Free To Siberia by Per Petterson Page A

get tears on his face, afraid he will wake up and see me looking at him and my chest hurts when I cry and hold it in at the same time. I look at Lenin’s shining scalp and the photograph and think of the ball Jesper holds under his arm that was red and the little black dog Aunt Else had then and the shirts Jesper wore that had buttons on the shoulders so his collarbones showed straight and clear on both sides. I fill my head with thoughts till it feels purple and hot like the glowing iron at the blacksmith’s forge while I stand bent over my naked brother weeping because he is beautiful as pictures I have seen in books of men from other times, grown men, and if I could remember why I came out to find him, it would not mean anything now. He is not the same anymore, cannot be and his arm around my shoulder will never be the same again.

 
     

    M y father works his way downward. To start with he had the workshop and a little furniture shop he was given as an advance on inheritance because he was a thorn in the flesh and had to leave the farm before his majority.
    That was an expression we used now. Thorn in the flesh.
    “If she doesn’t stop soon, I’ll get a thorn in the flesh,” Jesper said when my mother played the piano and sang for two hours. He held on to his behind where the flesh was plentiful and moaned and groaned and I could really see it, how the thorn went inward just as sharp as the sting in Death, where is thy sting, sharp and painful, and Grandfather had felt them both. But we couldn’t understand why he had used that expression at the Aftenstjernen that time and we did not dare to ask and my father never mentioned the event by so much as one word.
    Now he was in debt with the workshop as security. I had never seen the furniture shop. Eventually he bought the Lodsgate Dairy and the tiny flat on the floor above. A steep winding staircase linked the floors with a door opening on to the dairy shop at the bottom of the stairs, and the lavatory was in the yard. The flat was much smaller than the house we had rented from the Baptists. The whole situation seemed uncertain. My mother was to run the dairy and had less time for her piano and hymns. “Praise the Lord. His name be praised,” said Jesper. I had to deliver the milk and cream to the customers before school. I asked my father, and he said Rosevej was a part of our milk round. Jesper had finished with middle school and had to get up early and go to the workshop every morning with an apron on right up to Christmas, and after Christmas he was to be a printer’s devil at the local newspaper office. He was pleased about that. The typographers had a strong trade union and there were more socialists there than flies around a pig’s asshole, he said.
    So we moved from Asylgate one day in September. There were gray clouds driving across the sky and a strong wind, but no rain. We borrowed a horse and cart from Vrangbæk, Uncle Nils arrived early in the morning with a brown gelding pulling the cart. He sat bareheaded on the driver’s seat and the wind tore at his hair and the horse’s mane and forelock and it looked unkempt and mournful and nothing like Lucifer had been. Uncle Nils was going to help with the carrying, he usually came rolling up when there was something to be done, silent as always, but Grandmother and my father’s half-brothers stayed at home at Vrangbæk and the farms where they lived. My mother could have done with some help in the kitchen, but none of the women came, so I was the one who stood wrapping up cups and glasses in newspaper even though I was strong enough to lift most things, apart from the piano.
    Through the window I saw all our possessions under the open sky, and the sky was huge and the wind beat against loose ends of tablecloths and curtains, the furniture had shrunk and took up ridiculously little space although the house had always seemed full. It was not easy to grasp, but there was not much more than one load plus an