I Refuse

by Per Petterson

  When Siri came down from the house, through the alley by the crossroads, I walked out and took her bike and put it behind the petrol station, and we walked down and sat on the slope towards the lake, where no one could see us. It went like a dream. I mean, she wasn’t locked up or anything.

  SIRI ⋅ NOVEMBER 1967

  NO, I WASN’T locked up. Tommy had given me the rounders bat to use in my hour of need, and don’t think twice about it, he said, or he will make you suffer, and I put it under the bed, as he had done when we all lived together in our old house, but things were different here. I didn’t have to protect myself, not in that way, and Lydersen wasn’t the kind to creep up on me when I was in the shower or unexpectedly come into my room when I was about to go to bed. But Tommy wanted to look after me and often came in the evening to make me feel safe and give me comfort if he thought that was what I needed, but the fact was I had no problem looking after myself. It was a new thing. At home it had always been Tommy and me.

  We sat on the slope behind the Co-op on our separate rocks, one year had passed, and it was autumn now, and cold, we had our caps on and warm jackets, I had already started smoking, outside, in secret, and chewing Toy gum on the way home. I blew the smoke and my frozen breath out over the lake and said:

  ‘When I’m sixteen I’m going to sea.’

  That upset him, and he said:

  ‘But who shall I talk to when you’re gone.’

  ‘You’ve got Jim,’ I said.

  ‘That’s true,’ Tommy said. ‘I’ve got Jim, but that’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I like having sisters,’ Tommy said.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But you’ve got the twins.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘But they do their own thing, they just smile and wave and say hi Tommy when I walk past them on my way to Jonsen’s, and then they go back to their weird little games that never made any sense to me, and I could have been any neighbour, and then they run to the Liens to have their dinner. Even when I sit watching films with them I could be anybody. But they’re doing fine. I think they’ve forgotten how it was at home with Dad, how it really was. They don’t even remember Mum.’

  ‘But, they were so small when she left. I can barely remember her myself,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you remember her.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t want to.’

  ‘It was winter,’ Tommy said, ‘just before Christmas. Hell, there was so much snow. The school bus could barely get down the road. Don’t you remember. We shovelled and shovelled every single day to keep the snow from our door.’

  ‘No, I don’t remember that.’

  ‘I remember everything,’ Tommy said. ‘Everything.’ And then he went quiet and I couldn’t see his face, and when he didn’t say anything, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I just waited. I already felt sorry for him because I knew what he would say when he eventually did say something, and finally he said:

  ‘But how will you manage without me.’

  And that was it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I will probably be OK,’ I said, ‘don’t you think I will.’ But then he started to cry, he had just turned fifteen, and I said, but, Tommy, I said and put my arms around his shoulders and pulled him to me and said, but, Tommy, what is it, Tommy, but he wouldn’t answer me, and we sat there, me with my arm round him, and really, it should have been the other way around, that was why he had come to see me, he was the big brother, he was at the helm, that was how it ought to be. But I had never seen him cry before, cross my heart, and when he stopped he cleared his throat and got off his rock.

  ‘I’m a little tired,’ he said, taking two steps into the darkness, up the hillside, and then I couldn’t see his face any more and didn’t know what he looked like.

  ‘Well, I can’t come tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Another day then, Tommy,’ I said.

  ‘Wednesday, maybe.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Wednesday. I’ll look for you.’

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  And he climbed up the hill without waiting for me as he usually did so we could walk hand in hand around the Co-op at the top and over the crossroads to the petrol station and go our separate ways from there, and I said:

  ‘It will be difficult without you, Tommy,’ I said, ‘Maybe I can’t do it,’ I said, and I was sure there would be a flicker of a smile then, because that was what he wanted to hear, and then he would say, You can do it, Siri, you’ll be fine, I’m sure you will, but if he did smile, I couldn’t see it, and neither did he say anything. He just kept climbing and was gone around the corner of the Co-op on his way to fetch his bike, and maybe Lysbu was still behind the counter, in the light inside, and then push it out between the pumps and pedal off into the night with six long kilometres ahead of him. I took another cigarette from the soft pack of 10 unfiltered Carlton, and sat on the rock by the lake smoking, and when I had finished I stood up to clamber up the hill. It was easy to see in the dark now, every tree stood out, every rock, and when I stepped into the bright light beneath the street lamps at the crossroads, I had to close my eyes.

