I Refuse (16 page)

‘You there, get going,’ he said and impatiently he started to undo the big buttons at the front of her coat and was so rough in doing it that one came loose and was dangling from a thin thread, and she said:

‘What are you doing. Jonsen, stop it, I can unbutton my own coat, I don’t need your help with everything,’ and he felt desperate when she called him
Jonsen
, oh Christ, the distance there was in that name, as though he didn’t have a first name like any other person. But no one had called him anything else since he went to school, but then they all called one another by their surnames, just for fun, like precocious nicknames, it was what they were doing then, carrying their bags under the left arm and saluting with two fingers to the cap, as the grown-ups did, but gradually their names went back to Vidar and Olaf and Øivind or any other name they were christened with. Only
his
surname stayed on,
Jonsen
persisted in the years afterwards, and he didn’t understand why, but his solid first name slowly melted into air, into thin air, and at times it was as though he himself couldn’t remember what he was called other than Jonsen, and now he was Jonsen for her too, even though he called her Tya, and he liked her name so much, but he stopped using it, and he didn’t call her anything any more, the woman who had lain beside him in his bed, her body outstretched and cool, and him with his tentative warmth, but she had been a stranger to the district, she had come here in Berggren’s car, pregnant with Tommy, and for all he knew she might never have heard his first name.

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Do it yourself, but hurry up and take that coat off,’ and he heard his words and the tone he used and knew she hadn’t deserved them, for it was he who had offered to help her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Take the time you need and I’ll make a bed for you in the living room,’ and she said:

‘Maybe you can make make a bed for us both. That would be nice,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t it,’ and he did, with taut sheets and much effort he made a bed for them both, but she was only half there during the act, as it’s known, during the act she was only half there, she made love with him absent-mindedly, and once, right in the middle, when he was well into deeper waters and full flow, she said:

‘Do you think the snow will keep falling. Do you think I’ll have to wait even longer,’ and there was nothing she wanted more than to get away and nothing else had been on her mind while they were lying there, and if she had asked him what he wanted for Christmas, he couldn’t have been more perplexed. He tensed and lost what heat he had, and as if from above, he could see his back stretched over her body, almost covering it completely, and he could see his backside, and thighs, and her eyes staring past his ear at the ceiling, at anything but his face, and he thought, I can’t lie here like this, I’m disgracing myself, and then he stayed there anyway and slowly started to move again and then faster from where he had left off before she began to speak, and he thought, I want what I can get, or I take what I can take, and by then there was no love between them, but something else, and afterwards it made no difference to him what it had been.

Early next morning the snowplough woke him. She was already sitting on the divan, huddled up under the window, wearing a white vest and nothing else and was white all over, and with her head barely over the edge she was watching the road, and although day had not yet broken, the road outside cast a white light on her face, and her face white and her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms crossed over her breasts. She might have looked like a girl with her back arched that way, only the plaits were missing. But she didn’t look like a girl.

She turned away from the window, she was eager now.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said, and that was how it seemed, as though she hadn’t slept a wink, but he had, and he hadn’t noticed her getting up and realised he was alone in bed, and he thought, that’s it then, so things are back to how they’ve always been, and he felt redundant in his own home.

She said:

‘The school bus will be here in an hour.’

‘I’ll make some breakfast then,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to sit there in front of the window for a whole hour.’

‘I have to pay attention,’ she said. ‘Don’t you see.’

He went into the kitchen and put on water for coffee, and finally she followed him in to eat, and they ate with the curtains drawn, and when they had finished she didn’t thank him, but stood up and went back to the living room and to the window, crouched down so she couldn’t be seen from outside and sat down on the divan with her eyes just above the windowsill, and still she was wearing no more than a white vest, and it suddenly made him bitterly embarrassed, that she didn’t care whether he saw her dressed or undressed, he was nothing to her.

‘Here it comes,’ she said.

