Wilful Disregard (7 page)

‘I’ve got to go.’

She nodded. He was experiencing a diffuse sense of guilt. It was detectable in a certain slight lag in the way he moved his head; it disturbed his brow, the corners of his eyes and his posture.

‘Are you going to stay here a bit longer and philosophize?’ he said.

‘Yes. I’ll philosophize for a while.’

He leant forward and kissed her cheek. A distinct, affectionate, loving kiss. It was also a kiss that knew something about inadequacy. He stood still, hesitating, before he left.

She stayed a bit longer but did not philosophize. It was a Wednesday with a whitish haze of the sort that found its way under your collar. A day full of forebodings. Something was seriously wrong, she knew. Not with their encounter so much as in their different views of its gravity and significance.

Nothing had been said about how things would carry on and nothing about their entry into each other’s lives or the muteness that had followed it. Nothing about anything.

They had stopped talking the moment their bodies took over. Love needs no words. For a short period you can put your trust in wordless emotion. But in the long run there is no love without words, and no love with words alone. Love is a hungry beast. It lives off touch, repeated assurances and an eye that looks deeply into another eye. When that eye is right up close to the other eye, neither of them sees a thing.

She sat there for a quarter of an hour and then took the bus home. The air did not lighten all day and he did not call. Nor did she, but when she did not call it meant something different from him not calling, because he decided, he had the power. There was no evidence and yet no doubt that this was the case. The one applying the brake is always the one who decides. The one who wants least has the most power. When he did not call, it was hardly because he thought: I’d better restrain myself and not keep calling.

This is hell, she thought the next morning when twenty-four hours had passed. This is what hell feels like and this is a hell that actually exists. She was burning up from inside.

On Thursday evening Ester was due to attend a party to which Hugo had also been invited. They had spoken of this a couple of weeks earlier but then it had gone out of her mind, when they hit upon more pleasant reasons for assignations.

By then she had recovered from the hellish visions of that morning and a certain sense of anticipation crept in. It was a chance to meet, after all. Admittedly she could not ignore the significance of his failure to call or the fact that they were not in contact, even though this was precisely the period when contact should have been at its most frenzied. She knew it was not mere chance that nothing was happening; it corresponded to some psychological phenomenon for which there was presumably a precise term. But she tried to convince herself that it was mere chance, that things sometimes just happened, that people were different, that some were in frequent touch and others less so, regardless of how much they felt, and that beginnings were always tricky and tentative.

She didn’t believe her own mantra. She was just trying to appease the fates. She was convinced that what was happening could be traced back to realities. His non-action in not ringing her, even though he ought to want to, corresponded to a movement in his brain, a movement that was the result of a deliberation, albeit only at the level of perception, and of an absence of movement in his heart. She had sensed clearly and intensely that this deliberation was doing nothing to promote the progress of their love, their future relationship.

But he was also a hard-working man, she thought. She ought not to anticipate unhappiness that might never materialize. She should be bright and cheerful when they met that evening, not reveal anything of the thoughts and emotions raging within her.

By now it was afternoon. In the course of the day she had called him six times. He doubtless had a lot to do and was not near his phone. She thought it was a shame that he did not long for her enough to want to call even though he hadn’t time, that he did not keep the phone with him so as not to miss a single call from her as she would have done, behaviour that would normally characterize the stage they had now reached. Had she reached it alone? Or did his longing express itself in other ways?

It was the sort of day when she could not keep thought and feeling apart.

Heavy of heart, she went to the party. Once she was there she managed to shake off some of her uneasiness, chatted to people, laughed, ate and drank. At ten o’clock he had still not arrived. At eleven, a good number of people started to leave. Then he came, in a taxi. He had a smallish entourage with him, associates from the studio who had not been invited, among them Dragan. Since starting to keep company with Hugo, Ester had learned that Dragan was of Yugoslavian birth and had come to Sweden in 1981, with predilections for French philosophy and a sophisticated variant of Communism. Dragan had supported the mullahs in Iran in 1979 to defy Western hegemony and saw no reason to comment on or revise his standpoint thereafter. Most things were abstractions to him and as an abstraction this stance functioned well, in his view. Ester asked him how he could live with the consequences but he had dismissed her as an imperialist lackey and mental colonizer. Hugo Rask admired his friend and shared his contempt for all that smacked of liberalism, the West and bourgeois respectability, anything
comme il faut
. Socialists they might be, Ester told them sometimes, but they perpetually ended up in the laps of the conservatives, sometimes even dangerously close to a fascist world view. At that, Dragan would give a snort and call her a conformist and careerist, two labels he was always very ready to distribute, and declared that she had better go home and read up on it, because at this level it was beneath him to refute her assertions. Dragan had private financial means and did not need to work, it was said, though nobody knew the details, but ever since his arrival in Sweden he had acted as an informal adviser and companion to Hugo Rask. He spoke Swedish with a strong accent and excellent grammar. For decades the two confrères had sat in Hugo’s premises talking of the rotten state of the world and what to do about it. They had even done a number of things to excise the rot, everyone had to admit. Ester had devoured it all with famished energy: books, films, brochures and documentary accounts of past happenings that she had unearthed from the archive.

To start with, as Dragan sat there in the studio in the evenings smoking his eternal cigarettes, he had looked condescendingly and disdainfully at Ester, as if he knew something he was not revealing. Ester wanted to ask him what it was he knew, but realized where his loyalty lay.

Hugo had never distanced himself from any of the malice to which Dragan’s refined thinking inadvertently led. He had too much of a taste for provocation as a lifestyle to repudiate violence and oppression in the name of revolt.

