Per Petterson - It's Fine By Me

‘Audun, what is this? Where did you get that? Answer me!’

‘I have thick blood!’ I shout and laugh. ‘Do you want to hear a tango? Ho, ho! Here’s a tango!’ I pull and squeeze and stamp my foot, making the whole room shake, the glasses on the table and the glasses in the cupboard clink, and suddenly the picture of Jussi Björling falls off the wall and crashes to the floor. I stop playing and my mother hurries over to pick it up, and then I can see there is a baking recipe on the back and a photo of a loaf. The picture’s from a magazine, and the signature is printed on it. I laugh so much I can hardly stand.

THE SPRING AND the summer of the year I was thirteen were sunk in yellow haze. I was sweating all over my body for weeks and weeks and it was hard for me to see clearly. I walked up the gravel path to the house like a drunk, the air about me thick and quivering with a light that could explode at any moment it seemed, and sometimes I would aim for the door and miss. I sat hunched over my school books rubbing my eyes, but the yellow haze would not go away, and I kept going to the kitchen for something to drink. My throat felt so dry, I was constantly thirsty, and in the end I turned away from the school books. When I came home, I took them out of my satchel and the next morning I put them back, but I didn’t open them. And I didn’t read anything else. The Davy Crockett books were on the shelves, but there was an emptiness surrounding them that made me restless, an emptiness everywhere that made me gasp for air, and I felt sick. I lay in bed for a week gazing at the curtains. They were as sun-yellow as everything else that was on my mind, and outside my head the sticky silence hung thick and hot, and my temperature rose to thirty-nine degrees.

‘I have yellow fever,’ I said.

‘Yellow fever makes your skin go yellow,’ my mother said. ‘You’re poorly, no doubt about it, but if you ask me you look pretty pale.’

‘I’ve definitely got yellow fever,’ I said.

‘You may have, of course,’ she said and went to look it up in the family encyclopaedia, and the symptoms listed there were quite different, but if ever there was something called yellow fever, that’s what I had, and no one could tell me different.

After a week I was fed up lying in bed. I got up and put on a baseball cap and sunglasses.

The morning before the last day of school, I woke early, but stayed in bed, gazing at the ceiling, thinking about things. And when my thinking was done, I jumped out of bed and went down to the kitchen where my mother was standing with her forehead against the window looking out at the road.

‘Tomorrow I’m going off for a while,’ I said.

‘Fine,’ she said, and was relieved, for she didn’t really know what to do with me in the two months that lay ahead of us. She had to work all summer in the cafeteria at Gardermoen airport, and no one had seen my father for months. Kari would work at the newspaper kiosk, and my mother had enough on her plate looking after Egil.

‘Where are you going, then?’

‘Frank and I are going to the woods, we’ll set up camp by Lake Aurtjern. I’ll be away for about two weeks.’

‘You’ll need quite a bit of food then.’

‘Not that much. We’ll do some fishing. Have you got any money?’

‘You can have some. I haven’t got a lot,’ she said, turning her apron pockets inside out, so I could see for myself.

‘I’ll take whatever you can spare,’ I said and tossed the schoolbag over my shoulder, put my sunglasses on and set off for school. She didn’t ask which tent we were going to use. We had never owned one; neither had Frank. Besides, I hadn’t even spoken to him. We hadn’t been friends for a year.

It was quite a trek to school. But that was not where I went. By the chapel, where the roads meet, I turned right towards the railway station. Even that was not a short walk. We lived on the outskirts of the village, and the school and the railway station were at opposite ends.

It was so hot. Not a single leaf stirred on the trees, and sweat ran from my eyebrows over my face, and whenever I moved my arms, my armpits felt raw. Although my schoolbag was half empty, it was painful to carry, so I jumped into a ditch and hid it under a bush. I could pick it up on my way home, or it could just stay there. I really didn’t care.

As I walked, my body eased up and gradually the stiffness disappeared, and by the time I reached the station building, I could have run the sixty metres in under nine dead. Perhaps there was something in the air that had changed, I don’t know, but still I kept my sunglasses on. I decided to wear them at all times, at least during the day. I liked the distance they created.

For a couple of weeks I had been pestering the manager of the Co-op for his biggest cardboard boxes. Now I had three, and they were really big, I could almost stand upright inside one of them. I had kept them hidden behind a shed, and now I pulled them out and along the railway lines up to some big bushes. There I placed them one against the other, the largest in the middle and cut openings so I could move between all three. I had a hall, a lounge and a bedroom. There was not much space, but it felt right. Then I cut down some twigs from a nearby tree and laid them over the roof as camouflage. On this side of the railway lines there were just fields, so the chances of anyone stumbling upon me were small, and when I crossed the line to the road on the other side, my shack looked just like part of the scrub. I changed a few details and was home at the usual time. There was a large clock on the station building I could see from where I was camping.

I went home empty-handed; my bag was still where I left it, but my mother didn’t notice, or if she did, she didn’t mention it.

The next day, I packed my rucksack, sleeping bag, blanket for a groundsheet, torch, some extra clothes, fishing rod and the money my mother had given me. Egil stood in the doorway: he wanted to go with me, but she held him by the shoulders so he wouldn’t run off, and when I reached the gate I turned, and she looked so small and worn out, and I guessed it wasn’t such a bad idea to stay away for a while.

Everything went fine for a few days. The weather held, and that was a good thing, as I wasn’t sure at all how the house would cope with the rain. I slept and woke and felt the walls all around me. I could stretch my arms out and touch both ends of the box with my fingers and feel the smooth inside of the cardboard. The sleeping bag was snug and dry, and at night I heard noises that were new to me. There were cars coming and going on the road and the clunk of wheels from passing trains and the screech when a train braked and stopped at the station. I could hear voices, but I was never afraid; all these sounds belonged there, and I could go on sleeping, knowing that this was something I had chosen myself.

I had plenty to read. All newspapers and magazines for the kiosks and the shops were dropped off at the news-stand beside the station, and at the crack of dawn I sneaked over and took the top copies out from under the string of the bound packs, and hoped that the number of copies was on the safe side. I read the left-wing Arbeiderbladet , the farmers’ Nationen , and Texas and Cowboy , and Travnytt , for trotting news. I kept well away from Romantikk . When Kari read that magazine, she had a look on her face that made my toes curl.

But mostly I slept. My grandfather used to say you could sleep in your grave. It was something you had to earn, like a legacy, when it was all over. In that case I was taking out an advance on this legacy and withdrew as much as I could, but on the fifth day I woke up and felt good, on top form and all of a sudden very restless. I rolled up the sleeping bag and sneaked over to the tap behind the station, cleaned my teeth and washed my face. The air was chill, the sky overcast and breathing was easy. And yet, in my stomach there was a void that would not go away even after two slices of bread with peanut butter. I took a sweater from my rucksack, put on my sunglasses and started to walk along the silent road by the shops and the railway line, round the long bend and up between the fields by the chapel to the place where our house was. The dew lay shining on everything in sight and made the landscape look moist and grey, and for the first time in a long while, the yellow burning feeling was gone. There was a new shade of green, but my sunglasses made that, and I was used to it.