He could hear the drone of the diesel engine from up where the bus had carefully turned in off the main road to drive down this little road and out back again at the other end, and whether the snow had an amplifying effect and gave the sound an extra-dull boom, he didn’t know, but the whole house and his whole body seemed to vibrate, and she pressed her forehead against the window to see if she could catch a glimpse of her children getting on, a little lower down the road, and then the bus came past Jonsen’s house, and two of her children were on board: Siri who always sat in the middle of the bus and Tommy by a window at the rear, clearly visible above the drifts, and he was staring straight ahead without once looking to the sides, holding his packed lunch in the air, with his name written on the stiff, grey paper in looped handwriting, and it was hard not to think he had a reason to do that, just then, but of course he couldn’t have.

And she sat in her white vest on the divan with her eyes barely above the windowsill, staring out at the school bus driving through the neighbourhood with Tommy and Siri on board and watched them disappear, and it was hard to imagine that only an hour later she too would disappear, for ever, and it was him, Jonsen, who would drive her the sixty kilometres to Oslo through the snow to one of the quays where, at the last moment, she would sign on for work on a ship that soon after would drop moorings and sail down the Oslofjord, and not pull into quay again until Rotterdam.

I CLOSED THE
door of the Social Security office behind me, walked into the stairwell and stood straight for a couple of minutes. I felt a bit shaky, which was no surprise. But it was all right.

The stairs were quiet, no one was coming up, no one was going down. There was just a distant murmur from the mall and the shops below. The walls were painted the same colour as every stairwell of every public office in the whole world. If anyone came up here now, they would know for certain why I was there, where I had come from, and I really didn’t care, but just the same I walked quickly over to the lift, it was on the ground floor, I pressed the button and then changed my mind, went to the stairs and half ran down the three floors to street level and walked through the centre, into the big space, and took the escalator up to Level 2 and entered the café on the corner. I had often been there, it was a nice place. The café did not have a wall with a door to the concourse, you could go straight in from the gallery and the line of shops there, fashion boutiques mostly, Cubus, Dressman, that kind of shop, and inside the café I hung my jacket over the back of a chair, went to the counter and ordered a late lunch, or early dinner, depending on what part of the day you were looking from, and carried it to the table on a tray and went back for coffee and juice. It was always the same friendly woman behind the counter, and she knew me every single time I was there and asked me how things were going, and I never answered. I just nodded and smiled. What was I supposed to say. And the menu was the same every time, and every time I had the same dish. More than six months ago I decided that this was the way to go. It was much better than standing in front of the till having to choose from all the possible dishes and not being able to.

I sat down, quite heavily. I wasn’t really in such bad shape. The smoking set me back a bit, it goes without saying, but I often went for long walks in the forests surrounding the satellite town where I lived, and sometimes so far that I could barely find my way home in the murk along the paths because I had been thinking about everything but the route ahead. Things I could not remember later. But I’d had too little sleep for several nights in a row, and last night, for one, I awoke at four and got into my car and drove off, and at my age you pay the price.

I laid the napkin on my lap and loosened my tie, a rare tie, one of two in my possession, but you do make an effort, and isn’t it strange, I thought, that what I remember best from my time in the Bunker is how often I stood outside the large double doors of the hospital facing the car park and the low apartment buildings on the other side of the big square and the ambulances driving in and out with their sirens blaring. I stood there in all kinds of weather, smoking with nothing more over my top than the white hospital smock. There were smoking rooms inside, one on every floor, but at home I was always ordered out on the doorstep when I was dying for a cigarette, and after a while it felt like a deadly sin to smoke indoors, never mind in a hospital.

I could have changed into something else or put on a jacket to hide the easily recognisable shirt and the fact that I was a patient and not a visitor, but for some reason my standing there freezing my back off was an expression of pride, and defiance, as though it were a mission I had taken on, an important mission, a little like spending half of Saturday at a stand by Mørk railway station selling the magazine
For Vietnam
in solidarity with the NLF’s fight against the American soldiers in Vietnam and reaping nothing but abuse. So I stood there in the wind, a little heroically, as though protesting to the world: Psychiatric patients are people too! And of course, some might have had their doubts about that, but for my part, at least, I knew no one who did. And then most of those who walked past me on their way in or out of the Central Hospital probably thought I was a lunatic to stand outside smoking in the snow and the wind wearing only my paper-thin smock.

