Trond and his father

Trond and his father’s relationship is formed as much by absence as by closeness: wartime separation makes the boy long for a shared future, while a secret smile at their reunion seems to give him a special place beside his father. Years later, the memory remains vivid but unsettled. Trond carries the bond into adult life through remembered gestures, practical routines, and questions he has never managed to ask.

Identity and Early Separation

Trond’s father is loving and widely liked, but the boy does not experience him as a continuously present parent. During the German occupation of Norway, months can pass without Trond seeing him. His father returns changed each time, in ways the child cannot quite identify, so Trond has to concentrate to hold on to the person he knows. The distance is not evidence, to Trond, that his father has forgotten him: he believes he and his sister occupy a special place in their father’s heart, and perhaps that he, as a boy, holds an especially intimate place with a father who is a man.

That conviction coexists with shyness and incomplete knowledge. Trond likes his father, yet feels shy around him, partly because he does not know him as a boy ought to know his father. The relationship therefore begins with a gap between emotional certainty and lived familiarity: Trond trusts that he matters, while the long absences leave him struggling to understand the man who comes home.

The Summer of Work and Shared Purpose

In 1942, while Trond remains at home beside the Oslo fjord and attends school, his father comes to the river valley looking for a place to think and a base for journeys into Sweden. Those trips carry papers and sometimes films for the Norwegian Resistance. Trond imagines journeys he and his father will make together once the Germans have been defeated; his father’s actual work is secret, and the child is not told what the summer’s activities mean.

Franz shows Trond’s father an empty summer cabin on the east bank of the river. It has stood vacant for four years after a foreclosure, and Barkald owns the smallholding it belongs to. Its position matters: the nearest bridge is a twenty-minute walk away, and there are no buildings beyond the farmsteads until far across the Swedish border. The cabin gives Trond’s father both a useful base and a place where the work of concealment can look like ordinary rural life.

He takes pleasure in repairing and maintaining the property. He cuts grass, clears and burns the collapsed byre, fixes roof tiles, clears scrub from the riverbank, repairs the roof, replaces broken windowpanes, mends the stove, sweeps the chimney, and makes two chairs. The practical work is not incidental to Trond’s later sense of his father: it shows him as capable and absorbed in tasks that city life in Oslo, where the family rents three rooms and a kitchen, rarely allows him time or freedom to do.

The boy also remembers how closely his father attends to the timber they have felled. Each evening he returns to the piles beside the river, pushes at the trunks, checks their angle and distance from the water, and sometimes presses his face to the stripped wood to breathe in its resinous scent. Trond sees that the logs should slide into the river without difficulty, yet his father cannot leave them alone. The repeated inspection makes work a shared landscape of attention, even when Trond cannot know everything his father is thinking or planning.

Reunion and the Private Pact

After the war, Trond and his sister wait for their father’s return. They have not seen him for eight months and have heard nothing until two days before he is expected home. He arrives from Sweden in a worn grey suit, carrying a grey sack with something like a fishing rod protruding from it. Their mother runs down the road and throws herself at him; Trond’s sister follows her example, while Trond, embarrassed and shy, stops by the letter box.

From there he sees his father’s face change from confusion and helplessness. Then their eyes meet. Trond gives a slight nod, and his father answers with a faint smile that Trond understands as meant for him alone. In that brief exchange, the boy feels that they have made a pact and that, from then on, the relationship is especially between the two of them. At twelve, he experiences his life as shifting onto a new course, away from his mother and toward his father. Yet the adult narrator qualifies the memory: perhaps he was too eager to give the moment that meaning. The pact is emotionally decisive for Trond, but the text leaves open how fully his father understood it in the same way.

Departure, Memory, and Unanswered Questions

The intimacy Trond associates with that summer and reunion does not become a stable, openly discussed understanding. Late that autumn, a short letter arrives from Elverum, addressed to Trond’s mother but carrying all three family names inside. His father thanks the family for their time together, says circumstances have changed, and explains that he will not come home again. He provides authorization for Trond’s mother to collect the money owed for the timber at a bank in Karlstad. There is no special greeting to Trond, who had thought he had earned one. His mother’s single question about the timber underscores how much of the summer’s work and purpose Trond has never explained to her.

The letter turns their closeness into a lasting absence, without resolving what the relationship meant to either of them. In later reflection, Trond insists that his father did not flee to a far-off country to make a new life; he believes his father stayed by the river, where he wished to be. At the same time, he wonders whether Lars had taken a place in his life that should have been his, and whether years that belonged to him had instead been lived by someone else. He has never found the courage to ask Lars directly. The question reveals how the old bond remains entangled with uncertainty about the father’s choices and the lives shaped by his departure.

In the present, ordinary acts renew the connection without settling it. Trond struggles to light the stove on the first attempt, unlike his father, who always managed it; later, when Lars lights a fire quickly in Trond’s house, the percolator’s familiar crackle brings back the person with whom Trond once drank coffee every morning, although he cannot summon her face. His memories of riding through the forest with his father and crossing into Sweden remain bodily vivid. The past is no longer simply a foreign country to him: with concentration, he can enter it again. That access preserves the closeness, but it also preserves its limits—the affection was real, the parting was consequential, and the conversation that might have explained it never took place.