Trond

Trond is the remembered boy and retrospective narrator whose account of his father changes as he learns more about the man’s wartime life and recalls their last summer together. The distance between the child waiting for his father and the sixty-seven-year-old who revisits those memories gives his story its central tension: affection persists, but knowledge arrives late, and some losses cannot be repaired by understanding them.

Identity and Background

As a boy, Trond lives with his family beside the Oslo fjord and goes to school while imagining journeys he and his father will take once the Germans have been defeated and left Norway. His father is often away; during the occupation, months can pass without Trond seeing him. When his father returns, he seems changed in ways the boy cannot identify. Each homecoming brings a slightly different man, and Trond has to concentrate to hold on to the person he knows.

Trond’s sense of his father is not simply one of absence. He believes he and his sister hold a special place in their father’s heart, and imagines that he himself may matter especially because he is a boy and his father is a man. He loves him, yet sometimes feels shy around him, perhaps because he has not known him as closely as a son ought to know his father. The boy’s confidence in their bond coexists with an awareness that he cannot fully understand the adult who keeps leaving.

His Father and the Wartime Past

In 1942, while Trond is at home, his father comes to the village in search of a place where he can think and which can serve as a hiding place and base for trips to Sweden on behalf of the Norwegian Resistance. Those journeys carry papers and sometimes films. Trond, meanwhile, dreams of their future travels together, imagining a shared life after the war without knowing the full purpose of his father’s present movements.

The father’s character complicates the boy’s picture of him. Franz says he took to Trond’s father at once, and Trond recalls that men and women generally liked him. That popularity, he observes, did not come from being shapeless or from smoothing over conflict: his father smiled and laughed because it came naturally. Trond’s affection is real, but the father’s repeated absences and changing presence leave the boy conscious of how much he does not know.

After a morning with Franz, and after seeing his father on the jetty in front of Jon’s house, Trond feels that the valley, the forest, and even the familiar river seem altered. His father, too, appears different: perhaps closer, perhaps more distant, and at once easier and harder to understand. Trond cannot ask him about what he has learned from Franz. In his understanding, Franz has opened the door, not his father, and Trond is unsure whether he has a right to enter—or whether he wants to. New knowledge deepens the bond and makes it less accessible at the same time.

The Last Summer Together

Trond remembers the last days with his father through particular movements across the landscape. They ride through the forest, along a ridge above the river, and over the border into Sweden. At night they camp beneath an overhanging cliff beside a bonfire. Trond wakes and sees his father lying still, eyes open and hands beneath his head, watching the rock above him. In the morning his father has already watered and groomed the horses and is keen to continue. He moves tensely, though Trond hears no sharpness in his voice.

The journey’s familiar river reappears in Sweden, almost white through the trees. Trond recognizes it as their own river, though it lies farther south and well inside a country that is foreign to him. Looking back as an old man, he says those days cannot be separated from what came afterward: memory has taken colour from the future. Yet he can still enter that remembered landscape and feel the ride with his father as an experience held in the body, not merely a sequence of events.

The summer also has its unsettled private corners. At sixty-seven, Trond dreams of Jon’s mother as she was in 1948, while he appears as his present self; his father may also be somewhere in the background. The dream disturbs him, and he chooses not to examine it. He considers that the period when dreams could be put to use is past, and that he is no longer going to change anything. His decision to let the dream sink back among others he does not dare touch makes the remembered summer both present and deliberately unresolved.

Departure and Its Consequences

After the summer, Trond cycles into Oslo repeatedly, hoping to see his father arrive on the train from Elverum. Eventually he stops going. He describes the change as a curtain falling and as being born again: not merely a shift in weather or colour, but a change in the way fear and happiness feel. The waiting ends before the boy has received an explanation he can use to understand it.

Late that autumn, a short letter postmarked Elverum arrives, addressed to Trond’s mother. It thanks the family for their time together and says that circumstances have changed and his father will not be coming home. The letter authorizes Trond’s mother to collect the money owed in a Karlstad bank for the timber felled that summer and sent downriver. It offers no special greeting to Trond. He had believed he had earned one, and the omission gives the news a personal edge that the practical instructions cannot soften. He had told his mother nothing about what he and his father had been doing, only that his father would return when he had finished sorting things out.

When Trond later accompanies his mother to Karlstad to claim the money, he waits outside the bank, wearing the wool scarf left by his father. A confrontation with a man in the street brings him close to striking him; Trond recognizes that doing so would make his life different, and decides to leave the man alone. His mother calls from farther down the street to say the bank has arrived. The ordinary interruption marks the choice’s consequence without undoing its seriousness: Trond understands that a life does not necessarily arrive at the same destination by another route. He calls himself lucky, not because the past has been made whole, but because this particular choice remains unmade.

Memory and Narrative Role

The older Trond’s recollections do not resolve every uncertainty about his father. Instead, they show how a child’s conviction of being loved can coexist with bewilderment, and how later knowledge can draw someone nearer to the past while making its silences more apparent. His father’s work for the Norwegian Resistance, the ride across the Swedish border, the letter, and the missing personal greeting acquire their meaning in retrospect, as details the boy could not fully interpret when they occurred.

Trond narrates from a present in which he is sixty-seven and intends to stay where he is, if he can. His account moves between the old man’s unsettled dreams and the boy’s vivid but incomplete memories, without pretending that recollection can change what happened. The father does not come home, the letter does not give Trond the greeting he hoped for, and the remembered journey ends in a separation that the child could not yet name. What remains is the act of returning to those scenes—and the recognition that, even when the past can be entered again in memory, its choices and absences remain consequential.