To Siberia by Per Petterson Read Free Book Online Page A

autumn and driving rain on the outer walls. Here everything is brickwork and cement. The water seeps in through the cracks and spreads in damp flowers through the wallpaper so it peels off and the kitchen floor is icy to the feet even in summer with the sun shining in. There is no glow in bricks. In Siberia the houses are built of timber that gives off the good smell of tar and warmth in summer, and when the long winter sets in the glow stays in the logs and never fades. The wood contracts and waits and stretches out when spring comes and drinks in the wind and the sun.
    When no one is listening my father grinds his teeth. But I listen all the same. I show him books with pictures of Siberia and the houses there, and he slowly holds it at a long-sighted distance and after a while he says:
    “That’s a good piece of craftsmanship. But it is cold outside, terribly cold.”
    I do like it when summer comes with warm wind inside my dress on my bare thighs, but I don’t think the cold will bother me. They have different clothes in Siberia that I can learn to wear instead of now when I have only my thin coat against the wind that comes in from the sea between Denmark and Sweden and blows straight through everything. They have caps made of wolfskin and big jackets and fur-lined boots, and lots of the people who live there look like Eskimos. I might pass as one of them if I cut my hair short. And besides I shall sit in the train and look out of the window and talk to people, and they will tell me what their lives are like and what their thoughts are and ask me why I have come all the long way from Denmark. Then I will answer them:
    “I have read about you in a book.” And then we’ll drink hot tea from the samovar and be quiet together just looking.
    I brush the snow off the front of my coat and see Lone disappearing with her schoolbag under her arm and her cap in her hand. She isn’t mincing now, and then I still don’t go up our road, but down the main street until I get to the gateway and the rear courtyard where the workshop is. I walk through the gateway and see my father coming out of the door of the workshop with his coat on. I wait until he has locked up before I say hello, and he comes up to me and brushes snow off my back and looks at my face that has a scratch on one cheek.
    “Have you been fighting?” he says.
    “Yes. With Lone.”
    “Why?”
    “Grandfather,” I say, and demonstrate what she did, turning my scarf back to front and pulling it until it’s tight, and then he says:
    “Are they talking about it at school?”
    I nod, and he tightens his lips and walks out through the gateway and locks that too and won’t be going back today.
    “Where are we going?” I ask.
    “ We aren’t going anywhere. I am going to the savings bank.”
    “What are we, I mean what are you going there for?”
    “To borrow money. You can come along if you stay behind and wait nice and quietly.”
    He goes in through the heavy door, and I wait nice and quietly till he comes out again only a quarter of an hour later. He stays there on the steps beside me saying nothing before I look up into his face, and then he says very very softly:
    “That didn’t go too well.”
    I don’t know what to make of this.
    “That’s a shame,” I say a bit too lightly, running down the steps and starting to walk off. But he does not follow. He stands there with his hands in his coat pockets staring straight at the wall on the other side of the street, and when I speak to him he doesn’t answer. He runs his hand down his chin and turns.
    “Wait here,” he says and goes inside again.
    This time he’s gone half an hour. It’s too cold to stand still so long. I jump around and walk up and down the street looking into the windows and thinking what I could have bought if I’d had any money. But it’s not good to borrow money, and it was my father who said that. “If you’re broke they’ll tear the ears off you if you’ve borrowed