Lars

Lars is Trond Sander’s neighbor, a quiet and systematic worker whose unexpected disclosures reveal how thoroughly loss and departure have shaped his life. A shared day cutting a birch becomes more than practical help: as Lars and Trond work, eat, and talk, the present-day rhythm of labor gives way to the history of a farm Lars was expected to inherit, a brother he accidentally killed, and a home he has not seen since he was twenty.

Work and Bearing

In the present-day narrative, Lars is between sixty and seventy. He and Trond attack a birch from opposite sides with chainsaws, wearing earmuffs against the noise. They cut off the branches, saw useful wood into manageable lengths, and separate the material Trond can burn later. The work is dangerous, requiring each man to keep the moving chain under control. Trond watches Lars closely and admires the way he bends and shifts his weight to give the saw access to the trunk while protecting his body. Lars’s movements look practiced and economical; Trond’s understanding follows his observation, as he first absorbs the technique and only gradually comprehends its logic.

The contrast between Lars’s different kinds of movement is telling without requiring a claim about what he thinks. Trond finds him more elegant with a heavy saw than on the road with Poker. In the yard, Poker growls at his master, but Lars turns away without looking down or giving a command. The dog eventually follows him down the hill toward his cottage, reluctantly. Lars’s manner remains spare and self-contained: he thanks Trond for the meal formally, as though he is ill at ease as a guest, and seems more comfortable outdoors with an axe or saw. The next day’s work is already agreed upon: they will deal with the birch root using chains. Lars leaves his gloves behind, and Trond notes that they can be collected later.

The Farm and Its Succession

Over the meal, Lars explains that he was supposed to take over the farm in his home village. His account makes clear why the succession seemed his due: he was the only son at home, had worked on the farm every day of his life, and had never taken a holiday. Jon was away at sea, and Odd was dead. Lars’s father had also disappeared from the household. In 1948, after breaking his leg and injuring his shoulder, he was taken to hospital in Innbygda. No one knew what was wrong with him, Lars says, and he never returned.

Years later, Jon came home from the sea and announced that he was ready to take over the farm. He was twenty-four and claimed that it was his right. Their mother did not object or speak up for Lars. Lars remembers her expression, particularly that she did not look directly at him. His account registers the injury of that moment through what went unsaid as much as through the decision itself: the farm was the only work he knew, yet his mother did not intervene on his behalf.

Jon’s absence had left traces in postcards. Lars remembers the names of distant ports—Port Said, Aden, Karachi, and Madras—and the name M/S Tijuka, stamped on the envelopes. He had followed the ship’s routes in a school atlas, learning the geography of places he had never visited. When Jon finally returned, Lars thought he looked thin, slouched, nervous, and tetchy, and doubted that he could run a farm. But Lars also recognized the force of Jon’s claim: there was nothing he could do. In his telling, a long familiarity with the farm did not outweigh the right Jon asserted.

Leaving Home and Its Aftermath

Asked what he did after Jon took the farm, Lars describes leaving on the day of his twentieth birthday. He has not been home since—not even for five minutes. The bluntness of this account contrasts with the long history behind it: the daily labor that had made the farm his expected future, the father who vanished after going to hospital, and the brother whose return displaced him. Lars does not spell out every cause of his departure, but the sequence makes the rupture legible without turning it into a simple explanation.

He has not seen his mother since he was twenty. When Trond asks whether she is still alive, Lars says he does not know and never tried to find out. The admission extends his estrangement beyond the farm itself. His account gives no later meeting, message, or search to soften that distance; not knowing has become part of the fact of his separation. Trond sits with the silence that follows. Lars then asks whether he may smoke indoors, and the conversation returns, briefly, to the ordinary conditions of the meal.

Odd’s Death and the Burden of Memory

Lars’s history of leaving is bound to an earlier family loss. When Lars was a child, his mother was rowing upriver with a frightened stranger concealed in the boat, while Lars played on the kitchen floor with his twin, Odd, unaware of what was happening outside. The account places that innocent play beside the future neither twin could know: three years later, Lars would shoot Odd with Jon’s gun. The juxtaposition does not make the childhood scene an explanation for the shooting; it gives the reader the distance between a child’s unknowing present and the irreversible event waiting ahead.

Lars eventually states the fact plainly: he shot his brother. Trond answers that Lars did not know the gun was loaded and tells him it was not his fault. The brief exchange brings into the open what the long history of Lars’s family has carried: Odd is not merely the brother whose death left Lars alone at home, but the brother Lars himself killed. Lars’s confession does not erase the accident or resolve its burden. Its force comes from the difference between the directness of his words and the silence that has surrounded the event in their conversation.

Labor, Repetition, and Narrative Role

A remembered riverside scene offers a quieter counterpart to the present-day work. Lars, still young, sits beside the water breaking coarse twigs into equal lengths and stacking them between two upright twigs, arranging a miniature pile of logs. Trond praises the result; Lars answers that it is only a few twigs. The small construction recalls, in miniature, the actual woodwork later shared by the two men. Across the scenes, arranging and cutting wood are concrete activities rather than symbols that need to explain Lars’s whole life; their recurrence lets the narrative connect a remembered boy to the older man working beside Trond.

Lars’s character emerges through what he does and what he chooses to disclose: careful work, formal hospitality, a farm succession he could not prevent, a departure from which he never returned, and a brother’s death he finally names. Trond’s attention to Lars’s movements and pauses supplies a frame for the account, but Lars’s own sparse statements carry its turning points. The chainsaw’s controlled danger in the present sits beside the uncontrollable consequences of the past. By making the conversation arise during shared labor and a meal, the narrative lets practical companionship coexist with painful knowledge; neither cancels the other.