  JIM ⋅ SEPTEMBER 2006

  JIM SLEPT FITFULLY, and in his sleep he turned as a dog turns in its basket to find a position that would give his body peace. He was crying, but he didn’t know that. Deep down in his sleep he was going to die. He was in despair, he was trying to tell her he was going to die and explain to her why, and she got so upset it was almost a comfort, as if his dying made a greater impression on her than it did on him, but he didn’t know why he was going to die, and really, there was no comfort. He was alone. Only he was going to die. And he knew that one day soon she would get over it and to everyone’s surprise, would have put it behind her, forgotten it already, or hidden it inside herself, the size of a shirt button.

  When he woke up he was still going to die. It was over. It was all over. From the kitchen table he had swept any future he might have into a bucket that he carried out and emptied by the hedge. His life was at half-mast. He barely reached his own hips. He dragged himself along on his knees, the cross was heavy and sharp against his shoulder. I’m so thirsty, he thought and they give me only vinegar to drink.

  He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. In the dream he was still living in Mørk. My God, he thought, it’s Sunday school. The little yellow pavilion down by the creek, by Rumble Creek, as they called it, and you could hear it rumble and boom in the spring and rumble through the closed windows, and anyone with their wits about them would want to go out and watch it flow and wade in Lill Rapids with water up to the edge of their boots and let the water press hard and gently too against the palms of their hands until they could barely hold them still.

  His mother had said that the two hours every Sunday morning were of great benefit and that later in life he would think back to the dim room with the chairs in a horseshoe by the wall and Rumble Creek flooding its banks on the other side of the same wall, and find help and comfort in that, and it might well be that she had a point, but Tommy never came, his father didn’t allow him. His father thought it was nonsense. All that Jesus stuff.

  In the Sunday school building the flannelboard stood on three legs in the corner with its palm trees of felt, its crescents and disciples. The Good Samaritan lay in the box underneath, ready for action, and Lazarus rising from the grave, alive and kicking, was in the box, and Jesus entering Jerusalem with the multitudes streaming from their houses to cover the dust with palm branches of felt before the felt donkey he was riding. He was the King of the Jews. He was the Son of David. In all his dignity, he came down from the Mount of Olives with the road to Jericho probably at his back to the east, and slowly he rode down the slope through Gethsemane where events of great significance would unfold in a matter of days between the gnarled olive trees and tall cypresses of felt, and on he rode the donkey up towards the town walls and the Lions’ Gate or Damascus Gate or another gate entire
ly with another name on another side of town, if they were there at that time. The Gates. And it went as badly as it possibly could. A few days later he would collapse and graze his knees on the hard stone slabs of the ascending Via Dolorosa with the kiss of death still burning on his cheek and the heavy cross chafing his shoulder, and all that for thirty pieces of silver, my God, was that all I was worth, he thought, and not as I will but as you will, he had said to his father the night before, for this wasn’t what Jesus had thought up for himself, that he should crawl on his knees up this narrow path of stone. And of course he was afraid, who wouldn’t be, and Jim flitted in and out of this new dream with his eyes open, and then someone came who wanted to help Jesus and take the cross off his shoulders to lighten his burden and perhaps carry it himself for a stretch. And the man who took the cross was Simon of Cyrene. He was the father of Alexander and Rufus, it said in the text, but who cared about them, what had they done to deserve a place in the book of books. You had to make yourself worthy, that was the point, Jim thought, you have to be worthy of it, or else nothing could be measured against anything and everything would blur. But perhaps they were friends, Simon and Jesus, and perhaps Jesus had given Simon of Cyrene a helping hand not long before, or even performed a miracle for Simon exclusively, you could imagine that, that they supported each other as Tommy and Jim had done when they were sitting behind the mill or lying on their backs in the dip so that no one could see them, right up to the year they turned eighteen.

