Читать книгу When I Was a Child - Vilhelm Moberg - Страница 9

Valter’s world widened. He opened more gates and walked farther out into the world. He walked all the way to the village. Father no longer led him by the hand—he could walk about by himself and observe.

The farmers in Strängshult Village had bigger houses than the soldier-cottage. They had more than one cow in their barns, more than one pig in the pen, and they had a horse or two in the stables. The Alderman, Aldo Samuel, had two horses, one black and one red. The Alderman’s house was finer than the soldier’s.

Round about in the forest lay the cotters’ places. They were smaller than the soldier-cottage, and the smallest of them all was Trångadal, where Grandmother lived, and where Mother had grown up, and her brothers and sisters before they went to America. To that place led a narrow, little-used path that wound its way like a snake across the woodlands. Grandmother’s room was barely half as large as the room in the soldier-cottage. Round and about, in glades and openings in the forest, lived people who owned neither barn nor cow, neither pig nor sheep. There lived widowers and widows, crippled people and hunchbacks. There lived Välling-Lena, who was harelipped, and Tailor-Jan, who was deaf. People whose sight was poor or who didn’t hear well, people who walked with canes, who were a little off, and people who lay in bed ready to die. These were the cotter people, and they were poorer than the soldier’s.

The Christmas pig was slaughtered, and Valter was sent with lard and bacon to Balk-Emma, who had aided Mother at seven births and had helped him also into life. He knocked lightly on her door, and behind the smudgy window he could see a brown, wrinkled face peer out cautiously. Emma was afraid of stray men folk. At her door now stood a man, but he was so little that he barely reached the keyhole.

“Is it the little one from the soldier’s?”

Balk-Emma dared open. But it took a few minutes to remove all the boards and bolts securing the door. She took Valter’s basket and began to lift out all the food—a piece of pork, a chunk of lard, some bacon.

“She’s too generous, your mother. I can’t accept all this.”

She looked once more in the basket to make sure she had found everything, then said:

“It’s too much—I refuse it.”

Then she put the food in a cupboard near the hearth and pushed the basket toward Valter. He picked up the empty basket and made ready to leave, but the old woman motioned to him to stay; she began to poke among the quilts and sheepskin covers of her bed. She was looking for something. She dug herself deeper and deeper into the pile of bedclothes. Valter knew what she was looking for. And he trembled at the thought of what he must go through.

He must have coffee. And nothing else he had ever taken into his mouth tasted as evil as Balk-Emma’s coffee. She had her coffee container bedded down among the quilts, and her coffee tasted bitter and noxious; it was neither warm nor cold, but somewhat tepid. It was “bed-warm.” And thick as dungwater. When one swallowed the coffee, it wanted to come up again; it did not wish to be closed in the stomach. He had drunk it last year and the year before when he brought Christmas food, so he knew.

At last Balk-Emma found her coffeepot deep down in the bed. It kept warm between the pelts so she need not put it on the fire each time a visitor came. Thus, she had always coffee ready for a caller. The pot was well tied up in a black-and-white checkered woolen shawl.

Valter made an attempt to escape: he must get home before dark. But Emma grabbed him by the shoulder as if he were still the newborn brat of eleven pounds whom she once had hung on the steelyard. She pulled him up to the table: no caller had yet left her house without coffee; as long as she lived, no caller would leave her cottage without coffee. It was a matter of honor.

He could not escape. The cup, the sugar bowl, the cream pitcher were already on the table. And on the table sat also the coffeepot in its shawl with the corners tied like the ears of a crouching, vicious owl. There was no getting away this year either.

The coffee clucked in the throat of the shawl-owl as Emma poured it into the cup. Its color was the same as Emma’s face, dark brown like dried spruce bark. She must have drunk so much coffee that it had oozed through her leathery skin. With trembling hands Valter lifted the cup toward his lips. Last year he had managed not to vomit until he was outside; he hoped to do as well this year.

The old woman stood beside him and watched while he drank: her generosity and honor would be kept as long as she lived, she assured him. No one should be able to say over her dead bones that he had left her house without a treat.

Valter emptied the cup in deep swallows. He tortured himself valiantly for Emma’s honor and generosity. And in front of him sat the black-white shawl-owl, threatening a refill from its throat. But because he was so very little he escaped with one cup. Then the owl with its thick black coffee flew back to its warm nest in the bed, there to rest until the next guest arrived at Balk-Emma’s cottage.

Valter got out with the coffee still inside him. He stopped outside to vomit. But this year he was unable to. The coffee did not want to remain inside him, nor would it come up. During the whole way home he carried both his coffee and his feeling of nausea.

Dusk was already falling over the wide forest. Only in some openings between the fir-tops did light from the sky break through. He stumbled on a slippery root, tumbled over, and lost his wooden shoes. His father would say that it mattered little if such a short being fell—he was so close to the ground. He looked for his shoes and found them, but could feel from the pressure over the instep that the left one had broken in the fall.

