Trond and Lars

Trond and Lars are elderly neighbors whose relationship takes shape through shared work, meals, and the difficult disclosures that work makes possible. Trond’s initial uncertainty about whether he likes Lars gives way to relief at his arrival and pleasure in working alongside him; later, Lars’s account of leaving home and his admission that he shot Odd make Trond a witness to the past Lars has kept at a distance.

A neighbor becomes a companion

Trond comes up the slope from the bridge with Lyra at his heels and finds Lars in his yard, holding a chainsaw in one hand and gripping a birch branch with the other. The branch barely moves when Lars rocks the tree, but the situation is plainly obstructing Trond’s home: the branch has torn down the gutter and presses against the shed door. Lars offers to deal with it, and Trond answers with an enthusiasm he recognizes as genuine. He has not been certain whether he likes Lars; now he allows that he may, and is relieved to have the help.

The encounter makes their neighborly relation concrete rather than merely sociable. Lars does not stop at offering assistance: he starts his own Husqvarna, cuts away the branch blocking the shed, and clears the door so Trond can retrieve his Jonsered. The two men then decide to continue rather than break off to drive into the village for fuel. Trond’s wish to avoid a social excursion and his satisfaction at staying with the job give the practical arrangement a personal dimension: company suits him, but it does not require him to perform sociability beyond what he wants.

Working side by side

With earmuffs on against the saws, the two men attack the birch from different angles. Trond describes them as a pair of slightly stiff men between sixty and seventy, bending over the wood and keeping their arms away from their bodies as they guide the chains. They cut the branches close to the trunk, divide them into usable lengths for firewood, and heap the unusable material for a later bonfire in the November darkness. The work is shared, ordered, and attentive to danger; each man handles a powerful tool while keeping its chain under control.

Trond watches Lars’s movements closely. He finds Lars systematic rather than brisk, and more elegant with a heavy saw at the trunk than when out on the road with Poker. As Trond observes how Lars bends, twists, and leans to balance his body against the saw’s pull, he begins to understand the practical logic of those movements. His own manner of working is altered by watching: for him, movement comes before comprehension. The chainsaw’s danger also sharpens his awareness of how quickly a strong body can be destroyed. That thought carries him back to the history of Lars’s family: in late autumn 1944, Lars’s mother rowed upriver for her life while Lars, still a child, played with his twin, Odd; three years later, Lars would shoot Odd with Jon’s gun. Trond’s present-day attention to Lars at work thus holds their shared task alongside a past neither man can undo.

A meal opens a private history

After the work, Lars and Trond sit down to eat. Their first minutes together are quiet; both keep their eyes on their plates, and Trond is content not to make conversation. He even slows his eating to make the meal last. The calm does not prevent disclosure. Lars eventually says he was supposed to take over the farm, meaning the family farm in the village. Trond asks which farm, though he knows there can be only one, and the slight delay reflects how readily his solitary inner conversation can blur into talk with another person.

When Trond asks what Lars did instead, Lars takes a deep drag on his cigarette and makes an unexpected, grotesque expression. Trond watches the performance without knowing what it means; its comic resemblance to a silent-film clown does not make the moment funny. Lars’s face tightens and twists before settling again, and his eyes are moist when he tells Trond that he left on his twentieth birthday and has not been home since, not even for five minutes. The disclosure gives a personal consequence to the earlier fact about the farm: Lars did not simply miss out on inheriting it; he cut himself off from home and never returned. Trond’s brief, astonished response leaves room for the weight of what has been said rather than turning it into an interrogation.

The burden of Odd’s death

In a later exchange, Lars tells Trond that he shot his brother. Trond turns back toward him, his mouth dry, and answers that he knows, adding that Lars did not know the gun was loaded. The moment makes Trond more than a companion in labor or a listener to Lars’s estrangement: he is someone who can acknowledge the killing without treating it as proof that Lars intended it. The earlier recollection has already placed the death in the history of the twins and connected the weapon to Jon; Lars’s blunt admission brings that history into their present conversation.

Across these encounters, Trond and Lars build closeness without an expansive show of affection. Their bond rests on assistance freely given, time spent working in parallel, and a quiet meal in which silence is allowed before painful facts emerge. Trond’s readiness to keep Lars company does not erase either man’s past, and his reassurance cannot reverse Odd’s death or Lars’s lifelong absence from home. It does, however, establish a rare form of trust: Lars can speak plainly about what happened, and Trond can hear him without reducing him to the worst act of his life.