I Refuse

  Jim and Tommy came round the last bend on their way from Mørk on their bikes, along the gravel track and then on past Sletten’s house. He was sitting on a bench under the window with his accordion and a bottle of beer in his hand, watching them, he hadn’t mowed his lawn for weeks, it looked a mess, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He was in free fall, that man, on his way down into the great void because his wife had gone to Oslo and taken the children with her, there were two sisters and two brothers, Egil, and Audun, and Audun had been in their class, but even though he was a neighbour and the same age as Jim and Tommy, they weren’t friends with him. There was no room for anyone else.

  And then Tommy caught sight of Siri and the police sergeant in the sunshine at the front of the house. The twins were sitting on the steps with their arms wrapped around their shoulders as though they were freezing cold and it was late autumn, but it wasn’t autumn, it was summer in all its glory, and the sergeant stood with his arms crossed and his shirtsleeves rolled up all the way to his armpits, and he was powerful, it was easy to see, which was the point, that it was for show. And he stood there waiting, he was waiting for Tommy, and Tommy understood right away it was him they were waiting for, all four of them, and he thought, I’m strong too, he may not be able to take me, not if I’m quick, I’m quicker than him. He could have stopped right then and headed off another way, but there was no other way, for Siri was there, and the twins. There was a car he hadn’t seen before parked by the road as well as the police car. The police car was a black Volvo, but this other one was red as a communist flag, a van with letters painted on the side, but neither Tommy nor Jim could read what it said. What’s written on that van, Tommy said, you’re long-sighted, aren’t you. Jim always sat by the large window at the back of the class. Sure I am, Jim said, but I can’t read it. I think maybe it’s a carpenter’s van, there’s a hammer painted on it. And a carpenter he was. He must have been new to Mørk because they hadn’t seen the van before, and if they had, they would have remembered it, being so red, and there was a yellow hammer painted on the doors at the back, he was definitely a communist.

  Jim followed Tommy all the way down although his mother was out on the doorstep of their house staring at them as they cycled past, and then they braked and got off their bikes by the Berggren house and propped them against the dustbins, and right behind the bins stood the police sergeant with his sunglasses on. He slowly uncrossed his arms and dropped them each side of his hip and let them hang there, as a pistolero would, slightly apart from his thighs with only the index finger crooked forward into an unnatural curl. He was smiling, he had a broad belt with a large buckle round his waist, and on the gleaming silver buckle there was a skull with eyes of red glass in the sockets.

  There were four bags on the front steps. The biggest was Siri’s, the next biggest Tommy’s and the two smallest were identical and looked like doll’s cases on the large flagstones. They were all so full they were bulging. Their schoolbags were on the grass. What’s going on here, said Tommy. You’re moving, said the sergeant. We can’t, this is our house. Oh yes, you can, the sergeant said, you can’t live here on your own, you can’t look after yourselves. Sure we can, Tommy said. Nonsense, the sergeant said, and anyway you have no rights in this world, you’re not sixteen yet. I’ll be sixteen in a very short time, Tommy said. You’re thirteen, the policeman said, do you think I don’t know how old you are, you’re in the seventh class, do you think I’m stupid. Two more weeks, Tommy said, and I’ll have finished school. For Christ’s sake, shut up, the sergeant said. Grab your bags and put them in the back of my car, and then we’ll go, no, not you two, he said to the twins, you take your bags and walk across the road. He pointed, and Tommy looked across the road. Herr and Fru Lien were standing on their front steps, they were waiting, they were watching what was happening, but stayed on their side of the road. We’ve spoken to them several times, and so has child welfare, they would like to have you, the sergeant told the twins. Hell, you can’t give my sisters away, Tommy said. From the corner of his eye he saw the carpenter standing by his van, he was smoking, he was leaning against the bonnet. One of the back doors was open, and his equipment was inside, a toolbox and a pile of boards, and the carpenter too was waiting and staring up in the air letting white wisps of smoke stream from his mouth into the sunshine. The twins lifted their bags and started walking. Hey, girls, hang on a moment, Tommy said, and they stopped and turned and looked at him and smiled. We can call you, they said. But for Christ’s sake, Tommy said, no one here has a telephone, that’s just something you’ve seen in a film, people calling each other, but they shrugged and made identical funny faces. That was also something they had seen twins doing in a film, but Tommy couldn’t remember which film. And then they set off again, down to the road and then across it and up the flagstones from the dustbins on the other side, and when they reached the house Herr and Fru Lien took them each by the hand and led them in and closed the door.

