The Last Wild Horses by Maja Lunde

Author:Maja Lunde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Eva

I took the chance of using the car one final time to drive down to the harbor. It was Friday but there was but a single, solitary fishboat alongside the quay. This is how it had been the past few times I’d come here. Nobody came here any longer, to buy or sell.

The owner of the boat was the same fisherman who had sold me the cod the day I picked up Louise. He was in the process of packing up, stacking empty Styrofoam boxes on top of each other, securing them with a rope. I went over to him. When he noticed me, he looked down at the ground.

“Caught them this morning,” he mumbled and nodded toward three small saithe in a lone crate on the dock.

“I didn’t come to buy fish,” I said. “I have nothing to trade.”

He turned back to his work tightening the final loose end and coiling up the remainder of the rope.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said. “Her name is Louise, she has auburn hair, is my height. I ran into her the last time I was here trading with you. Her Norwegian’s a bit broken.”

“A foreigner?” he said. “Refugee.”

“She’s French.”

“Illegal,” he said.

This startled me. The distinction between legal and illegal . . . it had been several years since I’d heard anyone mention it. The borders had fallen; everyone came now, or left, nobody was legal, everyone was illegal, me, him, it no longer made any difference.

“She was staying with me,” I said. “She was my guest.”

“I haven’t seen anyone,” he said. “There’s nobody down here anymore. The fish is rotting, as you can see.”

Then I noticed that his fish was dull and the color a bit off. He’d lied about when it had been caught.

“You’ll have to eat it yourself,” I said.

“I’m sick of fish.”

“I can bring milk one day,” I said. “Later.”

Then I quickly walked toward the car.

“Hey,” he shouted after me. “Things might have been fine, you know, things might have been fine had it not been for your kind.”

“What?” I turned around.

“We would have managed to secure the borders. We could have protected what is ours. We still would’ve had . . . everything we had before.”

Milk. Why had I promised him milk?

I opened the car, did not dignify the fisherman with even a glance. At that moment, I noticed smoke rising out of the chimney of Einar’s house.

She couldn’t be there?

I stood beside the open door of the car. Why would she be there, with him?

Then I closed the door again and walked up the hill.

Long before I turned the corner, I heard the sound of wood chopping. He was standing in the yard, an axe in his hand, splitting log ends with a single stroke.

“Well, what do you know.”

“Hello.”

He was apparently a bit rattled by the sight of me here, that I had sought him out, because he dropped the axe on the ground.

For a moment, I considered the distance to it, three meters, perhaps, if I moved quickly, I could run over and snatch it away from him.

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