Wilful Disregard (8 page)

In that respect he’s an optimist in the midst of all his pessimism, she thought. Optimist in the same sense as utopians are, and Marxist-inspired pessimists. One day he would find the strength to do what was beyond him now. He put things off and dreamt of the state in which everything would be different. She did not, and she seldom put things off. Paradise was a logical nullity because life was friction and friction could only disappear at death. Life was composed merely of an endless series of small nows in which one lacked the energy to do what one wanted to do. There was no later, because later, too, would prove to be a now that was also deficient in energy. She believed in the paradise of two people meeting. Having experienced it, she knew it not to be a utopia. As an anti-utopian she did not believe she would find the energy to read articles she could not be bothered with now, and whatever society and individual human beings were incapable of now, they would remain incapable of later.

She looked at his piles of newspapers, so full of hope, and felt jealous of them. He hoarded yellowing old newspapers but he let her go to waste. The world was more important. She felt downcast, sitting there in his white, dead kitchen, and lines from Sonja Åkesson’s poem
Autobiography
came into her mind:

‘I seek a healthy soul in a healthy body. I have saved at least a hundred copies of
Dagens Nyheter
and really do intend to follow the debate one day. I see another war unroll across the black-and-white pages. I ran out into the early dusk and wanted to put my hand through the sky, but hurried back home so as not to burn the potatoes.’

She ate some of the bread and cheese he had bought for her, at least perhaps it was for her he had bought it, and drank a large cup of black coffee that she brewed in his coffee maker. That, too, appeared unused.

She thought of his weaknesses as an artist. The work he created was received as great visual poetry, but while some of it was interesting and original, it suffered from the same shortcomings as its creator. He dared not enter into his own pain and hence not into the pain of others, either. He did not know what pain was. He observed it from outside but did not feel it, and therefore did not reach as deeply in his portrayals of human beings as his thirst for greatness demanded. Those involuntary lies and that teetering on the edge of humanity kept him from what he was seeking. Whenever it started to get painful, he turned away, both in his self-absorption and in his observation of the world around him. From fear of what he might find, he dared not seek inside himself to understand what was in other people. He did not want to understand what was in other people, for they might harbour aggressions and reproaches directed at him. Thus he preferred not to face existence and see it for what it was, for all he claimed to do so. He observed people from outside, in a behaviourist light, never a phenomenological one. He wanted to accuse, not understand. This led to art with limitations. But no one was as good at making a virtue of their limitations as he was, hiding the weaknesses and making it look virtuosic. That was his great talent, the one with which he deceived the world. That was where his artistic strength lay.

With a vindictiveness that took her by surprise, her opinions of his insignificance came tumbling out. She came to the view that it was magnanimous of her to love him in spite of these deficiencies and that he ought to be grateful.

When she had finished eating and washed up, she put a note in the fridge with one of the commonest declarations of love that language has to offer. Subject, predicate, object.

The note had an unmistakable element of persuasion about it. It was an appeal and a shackle. As she closed the fridge door she saw a box of natural cold remedy lying on the worktop, and another handwritten note: ‘Take these and you’ll soon feel better!!! Love, Eva-Stina’.

The three exclamation marks indicated either a poor sense of style or an overwhelming urge to be heard. She remembered he had had a cold just after the Christmas holidays. They had met and gone out for a meal even though he was coughing and snuffling.

Eva-Stina was the young woman who worked for him, the one who had given her a sideways look the previous autumn. You didn’t write a note like that unless you really liked someone, you just wouldn’t phrase it that way. A note was always significant, not primarily for what it said, but for the act, the writing of the note. And that applied equally to the note she had just left on the top shelf of the refrigerator, even if that was more explicit. It did not only say, ‘I love you.’ If you factored in the circumstances, the background, her personality, the context and subtext, it said something more like: ‘I love you with all my soul, I’m nice to you all the time, I want only good things for us, so why do you assert the right to behave the way you do?’

Putting together the natural remedy and the thoughtful line of writing, the sideways looks that Eva-Stina had given her and the memory of Hugo a few weeks ago, uncharacteristically scratching his head and saying, ‘That girl with the double name I can never remember,’ Ester divined that this was not innocent. This note was more than a note. Eva-Stina lurked there in the offing, biding her time, with constant access to him because they worked together. Or were they already in a relationship? Was that why he had been so odd over the past few days?

It was impossible. In that case he wouldn’t have wanted her round at his place last night or the night before and he ought not to have suggested breakfast down on the corner on Wednesday.

She collected her things and herself, and left his flat. She brooded as she walked to the bus stop. After all, some people were prepared to organize their love lives that way, or rather their sex lives, having several partners simultaneously without letting on. Strangely enough they were the same people who were surprised and irritated by how much bother it was to juggle times, lies, assignations and other people’s actual, existing existences, and all that these involved in terms of demands, expectations and yearning. Necrophilia would be the best thing for people like that, she thought. The undemanding dead would be ideal for terribly busy, hardworking, highly sexed geniuses.

All that day she carried on thinking about his weaknesses as an artist. It eased the hurt a little.

Ever since he had suggested dinner at Ester’s so that a union of their flesh could occur, she had assumed that in doing so he had ended the supposed relationship with the supposed woman in the south of Sweden. Everything pointed to her having been more of a convenience than a love affair. Although travelling that far every other weekend was naturally a token of something. It was hardly something you undertook for the sake of convenience.

Ester thought it had taken him so long to come to her because he wanted to resolve everything first; that he had waited so things would all be lovely between them. Pure and lovely.

