I Refuse

  She reported to the steward. He was a tall man, he wasn’t young, on his face there were lines crossing from his nose to his ears unlike most people’s, which ran from their eyes down alongside the mouth, and this made him look like an Indian, a North American Indian of some tribe or other, but she was no expert, it wasn’t she who had read Zane Grey’s novels, it was Berggren, and she thought vaguely it had something to do with being a seaman, seeing the world, seeing many different peoples and pulling your roots up to become one of them. But he was from Hønefoss, and he didn’t look like an Indian there.

  He looked down at her brown suitcase. It was not big.

  ‘Is that all you brought with you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is what’s mine.’

  I see, he thought, so this is what’s hers, didn’t she have anything else, in some other place, and if not, how much was it that wasn’t hers, was there a standard for this you could measure it by, the contents of her brown suitcase, maybe, in cubic centimetres, which according to her was all that was hers and nothing more, or proportionate to what she had left behind, but he didn’t have the energy to ask, he thought, she is good-looking, almost too good-looking, and then he thought, she is on the run, of that I am pretty sure. Which, strictly speaking, was none of his business, as long as it wasn’t from the law, and he was certain it was not. He closed his eyes for a second, he was tired, he had slept badly, that was the problem, he had woken in the middle of the night, as more and more often he did, and he couldn’t go back to sleep, and then he lay awake with a book, and what he read was sometimes so upsetting it was five o’clock before he had any peace, and then soon after he had to get out of his bunk. It had been like that for a long time.

  ‘Come on, and I’ll show you to your cabin.’

  It wasn’t his job, but there was something about her, and he showed her the way and let her go down the stairs first, so he wouldn’t have her eyes on his back, that was his idea. It was four decks down, the lowest rung of the ladder, but you can probably work your way up a deck or two, he said with a smile as he opened the door and let her into the tiny room.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ she said, ‘this is perfect, it suits me perfectly, I don’t want anything more than this, thank you very much.’

  ‘Have a lie-down and I’ll see you again in an hour. You got here at the last minute, we’re slipping moorings now.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘This very second,’ he said.

  By Rotterdam she could master most of it. Working out of the kitchen she could soon dart through the halls, on her sea legs, up and down the long corridors and a tray in her hands with pitchers and plates to the mess for officers only and higher up to the worn-down splendour of the captain’s lounge, or the other way around, of course, to the captain first, to serve the most delicious meals the chef had concocted in the galley. He was a great guy, a wizard, and they became friends, or at least a team, and she didn’t mind the job at all. She would have done almost anything they might have put her to.

  But when they docked in Genova, she began to feel ill. She felt it in her toes first, and then in her fingertips, they went numb, they lost all sensation, and in Port Said she kept dropping things on the floor. On their way through the Suez Canal she kicked table legs and chairs and didn’t even notice, and soon it became hard to manoeuvre her own body across a room, down the stairs, so incredibly difficult to wind her way through the narrow galley with the casseroles in her hands, filled to the brim with steaming hot food, pitching, slopping against the sides like lava, and a warm wind drove them through the canal, past Sharm el-Sheikh with the sharks in the sea along the beaches, and the waves rose high and carried them across the Red Sea and lifted them south down the Yemen coast and out through the Bay of Aden. She had difficulty breathing, and the steward said, for Christ’s sake, get yourself into bed, and she did. She went to bed, and there she lay in her cabin four decks down gasping for breath in the heaving bunk, in the half-dark and heat in the dim light of a bedside lamp. No one had told the first mate what was going on, they covered for her, they lied, but the steward was annoyed, he felt desperate, she had only just come on board, only a fortnight had passed since they’d left Oslo, and now she was ill already. She was convinced she was going to die, and you couldn’t blame her, he felt sorry for her, she was good-looking, but she didn’t know what was happening. Nor did he. He didn’t have a clue. They would have to find a decent doctor in the next port, he would have to inform the first mate, but he stalled for as long as he could. The first mate would be furious, he would give him hell, and then he had to tell him, and the first mate was furious and shouted, why the hell did you sign her on in the first place, but the steward said, strictly speaking, it wasn’t me who did that, rubbish, the first mate shouted, she’s good-looking, what the hell can be wrong with her, she’s young, and the steward said he didn’t know, and nor did anyone else, she just lay in bed trembling and groaning and wheezing, he said, and I guess she doesn’t look that good any more. To tell you the truth.

