To Siberia by Per Petterson Read Free Book Online Page B

money,” he’ll say.
    His ears are red when he comes out and I think they may have tried to tear them off in there, but I don’t say that, I say:
    “Did it go better this time?”
    He takes out a cigar and lights it, it’s the last but one, and he takes a long drag before replying:
    “You could say that. They’ve lent me money, but I’ve pledged the workshop as security.”

 
     

    T he missionaries travel all over the world, to the benighted regions, to Tasmania and the negroes in Africa and further to the Far East. They spread God’s grain among those who wander through barren valleys, and have to suffer bitter hardship. Sometimes they are slain, their heads struck off, or thrown to the lions or buried in the earth with only their heads showing so the ants can slowly devour them. But they do not give up, they have God’s hand of authority at their backs. Each year new ones start out from the mission centers and every week we get the missionary journals through the post. Sometimes I read them if there’s nothing else, but my mother really studies them. She shows me the journals with pictures of fair-haired women and men who stand tall beneath distant stars, and she says:
    “Perhaps you can be a missionary,” because she knows I want to travel and to her that is the only route. But I don’t want to be eaten by ants and I don’t want to be a missionary. I am too short, my hair is dark, and I would much rather sit still keeping quiet and listening to the people I meet telling me about themselves.
    But when the journals arrive I’m the first to look through the contents to see if anyone has gone to Siberia. They never have, but I can’t be sure. One day my road is suddenly blocked and the train trapped in a wall of Bibles. There it stands with steam from the valves swirling out on both sides groaning without hope over silent steppes.
    My mother sits by the window in the evenings, there is a lamp between her chair and my father’s, and she reads and smiles with delight over each soul that is saved, and when someone in the Congo has perished from malaria, she puts down the magazine on her lap and sniffles:
    “Dear oh dear, the poor soul!” And then she goes to the piano and plays and sings one of her own hymns, and her high-pitched voice fills the room until the walls crack. It seems as if she will never stop, my father rustles his newspaper, but that doesn’t help and he puts it down and says:
    “For God’s sake stop it, Marie!” The flood of sound breaks off and she bows her head and looks down at the keys.
    “Oh, Magnus,” she whispers. My father repents all over, but he cannot stand it. I can’t either. I stand at the door not knowing whether to go or stay, and yet he is the one who chose her. I don’t understand it, they never touch each other, but she has told us about the young man with his powerful arms and a back bent over at the top like a hump. He came cycling along every morning in rain or shine when she was on her way to Søndergate to stand behind the counter in Jensens Tailors and Dressmakers. He passed her at the crossroads where Vrangbækvej meets Møllehuset allé, and he never said a word, just cycled past and came back and cycled past again, and she tried to look straight down at the road in front of her. But he did not give up. He did tricks on the bicycle to attract her attention. He stood with one foot on the pedal and the other straight out like you see on old circus posters, he hung from the side with his right leg under the bar, he stood up on the seat with his hands on the handlebars and he lay over the seat with his knees on the luggage carrier, and in that position he let go of the handlebars and sailed imperiously by. He did all this with a perfectly serious expression, and at last she could not help herself and began to laugh. Then he smiled cautiously, pleased. He was twenty, one year younger than her, and too young to get married. But he applied to the King for