Next morning at home I secretly filled another small bag full of salted meat. There were at least a dozen pieces, and during lunch I dropped them one at a time down behind the bench at different spots along the wall. Later on, after all the students had left, I was alone in the school. I was sitting in the classroom at the teacher’s desk, pretending it was the last day of class. I had already turned off the ceiling lights and was now just sitting there, smelling the graduation flowers that Inge and I usually picked in the woods in the spring.
Then suddenly I heard quick footsteps in the hallway. At first I went stiff from fear because I thought I was doing something forbidden by sitting there in the teacher’s chair. But the steps ended outside the door, there in the hallway. Relieved, I got up and acted like I was erasing the blackboard, just in case someone walked in. That’s when I heard the lunch bench being moved, first scraping against the floor and then creaking as it was pushed back against the wall. I heard a few more steps, and then they stopped again — in front of the window, it seemed. But I could still hear the snowboots squeaking against the floor.
I turned on the lights and ran to the door. A slice of light fell out into the hallway’s darkness, and directly in that small path of light I could see Sivert standing there. He was bent forward, greedily eating the salted meat and cucumber from his hands, with wild movements of his head, like when dogs tear at a piece of meat. And suddenly everything which had gathered up inside me during the winter — secret desires, suppressed thoughts, powerless knowledge, envy of experience, half-conscious guilt — all of it pressed violently against my core until I could not stop myself from crying out: “You goddamn thief! You goddamn thief! You goddamn thief!”
I chased Sivert through the darkness of the hallway and out onto the steps, where he slipped and tumbled down into the snow. I was on top of him at once, driving my knees into his shoulders. Some of the boys who were still outside throwing snowballs against the school’s basement windows came trudging towards us.
“He’s been stealing,” I shouted wildly. “He’s been stealing from me and Inge!”
Together we turned his long, weak body onto its back. One boy sat firmly on his legs. He pulled the laces out of Sivert’s boots and tossed them in the snow. Another stretched back Sivert’s arms and sprinkled the powdery new-fallen snow onto his skin. Yet another dug in hard with his hands all over Sivert’s bare chest. As for myself, I unbuttoned his shirt and shoved snow down his back as far as I could get it. In no time his eyes were cemented shut by the snow and even his mouth was filled with it. But then suddenly, as if reacting to some secret signal, we all jumped up and left him alone. Excited, I ran back into the school, freezing but also hot. Scattered on the floor of the hallway were little pieces of salted meat and cucumber. As I jerked open one of the windows I could feel them in my hand, cold and froglike. With indescribable disgust, I flung them out in the snow.
Then I went into the classroom, still hot, but still cold, too. There was some sort of earlier unknown tension still working inside me, and it made me feel as though I was slowly being torn apart. I roamed around the room, banging on all the desktops with my fist, wishing that I knew what to do next. But nothing more occurred to me than to sit at the biggest girl’s desk and write a dirty word on its underside with a piece of chalk.
However, the judge within me must have been more than nine years old, because at last it told me what a coward I had been. Was it really stealing to take something we had rejected? Still defiant, but slowly coming undone, I turned off the lights and left. Outside, I saw Sivert’s shoelaces lying in a snowdrift. I put them in my pocket. I hurried on my way home so that I would not have to be alone with my judge for too long.
A few minutes later I saw Sivert on the road ahead of me. He was kicking a piece of ice from one side of the road to the other. I hurried towards him.
“Hi,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder.
He crossed over to the left side of the road, looking down into the ditch as he walked along it. But I wanted to make things all right again, so I crossed over too and walked right beside him.
“Would you like a sandwich, Sivert?” I asked him.
Then he crossed over to the right side again, acting as if I wasn’t even there.
“Would you like a sandwich?” I asked him again, even louder. But he wouldn’t answer me.
He was the only one who could save me from the shame of what I had done — a shame which, at the time, I believed would last forever. And in despair that he would not help me, when he was the only one who could, I hung onto him heavily, pouring everything that was in me out over him, hoping somehow that he would finally push me away and scream “Go to hell!” — so that in the end I might at least have the chance to say to myself, “Well, I wanted to set things right. But he told me to go to hell.”
But Sivert did nothing. He simply let me hang there on him, spitting out all the abuses I could think of. So then I threw him down in the snow at the edge of the road, hoping that I might be able to say, “Well, I wanted to square things with him. But then he hit me!” But Sivert willingly let himself be thrown down into the snow drift. I jumped on him, pounding and hitting him wherever I could, panting above his closed eyes.
“You lousy thief! You goddamn animal killer! You lousy goddamn thief-animal killer!
And yet, all of this seemed to be happening to somebody else. I was so nearly out of my mind with tense despair that I just left Sivert lying there, and I ran and ran. In front of the church I suddenly began to cry. And I must have cried the whole way home, because I couldn’t see anything. I could tell the farmers were driving their manure sleds out into the fields from the smell and from the clanging of the bells, which flew like blue birds out over the expansive plains of twilight. And because it was that time of year, I also knew that the woods were releasing their small clouds of white winter mist. Yet the very next day the miller’s children told me how they had been standing next to father’s big maple tree, and how they had asked me to go home with them to play “people drowning” in the giant wheat bin. But then they said I just walked right on by, as if I didn’t even see them. And the simple truth was, I did not.
The Games of Night
Sometimes at night as his mother cries in her room, and only a clattering of unfamiliar footsteps echoes in the stairwell, Håkan plays a little game to keep from crying himself. He pretends he’s invisible and that he can wish himself wherever he wants merely by thinking about it. On these nights there’s really only one place to wish himself to, and so suddenly he’s there. He’s not sure how it all happens. He knows only that he’s standing in a room. Just what the room looks like, it’s hard to say, because he doesn’t have eyes for those things. But the air is filled with cigarette and pipe smoke, and men laugh out abruptly, horribly, for no reason at all. Women also sit there at the table, speaking words that make no sense. Sometimes they lean forward and break into fits of laughter which are every bit as terrifying. These things cut through Håkan like knives, but he’s glad to be here just the same. All of these people are sitting around a table with too many bottles spread out in front of them, and as soon as a glass is emptied, a hand unscrews the cap of another bottle and fills that glass again.