  But that wasn’t how it was. The man called Simon wouldn’t help anyone of his own free will. I stick my head out for nobody, he might have said, like Bogart in Casablanca. It was the soldiers of the Roman empire who forced him to lift the cross, at gunpoint, so to speak, or at the point of a spear to his neck, to be precise, so that Jesus would arrive at Golgotha in one piece, at Calvary, to be hanged on the Cross between the two thieves, and not perish too early in the streets below, that was why. And Simon of Cyrene wasn’t even one of the disciples, the chosen twelve, he wasn’t called Peter after Simon, and he wasn’t a fisherman, either, he was from the country, and people from the country, from places like Mørk, had always been slow, unwilling, they had no rebellion in them and took no chances if they could get out of it with honour intact, yes, even without honour they preferred to lay low whatever was at stake, and then you had to make them, that was how it had always been, they had to be pulled and pushed.

  At some point he had moved from the sofa in the living room into his bed. The air in the room was stale and smoke-filled, not only from his own cigarettes, and was expanding cube-like and dense against the walls and the ceiling and longed to get out. He sat up and his mouth was dry, his face was, and he swung his legs stiffly on to the carpet and walked into the living room towards the balcony door. Outside, the cold air stood tall as a man and pressed against the window and waited and was sucked in when he opened the door and the smoke was sucked out at the same time. For a brief moment there was much traffic around his body, and then he had to hurry back to his bed and lie under the duvet, and it wasn’t morning any more, and the scent of someone else’s body still lingered on the sheet, on the pillow, someone else’s hair. He had been so sure it would feel unpleasant, but it didn’t. On the contrary. He lay on his back looking up at the ceiling. He searched his mind for her name, but it was still gone. Perhaps it was never said. Which would have been strange. He must have said his, he must have said, Jim, and shaken her hand and bowed to excess, which he tended to do in situations like this, with a double whisky in his belly, so why wouldn’t she have done the same, why would she not have said hello and then her name. He closed his eyes. The bar in Olavsgaard Hotel. The big hotel that looked like a palace in a Disney cartoon, placed at random on a deserted, windblown hilltop by the motorway at the edge of the town of Lillestrøm where one of the three rivers was moving past in a not so elegant fashion, half dead, on its way to the great lake. This town that had just risen from being no more than a big village to some higher status, and the hotel had a rather dubious reputation, at least the bar on the ground floor had, but this was the place you never left empty-handed, that was the saying, and it was there he met her the night before. He could well remember them leaving.

  He was the wrong side of fifty, and yet for six months he had gone out at least twice a week, to restaurants and bars around this district and in Oslo, and entered and looked around thinking, where shall I sleep tonight, and most often he ended up in the house of a woman he had never seen or spoken to before, whose husband on this particular weekend or any other weekend was away, a lorry driver heading for Hamburg, a rig worker in the North Sea, or she was what you called single, not solitary, but single, and one time he came all the way out to a house in Høland, in the district of Hemnes, right in the south of it, and he was able to have a conversation with her the morning after, it was a major surprise, but he never saw her again, he couldn’t find the house, although he made a serious effort. It was just gone.

