Now he was holding the car. The little blue-and-black car he’d gotten from the boy he’d chatted with that first time. It was the same car. No, it was the same make. He wasn’t exactly an expert, but surely it was the same make as his own car? Yes. Kalle, that was the boy’s name, and it had been such fun, sitting in the car and talking to Kalle. What’s that you’ve got? Can I take a look? Hmm. Lovely, isn’t it? I’ve got a car too. It looks just like this one. But a little bit bigger. No, not just a little bit. A lot bigger! Much, much bigger! It’s the one we’re sitting in now. We can go for a little drive in this car, and you can drive your car at the same time, Kalle.

But that isn’t what had happened. Not that time.

He drove Kalle’s car over the floor, through the living room and then over the threshold into the kitchen, brrrmmm,

Brrrmmm; it echoed all round the room when he imitated the sound of the engine, Brrrrmmmmm!

And now he was opening the door of the big car. The sweat was still there on his brow. Worse than ever.

He drove. He knew where he was going. His face hurt because he was clenching his teeth so hard. No, no, no! He only wanted it to be fun. Nothing else, nothing else, but as he drove he knew that it would be different this time, and so it didn’t matter that when he tried to turn left he actually turned right at the first intersection, and then at the second one.

He could have driven with his eyes closed. The roads followed the streetcar tracks. He followed the streetcar tracks. He could hear the streetcars even before he saw them. The rails glinted in the sun, which was still shining. He kept as close to them as possible, because when he did that he didn’t feel so frightened.

13

THE LIGHT OVER THE FIELDS WAS AS SOFT AS WATER. IT SEEMED as if everything was sinking down toward the ground. Trees. Rocks. Fields glowing black, the soil plowed into furrows, like a sea that had stiffened and would not thaw and come to life until the spring.

What am I doing? What have I done? What have I done?

He could see a tractor in the distance. He couldn’t hear anything, but saw that it was moving. It had been working out there in the fields for so long that its paint had rubbed off and disappeared, and so everything out there was the same color, the machine and the countryside, the same rubbed-off November glow that always seemed to be gliding through the day toward dusk.

He felt calmer now, after driving for an hour, but he knew that was only temporary, just as everything all around him was temporary. No. Everything around him was not temporary. It’s eternal, he thought. It’s bigger than anything else.

I wish I loved it, but I hate it.

He turned in through the gates that seemed to have acquired a new layer of rust on top of the old one. The farm road was almost the same as the fields out there, churned up by the tractor wheels that were still rotating out on the prairie.

He was standing in the farmyard now.

I once dreamed about the prairie. I could have had a horse and ridden through that glade and never come back.

I could have flown in the sky. Lots of people could have seen me.

I’ll do that one day.

The wind was whipping pieces of straw and twigs into a circle in the middle of the yard.

There was a smell of dung, as always, and straw and seeds and soil and rotten leaves and rotten apples and rotting wood. The smell of animals lingered on even though there were no animals left.

Not even Zack. He walked over to the dog pen that seemed to be hovering above the ground, as if waiting for the wind to come and whisk it away over the fields and roads.

He missed Zack. Zack was a friend when he needed a friend, and then Zack had passed away and everything had been as it had always been.

He heard the tractor approaching down the road, and soon it would grunt its way in through the gate and stop more or less where he was standing now.

He turned around. The old man parked the tractor, turned off the engine, and clambered down in a way suggesting habit rather than agility. His body would keep on moving as per routine long after it had lost all its softness.

All its softness, he thought again. When you’re a child everything inside you is soft and everything outside you is hard, and you eventually become hard as well.

The old man limped up to him.

“Been a long time,” he said.

He didn’t reply.

“I didn’t recognize the car,” said the old man.

“It’s new.”

“It don’t look new,” said the old man, staring at the hood.

“I mean it’s one you haven’t seen before.”

The old man looked at him. There were specks of dirt on the old man’s face. He’d always looked like that. It had nothing to do with age, didn’t mean that he could no longer take care of his personal hygiene or anything like that.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” the old man asked. “It’s the middle of the day, a weekday.” He looked up at the sky as if to get confirmation of the time. Then he looked back at his visitor and snorted: “But you couldn’t have driven your streetcar here.” He snorted again. “That’d been something to look at.”

“It’s my day off,” he said.

“A long way to drive.”

“Not all that far.”

“You might as well live at the other side of the globe,” said the old man. “What could it be?” He looked up again at the Big Calendar in the Sky. “Is it four years since you were last here? Five?”

“I don’t know.”

“Typical.”

He heard the beating of wings overhead. He looked up and saw a few crows flying from the cowshed to the farmhouse.

“Now that you’re here you’d better have a cup of coffee,” said the old man.

They went in. He recognized the smell in the hall, and suddenly he was back here again, but at a different time.

He was a little boy again.

Everything in the house looked just the same as before. There was the chair he used to sit on at that other time. She had sat opposite him, big, red.

She had been nice, at first she had, that was when he could still feel that his boyish body had softness in it, when it still wasn’t too late.

Was that the way it was? Did he remember correctly?

It belonged to that other time. Then those misters and ladies had decided that he shouldn’t live with his mom. He’d gotten a foster father, and the old man was fussing at the stove now and the water was bubbling away after a while, and the old man produced a couple of cups and saucers from the cupboard behind him.

“Yes, nothing’s changed, as you can see,” he said, and served up a little basket full of buns, still in their plastic wrapping.

“Yes.”

“Not as neat and tidy as it used to be, but apart from that, nothing’s changed,” said the old man.

He nodded. Assumed it was a joke.

The old man served coffee, then sat down again and looked at him just as he used to do, with one eye sinking down and the other lifted up.

“Why did you come here?”

“I don’t know.”

He’d been back a few times. Perhaps because this was the nearest he’d had to anywhere that could be called home. And he’d liked the countryside, no doubt about that. All those smells.

“I wrote,” he said.

“That’s not the same thing.”

He took a sip of coffee that tasted like the soil in the fields outside must taste, or the tar that had been used to upgrade the farm road when he used to live here. That was a smell to remember.

“What are you after, then?” said the old man.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything. Do I have to want something?”

The old man drank some coffee and took a bun, but only held it in his hand.

“I’ve got nothing to give you,” he said.

“Since when have I asked for anything?”

“Just so as you know,” said the old man, who then took a bite of the bun and kept on speaking with his mouth full. “There’s been a break-in here. In the cowshed, just imagine that. Somebody breaks into a cowshed where there’s no animals and nothing to steal. For Christ’s sake.”