Per Petterson - Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes

‘The canoe’s mine! He always said I was the one who should have it!’

‘OK, have it then, for Christ’s sake! Take the crappy old canoe, be my guest!’

Uncle Rolf stared furiously at Dad, and then he grinned and turned to Arvid. He leaned forward, went to prop one elbow on the table but missed, and his head knocked the glass over and the aquavit ran down his trousers, he was drunk as a skunk, but he was still grinning.

‘Do you know what, Arvid?’ he said. ‘Do you know what your father used to say? He said he probably isn’t your father at all. Actually it was an Italian plumber calling on your mother one morning while he was at work. Heh, heh.’ Uncle Rolf sniggered, and Arvid froze and looked at his dad, who looked back with a dull expression in his eyes, he was just as drunk and he frowned and had to concentrate, and then his face darkened and from out of the blue he planted a straight left on Uncle Rolf’s nose. Uncle Rolf fell from his chair onto the floor with a thud, his nose began to bleed at once, but he was still sniggering. Arvid could feel his stomach churning faster and faster, he looked from one to the other, Dad was standing with his fist raised and was about to strike again.

‘I am not Italian!’ Arvid screamed. ‘I’m Norwegian! I speak Norwegian and you’re both pissed. Don’t you think I know?’

Uncle Rolf peered up at Dad and wiped his nose and there was blood all over his hand.

‘Christ, Arvid, I was only joking.’

‘Don’t joke about that sort of thing, you fat oaf,’ Dad said, with a lurch. ‘And now you’re going to get a beating like you haven’t had since before the war!’ And with that he went at Uncle Rolf, and Uncle Rolf was scared and said:

‘Are you out of your mind?’

Dad looked dangerous, with his shoulders raised and fists clenched in front of him and his chin stuck out like a knife. Arvid took aim and punched that chin for all he was worth, and his dad snapped back and shook his head and turned, but Arvid was running up the stairs to the first floor. He heard a thud from below, and he crawled under a bed.

‘You’re out of your mind!’ Uncle Rolf shouted again, and then something was knocked over in the living room, the front door slammed and Arvid heard the heavy footsteps across the drive and the hinges of the gate screeching as it was thrust open.

‘Arvid!’ Dad shouted from the living room, but Arvid did not answer, he just huddled up against the wall.

‘Dammit,’ Dad said. ‘Dammit!’ And it sounded as if he were crying, but he couldn’t have been, and anyway it was difficult to tell when you were under a bed on the first floor.

The aquavit bottle clinked and the front door slammed again and there was total silence. Arvid crept out from under the bed and went to the stairs and listened. He tiptoed halfway down and looked around the sitting room. The bottle was lying empty on the table and the room was deserted. He went all the way down. There was no one in the cabin any more, he was alone. The front door was ajar and he went out onto the steps. It was pitch black now, it was night, there was forest around the cabin on all sides and it bore down on the walls.

‘Dad,’ he shouted, but it wasn’t much of a shout, he could barely hear it himself, and no one answered. Then there was a proper shout from the jetty. It was his dad’s voice, but it did not sound as it usually did, it was high-pitched and piercing, and Arvid ran down between the trees that stood like a wall and wanted to block his path, but he didn’t pay them any heed, he just ran in the darkness, down, down. The roots criss-crossing the path knocked against his feet, but he managed to stay upright, he didn’t want to stumble and so he didn’t. He took the concrete steps in great leaps and bounds, and he was good at jumping, he flew through the autumn night panting for breath, but it was not he who was panting, the panting was driving him , in heavy rasping gasps, and he could hear them from a distance as though they were not his, and once he had to turn and look back, but he was alone.

‘Dad!’ he shouted. ‘Where are you?’ No one answered, but then he heard his dad cursing and then there was a loud splash.

Arvid raced all the way down, his legs flashing like drumsticks while his gaze scanned the shore searching for something that was not as it should be, but at night nothing is as it should be, he ought to have known, and then he was on the jetty and just managed to stop before he fell head first into the water. On the edge of the jetty was a paddle and a few metres into the fjord was the canoe, upside down. There was a big hole at one end, and the jagged edges sticking up were brown and rotten, and suddenly everything was silent, the night and the forest behind him, the glistening fjord.

A roar splintered the silence and a face broke the surface right in front of Arvid. He jumped back and it felt like a cold finger scraping down his spine, he covered his eyes, for he thought it might be a water sprite, but it wasn’t, it was his dad, and he was roaring:

‘Jesus! The damned tub’s rotten to the core! I stepped right through it!’

Arvid jumped down into the water and waded a few metres and grabbed Dad’s one hand and pulled and tugged so hard his arm almost came off, and Dad crawled and spat and at last he was up. But then he slipped on the seaweed, for it was low tide, and they both fell, and Dad landed with his head in Arvid’s lap. Arvid could feel the weight on his thigh, and he held the head tight. He was trembling with cold now, for he was wet up to his waist, and then he saw for the first time that Dad was turning bald. He stroked the thinning wet hair and said:

‘Shhh, Dad, it will be fine, everything’ll be fine, right?’ Dad turned his head up to look at him and then he was sick, it gushed from his mouth and down Arvid’s legs.

‘It’s OK, Dad,’ Arvid said.

Dad spat in despair and said:

‘This would never have happened before the war.’

‘I know,’ Arvid said. ‘I know.’

PER PETTERSON was born in Oslo in 1952 and worked for several years as an unskilled laborer and a bookseller. He made his literary breakthrough in 2003 with the novel Out Stealing Horses , which has been published in forty-nine languages and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

DON BARTLETT lives in Norfolk, England, and works as a freelance translator of Scandinavian literature. He has translated, or co-translated, Norwegian novels by Gaute Heivoll, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Lars Saabye Christensen, Roy Jacobsen, and Jo Nesbø.