To Siberia Read Free

and Grandfather are hardly ever in the same room together, and when they are Grandmother holds her head high and her neck stiff. Everyone can see it.
    I stand there getting used to the heavy darkness. I hear Jesper’s steps inside and the cows shifting about in the stalls, and I know without seeing them that most of them are lying down, they’re sleeping, they’re chewing, they bump their horns against the low dividing walls and fill the darkness with deep sounds.
    “Come on then,” says Jesper, and now I can see him right at the end, and I walk softly down the middle past the stalls, careful not to tread in the muck along the sides of the walkway. Jesper laughs quietly and starts to sing about those who walk the narrow path and not the broad road toward the pearly gates in the blue, and he mimics my mother’s voice and he does it so well I would have burst out laughing, but dared not in the presence of all these animals.
    “Come on now, Sistermine,” says Jesper, and then I step all the way up to where he is and he takes hold of my coat. “Are you still cold?”
    “A bit.”
    “Then you must do this,” he says, enters one of the stalls and pushes his way in between the wall and the cow lying there. He squats down and strokes her back and talks in a low voice I do not often hear him use, and she turns her head and edges nervously toward the far wall, but then she quiets down. He strokes her harder and harder and then cautiously lies down on her back, quite stiff at first and when he feels it is safe he goes limp and just lies there like a big dark patch on the patched cow. “Big animals have a lot of heat,” he says, “like a stove, you try it.” His voice is sleepy, and I do not know if I can manage, but now I’m sleepy too, so sleepy that if I don’t lie down soon I shall fall over.
    “Try the next stall,” says Jesper, “that’s Dorit, she’s friendly.”
    I stand in the walkway and hear Jesper breathing calmly and look in at Dorit in her stall until her broad back stands out clearly and then I take a big step over the gutter but not quite big enough, but now I don’t care, I’m too sleepy. I bend down and stroke Dorit’s back.
    “You have to say something, you must talk to her,” says Jesper from behind the wall, but I do not know what to say, all the ideas I think of are things I cannot say aloud. It is cramped in the stall, if Dorit turns around I shall be squeezed against the wall. I stroke her neck and lean forward more and start to tell the story of the steadfast tin soldier into her ear, and she listens and I know Jesper is listening behind the wall. When I reach the end where the tin soldier bursts into flames and is melting, I lie down on her and put my arms around her neck and tell her how the puff of wind comes in at the window and lifts up the ballerina and carries her through the room into the fire where she flares up like a shooting star and dies out, and when I have finished I dare not breathe. But Dorit is amiable, she hardly moves, just chews and the warmth of her body spreads through my coat, I feel it on my stomach and slowly I start to breathe again. It is Christmas Eve 1934 and Jesper and I lie there each in our stall each on our own cow in a cowshed where all things breathe and perhaps we fall asleep, for I do not remember anything very clearly after that.

 
     

    T he town we lived in was a provincial one at that time, in the far north of the country, almost as far as it was possible to travel from Copenhagen and still have streets to walk along. But we had earthworks going back two hundred years, and a shipyard with more than a hundred workers and a lunch-break siren that could be heard all over the town at noon. We had a harbor for fishing boats where the throbbing of the trawlers’ motors never stopped, and boats came in from the capital, from Sweden and from Norway. If you took the swaying wooden staircase to Pikkerbakken up from Møllehuset and stood by the