My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (61 page)

I, a fervent anti-Christian from early teenage years and a materialist in my heart of hearts, had in one second, without any reflection, got to my feet, walked up the aisle and knelt in front of the altar. It had been pure impulse. And, meeting those glares, I had no defence, I couldn’t say I was a
Christian.
I looked down, slightly ashamed.

Many things had happened.

When dad died I had spoken to a priest, it had been like a confession, everything poured out of me, and he was there to listen and to give solace. The funeral, the ritual itself, was almost physical, something to hold on to for me. It turned dad’s life, so miserable and destructive towards the end, into a life.

Wasn’t there some solace in that?

Then there was what I had been working on over the last year. Not what I wrote, but what I was slowly realising I wanted to explore: the sacred. In my novel I had both travestied and invoked it, but without the hymnic gravity I knew existed in these tracts, in these texts I had started to read; and the gravity, the wild intensity in them, which was never far removed from the sacred, to which I had never been or would ever go, yet which I sensed all the same, had made me think differently about Jesus Christ, for it was about flesh and blood, it was about birth and death, and we were linked to it through our bodies and our blood, those we beget and those we bury, constantly, continually, a storm blew through our world and it always had, and the only place I knew where this was formulated, the most extreme yet simplest things, was in these holy scriptures. And the poets and artists who dealt with similar themes. Trakl, Hölderlin, Rilke. Reading the Old Testament, particularly the third Book of Moses with its detailed accounts of sacrificial practices, and the New Testament, so much younger and closer to us, nullified time and history, it was just a swirl of dust, and brought us to what was always there and never changed.

I had thought a lot about this.

And then there was the trivial matter of the local priest being somewhat reluctant to christen Vanja because we weren’t married, I was divorced and when she enquired about our faith and I couldn’t say, yes, I am a Christian, I believe that Jesus was God’s son, a wild notion I could never entertain as a belief, and instead just skirted round it, tradition, my father’s funeral, life and death, the ritual, I felt hypocritical afterwards, as though we were christening our daughter under false pretences, and when the communion came I suppose I wanted to revoke this, with the result that I appeared even more hypocritical. Not only had I had my daughter christened without being a Christian, now I was taking bloody communion as well!

However, the sacred.

Flesh and blood.

Everything that changes and is the same.

And last but not least, the sight of Jon Olav walking past and kneeling up there. He was a whole person, a good person, and in some way it also drew me up the aisle as well and down on my knees: I so much wanted to be whole. I so much wanted to be good.

On the church steps we, the parents, the child, the godparents, stood for photographs. Vanja’s great-grandmother had been christened in the dress she was wearing here in Jølster. Some of my maternal grandmother’s sisters were there, among them Linda’s favourites, Alvdis and her husband Anfinn, all of mum’s sisters, some of their children and grandchildren, in addition to Linda’s friends from Stockholm, Geir and Christina, and of course Vidar and Ingrid.

And while we were standing there Ingrid came running up the hill. The fear she’d had that the house would be locked was not ungrounded, for mum, who was so scatter-brained, had indeed locked the door. Ingrid was handed the key and dashed back. When we arrived half an hour later she was in despair over some dish she could not find. But all was well, of course, the weather was brilliant, we held the celebration in the garden with a view of the lake, in which the mountains were reflected, and the food was praised by everyone. But once the food had been served and Vanja wandered from lap to lap without needing any one-to-one supervision, Ingrid had nothing to do, and perhaps that was what was difficult for her. At any rate she went up to her room and there she stayed until we began to miss her, at five, half past five, when the first guests had already left. Linda went to find her. She was sleeping and almost impossible to wake. She had always been like this, I knew. Linda had told me before how scary it was when she was fast asleep and how impossible it was to have any contact with her for the first five to ten minutes after she woke up. Linda had a theory that sleeping tablets were involved. When she did come outside she almost staggered across the lawn, and her laughter was inappropriate, in the sense that it was too loud for what was going on around the table where she sat and slightly out of synch with the places where the others laughed. I was concerned to see her like that, there was something wrong, it was obvious. She wasn’t really present, she was loud and overwrought, with glittering eyes and a flushed complexion. Linda and I talked about this after all the others had settled down for the night. It was the sleeping medicine, as well as all the stress in connection with the party. After all, she had made food for and served twenty-five guests. And everything was new and strange for her.