  Outside Djibouti she started crying, and she cried all the way round the Horn of Africa, I don’t want to, she cried, I can’t breathe. There were forty-five men on board and most of them made long detours round the stairs and the corridors to avoid her cabin and the red-hot door that could burst into flames at any moment, and whenever they had to go that way, they covered their ears. She made them nervous, anxious, and it came to them that one day life would just stop, any day it could, and everything they had ever known and knew anything about would fade and be gone, and then, the instant before all hope was lost, they would cry in the way she was crying and maybe it would sound just as it did in there, inside her cabin, and they thought, oh, what the fuck did he let a woman on board for, how could he have been so stupid, we can’t sleep at night.

  The steward counted the days and steeled himself and let time slip by until they arrived in Mogadishu, where they were docking anyway to load and unload, and she was worn out but still alive beneath the hammering sun of Africa as they glided quietly inside the long, thin arm of the mole and turned slowly and docked in the new harbour in the west of the city with the white, pink and acid-green ancient buildings and the ancient wall alongside the lido and the rows of palm trees, like the backdrop to a film.

  They took her with them through the town, almost dragging her across the quay, up past the church with its two towers a mere stone’s throw from the minaret where two girls on a scooter almost knocked them over as they supported, or rather carried her between them, but it was too far, they would have to flag down a car, why on earth were they walking her like this. And then a car did stop, and the driver looked at Fru Berggren and nodded and spoke to them in Arabic first, and then in Italian, and the steward had some Italian and explained to the dark, handsome young man where they were going, to Ospedalka wee, that’s what it was called.

  And they were in a hurry now, the young man could see that, and he gave it all he had, the only thing missing was the flashing blue light, they couldn’t have asked for more, but on the way there, they were held up at a crossroads, total gridlock, no way out, and they sat there waiting for the policeman at the heart of the crossing to let them pass, and he had his stylish green beret on, and from all quarters came yesterday’s cars, little cars, big cars and scooter taxis, Simcas and Fiats, motorbikes and more scooters, and everything was on the move, and the wind blew through the palms and rustled the leaves and the trunks were swaying, and the policeman stood straight as a pole in his fluttering shorts on his little platform with the white gloves up to his armpits, waving his arms like Toscanini must have waved his, if any of them knew who Toscanini was, and the steward did.

  And above the door to the hospital, it really said, Ospedalka wee, arched and in white, and beside it Somalia é la mia patria, painted in large, blue letters on a wall.

  The doctor wasn’t a Somali, he was white, he was from Aalborg in Denmark and must have studied at the University of Copenhagen, at the Faculty of
Medicine there, a reassuring fact, the steward thought, if indeed it was a fact, but this doctor from Aalborg couldn’t find anything wrong with her. She cried and cried, and he asked her, why are you crying, are you in pain, I don’t know, she said, I don’t know why I’m crying, and there was nothing wrong with her that he could find, not with the expertise and equipment at his disposal, it’s really mysterious, he said, and jabbed a needle into her foot, does that hurt, he said, what, she said, does what hurt, and he shook his head and said, well, I’ll be damned if I know what’s wrong.

  And then back the same way. Straight through town to the ship in a car they flagged down, an East European one this time, a Wartburg, and what was a Wartburg doing here, now, and they couldn’t very well leave her behind in this place, not in Mogadishu, no, no, so then it was up and across the deck and one man holding each arm hurrying down the companionway to her cabin. And then they cast off, hauled in the hawsers and coiled them flat, and a bulky tugboat pulled them out of the harbour in one long arc, and would you believe it, only two mornings later, up she came from the depths and into the galley, handling the same casseroles, the same pans and filling the same trays with breakfast and darting into the corridor on her way to the mess for officers only, as though she’d had a shift off and was rested now and ready to resume where she had left off.

