Out Stealing Horses

Trond recalls the weeks after he returned to Oslo without his father in 1948. Every day, he rides the bike his father gave him to the train station to see if his father has arrived, until he has all the train schedules memorized. In autumn, a letter arrives that addresses the whole family and thanks them for their time together but says things are different now; it includes information for retrieving the timber money from a bank in Sweden. Trond is disturbed that there is no special message for him.

Trond and his mother take the train into Sweden with money borrowed from his Uncle Amund, “the brother who had not been shot by the Gestapo while trying to escape from a police station on the south coast in 1943” (243), and he resents his father for leaving him with her. In Karlstad, they have trouble finding the bank, and Trond almost gets into a fight with a man who pretends not to understand what he’s saying. He knows that if he punches the man, his life will take a different direction, and he restrains himself.

They find the bank but discover only 150 kroner in the account. Trond knows it should be 10 times that amount, but his father’s decision to send the timber in summer meant only a fraction of it had reached the mill.