Trond and Jon’s mother

Trond and Jon’s mother are linked by the adolescent attachment Trond forms during the summer of 1948, when her ordinary kindness becomes charged for him by attraction and by her closeness with his father. Decades later, she remains present in his dreams: a figure from that summer who draws him back toward feelings he would rather leave unexplored. The relationship is chiefly known through Trond’s perceptions; the evidence does not establish that she shares his feelings or that they become a couple.

The Encounter by the River

During a timber-working day in 1948, Trond grows exhausted and rests beneath the memorial cross on a pine tree. The cross had been put up by Franz in 1944 for a man from Oslo killed there by German bullets. Trond falls asleep at once. When he wakes, Jon’s mother is kneeling beside him and asks whether he is hungry. The encounter is brief and practical, but Trond experiences it through the residue of a dream: for a moment, he imagines himself as the man remembered by the cross, alive and looking up at her, before that dream-image vanishes.

Trond realizes that he has been dreaming about her, though he cannot recall what happened in the dream. He does remember its intense warmth, and blushes while trying to get up. She tells him that the food is ready and smiles; he looks away. Her invitation is simply an act of welcome, and nothing indicates that she knows what he has dreamed or understands the force the encounter has for him. The imbalance between her unselfconscious care and his concealed response is central to how the connection is presented.

Attraction and the Shared Meal

At the bonfire, Trond sees his father sitting with Jon’s mother. They are still close, though less so than they had been together on the jetty that morning. Their relaxed ease irritates him. Franz offers Trond another place to sit and reminds him that he needs food before more work, but Trond declines that seat and takes the place between his father and Jon’s mother instead. He pushes himself into the limited space, particularly against her, and announces that it is a great place to sit.

The action is an unmistakable interruption of their closeness, but Trond’s own account also preserves his discomfort with what he does: the gesture makes him sad even as he goes through with it. Jon’s mother pulls away, and Trond’s father becomes stiff. The scene therefore gives his attraction a visible consequence. Rather than confessing or explaining his feelings, Trond acts on his irritation by inserting himself between the pair, changing the ease of the gathering. His father’s skeptical response does not resolve the tension, and the evidence gives no account of what Jon’s mother makes of Trond’s behavior beyond her immediate withdrawal.

His Father as a Third Presence

The connection cannot be separated from Trond’s awareness of his father. At the fire, it is specifically his father’s comfort beside Jon’s mother that provokes Trond’s irritation. Later, while they ride, his father asks whether Trond knows a woman as well. Trond claims that he knows her well and has visited her several times, although he admits that this is not strictly true. He is unsure whether his father means Jon’s mother, and wonders whether his father remains angry with him after the day they sent the timber off.

His father then asks about someone Trond’s own age. Trond answers that there is no one nearby: in two summers he has seen no girl his age for several kilometres, and he says that this suits him. His voice becomes stiff and hostile as he answers. His father agrees with him and laughs, while Trond demands to know what is amusing. The exchange does not settle whom the first question concerns, so it cannot be treated as proof that his father directly confronts him about Jon’s mother. It does, however, place Trond’s guardedness about women, his age, and his father’s questions in the same conversation.

The Relationship in Later Memory

More than fifty years later, at sixty-seven, Trond dreams of Jon’s mother as she was in the summer of 1948, while he himself appears at his present age. He thinks his father may also be somewhere in the dream, in the background or shadows. Trond identifies the dream as intimate and disturbing, but cannot bring himself to examine it. Even touching its meaning produces a tension he would rather avoid; he decides to let the dream sink back among others he does not dare explore.

His response connects the remembered attraction with his present choice not to revise or reopen the past. He considers the period when he could put his dreams to use finished and says that he is not going to change anything now; his plan is to stay where he is, if he can manage it. The dream does not reveal a later reunion or an outcome between him and Jon’s mother. Instead, it shows that the 1948 attachment remains emotionally unsettled in memory, bound up with the presence of his father and with Trond’s reluctance to interpret what he still feels.