  ‘How are you doing,’ the steward said. He laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it gently, it was a fatherly hand, a fatherly grip, do you feel better now, he said, can you feel your hands, can you breathe properly, and she sent him a barely visible smile and shrugged.

  It was easy for all to see how attractive she was, the shape of her body, how defined it was, it had been easy to see the whole way from Oslo, whatever clothes she was wearing, aprons, skirts, jumpers, trousers, but it was not intentional on her part, she wore what she wore because it seemed practical to her. For a while they had all been concerned, no doubt about it, especially the young ones fell apart when she got ill, but it was already forgotten, and the steward did what he had decided to do out in the North Sea several weeks before. He walked with her along the catwalk just out from Mombasa, where they were not docking on this voyage, and he asked her to stop, and they stood, hovering high above the deck, and he said:

  ‘You gave us a shock, you should know that, there was no one on board that wasn’t affected, but now you’re well again, and beautiful, yes, you are, every one of us can see that. They’re good boys, most of them, make no mistake, so you’ll be fine for the rest of the trip, it’s not that, but to be be frank with you, it would be best if you chose one and stuck to him. Then none of us would have a problem.’

  She looked at him, was he serious.

  He was.

  ‘Then I choose you.’

  ‘I’m married,’ he said.

  She shrugged. It was all the same to her.

  She’d made a remarkably quick recovery, and she looked really good now, and it wasn’t something she was trying to hide, she played with her cards on the table, or so he thought, but there was this thing about her he couldn’t grasp, which made him a little nervous. Though it wasn’t easy to say no to her for her linen trousers clung to her hips and her thighs in the wind, and there was something about those lines around her mouth and how her hair was pinned up and the skin beneath it so naked to the sun, and here she stood on the catwalk and it came to him that she probably had no idea how striking she looked. And his first thought, was the one many men would have had, that it was his task to reveal this to her.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘That’s it then.’

  He already had some regrets on the first evening, in the darkness, with the tropical night outside, not a light to be seen and Fru Berggren beneath him. His cabin was twice as big as hers or even bigger, and there were men’s things scattered around the room. There were cuttings on the wall of places he had been and football matches in black and white, framed with the ocean on both sides of the ship and football teams on deck with him kneeling in the front row holding the ball in his gloved hands, and there were bashful half-nude models on the bathroom door, a drawing pin in each corner. A Gillette shaver lay in a bowl on the dresser, above the bunk hung a guitar from a nail in the wall, and the strings were frayed and worn and brown and lifeless from too little use over too many years, and a table tennis bat lay on the floor under the desk. Everyone on board had at least one. He had a shelf of books from the farthest-flung places in the world, from Borneo, from Arabia, and Persia from the roof of the world, on board a Fulvio yacht in the spray of a storm around Cape Horn, on horseback across the North American prairie. There were many novels too. Which was not so masculine, maybe.

  He lifted himself off her breast with his elbows straight, and the darkness in the cabin was so all-consuming he could hardly see her beneath him, and in the heat of the African night her skin was cool and white, it felt white to him, and he said:

  ‘You have to make an effort. You really have to. Or else it’s no good. Do you understand what I’m saying. You have to concentrate.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said at once. ‘I know what you mean. I will. Cross my heart.’

  The morning after, he had a strange feeling. He felt alone. He used to read in bed, but he didn’t feel like reading. He got up and sat down naked on the chair by the desk, light came pouring from the porthole. She was still under his duvet. He lit a cigarette, he thought, I can just tell her when it’s over. It’s over, I can say, do you understand that, when I know I can’t do it any more. And then he thought, but who else would want her then, on board this ship, and he suddenly realised it was already too late to turn her away.

  And then, some months later, she changed to another shipping line. The steward couldn’t remember what she gave as a reason, but when she went ashore in Singapore to catch another boat before it departed and left the busy city-state, he felt a relief so great that it made him ashamed. The new company wasn’t Norwegian and didn’t dock in Oslo or Bergen or any other Norwegian town. Nor did it dock anywhere else in Europe, but sailed between countries in South East Asia and the east coast of Africa, and leaning over the railing, watching her cool, slim back in her yellow blouse grow smaller on her way down the gangway, he had a strange feeling he was the last person to see her alive.

  TOMMY ⋅ SEPTEMBER 2006

  SO I RANG off. He wasn’t dead. Right.

  I had seen my father only once in forty years. He was standing by the entrance to Lillestrøm station, the old one, smoking under the clock there, leaning against the wall. He had a beard he didn’t have before. He held his jacket together at the neck, it was a grey jacket, a kind of blazer, or an old, threadbare suit jacket, the way Salvation Army jackets had always looked, but it should have been a coat, a down jacket, something warm, something with a lining, it was so goddamn cold that day, it was December and way below zero, but I didn’t walk up to my father to give him my coat. No peace. Not the other cheek.

  And now that too was many years ago, and he looked old even then, and I was convinced I wouldn’t know him if I went up to the police station in Upper Romerike. And yet it was my name, Tommy Berggren’s name, he had given when they must have asked after close relatives they could contact. Was he so sure that he would know me, or didn’t he have anyone else they could ring. It seemed unlikely after all the years that had passed. And what would happen if I didn’t turn up, if I just let it pass. It would have been so easy. I didn’t know what would happen. Was it an important decision I had to take, and if I didn’t go, would it trouble me for the rest of my life. I didn’t know that, either.

  I got up from the desk, went into the corridor, opened the door to the office next to mine, poked my head in and said:

  ‘I’m going now,’ and they looked at their watches, I had only just come, they thought, a few minutes ago. ‘I’m taking the day off,’ I said, and then they said, go, just go, you’ve earned it, they said, the market won’t collapse just because Tommy Berggren takes this day off, away with you, they said, take
the day off. But I could take any day off. I worked too hard, for long hours. I was well paid but my blood pressure was going haywire. I had to take pills.

  And then back down to the garage in the lift, and when I put my hand on the bonnet the metal was still warm. I got in and turned the key, and the car started first time, it would have been a scandal if it didn’t, given the money I had paid for it. It was a quarter-past eight, and the police had rung me early, it was a shot in the dark on their part and they hit the mark. I drove through the centre of Oslo, alongside the railway line at first and a cream-coloured mist was drifting over the rails towards the Ekerberg Ridge, the same way I was going, like a river it rolled between the platforms and looked like something you saw only in dreams. And I drove into the tunnels beneath Vålerenga, Etterstad and further north-east, past Karihaugen, Lørenskog and the hotel called Olavsgaard, where the bar on the ground floor was known as the Last Chance Shed, and if you went home alone from that bar in the early hours, there was something wrong with your person you needed to do something about. I had been there a few times myself, several years ago, and when I left I was never alone.

  After half an hour I passed the station where Jim and I had stood so often on the platform, waiting for the train so we could go to Oslo to buy records and clothes when we had money or just to walk up and down Karl Johans gate looking at girls in shorter skirts than the girls we knew had ever worn. I always had some money after the summer. Every school holiday Jonsen fixed me up with five weeks’ work at the Kallum Saw Mill, and there I measured the lengths of boards with a folding rule and wrote them down at one end of the boards with a carpenter’s pencil and loaded planks on to lorries and drove the forklift between piles of timber, and Jonsen had worked there himself for many years, at first as a saw sharpener and then at all sorts of jobs. At times he ran the mill almost single-handedly, on the floor, but also inside the office, where he wrote invoices and reminders and whatever was necessary when the boss was away, and he was away often. And I helped him as much as I could, I had a head for figures, Jonsen said, I thought maybe it was my only strong point, at school that is, I was good at maths, and at woodwork as well, and I was living with him then, from when I was thirteen, fourteen, and for a good many years he was the only adult I ever trusted, and in the end he gave me a permanent job at the mill.