Wilful Disregard (11 page)

‘You get that sort of thing with these modern devices,’ she said.

‘Yes, you certainly do,’ he said.

‘But wasn’t it strange that it rang me, of all people? Almost like a sign.’

His laugh was embarrassed now. It generally was, in fact. Ester thought he must find his own laughter uncomfortable because laughter was intimate.

‘Maybe your phone’s missing me and all those wonderful conversations it listened in on,’ she said.

Scornful laughter wasn’t intimate, her train of thought continued, but then it wasn’t really proper laughter. It merely mimicked the sound and muscle movements of laughter to parasitize the genuine article.

The great expanses of silence in the conversation made her thoughts go bouncing off in various directions.

‘Do you remember how lovely it was together? When we talked and talked.’

‘Is it all right in France?’ he said.

‘Yes, fine. Great. Really interesting.’

‘France is good,’ he said. ‘The native land of cheese and wine. And true intellectualism.’

‘Paris is always Paris, of course,’ she said, feeling the ghastly platitude to be emblematic of their shipwrecked liaison.

‘Yes indeed.’

‘I’ve been walking all round the city, soaking up the atmosphere. There’s nowhere like it.’

‘Sounds splendid.’

‘It’s spring here. In the capital of love.’

‘I can imagine. I mean to say, it’s March already. How time flies.’

‘Yes. Or creeps by. Anyway, that was all. I just wanted to check whether you rang me yesterday for any particular reason.’

‘No. As I said. It must have been an accident.’

‘That’s a pity.’

She considered the conversation closed and had removed the telephone from her ear when she heard his voice again:

‘Maybe speak when you’re back, then.’

She put the phone back again.

‘What did you say?’

‘Maybe speak when you’re back, then.’

‘Yes? Yes! Shall we? Do let’s!’

‘OK, we’ll do that,’ he said. ‘Have a nice time until then.’

After those small, nonchalant words from his lips she went weightlessly out into the Paris evening, loved every scent and felt in sympathy with every person she saw. She got down to Shakespeare & Company just before they closed and bought a couple of books, one by Hannah Arendt and the other by Derek Parfit, and took an internal decision to work harder, resume her self-discipline, her reading and her efforts to understand how the world fitted together.

She chatted away in bad French to the bookshop assistant while she was paying, and nothing would have the power to annoy her ever again.

It was just before two the following day when her plane landed. Less than an hour later she was back home in her apartment on Kungsholmen. She should probably wait a little while before getting in touch, she thought. It was Sunday, the day when she went for her long-distance training run. She would normally consider a travelling day like this a wasted one for any important activity, but today was another sort of day, it was the start of something new. The biochemical processes that constituted her body were today without obstacles or barriers, nothing was weighing them down or applying any brake. Unresistingly, she went out and did her long Sunday run, even though it was the afternoon. She normally tackled it in the morning or not at all; it often felt too much of an effort to go out later in the day. She was up to eighteen kilometres now, and by the start of May she planned to have increased it to the maximum distance, which she decided would be more than the twenty kilometres she had planned, at least twenty-two. Today, not a single step felt like a struggle. Throughout her circuit, hugging the shoreline of the city’s many inlets, she visualized them meeting tonight, and perhaps tomorrow. He wanted them to be in touch when she got home. And now she was home. Not since the catastrophe occurred had he suggested anything like that. And of course it was no ‘accident’ that the phone had rung her. It was too improbable. No, he was missing her, too.

After her run she took a bath, with bubbles. Her body was pleasantly tired, particularly her tendons. She felt a sense of satisfaction and inner stability. As soon as she had bathed and dressed she would call him, but not too early, because she had things to do, and a life.

So she took it easy, rubbed herself dry and, still steaming, lay down on the bed to finish sweating and cool down. Ironed a blouse and with it donned a pair of stiff new jeans, some socks she had never worn before and a V-neck jersey of a colour that matched the checked pattern of the blouse.

Her hand did not shake as she made the call, it had no need to. They were to be in touch when she was back from Paris, he had urged her to do it, and now she was home, so she was doing it.

