Amberville (16 page)

I
move about freely. I am living a free life.

Eleven paintings in narrow, white wooden frames hang in the corridor on my floor. Abstract art. Painted with a lot of water and a knife’s edge of pastel paint. I don’t like them. I never would have chosen them myself. But in that case, would I have made things too easy for myself?

These paintings, in particular the two hanging before my door, counting from the stairwell, irritate me. Irritation stimulates reflection. Reflection develops me.

With paintings that I appreciated I would have stagnated.

My room is my universe. My bedroom and my bathroom.

I take my meals with the others in the dining hall one floor down.

Every week I go into the city. I take long city walks. I keep myself up-to-date. I know they’re performing a comedy by Bergdorff Lizard at the Zern Theater. It’s a tragic piece that must be carried by the individual efforts of the actors. Every other week I visit Mother and Father. I call them in advance and tell them I’m coming. I don’t want to surprise them at
an unsuitable moment. I know that Father thinks my visits can be trying. I wish he himself would choose to see me.

As it is, he chooses not to.

Eric comes out to my place to visit.

Mother and Father never do.

What is more absurd than the life I’m living today is how defensive I get when I have to describe the life I’m living today.

That says something about society.

I shouldn’t need to defend myself.

On the other hand, I might agree that it’s peculiar that I’m married and responsible for the city’s leading advertising agency at the same time as I’m living this life in my own universe.

The mayor appointed our mother as head of the Environmental Ministry the same week that I completed my academic degree.

Mother has worked at the Environmental Ministry her entire life. At the transportation and energy offices, she had been in charge of recycling issues and responsible for the city’s road maintenance.

Nonetheless, her appointment came as a shock to those of us who were close to Mother.

There were many of us who were close to her.

I was the closest to her.

Her double identities were so well separated that I had a hard time seeing her in a role as a department head. To me her list of qualifications consisted of slow-cooking and roll-baking. For Mother herself this political success was expected. The animals in the city as well felt that the choice of Rhinoceros Edda was a good one. Mayor Lion knew what she was doing. Her most important mission was to appoint popular department heads. If she made popular decisions, the Mayor’s chances of reelection increased.

We celebrated Mother’s appointment in the evening. It was a Thursday in the beginning of June. There was me, my brother, and Mother and Father. We sat in the kitchen, and Father had bought a bottle of champagne after work. The news about Mother had been in the newspaper and Father got a discount on the champagne.

I don’t recall what we ate.

I smiled dutifully, raised my glass, and toasted.

I was deeply downhearted.

I had applied for an internship at the Environmental Ministry. For several years Mother had been in charge of the Planning Division, which dealt with issues of city planning and resource allotment. Her office was in Lanceheim. I had applied for a job at the Energy Unit in Tourquai. I believed that my future was in advanced energy research.

Now that was impossible.

With Mother as head of the Environmental Ministry my application papers would be questioned. My competency would be closely scrutinized. Even if I were deemed qualified, there would always be a measure of doubt.

I sipped the champagne, feeling confused.

What would I do now?

Time would help me answer that question, but that evening I felt the weight of an unobliging fate. For several years I had set my heart on a career in the Environmental Ministry, a place of employment big enough to hold both me and Mother.

Father gave a little speech.

“In order to gain something you have to give up something else,” he said.

His eyes glistened. I had never before seen him cry. Now a tear of pride was rolling down his cheek.

“But what you have given up, I don’t know,” he continued. “It’s not your family, in any case. Not your friends, either. Or your cooking ability. Perhaps it’s the other way
around, because you’ve refused to give up, that you have gained?”

He’d intended to say something else, but Mother stood up and silenced him with a hug.

Eric applauded.

I applauded too. This took the edge off my brother’s irony. My smile, however, was still strained.

Then I recall a cozy evening in the kitchen. I recall that I set my disappointment aside to be happy with Mother. I recall that Eric and Father for once found something around which to unite. We showered Mother with congratulations and prophesied success for her in things both great and small. Not until I turned off the lamp on my nightstand did I again recall the situation that Mother had unknowingly put me in. I brooded a while, but soon fell asleep.

I was no longer the lost bear I’d been before.

I had become aware of myself.

These words from my late teens still apply. This was the way I saw, and still see, myself:

I am a stuffed animal who cannot commit an evil action. I am an animal who is driven to always, as far as is possible, do right.

With that it was said.

Not so remarkable.

Nonetheless, unusual.

This insight about how things stood grew during my secondary school years, but it was in the final grade that these intuitions blossomed into certainty.

When I understood, it was impossible to understand that I hadn’t already understood.

I’d always been the same, but when I was little I was not in command of my actions. Someone else—my parents or teachers or other grown-ups—decided in my place. Besides, I could still not determine what was right and wrong. I was brought up to believe that there was a kind of unwritten
rule book in ethics to fall back on in difficult cases, and that you weren’t allowed to read that book before you were an adult.

I imagined to myself that I could disregard my intuitive sense of what was right and wrong, and that the anxiety created by the conflicts between my own conviction and the norms of society was just part of being a teenager.

That I would grow into myself.

That it was a matter of maturity.

Poor wretch.

Let me give examples:

I don’t walk against red lights.

I don’t tell “white lies.”

I redid one of my last examinations after I’d accidentally caught a glimpse of the answers my neighbor had filled in and then couldn’t figure out what I’d happened to see and which answers were my own. Despite the fact that the likelihood that I was influenced was very, very small. Despite the fact that he’d never done better than me on any test.

I’m not some kind of compulsive truth-sayer who can’t keep his thoughts to himself. I don’t run over to strange animals and accuse them of living in sin. But I suffer—and I don’t hesitate to use the word “suffer”—from an effort to be good and truthful in a way that restricts my life.

