Per Petterson - It's Fine By Me

‘There, there, little one, everything’s fine,’ and I stand with my arm still in the air, I don’t know what to do with it. I squint so hard my eyes start to ache, and I stare into the dark behind her.

‘Where’s James Dean?’ I say. The words feel sluggish and stiff in the cold.

‘James Dean?’ Kari is puzzled, she looks up at the crowbar and then at me and bursts out laughing. ‘Oh, Audun, that’s so like you. You mean Alf. He’s gone to Eidsvoll. He’s been there for two days. He had some cars to buy.’

‘But why did you ring, then?’ I lower the crowbar like some alien thing I try to make invisible, but I have cramp in my forearm, and my hand feels numb and maybe it’s frozen fast to the metal. Kari follows my every move, and she’s no longer smiling.

‘I told you, didn’t I. I want to come home. What exactly were you going to do with that crowbar, Audun? Demolish the house? The door was open, I heard the car come and saw you from the upstairs window,’ she says, pointing, ‘and I just had to dress little one. She didn’t want to be dressed, of course, so she cried like a stuck pig, but that’s how it is. She hates that bag. Here,’ she says, handing me the whole bundle. I have to drop the crowbar, it makes a clanking sound on the doorstep, and I take the bulging bag and hold it with numbed fingers. The baby starts to cry at once, and I stand there breathing smoke signals.

‘Rock her then, Audun,’ Kari says. And I rock away and hear Arvid coming up behind me.

‘Hi, Arvid,’ Kari says, ‘I just have to fetch a few things. I didn’t know you two would be here so quickly. When I had changed this little cry-baby, I rang you back, Audun, but you must have left already.’ She turns and goes into the house. The door makes a creaking sound, and just before it bangs shut, a cat comes shooting out. Arvid rounds me like a buoy and throws himself at the cat, and he catches it and rolls around in the snow, wrestling as if the animal were ten times bigger, howling like Johnny Weismuller in the movies. After a short struggle he gets up, holding the cat firmly by the scruff of its neck. He is all white with snow and has a scratch on his cheek, the cat’s wriggling and hissing, and Arvid raises a clenched fist and grins.

‘I’ve got a brilliant idea,’ he says. ‘Why don’t we kidnap the cat ! Then at least we’ll have accomplished something. What do you think?’

I hear what he’s saying, he is trying to be funny, but I don’t really get it. I go on rocking the baby and I say, ‘It’s fine by me.’

He lets go of the cat, it’s running before it hits the ground and rounds the house and is gone behind the woodshed. Arvid brushes snow off his clothes, sighs and looks up at me.

‘Do you know something, Audun. Nothing’s fine by you. Absolutely nothing. And you can stop rocking that baby, she’s not crying any more.’

It’s true. All around us, it is quiet; in the woolly bag, it’s quiet. I look between the blankets and see the baby sleeping, her little face so smooth.

‘I guess she’s sleeping,’ I say. Arvid nods, rubs his bare hands, takes the mittens from his pocket and puts them on.

‘Shall I hold her for a bit? You could do with a breather.’

‘No, no, I’m fine.’ He nods again, wipes his nose with the mitten and takes a deep breath you could hear for miles and looks up into the air.

‘Jesus, I feel like singing,’ he says, ‘I really do. But maybe I’d better not. She might wake up again.’

‘Best if you don’t,’ I say. The door creaks, and Kari comes out carrying two large bags. She puts them on the step and locks the door with a huge key, and I hand her the baby, and Arvid goes over and takes one bag, and I take the other, and we wade across the drive to the car.

‘That’s all I could carry,’ Kari says. ‘It’s mostly for little one. Alf will bring down more whenever he comes home. He knows I’m going. I said I had to get away for a bit, and then he started to cry. You want to get divorced, he said. Christ, we aren’t even married.’

We push the bags down on the tarpaulin in the boot, and Kari puts the bag with the baby beside her on the back seat. Arvid and I sit at the front. I turn the key and start the car. Kari looks out of the window at the house.

‘The old house. Shit, I think it’s haunted, for a fact. Ride on, my gallant knight, and don’t spare the horses. I want to go home!’ Arvid laughs, and Kari laughs, and I coax the car gently up the slope, and then we glide along between the white fields towards Ask. The sun is out and shines as best it can, and the lines turn soft and yellow, and red in some places, and blue where the fields cut down to the river, and I think of what’s there beneath, the frozen, the rigid, and we don’t speak, and the baby is sleeping in the bag, and by the time we reach the Skedsmo junction, my hands are trembling so badly I pull into the verge, stop and say:

‘How about taking over, Arvid?’

‘I thought you’d never ask.’ He opens his door, and I open mine, and we walk around the car. In front, by the grille, his shoulder gently brushes mine as he passes, and then we get in. I lean back in the seat, Arvid turns the car back on the road. I close my eyes. I could sleep now, I think, and then I fall asleep.

I don’t wake up until we pull off Trondhjemsveien. In the bend, the low sun is straight in my face. It’s not even noon yet, and I miss my old sunglasses, but I haven’t worn them outdoors since I started training. Arvid drives under the Metro bridge, into Beverveien, right by the big garage and down the hill. In front of the block, he parks the car with its nose well on to the footpath. Sore and stiff we get out of the car, Kari with the baby in her arms, and Arvid opens the boot, and I pick up one bag and lead the way. There is a Sunday silence in the stairway tower and along the Sing-Sing gallery, and when I enter our flat, my mother is sitting by the kitchen table, smoking, her forehead against the window.

‘Hey, where were you?’ I say. She looks at me, but her mind is miles away. She was never like this before. There is a silence, she is looking right through me. She takes a puff of her cigarette, slowly blows the smoke out and seems to vanish in it.

‘I’m getting married again, Audun,’ she says.

I put down the bag and wipe my hands on my trousers. The lid on the stove is up and the cylinder hotplate is reeking heat into the room.

‘Who to? The man with the white back?’

‘The man with the white back?’

‘Forget it. Do I know who he is?’

‘I wouldn’t think so,’ she says calmly, ‘I haven’t known him that long.’

‘Aha. Are you going to move house then, or were you thinking that he should live with us?’

‘That was the idea, yes,’ she says, and now her mind is sharp. She sends me a defiant look.

‘I see. Well, then it’s going to be goddamn cramped here,’ I say, and Kari comes in through the door, the baby is awake, and she calls through the hall:

‘Hi, Mamma! Guess who’s here!’

MY FATHER IS dead. Two dog sledders found him on their way home from Lilloseter. It was the 22nd of December. They had taken a trail off the floodlit ski track and had seen a cabin in a clump of trees with a metre of snow on its roof. The cabin wasn’t there before, they said, so they steered the dogs off the trail to take a closer look. They were young men of my age with red anoraks and that Helge Ingstad look in their eyes and blue and white Oslo Dog Sledders Club badges on their arms. The cabin was small and solid and as tight as a bottle. The person who had built it knew what he was doing. Inside the cabin my father lay in his sleeping bag on a mattress of spruce with a primus stove up by his shoulders. There was no paraffin left. He must have fallen asleep, and it had burned with a flame turning brighter and brighter and finally poisoned him. He didn’t feel a thing. At least that’s what the doctor at Aker Hospital said. He had been dead for three days, he said, but it was cold, and I could picture the grey-blue air and the snow with its hard crust and the dog sledders doing what they had to do with a lump in their throats, loading my father on to the sled as stiff as a board, and fast as a train they set off for Ammerud where they could ring for an ambulance. From some papers he kept in the grey rucksack, they found their way to us, and now I am glad they did.