Per Petterson - I Refuse

At night I lay awake thinking of ways to kill him, and I took them with me, every single one, deep into my dreams where everything was distorted and twisted in the worst possible way. All the better, I thought. All the better. I was still afraid of him, but soon it would pass. In twelve months or maybe only six. So that’s what I was doing too, I was waiting. And the day would come in a blinding flash from the sky. And the clouds drawn asunder by mighty hands, and then the day did come, right out of the blue, and revealed itself to all. Everything fell into place. The sun bore down from a white sky and ricocheted from the windows on either side of the road and blinded me as I came down the steps. It was the Tuesday after Whit. I went to school on the bus and knew it was a very special day. I was restless even before I left the house, before my father had left for work. He didn’t start until later that day and was still in bed, and the hours I sat in the classroom dragged like a month of wet Sundays. When finally I stepped off the bus by our postbox at home, I felt impatient, excited.

There were two others getting off at the same stop. We said ‘bye’, lifting our right hands in a grown-up way and they each went to their small houses, one up the road and one down, and neither of them was afraid of me. Willy wasn’t, he didn’t have the imagination. And Jim wasn’t. No, not Jim, he knew me through and through, he was my best friend. He walked backwards for a few metres, giving me that look. He had watched me ever since we came into the playground and knew that something was going to happen on that day, but he didn’t know what.

‘Anything you’ve been planning to tell me,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, but then maybe I should have given him a sign, a very small sign he could just about decipher and take with him up the road and keep in his head, like a little ant, it was Jim, after all, but I gave him nothing.

‘Right,’ he said, looking a little disappointed, and he turned with his bag in his hand, we had stopped carrying satchels by then, it was embarrassing just to be seen with one on your back, and he walked up towards the house where he lived with his mother. She was a teacher at school, in Norwegian and Christianity, and had moved here from the west coast and pronounced her ‘r’s differently from the way we did, she just couldn’t let them go. His father I had never seen.

‘Jim,’ I said. He stopped and turned round, and I smiled and said: ‘It will be OK. Don’t think about it.’

He looked at me. He stroked his cheek with the back of his hand. It looked a little odd. As if his palms were grazed.

‘OK,’ he said.

I smiled again. ‘It will be all right,’ I said.

‘OK.’ He gave a slight nod and turned round and flung the bag over his shoulder and went up the road to his house.

I walked up the flagstone path to our door, and the door was ajar, and I entered the hall and dropped my bag on the floor and saw that under the hat shelf his working clothes were hanging from the hook in exactly the same way as they had when I left in the morning. They were worn and newly washed, but they still smelt of garbage. He could never get rid of that smell, none of us could, it had tainted everything we owned and neighbours talked about it behind our backs, it had settled on the house for good. I don’t know how it was possible for me to see that they were hanging there, the overalls, the jacket, in exactly the same way as they had before I left. I was a goddamn psychic.

The twins were sitting silently on the first-floor stairs waiting with their hands between their knees. Something might have taken place here while I was away at school that had frightened them. I hoped not. But maybe they too knew something was going to happen.

And I said to them:

‘Go over to the Liens and knock on the door.’ And right away they did as they were told.

I walked through the ground floor and through the hall and the living room, and the door was wide open and gave on to the patch of grass behind the house. He was sitting in a shabby chair with his back to the door, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands hanging limply down over the stone tiles below. He had a Rødmix cigarette poked between his lips, it had a slight curve and opened at the end like a trumpet and must have been rolled with his mind elsewhere, but he wasn’t smoking. The cigarette was just hanging there.

He didn’t turn when he heard me come, for surely he heard me come. I stopped behind him and said:

‘What the hell . Have you been fired.’

I shouldn’t have said that, and a hammer struck a bolt, and the bolt was was jammed and could not move either way, there was no turning back. Slowly he got up. I stood firm. I was breathing though my mouth, quickly in and out, I had been running for two years, ever since my mother disappeared. I stood there. He turned, and a surprisingly blind expression crossed his white face, which in any other situation, with any other face would have moved me. It is true, there was a confusion there that I had never seen on my father before.

Gently, almost, he held my arm and led me into the living room. Then he closed the door carefully behind us, turned and suddenly he started to shove me around the room among the little furniture we had, and each time I was sent flying, he came after me and punched me hard in the shoulder and the throat and hurled me against the wall, where my head smacked against the panel, and it was shocking that he didn’t use his boots. I wasn’t prepared, and I thought, think, think, think, and then it came to me that I could get through this if I feigned it didn’t hurt, that what was happening to me was happening to someone else. I had heard it might work, and he yelled at me:

‘I’ll shut that goddamn mouth of yours,’ and he turned on me with a fury I hadn’t witnessed before. There was nothing that could hold him back, and he sent me smack against the wall again, and the air flew out of my mouth in a groan drawn from the farthest reaches of my body, but I didn’t want to feel anything, and I didn’t want to hear anything, and I filled my head with a dream that my father could not see, and it worked, it truly did. I rushed into the dream, and he thought we were in the same room, in the same house, but I was somewhere else entirely, and I feigned there was no pain, in my face, in my arms and chest, and I sailed away and dreamt I wasn’t there, and in the dream a wind came through the room, it blew across the field, it blew through the woods and the sound of it was so loud there was nothing you could hear but the wind, and Jim came flying in the wind. And he was singing to me in the wind, and wind and song were the same, and I am not kidding, he sang:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want;

He makes me down to lie,

In pastures green,

and other songs his mother had taught him, Christian hymns about angels singing, and the wind left my skin both numb and lukewarm, not cold, not hot, as you might have expected, and I couldn’t have told one from the other. And he who always used his boots when he punished us, he was punching me now, but inside my strange intoxication I was not afraid of him any more. It was time for celebration. He could hit me and hit me, and what I feared would soon be over, and then there was nothing else he could do except to kill me.

And then I rushed out of the dream as quickly as I’d rushed into it and felt his fist hit me in the eye with a sickening sound, and it closed up, and through the other I saw Siri entering the living room from the hall. She stood in the doorway staring at us, her mouth open, and with my left arm covering my face I pointed to the stairs with the right, and he hit me with such a blow to the chest that it sent me flying over the chair that was standing there, and my elbow hit the edge of the coffee table, and the table fell over, and the chair fell over, and Siri ran upstairs. I quickly rolled over on the floor in case it was the boot again, but then he put the chair back and sat down breathing heavily, his elbows on his knees. He stared straight at the wall. Slowly, I rose on to my knees. He kept staring at the wall. I felt such such a pain in my side that the air wouldn’t go all the way down into my lungs, so maybe a rib had been broken. And I was a one-eyed boy, and it was hard to find my way, the hot blood flowing from my brow over the eye that was completely shut now and down over my cheek. From the other eye something salt and shiny was coming, and with my tongue I could taste I was crying.