It's Fine By Me by Per Petterson Page B

piece of rock and heaves it with both hands as far and as hard as he can and he yells:
    ‘Goddamnit!’ He turns. ‘What’s happening here?’ he says.
    ‘Nothing. I’ll just quit school.’
    ‘It’s not only that,’ he says, ‘and you know it.’

6
    EGIL WAS TWO years younger than me, and I am pretty certain I can remember when he was born. Or maybe I am mixing it up with stories Kari has told me.
    One story goes like this.
    Kari and I are alone at home. She is six and is supposed to be looking after me. My mother and father are away. She is at Stensby hospital having Egil, but I don’t understand that, only that both of them are away and Kari is with me, and anyway this is not the first time. It’s funny the things you don’t forget. There is a knock on the living-room window and I turn and see my father’s face through the glass. He looks strange. He is waving one hand and making faces, and his face fills the window. The door is locked, and he has lost his key. Kari goes to open it. She doesn’t really want to. I hear a bang and run into the hall and see my father lying face down on the floor. He is laughing into the floorboards. I hurry over and sit on his back, but then he gets up and I fall off, hitting my shoulder on the shoe rack. It hurts. I scream, but he doesn’t care. He goes over to the cupboard in the living room, it is called grandfather’s cabinet, I already know that. He bursts into laughter and says:
    ‘Now there are three of you. We have to celebrate.’ I don’t understand what he means, but he takes the pistol from the cupboard. I must have seen it before. It has been oneobject among many; now it is different. He lifts his arm and fires three shots into the ceiling. We cover our ears, the loud cracks make our bodies shake.
    ‘I’ll never forget it,’ Kari says. ‘I thought my head would explode.’ We have been to the Grorud Cemetery and are walking along Trondhjemsveien on our way home. My mother is a few steps behind us, she’s crying and wants to be left alone. It’s Egil’s sixteenth birthday. It’s a Friday in October. I have taken the day off from school, and when we get home,Jussi Björling will be on the turntable. She always plays opera when something is wrong, she plays opera when nothing is wrong, she always plays opera no matter what. Sometimes she locks the door, turns the volume up and stands on a chair conducting with her eyes closed. I have seen her through the window on my way from friends’ houses at Linderud, I have looked across the little hollow with the stream and into our apartment on the third floor and seen how my mother is standing on a chair conducting the music I cannot hear, and wondered how many other people have seen her.
    And almost always it is Jussi Björling. There is a signed photograph of him on the living-room wall. How she got hold of that, no one knows, but it has always seemed impressive, has given her records some extra meaning, and it was on the wall of our house in the country. My father couldn’t stand it, he did not like opera, he liked tango and anything else was for people with thin blood. On his own accordion he could play the tango, and people said he was pretty good.
    ‘Jussi Björling? Hell, he looks like a pen pusher!’ he used to say, and once, when he was in a drunken haze, he smashed some of her records.
    ‘We were lucky the neighbours called the police,’ Kari says. ‘Things could have got out of hand. You were only two years old, for Christ’s sake. He was so drunk. He was always so goddamn drunk. Was I happy when we moved at last.’
    We talk about him as though he, too, were dead, we do that every time we talk about him. It’s not often. But he isn’t dead.
    We walk down Trondhjemsveien. Flaen and Kaldbakken are on the lower side where many from my class live. Among them is Venke. I know exactly which window is hers. I have been there with her, kissing on her bed with my hand up her skirt and her hand down my