Sleet. Stig Dagerman

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СКАЧАТЬ I can’t set on the chaff-cutter, then the hell with it!” he says. “Both here and there! If you got a sister that’s so high and mighty that she can’t come and see her only brother ’cept but in a car, and that can’t bear to see him if he’s setting on a chaff-cutter, then the fucking hell with it! That’s what I say. Both here and there!”

      Now Sigrid’s laughing so hard that she has to get up and go into one of the stalls again. And Grampa’s so upset that he drops his knife, and now Mama’s taking all his carrots and chopping them in a flash. I stick my knife in its sheath and head out to the yard. I look out on the road to see if the car’s coming, but it’s still way too early. Next I go over to the gate and carve my name in the wood. I’ll never forget this day when we were chopping carrots, when it was raining and the rain turned to sleet, and when the aunt from America was coming here to stay.

      I go and sit on the daybed in the kitchen, looking at the Atlantic in the atlas. But there’s not much to see. I don’t see even one single wave. So I can’t be sure whether Alvar was lying or not. Anyway, now I hear a big ruckus outside and when I look out the window I can see Alvar and Mama coming through the yard with Grampa between them. He’s struggling against them, but it’s not doing him a bit of good. They get him through the gate and then up on the porch. In the doorway he braces himself against the frame and then kicks the door. But they manage to get him into the kitchen, anyway, before they finally let him go.

      “Now we’re going to wash you,” says Mama. “And I mean right now!”

      Alvar goes and stands by the door so that Grampa can’t bolt out, and Mama runs water into a washbowl from the big tank. Then Alvar goes over and pulls the work-shirt off Grampa. Beneath it, he’s only got on an old t-shirt which comes right off, too, because he’s so sweaty from the fight. Underneath that, he’s all yellow and skinny-looking. He struggles against them some more, but they get him over to the sink, anyway.

      “Arne, come here!” Mama yells. And it’s such an angry voice that I know I don’t have much choice.

      “Soap his back!” she says.

      And I don’t have much choice but to do that, either, even though it’s not very nice, because Grampa really doesn’t smell too good. I soap his back so that you can’t even see it through the lather. Then Mama scrubs it off with a rag. Alvar’s just holding him, and Sigrid’s sitting over on the daybed, grinning. Next Mama takes the soap and scrubs his neck and face and ears, and he just keeps on huffing and snorting, but he still can’t break loose. Finally, Alvar dips his head down into the washbowl so that Grampa gets water in his throat and starts coughing like he’s about to choke to death.

      “Alright Daddy, now all you need is a shave,” says Alvar, as he rubs Grampa dry with a towel. Mama comes over with a clean shirt and slips it over his head. Then Alvar leads him over to the table and sits him down on a stool. He grabs the shaving mirror off the dresser, takes out the straight edge from the drawer, strops it, takes a mug of hot water from the tank, and sets it on the table. He puts an old newspaper on the table, too, just in front of Grampa, and ties a towel around his neck to keep that new shirt from getting soiled.

      “And I want you to be on your best behavior,” says Mama as she chases a moth through the kitchen. “No spitting on the floor while she’s here.”

      Alvar soaps Grampa’s face, then takes the razor and starts scraping.

      “Hold still,” he barks. “Or you can do it yourself!”

      Grampa just sits there, looking at himself in the shaving mirror. And at last I guess he must figure he looks pretty horrible, because then he starts to sob a little.

      “I ain’t seen her for twenty years,” he says. And his face gets so scrunched up from all the sobbing that Alvar cuts his cheek.

      “Didn’t I tell you to sit still!” he barks again.

      “Not for twenty years,” Grampa goes on. “I was fifty-three then, and she was thirty-three. Me and the woman went down to the station with her. We gave her lilacs and a dozen eggs. The three of us cried so much the train pretty near left without her.”

      I can’t bear to sit here anymore, watching Grampa like this, so I run outside and start walking along the edge of the creek, throwing stones at the frogs and scaring off a trespasser that’s fishing from a boat he’s got hidden in our reeds. It’s dark so I can’t see his face, and he makes real sure to turn it away from me while he’s rowing out of there.

      After a while I feel like carving, so I take my knife and run up through the yard to the stable. But when I pull open the door, I see Sigrid lying on her back in the middle of the carrot-top heap. And right there on top of her – sitting right there on top of her! – is Alvar, biting her hand. He jumps up and curses at me. I slam the door and run.

      I don’t run inside the house. What I’m feeling is too strange to go inside – so strange that I need to be alone with it for a while. So I run around to that room at the back of the barn where we usually shoot the pigs. I sit down on a milk pail and put my head in my hands. I’m trying to get that picture of Alvar and Sigrid out of my head, but I can’t seem to do it. And at last, I figure the only way I can get rid of it is if I do something really different, something so dangerous and exciting that it’s bound to make everything else seem like nothing. So I sneak into the hen house and scare away a hen that’s sitting on her eggs. Then I feel around under the hay with my hands. I once got a cigarette from one of the neighbor kids and that’s where I hid it, along with a pack of matches. But I’m nervous, so when I go to light it, I accidently drop the burning match and it starts a little fire in the straw on the hen house floor. Real quick I pour a bowl of milk over it, and it dies out. But it still smells like smoke in here.

      I go and sit down again on the milk pail in the slaughtering room. It’s totally dark in here, and the little bits of light coming through the cracks in the barn wall make the threshing machine, with all its wheels and belts, look like some kind of giant ghost animal that just creeped into its dark cave. The rain’s knocking lightly against the splintered roof and the cows are chewing in their stalls – actually, that kind of sounds like rain, too. All of a sudden Sigrid comes walking in with a lantern and a couple of milk pails. When she catches sight of me, she puts them down on the floor and comes right up to me. And with the light coming up from underneath, her face gets all these terrible shadows all over it, and it’s pretty scary. I scream out, but she grabs hold of my arm and pinches, long and hard.

      “You tell Tora or the old man …,” she says, “and I’ll pinch you in the throat so bad you’ll never say another word again.”

      Then she lets go of me, picks up the pails and the lantern and heads into the stall. When they see her, the cows stand up, grunting softly, chains rattling like a gang of prisoners.

      When I go inside Grampa is sitting on the daybed, looking totally different. Mama must’ve made him get into his best suit of clothes. He hasn’t wore it since last year at Gramma’s funeral. He looks way too white in all those black funeral clothes, like all the blood has run clear out of him. There’s a red scratch on his cheek that sticks out like a thin mouth, but the rest of him is pure white. He looks tired, too. Doesn’t seem to know what’s going on around him. I wonder if he even knows his only sister that he hasn’t seen in twenty years is coming in about a half an hour.

      Mama’s standing there combing her hair in front of the dresser with the mirror on it. She went and put on her best dress. And the wristwatch that’s broken, the one she got from my daddy, she even put that on. I go and turn on the radio. It’s in the middle of the weather: Eastern Svealand and the coast of Southern СКАЧАТЬ