When I look back, I realize that it’s always been like that.

I talked with Mother and Father and Eric about the matter. They reacted in different ways.

I spoke with Father one morning when he had time and was sitting, enjoying the newspaper with a cooling cup of coffee. That was the way he liked his coffee best. Cold. I did my best to express what I was feeling. Father’s sense of justice was almost paralyzing. It was one of the most distinguishing features of his character, and I thought he would understand.

He didn’t understand.

He looked at me as if I were crazy. He muttered that life didn’t let itself be tamed. That principles were a way of surviving. That terms like “good” and “evil” always had to be put into context. After that he lost interest in his line of reasoning and returned to his newspaper and his cold coffee.

Mother didn’t understand, either.

We were on our way to the market hall in Amberville one Sunday the month after I’d finished my degree.

“I had a plan for the future,” I explained. “But then it didn’t work out. It doesn’t matter. My mission is more important than anything else.”

“What mission, darling?” asked Mother.

I told her. About being good, and what that entailed. About the illusory simplicity of the promise. How it was a matter of a full-time occupation and that perhaps I would have a hard time managing much more than that.

Mother didn’t understand.

I tried to explain three times, three times she changed the subject and instead talked about the red beets that we were on our way to buy.

Eric understood everything. This was no surprise. We were each other’s antitheses; if he hadn’t understood, it would have been strange.

Eric understood everything, but didn’t agree with anything.

Getting Eric interested in goodness was like getting a reptile interested in doing laundry.

After the summer, I applied for a job at an advertising agency.

It was by pure chance. A good friend of Father’s had told about a job as an assistant. The pay was better than for
an established energy researcher. I sent in my application papers without any expectations. I will never understand why they decided to call me in for an interview. Two days after the interview they called and offered me the job. Father’s friend had exaggerated the pay, but only marginally. I arranged to start at the advertising agency Wolle & Wolle the first of October.

Wolle Hare and Wolle Toad had located their office in the Lanceheim district. Of the city’s four districts, Lanceheim is the largest. In Lanceheim there are both hectic office districts and broad, illuminated shopping blocks. In Lanceheim there are large, green areas of single-family homes in the north and crowded apartment blocks of high-rises and underground garages in the west. The advertising agency Wolle & Wolle was on plum-violet Place Great Hoch, just over a block from the Star and walking distance from the advertising school where the hare and the toad had once met.

The position I took was as assistant to Wolle Toad, the stingy, bean-counting Wolle in the successful duo.

I didn’t think it would mean anything.

I thought my mission in life had to do with goodness. That the job was something I could go to in the morning and go home from in the evening. Nothing more.

It didn’t turn out that way. Not at all.

I met Emma Rabbit on the outskirts of my universe.

In a neighboring galaxy.

She was an angel. If I close my eyes, I see her before me clad in white. How she floats up the stairway.

Can it have been at Wolle & Wolle? In that case, Emma must have felt as uncomfortable there as I did.

That was why we sought each other out. We were both in the wrong place at the same time. Forced to be in the wrong place, for different reasons.

Deep down, Emma Rabbit didn’t want to work at an advertising agency at all. She despised the advertising industry. It was for art that she lived and about art that she dreamed. It was in her studio apartment in Tourquai that she showed me the minimalist canvases where she, with the finest pony-hair brush and watercolors, created enchanted forests and meadows and fields and mountains.

After that evening my fascination turned to veneration.

In Emma Rabbit’s imagination lived primeval forests and wide-branching, richly fragrant deltas.

No one listened like she did.

With her head to one side and those big eyes that followed every thought. From its source to its outlet. I had never been able to talk with anyone that way.

It made me happy.

It made me unhappy. How many years had passed without my having a friend like her?

I brooded.

The job as assistant to Wolle Toad offered independence. I was creating routines on the basis of a responsibility that I myself had defined. This suited me well. My time was required, not my thoughts. This meant that I could devote myself to significant questions.

I was worried.

I was almost alone in putting value on that goodness that ought to be desirable for everyone.

I believe, I explained to Emma as we sat across from each other and her large eyes were locked with mine, that all animals are delivered good. But from the first day outside the factory we are exposed to temptations.

To expose the good to temptations is the challenge and driving force of evil. Evil derives its nourishment by luring the good stuffed animal to commit mistakes.

What worried me was how unequal the battle was. I drew
up a number of maxims in order to make clear the relationship between good and evil.

Evil had a clear advantage.

Like this:

Evil is impossible without goodness. Evil seeks balance, it seeks symmetry. Evil is social, because it only exists in an opposing relationship. Goodness is self-sufficient. It needs no one, nothing. I can be good on my own. But to manifest evil requires a counterpart.

Evil is restless, goodness passive. Evil constantly seeks ways to reach its goal. If one temptation isn’t enticing, evil tries another. Goodness seeks nothing, because it knows in advance how it should be good. If evil is dynamic, changeable, and intellectually stimulating, goodness is, to put it bluntly, boring. Goodness doesn’t have much to put up in defense in the battle against all the temptations of evil. Evil is incomprehensible and absurd. Goodness lacks a short-term force of attraction.

Against the background of these suppositions, I asked Emma Rabbit, is it possible for an intelligent animal to remain good? Or, in reality, is goodness only possible for fools?

Emma Rabbit shook her tender head and wrinkled her plastic nose.

She didn’t have the answer. But in her eyes a possibility glistened.

I showered her with questions.

Are good actions without genuinely good intentions pointless? Are good intentions which result in misery disguised evil? If goodness is a matter of faith, is goodness impossible for the agnostic or atheist? Is there a clear connection between goodness and spiritual harmony? Is there a connection between evil and anxiety? If there isn’t such a connection, how will goodness find its adherents?