What was strange about Hugo Rask, thought Ester Nilsson, was that the only thing to attract him more than provocation was being loved by the public. It was pulling him apart, because at the same time he could not bear being loved by the public, believing it to signal complicity, cowardice and indifference in the face of the raw truths which no present day had ever had the courage to confront but which the future always saw uncomfortably clearly, with an indulgent smile at the narrow outlook of times past.

With defiant pride, Dragan and Hugo had lined up behind Milošević in Serbia. This was still viewed as an embarrassing blot on the artist’s public image, something that had to be touched on in any tribute article so the writer could not be accused of playing down the artist’s poor judgement and unforgivable lapse, or perhaps it was the complexity of his soul. It was a stance that had come at some cost, including several cancelled exhibitions. Ester once asked him about it, and received the answer that he was not interested in anything that was held in wide affection, was uniform or imposed by the elite. She was not offered any arguments in support of his position. She wanted to ask more, wanted to hear how he reconciled such slogans with being so desperately anxious personally for the public’s affection.

But she had swallowed her questions in order not to jeopardize their fragile intimacy.

Dragan made his entry to the party in a black suit, black polo-necked sweater and the elegant black shoes he had been wearing the first time she met him. He gave a malicious wave in her direction.

‘So you’re here too?’ he said.

The fact that Hugo was surrounded by his own people even here at the party considerably reduced her opportunities for wondering out loud about all those unanswered phone calls and other things that had failed to happen. His face shone like a round red cheese when he saw her, a nervous, uncomfortable, round red cheese. From that point he was always half turned away, making off somewhere, as if in fear of questions. When he finally met her eye he did it with an insouciance that was almost brazen.

‘Have you missed me?’

The question was entirely rhetorical, a laboured game.

‘Yes. I have. A lot.’

Her words thudded clumsily to the floor between them and died. She did not return the question, to avoid hearing the answer and seeing him discomfited by the need for evasion.

‘Shall we try the buffet?’ he said.

‘I already have,’ she said. ‘It’s delicious.’

‘Oh, um,’ he said, apparently disconcerted by the fact that she had thought he was addressing her. He indicated with a nod and a gesture that the invitation was meant not for her but for the friends he had brought with him, famished after their day’s strenuous labour among set pieces and constructions designed to deceive the eye.

His spite was not deliberate or studied. It was simple omission, inability, fear disguised as considerate behaviour. Ester left them to it and went to talk to other people, kept her distance.

As the party began to feel past its prime, she sought him out again. She had weighed it up and reached the decision that she would rather be brushed off than fret about not having tried. He was discussing something with a journalist, one of the arts editors. Dragan was standing with them. All three were laughing, in relaxed agreement over something. Ester put her hand on Hugo’s back. He looked at her with eyes that were swivelling round in their sockets in search of an emergency exit. Somewhere inside herself she understood that this was answer enough, but she could not bear it. She took him to one side and asked:

‘Shall we go back to my place?’

She steeled herself not to offer him freedom at the same time. If he wanted to run away he would have to organize it himself.

‘If we’re going, it had better be my place,’ he said.

She wanted to say they should forget all about it, but stayed silent.

They went out into the street. The streetlights gleamed coldly in the black-white night. They walked three blocks to a more major road, where a taxi soon came along. It struck her that this was exactly where she had been when, bathed in spring sunshine, she took the call asking her to give a lecture on him. Now it was night and winter in the same spot. He held the back door of the car open for her and they got in. She took his hand to give it a squeeze but the hand squirmed like a captured maggot, trying to extract itself from hers without making it too obvious.

Unsolicited gifts can be appalling in their demands, their expectations, their sticky demonstration of the giver’s solicitude. It was not impossible that he looked on her pressurizing hand as such a gift. He tried to stroke her fingers but it was more like rubbing. He seemed in the grip of some great torment that transmitted itself through his hand.

She did not understand what that torment could be. She did not think she was demanding anything unreasonable. Freedom was a virtue and she honoured it, but she could not offer freedom from closeness. What she could offer, on the other hand, was the freedom to be closer to her than anyone else, and the freedom to escape his loneliness. What could be more beautiful?

The taxi stopped at the front entrance of his building. He let go of her fingers, took out his wallet, paid. Had it been up to her they would have taken the bus, so she let him pay.

The third night. Three nights in five days can’t be put down to mistake, whim or aberration. They climbed the stairs to his inhospitable little den for this, their third night. They undressed, their bodies joined. They went to sleep. Morning came again. Their bodies joined again. But something was wrong. Something was wrong the whole time.

He kept his blinds closed round the clock; except for a broken slat where the light shone in you could not tell whether it was night or day, clear or overcast.

The light coming through the gap showed that it was now morning. He touched her in the right ways. He knew how you show that you want to be present, but he was absent, and tense and evasive with it, afraid that by talking they would find a vein from which difficulties would come gushing forth.

He was soon dressed and ready to go, before she was, even though they were in his flat. It looked as though he wanted to get out so he could breathe, as if he were escaping to an oxygen cylinder.

‘There’s bread and cheese,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you going to have anything?’

‘I’ve got to get down to the studio and work. I think there’s coffee as well. I did some shopping.’

‘Who for?’

‘You said breakfast was important to you.’

She kissed his closed lips and he went. So he had been out to buy breakfast for her after Wednesday morning’s foray to 7-Eleven, that is, he had planned to bring her here again. In that case, why was he behaving so strangely?

The sense of desolation in a flat that your lover has just left is the most complete sense of desolation that exists. It hit her now.

It’s not worth it, she felt.

It’s always worth it, she thought.

Worth it or not, I can’t give it up, she thought and felt.

She sat down to eat in his untouched kitchen. Piles of newspapers were stacked along the lower parts of the walls, several years’ worth of the
Dagens Nyheter
and
Svenska Dagbladet
review sections. He was doubtless saving them because there was an essay or opinion piece he had not managed to read at the time but imagined he would get round to later.