Out Stealing Horses

“We were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and one of the first days of July. Three years earlier the Germans had left, but I can’t remember that we talked about them any longer. At least my father did not. He never said anything about the war.” 

The first of three times the novel’s title appears in its narrative, this quote captures the joyful and idealized mood Trond associates with the early days of the summer of 1948, when “stealing horses” is code for a harmless pastime. It establishes the past-tense setting of the novel and Trond’s place in it but also demonstrates the long shadow that the war had cast; though Trond insists that he can’t remember people talking about the war any longer, he knows just how long it has been since the Germans left, and his comment that his father never said anything about the war suggests that Trond finds this strange.

“There wasn’t much money about, as far as I could make out. Maybe Barkald had some, but Jon’s father had none, and my father certainly did not have any, not that I knew about, anyhow. So how he had scraped together enough to buy the cabin where we stayed that summer is still a mystery.”

That there isn’t much money to be had illustrates the relatively impoverished circumstances of people in the rural woods following the war, developing the sense that the lasting impacts of that time are still being felt. The observation that Trond’s father had enough money to buy a cabin conveys Trond’s suspicion that his father is hiding something, building the sense of mystery connected to the adults and their relationships in his memories.

“‘You decide for yourself when it will hurt,’ he said, suddenly getting serious. He walked over to the nettles and took hold of the smarting plants with his bare hands and began to pull them up with perfect calm, one after the other, throwing them into a heap, and he did not stop before he had pulled them all up.”

Trond’s father uses the stinging nettles as a metaphor for all of life’s pains. While Trond works a wide circle around the nettles with his scythe, his father insists that the only way to remove something painful is by confronting it head-on and refusing to allow it to cause pain. Not heeding this advice, in the present-tense narrative, Trond has run to the woods to escape the pain of his wife’s death but is instead confronted by the painful memories associated with his father’s abandonment. When this advice appears again in Trond’s memory at the end of the novel, it suggests confronting these memories has allowed him to move beyond the pain.

“[F]rom everywhere in the forest around us there were sounds; of beating wings, of branches bending and twigs breaking, and the scream of a hawk and a hare’s last sigh, and the tiny muffled boom each time a bee hit a flower. I heard the ants crawling in the heather, and the path we followed rose with the hillside; I took deep breaths through my nose and thought that no matter how life should turn out and however far I travelled I would always want to remember this place as it was just now, and miss it.”

The use of anaphora builds rhythm in this passage that is characteristic of Per Petterson’s descriptions of nature in the novel in general. The phrasing and punctuation create a poetic impression and a rhythm that is close to the natural rhythm of breath. Using this rhythm to capture Trond’s close observations of the world around him—and his wish to impress them on his memory forever—conveys his feeling of harmony with nature and the idealized view he takes of the rural setting during the days early in that summer.

“I thought it was just like my father, to take me as far as he possibly could where it still was called Norway, and I asked no questions about why precisely here, for it was as if he was testing me, and I did not mind that. I trusted my father.”

Trond and his father have ridden the bus literally to the end of Norway, to the last stop before the border with Sweden. Trond wants to measure up to any test his father sets before him, so he follows him without question, but the insistence that he “trusted” his father in the past tense creates a sense of dramatic irony and foreshadows his father’s motivations; even if Trond doesn’t harbor doubts yet, he will come to regret his failure to ask questions when he begins to realize how much he doesn’t know.

“I thought about how it must feel to lose your life so early. Lose your life, as if you felt an egg in your hand, and it fell to the ground and broke, and I knew it could not feel like anything at all. If you were dead, you were dead, but in the fraction of the second just before; whether you realised then it was the end, and what that felt like.”

After Odd’s death, Trond tries to imagine what dying feels like, and his description of death as dropping an egg recalls Jon’s destruction of the goldcrest nest. His use of the passive phrasing “lose your life” conveys his sense of people’s powerlessness in the face of their own mortality, as well as the theme of The Pivotal Role of History in Shaping Identity.

“He is just sitting there, and I can see he misses his father, quite simply and straightforwardly, and I would wish it was as easy as that, that you could just miss your father, and that was all there was to it.”

Trond’s interaction with the mechanic Olav emphasizes the sense of isolation and loneliness that remembering his own father creates. He has the impression that missing his father provides a sense of consolation for Olav because they had a “simple and straightforward” relationship; however, because Trond’s memories of his father involve a complicated mixture of pride, love, and abandonment, he cannot take consolation in his memory.