It’s too easy to say ‘Maybe speak when you’re back’ with half a continent in between. It’s too easy. The content and meaning of the words are too large in relation to how simple they are to utter. No. Wrong track. Like anybody in love, Ester Nilsson laid too much emphasis on the content of the words and their literal meaning and too little on plausibility and her overall judgement. It was part of her profession to assess plausibility and to make overall judgements, and she was good at her profession but that, of course, was an area in which her emotional life was not involved.

Admittedly the content of the sentence he had spoken, ‘Maybe speak when you’re back,’ was not much to go on. It was a standard, polite phrase to someone who was away on a trip. It could mean that you’d be back in touch with each other in a week, or two months. The phrase did not so much express its content as a simple acknowledgement between two people: ‘We know each other, we’ve no scores to settle, this isn’t the last time we’ll be talking.’ But when the phrase was said to someone filled with yearning it was brutal, a sloppy combination of cowardice and guilt, solicitude with nothing behind it.

In her heated state, Ester was unable to see that utterances could be as light as ash and just as burnt-out. They were scattered lazily, fell, came drifting down. Words were not enduring monuments to intentions and truths. They were sounds to fill silences with.

Happiness seldom exists in the experiencing of happiness. It resides in the expectation of happiness and almost only there. Since the evening before, she had been happy.

After what she judged to be eight rings he answered, his voice turned away.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘It’s me.’

His hello was guarded and her voice instantly became strained because her throat constricted and the vocal cords tightened.

‘How are you?’ she croaked.

‘Oh, I’m fine?’

She heard the question mark, its dreadful chill. She sensed a sewer of contempt. He might just as well have come straight out with it: ‘Why are you ringing again, don’t disturb me, we spoke yesterday, what is it you want of me?’

‘I’m doing a bit of work,’ he said more mildly, having registered how tense and stifled she suddenly sounded.

‘That’s good. Working, I mean. I did some work on the plane. Other than that I haven’t done much today. It’s Sunday, not that that matters, but it’s a good excuse if you want a rest.’

She refrained from hanging up abruptly, solely to avoid drawing attention to how ridiculous she felt. She said:

‘Going all right?’

‘What?’

‘Your work.’

‘It’s going as usual. We’ve lots to do. We need to get in a good few hours today. The whole team’s assembled. We’ll be working into the night.’

The freshly ironed blouse clung damply to her back and the inside of her elbows. Don’t humiliate me, she thought, I can hear your subtext, I’m not going to gatecrash.

‘Did you want anything in particular?’ he said.

‘No. Nothing in particular.’

He laughed that embarrassed laugh.

‘Well, I’m back,’ she said.

‘Ah yes. Right.’

‘I was to call when I got home.’

‘Oh yes, you were in Paris.’

‘Yes, I was in Paris.’

There was silence for a brief but discernible moment. ‘

Did you have a good time?’

‘No. Because my head and my body came with me.’

He made a sort of humming sound, sensing intimacy in the offing, and wanted to break off. She could hear all she needed to hear to understand definitively that she had to walk away and not spare this man another thought. But the knowledge did not penetrate as far as her autonomous system of insight. It stopped at a more superficial level where excuses feed on whatever they can get hold of. In the never-ending battle between insight and hope, hope won, because insight cost too much to incorporate and hope made it easier to live.

‘I wanted to ask if you fancied having dinner,’ she said dully.

‘Tonight! No, it’s impossible!’

They were exclamation marks of sheer dread.

‘No, I didn’t mean tonight.’

‘It’s out of the question.’

Shame pulsed at its steady, even pace.

‘You said yesterday we should be in touch when I got home. That was why I called. The only reason. Otherwise I naturally wouldn’t have.’

‘No problem. I’ve got to get back to work now. All the best. Bye now.’

