My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (51 page)

All the way through snowy glistening Stockholm she screamed. Only when we were through the door, at home and she was lying undressed on the bed with Linda did she stop.

We were both drenched in sweat.

‘That was a bit of an ordeal!’ Linda said as she got up from Vanja, asleep on the bed.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s some life in her anyway.’

Later that day I heard Linda telling her mother about the medical check-up. Not a word about all the screaming or the panic we had felt, no, what she told her was that Vanja smiled when she was on the table being examined. How happy and proud Linda was! Vanja had smiled, she was in perfect health, and the low sunlight outside, seemingly elevated by the snow-covered surfaces, made everything in the room soft and shiny, even Vanja, as she lay naked on the blanket kicking her legs.

What had happened afterwards was passed over in silence.

Now, waiting in the wind for the ferry, close to a year later, the whole scene appeared bizarre. How was it possible to be so ignorant? But that was how it had been, I could still remember how I felt inside then, how fragile everything had been, also the happiness that was radiated everywhere. Nothing in my life had prepared me for having a baby, I had barely seen one before, and the same was true for Linda, she had not had a single baby near her during her adult life. Everything was new, everything had to be learned on the hoof, also the mistakes that were bound to be made. Quite soon I began to regard various elements of childcare as challenges, as though I were participating in a kind of competition the point of which was to tackle as much as possible at once, and I had continued doing this when Vanja became my responsibility during the day, until there were no new elements left, the little field was conquered, and all that remained was routine.

The engine on the ferry was thrown into reverse as it slowly glided the last metres towards the quay. The ticket collector opened the gate and we, apparently the only passengers, pushed the buggy on board. Bubbles of grey-green water rose to the surface around the propellers. Linda took her wallet from the inside pocket of her blue jacket and paid. I held the railing and looked back towards the town. The white projection which was the Royal Dramatic Theatre, the ridge of hills that separated Birger Jarlsgatan from Sveavägen, where our flat was. The vast mass of building that filled almost all the space in the countryside. How a different perspective, which knew nothing of the purpose of houses and roads, but which considered them as forms and mass, the way pigeons must see the town they fly over and land on, saw the town, how this view in one fell swoop made everything alien. An enormous labyrinth of passages and cavities, some under an open sky, others enclosed, others again under the ground, in narrow tunnels through which trains raced like larvae.

Well over a million people lived their lives there.

‘Mummy said she could look after Vanja on Mondays if you wanted. Then you’d have the day to yourself.’

‘I’d like that of course,’ I said.

‘No of course about it,’ she said.

Mentally, I rolled my eyes.

‘But then we can sleep there,’ she went on. ‘And then come back together early in the morning. If you want, that is. And mummy can bring Vanja in the afternoon.’

‘Sounds like a good plan,’ I said.

When the ferry moored on the other side we walked up the street beside the fair, which in the summer months was always full of people, queuing in front of the ticket windows or hot dog stands, eating in one of the fast food restaurants across the way or just walking. The tarmac was littered with tickets and brochures, ice cream wrappers and hot dog paper, serviettes and drinking straws, Coke cups and juice cartons and everything else people enjoying their leisure tended to drop. Now the street ahead was quiet, empty and clean. Not a soul to be seen anywhere, not in the restaurants on one side, nor in the fair on the other. On a little hill at the other end was Circus, the concert venue. I had been to the restaurant there once with Anders, we had been on the lookout for somewhere showing the Premier League. They had the match we wanted to see on the TV at the back. There was only one other person inside. The light was dim, the walls dark, yet he was wearing sunglasses. It was Tommy Körberg. All the newspapers had his face plastered over the front pages that day, he had been caught drink-driving, you could hardly walk a metre in Stockholm without seeing his face. Now he was hiding in here. The flagrant stares must have been as unpleasant for him as the carefully averted eyes, he left a short time after we entered, even though neither of us had glanced in his direction once.

Compared with what he appeared to be going through, my worst attacks of post-alcoholic angst paled into insignificance.

My mobile rang in my pocket. I took it and looked at the display. Yngve.

‘Hi?’ I said.