Now he had reached Janne-Shoemaker’s cottage. Janne came once a year to their home. He would stand at the barn gable and dig into a pile of alder logs until he had made two pairs of shoes for each one of them. When he left, sixteen pairs of wooden shoes would stand in a row in the attic at Soldier-Sträng’s to dry. Valter had an extra pair up in the attic and he had been promised the use of them after Christmas. He might therefore just as well break both his old shoes; they would be thrown away anyway; there was no sense in having one broken shoe and one unbroken.

He stopped and took off the unbroken right shoe and hit it against a stone. It didn’t break. He banged it against the stone once more, this time much harder. Now it broke completely, in two pieces.

Darn it! He almost swore. Darn it was as near as one could come to swearing without actually doing so. He hadn’t intended his shoe to break so badly that it was unusable; he had only meant to crack it, like the left one. Now he had no shoe to put on his foot for his walk home, and he still had a great distance left. He put the two halves in the empty basket and walked on wearing only a stocking on his right foot.

There was no snow, but the ground was cold and muddy. The stocking had a hole in it, which left his heel exposed. Wooden shoes were always hungry at the heel and gnawed through the stockings. Now the stocking got wet and his whole foot felt cold. He had a wooden shoe on one foot but only the stocking on the other, and he limped along like a cripple. Darn! Damn! Now he swore outright. He would have to begin using the extra pair even before Christmas. But Janne made poor shoes that cracked easily; this he must tell Father.

He hopped along on the shod left foot to avoid putting the shoeless right one down on the ground.

In America wooden shoes were not used. All his thirty cousins might not have a single pair among them. Only here, in “poor Sweden” did people go about in wooden shoes. The ancient inhabitants of the cottages hereabouts must have worn out whole forests, having lived so long on this earth. Wooden-shoe people inhabited this land.

Now it was as coal-dark as it could get. Valter started to run. Not because he was afraid, but he would get home sooner if he ran. He was just passing the Stallion Moor where will-o’-the-wisps and trolls were supposed to run about with their lights after dark. He didn’t look in that direction, he didn’t need any light. At the edge of the moor lay Stallion-Daniel’s cottage, now long deserted. When Daniel died and was buried, he had taken all his money with him in the coffin; he kept his money in a bag that he had tied around his chest. His relatives missed the money and dug up the coffin in the churchyard. They found a huge snake coiled on the chest of the corpse, and the coffin was lowered again without anyone daring to touch the snake or the moneybag. Daniel still lay in the churchyard with the snake and the bag on his chest, and here stood his empty cabin, which Valter must pass.

The snake on Stallion-Daniel’s chest was said to be as thick as a man’s thigh; Valter ran a little faster.

Then rose a shriek between the trees, from the right side of the road, from Stallion-Daniel’s desolate cabin. It sounded like a human cry, like a person being slowly choked to death. It could come from someone being choked by a thick, enormous snake. Valter had heard the same cry before when passing this cottage; he took longer jumps in his single wooden shoe.

The shriek at Stallion-Daniel’s old house was well known. Once, when he heard it in daytime, Valter had gone closer to see what it might be. He found two young firs, grown so closely together that when the wind moved them back and forth, an eerie, complaining sound was caused by the friction of their trunks. He wasn’t afraid of a tree that cried. There was a wind tonight and the firs were crying, of course. It might be something else, but he wasn’t going to investigate tonight. Moreover, it was too dark to find the trees.

Now he must be near Potter-Isak’s place. Part of the chimney and a pile of stones with nettles were all that was left. Potter-Isak had practiced witchery with human bones, and one of his feet had been a horse’s foot. Isak had worn an iron horseshoe on that foot. Potter-Isak had been dead a long time when Valter was born; he wished he could have seen the man with a horse’s foot. Potter-Isak must have been the only one who didn’t wear wooden shoes on both his feet. But, then, he had been a witch man.

Now Valter had reached the road that led to the soldier-cottage in Hellasjö. Mr. Hellström lived there; he was a corporal and bailiff, and had a long black beard. Little Bäck from Bäckhult was the shortest soldier. All the soldiers came to Father’s Christmas party: Godfather Banda, the fat Nero from Bökevara, Flink from Sutaremåla—he got drunk and sang songs—Lönn from Hermanstorp, the tallest soldier except for Father, Tilly from Grimmanäs. They were Father’s buddies from the other villages. Mother prepared a feast for them, Father bought a can of anchovies, and brännvin was poured from a keg and drunk. The soldiers ate and drank and made much noise, and Valter would sit hidden behind one of them to listen. He didn’t understand all they said, and he heard that he was not supposed to understand. The soldiers were foul-mouthed, Mother used to say. But Valter liked to know the truth in all matters. He would not go to bed as long as the soldiers remained, but sat hidden and listened and learned. At last he would go to sleep in a corner with his clothes on.

