My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (52 page)

Grey and green.

But also grey and yellow, as in David Hockney’s fantastic painting of lemons on a dish. Detaching colour from motif was modernism’s most important achievement. Before it, pictures like Braque’s or Hockney’s would have been unthinkable. The question was whether it was worth the price, bearing in mind all the baggage it brought to art.

The café I was in belonged to Liljevalch’s art gallery, whose rear was formed by the fourth and last wall of the garden area, and the cloistered passage at the top of the steps was a part of it. The last exhibition I had seen there was of Andy Warhol’s work, which I was out of my depth to judge as far as quality was concerned, whatever perspective I took. This made me feel ultra-conservative and reactionary, which I certainly did not want to be and definitely didn’t want to cultivate being. But what could I do?

The past is only one of many possible futures, as Thure Erik was wont to say. It wasn’t the past you had to avoid and ignore, it was its ossification. The same applied to the present. And when the movement art cultivated became static, that was what you had to avoid and ignore. Not because it was modern, in tune with our times, but because it wasn’t moving, it was dead.

‘Lamb meatballs and chicken salad?’

I turned. A young man with pimples, a chef’s hat and an apron stood behind the counter looking around with a plate in each hand.

‘Yes, here,’ I said.

I put the plates on the tray and carried it through the room to our table, where Linda was sitting with Vanja on her lap.

‘Did she wake up?’ I asked.

Linda nodded.

‘I can take her,’ I said. ‘Then you can eat.’

‘Thanks,’ she said.

The offer didn’t spring from altruism but self-interest. Linda often suffered from low blood glucose and became more and more irritable the longer it lasted. Having lived with her for close on three years I picked up the signals long before she herself was aware of them, the secret lay in details, a sudden move, a hint of black in her gaze, a touch of curtness in her responses. Then all you had to do was put food in front of her and it passed. Before coming to Sweden I had never even heard of this phenomenon, had no idea low blood glucose existed and was perplexed the first time I noticed the condition in Linda, why did she snap at the waitress? Why did she give a brief nod and look away when I asked her about it? Geir thought this phenomenon, which was widespread and well documented, was caused by the fact that all Swedes went to nursery schools and were given
mellanmål
, ‘between-meals’, all through the day. I was used to people getting moody because something had gone wrong or somebody had made an offensive remark or suchlike, in other words for more or less objective reasons, and I knew the moods of younger children were affected by whether they were hungry or not. I clearly had a lot to learn about the ways of the human mind. Or was it the Swedish mind? The female mind? The cultural middle-class mind?

I lifted Vanja and went to fetch one of the children’s chairs inside the door by the entrance. With my daughter in one hand and the chair in the other I went back, took off her hat, romper suit and shoes and put her down. Her hair was unkempt, her face sleepy, but there was a glint in her eyes that offered hope of a quiet half an hour.

I cut off some bits of the meatballs and put them on the table in front of her. She tried to knock them away with a sweep of her arm, but the edge of the plastic table prevented her. Before she had time to pick them up and throw them one by one, I put them back on my plate. I leaned over and rummaged through the bag to see if there was something that might keep her occupied for a few minutes.

A tin lunch box, would that do the trick?

I removed the biscuits and put them on the edge of the table, then placed the box in front of her, took out my keys and dropped them in.

Objects that rattled and you could take out and put down were just what she needed. Satisfied with my solution, I sat at the table and began to eat.

