Free To Siberia by Per Petterson Page B

extra trip for the piano.
    At Lodsgate the piano had to go on the first floor up the narrow winding staircase, and my father and Uncle Nils and Jesper had several bad moments on the way up. I stood in the gateway watching the veins swell in my father’s forehead and Uncle Nils’s gray face and Jesper grinning scornfully all the time.
    “I can tell you Christianity was at stake on the turns,” he said afterward—“it was only just rescued. On that staircase I heard words a minor should be protected from. Hell,” he said, smiling as he spoke, enjoying himself more than he had for a long while. For a moment he had considered letting go and leaving the piano to fall, then we should be free of that grief, but then my mother might get hold of a cheap organ instead, so it wouldn’t have been worth the trouble, especially because my father was lowest down and would have had the piano on his head.
    We are closer to the harbor now. I hear the throb of the fishing-boat motors and the cranes of the shipyard at evening and drunk men on their way up from the Færgekroen at midnight. Sometimes I hear animals screaming from the slaughterhouse. That cannot be right. I do not think they scream, but I know how they stand packed tightly together in the compounds waiting and scraping their hooves and perhaps that is the sound I hear when I lie in bed and can’t get to sleep.
    I walk through our new home, from bedroom to living room, counting the steps, everything is cramped, the kitchen at the top of the stairs has two gas rings and one larder cupboard and room for two people if they stand without lifting their elbows. From the little window above the bench I look down into the yard. A little girl I don’t know is skipping outside the lavatory. I walk downstairs and through the door at the end and out into the shop and along the counter at the back to a door in the opposite wall that leads into a small side room with a window on to the street. This closet is three meters by three. Jesper and I have to share it. My mother is filled with misgiving, she bites her lip, she thinks it isn’t right, she wrings her hands and that irritates me. Though I share her misgiving. Jesper hangs up two pictures of ladies above his bed, one of Rosa Luxemburg and one of Greta Garbo, he hopes they will merge into one when he is not looking, when he sleeps and dreams of the new world. I hang a picture of Lucifer over mine. I want white curtains, he wants red ones, like flags, he says. We end up with one of each, so he gets his flag. It looks peculiar. My father blows into his mustache, he thinks it looks daft, but he makes no comment.
    Every night I get undressed under the quilt. Jesper carries on as usual, because he has not changed. It makes me transparent and I have to go up the dark stairs in the middle of the night and look at myself in the big mirror and feel my face and my shoulders and chest while he sleeps. I stand there a long time with the small light on, and when I switch it off I can see myself almost without a face, and I think of Irma in her red dress. She stands freezing cold in a big room, she is rubbing her arms. Then I turn the light on and stay there in front of the mirror until I find myself again, and then I go back downstairs and through the shop. The tiles shine dully in the light of the streetlamps, the milk bottles are up to their necks in ice-cold water. I rub my shoulders as I walk past them.
    “You brood too much,” my mother says, as if she’s anyone to talk, she walks into closed doors with both hands in her hair and hairpins in her mouth mumbling and her nose gets flattened.
    “Dear oh dear,” she says. She is lost in thought at the till with her hand in the drawer searching for change, and she just stands there. A customer can rustle notes before her eyes and her pupils do not move. She is transported from this world, with one foot in heaven, one knee on the stool at communion with the taste of wafer in her mouth.
    I