Two months passed. It was spring, the season that reveals grimy surfaces and clogged corners. Everything was exposed by the keen rays of the sun. Grief cannot remain acute indefinitely. It soon gets moved to the day ward and then to the rehabilitation clinic. Ester anaesthetized herself with company and people she would not have spent time with had she been harmonious rather than half dead. She did everything in her power to avoid being alone with herself, asking acquaintances and friends to stay over so she could avoid feeling the darkness of the night taking up residence in her.

She was not stoical but in shreds, totally frayed. One evening she decided to ring Per, the man she formerly lived with but had abruptly left six months earlier. She didn’t know why she was ringing; her fingers ran ahead of her consciousness. Per said he still loved her, he missed her terribly and everything had been grey since she left. Ester was moved and touched and said she was grateful for the years they had had together. Then Per asked why she was calling and there was something knowing and sharp in his tone. He was as well aware as she was that nothing of that kind happened by chance, it corresponded to internal emotions. Ester said she had just wanted to talk for a while. The next day, Per called twice and asked if perhaps they should try again. On the third day his voice was shrill and he asked what she thought gave her the right to disturb what little equilibrium he had been able to salvage after months of suffering and despair. Ester found it hard to accept she could mean that much to Per, she didn’t think it had seemed that way over the years and therefore she didn’t really believe him. Moreover she was fully occupied with her own suffering and her own despair. His misery had little genuine effect on her. To her, it seemed unreal.

The girlfriend chorus was kept very busy. It interpreted, comforted, soothed, exhorted and indicated new directions of travel. She had to break free, it said, and she repeated: I’ve got to break free from this idiocy.

One day, it said, Hugo might turn up at her door with a bunch of flowers, you never knew. But she had to wait until he was ready and be open to life in the meantime.

The girlfriend chorus shouldn’t have said that, because she immediately felt the hope of this happening seize hold of her and become the only thing she cared about.

‘Do you think it’s possible?’ she gasped. ‘Do you think it could really happen that one day I’ll find him at my door and he’ll have changed his mind?’

‘Everything’s possible but you mustn’t think about it,’ said the chorus.

It was an abortive piece of advice, impossible for her to follow. If there were even the slightest chance, Ester would think of nothing else and live in parenthesis until that day arrived.

Something that had been of crucial importance to her had been nothing but a way of passing the time for Hugo. There were short periods when she dwelt on this thought. Then she deleted it, in order to hold out. In April she wrote two long letters and posted them. She wanted to explain herself and understand. She wanted to put into words what she had felt and why she had acted and thought as she did, wanted to say that his actions had shaped hers, that no one acts without also reacting, that he had given her good cause for making her assumptions.

She did not expect an answer, nor did she get one.

There were days when life was bearable and the pain point shrank to a pinhead.

She read a book about the Holocaust that had just come out, she wrote poems about her misery, which were exceedingly bad but she kept them all the same. She did her five runs a week. Spring progressed. Her legs had clocked up a considerable number of kilometres since the new year.

Towards the end of May she was sitting in a cafe at Östermalmstorg. It wasn’t because of its proximity to Kommendörsgatan that she had ended up there, she persuaded herself. Or rather it was, of course, she conceded. She still gravitated to his district sometimes.

A Christian festival and holiday weekend lasting from Thursday to Sunday was approaching. It was warm and desolate in town. She sat reading over a cup of coffee, able once again to sink into a text, particularly when she was not at home in solitude but, like now, among people and buzz and life. She was in her book, but not so deeply that she missed seeing out of the corner of her eye a coat that she recognized, a shabby green outdoor jacket. There was something about the way the body moved, too, a certain bagginess about both his body and his style. She thought she really must stop seeing him everywhere. Hugo Rask never went to cafes. But here he was now, coming in, approaching her table, raising a hand in greeting and smiling uncertainly.

Ester put down her book on the table, cover uppermost; it was Chekhov’s
The Lady With the Dog
. He had once said that she ought to read it. She recalled the moment when she heard him say it and how the warmth between them had felt at that moment of encounter, the way she had been looking out over banks of snow and parked cars as he mentioned the book. Some images just incomprehensibly froze into place. That was six months ago.