Wilful Disregard (17 page)

‘Did we?’

They might just as well have been filmed for
The Natural World
. Biology had taken over. Territory and rivals and plumage and sexual selection were in full swing. Hugo gave a quick smile, a socially acquired twitch of a muscle, yet still part of nature’s game. The expressions of the second woman who might have been the first grew steadily more remote.

Ester remembered what the girlfriend chorus had once said: To be dropped for someone else is always incomprehensible, impossible to take on board. The replacement always seems preposterous. Always.

When Eva-Stina went to the toilet, Ester asked:

‘So how are you?’

Hugo replied that the USA’s actions were upsetting him more and more, that one had to do something, make some protest. That was what he was considering, what he as an artist could do, what his responsibility was when nobody was doing anything and the world was collapsing in front of our eyes.

He often talked like that, she noted, about nobody doing anything, saying anything, having the guts for anything. They were all morally corrupt, bankrupt and cowardly.

‘Why does no one see the injustice of society and protest against it?’

It was a wholly rhetorical question.

‘Oh, surely there are a lot of people expressing opinions on that all the time?’ said Ester. ‘All over the media, as they say.’

‘Where do you see it? To me they all seem too tied up in themselves and their own consumption.’

The plates were whisked silently away by an efficient waiter. Ester looked at Hugo. This body and this consciousness were what she had been yearning for, all day every day for almost a year and four months. She said:

‘If I hadn’t dropped round this evening. When were you planning to give me that book?’

‘Which book?’

‘The book you just gave me. The one you chose for me.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think about that sort of thing as much as you do. I expect I would have posted it.’

The second/first woman returned. Ester saw him smile a warm, glittering smile at her and pull out her chair, and heard him say:

‘We’re talking about US imperialism.’

She felt the defiance swelling like a mushroom cloud inside her.

‘The Taliban are worse than all the US imperialism in the world,’ she said.

‘It’s the West that brought the Taliban into being,’ said Hugo.

‘They brought themselves into being. Nobody forced them to have their ideas. But they’ve got them, they believe in them and they put them into practice, to the horror of the women who get in their way.’

‘Is that how you think?’

‘And is that how you do?’ said Ester.

‘They join the Taliban as a protest against some form of oppression,’ said Hugo pedagogically. ‘Terrorism is the only weapon of the poor.’

Ester felt suddenly weighed down and dulled by the fact that the man she loved sounded like an echo and lacked the stamina or ability to progress any further than such simplistic sloppiness.

A thought went through her head, timid as an agoraphobic it slunk along the walls of the cell, but both the thought and the anxious agoraphobic risked the walk nonetheless: this was not a person she wanted to live with. She would not be able to bear the self-sufficiency of his political morality.

‘How is it,’ she asked, ‘that only Westerners have to answer for their actions and ideas, not other people? You and many like you divide the world into pre-determined and immutable categories of the responsible and the innocent, the active and the helpless. How can you stand yourselves and your own brutal condescension to everybody, except those you count among your own sort?’

‘One simply has to have an analysis of power,’ said the second woman sanctimoniously, or perhaps she was the first.

‘One also has to see when the powerless wield power, and that powerlessness doesn’t automatically imply that one has good sets of values,’ said Ester. ‘Power depends on situation. The structures recur in all situations but the people shift around in them, and behave equilaterally to each other. The same person finds him-or herself at different points in the structure in different contexts, it’s not something in their skin colour, their religion or their geography.’

‘Nobody’s saying it’s in their skin colour, religion or geography,’ he said.

‘No? Well then, how can you people always know in advance which party is the underdog, regardless of the question at issue?’

With suppressed irritation, Hugo signalled for the dessert menu to be brought over and said:

‘My father used to say that Stalin was the only one who understood the workers’ conditions.’

‘He defended Stalin?’

‘He understood him. Understood what he wanted to do.’

He sounded smug and looked pleased with himself.

‘Do you, as well?’

‘What?’

‘Understand Stalin?’

He took his spectacles out of his shirt pocket and studied the choice of desserts with interest.

‘But opinion is free,’ said Eva-Stina. ‘One has a right to think whatever one wants, surely?’

‘Not if Stalin has his way. Do you defend Stalin on even a single point?’ insisted Ester, turned to Hugo.

‘I’m not in the same position as my father.’

‘But regardless of position, your father can’t defend one of the worst murderers and criminals in world history, can he?’

‘That could be propaganda, at least in part.’

‘This is unworthy of you, Hugo.’

‘Stalin would have been good for my father and others in his position, as workers. Stalin would have furthered their interests. We haven’t the right to pass judgement on this; it’s a question of class interests and it was another age, things were different.’

‘So workers can’t rise above their own short-term interests, assuming that really was in their interests, which I dispute because reigns of terror and totalitarianism are in no one’s interest, but let’s assume it just for the sake of this argument. Your interests are furthered by the ideas and practices of liberalism. You make video artworks critical of society, which you’d never be allowed to do in any of the countries or political systems you applaud and defend. And yet you don’t feel obliged to back up the ideas that are in your own short-term interests as a professional practitioner. In your view you have a duty, for the sake of the whole, of society and the exploited, to rise above vulgar class interests of that sort. Why don’t you expect the same of your father and other workers, the ability to rise above their own self-interest? Why do you demand greater stature of yourself than of others?’

‘My father was a simple labouring man. A little person who got into a tight corner.’

‘It’s a completely different matter, depending on whether you have power or not,’ said Eva-Stina, which sounded a bit repetitive this time.

‘So workers can’t make ethical assessments for any other reason than their own profit?’ said Ester. ‘Can’t think of anything but themselves and their interests? Can’t pay regard to the whole, or to the lives of others?’