‘Hi,’ he answered. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine. How about you?’

‘Yep, fine.’

‘Good. Yngve, we’re about to go into a café. Can I ring you later? This afternoon some time? Or was there something in particular?’

‘No, nothing. We can talk later.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

I put the mobile back in my pocket.

‘That was Yngve,’ I said.

‘Is he all right?’ Linda asked.

I shrugged.

‘I don’t know. But I’ll call him afterwards.’

Two weeks after he turned forty Yngve left Kari and moved into a house on his own. It had all happened very suddenly. Only when he had been here last time had he told me about his plans. Yngve seldom talked about personal matters, he kept almost everything to himself – unless I asked him direct questions, that is. But that didn’t always happen. Besides, I didn’t need him to confide in me to know that he had been living a life he didn’t want. So when he told me it was over, I was happy on his behalf. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help thinking about dad, who had left my mother just a few weeks before he turned forty. The age coincidence, which in this case was down to a week, was neither a family nor a genetic matter and the midlife crisis was not a myth: it had begun to hit people around me, and it hit them hard. Some went almost crazy in their despair. For what? For more life. At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become
life
itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realised it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble.

Yngve had done it because he wanted a better life. Dad did it because he wanted a radically different one. That was why I wasn’t worried about Yngve, and actually never had been, he would always manage.

Vanja had fallen asleep in the buggy. Linda stopped, laid her on her back and glanced at the board on the pavement outside Blå Porten showing the meal of the day.

‘In fact, I am hungry,’ she said. ‘How about you?’

‘We could have some lunch,’ I said. ‘The lamb meatballs are good.’

It was a nice place. There was an open area in the middle, full of plants with a fountain, where you could sit in the summer. In the winter the centrepiece was a long corridor with glass walls. The only downside was the clientele, which for the most part consisted of cultured women in their fifties and sixties.

I held the door open for Linda, who pushed the buggy in, then grabbed the bar between the wheels and lifted it down the three steps. The room was just over half full. We chose the table furthest away in case Vanja woke up, and went to order. Cora was sitting at the window table at the back. She got up with a smile when she saw us.

‘Hi!’ she said. ‘How good to see you both!’

She hugged first Linda, then me.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘How are things?’

‘Good,’ Linda said. ‘How about you?’

‘Good. I’m here with my mother, as you can see.’

I nodded to her mother, whom I had met once, at one of Cora’s parties. She nodded back.

‘Are you here alone?’ Cora asked.

‘No, Vanja’s over there,’ Linda answered.

‘Oh yes. Are you going to be here for a while?’

‘Ye-es, I think so . . .’ Linda said.

‘I’ll come over afterwards,’ Cora said. ‘Then I can have a peep at your daughter. Is that all right?’

‘Of course,’ Linda said, and went to the end of the counter, where we took our turn in the queue.

Cora was the first of Linda’s friends I had met. She loved Norway and all things Norwegian, had lived there for some years and was prone to speaking Norwegian when she was drunk. She was the only Swede I had met who understood that there were big differences between our two countries, and she understood in the only way it could be understood, physically. The way people bump into each other in the street, in shops and on public transport. The way people in Norway always chat, in kiosks, queues and taxis. Her eyes had widened in surprise when she read Norwegian newspapers and saw the tone of debates. They really give each other a tongue-lashing! she said with enthusiasm. They give it everything they’ve got! They’re not afraid of anything! Not only have they got every opinion under the sun and the courage to say things no Swede would ever say, they also do it while going at each other hammer and tongs. Oh, how liberating that is! Her reaction made it easier to get to know her than Linda’s other friends, who were sociable in quite a different, formal and more polished way, not to mention the office collective where she had got me in. They were kind and friendly, often invited me to lunch, and just as often I declined, apart from a couple of occasions when I sat silently listening to their conversations. On one of the occasions they were discussing the imminent invasion of Iraq and the neighbouring eternal conflict between Israel and Palestine. Discussing is perhaps not the right word; it was more like small talk about the food or the weather. The following day I met Cora, and she told me her friend had resigned her post at the collective in a fury. Apparently there had been a heated exchange of opinions about the relationship between Israel and Palestine, she had lost her temper and resigned her post on the spot. And sure enough, her place had been cleared the next day. But I had been present! And I hadn’t noticed anything! No aggression, no irritability, nothing. Only their friendly chatty voices and their elbows sticking out like chicken wings as they plied their knives and forks. This was Sweden, these were the Swedes.

