Before I Burn: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

beside the stone church.
    By then I was already soaked in sweat. Quite an audience had assembled, because several writers were going to do readings, before and after me. I was nervous, as I always am before I mount a stage. I greeted my interpreter, a woman in her fifties who had lived in Stockholm over thirty years ago, but who nevertheless spoke almost fluent Swedish. When at length it was my turn the audience was in darkness, while up on stage a strong white light shone into my face. It was still suffocatingly hot, and the wind was so strong that it howled like thunder in the microphone. I don’t know whether it was the heat or the dry desert wind, or whether it was something I had eaten or drunk, or perhaps the intense light, but standing in front of the microphone, I suddenly felt unwell. Within a few seconds all my strength seemed to ebb out of me. My arms went slowly numb and my knees were giving way beneath me. I felt as if I was going to faint. The sea of faces began to heave. A mist veiled my eyes. It was like a bitterly cold afternoon a long time ago when I fell and hit my head on the ice of Lake Bordvannet, and my senses switched off one by one. Lying supine, I had felt the cold, hard ice against my head and shoulders and thought I was dying. So this was how I would die, I had time to think, on my back, ten years old, on my own in the middle of the lake. First my eyesight shut down, it slowly lost all colour, the forest disappeared, the pale sky above me, everything went, until I lay there completely blind. Next all the sounds faded and then I was gone, as the snow continued to fall quietly on my face. Now the same was about to happen to me here, watched by several hundred curious Italians. Or almost the same. For that was when I caught sight of some familiar faces down in the crowd. At first I didn’t know exactly who they were, but I was aware I knew them, and I couldn’t fathom why no one had come over to me before I went on stage, because surely it is natural enough for old acquaintances so far from home to say hello to one another? I was unable to place them, either, but then I spotted Lars Timenes, whom I remembered from when he lived in the former telephone exchange in Kilen. I clung to him, as it were, as he stood there, small and down at heel, while I called to mind how he used to sit in a chair in the middle of the sitting room, mercilessly illuminated by the constant flicker from the television. Straight afterwards I spotted Nils, my neighbour at home, standing in front of the stage as well, Nils, of whom I have no more than a fleeting memory, a friendly back as he walked away. There was Nils, and there was Emma, who used to sit staring at me from the corridor in the rest home when I went to visit my father, and there was her daughter Ragnhild, who was a grown-up yet still a child and who lived in another part of the country, but came home every summer and talked like a stranger. There was Ragnhild, and there was Tor, who one night left a party, went behind the house and shot himself, and there was Stig, next to whom I stood in the youth choir and with whom I sang beneath three Roman arches in a church, or in the chapel beneath a picture of a man with a hoe, or at the rest home in Nodeland. Stig, who went swimming and vanished from sight, who sank deeper and deeper and wasn’t rescued until it was too late, Stig who just managed to make it to voice-breaking age, he was there in the audience, too. And there were more. Teresa was there. Teresa, who taught me piano for a whole winter. Who always stood over my shoulder with a slight stoop, waiting, now she was there with all the others, watching. And there were more. Jon was there, who taught my father, who was always called Teacher Jon to distinguish him from other Jons in the area. I remembered Teacher Jon from the elk hunts because he used to set off before all the others. He set off while it was still dark and sat ready and waiting for several hours