Wilful Disregard (2 page)

‘To make other people see what I’ve seen.’

Dragan said no more. It was impossible to tell whether her answer had satisfied or dissatisfied him, but in Ester’s judgement the answer had proved better than he was expecting and he did not like the fact.

‘It was fabulous, what you did last Saturday,’ said Hugo.

He seemed in a flutter by comparison with Dragan’s bad-tempered immobility.

‘What was that?’ said Ester.

‘Your lecture about me.’

She felt the roar of her pounding pulse and looked at Hugo sitting there, big and tall, full of food, drink and years lived. She loved everything she saw, so much that her insides ached.

‘I was up in Leksand for the weekend,’ he said.

Ester waited for him to continue.

‘I’ve a house there. By Lake Siljan.’

There was something peculiar about the statement as if he, too, was accounting for something nobody was wondering about to hide something nobody could see, and Dragan raised one eyebrow accordingly. Ester felt he was talking about Leksand and his house because he wanted to introduce every aspect of himself to her without delay.

She sat on an upright wooden chair but did not take off her down jacket. She had bought it yesterday, when the first cold snap arrived. Her trousers were new as well, dark-blue corduroy; the jacket had matching blue-corduroy detail on the shoulders. It was only when every neurotransmitter in her brain was running in top gear that she could galvanize herself to buy clothes. Otherwise it was far too meaningless an activity, merely stealing time from the self-imposed task of decoding reality and locating language’s most truthful illustration of it. One day she would understand how everything was connected. For now, it came in fragments and pieces.

Hugo Rask nodded appreciatively at the jacket and said how smart it was, not as puffy as other down jackets. She unbuttoned it so as not to get too hot but felt that removing it would be like inviting herself to stay and since that was exactly what she wanted – to stay there for ever – she could not take off the jacket.

At that moment she was incapable of perceiving that it would be normal behaviour to take off a thick down jacket even if only staying for a short time. Mimicking normality is the hardest thing of all. It has a lack of concern that is impossible to imitate. Exaggerations show up and look like stupidity. But attempts to hide feelings do have the advantage that the observer does not know for sure. Taken to extremes, life is a process of reorientation after shame or glory, and when anxiety sweeps in there is a relief at not having left any definite tracks. Having kept a jacket on, having seemed awkward or nervous, these are not proof in the way utterances are proof. At most they are circumstantial evidence.

Ester Nilsson, who generally dismissed shame and glory because both of them made the individual a slave to the judgements of others, now sat there wondering how much or how little she should take her jacket off to ensure nobody noticed how much she was in love.

They talked about Hugo, his works, his stature and achievements. He asked her a little about herself but she swiftly brought the conversation back to him, referring to a sequence of images he had done of people at a bus stop in the rain, which had recurred over the years.

Why that theme, and why recurring?

Hugo got up, stretched his arms in the air, took a few steps and tore down a note that was stuck to the wall. She saw his body from behind and wanted to rush over and hold it.

‘Because it’s beautiful,’ he said, crumpling the slip of paper and throwing it into a waste-paper basket.

She felt weak in every joint at seeing these physical movements and at the sensuality that must reside in anyone who sees that people in the rain can be beautiful. Was this not exactly what she had been seeking all her life?

But she had to go home to a man who was waiting for her, a man so afraid of the answer that he no longer asked where she had been and why she had stopped talking to him.

One afternoon, Ester met a friend at a cafe. They drank coffee and ate American muffins and talked about everything that was happening in their lives. Ester liked her friend a lot; they had known each other for a long time. When they had been chatting for a while, the friend gave Ester a quizzical look and asked:

‘Are you in love with Hugo Rask? You blush every time his name comes up. In fact your face is permanently flushed.’

Ester gripped her serviette.

‘But I shan’t leave Per.’

Her friend went from quizzical to surprised.

‘Oh, was that on the cards?’

‘No.’

Her friend went from surprised to sympathetic certainty.

‘We’ve made contact at a deep level and we’re going to be friends,’ said Ester.

Her friend smiled in amusement. But Ester believed what she was saying. She did not realize she had crossed a boundary. The brain knows no tenses. If it has longed for something, it has already had it. The leap comes when we do not want to lose the future we have already known.

‘Your face is all red,’ said her friend.

Ester raised her hands to her cheeks, mainly to cover them, but also to cool them.

‘It’s hot in here,’ she said.

Passion was raging inside her. Its internal combustion engines were firing on all cylinders. She was living on air. She did not eat but needed no nourishment. She did not drink but felt no thirst. With every passing day her trousers hung more loosely. Her flesh was burning and she could not sleep. She had started putting her mobile in her dressing-table drawer and in the reckless self-absorption of being in love she failed to register that the man beside her was lying awake in silent fury. Despair was too big a word, because he was a reserved type, even to himself, but not many sizes too big.

The implication hitherto had been that Per and Ester liked each other’s company and were always together, whereas the implication now was that Ester did not come home in the evenings until she had to. Their whole relationship had been implied, so its disintegration also took place without comment.

Hugo’s text messages generally arrived at night, when his assistants and Dragan had gone home and he was still working away on his own. Every evening around midnight he would send a friendly line that she read the instant it arrived. In the bed beside her lay a human being who did not exist.

His studio was on Kommendörsgatan, in one of the few unassuming buildings on the street. In the evenings she would patrol the surrounding area. She hoped to catch a glimpse, hoped that someone in his circle, or even he himself, might emerge from the front door. And one evening, it happened. On her way home from the cinema, she took a detour past his place to do some more circuits of his block. All at once she spotted him on the other side of the street, walking along the pavement. He was heading briskly in the opposite direction. She turned and followed at a distance. He rounded a couple of corners and went into the ICA Esplanad supermarket on Karlavägen. Ester waited outside.