But Cora also got annoyed that day. I told her that Geir had gone to Iraq two weeks before to write a book about the war. She said he was a conceited egotistical idiot. She wasn’t a political person, so I was surprised by her violent reaction. In fact, there were tears in her eyes as she cursed him. Was her empathy that strong?

Her father had gone to the war in the Congo in the 1960s, she said then. He had worked as a war correspondent. It had destroyed him. Not that he had been injured or anything like that, nor that the experiences had shaken him in such a way that he bore mental scars; more the opposite, he wanted to go back, he wanted to have more of the life he had lived there, close to death, a need nothing in Sweden could fulfil. She told us a strange story about how he had ridden a motorbike at a circus afterwards,
the motorbike of death
she called it, and of course he had started drinking. He was destructive and had died by his own hand when Cora was young. The tears in her eyes were for him, she was grieving for him.

Fortunate then that she had such a strong, authoritative and strict mother?

Well, not necessarily . . . My impression was that she viewed Cora’s life with some disapproval, and Cora took that more to heart than she should. Her mother was an accountant, and it was clear that Cora’s wanderings in a vaguely cultural landscape did not quite correspond to her expectations of what constituted a suitable life for her daughter. Cora had earned her corn as a journalist on a variety of women’s magazines, although that didn’t leave much of a mark on her self-image, and she wrote poems, she was a poet. She had been to Biskops-Arnö, the writing school where Linda had also been, and she wrote good poetry from what I could judge; I heard her do a reading once and was surprised. Her poems were neither language poetry, which most young Swedish poets went in for, nor delicate or sensitive, like those of the others, but something else, unrestrained and exploratory in a non-personal way, written in expansive language it was difficult to associate with her. She remained, however, unpublished. Swedish publishers were infinitely more budget-conscious than their Norwegian counterparts and much more careful, so if you didn’t align yourself perfectly with the literary surroundings you didn’t have an earthly. If she held her nerve and worked hard she would succeed in the end because she had talent, but when you looked at her, endurance was not the first quality to leap up at you. She was given to self-pity, spoke in a low voice, often about depressing matters, although she could also turn on a five-
øre
piece and be lively and interesting. When she drank she could take centre stage and make a scene, the only one of Linda’s friends who would. Perhaps that was why I found her so congenial?

Long hair hung down on either side of her face. The eyes behind the small glasses had a kind of dog-like melancholy about them. Whenever she drank, and occasionally when sober as well, she expressed her great admiration for and feelings of identity with Linda. Linda never really knew quite how to react.

I gently stroked Linda’s back. The table we were standing beside was covered with cakes of all shapes and sizes. Dark brown chocolate, light yellow custard cream, greenish marzipan, pink and white meringue kisses. A little flag with the name on every dish.

‘What would you like?’ I asked.

‘I don’t really know . . . Chicken salad maybe. And you?’

‘Lamb meatballs. I know what I’m getting then. But I can order yours. You go and sit down.’

She did. I ordered, paid, poured water into two glasses, cut some slices from the loaves at the end of the enormous cake table, took some cutlery, grabbed a couple of small packets of butter and some serviettes, put everything on a tray and stood beside the counter to wait for the food to be brought from the kitchen, the top half of which I could see over the swing door. In the atrium-style courtyard, tables and chairs stood unoccupied between all the green plants, which the grey concrete floor and the grey sky set off to perfection. The combination of these particular colours, grey and green, drew your eye. No artist would have known how to exploit them better than Braque. I remembered the prints I had seen in Barcelona when I was there with Tonje, of some boats on a beach under an immense sky, their almost shocking beauty. They had cost a few thousand kroner, too much, I had thought. When I reconsidered, it was too late: the next day, our last in Barcelona, a Saturday, I stood vainly pulling at the gallery door.