But then spring came, and it was warm outside and light in the morning, and the wind was soothing and welcome.

Tommy came a few times from Mørk and stood there with me. He was well wrapped up, but he didn’t smoke. He never had. On account of his father. And then he stopped coming. I don’t remember why. I don’t remember much of what he said. I don’t remember much of what I said, either. Or if we said anything important. I certainly hadn’t seen him since, not before that morning in September, on the bridge between the mainland and Ulvøya in Oslo, and it was thirty-five years between then and now. We moved from Mørk as soon as they let me out of the Bunker. My mother couldn’t get away soon enough. Early one morning, before anyone was up, we stowed all our possessions on the flatbed of a truck, tied them down and drove away. We didn’t say goodbye to anyone.

Even if Tommy didn’t come any more, I wasn’t always on my own outside the hospital. Fredrik came too, pretty often as time passed, and smoked next to me. It was because of me he had started, or to be more accurate, he had started because then he would have a more valid reason to stand where I stood, when I was standing there, by the entrance to the hospital. If he smoked. That was his reasoning, and especially at the beginning it was terrible to hear him coughing. Jesus Christ. He must be a little mad, I thought. And he was. That was why he was here. It was why I was here too.

He told me about his mother. He was an only child, his father died when he was five years old. He loved his mother. And she loved him. She had given her life to Fredrik, and he had accepted it willingly, and yet, she was everything, and he was nothing.

‘But if she’s given you her life, how can she be everything and you nothing.’

‘That’s what’s so damn strange,’ he said. ‘I can’t work it out. I’ve tried and tried,’ he said, ‘but I can’t work it out.’ He must have been fifteen years older than me, and I was the only person he spoke to. He hardly even spoke to the doctors. ‘All they want is to send me home,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want to go home. I’m better off here.’

We had a kind of telephone booth in the ward. Not like the wonderful red ones in the streets of Oslo, but a soundproof chamber with a Plexiglas window, so that those on the outside could see the person inside, but not hear what he was saying.

Every evening Fredrik called his mother.

‘I have to clock in,’ he said, and I was sure he was joking, but he wasn’t, and I said:

‘Do you really have to. You’re more than thirty years old.’ And then he said:

‘Are you mad. Of course I have to, what would it be like if I didn’t.’ We often said that to each other, are you mad, this or that, and then we laughed, but he wasn’t trying to be funny.

After he had been on the phone for a few minutes, I could see through the Plexiglas how he started to chew his lip, and then the snot started running, and finally he was squeezing his eyes and crying, and not how a man would cry, if a man cries at all: in a controlled, restrained way without any gestures. But when Fredrik cried, his mouth opened wide and his face split into two, like the face of a child does when it plays in the road, maybe hopscotch, or skipping, and suddenly falls and grazes its knee on the tarmac, and the mouth becomes one big, black gorge. I have seen it happen many times and heard the silent gasp before the wails begin. I am pretty sure that Fredrik was wailing, but he was inside the soundproof booth, and if he really was, I couldn’t hear him. Behind the Plexiglas his mouth opened without a sound and was wide and dark as a deep dish, and it looked very, very strange.

In retrospect it’s not easy to say in what way you were mad. I knew why I ended up in the Bunker, that’s not it. I tried to hang myself in the woodshed, I can well remember it: the firewood inside, birch mostly, but also ash and spruce, and I remember thinking that birch was superior by a mile to any other kind of wood when you lit a fire in the stove or in the fireplace. It didn’t crackle the way spruce did sending red and yellow sparks flying into the room and making dark brown burn marks on the floor, and birch also burned more slowly. On the other hand, birch was more expensive, if you didn’t have a wood yourself and had to buy it. That’s what I was thinking about. I stood there with the coarse rope in my hand pondering the economic aspects of wood heating as I was looking up at the ceiling to see if there was anything that would not break when I kicked away the stool I had brought with me.