The next time I met them was here, and all her fluster and unease was completely gone. And Vidar was back into his routines.

Now he was standing with his hands on his hips for a moment contemplating his handiwork. The sound of a train approaching carried from the other side of the ridge, faded, returned a few seconds later on the other side, louder and fuller, as Linda came walking up the slope towards us.

‘Food’s ready!’ she shouted, on catching sight of us.

Early next morning Vidar drove us to the railway station. We arrived just before the train was about to depart, so I had no chance to buy a ticket. Ingrid, who had joined us to look after Vanja for the next three days, had a monthly ticket while Linda had enough left on her strip for the return to Stockholm. I sat down by the window and took out my pile of newspapers, which I still hadn’t managed to read. Ingrid took care of Vanja, Linda sat looking out of the window. The conductor didn’t come until several stations after we had changed trains at Södertälje. Ingrid showed her card, Linda passed him her strip and I dug in my pocket for loose change. When he turned to me, Ingrid said, ‘He got on at Haninge.’

What?

Was she fiddling the fare on my behalf?

What the hell was she doing?

I met the conductor’s eyes.

‘To Stockholm,’ I said. ‘From Haninge. How much is that?’

I couldn’t say that actually I had got on at Gnesta. How would that make Ingrid feel? Nevertheless, I always made it a rule to pay for myself; if I was in a shop for example and was given too much change, I always pointed this out to the assistant. Fare dodging was the last thing I would do.

The conductor passed me the ticket and my change, I thanked him and he merged into the throng of early-morning commuters.

I was furious, but I continued reading and said nothing. After we had arrived at Stockholm Central and I had lifted the buggy onto the platform I offered to take her suitcase to the office so that she wouldn’t have to drag it up to ours first of all, then back down to the office, which is where she usually stayed when she visited us in the afternoon. She was pleased. I said goodbye to them in the concourse, made my exit by the airport trains, walked to the marketplace with the fortress-like trade union building, hurried up Dalagatan, one hand pulling the roller suitcase, the other holding the bag containing my computer, and unlocked the office door five minutes later.

The place had already become full of memories. The period when I wrote
A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven
flooded towards me from all sides. Oh, how happy I had been then.

I made room for Ingrid’s suitcase in the cupboard under the sink, I didn’t want to have to look at it while I was working, then I went to the toilet for a pee.

And what did I see there? Ingrid’s shampoo and hair conditioner. And what was that at the bottom of the rubbish bag? Ingrid’s Q-tips and dental floss.

What the HELL! I shouted, grabbing the two bottles and throwing them in the kitchen bin. That bloody DOES it, I yelled, snatched at the bag in the wastepaper basket, bent over and took the little clump of hair from the plug hole, it was hers, for Christ’s sake, this was my office, the only place I had that was all mine, where I was completely alone, and even there she came with all her bits and bobs and all her odds and ends, even there I was invaded, I thought, slung her hair as hard as I could into the bag, crumpled it up and stuffed it deep, deep, down in the rubbish bin under the worktop in the kitchen.

Well, screw that.

Then I switched on the computer and sat down at the desk. Waited impatiently for it to boot up. On the wood floor there was the thorn-crowned Jesus Christ. On the wall behind the sofa hung the poster of Balke’s night scene. Over the desk Thomas’s two photos. On the wall behind me the dissected whale and the almost photographically precise drawings of beetles from the same eighteenth-century expedition.

I couldn’t write here. That is, I couldn’t write anything new.

But that wasn’t what I was going to do this week. On Saturday morning I would be giving a lecture about my ‘authorship’ in Bærum of all places, and that was what I would be working on for the next three days. It was a meaningless job, but I had accepted it ages ago. The enquiry had come the same day it became clear that my book had been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. They wrote that it was a tradition for the Norwegian nominee to go and talk about their book or their authorship, and as my defences had been low at that point, I said yes.

And now here I was.

