Per Petterson - I Refuse

And if you came flying through the night, quite still, like in a dream, like Peter Pan, and not as in a helicopter, rising with the wind along the hillside from the valley below at a good height above the woods and soar over the ridge to the east by the slalom slope, it would be easy for you to spot Jim driving down through the bends to Lillestrøm, and there wasn’t much traffic at this hour, so you couldn’t miss his car pushing a shining, yellow and white segment of light in front of it, and then again you wouldn’t really be able to see the car from where you were gliding, like an angel, just this illuminated segment moving without haste, with no visible source for the light. Right at the bottom, where the river ran into the lake, before the station with the car parks, Jim unexpectedly turned off from the Lifeline and instead drove through Lillestrøm to Fetsund over the wide plain with the river Leira flowing across it and on over the high bridge with the river Glomma far below and the old collection station for timber at the bank down to the right, and to the left the beautiful old cast-iron railway bridge, which also crossed the Glomma, and none of this you could see now, but Jim knew it was all there.

He turned south and drove all the way along Lake Øyeren, and it wasn’t especially late yet, or especially early, there was enough time to take a longer route than he normally did to get to Oslo and the fjord, and so he could sit in the dark of the car that was humming quietly through the night. But after more than an hour on the E18 it was suddenly later than he had planned. That made him restless. He switched on the radio. There was classical music on, a Beethoven string quartet, or so he thought, and it might have been nice listening, but right now it was what his mother would’ve called enervating. So he switched it off again. I am going to be late, he thought, it will soon be half-past five, and then he thought, Christ, late for what. You will get there soon enough, where you are going. And it was still dark, and after half an hour on the smaller roads he preferred, he finally came from Hauketo by the railway line and then a bit further on by the overhang towards Herregårdsveien. Just before Ljan station he turned off to the left over the railway bridge, the lights were red, but there was no one else around, so he turned anyway. When he was on the other side and further down the road, past the shop there they called Karusellen, no one plunged out of the dark into the headlights of his car, on the contrary, both sides of the road were quiet, nothing stirred, apart from two headlights on the way up towards him, and Jim was calm now and his breathing measured and fine, and he passed the other car very easily and drove down to Mosseveien and turned right at the bottom, towards Oslo and the white bridge, and he thought, I will get there soon enough, where I am going.

I REALLY HAVE to tell you this.

I was going to Afghanistan for Save the Children. I had travelled on their behalf for some years and had worked among families in the remotest places and parents with one foot in the Middle Ages, with schools and sick children, and now everything was packed and ready. I had been to Afghanistan twice before and knew exactly what I needed to take and what was not such a good idea and therefore left at home, certain books, certain clothes, jewellery with certain symbols, a number of women’s things I won’t list here, but for professional and personal reasons I went to Singapore first, where I knew a man, that is, he was in that city at that particular time. He was Norwegian, he was a journalist, we had been together for a while some years ago. It had been nice, we both got a lot out of it, and after we had put the romantic part behind us and gone our separate ways, there was no bitterness between us. It was simply that I didn’t have the talent to share my life with anyone, and his talent for sharing his life with me wasn’t up to much, either. But when we met we shared a bed. And we met in various places in the world, after all he travelled, and so did I. The first time we met was in Sarajevo in the mid-Nineties, but not in Pristina a short time afterwards. And once we met in Libya, in Benghazi of all places, I don’t recall what he was doing there, what he was writing about, and we also met while he was married. She was from Geneva, he told me, and was a journalist too, but that never bothered me, neither the thought of the woman he was cheating on, nor the fact that he belonged to someone else. He was kind and clever and he was good at many things, I have to say, and I didn’t know anyone who could kiss like he did. I was a bit finicky about this. Ha ha.

But I didn’t go to Singapore on a caprice just to see this man. He wasn’t that important to me any more. If I had, it would have been an expensive caprice, and I didn’t have that kind of money.

What I also had to do in Singapore was supervise a large consignment of school materials and medical equipment which had arrived by ship and was going by air to Kabul. The little airline had suddenly got cold feet and didn’t want to fly to Kabul after all, they were worried someone might get it into their head to shoot down their plane. It was clear to me that they were more worried about losing their plane than losing their crew, because the crew was never mentioned. This was late winter in, not long before the shameful invasion of Iraq, but I can say hand on heart that in those days flying to Afghanistan was not dangerous. We had a constructive dialogue with several parties and we had a good overview of the situation. But what I said or thought made no difference to them and so I had to find another airline to accept the commission. It took time, but I succeeded. I had to run all over the place with papers and forms waving my Norwegian passport. But the real problem was that the first airline had just unloaded the cargo halfway between here and there, and now it was in three different places and knee deep in logistical quicksand. So it was my job to talk nicely to all the authorities, to get it all into one place and make sure that nothing disappeared or fell off the back of a lorry, and then assist the small airline, which, sorry to say, was a little uncoordinated, and then get it airborne as quickly as possible and follow on after all the loose ends had been tied up.

My friend was happy to see me. We had a few fine days together while I was waiting for the bureaucratic mill to stop grinding, but then he had to leave for Thailand and its border with Burma, where things were happening. Nothing came of it, I learned later, because what was about to happen, didn’t happen.

We parted with a smile. I gave him a kiss. You’re sweet, I said. He laughed and shook his head. But he was sweet.

And then I was alone in the big city. And I felt a sudden weariness inside, a reluctance to speak English and nothing else for a long time to come, to enter into all that, to adapt, and I decided to go up to the Norwegian Seamen’s Church. It was at the summit of the steepest hill in Singapore with a view of the container harbour, which was one of the biggest in the world, or so I had read. That fits, I thought, considering why I was here. In fact, the first thing that struck me was that down there anything could be lost and gone for ever.

They served me coffee and waffles at the church. I hadn’t eaten waffles since Tommy and I found my mother’s old waffle iron at the bottom of the kitchen cupboard, and from memory we stirred the mixture in a green bowl, from Tommy’s memory, that is, and when he closed his eyes and set his mind to it, he could see our mother moving her hands: this way, that way, beat the eggs, add the sugar, whip it all with a whisk and put in flour. We made the waffles for the twins so they would smell the wonderful aroma coming from the kitchen and feel happy and sleepy and safe in the house. Tommy and I had talked about it and we agreed that waffles and safety were two sides of the same coin, and we struggled a little, I can remember, for we forgot to grease the iron first, and the waffles we ended up with were so few the two of us had to be content with one waffle heart each and let the twins have the rest. That took some willpower after all the effort.