Trond’s father and Jon’s mother

Trond’s father and Jon’s mother are joined by an intimacy that crosses the river and the boundaries of their families, becoming entangled with the village’s covert wartime traffic. She repeatedly travels upriver to his cabin, ostensibly to cook, but her visits also coincide with moments of danger and consequence. Trond’s later memories preserve the relationship in charged fragments: a kiss at the jetty, two adults sitting close beside a bonfire, and a journey that deliberately avoids the place where he saw them together.

Visits Upriver and the Cover of Ordinary Life

Jon’s mother rows upriver once or twice a week, sometimes carrying food and sometimes what the villagers call mail, to reach Trond’s father at his cabin. The practical explanation, as Barkald tells it at the shop, is that she cooks proper meals for a man living alone, keeping him from becoming weak and unable to do the work expected of him. Trond knows his father can cook well when necessary; when the two of them are alone, they often eat simple country food, especially fried eggs. The account of her visits therefore sits beside a domestic fact that makes her assistance seem less indispensable than it is presented to be.

Her journeys also belong to the larger secret movement through the village. The traffic carries more than mail across the border to Sweden: strangers are hidden and moved without lights or conversation. Jon’s father refuses to take part, but does not openly oppose the activity. He looks away when his wife takes the red-painted canoe upriver, and again when a city-dressed stranger is silently shown into the barn at twilight before being taken upriver by night. Jon’s mother’s regular visits to Trond’s father thus occupy two registers at once: the visible routine of food and household care, and the guarded passage of people and information. The relation between the two adults is set within this atmosphere of concealment, though the evidence does not reduce their closeness to a mere cover for the work.

A Bond Seen Through Trond’s Memories

Trond’s father’s own recollection of one departure gives the journeys a more personal weight. Standing in stockinged feet and listening, he hears his wife’s oars enter the water and the iron creak against wood as she rows. He recognizes the strength of her arms from the embraces they have shared over many nights and years. Yet she is again going upriver to visit the man from Oslo in the cabin, and this time she has a trembling stranger in the boat. Trond’s father understands that her visits recur whenever something is wrong or something important is about to happen. In harsh daylight on the snow, he looks once across the yard, makes a choice he will regret, closes the door, and sits down. The twins continue playing in the kitchen, unaware that anything has changed.

Trond later remembers seeing his father kiss Jon’s mother by the river and jetty at night, in a moment that seemed to him almost final. The kiss becomes a fixed point in the geography of the relationship: the river path is not simply a route between cabin and village, but the place where Trond encountered evidence of an intimacy he could not easily absorb. Years later, riding with his father, he notices that they do not take the bend toward that jetty. They follow another path east, through birches and across a cold stream, toward Furufjellet. The detour does not erase the remembered scene; it shows how the landscape can carry it forward even when the riders choose another way.

The Bonfire and the Son’s Interruption

At the bonfire, Trond finds his father sitting beside Jon’s mother on a log. They are not pressed together as they had been on the jetty that morning, but they remain close, their relaxed posture appearing to the boy almost smug. Franz sits opposite them with a tin plate and invites Trond to sit on a nearby stump, reminding him that food is necessary because more work remains. Trond refuses the place offered to him. Instead, he pushes behind the pair and wedges himself onto their log, forcing his way between them and pressing especially hard against Jon’s mother.

The gesture is physical before it is fully explained. Trond feels sadness as well as aggression in the force of his movement; Jon’s mother pulls away, and his father becomes stiff. Trond announces that the spot is a great place to sit, turning an act of displacement into a pointedly casual remark. His intrusion makes the adults’ closeness visible as a conflict within the group, not just as a private bond. It also gives the remembered relationship a distinctly unequal perspective: the adults may occupy the log with ease, but for the boy their ease sharpens irritation and prompts him to claim space between them.

Intimacy, Secrecy, and Distance

The relationship is conveyed through actions and remembered bodily details rather than through an explicit account of its terms. There are the embraces known to Trond’s father, the kiss witnessed by Trond, the recurring journeys upriver, and the quiet proximity at the bonfire. Alongside these signs stand departures, silences, and a door closed while the children remain in the kitchen. The adults’ closeness is therefore inseparable from the choices and omissions surrounding it: Jon’s father looks away, Trond’s father stays behind, and Trond himself later rides away from the jetty with his attention fixed on moving onward.

For Trond, these memories make the bond consequential beyond the two people involved. He sees it through a son’s partial understanding, registering the adults’ ease, then interrupting it, and carrying the image of the kiss into a later ride through the same landscape. The relation is neither explained away by the resistance work nor detached from it. Its visits and its secrecy share the river as their route, while the bonfire and the avoided jetty reveal how private intimacy becomes part of what the family must see, conceal, or remember.