Ladies and gentlemen. I don’t give a shit about you, I don’t give a shit about the book I’ve written, I don’t give a shit if it wins a prize or not, all I want is to write more. So what am I doing here? I allowed myself to feel flattered, I had a moment of weakness, I have lots of them, but now this is the end of feeling flattered and having moments of weakness. To mark the occasion in a suitably unambiguous way I’ve brought along a few newspapers with me. I’m going to place them on the floor in front of the rostrum and have a shit. I’ve saved it up for a few days so that I can make the point with force. So here we go. Right. Oooh. There we are. Now I’ll just wipe my arse and that’s that. May I now pass over to the second nominee, Stein Mehren? Thank you.

I erased that, went to the kitchenette, filled the kettle, poked a spoon into the jar of freeze-dried coffee, loosened some clumps and sprinkled them into the cup, which I filled with boiling water straight afterwards. Then it was on with my outdoor clothes and out to the bench opposite the hospital across the street, where I smoked three cigarettes in quick succession while observing people and cars passing by. The sky was a dreary grey, the air cold and raw and the snow by the kerb dark with exhaust fumes.

I took out my mobile and tapped to and fro until I had written a verse I could send to Geir.

Geir, Geir, I have to say

That stiffy of yours has had its day

But fret you not

A child you begot

A girl who never says no to a lay

Then I went indoors and sat down in front of the computer again. The aversion I felt, along with the fact that there were three whole days until I had to be finished, made it difficult, if not impossible to motivate myself. What should I say? Blah, blah, blah,
Out of the World
, blah, blah, blah,
A Time for Everything
, blah, blah, blah, happy and proud.

The mobile in my jacket pocket went off. I grabbed it and clicked on Geir’s message.

Quite right, died in a car accident this morning. Didn’t know it was already news. You can have my porn mags. I won’t need them any longer. I’m stiffer now than I’ve ever been. Fine epitaph, by the way. But surely you can do better than that?

Certainly can
, I wrote back.
What about this?

Here lies Geir in his final abode

He was driving his Saab when it left the road

His eyes were extinguished, his heart beat on

Yet nobody knew he’d actually gone

Though his bones were smashed, his ribcage crushed

Talk of his death was always hushed

Till the coffin was lowered and all went black

As his soul took flight, that wonderful hack!

It wasn’t outrageously funny, but at least it helped to pass the time. And gave Geir a cheap laugh in his university office. After I had sent it I went to the supermarket and did some food shopping. Ate, slept for an hour on the sofa. Finished reading the first volume of
The Brothers Karamazov
, started the second, and when I had finished that it was completely dark outside and the house was filled with its early-evening sounds. I felt as I had in my childhood, when I also used to lie on my bed reading for several hours at a stretch, my head somehow cold, as though rising from a sleep, a cold sleep, in the afterglow of which my surroundings appeared hard and inhospitable. I rinsed my hands in hot water, dried them thoroughly, switched off the computer and put it in my bag, knotted a scarf around my neck, pulled a hat over my head, put on a coat and shoes, locked the door behind me, put on gloves and went into the street. I had just over half an hour before I was due to meet Geir at Pelikanen, so there was plenty of time.

The snow on the pavement was yellowish-brown with a fine-grained consistency like semolina, which meant it slipped when you stepped on it. I walked up Rådmannsgatan towards the Metro station, where it crossed Sveavägen. It was half past six. The streets around me were as good as deserted, permeated with that elusive darkness that is only found in the gleam of electric light and which here was reflected from every window, every street lamp, across snow and tarmac, stairs and railings, parked cars and bicycles, façades, window ledges, street signs and lamp posts. I could equally well have been someone else, I thought as I walked, there was nothing in me now that felt precious enough for it not to be taken for something else. I passed Drottninggatan, which at its lower end was teeming with dark beetle-like people, descended the steps beside Observatorielunden Park, along the part of the street where there was the repugnant sign outside the Chinese restaurant exhorting us to ‘guzzle’, and down the stair shaft to the underground. There were perhaps thirty to forty people on the two platforms, most on their way home from work judging by the bags they were carrying. I stood where there was most space, placed my bag on the floor between my legs, leaned against the wall with one shoulder, took out my mobile and rang Yngve.