I Refuse

by Per Petterson

  I ran for all I was worth when I heard her calling me, Tommy! Tommy! she shouted, but I couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear where her voice was coming from. I ran in circles, round and round staring up the road, staring down, but there was no one out there on the road, and I ran down the path between our house and the next and further across the field, after the dip, and we used to play in the dip, Jim and I, because they couldn’t see us from the windows. And there she was, I could see my mother by the low ridges, in her grey cape between the birches, in her warm coat in Birch Woods, we all called it, and the crooked pine was the tallest and was split from the top right down to the middle and from there it grew up again like two completely different trees and the one didn’t know what the other was doing. Lightning had struck the pine tree exactly on the night that I was born, someone had said, perhaps my father said, but I didn’t believe it, lightning striking, on the day I was born, come on, there were no thunderstorms at that time of year, and later in the day Jim was supposed to come, he was coming after dinner, to have cake.

  Behind Birch Woods the field went up to the ridge, and I ran as fast as I could, and our school was on the other side of the ridge, in Mørk, and we went there in the school bus every morning, every single day except Sunday. There had been a farm by Birch Woods called Bjørkerud, but now it was gone, along with the barn and hen houses and all the things you were supposed to find on a farm, like the tractor was gone and the plough behind the barn and the horse’s harness from the stable wall and the dog’s leash and the storehouse on pillars was gone and had been for all my living days, not a stone left standing. There was a pond there too, that had belonged to the farm, and there were ducks in the pond, or so my father said, he even said they had a house built on stilts in the water, a little house, the ducks’ house that is, when the farm was a farm. And what was more, the people who lived on the farm used the greenish water in the pond as their drinking water, my father said, and it sounded so sickening with the ducks swimming around in the green water doing all kinds of things in it, that anyone could drink that water.

  And that’s what I was thinking about as I raced away, that someone had drunk that devilish green water. I could see it before me as I ran, I could see them drinking it, their mouths opening to the glass, and it was from down by the pond that my mother was calling me, Tommy! Tommy! she called, Hurry! Hurry! He’s drowning! And then I pushed myself even harder, and I couldn’t feel my feet touching the ground, but of course they were, my feet, they were touching the ground, I couldn’t fly for God’s sake, but on the path down to the pond they were lost to me, for there was someone drowning and my mother couldn’t swim.

  It was a dog. It was Lobo in the water. I saw his dark head, and his grey beard, just sticking up from the pond, and he was stretching his neck for all he was worth. He looked so tired, he was old and his legs were so full of rheumatism that the joints could hardly bend, and every single day he made the trip up to the Slettens’ house on his four stiff legs to get a good sniff at close range and find out if their bitch was on heat. It took him twenty minutes up and twenty minutes down, and the bitch was on heat, she was on heat about twice a year, on the dot, like all bitches of the right age were, but Lobo had trouble mounting her from the rear, and it didn’t look stylish, no, it did not. Besides, he didn’t have it in him, everyone knew that, and no one could be bothered to chase him away, why would they. Let the dog have some fun for God’s sake, Sletten said, his days are numbered.

  He had a pistol in the kitchen drawer, my father said. Sletten had.

  She couldn’t swim, but Lobo couldn’t either, not with those sticks for legs, and I ran straight past her in her grey coat and threw myself into the pond. A thin sheet of ice had settled on the water overnight and was still there, and I hit it and it cracked around me like flatbread, and the water was cold, cold, cold. I grabbed his collar with one hand and was treading the green water and it wasn’t easy, moving forward with my shoes on, and my clothes, and Lobo’s feet couldn’t touch the bottom of the Bjørkerud pond and neither could mine. It was slippery, and sticky, and I had to drag him as I swam, and a few times I tried to push off with the tips of my toes, like I did when I took my swimming badge, but I couldn’t reach and Lobo couldn’t help me. He tried, but his body was like an anchor, a dead weight I had to pull through the water, and his black coat was short, so he must have been frozen stiff, Lobo, like the rest of him was stiff. I was just a boy then, he was older than me, but we had never been friends. I thought he was shifty, a sneaky lurker always on the lookout for a screw, and what the hell were you doing in the pond, I said, were you thirsty, Lobo, and I was so fond of that dog, I really was, I wouldn’t have been without him, not for a single day, and why did you come here for a drink, Lobo, I said, were you so thirsty, I said, was it too far to walk home.