Hugo inserted a toothpick between two of his teeth and turned towards Eva-Stina to ask what she wanted for dessert. Sorbet, came the answer. Hugo wanted chocolate fondant. So did Ester but with such tension between them she could not have the same as him and had to settle for panna cotta.

‘Mayakovsky was in favour of the Soviet state,’ said Hugo once they had ordered. ‘Read “My Soviet Passport”. “Envy me – I happen to be a citizen of the Soviet Union”.’

‘Let’s hope he wouldn’t have written that if he’d known what we know.’

Hugo Rask cast a longing look out into the winter night, where the falling snow could be clearly seen under the street lights. Big, round flakes. For a few seconds, Ester was seized by the feeling of having had the chance to resume a relationship with him but having thrown it away by coming across as overbearing, sharp-tongued and polemical.

Now he’ll choose her instead of me, she thought. This was the moment I lost him and crushed the fragile shoot that had started to re-grow. Taking us both out to dinner was a test, and here and now he realized definitively that he didn’t want me. His final doubts, which he wanted to examine one last time tonight, evaporated right here.

Her face flushing, she said:

‘Well naturally, it all depends on one’s perspective.’

How hideously unnecessary to get into a discussion of Stalin and the Taliban.

She regretted doing it. She didn’t regret doing it.

She still couldn’t live with someone who thought in catchphrases and kept to the sleek outer layer of activism so as never to have to descend to the labyrinth of investigation.

The waitress was approaching with more food and his smile broke out like fire from green timber. They quickly ate their desserts and then he produced his wallet like some rich businessman in a cartoon and paid for all three of them.

‘You needn’t,’ said Ester.

‘Don’t mention it.’

He closed his wallet with a bang so the weight of responsibility was clearly audible and got to his feet to tower over his two followers. They went up Nybrogatan, three abreast, crossed the square to Sibyllegatan and continued towards Kommendörsgatan. The snow fell.

The two colleagues were returning to their workplace while Ester would walk on to her bus stop. They stopped outside to say goodbye.

‘Thank you for the book and the dinner,’ said Ester.

‘Hope you find it useful.’

‘I’m sure I will.’

He raised his arm in a wave.

‘Best of luck, then,’ he said.

She saw the two of them enter his door. Then she walked along the pavement as she had done so many times before. How many pavements must a person walk down, before she gives up?

‘Best of luck, then,’ she thought, a phrase with all the qualities of a murder weapon.
People are created to torment one another
. She had underlined that sentence when she read
The Idiot
not long before.

She halted in mid-step and stood still. She saw all at once with absolute clarity what she must do. And she must do it now. Far too much remained unresolved. This evening was the chance to talk it through. Something had to happen this evening. She went back to the building. He owed her a proper conversation.

The lights were still on in the studio. Ester could wait. She was a little elated by the thought that they could finally talk to each other about everything there’d been and why it had turned out the way it did, and by the prospect of what could happen then, where a frank conversation might lead in the middle of the night and with alcohol in their bodies.

She walked round the block. When she got back they would undoubtedly have finished in there. When she got back the lights would be off and the place in darkness.

When she got back a window had been opened wide and she could hear a game of table tennis in progress.

They were laughing to each other in that polite way you do when you want to like somebody but there’s a vacuum in between, when you feel goodwill but no sense of affinity, when you want to show that you’re having fun together but are not on your own ground and aren’t finding the chosen activity particularly edifying. You take part and show pleasure for the other person’s sake. When everything’s a bit artificial. That was the way they were laughing.

She had laughed like that herself sometimes. But never with him. With him she had never played or pretended or felt uncomfortable. Once he told her he had never shared conversations with anyone as he had with her. Talking was her aphrodisiac, the only one she knew and had mastered. Through conversation she could knock down anyone who shared her appetite for verbal sparring and the exchange of ideas. The conversations between her and Hugo had been erotically charged, never-ending and infinitely rewarding – but apparently not indispensable. People could clearly live without interesting conversations. Their primary need was not verbal-erotic intercourse but absence of inconvenience. That always took priority over the desire for substance and meaning. They bought this freedom from bother at the price of mild ennui.

Ester Nilsson stood on the pavement in Kommendörsgatan with frozen feet and thought that unusually lively activities seemed to be laid on for those who worked there. She waited another hour in her coat of hopelessly inadequate thickness. Then the lights finally went out and the premises were dark except for a faint gleam from a back room. She waited another five minutes. Then she went through the entrance, across the courtyard and up the stairs to his flat.

The smell of the stairwell was as she remembered it, old dust and cold stone. The smell would have been painful, as recollections are, but her sense of expectation was stronger. The door to his flat stood ajar. She knocked.

‘Yes?’ came his voice, friendly and expectant.

She took a step into the hall. How she had longed for this, to talk everything over with him properly, undisturbed, in his home, when neither of them was on their way somewhere else.

She heard him coming to meet her, walking from the kitchen, rounding the corner. Now she saw him, his shining, full-moon face that generally also bore a look of slight doubt and introspection.

Ester started to say something. She had practised it while she was stamping her feet out in the street. It ran: I thought we could have a little talk now, seeing how nice it was this evening. We’ve never had the chance to talk properly about what happened and where we actually stand and what we’re going to do with the beautiful thing we built between us.

That was what she had worked out that she would say.

This perpetual talk that the jilted party feels obliged to engage in. This perpetual talk. The jilter never feels the need to talk.

She, if anyone, should have known that the one walking away feels no pain; the one walking away does not need to talk because they have nothing to talk about. The one leaving is through with it. It’s the one left behind who needs to talk for an eternity. And all that this talk boils down to is repeated attempts to tell the other person he’s made a mistake. That if only he realized the true nature of things he would not make the choice he has, but would love her. The talk is nothing to do with gaining clarity, as the talker claims, and everything to do with convincing and inducing.