Per Petterson - I Refuse

Two days later the police sergeant came and took us away.

He was a very nice priest. He wasn’t old. I introduced myself and then my waffles came, and we sat talking over coffee. He was eager and asked me many questions, and I told him about my work, about what I had seen, about the places I’d been sent to, which would often be trouble spots, and that was of course the point, that someone had to go there. That’s the way it was. Someone had to go. He said I showed Christian spirit, and I just smiled and tried to explain to him that Christian spirit had very little to do with it. But there was no point really, I didn’t know him, and I wasn’t going to put my life in the hands of someone I didn’t know, however nice that person was.

‘Berggren,’ he said. ‘That reminds me of something. There was a Berggren here. It was before my time, I’m not quite sure when, and I only remember because not long ago I had to go through a lot of things that people had left here, things they had forgotten or left on purpose, it’s not always easy to say which. Anyway, we have a box with a few possessions belonging to someone called Berggren.’

‘But there are so many people called Berggren in Norway,’ I said. ‘And in Sweden. And some of them them must have gone to sea.’

‘You’re right, of course. But this was an elderly woman. I’m not sure if she was still working on board a ship or had simply ended up here in Singapore. But she had an unusual first name: Tya, she was called. Tya Berggren. That’s why I remembered. Because of the name.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘She came here,’ the priest said, ‘she was feeling unwell. Those who ran the church at the time had her admitted to hospital. Where sadly she died. It doesn’t say what was wrong with her. She had no address in Norway. And no next of kin were ever found.’

I still said nothing. And then I said:

‘My mother’s name was Tya Berggren.’

‘Was it. Did she go to sea.’

‘I have no idea,’ I said.

‘I see,’ he said. And then he said: ‘Please stay.’ He got up and walked across the room and out through a door at the other end, and through that door he returned with a shoebox under his arm. I looked out of the window. It was much too hot. In fact, it was unbearable. All the colours. There were too many of them. The hot metal of the containers made the air shimmer. You couldn’t touch it. It was tiring, oppressive. All the cranes sticking up. I suddenly longed for Kabul. Where it was early spring and barely that, it was high up, near the Hindu Kush, near the roof of the world, and cold.

He placed the box on the table.

‘Shall we have a look.’

‘It can’t hurt, I suppose,’ I said.

He opened the box and took out what was in it and put it on the table, object after object, there were strangely few.And I thought, in English, actually, how strange, I thought, I would have expected more.

‘That wasn’t much,’ the priest said.

‘No, it wasn’t,’ I said.

‘Is there anything you recognise.’

I spread the objects over the table. Keys, a wristwatch, some really beautiful jewels, a folded newspaper cutting with a photo of a man holding a football in his gloved hands, some money, dollar bills, quite a bundle in fact, and headed paper with the logo of various shipping lines. None of them Norwegian. But her name was on them. And that was Norwegian. There was a passport, it wasn’t Norwegian. I opened it and looked at the photograph, at her face. I couldn’t say. I didn’t recognise it. But then I wasn’t so sure. It made me feel uncomfortable.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but that’s not so strange. I can hardly remember my mother. I was so small when she left us. This is an elderly lady. It probably isn’t her.’

‘No, it might well not be,’ he said. ‘But what about these, then,’ he said, taking some small framed pictures from the bottom of the box, there were three of them, and he turned them and laid them out on the table in front of me. I leaned forward. It was like a shock to my stomach. In one photo there was a boy, he was maybe thirteen years old, not more, and in another there was a girl, about two years younger, and in the last there were two small girls, they were obviously twins, they both had plaits with the same ribbons, only the colours were different, and I held the photos in my hand one after the other and studied them carefully, and I thought: they’re not us. Everything fitted. But they were not us. They didn’t even look like us. And then I saw that the pictures weren’t proper photographs, they’d been cut out of a glossy magazine, and not even the same magazine because the paper quality was not the same, and I thought, am I supposed to get upset now, over this. Is that what’s happening. I hadn’t been upset for a long time. Why should I be upset. But I wasn’t upset. I was confused, and then something more, maybe, than confused. I must ring Tommy, I thought, and tell him about this. But what would I say. That I had found three pictures of some children who weren’t us in a shoebox in the Norwegian Seamen’s Church in Singapore.

‘No. I don’t know who those children are,’ I said.

And that, at least, was true.

‘It was worth a try,’ the priest said.

‘Yes, it was.’

As I was leaving I took the priest’s hand and thanked him for the waffles, they were so good, I said, I haven’t had waffles since I was a child, and then he said, waffles and children are of God’s kingdom. It was a strange thing to say, but funny too, in a nice way, he was a nice priest, I thought, with a Christian spirit, and don’t get lost now on the way to Kabul, he said, and good luck with your work, and so I gave him a really big hug, and then he blushed. He was a handsome man with dark curls, at least fifteen years younger than me. But he laughed too, proudly almost. I can’t very well kiss him, I thought.

I walked down the hill from the church, which didn’t look like a church at all as I turned and waved, but more Asian somehow, there was something Buddhist about the roof, and I was still in a state of confusion at what I had seen inside, but also happy. Yes, that was it. I felt happy.

Only three days later I was up in the air.