Per Petterson - I Refuse

Within twenty minutes the yellow ambulance arrived, turned in to the footpath in front of the block, and they put me on a stretcher and drove off.

I could have been dead by then of course, but at the hospital they didn’t find anything wrong. I was sure I’d had a stroke, some damage to the brain, at least, or a heart attack, something fatal along those lines, anything less would have been sensational, but there was nothing wrong with me that the doctor could trace. It was just the shoehorn. And a headache. He was young, he may have been inexperienced, I thought, but he was unwavering, so there was nothing really to squabble about. And I was relieved of course. In a sense. I wasn’t going to die. But to be honest I felt cheated. When you thought about what had happened, which was fairly dramatic, at least for me, surely there must have been something pretty bad that ailed me, something I could be treated for. But that was not what the doctor said, it was probably a one-time event, he said, it could have been any number of harmless things: an unexpected contraction of nerves or a muscle gone astray and it would probably never happen again.

But that’s exactly what it did. Just a few days later. I had been at home off work for three days because of the pain in my ribs. None of them was broken, but it was still unbelievably painful, and there was nothing useful I could do. But on the morning of the fourth day, I pulled myself together and swallowed a painkiller, a Paralgin forte, after breakfast, and left home and parked by the station down in the valley, as I was supposed to, and caught the train to Oslo, and it was so unbelievably stupid, because it happened in the lift on the way up. Between the second and third floors I began to gasp for air, and the people standing around me turned to see what was going on, and when I dropped to my knees they all squeezed back against the walls. There must have been six or seven of them in the lift, and they were all scared stiff and not one of them said a word to me or to each other. The situation was awkward. I clenched my lips and tried to stop the gasping, but it was plain impossible, and then the air stopped coming, and I keeled over like I did the last time. It will come back, I thought as I fell to the floor, and of course it did, thirty seconds later the air came back, and I guess it sounded strange when I sucked it in because it was pretty loud, and a man hit the red button on the panel with his fist and the lift jerked to a halt. The others tumbled in all directions, but I was already down, and we were stuck between the fourth and fifth floors, and of course it was the wrong button, he should have hit the alarm, not the emergency stop, and what were we supposed to do there, between two floors.

Slowly I got up. First, on to my knees. Then on to one leg. Then the other. I was breathing hard. When I was standing straight the lift started again and it stopped on the fifth, and then on the sixth. The last passengers got off, including me, and not one of them met my eye on their way out, and I didn’t look at them either, my eyesight was gone, that was why. When the lift was empty I went back in and, half-blind, I pressed the button for the ground floor, and down in the entrance hall my sight returned, and I already felt a little better.

It was not a long walk to the Central Station. I bought a ticket from one of the machines, and slumped back in a corner with my collar turned right up and my chin sunk down below the top button, and I realised I would probably never again turn up to work at the Oslo Libraries, that it was over almost before it had begun, and where was I heading now. I had no idea.

Back home, I locked myself in my flat, went to the phone, called my doctor and explained to him what had happened. Shit, that doesn’t sound good at all, he said, and promised me he would send a sick note to the proper authority and a copy to me, and then I had to get round to his surgery at the double. OK, I said, I will, I’ll be right over, I said, and I put the phone down and undressed and walked into my bedroom and got into bed and stayed there for several days, a week almost. I hardly had anything to eat. I didn’t get up until one morning someone came to my door and leaned on the bell and wouldn’t stop. I didn’t feel like getting up, I wanted to remain in my state of drowsiness, so pleasantly half-dead. But I got up anyway. It took me such a long time to dress. I was sure the person who had been ringing the bell was already at the next door when I finally came through the hall to open up, but he wasn’t. Behind him he had a trolley of the kind I had seen newspaper boys use when they were out doing their early-morning rounds with me standing at the window staring out because I couldn’t find any sleep and saw them coming down the hill with their trolleys behind them from the bus stop, where the newspapers were thrown out from the van in firmly tied, fat bundles and the van didn’t even stop, but just kept on driving with the sliding door still open and no one but the paper boys was out on the roads yet.

On the trolley there were several boxes. He sold books. I asked him what books, and he said, Maigret, Georges Simenon’s novels about Police Inspector Maigret, in Paris, in the eleventh arrondissement, he said, if I knew what an arrondissement was, and I said I did, I had been to Paris several times, to conferences. He opened one of the boxes he had on the trolley, and there they were, fifteen blue volumes, each with two novels inside and gold letters on the spine, and I asked how much they cost, and he said five hundred kroner. I bought them on the spot. I took a five-hundred note from my wallet and thanked him for the books and closed the door and went in and put the Maigret books on the floor beside the bed and crept back under the duvet. By the end of the week I had read them all, and when I got up I put the books back in the box and the box in the closet, on the shelf under the biscuit tin with the fishing gear in it.

Then I went to see the doctor.

When he saw me coming through the door, he went all cranky and said, where the hell have you been, weren’t you supposed to be here almost two weeks ago, how can I possibly find out what’s wrong with you if you don’t come and stand in the goddamn queue like everyone else, and then I wept a little on the chair, facing his desk, it was difficult not to, and there and then he wrote me an indefinite sick note and now I had been away from work for a whole year, to the day in fact, they were meticulous at the Social Security office. They had sent me a letter telling me that this was the end of my benefits. Now something new would have to be pulled from the hat, I was aware of that, a year had passed. It was the law, and that was the matter I had come here to discuss.

I walked between the tables in the Social Security office in Lillestrøm and stopped at a suitable distance from the despondent man facing the young woman at the desk. I could see only his back. It was broad and there was not much else but muscle under his shirt. He had his jacket over his arm, and a coat over the jacket, and he looked pretty warm now, his neck was red, his face white and embarrassed when he half turned and sent me a grey glance over his shoulder, the left one, and slowly shook his head, and turned back and said, right, right, that’s fine, that’s all fine, it will all be fine in the end young lady, don’t worry, in an ironic tone, so it was probably not fine at all. I’m not worried, the young woman said, and I couldn’t see her, but her voice cut like a scythe through the grass, and the man rolled his eyes and gave me a nod as he left. I nodded back, and it was my turn.

‘Just a moment,’ she said and started writing whatever she had to write on the form in the computer next to her. I didn’t know what was wrong with the man in front of me in the queue, but there had to be quite a bit because she kept writing for some time, and I was beginning to feel warm myself and thought maybe I should take my jacket off, but I knew that if I did, I had lost. I didn’t know what I would have lost, but I would have lost something.