my change, and I say:
    'Many thanks,' and I am on the verge of tears, for Christ's sake, and go out quickly with my purchases in a bag and across to the filling station. I have been lucky. They do not understand a thing.
    He has changed the bulb for the indicator light. I put my bag on the passenger seat and walk between the pumps and into the shop. His wife is smiling behind the counter.
    'Hi,' she says.
    'Hi,' I say. 'That bulb. How much is it?'
    'Not much. It can wait. How about a cup of coffee? Olav is taking five minutes/ she says, gesturing with her thumb towards the open door of the room behind the shop. It's hard to refuse. I walk to the open doorway, a bit uncertain, and look in. There sits Olav the mechanic on a chair in front of a computer screen with long shining columns of figures. None of them is red, as far as I can see. He has a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a chocolate bar in the other. He must be twenty years younger than I am, but I'm no longer surprised when I realise that mature men are well below my own age.
    'Sit down and relax for a bit,' he says, pouring coffee into a plastic mug and placing it on the table in front of a spare chair and waving me forward as he leans back heavily in his chair. If he gets up as early as I do, and I have a feeling he does, he has been at work for a long time and must be tired. I sit down on the chair.
    'Well, how's it going then at The Top?' he says. 'Are you settled in?' My place is called 'The Top' because it has a view over the lake.
    'I have been there twice myself,' he says. 'Looking round, and wondering whether to put in an offer. There's plenty of room for car repairing there, but there was so much to be done on the house I thought better of it. I like working on cars, not houses. But maybe it's the other way round for you?' We both glance at my hands. They don't look like the hands of an artisan.
    'Not exactly,' I say. 'I'm not much good at either, but given time I will put the house in order. I might need a spot of help now and again.'
    What I do, which I have never let anyone know, is I close my eyes every time I have to do something practical apart from the daily chores everyone has, and then I picture how my father would have done it or how he actually did do it while I was watching him, and then I copy that until I fall into the proper rhythm, and the task reveals itself and grows visible, and that's what I have done for as long as I can remember, as if the secret lies in how the body behaves towards the task at hand, in a certain balance when you start, like hitting the board in a long jump and the early calculation of how much you need, or how little, and the mechanism that is always there in every kind of job; first one thing and then the other, in a context that is buried in each piece of work, in fact as if what you are going to do already exists in its finished form, and what the body has to do when it starts to move is to draw aside a veil so it all can be read by the person observing. And the person observing is me, and the man I am watching, his movements and skills, is a man of barely forty, as my father was