“I turned to look at Jon’s mother, who at this moment had nothing to do with Jon, or maybe that was precisely what she had, but she was in fact two different people and we were equal in height and our hair equally fair after weeks in the blazing sun, but the face that a moment ago had been open, almost naked, was closing now, only her eyes had a dreaming look as if she was not present at all and looking at the same thing that I was looking at, but at something beyond, something larger than this that I could not fathom, but I realised that she was not going to say anything either, to stop these two men, that as far as she was concerned they could go on to the bitter end to settle once and for all something I did not know about, and possibly that was just what she wanted.”

Trond’s increasing awareness of Jon’s mother as a sexual being, and of his father’s recognition of her as such, causes him to suddenly see her in a new way. As in other places where Trond experiences a disorienting shift in perception, Petterson uses longer sentences that convey his stream of consciousness. As his father and Jon’s father proceed in their competition stacking logs, Trond realizes it is Jon’s mother they are fighting over; her willingness to settle the matter through a feat of physical strength calls to mind a battle to the death a measure of ruthlessness. Just as her sensuality intrudes upon Trond’s understanding of the relationships between men and women, his impression of events is at odds with what he understands about the polite rules of civilization.

“I knew I was close enough to reach out my hand as far as I could, and then maybe reach the whole way and know the meaning of it all. […] and I recall running from the bedroom with my clothes in my hand that summer night in 1948, realising in a sudden panic that what my father said and how things really were, were not necessarily the same, and that made the world liquid and hard to hold on to.”

Trond awakes in the night to realize that his father has not been to bed, even though he had said he would be “right behind” him when he went inside. Trond has until this point demonstrated an unquestioning trust in everything his father says, and the dissonance between his father’s words and what he knows to be true takes the shape out of Trond’s world. As he has before, Trond recoils from the chance to learn the full truth, not yet prepared to step into the adulthood that awaits on the other side of that knowledge.

“But life had shifted its weight from one point to another, from one leg to the other, like a silent giant in the vast shadows against the ridge, and I did not feel like the person I had been when this day began, and I did not even know if that was something to be sorry for.”

Trond walks through the darkness as he pursues his missing father, but he already knows that a pivotal change has occurred in his life and in the way he understands the world. Personifying life in the form of a dark and silent giant, Trond suggests that powers larger than him are at work but have not yet communicated to him what the outcome of this change will be.

“He kissed her, and I could see she was crying, but it was not because he kissed her she was crying, and anyway he kissed her, and anyway she cried.”

Trond witnesses his father and Jon’s mother from across the river. The rhythmic repetition of words like “kissing” and “cried” builds his inability to make sense of the scene or to contextualize the reason Jon’s mother would be crying while also kissing his father; his use of “and anyway” emphasizes that his ability to understand their kiss is beside the point, as he is powerless to do anything about it.

“In the course of one month they both died, and after they were gone I lost interest in talking to people. I really do not know what to talk to them about. That is one reason for living here. Another reason is being close to the forest.”

After long insisting that he has always wished to be alone in a place that was only silence, Trond finally admits that it was the loss of his wife and sister that propelled him into the woods. This double loss connects with the motif of doubles, and his disinterest in talking to people and his desire to be close to the forest both stem from a need for peace and solitude to reflect on the events of his life. Both women had called him lucky, a phrase that he repeats like a mantra as though it will keep them with him.

“Russian grenades are pouring down on Grozny. They are at it again. But they will never win, not in the long run, that goes without saying. Tolstoy knew it already in Hadji Murat, and that book was written a hundred years ago. It is really incomprehensible that the great powers cannot learn the lesson that in the end it is they themselves who will disintegrate.”

As Trond listens to a news report about Russia bombing Grozny during the Chechen War in 1999, he reflects on the nature of war; like with the German occupation of Norway, the historic actions of a “great power” are altering the course of thousands of lives. His allusion to Tolstoy’s novel is also significant, as its themes—worldliness versus corruption, personal and family relationships, and the destructiveness of war—connect with many ideas in Out Stealing Horses.

“And when the same man was taken by boat upriver in the night, all without a sound, first across the yard and then down to the jetty where not a word was uttered, not a light lit, he did not comment on that either […] even if the man was the first of several, for now not only ‘mail’ passed through the village on its way across the border to Sweden.” 

Trond imagines the “traffic” during the Resistance as Franz describes it to him, along with the way Jon’s father deliberately ignored the work his wife did. The idea that people were among the “mail” being passed through the village into Sweden implies that the Resistance was involved in helping Jewish people escape Nazi-occupied Norway. By emphasizing the danger of the work being undertaken by Trond’s father and Jon’s mother, the narrative suggests that Jon’s father’s apathy altered her view of her husband.

“The German motorcycle with the sidecar calmly driving up the main road lately cleared of snow, […] with no apparent motive, no-one ever understood precisely what the rider was looking for. Maybe he was just lonely and looking for a person to talk to, or wanting badly to smoke a cigarette.”