  At long last I felt solid ground beneath my feet, and I hauled Lobo up the muddy slope at the end of the pond where the double pine was holding on tight with its long, gnarled and twisted roots, and my teeth were chattering beyond control, and they grew bigger in my mouth, and Lobo keeled over on to the grass like a block of wood. He was breathing in long gasps with a whistle at the back of his throat. Soon he would draw his last breath, a few more gasps and he was done for, no question about it. But then he just kept breathing, and I stood up in my sodden clothes. I was so cold. Everything was a sticky green, there were sticky green stripes across my wet, blue jumper, and in my mouth there wasn’t room for one more tooth, and my mother said to me, There’s a good boy, Tommy.

  TOMMY ⋅ SPRING 2006 ⋅ 1966

  THE TELEPHONE RANG in my office. I had just taken the lift from the garage and got out on the ninth floor in the new high-rise in Oslo close to the harbour front. I was still thinking about Jim. The bag. The reefer jacket. The dark woollen cap. Once upon a time his clothes had been so stylish, he was the first to have long hair out where we lived, the first to wear flared hipster pants, a reefer jacket and a neckerchief. A long-haired sailor on dry land. He looked fantastic.

  It was Upper Romerike police district calling. I said:

  ‘Hello, this is Tommy.’

  I was a bit out of breath, I hadn’t run a metre. I drank too much, that was why.

  ‘Could you come up here and collect your father.’

  ‘I don’t think my father’s alive,’ I said, and the policeman said:

  ‘He’s not so sprightly at the moment, I’ll give you that, but he’s not dead.’

  ‘Are you certain it’s my father,’ I said. ‘How can you know,’ and the policeman said:

  ‘Who else could it be.’

  I had been so sure he was dead. I tried to work out how old he might be now. Seventy-five, maybe. Or even older. So he was alive. It was hard to imagine.

  Back then, in 1966, we lived in Mørk. My father was a dustman. He worked on a dustcart. He was the man who stood on the footplate with his hands in gloves and the gloves round the steel bar at the back where the shiny, curved shutter door slammed down like a huge bureau top when the cart drove off, and creaked open when my father jumped from the footplate and the dustcart still moving, and him running into the sheds or along the kerb where most of the bins were. He pulled the square hundred-litre metal bins out or dragged them across the gravel and hoisted them up on to his shoulder and poured what was in them into the back of the cart and ran back with the empty bins to fetch more. Sometimes he took two at once, one in each hand, and hoisted them on to his shoulders in one parallel movement and walked over to the cart and leaned forward in a towering bow so that the garbage poured out on either side of his head. I had seen him do it many times. To me it was a disgusting sight.

  My father would never be one of the drivers who flew so high in their polished cabs not bothering to look out of the window while he slaved away along the road, not watching him while he showed off with the two bins at once, no, they didn’t, so, without an audience, he carried them, one on each shoulder, and was the strongest man in the district. N
o, not even then could they be bothered to look out of the window but instead sat with their hands on their knees hunched over the wheel half asleep waiting for my father to carry the bins back to their sheds and jump back on to the footplate again and smack the shiny metal, so they could drive the fifty or a hundred or two hundred metres to the next bins. He had a driving licence, my father, but they never let him drive. He never flew so high.