The room around us was filled with the buzz of voices, the clink of cutlery and occasional muted laughter. In the short time that had elapsed since we arrived, the café had become almost full to the rafters. Djurgården was always crowded at the weekends and had been so for more than a hundred years. Not only were the parks spacious and beautiful, with more trees than park in some places, there were also lots of museums here. The Thielska Gallery, with its death mask of Nietzsche and paintings by Munch, Strindberg and Hill; Waldemarsudde, the former residence of Prince Eugen, also an artist, the Nordic Museum, the Biological Museum, Skansen of course, with its zoo of Nordic animals and buildings from the whole of Sweden’s history, all brought to light in the fantastic period at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a strange mix of middle-class respectability, national romanticism, health fanaticism and decadence. The sole remnant was health fanaticism; Sweden had distanced itself from the rest, particularly national romanticism; now the ideal was not human uniqueness but equality, and not cultural uniqueness but multicultural society, hence all the museums here were museums of museums. This was especially true of the Biological Museum, which had stood unaltered since it was built some time at the beginning of the previous century and had the same display as then, various stuffed animals in a pseudo-natural environment against backgrounds painted by the great animal and bird artist Bruno Liljefors. In those days there were still enormous tracts of the planet untouched by humans, so its re-creation was not prompted by any necessity other than to provide knowledge; and the view it offered of our civilisation, namely that everything had to be translated into human terms, was occasioned not by need but by desire, by thirst; and the fact that this desire and thirst for knowledge, which was meant to expand the world, at one and the same time made it smaller, also physically, where what then had only just been started, and was therefore striking, had now been completed, made me want to cry every time I was there. The crowds of people walking along the canals and on the gravel paths, across the lawns and through the copses of trees at the weekend were in principle the same as at the end of the nineteenth century, and this reinforced the feeling: we were like them, just more lost.

A man of my age stood before me. There was something familiar about him, although I was unable to put my finger on what. He had a strong jutting chin and had shaved his head to hide the fact that he was beginning to go bald. His earlobes were podgy and there was a vaguely pink glow to his face.

‘Is that chair free?’ he asked.

‘Yes, help yourself,’ I said.

He carefully lifted it and carried it to the table adjacent to ours, where two women and a man in their sixties were sitting with a woman in her thirties and what had to be her two small children. A family outing with grandparents.

Vanja unleashed one of her dreadful screams, which she had started to do in recent weeks. She launched it from the bottom of her lungs. It went right through my nervous system and was unbearable. I looked at her. Both the tin box and the keys were on the floor beside the chair. I picked them up and placed them in front of her. She grabbed them and threw them down again. It could have been a game had it not been for the ensuing scream.

‘Don’t scream, Vanja,’ I said. ‘Please.’

I forked the last bit of potato, yellow against the white plate, and raised it to my mouth. While I was chewing I gathered the remaining pieces of meat on my plate, loaded them onto my fork with the knife, together with some onion rings from the salad, swallowed and lifted it to my mouth. The man who had taken the chair was on his way to the counter with the older man, whom I guessed to be his wife’s father, since none of his facial features were recognisable in the older man’s more ordinary face.

Where had I seen him before?

Vanja screamed again.

She was just impatient, no reason to get excited, I thought, as anger mounted in my chest.

I placed the cutlery on my plate and got up, looked at Linda, who would soon have finished as well.

‘I’ll take her for a little walk,’ I said, ‘just through the cloisters. Would you like a coffee afterwards or shall we have one elsewhere?’

‘We can have one somewhere else,’ she said. ‘Or stay here.’

I rolled my eyes and leaned forward to pick up Vanja.

‘Don’t you roll your eyes at me,’ Linda said.

‘But I asked you a simple question,’ I said. ‘A yes-or-no question. Do you want to, or don’t you? And you can’t even answer.’

Without waiting for her response, I put Vanja down on the floor, took her hands and started to walk, with her leading the way.

‘What do
you
want then?’ Linda asked behind me. I pretended to be too busy with Vanja to hear. She moved one leg in front of the other, more in enthusiasm than pursuit of a particular destination, until we reached the steps, where I carefully let go of her hands. For a moment she stood upright and swayed. Then she went down on her knees and crawled up the three steps. Set off at full speed for the front door like a little puppy. When it was opened, she sat back on her haunches and peered up at the newcomers with saucer eyes. They were two elderly women. The one at the back stopped and smiled at her. Vanja cast down her eyes.

‘She’s a bit shy, isn’t she?’ the woman said.

I smiled politely, lifted Vanja and carried her into the courtyard outside. She pointed to some pigeons pecking at crumbs under a table. Then she looked up and pointed at a seagull sweeping past in the wind.

‘Birds,’ I said. ‘And look over there, behind the windows. All the people.’

