My Struggle: Book 3 Read Free Page B

they can become frightened or aggressive themselves and go on the attack. If you’re not afraid they are nice to you.
    How that occupied my mind. How could they
smell
fear? What did fear
smell
like? And was it possible to pretend you weren’t frightened, so that the dogs would smell that and wouldn’t notice the
real
feelings that lay beneath?
    Kanestrøm, who lived two houses up from us, also had a dog. It was a golden retriever called Alex and as meek as a lamb. It ambled after Herr Kanestrøm wherever he went, but also after every one of the four children if it could. Kind eyes and, somehow, gentle, friendly movements. But I was even afraid of this one. Because when you came into view on the hill and were about to go in to ring the doorbell it barked. Not tentative, friendly, or inquisitive barking, but vigorous, deep-throated, and resonant. Then I would stop in my tracks.
    “Hi, Alex,” I might say if no one was around. “I’m not frightened, you know. It’s not that.”
    If someone was there I would feel forced to carry on, act as if nothing were happening, plow my way through the barking, as it were, and when the dog was in front of me, its jaws agape, I would bend down and pat it a couple of times on its side with my heart pounding and every muscle trembling with fear.
    “Quiet, Alex!” Dag Lothar would say, as he came running up the narrow gravel path from the cellar door or rushing from the front door.
    “You’re frightening Karl Ove with your barking, you stupid dog.”
    “I’m not frightened,” I would counter. Dag Lothar would just look at me with a kind of stiff smile, which meant “Don’t give me that.”
    Then off we went.
    Where did we go?
    Into the forest.
    Down to Ubekilen, to a bay.
    Down to the pontoons.
    Up to Tromøya Bridge.
    Down to Gamle Tybakken.
    Over to the plastic boat factory.
    Up into the hills.
    Along to Lake Tjenna.
    Up to B-Max.
    Down to the Fina gas station.
    Unless, that is, we just ran about in the road where we lived, or hung around outside one of the houses there, or sat on the curb, or in the big cherry tree no one owned.
    That was everything. That was the world.
    But what a world!
    An estate has no roots in the past, nor any branches into the skies of the future, as satellite towns once had. Estates arrived as a pragmatic answer to a practical question, where are all the people moving into the district going to live, ah yes, in the forest over there, we’ll clear some plots and put them up for sale. The only house there belonged to a family called Beck; the father was Danish and had built the house himself in the middle of the forest. They didn’t have a car, or a washing machine, or a television. There was no garden, only a drive made from pounded soil in among the trees. Piles of wood under tarpaulins and, in the winter, an upturned boat. The two sisters, Inga Lill and Lisa, went to the local middle school and looked after Yngve and me for the first years we lived there. Their brother was called John, he was two years older than me, wore strange, homemade clothes, wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in what we were interested in, and devoted his attention to other matters, which he never told us about. He built his own boat when he was twelve. Not like us, not like the rafts we tried to cobble together from dreams and a lust for adventure, but a proper, real rowboat. You would have thought he would be bullied, but he wasn’t, in a way, the distance was too great. He wasn’t one of us and he didn’t want to be. His father, the cycling Dane, who perhaps had nurtured an urge to live alone in the middle of the forest ever since his time in Denmark, must have been mortified when the plans for the estate were drawn up and approved and the first construction machinery rolled into the forest just beyond his house. The families who moved in were from all over the country and all of them had children. In the house across the road lived Gustavsen, he was a fireman, she