My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (17 page)

‘Do you know what
kjempe
means, Anders?’ Linda asked.

He shook his head.

‘I know
avis
, newspaper. And
gutt
. And
vindu
, window.’

‘It’s the same as
jätte
in Swedish, big, huge.’

Did Linda think I was offended, or what?

‘It took me six months to understand that,’ she continued. ‘It’s used in exactly the same way. There must be loads of words I think I understand, but I don’t. It hardly bears thinking about that I translated Sæterbakken’s book two years ago. At that time I couldn’t understand Norwegian at all.’

‘Could Gilda?’ Helena asked.

‘Her? No. She knew even less than me. But I had a look at it not so long ago, the first pages, and it seemed fine. Apart from one word that is. I blush whenever I think about it. I translated
stue
, living room, with
stuga
 . . . so he was sitting in a
stuga
when the text said he was in a living room.’

‘What’s
stuga
in Norwegian then?’ Anders asked.

‘
Hytte
,’ I said.

‘Oh, it’s a
hytte
, a cabin! Yes, there’s certainly a difference then . . .’ he said.

‘But no one has remarked on it,’ Linda said. She laughed.

‘Anyone fancy some champagne?’ I asked.

‘I’ll fetch it,’ Linda said.

On her return she gathered the five glasses together and started to loosen the wire holding the cork in place. Her face was slightly averted and her eyes were narrowed, as though anticipating a huge explosion. In the end the cork came off into her hand with a wet plop, and then she held the bottle, with the champagne pouring out, over the glasses.

‘You managed that well,’ Anders said.

‘I worked in a restaurant a long time ago,’ Linda said. ‘But this was the one thing I could never do. I have no sense of depth anyway, so when I had to fill customers’ glasses, it was hit and miss.’

She straightened up and passed the sparkling, bubbly champagne to us one by one. For herself she poured a non-alcoholic variant.

‘
Skål
, then, and nice to see you!’

We toasted. When the champagne was finished I went into the kitchen to get the lobsters ready. Geir followed me and sat down at the table.

‘Lobster,’ he said. ‘It’s unbelievable how quickly you’ve adapted to Swedish society. I come to your place on New Year’s Eve two years after you moved here and you serve traditional Swedish New Year fare.’

‘I’m not exactly on my own,’ I said.

‘No, I know,’ he said with a smile. ‘We had a Mexican Christmas at home once, Christina and I did. Have I told you about it?’

‘Yes,’ I said and split the first lobster into two, placed it on a dish and started on the next. Geir began to talk about his manuscript. I listened with half an ear. Oh yes? I said now and then to signal that I was following even though my attention was elsewhere. He was unable to talk about his manuscript with everyone so it was only here he had the chance, and when I went out for a smoke, he saw his opportunity. He had written a rough draft, spent eighteen months on it, which I had read and commented on. The comments were comprehensive and detailed, they extended over ninety pages, and sadly the tone of the criticism was often sarcastic. I had imagined that Geir could take anything, but I should have known better, no one can take anything, and few things are as difficult to swallow as sarcasm when your own work is the target. But I couldn’t stop myself, it was the same when I wrote reader reports, irony was never far away. The problem with Geir’s manuscript, as he knew and admitted, was that the narrative was often too far removed from events, and a lot was often left unsaid. Only a fresh pair of eyes could remedy it. And that was what he got. But I was always ironic, much too ironic . . . was it perhaps caused by a subconscious desire on my part to get one over on him, the man who otherwise always reigned supreme.

No.

No?

‘I’m terribly sorry about that,’ I said now, placing the third lobster on its back and cutting through the shell on the stomach. It was softer than crab shell, and something about the consistency made me think it was artificial, like plastic. The red colour, wasn’t there something unnatural about that too? And all the attractive, intricate details, like the grooves in the claws or the armour-like tail shell: didn’t they look as if they had been forged in the workshop of a Renaissance craftsman?

‘And so you should be,’ Geir said. ‘Ten Hail Marys for your evil, sinful soul. Can you imagine what it is like to pore over your comments and voluntarily allow yourself to be mocked by them every single day? “Are you an absolute idiot or what?” Ye-es, I suppose I am . . .’