  Is this all we’re allowed to take, Tommy said, we’ve got much more than this, he said, and the sergeant said, the people at child welfare say it’s best you start afresh somewhere else, they say there’s been too much going on in this house, and the police chief agrees, so it’s all decided, you just take what’s in the bags. It’s not decided, Tommy said and ran to the door and pulled it open and charged through the hall and into the living room where everything was spick and span, they had washed and tidied everything and they’d done it on Saturday when Tommy was well again. They had turned the house into a home, Siri and he had managed it all by themselves, they had aired the rooms and chased the cigarette smoke out, cleaned every single nook and cranny and made food and looked after the twins, and watched TV together in the evenings, no one could have been happier, and he ran up the stairs to their room and dived under the bed. There was the rounders bat back in its place, and he crawled out again, and on the shelf he found the book by John Steinbeck, it was a present from Jim but he hadn’t read it yet, and he went over to the window and flung it open and called to Siri, is there anything you want. My diary, she called. He went to her bed and took it out from under the pillow, where he knew it was, where she knew he knew it was. He had never read it although he could easily have done so. And then he went back downstairs.

  When Tommy came out of the house with the bat in his hand, the sergeant said, no, no, no, that’s no good, not the bat, for Christ’s sake, are you stupid or what, he said, but Tommy wouldn’t let go of it, and the sergeant didn’t want to fight, not in the road where everyone could see, in case he lost. Hey, Tommy. Do you think it’s smart to take the bat, Jim said. I don’t know, Tommy said. Maybe not. But he wouldn’t hand it over. You two sit in there, the sergeant said, and Siri got in, and Tommy said to Jim, see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow,Tommy, Jim said, don’t be sad. I’m not, Tommy said, and he got in. He gave Siri the diary, and she took it and squeezed it hard to her chest. Thank you, she said. Where are we going, Tommy said. You’re going to Mørk. Will we be together, Siri and I. Are you stupid, the sergeant said, of course you won’t be together. You two living together, are you stupid, he said, don’t you get it, and he put the car in gear and set off slowly and then picked up speed.

  A couple of hundred metres further up Jonsen came running from his house, it was a sight to see, he looked awkward, and clumsy, and he came right out on to the gravel road and stopped in the middle with his hands on his hips. The sergeant groaned and hit the brakes. He rolled down the window. What is it now, he said. Jonsen came round the car, he was thinking, I have to do this, it’s not something I can walk away from, and he bent down, his hand on the car door and said through the open window, I’ll take Tommy. What, said the sergeant. You can’t, we’ve already decided on someone else. Who, Jonsen said. The sergeant said a name. He blushed. What, Tommy said from the back seat. No, no, that’s not good, Jonsen said.

  The sergeant stared straight ahead through the windscreen. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I kno
w, he said. He leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. Has anyone here got a telephone, he said. No, Jonsen said. I mean yes, Høiland has of course, Jonsen said, pointing a few houses further up the road. He just had it installed, there will be more soon, they’re going to dig trenches, he said. The sergeant shook his head, suddenly he was so tired, why was he the one to deal with this. He got out of the car with a groan. Shit, he said under his breath. He left the black Volvo in the middle of the road with the door open and the engine running and walked up to Høiland’s house as he rolled down his shirtsleeves to his wrists and then he looked like someone else, more like someone they knew, more like one of them. After all, Jonsen had been in the same class as his older brother.

  Tommy got out of the car and walked round the back and stood looking down at the house where he had always lived. The carpenter had already boarded up one window and gone on to the next. The house looked quite different already, it looked blind and not the way a home should look. He felt sick. As though he were spinning through the air. As though he were falling. I’m falling, Tommy thought, it’s so strange. I’m so dizzy. He crouched down. He leaned forward with his knuckles on the gravel. Then he threw up. I’m thirteen years old, he thought, I’ll be fourteen in the autumn, but he didn’t feel any age. Then he heard the sergeant returning from Høiland’s house. Shit, the sergeant said as he walked, and he groaned, as he often did, he had a heavy heart and carried it with him wherever he went. Tommy got up and walked back around the car. Jonsen was standing there. I’ve spoken to the police chief, the sergeant said. He looked at Tommy, he didn’t even wink. Then he said to Jonsen, he can stay with you for the time being. Until child welfare can find somewhere else. He can’t live with you, you live alone, he has to be with a family, those are the rules. Do you understand, the sergeant said. Jonsen said nothing. Then he said, that’s fine. You can take your bag, the sergeant told Tommy, and Tommy walked around the car and opened the boot and took out his bag, and then he went back and put his bag on the road and opened the door to the seat where Siri sat in the corner with the diary held tightly to her chest. He leaned in. They looked at each other. Hi, he said, and she smiled. She will stay with me in Jonsen’s house for the time being, right, he said aloud. Goddamn it, the sergeant said, why aren’t you paying attention, of course she’s not staying with you, are you stupid, he said, Jesus Christ. It’s all right, Tommy, Siri said. I’ll be fine. Are you sure, Tommy said. Do you know where you’re going to stay, he said. Yes, Siri said, he told me before you and Jim came. I’m going to Lydersen’s. Right, Tommy said, who’s Lydersen. I don’t know who he is, Siri said. Tommy straightened up and held on to the door frame. See you tomorrow then, Siri, he said. See you tomorrow, Tommy. He closed the door, and the sergeant got in and started the engine, and they moved off.

  Come on, let’s go inside, Jonsen said, and Tommy took his bag and they walked up to the house.

