to go. He had said he would. He had no choice. And if he was to get there in time he had to leave at once. He turned and went into the house again. Lars stood in the hall, stiff and silent, and his father saw him, but he could not think about more than one big thing at a time, and he went into the bedroom and laid Odd on the marriage bed, found a blanket and covered the small body. He changed his blood-soaked shirt and he changed his trousers and went to harness Bramina. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Jon was on his feet and walking slowly towards the stable. By the time the horse was between the shafts Jon was there. His father turned round and seized him by the shoulders—much too roughly, he thought later—but the boy said not a word.
'You'll have to look after Lars while I'm gone. That at least you can manage,' and he looked across at the steps where Lars had come out into the sun and stood blinking in the strong light. Their father ran a hand over his face, closed his eyes for a moment, then he cleared his throat and climbed onto the box, whipped up the horse and the cart began to move and turned out through the gate and down to the main road, up past the shop and then slowly the long way to Innbygda.
Jon took Lars out in the boat with him and down the river to fish, he could not think of anything else, and they were away for hours. What they talked about I have never been able to imagine. Maybe they did not speak at all. Maybe they just stood on the bank, each with his rod, fishing; casting and reeling in again, casting and reeling in, with a good distance between them, and nothing around them but the forest and a great silence. That I can imagine.
When they returned they went in the barn with their small catch and sat there waiting. Not once did they go into the house. Late in the evening they heard the sound of Bramina's hooves on the gravel and the cart rolling up the road. They looked at each other. They would really have liked to sit on there for a while longer. Then Jon got to his feet, and so did Lars, and they held hands for the first time since the twins were quite little, and went into the. yard and watched the cart come towards them up the drive and stop, and they heard Bramina's asthmatic breathing and their father's comforting words to the horse; kind words, gentle words, words they had never heard him say to a human being.
Their mother sat on the box in the blue dress with the yellow flowers on it, her handbag in her lap, and she smiled at them and said:
'Here I am, home again, that's nice, isn't it?', and she rose, put her foot on the wheel and jumped down.
'Where is Odd?' she said.
Jon looked up at his father, but he did not look back, he just stared at the barn wall and chewed as if his mouth was full of tobacco. He had not told her. The whole long way through the forest, just the two of them, and he had not told her anything.
The funeral took place three days later. My father asked if we should go and I said yes. It was my first funeral. One of my mother's brothers had been shot by the Germans when he tried to escape from a police station somewhere in Sorlandet on the south coast in 1943, but of course I was not there when it happened, and I don't even know if there was a funeral.
I remember two things about Odd's funeral. One of them is that my father and Jon's father not once looked each other in the eye. My father did shake his hand and say: 'Condolences,' a word that sounded completely foreign, and he was the only one who used it that day, but they did not look at each other.
The other thing was Lars. When we went out of the church and stood by the open grave he grew more and more restless, and when the priest was halfway through the ceremony and the little coffin was to be lowered down with a rope round each handle, he could not bear it any longer and tore himself free from his mother and ran away among the headstones until he was almost out of the churchyard, and started to