‘It’s just a technical point,’ I said, glancing at him while I sawed through the shell with the knife

‘Technical? Technical? Easy for you to say, that is. You can spend twenty pages describing a trip to the loo and hold your readers spellbound. How many people do you think can do that? How many writers would not have done that if only they could? Why do you think people spend their time touching up their modernist poems, with three words on each page? It’s because they have no other option. After all these years surely you must understand that, for Christ’s sake. If they could have done, they would have done. You can, and you don’t appreciate it. It means nothing to you, and you would rather be clever and write in essayistic style. But everyone can write essays! It’s the easiest thing in the world.’

I looked at the white flesh with the red fibres which appeared as soon as the shell was pierced. Recognised the faint tang of seawater.

‘You say you don’t see the letters when you write, don’t you?’ he continued. ‘I don’t see anything but bloody letters. They intertwine like damn spiders’ webs in front of my eyes. Nothing can force its way out through that, you understand, everything is turned inwards like some ingrowing toenail.’

‘How long have you been working on it?’ I asked. ‘A year? That’s nothing. I’ve been writing for six years now, and all I have to show for it is a stupid essay of a hundred and thirty pages about angels. Come back in 2009 and I’ll be more likely to feel sorry for you then. Besides, it was good, the bit I read. Fantastic story, great interviews. All it needs is to be checked over.’

‘Ha!’ Geir said.

I put two halves of lobster on the dish, shell up.

‘You know that this is in fact the only hold I have over you?’ I said, grabbing the last lobster.

‘Not sure about that,’ he said. ‘There are at least a couple of other things you know about me that are best kept quiet.’

‘Oh that,’ I said. ‘That’s a completely different matter.’

He laughed loud hearty laughter.

Then a few seconds passed without a word being said.

Was he sulking?

I started to part the lobster with the knife.

It was impossible to say. If I hurt his feelings, he had once said, I would never know. He was as proud as he was haughty, as arrogant as he was loyal. He lost friends one after the other, perhaps because he so seldom backed down and was never afraid to say what he thought. And there was no one, or virtually no one, who liked what he thought. Last winter, a year ago, a very bad atmosphere had developed between us: whenever we went out we generally sat in silence on our bar stools, and if anything was said at all it was usually him making some acid remark about me or mine, with me trying to give as good as I got. Then I heard nothing from him. Two weeks later Christina rang to say he had gone to Turkey to do some fieldwork and would be away for several months. I was surprised, it was an unexpected development, and a little offended too, as he hadn’t said anything about this to me. A few weeks later I heard from a friend in Norway that Geir had been interviewed by
Dagsrevyen
in Baghdad, where he had volunteered as a human shield. I smiled to myself, this was typical of him, although I was unable to understand why he had kept this a secret from me. Later it transpired that I had in fact upset him in some way. I never found out what had caused him to take umbrage. But when he came back to Stockholm four months later, loaded down with micro-cassettes of interviews, after having been under attack by bombs for several weeks, he seemed to be reinvigorated. All of the autumn and winter’s crisis-like despondency had gone, and when we resumed our friendship it was where it had been when it started.

Geir and I were born in the same year, we had grown up a few kilometres from each other, on our separate islands outside Arendal – Hisøya and Tromøya – but without knowing each other as the initial natural point of contact would have come with
gymnas
, by which time I had long left for Kristiansand. The first time I met him was at a party in Bergen, where we both studied. He was on the periphery of the Arendal set, with whom I was also loosely connected through Yngve, and when I spoke to him I felt he might be the friend I was missing, for at that time, my first year in Bergen, I didn’t have one and clung to Yngve. We went out some nights, he laughed all the time and had a devil-may-care attitude I liked, and he was genuinely interested in people around him and had something to say about them. He was the kind to cut through to the essence, and thus someone who made a difference. I had found a new friend; that was the good feeling I went around with during the spring of 1989. But then it transpired he was going to move on. Bergen was no place to set roots for him, he packed up as soon as the exams were over and went to Uppsala in Sweden. I wrote a letter to him that summer, never posted it however, and then he disappeared from my life and my thoughts.

