The pact between Trond and his father

The pact between Trond and his father is an unspoken understanding that gives shape to their closeness across years of absence, reunion, and disappointment. It is never presented as a formal agreement: its clearest declaration is a secret smile and exchanged nods, which Trond reads as confirmation that the two of them share a special bond. Because that understanding is carried in small gestures rather than explained aloud, it can reassure Trond and leave him uncertain at the same time.

Origins in Separation

During the German occupation of Norway, Trond’s father was often away for months at a time. In 1942, while Trond lived with his family beside the Oslo fjord and went to school, his father was looking for a place to think and for a hiding place and base for journeys to Sweden with papers and sometimes films for the Norwegian Resistance. The boy imagined the journeys he and his father would make together after the Germans had been defeated, while the father’s actual work kept them apart. Trond does not describe that distance as evidence that his father had forgotten him. He is sure that both he and his sister held a special place in their father’s heart, and believes that his own place may have been especially close because he was a boy and his father was a man. Yet affection could not give him the everyday knowledge of his father he felt a son ought to have. Each time his father returned, Trond sensed that he had changed a little and found he had to concentrate to hold on to him. The pact answers this insecurity not by making the absences disappear, but by giving Trond a private sign that their connection has endured them.

The Return and the Silent Recognition

After the war, Trond and his sister watched from the house as their father slowly walked up Nielsenbakken from Ljan Station, coming home from Sweden after an absence of eight months. The family had heard nothing until two days before his return. He wore a worn grey suit and carried a grey sack with something like a fishing rod poking out; he appeared uninjured, but moved as if surrounded by silence. Trond’s mother ran to him, and his sister followed her into the road. Trond, shy and unable to join their spontaneous welcome, stopped by the letter box and watched them cling to their father. Then his father looked over their shoulders and found Trond’s eyes. They nodded to each other; his father gave him a faint smile that Trond understood to be meant for him alone. That exchange is the pact’s defining moment. It does not displace the rest of the family’s reunion, but gives Trond a distinct place within it: he believes that, from then on, the relationship between father and son has its own private understanding. At twelve, he experiences the moment as a shift in the direction of his life, away from his mother and toward his father. His later qualification that he may have been too eager keeps that conviction open to doubt: the pact is real as Trond’s experience, but the scene does not establish that father and son have agreed to its meaning in words.

The Summer Bond Under Strain

In the later summer, after the timber has been sent off, Trond again wants his father’s attention and shared time. His father seems restless. He reads by the river, lying in a moored rowing boat or on rocks beneath the cross pine, and appears to Trond either not to be thinking about what happened there in the winter of 1944 or to be deliberately keeping his expression calm. Trond suspects that his father’s attention is fixed instead on the timber, especially when he raises his head to look downriver. The boy is provoked by this concern: if the two of them have a pact, he thinks, they ought to spend what remains of the summer together before it is gone. The disappointment is sharpened by a plan his father had proposed after they arrived: a three-day outing on horseback using Barkald’s horses. Trond had welcomed the idea, but it had not been mentioned again. He had already ridden with Jon, an excursion that did not go well, and he is surprised when the prospect of riding with his father returns. The episode shows that the pact does not guarantee the companionship Trond hopes for. He takes his father’s attention to other matters personally, and measures the present against the intimacy he believes they share.

Gesture, Intimacy, and Meaning

When Trond’s father reaches out a hand, Trond takes it; his father squeezes hard enough to nearly hurt, but does not pull him up. Instead, he drops to his knees and embraces him. Trond is startled. They have been good friends, and he looks up to his father more than any other grown man, but they are not accustomed to embracing. He lets himself be held, uncertain where to put his hands and unwilling either to push his father away or to return the embrace in the same way. The embrace ends without explanation. His father lets Trond go, helps him to his feet, gives him the reins, and brushes dirt from his shirt before becoming his usual self again. The return to practical, familiar gestures matters: affection appears suddenly, but does not turn into a speech defining their relationship. They mount their horses and ride toward Sweden, crossing a border after which, Trond observes, everything looks the same but feels different. The pact likewise joins outwardly ordinary moments to an inward change in meaning. It is Trond’s way of naming a bond that survives absence and is renewed by looks, touch, and shared activity, while the gaps between what he hopes for and what his father does remain part of it.