He emerged three and a half minutes later holding a small bag and went back the way he had come. She made sure to stay twenty metres behind. As they approached the entrance to his building, she caught up with him, put her hand on his shoulder and said:

‘What a coincidence.’

He expressed no surprise but touched her arm and said:

‘Come on up. We’re having a chat after work, just me and a few of my associates.’

‘Are you sure the others would want me to?’

‘I want you to. Do come.’

There were five people standing in the studio’s kitchen, their glasses charged with red wine and their elbows propped on the bar counter. He produced what he had bought: crackers, grapes and some blue cheese, which he unwrapped from its plastic packaging.

One of his collaborators, a youngish woman with frizzy hair and startling spectacles, gave Ester a sideways look, but that was presumably a misreading, because Ester saw no reason why she should.

They ate and drank and said how delicious the cheese was. Hugo explained that the taste combination of bread, cheese and grape had taken centuries to develop. Only this extended timescale had allowed them to evolve to appeal perfectly to the taste buds. She loved the fact that he reflected on such big and important topics.

The only thing that dissatisfied her was the fact that he always had people around him. It said something about him that made her feel vaguely sceptical. She would have preferred him to be a solitary being with a fissure of longing in him that she could fill.

Before you understand where the emotion is going to lead, you talk to anyone and everyone about the object of your love. All of a sudden, this stops. By then the ice is already thin and slippery. You realize that every word could expose your infatuation. Feigning indifference is as hard as acting normally, and fundamentally the same thing.

Ester had still not reached that point, which became evident at an event where she ran into the editor of the philosophy periodical
The Cave
, for which she had occasionally written, and immediately turned the conversation to Hugo Rask, although they were talking about something else. The editor agreed that he was extremely interesting, and had a sudden idea. She said they were just putting the finishing touches to an issue on the theme of self-sacrifice and duty but still felt something was missing, something to tie everything together and attract readers at the same time. The editor had not decided what it should be until this moment. As Hugo Rask’s work always revolved round ethical issues, the editor proposed an interview with him about the tension between I and You, in his work and for him personally.

Ester Nilsson felt her hair follicles tingle with heat as she asked the editor why she felt Ester was particularly suited to the commission because, after all, she had not addressed those tensions either in her own work or in her study of his.

‘Because you’re in love with Hugo Rask and will dare to ask questions it would never occur to other people to ask.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Think what?’

‘That one would ask penetrating questions in that case. I thought it was generally considered to be the other way round, namely that being in love makes one uncritical, undiscriminating.’

‘Undiscriminating, certainly. But not uncritical; severe, rather. If the object of one’s affections proves to be pitiful, contradictory and weak, it simply makes one love them more.’

‘It sounds as though you’re speaking from experience.’

‘You bet I am.’

The editor smiled more broadly than was advisable for someone with a set of teeth ruined by wine and cigarettes.

‘But there’s another, much more immediate reason for asking you to do it.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Only someone in love would be able to produce an article like that within the week. I’m afraid that’s all the time I can give you.’

‘What makes you think I’m in love?’

‘I can tell from the way you look.’

‘I rate his art highly,’ said Ester. ‘I genuinely do.’

The editor gave an indulgent and slightly unkind laugh.

‘2,500 words maximum, 2,250 minimum. Submission date a week from now.’

An interview of this sort called for hours of conversation and a good deal of contact thereafter, to discuss the framing of the text. This was her chance.

The next morning, she called Hugo. He was flattered but wanted to consider the matter, for this was a weighty subject that demanded a lot of time and thought; it had to be right and it had to be good. But in principle he was interested, and he respected
The Cave
.

In the course of that day she discovered the impossibility of telling her partner about the commission and realized their relationship was over. The question that remained was how she was going to say it. She hoped he would help her. And that was indeed what happened. He could not cope with living with the ambivalence and the following evening he gripped her firmly by the top of her arm and said:

‘Is there any point in this any longer? In us?’

But behind his words, Ester discerned above all a wish for reassurance and relief. He was saying it to find out that he was wrong. There is a resistance in the party who wants to leave, a fear of the unknown, of the hassle and of changing one’s mind. A party not wanting to be left must exploit that resistance. But then they must restrain their need for clarity and honesty. The matter must remain unformulated. A party not wanting to be left must leave it to the one wanting to go to express the change. That is the only way to keep a person who does not want to be with you. Hence the widespread silence in the relationships of the world.

Ester thought: I mustn’t. I mustn’t soften his pain and my own inconvenience. I mustn’t.

‘No, there’s no point,’ she said.

‘So it’s over?’

‘Yes.’

‘In that case you can move out tomorrow.’

‘I’ve nowhere to live.’

‘When I get home from work tomorrow, I want you to be gone.’

The next morning, she moved back in with her mother in Tulegatan. Her mother asked neither too many questions nor too few. She said Ester could stay as long as she needed to. When she awoke the first morning there was no sorrow, no sense of loss, just a sensation of freedom. Nobody can pretend away their rapture. It is said that breaking up is always hard. But if you are in love with someone else you are not going to be simultaneously sad, not really. You may feel weighed down by guilt and the complications in prospect, you can suffer with the other party. But your love is total, even totalitarian. It envelops everything you do and think, hence its power to inflict damage.

Ester arranged to meet Hugo for the interview the following Sunday at one o’clock.

Sunday was a grey, damp, raw day with half-closed eyes. It was almost 1 p.m. and she was standing in one of the streets that intersected his own, waiting for the moment when she could ring at his door. She was calm at the prospect of the encounter. Concentrated discussion of real things for several hours was something at which she could not fail. Her only vague worry was the thought of missing out on the future in which her desire was already nesting.