I Refuse by Per Petterson Read Free Book Online Page A

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