Trond continues reimagining the scene when his father and Jon’s mother were chased by German soldiers. His assertion that there was no apparent motivation for the soldier’s actions that morning conveys the randomness of war and the futility of the violence it creates; the lives of the young soldiers and the people working for the Resistance alike depended on chance, to such an extent that if any element of the morning were different—if there were no snow, or if the soldier had not been lonely or not wanted a cigarette—the future might have turned out differently.

“Something inside me is changing, I am changing, from someone I knew well and blindly relied on, called ‘the boy with the golden trousers’ by those who loved him, who came up with an endless supply of shining coins whenever he put his hand in his pocket, into someone much less familiar to me and who really has no idea what kind of rubbish he has in his pockets, and I wonder how long this change has been underway.”

Trond’s reference to the nickname his sister and wife used for him emphasizes the extent to which he feels their absence from his life. The metaphorical rubbish in his pockets replacing the gold they figuratively placed there represents the way he values himself in their absence; in many ways, he no longer knows who he is at all.

“It was a strange, lonely sound out there in the night, but I did not know whether it was the bird I thought was lonely or if it was me. […] There was no way I could reach him now. His breathing sounded peaceful and content, as if he did not have a care in the world, and perhaps he did not, and neither should I have, but I was uneasy and didn’t know what to think about anything at all, and if breathing was easy for him, for me it was not.”

Trond’s observations about the natural world continue to represent his sense of place within it, as the bird’s cry mirrors his own loneliness. Sleep, like the revelations about his father’s life, put a barrier between him and his father. Throughout the novel, Trond sleeps poorly for many reasons; his poor sleep seems to stem from moments that disturb his peace of mind, and after he discovers his father missing once, he begins waking in the night to make sure he is there.

“In that case I might as well have stayed on in the city, plodding up and down the same dreary streets I had walked for three years thinking there must be an end to this, now something will have to happen, or I am finished. So I say to myself: why should I not get tired, what else is there in my life I am saving my strength for?”

As Trond walks deep into the snowy woods outside his cabin, he finds that nature has in fact given him back his sense of purpose; by contrast, his life in the city after his wife died had been slowly sapping his will to live. By choosing to avoid the paved and plowed road, he metaphorically embraces the wildness of the woods over the civilization of the city and makes the decision to fully experience each day of his life.

“Then she turns to me. ‘Tell me. How are you really?’ she says, as if there were two versions of my life, and now she is not on the verge of tears at all, but sharp-voiced as an interrogator.”

Ellen confronts Trond about his retreat into the woods. Her assertion that there are two versions of his life connects again with the motif of doubles and mirrors; the two sides of herself that appear in Trond’s cabin connect with this as well. Her pointed questioning forces him to move beyond the surface level appearance of his days and share more with her, prompting the emotional catharsis that develops into the novel’s climax and resolution.

“[T]he fact that Lars has not mentioned my father, not one single word in the time we have known each other, must be because he feels he wants to spare me, or because, like myself, he cannot make his thoughts come together around these persons, himself and myself included; come into that one point, because he does not have words for it. I do understand that. It has been the same for me almost all my life.”

Trond and Lars have a mutual understanding that Trond’s father’s role in both their lives should be unspoken and that to pull the bandage off that wound would be too painful for both of them. Trond views Lars as a mirror of himself, with their two lives reaching a singular point around his father’s presence.

“When […] I look back to that time, I see how each movement through the landscape took colour from what came afterwards and cannot be separated from it. And when someone says the past is a foreign country, then I have probably felt that way for most of my life because I have been obliged to, but I am not any more. If I just concentrate I can walk into memory’s store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.”

This metaphor forms Trond’s epiphany about the role he can allow memories to play in his life. If the past has been a foreign country with a border he cannot cross, he has felt forced to leave his memories on the other side of that border rather than understanding its part in building the landscape of his identity. When he says “not anymore,” he rejects this myth, determined to navigate his memories on his own terms from now on.

“It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But the difference between the way I was frightened and the way I was happy.”

These lines are repeated in part on page 242, and they are taken from the first paragraph of Jean Rhys’s 1934 novel Voyage in the Dark, which tells the story of a girl who feels metaphorically caught between two worlds. After returning home without his father, Trond feels caught between his past and his future, his mother and his father, and the city and the woods. The emotional changes he has experienced have altered his perception of the physical world and of himself.

“Best wishes. End. No special greeting to me. I don’t know. I really thought I had earned one.”

Trond’s pithy description of his father’s letter marks his disbelief and disappointment with its contents. He does not worry about whether his mother or sister get a special greeting, because he feels that his relationship with his father was separate and more important than theirs. The phrase “I don’t know” serves as a verbal shrug, wherein he tries to minimize the pain this caused him.