It's Fine By Me by Per Petterson Page A

He left his accordion, it was too heavy to carry with him. He said he was going far. I could just keep it, he didn’t give a shit, if you’ll pardon the expression. There it is.’ He points to a corner of the large kitchen. All the junk is still there, I remember a lot of it, and straight away I recognise the worn, brown case. I go over and open the case and there it is, black and white with red stripes on the bellows, a Paolo Soprani. I bend down and run my fingers across the keys as if the notes might come, but they don’t. For people with thick blood, I think. I look up at Leif. He is looking at me.
    ‘He didn’t look too friendly when he left, Audun, I have to say. But I don’t know what to do with that squeezebox. None of us here can play. Perhaps you could take it with you? That would be good. Then it would stay in the family, like.’
    He crossed the line there speaking of family, and he knows it, so I don’t answer. I look down at the accordion.
    ‘Fine,’ I say, ‘we’ll take it with us,’ and Arvid, who has heard about this accordion, is about to speak, but then he catches himself before the words come out. The air in the kitchen goes quiet, and we stand there hardly daring to breathe. I think fast and say:
    ‘What happened to Toughie, the fox you kept on a chain behind the barn?’
    ‘Oh him,’ Leif says and tells the story of the fox that thought he was a dog and was kept on a rope behind the barn, and the hens refused to sit on their eggs as long as he was there. But everybody loved that fox and didn’t want to let him go, so Leif had to brood the eggs in his armpits and in the end Signe, Bjørn and all the guests were walking around with eggs in their armpits until they had aches and pains all over. Dinner was especially difficult, Leif says, and demonstrates how they had to sit at the table with their arms down by their sides, all posh like, and hold their knives and forks like aristocrats.
    ‘In the end we had better manners than the Sun King,’ Leif says, and Arvid laughs, and Ingrid hums by her bench, and as we leave I grab the case by the handle and promise to be back soon now that I have my driver’s licence.
    We put the accordion on the rear seat and drive out of the yard. After the pool of mud Arvid says:
    ‘Why did you take the accordion?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘You can’t even play it.’
    ‘I’m telling you, I don’t know.’
    ‘I don’t think your mother will be too happy about it, now that you know he’s close by. Do you believe in fate now or what?’
    ‘For fuck’s sake, I don’t know, I keep telling you! Goddamnit, why can’t you leave me in peace!’ I come out of the drive and turn too sharply round the bend and hit a fence post and it scrapes against the door, and I jump on the brakes. We both sit there. Arvid’s face is white.
    ‘Oh shit, I’m sorry,’ I say.
    ‘It was my fault. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.’
    We open the doors. Leif’s house is on the opposite side of a hollow, but if anyone is standing in the window, I can’t see them. The car door is not as bad as I thought, but there is quite a scratch in the paintwork. But no dent. Arvid runs his hand along the door.
    ‘It won’t be cheap. The whole door will have to be resprayed.’
    ‘I can pay. I’m going to stop anyway,’ I say.
    ‘Stop what?’
    ‘Stop school.’
    ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve got less than a year left. Weren’t you going to be a writer?’
    ‘You won’t be a writer just because you finish school. Did Jack London finish school? Did Gorky? Or Lo-Johansson or Nexø, or Sandemose, or anyone else worth reading?’
    ‘For Christ’s sake, Audun, that was a hundred years ago! No one went to school for long then! Today everybody does!’
    ‘Not me. I’m going to get a job.’
    Arvid sits down in the ditch and starts throwing stones into the field, small ones at first and then bigger and bigger and he gets up and finds himself a big