Wilful Disregard (14 page)

She had been convinced they would never be in touch again.

She was ecstatic at simply seeing his name and thought she must have made a mistake and it was an old email playing tricks on her.

What could Hugo be writing to Ester after that long silence? He wrote that he had thought of her when he read an article in the paper the other day and that he had had an operation to remove the meniscus in his knee.

The knee, their shared body part, the one she had been allowed to touch before she was allowed to hold the rest of him. It was not fraught with danger but sufficiently erotic for him to use the reference to lasso her now. Every time they met in the early winter she had asked how his knee was, and felt it under the table to make a diagnosis. Repetitive stress disorder was her special subject.

He also wrote a line about the recent general election and deplored the outcome, reported that he had been in a hard and intense period of work recently and had not been able to be sociable for a long time.

So would they have met, otherwise? Was that what he intended to say? Or did he mean that she was not the only one he never met, he hadn’t time for any socializing at all and she shouldn’t feel she’d been replaced or ousted?

He did not propose any meeting.

Ester wondered what had prompted him to get in touch. The only thing she could think of was that a human rights organization on whose committee she sat had approached him to propose a collaborative venture. She had kept quiet at the meetings where they had talked about Hugo’s important work on issues relating to human rights and the desirability of involving him in their new project. He agreed to a meeting and the other committee members asked Ester to be part of it because they knew she had given a lecture on Hugo the previous autumn and admired his art and his courage. She had declined. Hugo knew she was on that committee. The meeting had been yesterday. He had noted her absence of course, and wondered about it.

The dynamics were as regulated by laws as the motion of the tides, and had the same origins.

But the urge to be worshipped without the wish to love in return was something Ester found so strange that she had to assume his contact-seeking after the discovery that she was avoiding him was a sign that he missed her. Otherwise she did not understand what he was up to.

The horrific possibility presented itself that he only wanted to be assured of her continuing goodwill. But it got no purchase on her. She could not go so far as to see things in that cynical light, even though she had observed that he always wanted to show his most genial face to the world, because the world was potentially hostile. The world was all that was Other, and that made her the world, so she had to be disarmed just in case she was honing a weapon. The world was always honing weapons. Rather than forfeit the love and admiration that kept her faithfully placid, thus setting them both free, he tossed her yet another juicy bone – and consigned her once again to the mincer.

Forgoing the gestures of lazy concern.

Being strong enough to wear the mask of cruelty.

Amputating the leg that will otherwise rot from gangrene.

These were not for him.

She waited twenty-four hours to reply. It took her two hours to compress it down into five lines. The message that resulted from all this painstaking effort was controlled and reserved but sufficiently affirmative and full of melancholy yearning to ensure he would not be back in touch.

He would receive all the confirmation he needed and could go quiet again.

A fleeting whiff of something wonderful is harder to bear than nothing at all. Hugo’s re-entry into her existence sabotaged in a few seconds her months of work on alleviating her symptoms. The itch was back and she started trying to reach him anew, convinced that nothing comes to anyone who fails to make an effort. And he answered. Everything intensified and came flooding back. Whatever had been lying at rest in her body arose intact and resumed its dominion. The hours once again grew long and full of waiting, and everything besides contact with him was meaningless, which meant that most things were meaningless because the contact was scanty and sporadic.

The girlfriend chorus said: Too much time’s gone by. If he wanted anything with you he’d show it.

Ester turned her back on the chorus. It did not understand.

Once in the course of the autumn he said he was going to call so they could decide on a date to meet. The call never came. When she rang him he said it was a good job she’d got in touch because he had lost her number in his most recent change of mobile phone. She sent a letter on paper in which she wondered why he kept making contact and holding out the prospect of things when he never lived up to them. No reply.

She could see with crystalline clarity that her behaviour was absurd, and put the blame on him: if only he had not got in touch in that futile way in September, if only he had left her in peace. It is the stronger party, the one who wants least, who has to hold their impulses in check, she told the girlfriend chorus when it enquired why she didn’t concentrate on her own behaviour rather than his; after all, she knew everything she needed to know about him. She couldn’t change him, only herself etc.

‘It would take less for him to change than for me, because he wants nothing,’ Ester said. ‘He’s the one who has to impose some self-discipline, not me, because I want something different to happen from what is, you see. It costs him nothing, not getting in touch. Whereas it costs me the risk of missing that microscopic chance.’

But surely you don’t believe in miracles? said the girlfriend chorus.

She convinced herself and others that she was no longer hoping the two of them would become a couple. All she wanted was an admission – of what had been, that there had been something, that he had felt something, that there had been times when he doubted and wavered – and for him to have got back in touch this autumn in spite of it all being over because there was a damp patch in him that refused to dry.

When nothing else remains, there’s redress to fight for, so that one can continue the struggle and not sink into resignation. Even redress requires contact. If she could only purge herself of that longing for contact. That’s what was hollowing her out. If only she could become indifferent to him.

She thought about the amazing fact that seven billion people on earth did not have this reliance on hearing from him. Their health and wellbeing did not depend on it. So why did hers? There was no rhyme or reason to it. Why could she not feel the same towards him as the seven billion did, living their lives with complete lack of concern for what he was engaged in?

The girlfriend chorus said: Give up and leave this man. He’s doing you harm.

The girlfriend chorus really didn’t understand. They were the seven billion.

November came and a documentary film was being made about Hugo Rask. It was almost finished. He invited her in to an advance screening so she could express her opinions on the film. He needed her ‘critical eye and sharp brain’, as he put it, for there was still time to do some re-cutting of the film.