  TOMMY ⋅ 1966

  THE THING ABOUT Mørk was that it could have been anywhere. There were hundreds of places in Norway called Mørk, you just had to look in the atlas of Norway, in the index at the back, and they were scattered all across the country. But however many there were, Mørk was where we lived, in our own Mørk, although in fact it wasn’t quite in Mørk, but rather six kilometres further east in a neighbourhood where the houses formed a line on both sides of a gravel road. But to Mørk we had to go. That was where the shop was and the mill and the garage, and the BP station for those who had a car and the school for those who went to school and the church for those who were Christian, and hell, they were quite a few. I was a Christian myself. I felt Christian, perhaps not as Christian as Jim, but how else should I feel. There was nothing else. On a scale of one to ten I was about six, seven at the most, but it wasn’t something I wasted my time thinking about.

  There was a railway station in Mørk, and many of the old people thought it was a curse, what with all the riff-raff that got off the train from Oslo, car thieves and communists and boys with long hair like girls, and you couldn’t tell them apart. The school bus left for Mørk from the road where we lived, but there were no other buses and of course that was bad for those who had a limp or were old and short of breath, but that was the way it had always been, and if time was on your side and you weren’t lame or stooped, you could easily walk to Mørk in a little over an hour.

  Of course you could cycle to Mørk, and that was what we did when there was football in the evening or community cinema in the school gym or just to hang around the green pumps at Lysbu’s BP station on the crossroads and fool around. We cycled, Jim and I, and sometimes Willy, and we got there in no time.

  It was Jim and I who stuck together, we always had, you would not often see one of us out on the road without the other, without Jim shoulder to shoulder with Tommy, or the other way around. It wasn’t easy for people in the neighbourhood to understand, our being so different, our lives so different behind the closed doors in the evening, but we got a lot out of those differences, and though many said that birds of a feather stick together, it wasn’t true in our case.

  My father disappeared, no one ever saw him again, and it was strange, considering the smashed leg he would have had to drag with him, that he could vanish, just like that. For a couple of weeks the four of us managed on our own. Siri and I took care of most things for the twins, and after that I moved in with Jonsen, a bit further up the road. We had been friends for a long time. He was a bachelor, about the same age as my mother, and lived in the house next to Jim’s. I was supposed to stay there until child welfare had worked out what to do with me. But they didn’t have a clue what to do, so they just let time pass.

  The twins stayed with the Liens on the opposite side of the road from our old house. The day the four of us moved, the police sergeant came in his black Volvo, and a carpenter came in a communist van with his tools in the back, and covered the windows with boards and put a steel bar with a padlock across the door. No one told us in advance, so most of our things were still inside.

  The Liens had never had any children of their own, and I guess they were a bit old to be foster parents, but I had always liked them, and they let me speak to the girls every day, the word ‘no’ never crossed their lips. Sometimes I was also inside the house, on the sofa with one little sister on each side, they were six then and their hair was done in identical pigtails, the only difference was the colour of the ribbons, one had red, the other blue, and we watched the Monday film together whenever children were allowed to, mostly old black-and-white films starring Fred Astaire or Cary Grant or sometimes Humphrey Bogart in a world which had nothing to do with ours, and the twins would clap their hands every time a man kissed a woman on the screen, and they looked at each other and laughed until they toppled over, but of course they didn’t understand a thing.

  Siri lived in a house in the centre of Mørk with a family I did not like at all, and they certainly didn’t like me, they said I was a bad influence, and not only on her, was the general opinion, and they wouldn’t even let me near the house. The Lydersens they were called. If I crossed the road from the Co-op and went between Mørk Machinery and the Old People’s Home and over to the picket fence around the garden in front of the house, the old man would come out on to the front steps and shout: Get lost.

  I couldn’t understand why child welfare thought this was a good house for Siri to live in. They were model Christians in there, that must have been it, and everyone they knew was as Christian as they were, together they formed their own layer of the Mørk population, and they never spoke to anyone else unless they had to. They had even moved Siri to a different school, more than fifteen kilometres away, to Valmo, and so she went on a different bus from the one we had always caught from our neighbourhood. But I spoke to her anyway, behind the Co-op and the post office in the evening, maybe twice a week for as long as summer lasted and the days were long, and when autumn came, I cycled alone to Mørk in the cold and dark, and the frost had settled, you could feel it on th
e tarmac, how the tyres sang a different song, and the only lights I could see were the lamps lit in the windows of houses along the road and the shine of the lanterns in the courtyard of farms up against the forest, and they all made the road even darker.

  When I got there I turned into Lysbu’s BP station, he wasn’t retired yet, and I waited there with my bike against a pump. Sometimes when I got there early, I went in for a chat if it was his shift that evening, and most often it was. He thought that was all right, he liked me, I think, and he didn’t nag. He knew well why I turned up so late, and that was fine by him, it was no less than right and proper for us to come together, he said, you’re brother and sister for Christ’s sake, why the hell should you not, and he didn’t say a word to anyone, why the hell should I, he said.