She glanced at me, then stared at the people. Her eyes were alive, as expressive as they were open to impressions. When I looked into them I always had a sense of who she was, this very determined little person.

‘Brr, it’s so cold,’ I said. ‘Let’s go in, shall we?’

From the steps I saw Cora had gone over to our table. Fortunately she hadn’t sat down. She was standing behind the chair with her hands in her pockets and a smile on her lips.

‘How big she is!’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How big is Vanja?’

Usually Vanja was proud when she could answer the question by stretching her arms above her head. But now she just leaned her head against my shoulder.

‘We’re on our way home. Aren’t we?’ I said, looking at Linda. ‘It’ll take half an hour to get a coffee now.’

She nodded.

‘Yes, we have to go soon as well,’ Cora said. ‘But I’ve just arranged with Linda to pop round one day. So I’ll see you soon.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said. I sat Vanja on my lap and started to put on her romper suit. Smiled at Cora so as not to appear stand-offish.

‘What’s it like being a house husband?’ she asked.

‘Dreadful,’ I replied. ‘But I’m hanging in there.’

She smiled.

‘I mean it,’ I said.

‘I got the message,’ she said.

‘Karl Ove’s hanging in there,’ Linda said. ‘That’s his method in life.’

‘It’s an honest answer, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Or would you rather I lied?’

‘No,’ Linda said. ‘I’m just sorry you dislike it so much.’

‘I don’t dislike it
so much,
’ I said.

‘Mum’s waiting over there,’ Cora said. ‘Nice to see you. And see you again soon.’

‘Nice to see you too,’ I said.

As she left I met Linda’s glare.

‘I didn’t say anything out of place, did I?’ I said, and put Vanja in the buggy, tightened the belt and kicked up the lever on the wheel.

‘No,’ Linda said with such vehemence that I knew she meant the opposite. Tight-lipped, she bent down and lifted the buggy when we came to the steps; tight-lipped, she walked beside me out of the courtyard and onto the road to the centre. It felt as if the wind was blowing straight into our bone marrow. Around us, everywhere was teeming with people. The bus stops on both sides were packed with shivering people clad in black, not unlike birds from a certain angle, the ones that hunch together and stand motionless on some cliff in the Antarctic, staring into the sky.

‘It was so lovely and romantic yesterday,’ she said at length as we passed the Biological Museum and caught fleeting glimpses of the gleaming black canal between the branches. ‘And then there’s nothing left of it today.’

‘I’m not the romantic type, as you know,’ I said.

‘No, what type are you exactly?’

She wasn’t looking at me as she said it.

‘Cut it out,’ I said. ‘Don’t start on that stuff again.’

I met Vanja’s eyes and smiled at her. She lived in her own world, which was connected to ours through emotions and perceptions, physical touch and the sound of voices. Alternating between worlds, as I was now, being cross with Linda one moment and being happy with Vanja the next, was strange; it felt as though I was leading two quite separate lives. But she had only one, and soon she would be growing up into the second, when innocence was a distant memory and she understood what was going on between Linda and me at moments like this.

We reached the bridge over the canal. Vanja’s head moved back and forth from one passer-by to the next. Whenever a dog came along or she saw a motorbike she pointed.

‘The thought that we might be having another child made me so happy,’ Linda said. ‘It did yesterday and it does today. I’ve been thinking about it almost non-stop. A shot of happiness in my stomach. But you don’t feel the same way. That makes me sad.’

‘You’re mistaken,’ I said. ‘I was happy too.’

‘But you aren’t now.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But is that so strange? I’m not in such a great mood.’

‘Because you’re at home with Vanja?’

‘Among other things, yes.’

‘Will it be better if you can write?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we’ll have to start Vanja at a nursery,’ she said.

‘Do you mean that?’ I asked. ‘She’s so small.’

It was the middle of the rush hour for pedestrians, so on the bridge, which was a bottleneck on the route towards Djurgården, we were obliged to walk slowly. Linda held the buggy with one hand. Even though I hated that, I said nothing, it would have been too petty, especially now, during our discussion.