Per Petterson - I Refuse

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ he said. He turned and smiled. A voice in the house that wasn’t his.

‘I can’t see you,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Are you smiling,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Good.’

He opened the wardrobe. It was a big wardrobe, there was a light inside that he switched on, and it glowed softly. The entire rear wall was a mirror, and luckily he could barely see himself between the clothes hanging in a line. ‘What is it she’s seeing,’ he thought.

Most of the clothes he had never worn. He had bought them on a whim, like so many other things in the house. He looked at all the shirts. I don’t know which one to wear, he thought.

Behind him in the dark, she said:

‘You’re well equipped.’ And then she laughed her dark laugh, and he smiled and said:

‘That’s not what counts, is it.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she said, and he said:

‘But if you mean the shirts, I’ve got plenty of them.’ He gazed at all the shirts in front of him, several of them still with pins in the cuffs fixed Napoleon-style to the chest, and he thought, I don’t know which one to wear. And then he panicked and said aloud:

‘I don’t know which shirt to put on, whether I should take one of the standard white ones, but then I might have to wear a suit as well,’ he said, and he thought, hell, I can’t go to the bridge in a suit, I’m not going to work, I’m not going up those ten floors again, and he wasn’t used to being like this, being indecisive. Being decisive had always been a strong point of his, maybe a little too strong at times, in some situations he should have waited, but now it was making him so confused he was close to giving up, I give up, he thought. It’s no good. I don’t know what to wear.

He said:

‘But I’m not going any further than the bridge, and I’m going there on foot. Jesus, I can’t walk up the road between all the houses across the island in a suit and coat, I can’t walk there with that coat on, what would he say if he saw me coming on foot in that damned expensive purple coat. But I have to dress up, don’t I,’ he said, ‘so he can see I am serious when I come. I have to dress up for Jim.’

‘Do you,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I should dress up. Or maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s too much. I don’t know. I don’t know what to wear,’ he said.

He heard the silky sound of the sheets as she got out of bed, and he turned, and she came across the floor with the duvet wrapped around her in the dim light from the wardrobe, and she stood where he stood, and then she was in the mirror behind the clothes in the wardrobe, as he was, or parts of him, and parts of her.

‘You’re shivering,’ she said. ‘Are you cold.’

‘No,’ he said, and when she picked a shirt from the wardrobe, the duvet slipped down, and she laughed, and he thought, she is a grown woman. I’m glad she is. The shirt was a light blue one he’d had for many years and worn a few times. It wasn’t ironed, but looked decent anyway. She pulled the duvet up over her shoulder and gave him the shirt.

‘This one,’ she said.

He just did what she told him. He put on the shirt, and she said:

‘Jeans are no good. They’re not you. It will have to be these,’ she said, and took a pair of dark trousers from a hanger, in what he would call khaki material because his father had called the material khaki no matter which colour the trousers were, and she gave him a grey, cotton V-neck sweater, and in this way he was dressed by her, he, Tommy Berggren, being dressed as though he were a child, and he let it happen, he succumbed to it. This is not the way it should be, he thought. Only today.

He walked from the bedroom into the hall past the big mirror, in a jacket he had barely noticed before, it was blue, a kind of canvas material, that looked sporty, upper class and stiff. I have never looked like this in my life, he thought. But it’s fine. And she followed him and stood in the doorway with the duvet wrapped round her up to her chin. She smiled, and he said:

‘Shit, I’m so nervous. Suppose he isn’t there. Then what do I do. I’ve only got dress shoes,’ he said, ‘they’re all black and polished. They’re meant to go with a suit. They will look odd with this jacket.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘There isn’t a soul who can see them in the dark.’

He chose a pair that didn’t look so new, but in fact it didn’t make much difference. They still looked odd, they would shine in the dark.

‘Don’t think about it,’ she said.

And he knelt down to tie the shoes and laced them up slowly thinking, what shall I say, I don’t know what to say, he thought, when I get there. If he is there.

‘I don’t know what to say when I get there,’ he said, but she just smiled and said nothing, and he got up and said:

‘I’m off then.’ She smiled. She was so attractive. She raised her right hand with the palm towards him and moved it slowly from side to side and went back to the bedroom in the darkness, and in the last light from the hall the duvet fell from her shoulders, and she was naked all the way down to her heels.

He didn’t turn on the outside lamp as he normally would, he just opened the door and went out on to the stone steps. It was cold, he turned up his jacket collar and blew into his hands as he rubbed them, but it wasn’t that cold. It was only something he did. The blue jacket was fur-lined, warm and windproof. You could call it snug. He started to walk. It was a steep track from his house to the top of the island, and it took him longer than he had expected. He looked at his watch, which he could only just make out, and thought, damn, he thought, damn it, but when at long last he passed Zaman’s shop, it was downhill from there, and he walked along the road in a big bend, and soon he could see the oil-black water to the right down the slope and the street lamps on the other side of the sound and the shine of them in the water, and after he had walked round the bend, the bridge came into view. He stopped and stared. It was luminously white and hung there suspended from darkness to darkness. I have never seen it, he thought, and then he thought, but Jim has.

He walked down the last part of the last hill, and just before the bridge he thought, I’ll just go ahead, I won’t wait, and he walked out on to the bridge and the fishermen were standing there with their rods and gear, and they pulled the lines hard to their chests and let slip the line just before the railing in a rhythm he couldn’t catch, for each of them had his own, and all of them were on the same side of the bridge, because of the lines, he thought, so they won’t get entangled, that is why, he thought. He walked past them one after the other, and they all turned and looked at him briefly with little interest and then turned again, whereas he examined each of them with great care and walked on to the next and then the next in search of the dark blue cap and the reefer jacket he once knew so well. There were six of them. When he reached Mosseveien he turned and walked back. Jim was not among them. He stopped by the last fisherman, or the first, rather. He looked a bit shabby, wearing one sweater on top of the other, both of them ragged. You might call it off-white the one underneath and the top one a tentative blue. On his hands he had pink fingerless gloves. It looked odd.

‘Hello,’ Tommy said. The man turned. ‘Sorry,’ Tommy said, ‘but the fisherman who was standing next to you yesterday, has he been here today.’

The man shook his head.

‘But, would he usually come every morning.’

The man shook his head.

Hell, Tommy thought, then I’m done for. What should he do now. What the hell shall I do now, he thought, and then the man burst into a racking, dry, hollow coughing fit, and it took its time, and it didn’t sound at all good, he ought to see a doctor, Tommy thought, and when the fit was over, the man had to clear his throat several times before he could draw breath, and he said: