I Refuse

  But I didn’t turn off at that station. Jonsen had died a few weeks before this day in September, and Jim and his mother didn’t live there any more, they moved into Oslo as soon as Jim was discharged from hospital. Other people lived in their house now, and now the house I had lived in had burned down in May the year before, and everyone thought I had set fire to it. It was a long time before a new house was built there for a new family. The police sergeant died suddenly a couple of months after the fire. It was sad, it was something to do with his heart, it was too big apparently, and all this happened more than thirty years ago. Siri was in Asia now, in Afghanistan, in Sri Lanka or anywhere that children were in trouble, in Kosovo, in the Caucasus, she sent me a postcard now and then, and I hadn’t seen the twins when I was back in the neighbourhood to visit Jonsen, in fact I didn’t know where they were. That was not good of course, but there was nothing I could do about it. So I no longer knew anyone in Mørk I had any wish to talk to, and anyway I still had twenty kilometres to drive.

  I had passed the turn-off to Lillestrøm, and the Skedsmo crossroads and Frogner, and kept up a steady hundred on the E6, you were allowed to now, the signs said 100 and then of course most people were doing 110 or more, that’s the way it always has been, I used to be one of them myself. Finally I turned off the motorway to the east in a long curve over the bridge and back west and into the village and along the main street and parked by the police station. I sat in the car for a few minutes. It was the right thing, to come. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t peace. It wasn’t the other cheek. But I felt like ringing Jim. He could have gone in with me. We could carry that weight together. He knew what my father was like. How easy it was to think of Jim now. How difficult it had been, but when I saw him on the bridge and knew him at once despite the dark, the woollen cap, it came so suddenly I didn’t have time to be anything but happy. But I shouldn’t have said what I said about expensive cars, not to Jim, not if he was now the way he was before. I looked at my watch, it was gone nine.

  Behind a counter sat a uniformed officer, wearing a light blue shirt with a golden lion on his upper arm, on the sleeve, just below his shoulder, and I went over and said:

  ‘Good morning. My name’s Tommy Berggren. I’ve come to fetch my father.’

  ‘Your father,’ the man said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘my father. His name’s Walle Berggren.’

  ‘Walle. Is that a “v” or a “w”.’

  ‘W.’

  ‘Then I’m sure his name is Waldemar, that’s his name, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘I’ll write Waldemar.’

  ‘You’d better write Waldemar, then,’ I said. ‘I don’t care what you write. Anyway, you rang me.’

  The policeman turned and called to a second man sitting a bit further back in the room, by a window, in plain clothes.

  ‘Finn. Have we rung a Tommy Berggren about a man called Walle Berggren, Walle with a “w”. Tommy Berggren says it’s his father. He’s standing here. Tommy is.’

  ‘I haven’t rung anyone,’ the other man called, ‘Maybe Jonny did. He left about an hour ago. He’ll be back this evening.’

  ‘Maybe,’ the first policeman said, turning back. ‘Maybe it was Jonny,’ he said. ‘But neither of us has rung anyone about someone called Walle Berggren with a “w”, and we don’t know what this is about. I can’t see anything here,’ he said, shifting a few papers, some forms, to and fro on the desk. A computer was humming in the corner. ‘Why would he be here.’

  ‘The man on the phone didn’t really say it that way, but I got the impression he was being held in custody. My father, that is.’

  ‘We don’t have any cells here.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘No, you need to go to Lillestrøm.’

  ‘Why didn’t he say that.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he thought you knew. Aren’t you from around here.’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Well, if you say so. But, wherever you’re from, the cells are in Lillestrøm.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, ‘I guess I’ll have to drive to Lillestrøm, then.’

  ‘It’s not too far to Lillestrøm, not on the motorway, you can do a hundred,’ said the policeman in his light blue shirt.

  ‘I know how far it is to Lillestrøm,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ he said, and I turned and headed for the door, and behind me he said: ‘Good luck. Hope your father’s all right,’ and I said:

  ‘I don’t give a shit how my father is, I’m just fetching him,’ and I walked out, down the steps, three strides along the pavement and into my car. My temples were throbbing. It was my blood pressure, I was sure of it. I couldn’t remember if I had taken my pills this morning. I probably had. It was the first thing I did in the bathroom, and the day had begun so well. With Jim and everything. Seeing him made me so happy. But now my temples were throbbing madly. I held both sides of my head. What I needed was a drink. But I never drank before seven in the evening, when the TV news was on. And never after ten. OK, maybe half-past ten. Between those times I drank a fair bit and sometimes I forgot my rules and carried on for an hour longer.

  I started the car, drove out of Jessheim and back on to the motorway, and this time I was heading south.

  I came into Lillestrøm via Kjeller and the aerodrome there and drove down the length of the high street and turned off at the railway station, which still surprised me with its fresh elegance, and on past the equally elegant bus terminal to the town hall. I parked where everyone else parked, it was not a good place to get a parking ticket, and I went into the foyer and over to the first man in a light blue shirt I could see and tapped him on the shoulder, and it turned out his shirt was a normal blue one without a lion on the sleeve, he was the school secretary, he told me, and had his office up on the second floor, it was a hell of a place to work, there were too many schools, too many silly headmasters, I wish you knew, he said, and deputy heads, Jesus Christ, but the kids were fine, that was why he kept at it, and he was a nice man and told me where to go. I had entered the wrong building and had to go back out, across the car park and a short cut to the next car park and across that and into the building called Justisen. I should have seen it straight away, there was a sign on the wall.

  I opened the door and went in. It was quite full in there, and you had to take a ticket if you wanted to talk to the police, and people were standing around with the ticket and a passport in their hands, and were applying for a new one, or maybe wanting a police check for a new job, and they were sitting and standing all over the place with their A4 forms and inward gazes, waiting in total silence until their number came up with a pling. I took a ticket and stood for a while until I suddenly thought, what the hell am I doing, it was they who rang me, not the other way around, so what am I standing here for, and I went over to the counter where a woman sat with no queue in front of her and I explained why I was there, as I had done at Upper Romerike police station, and she said, just a moment, and picked up the phone. Shortly afterwards a policeman in the correct shirt with a lion on his sleeve just below the shoulder appeared.

  ‘Jesus, have we been waiting for you,’ he said, ‘just follow me,’ and I did. We went down one flight of stairs and along a corridor with grey doors on either side, like in a bunker, a sorry sight, and he unlocked one of those doors, and inside my father was lying on his side on a thin foam mattress with a blue plastic cover. I knew it was him because they had said it was him, but I wouldn’t have recognised him in the street. I would have walked straight past. He had tucked his feet up underneath him, and in the striped socks they looked like a child’s feet. But it was an old man lying there. His hair was long, and his beard long, and he was grey all over, his clothes were grey with grey stains on them, and the shrill light from the naked bulb under the ceiling struck his open staring eyes and flowed into them and was gone. You wouldn’t call it a reading light, you couldn’t read in that light, and my father had liked to read, Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of book. He r
ead them late at night when I was in bed, and in the morning they lay open on the table, the spine in the air, and one was called The Thundering Herd, and another was The Buffalo Hunter and some had nice drawings on the jacket and others had golden hooves engraved in the light blue covers, and the ashtray was full to the brim with cigarette butts and the house was full to the rafters with smoke, it was seeping through each and every crack and you could smell it all over the house, even in the deep of the bathroom you could feel the smoke from his cigarettes, but you couldn’t read a book in this cell, you could barely brush your teeth. It was all cold and smooth, the shiny walls painted a yellowy cream colour or more like caffè latte, that kind of colour, but not in an attractive way, and there wasn’t a splinter of wood to be seen, no panelling, no skirting boards, nothing. The floor sloped inwards from both sides so any fluid you could think of would run in only one direction. In the corner there was a polished steel funnel cemented into the floor with a platform for your feet on either side, and there my father could go to the toilet when he needed to, but when you saw the thin, grey man on the thin, blue mattress with his child-like feet drawn up under him, it was hard to imagine that he would be able to squat over that hole, and as hard to imagine that the body of the man lying there was my father’s body.

  ‘What a place to put him.’

  ‘He didn’t come quietly,’ the policeman said.

  ‘He’s just a thin, old man.’

  ‘You should have seen him fighting.’

  Then my father suddenly woke from his torpor and rose through the layers of floating space where he had found himself for a few hours and staggered to his feet, and as he straightened up his trousers fell down, because they had taken his belt, and they fell from his skinny hips like an empty sack to the floor, and he made a grab for them and caught them by his knees and behind his unkempt beard he smiled such an enthusiastic smile and said, but isn’t it Tommy, isn’t that my boy, he said, and he turned and said to the policeman, that’s Tommy, that’s my boy, he said, that’s my son, but he couldn’t disentangle his trousers. They got caught around his knobbly knees and hung there from halfway up his thighs and refused to fall down to his striped socks or to go up his hips, and he just stood still, unable to let go of his trousers and unable to move without tripping, or else he would have given me that bear hug I didn’t want at any price. That’s how he looked, as though it was the very thing he wanted to do and was on his way over, and it embarrassed me that he didn’t blush or feel any shame over his stupid trousers or the way he appeared in front of a son he hadn’t seen for so many years, but as far as I could tell, there was not a scrap of shame on his face, only this meaningless, indecent enthusiasm.

  It all went quiet. He stood with his hand clenched white with expectation around the top of his trousers. What should I do now. And the policeman was waiting. I couldn’t even hear him breathing. He looked up at the ceiling to leave us in peace during this embarrassing moment between father and son, and he tried to make himself invisible, inaudible, but I didn’t want to be left in peace with my father. I didn’t want to be there at all. And yet I couldn’t leave without him. Anything else was too late.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Come on. I’ll drive you home,’ and I heard the policeman slowly let out his breath, and my father put on a broad smile from behind his beard and said:

  ‘What a fine coat you’ve got, I’ll give you that. It has style. I’ll bet it cost you serious money.’

  ‘Yes, it did cost serious money,’ I said, and turned and walked out of the cell, and my father came out after me, clutching his trousers and then the policeman locked the door behind us. We walked down the corridor and into another room where his possessions were returned to him, and, because his hands were shaking so badly, I had to sign for each item as he was unable to do it himself, and for his shoes and his belt I had to sign, and for what was left in his wallet, and the pocket knife, I think we’d better hang on to that, the policeman said, and I said, that’s fine, just keep it, and then I signed for the jacket. I could have sworn it was the same jacket he was wearing the last time I saw him by the railway station only two hundred metres from this large house that didn’t exist then, in front of the old, heavy, stone-grey station building, and not the modern one that was put up beside it.

  The policeman let us out of a door at the back of the building. Then we didn’t have to push our way through the crowd with their passports and tickets and A4 police checks, and I could see my father was limping on his right leg as we crossed the first car park and then the second one over to my new, grey Mercedes with the tinted windscreen, and he said:

  ‘Oh, what a car, it’s nice, and the coat, and the car, it must have cost serious money, that car,’ and I said:

  ‘Yes, sure, it cost serious money.’

  ‘But I can’t sit in that car with these clothes on,’ he said, and I looked at his clothes, and he did have a point.

  ‘Just get in,’ I said, and he opened the door at the back, and I said:

  ‘No, you sit in the front.’

  ‘Ah, but, I can’t, can I.’

  ‘Yes you can, for God’s sake, just sit in the goddamn front, come on, you cannot sit in the back. Jesus Christ.’ And very carefully he sat down in the front, trying as hard as he could to leave a thin layer of air between his backside and the fragrant, immaculate leather cover I had taken the plastic off only a few days ago. Then we turned out of the car park in front of the building they called Justisen, and I left Lillestrøm the same way I had come and drove up the E6 and past the turn-offs to both this place and that place and all the places I couldn’t give a damn about or who lived there and on up past Mørk station.

  I turned into the drive of the house he claimed was his. I had never seen it before. It was north of Mørk, and a little to the west, and the railway line wasn’t even close and never had been. The bus stop was a kilometre’s walk, and there was only one bus a day, except at weekends when there was no bus at all. That was the kind of place it was, meaningful only for those who lived there, and barely that. I had cycled past with Jim a couple of times in my childhood to go fishing in a little river even further to the west. There was a waterfall and a pool with good fishing. It was Jim who liked fishing, but I always went along, he was my best friend, so at Christmas I wished for a rod with a spinner and all, and Jonsen gave me one, he was the one who listened, and no one else. And then the local council got it into their heads to build a dam, and the waterfall stopped falling, and we stopped going there. We didn’t care, there were other places we could go.

  He got out of the car under his own steam, he didn’t need any help, he felt better now, he said, with the belt back on his trousers.

  I got out too, on my side, thinking, I’ll complete this mission, and then I’ll be off, I won’t stop down here by the road, I’ll follow him to the door, and then I’ll be gone.

  There was a man on the steps of the house next to my father’s. He was smoking. He looked at us as though he wanted to tell us something, and I looked back at him and was ready to hear what he had to say, he was my father’s neighbour and he gave a slight nod, and then he wasn’t interested after all and turned away and stared up the road.

  ‘I’ll walk you to the door,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes, that’s nice,’ he said. ‘You walk with me, that’s good, that’s how it should be, a son walking his dad home, that’s it, and you can come in and have a cup of coffee as well, of course you can, that’s how it should be, I’ll put the kettle on, it’ll be ready in no time, but you know, I’ve only got instant coffee, you probably don’t drink instant coffee any more, not like you used to, not with that car and all, you probably drink something French, what’s it called, café crème, or something it’s called, you do that, don’t you.’

  It was true I drank coffee when I was a boy, he forced me to when I was ten, and I became addicted, he mixed it with sugar and milk and sat watching me as I poured it down, have another cup, he said, and I still drink
coffee that way, with sugar and milk, but I couldn’t remember if what we drank was instant coffee, if someone had invented instant coffee by then, I didn’t think so, and if they had, it could only be in America, so back then I was sure my father made the usual boiled coffee.

  We were up by the doorsteps. He had staggered and limped over the flagstones, but he wasn’t drunk now, there were just these rubber legs, he was so thin, and I said:

  ‘That’s it then. Is your door unlocked.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘it’s unlocked, but you must come in and have a coffee, it’s all wrong if you don’t come into your dad’s house and have a cup, we haven’t seen each other for such a long time, but you’re the same, I knew you would be, Tommy is the same boy he always was, I said to the police,’ but we hadn’t seen each other for forty years, and I didn’t know how he could say something so ridiculous, the boy with the bat then, but I had changed so much and was changing by the day. I was changing fast, and not for the better.

  And then his door wasn’t unlocked, and he suddenly looked confused, and his eyes grew big and round, and he looked scared and began to rummage through his pockets, but he didn’t have the keys in his trousers, nor in his jacket, perhaps he had left them in Lillestrøm, on a shelf somewhere in Justisen, or he had lost them when he was drunk, wherever he had been drunk, but that he couldn’t remember.