Eleven years later he sent me a book in the post. It was about boxing and entitled
The Aesthetics of a Broken Nose
. After reading a few pages I was able to confirm that both his devil-may-care attitude and ability to cut through to the essence were intact, and also that a lot had been added since our student days. He had boxed at a club in Stockholm for three years in order to gain first-hand experience of the milieu he described. There the values that the welfare state had otherwise subverted, such as masculinity, honour, violence and pain, were upheld, and the interest for me lay in how different society looked when viewed from that angle, with the set of values they had retained. The art was to confront this world without everything you had from the other world – to try and see it as it was, on its own terms, that is – and then, with that as a platform, look outwards again. Then everything looked different. In his book Geir linked what he saw and described with the great classical anti-liberal cultures, in a line extending from Nietzsche and Jünger to Mishima and Cioran. There nothing was for sale, nothing could be measured in terms of monetary value, and therein, or seen from this perspective, I discovered to what great extent things I had always assumed were nature-given were in fact the opposite, namely relative and random. In this sense, Geir’s book became as important to me as
Statues
by Michel Serres had been, where the archaic past in which we are and always have been steeped is thrown into relief with alarming clarity, and as
The Order of Things
by Michel Foucault had once been, where the grip that present time and contemporary language have on our notions and concepts of reality is made patently clear, and we see how one conceptual world, in which we are all completely immersed, is succeeded by another. What all these books had in common was that they established a reference point outside the present, either on its periphery, such as in the boxing club, which was a kind of enclave where some of the most important values from the recent past lived on, or in the depths of history, from where what we were, or imagined we were, became totally transformed. Presumably I had moved towards this point by small degrees, groping my way almost imperceptibly and more or less invisibly to my thinking, and then these books came into my life, they were virtually banged down on the table in front of me, and something new became clear to me. As is always the case with books that seem to be ground-breaking, they put into words what for me had been suspicions, feelings, hunches. A vague discomfort, a vague displeasure, a vague, untargeted anger. But no direction, no clarity, no exactitude. The reason Geir’s book was so important to me also had to do with the fact that our backgrounds were so similar – we were exactly the same age, we knew the same people from the same places, we had both spent our adult lives reading and writing and studying – so how could it be that he had ended up in such a radically different place? Ever since I went to my first school I, and everyone around me, had been urged to think critically and independently. It had not occurred to me until I was well over thirty that this critical thinking was only of benefit up to a certain point and that beyond this it was transformed into its own opposite and became an evil, or evil itself. Why so late in life? one might wonder. Partly it was a result of my loyal-follower naïvety, which in its country-cousin gullibility might well cast doubt on opinions but never on the premises of those opinions, and hence never asked whether ‘the critical’ really was critical, whether ‘the radical’ really was radical, whether ‘the good’ really was good, things which all intelligent people do as soon as they escape the clutches of the self-intoxicated and emotion-laden views of youth; and partly it was because I had been trained, like so many of my generation, to think abstractly, in other words to acquire knowledge of various schools of thought in various fields, to reproduce them in a more or less critical manner, preferably contrasted with other schools of thought, and then to be judged on that, but sometimes it was for the sake of my own insight, my own intellectual curiosity, not that this gave my mind cause to abandon abstractions, such that thinking was in the end wholly an activity played out among secondary phenomena, the world as it appeared in philosophy, literature, social science, politics, whereas the world in which I lived, slept, ate, spoke, made love and ran, the one that had a smell, a taste, a sound, where it rained and the wind blew, the world that you could feel on your skin, was excluded, was not deemed a topic for thought. Actually, I did think there too, but in a different way, a more practical, phenomenon-by-phenomenon-orientated way, and for other reasons: while I thought in abstract reality in order to understand it, I thought in concrete reality in order to deal with it. In abstract reality I could create an identity, an identity made from opinions; in concrete reality I was who I was, a body, a gaze, a voice. That is where all independence is rooted. Including independent thought. Geir’s book was not only about independence, it was also enacted within its terms of reference. He described only what he saw with his own eyes, what he heard with his own ears, and when he tried to describe what he saw and heard, it was by becoming a part of it. It was also the form of reflection that came closest to the life he was describing. A boxer was never judged by what he said or thought but by what he did.