  He lay under the duvet with his hands behind his head looking up at the the ceiling. He closed his eyes. It’ll come to me, he thought, and then I can call the hotel, or perhaps not, perhaps I should drive out to Hemnes for the seventh time and continue my search there. How many houses could there possibly be in Hemnes. And then he fell asleep and woke up again thinking, it was the woman from Hemnes. I’d tried to explain to her that I was dying. A more telling sign I have never had, he thought, and then he thought, that man this morning, in the dark, down Herregårdsveien, why did it strike me it was my father. Most people who suddenly remember their fathers would they not picture a younger man, a more handsome man with his face settled in a very special place in their memory, physically imprinted in the brain, you could see it on an X-ray, no doubt, and if everything had been as it should have been, that man would still be walking among them, a man so badly needed in his wholeness and consequence, but then one day he would just be gone, to sea, maybe, and was last observed on some other continent rounding the corner of a warehouse on the waterfront of a town like Shanghai, or Port Said, or he was killed in a dreadful accident, a car crash, a collision at a hundred kilometres an hour on the E6 between Jessheim and Kløfta; camera flashes and ambulances everywhere, and police cars and the constant clamour of journalists and photographers, who left no patch of white on the map of this district, Upper Romerike, and so life was twisted and distorted for the boy left behind, with his achingly empty hands, robbed of his masculine model, the football-playing man, the cross-country skiing man, a man who stood his ground, who never let his gaze drop, but looked everyone boldly in the eye. And now this man was gone or dead and was already a legend it was hard for the boy to handle. And yet, in some form that man would still be hidden somewhere in the mind and might suddenly rise in some situations, like the situation this morning on the way down Herregårdsveien. But in Jim’s mind there was nothing stored, nothing you could see on an X-ray, inside his brain everything was as it had always been, and he had never had a father like that, or any father at all, and then this empty room in his life must have weakened him and feminised him, for the simple reason that he grew up alone with a woman as his guardian and role model, who on top of everything was openly Christian and a member of the Christian Democrats and high on the party’s list at the local elections and who taught Christianity at the very school that he had to attend.

  Jim didn’t know who he was supposed to miss, or if it was possible to miss someone he didn’t know, that he had never seen, who left no trace, no hollow in his life, no vacuum for him to fill, he didn’t know if the feeling he had when he thought about all this was the feeling of loss, but it was clear enough that Tommy had something Jim didn’t have. Tommy’s father was as visible as you could wish, and the women could see him every single day running up and down the road with the dustbins on his shoulder, and the men took part in his rough games, but then Tommy was given his beatings, and surely there was nothing there to mourn. No one had ever beaten Jim, not yet, and his mo
ther didn’t beat him, she didn’t believe in beatings, she didn’t want to chastise her own son.

  He got out of bed and went to the kitchen, and there he saw the clock above the door, bulging, quivering like a jellyfish, oh, Christ, I’m in a tight spot now, he said aloud and spun round in the doorway and ran into the bathroom instead, into the shower cabinet, and stood there for three minutes to the second with the ice cold water hammering against his head. He looked at the clock again, a different clock, and from behind the steam it had moved on a good deal further than the one in the kitchen and ended up like Dali’s melting clock on the wall above the mirror where every morning he watched himself keep life going against all the odds with the electric shaver raised to his face on the days he didn’t go to the bridge. There wasn’t any alcohol in his blood now and it probably wasn’t that much this morning either, he didn’t think he would have been stopped and lost his licence in the Enebakk forest or on his way down to Hauketo. And he ran into the hall and pulled on his worn-out reefer jacket and quickly pushed the buttons through the holes and undid them equally fast and said, for God’s sake, the whole jacket stinks of fish, why is it hanging here next to the Sunday best clothes in the first place, he said, what was I thinking, he said and took a different jacket, a coat, in fact, grey, anonymous, stain-free, which he had worn only twice. Then he hurried to the stairs going down to the garage two floors below and got in his car and drove out into the light and down the first long hill and then the next hills towards one of the three rivers, towards Lillestrøm. It was already late in the day.

  He parked by the railway station, by the tracks on the south side, it cost twenty-five kroner there, for twenty-four hours, you didn’t find it any cheaper, and then he walked along the rails and around the brick building with the fitness centre inside, called SATS. You could see the exercise bikes through the windows and the sweating bodies in their tight training suits, and he went on into the station building past the Narvesen kiosk and past the stairs up to the platforms, from number 8 right through to number 1, and then past the Narvesen kiosk at the other end and out through the doors on the side of the station facing Lillestrøm city centre.