The day, which was a Friday, passed slowly. Anxiety weighed like a painful, nagging stone inside her. She told herself that people who have entered into the union of bodies and love each other have to have trust. There was a lot speaking in their favour. Now she just needed steel in her belly rather than this stone.

Since their relationship had become sexual they had not discussed essential topics even once, but there would be time for that, too. Anything important took time. There was a time for everything. Everything was fine. It had all gone better than she could have dreamt of, that Saturday in October, and the outcome she had craved so madly in November and December had materialized. She had everything she had fantasized about. It was unbelievable. Everything looked bright. It was a day filled with light. And yet another day on which she was incapable of writing. What little she did get down came out as dead phrases, spreading the smell of corpses across the text.

Friday limped on. The most common question since the invention of the telephone could very well be: Why doesn’t he ring? She lay down on the bed and read Mayakovsky’s poem ‘A Cloud in Trousers’, because he had claimed it was important. The title was fantastic; the poem had its good points but much of it left her unmoved. She was by turns furious with him and filled with enormous tenderness and love for everything he had ever touched or been touched by (with certain obvious exceptions).

She had made up her mind not to ring him. He was hard at work; she must show him respect and demonstrate that she was a self-sufficient, independent, autonomous grown-up perfectly able to cope without constant contact. Admittedly she thought it was strange that one would not want perpetual contact with the person with whom one had just embarked on a loving relationship, but she had to be flexible.

She changed books and read some of
Hitler’s Table Talk
, which he had also recommended. He had wanted to study the book in order to comprehend how things could go the way they did and to learn to recognize the signs in time. Everywhere in the contemporary world he saw signs that Nazism and fascism were continually latent in those societies ruled by parliamentary pseudo-democracy. He saw this particularly clearly when he had been talking to Dragan a lot.

Ester read. She was absolutely not going to call him today. She called. He didn’t answer. Eight o’clock came. She wondered what could explain his not wanting to be with her on their first Friday evening together. She didn’t understand. But one can’t push things. One must never push things. Just be considerate and accommodating yet avoid becoming stifling. There are natural explanations for everything, she thought. He was in a concentrated working phase. He felt secure with her and did not need to keep telling her what he was doing, or making contact, because they were in continuous spiritual contact anyway. They knew where they were with each other.

What she must definitely not do now was to expose herself to the anguish of sending a text message that would go unanswered. The anguish generated by the non-appearance of an answer was something the creators of texts and emails could not have anticipated. Or perhaps they lacked that kind of empathy? Your fingers burned after you had texted and experienced the relief inherent in sending something off, which persisted for some minutes afterwards, while some hope of an answer still remained. She picked up her mobile more than once and began tapping in a message, but deleted it every time and put the phone down.

When she woke up it was Saturday. She could not work that day either. For her, writing was never escape, it was resistance, and resistance is nothing to escape to. She had to occupy herself with something while waiting for her life to start. She looked at the phone. Perhaps she had it on silent by mistake? No. No one had called, and no text message had arrived unnoticed. She rang herself from her landline to check her mobile was working. Sent herself a text. Everything worked as it should.

She ventured out into the city. It was cold outside. It was around midday, in fact getting on for one. She wandered about, had a Turkish burger in the indoor food market in Hötorgshallen and strolled aimlessly through a few clothes shops, feeling the fabrics between finger and thumb. If he would only get in touch and tell her what was going on, that was all she wanted. He had bought breakfast for her some time between Wednesday morning and Thursday evening. That must mean that he etc. She went down Kungsgatan, across Stureplan and on down Birger Jarlsgatan. In Rönnells’ second-hand bookshop she saw a book she wanted to give him, but decided to postpone all such purchases until the following week. She did not know whether he wanted any more books from her or whether they would even be seeing each other again. She didn’t understand. The worst part of all was not understanding this thing she was in the midst of, this thing that had her in its clutches. There is no pain like the pain of not understanding.

It was three o’clock and he had not called. She had coffee in a cafe and an extra-large pastry with it, on account of the situation. There was a book in front of her that she was trying to read. It was four o’clock. She went to the cinema to see a film about the CIA, one of those films she never really managed to keep up with but could not work out what she was missing either. As the film was showing she thought how relieved she would be if he rang at that precise moment. All the knots in her body would suddenly loosen as if they had never existed and she would become human again. Not even he could work non-stop. But perhaps this really was an extremely intensive phase.

She did not understand this CIA film, either. The plots were made for the people who wrote them and not for the audience, she thought. They had spent so long writing their scripts that all the events seemed self-evident to them. They wrote the work backwards whereas the viewers saw it forwards.

Something came into her mind, which she then formulated in the minutes that followed.

The physicists’ problem:

That we don’t remember things that have not yet happened.

The philosophers’ problem:

That we remember something merely because it has happened.

The psychologists’ problem:

That we remember what suits us.

The politicians’ problem:

That people have a memory.

The medics’ problem:

That memory fails us.

The unhappy lovers’ problem:

That the memory of what has happened alters us.

She looked around the auditorium. The audience was sparse but those who were there looked attentive. Perhaps they were the sort who did not spend their time suffering and being tormented, the sort who had a life both now and when the film was over.

All at once she had a very definite premonition and could see in her mind’s eye that she and Hugo would meet that evening, eat, drink, laugh, make love. He would ring her any moment now, bellow cheerily and this nightmare would be over.

‘What are you doing this evening? Are you hungry?’ he would shout, and she would not reveal with a single sound how she had been feeling – never reproach – but simply say:

‘Yes! I’m hungry! What time?’

Within an hour or so they would be sitting in a restaurant and with sparkling eyes he would reach out his hand and touch her cheek. She had been in agonies before, believing it was all over, just before he got in touch. The important thing was to hold on, not hang up.