From the soldiers he learned each Christmas a few more swear words, which he practiced while alone. He could practice also while Gunnar listened, for Gunnar did not tell on him. But Gunnar didn’t know nearly so many swear words as Valter, even though he was older and the best in his class according to the teacher’s report to Mother.

Valter wanted to become a soldier, too. If he didn’t go to America, he would be a soldier.

But soldiering would be abolished, Father had said. No more young men were accepted. Valter was deeply disappointed.

“But you can be a volunteer,” said Father. “You can volunteer for three years.”

Volunteer—that sounded almost better than soldier.

“Can I have my own gun?”

Of course he could have his own gun if he volunteered, said Father. The volunteers had the same kind of guns as the soldiers, model ‘96, the same gun which hung on the wall and which Valter was not allowed to touch. Exactly the same, with a yellow sling.

He would be a soldier, with his own gun to fight with, but his name would be Volunteer Valter Sträng. This was something to think about for a long time.

Now his right stocking was dripping-wet and his foot felt terribly cold. Valter had reached Carpenter-Elof’s cottage, and he slowed down—he had run so fast he had a pain in his chest; he panted and his stomach jumped out and in. Carpenter-Elof’s cottage was not deserted and empty. Elof was a religious man, respected by all. He was sent for when someone was to die and needed comfort. Carpenter-Elof helped people die, because this was very difficult.

D-i-e. Valter tried the word. It could be pulled out as much as one wished, into eternity. But: Dea-th. Death—that word could not be pulled out. It ended inexorably on the last letter. One hit a wall, and then it became silent and over and done with: Dea-th. Strange how that last letter stopped and one couldn’t do a thing with it. One’s tongue seemed to be locked in the mouth after the word Death.

Carpenter-Elof was a God-fearing man who could help one get by death.

Valter walked by his cottage slowly. Elof never swore. And no one swore in his presence. Valter decided not to swear any more while walking homeward.

He made a jump backward, a yell froze in his throat. In the dim light he saw a wild beast rise from the edge of the road, its long limbs and claws flailing the air. Our Father Who art in Heaven! This was like dying, as he thought dying must be like … Then he remembered the fallen tree with its roots stretching skyward. He started running again.

Now there was only Miller-Kalle’s cottage left before he reached home. The miller was the laziest man in the parish. He wouldn’t do anything except make children, people said. He had seven in school, one in each class. Altogether, he had eleven. That’s what happened when the father was lazy. And the miller’s family had lice. Laziness was punished with vermin, Mother said. The greatest shame there was, to have lice. The only thing one got in life without effort. Father and Mother were not anxious to visit at Kalle’s. The children in that cottage would scratch and twist their bodies from itching. They were skinny and miserable and coughed, and two had died from consumption. But their lice were fat and could make bigger and redder bites than any other lice hereabouts. If Father had some errand at Kalle’s, he would take off his shirt on the stoop when returning and examine it carefully before he came inside. No vermin was allowed at the soldier’s. No matter how poor, one could afford to keep free of vermin, Father said.

The biggest lice had the ace of spades on their backs. Valter had not seen them, but he had seen how big the ace of spades was. Banda’s Edvin had an old deck of cards which his brother Valfrid had given him, and Flink’s Ossian at Sutaremåla also had a deck. Valter would like to learn to play cards. Then he could play when he became a volunteer and had his own Crown gun to fight with.

Father served and defended King Oscar and the Crown. The King and the Crown belonged together and owned everything between them. The crown that sat on top of King Oscar’s head owned practically all of Sweden. But the King didn’t use the crown every day—Father had seen the King at a maneuver and then he wore a cap. He had left his crown at home, perhaps he was afraid of losing it. The great gold crown that Oscar wore at home when he sat on the silver throne, that crown owned the gun on their wall, as well as Father’s rucksack, his coat, his pants, everything. The crown was richer than anyone else, Father said.

It was so dark in the forest that Valter really should have been afraid. And the closer he got to home, the more afraid he grew; on one foot he had a cracked wooden shoe, on the other his stocking; it was Janne-Shoemaker’s fault, he made such poor shoes that they cracked for almost no reason at all.

Now he saw the light between the pines, the yellow light from a coal-oil lamp in a little cottage in the forest. It was a small tin lamp, but it spread a warm and friendly light. No longer did Valter’s wet foot feel cold. Home.

He walked slowly and confidently this last piece of the way—this way that he would tramp at all hours of the day, at all seasons of the year, through all the years of his childhood. It led through the wide, desolate woodlands where lived the people of the small cottages, the people he belonged with. Here lived his people, among whom he was born, the wooden-shoe people—the rugged, proud, silent, paucity-people.