  He was incredibly strong. When the men stood out on the lawns in the evening lifting weights, lifting anything they could get their hands on, lifting milk churns and car wheels, lifting several at once, lifting flagstones and scrap metal and pumping it up and down until the skin on their biceps almost split, there was no one who could beat him. And so you would expect him to use his arms, or his fists, when he beat us. But he didn’t, he used his legs, and of course they were strong too, his legs, and it was logical if you gave it some thought, the way he ran up and down the road with the bins, that his legs would be strong as well.

  He used his boots. He kicked us. He kicked our bottoms from behind, and at times it was so painful, and for Siri and the twins it was really bad. They couldn’t take the punishment that I could and didn’t have the muscles back there to handle his kicks. But he didn’t discriminate, he treated both sexes equally. He kicked all four of us.

  In the evening when my father had fallen asleep with the TV still on, we got together in the room we shared on the first floor and pulled down each other’s pants and lay stomachs down bottoms up on one of the beds, showing each other the red and blue marks and the hard scabs where the skin had split and not quite healed yet, and we compared size and colour to see who had got the worst treatment that day or any other day when he was in the the mood, which he often was, and we all had our fair share, but normally it was me who got the most, because I was the eldest and a boy.

  It was sad to see the state of my sisters, and I calmed them down and said the nicest things about their behinds and said the bruises didn’t look as bad as they probably felt, and they would soon be pretty again, if that was what they were worried about. And it was. They were afraid they would not be pretty again soon enough, for it was difficult to sidle through the showers every single time they had gym at school, and they couldn’t turn and always had to keep their backs against the wall, and they didn’t know what to say if anyone asked them why they looked that way. As for me, I didn’t give a shit, and if anyone had asked me, I would have told them the truth, but they rarely did. They didn’t dare. Everyone thought I was scary.

  It wasn’t so easy for my sisters, though.

  One evening, when we were sitting together in our room, and I was about to pat them and stroke their behinds as I always did to comfort them and say they were pretty no matter how they looked, I felt a sudden urge to comfort them in that way and stroke them where it hurt the most, and it came in a rush that feeling, and overwhelmed me. And I patted them once and stroked them again, I stroked all three of them, one after the other, and then I turned to look out the window and my throat felt tight, and out there of course, the Easter snow lay high, a gleaming yellow in the light from the outside lamp by the door, and everywhere else it was dark. It looked so beautiful, it’s true, I had always liked snow when it looked like that, warm and yellow, as in a film with all the lights and the snow, a Christmas film that we all liked to see together, which was on every year on Christmas Day. But in the room the lamps were lit, and I stroked my three sisters again, and they were so lovely no matter how their behinds looked, and I wanted so much to comfort them in this way, more than I had ever done, and I saw myself sitting on the edge of the bed stroking them up and down with my hand, and it was then I realised that this could not go on. And I spoke my thoughts and said, I cannot go on like this, comforting you in this way, and the twins didn’t understand why and burst into tears. They needed that comfort, they said, you have to do what you’ve always done, they said, or else it will only get worse, and of course I could see that they needed the comfort, but it was too late now. It was too late because suddenly I had felt in my gut how much I wanted to stroke their behinds, I had felt the heat, and I had already stroked them too many times that evening. My palms told me how much I liked it. And then everything was changed, and it couldn’t be as it had been before. Only Siri turned and looked at me, and I knew she had understood what I had understood. That she couldn’t stroke my behind any more, nor I hers.

  I hated my father especially then, for he was the one who had kicked me into that room with the girls, the secret room that both existed and did not, which I now reluctantly had to leave because it was too late, because I had seen myself in my own mirror, seen my tanned hand on the girls’ white skin with the red and blue bruises from my father’s boot, and in this way he kicked me out again. That was how it felt, and I hated him for that, too.