Off she went, pleased by his praise but even more pleased that she would get to see him. It was the first time in six months, the first time since they had coffee in the cafe on the square and he had said he was going to show her Leksand.

The film studio was in Bergsgatan at street level, a poky venue with shabby décor and fluorescent strip lighting on the ceiling. She had made her way there on foot in good time, so in order not to be the first to arrive she stationed herself on a street corner with a view of the entrance. Once a number of people had arrived she went to the door. The audience largely comprised his customary garland of hangers-on, the whole entourage of unpaid interns from the art schools who worked for him in the hope that a stroke from his paintbrush of genius would touch their souls.

The lights went down and the film started. It was about an hour long and followed him through all the various stages of his work, and through interviews in which he expounded his world view. She had heard it before, the same examples and anecdotes that he usually employed, which from her reading she knew him to have used twenty years before. No variation, no movement. His head appeared to have petrified at a high level and got stuck there.

Once the film was over, they were all asked to share their individual thoughts. To Ester’s consternation, no one had anything critical to say about what they had seen, or even an interesting reflection. She did not understand this homage. The film was utterly pointless, unpolished and lacking any narrative thread, conceivably acceptable as an early draft and, in the way of early drafts, without the depth that only comes from the sediment gradually accruing from a work that has been allowed to take its time. This was a rushed piece of work. Moreover, the film was embarrassingly deferential.

As she sat there listening to their mechanical, cultish adoration she thought that the others, those who were part of his staff, worshipped him – but she loved him. A person who loved did not need to adore. For the worshipper, the object had to be kept intact in order not to split apart if flaws were discovered. The lover, by contrast, was free to judge. She loved him even when the element deserving of worship disappeared, in fact more so then, for she loved his person, not his work. And wasn’t that what the editor of the philosophical periodical
The Cave
had meant exactly a year ago, although Ester had not fully appreciated it?

It was Ester’s turn to speak and her first question was mild and exploratory, for she did not want to appear brusque: Had the idea been to make a PR film about him in preparation for the forthcoming exhibitions in Tokyo and Turin? Hugo’s expression shifted towards vulnerability, and he said he had had nothing to do with the production side. The film was supposed to be a penetrating and objective documentary. Ester said nothing as she wondered how to approach what she felt she had to say.

‘It feels terribly uncritical,’ she said.

‘Why should it be critical?’ said one of his staff.

‘Exactly. Why do we always have to find fault?’ said someone else.

‘Naturally it doesn’t have to be critical in a negative sense,’ said Ester, ‘or even supposedly objective. But it does have to be testing, neutral, searching and unprejudiced, prepared to disturb the viewers’ habitual lazy thinking. This film already knows what it wants when the filming starts and uses the same phrases that are always used about Hugo. It isn’t trying to discover anything; it just wants to confirm what we already think.’

‘And what do we think?’

The question was asked irritably from among the cabin stewards and refuse collectors of his mind, those who had been assigned to, and taken as their mission, the task of defending the object of their worship from hearing the truth, which he in his turn was allegedly seeking.

Ester thought he wanted adoring people around him, that was what he wanted and made sure to get, showing them what was expected of them. He did not want her ‘critical eye and sharp brain’ in either his love life or his professional life. She had been allowed to be near him as long as she did not see him for what he was.

‘The film wants to pay homage,’ she said. ‘It wants us to worship its subject.’

‘Deservingly, do you mean?’ said the staff.

‘It makes no odds whether it’s deserved or undeserved. Homage isn’t interesting. One wants to learn something, get some depth, problem solving, interpretation. Not a panegyric.’

Only now did it strike her that it was Eva-Stina who had asked the most acerbic questions. She had changed her glasses and hairstyle since last winter, perhaps even had her hair tinted a different shade. She was sitting alongside Hugo, sitting awfully close to him and glowering infernally, except when she was yawning at the trivialities being aired.

‘The film was good,’ Ester said. ‘I need to see it again, of course, to be able to assess it properly.’

The session ended and the whole group went out for a meal at a little local restaurant. Some of them seemed to feel that it had been a case of freezing out in the viewing studio and were extra solicitous to Ester while they waited for the food, solicitous in that pitying, patronizing way adopted by convinced but tolerant people when the gulf is too great. Kindly beings who have seen the light and are eager in their attentions because their horror at the deviant’s lack of judgement would be ugly and harsh if they let it show. They smiled sect-like smiles and asked how familiar she was with the craft of documentary film-making. She smiled back, as fearful as they were, and replied that her particular interest was the mechanisms of oppression and the adulation of leaders in totalitarian systems rather than documentary films. They ignored her remark and insisted with warm smiles on knowing more about her ignorance of the documentary film’s particular requirements and aesthetic.

They ate and drank, and when it was time to go home Hugo Rask stood on the pavement under the pale light of a shop sign. He stood there with Dragan, who had been regarding Ester with reluctant interest when she made critical comments on the film. Ester could see by the way he looked that he agreed with her. On the other side of Hugo stood Eva-Stina with her hands in her pockets and her hair curling out from under her hat. In a way that Ester could not quite put her finger on, they appeared to find it natural for Eva-Stina to be there beside them.

It had just been raining. The asphalt was a dark mirror in which they could see themselves and others.

The autumn passed, the days rambled by, the hours moving more quickly now that Ester Nilsson had given up hope again. Since the screening of the documentary there had been silence.

A few days before Christmas she went to a party, a big occasion to which everyone who had commented publicly on the cultural climate of the land was invited. She was idly stirring the almonds and raisins served with the
glögg
when she saw him standing over by the wall, without company. It had not occurred to her that he might have been invited – it was mainly journalists, academics and writers. He met her gaze and held it.