  I hated my father. Everyone knew I hated my father. Jonsen, my only adult friend in the neighbourhood, knew it. They all did, right down to the end of the road, they knew I hated my father, and they eyed me warily and came out of their houses in the evening, and some joined my father in his childish games lifting scrap metal on the lawn and were such stupid cowards and then went back in and watched TV and went to work in the morning and came back and all the time waiting for what they knew was coming. And the few friends I had, caught the bus to school, which I did too, and came back and did their homework and watched High Chaparral on the Swedish channel at half-past seven, which I did too, if it suited my father, and they were all waiting for what was to come. But I wasn’t ready.

  At night I lay awake thinking of ways to kill him, and I took them with me, every single one, deep into my dreams where everything was distorted and twisted in the worst possible way. All the better, I thought. All the better. I was still afraid of him, but soon it would pass. In twelve months or maybe only six. So that’s what I was doing too, I was waiting. And the day would come in a blinding flash from the sky. And the clouds drawn asunder by mighty hands, and then the day did come, right out of the blue, and revealed itself to all. Everything fell into place. The sun bore down from a white sky and ricocheted from the windows on either side of the road and blinded me as I came down the steps. It was the Tuesday after Whit. I went to school on the bus and knew it was a very special day. I was restless even before I left the house, before my father had left for work. He didn’t start until later that day and was still in bed, and the hours I sat in the classroom dragged like a month of wet Sundays. When finally I stepped off the bus by our postbox at home, I felt impatient, excited.

  There were two others getting off at the same stop. We said ‘bye’, lifting our right hands in a grown-up way and they each went to their small houses, one up the road and one down, and neither of them was afraid of me. Willy wasn’t, he didn’t have the imagination. And Jim wasn’t. No, not Jim, he knew me through and through, he was my best friend. He walked backwards for a few metres, giving me that look. He had watched me ever since we came into the playground and knew that something was going to happen on that day, but he didn’t know what.

  ‘Anything you’ve been planning to tell me,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said, but then maybe I should have given him a sign, a very small sign he could just about decipher and take with him up the road and keep in his head, like a little ant, it was Jim, after all, but I gave him nothing.

  ‘Right,’ he said, looking a little disappointed, and he turned with his bag in his hand, we had stopped carrying satchels by then, it was embarrassing just to be seen with one on your back, and he walked up towards the house where he lived with his mother. She was a teacher at school, in Norwegian and Christianity, and had moved here from the west coast and pronounced her ‘r’s differently from the way we did, she just couldn’t let them go. His father I had never seen.

  ‘Jim,’ I said. He stopped and turned round, and I smiled and said: ‘It will be OK. Don’t think about it.’

  He looked at me. He stroked his cheek with the back of his hand.
It looked a little odd. As if his palms were grazed.

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  I smiled again. ‘It will be all right,’ I said.

  ‘OK.’ He gave a slight nod and turned round and flung the bag over his shoulder and went up the road to his house.

  I walked up the flagstone path to our door, and the door was ajar, and I entered the hall and dropped my bag on the floor and saw that under the hat shelf his working clothes were hanging from the hook in exactly the same way as they had when I left in the morning. They were worn and newly washed, but they still smelt of garbage. He could never get rid of that smell, none of us could, it had tainted everything we owned and neighbours talked about it behind our backs, it had settled on the house for good. I don’t know how it was possible for me to see that they were hanging there, the overalls, the jacket, in exactly the same way as they had before I left. I was a goddamn psychic.

  The twins were sitting silently on the first-floor stairs waiting with their hands between their knees. Something might have taken place here while I was away at school that had frightened them. I hoped not. But maybe they too knew something was going to happen.

  And I said to them:

  ‘Go over to the Liens and knock on the door.’ And right away they did as they were told.

  I walked through the ground floor and through the hall and the living room, and the door was wide open and gave on to the patch of grass behind the house. He was sitting in a shabby chair with his back to the door, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands hanging limply down over the stone tiles below. He had a Rødmix cigarette poked between his lips, it had a slight curve and opened at the end like a trumpet and must have been rolled with his mind elsewhere, but he wasn’t smoking. The cigarette was just hanging there.