by Philip Teir
‘Don’t ask me what I want. What do you want? Do you want to move in with her?’
Part of Katriina felt like laughing, and she almost did – but she realised that if she laughed, that would be the totally wrong response, considering Ebba.
Max touched her cheek and gave her a hug, which was what he always did when she was sad about something. She pressed her face closer to his chest, let his hands stroke her hair, let him kiss her on the head. She reached up to caress his beard.
Max reacted instinctively by hugging her harder, running his hand over her hair, and then down her back to her arse. He was tired, worn out, but paradoxically enough – as she now noticed – not too tired to get turned on. Maybe it was the only logical way of handling this situation, the only emotion that wasn’t split in two and could still be understood. She responded to his caresses by tipping her head back to look up at him. She closed her eyes, leaned closer and kissed him. Then she took his hand and led him to the bed.
His hands were moving all over her body. Now he shifted his weight and began kissing her neck, then her breasts and she felt his hands trying to get under her dress. Somewhere deep inside her a titillating sensation stirred. She moved higher up on the bed and he followed, then slipped down and began pulling off her clothes.
Several seconds, or maybe several minutes later, they were lying on the bed, wrapped in each other’s arms.
She felt his tongue, so soft. She moaned faintly, and he went on. Everything ran out of her, all her fear, all her anger. She felt so safe in this situation. This was her life. And yet it seemed new, as if something had changed in Max’s behaviour. Maybe it was the tension, the not knowing, so that in a way she was sharing her bed with a stranger.
It was dark in the room, with Max’s body on top of hers, the familiar salty taste of his skin. When he entered her, it felt thrilling in a way it hadn’t done for years.
‘Oh, Max … what are you …’
In the midst of pure ecstasy she turned her head and opened her eyes.
Her reaction was so strong – and her scream so loud – that her knee rammed into Max’s head before he could pull off the covers. He looked at her, confused and alarmed.
‘What’s wrong? I’m sorry, I was just trying something new.’
Sitting on the bedside table right next to Katriina was one of the grandchildren’s hamsters, staring her right in the eye. On the floor next to the bed, Katriina’s knickers were moving about. They must have landed on the other hamster when she took them off, and now the little creature was trying in vain to get out.
twenty-seven
THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS HAPPENED so fast that the outcome was inevitable. When Max thought about it later, he realised that nothing could have been done to save Blixten.
Max jumped out of bed, planting his right foot on the floor. When he set down his left foot he felt something soft, something moving next to Katriina’s knickers. He heard a strange and awful – but also extremely brief – squeak from the floor. When he lifted his foot, he saw the squished and shocking result of what he’d done.
Katriina was still sitting on the bed, peering nervously at Skorpan, the other hamster on the bedside table who was staring back at her.
‘Have they been missing all week?’ she now asked.
Max leaned down to inspect the damage.
It was bad. Blixten lay on his back with his mouth open, and the tiny paws hung lifelessly at his sides.
Katriina got up and went into the bathroom to put on her dressing gown. Max picked up his clothes and got dressed. He lifted the crushed hamster off the floor and placed it on the bed. He didn’t have time for this right now, didn’t have time to deal with this sort of problem.
Edvard came into the room and sniffed at Blixten.
‘We need to catch the other one before it disappears again,’ said Max.
Katriina came out of the bathroom and went over to the bedside table. Skorpan was sniffing at the lamp, moving back and forth across the table. Katriina bent down and picked up the hamster in both hands. Then she went to Eva’s room and put it inside the cage.
Max went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Edvard followed.
‘Do you love her?’ Katriina had asked.
Max had never been the sort of person to take a stand. He’d never felt any desire to adopt a specific position regarding an issue simply for the sake of argument. This might be considered cowardly – a way of avoiding controversy – but he’d also seen so many people of his generation get locked into specific opinions that marked them for the rest of their lives.
Of course there were moments in everyone’s personal life when he or she was forced to heed what might be called an internal compass. Was it certain actions that shaped who a person became, or did people act in accordance with who they were from the very outset?
He thought about the trip back from Kristinestad. Elisabeth had phoned just after they’d got on to the motorway. Laura and Max had had to turn around and drive back to the hospital. Once they arrived, it was clear there was very little they could do. Elisabeth was crying as she sat in the waiting room, and she didn’t ask any questions when Max turned up with Laura. By then it was close to lunchtime, and they were both hungry. The snowstorm was still raging, and nobody knew how long they would need to stay in Kristinestad.
‘You drive home if you like. I can take the bus,’ Max told Laura.
‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll stay,’ she said.
Max didn’t really want her there, but he couldn’t very well force her to go home. He and Elisabeth went to their mother’s room and had a talk with her doctors.
‘Cerebral haemorrhage,’ said the female doctor in charge. ‘She’s old, and she’s had a blood clot before. This one was quite severe. If she manages to pull through, she’ll still be at risk for more strokes. She might do fine, but I don’t want to get your hopes up.’
Their mother looked peaceful as she lay in the hospital bed. Her face was only slightly distorted – something about her mouth, something about her features that was oddly unfamiliar. Elisabeth continued to weep. Max gave his sister a hug. They sat down, then got up to pace the room as they waited for the doctor to come back and tell them the results of the blood tests.
Max went out to speak to Laura again.
‘You can drive home if you want. Looks like I’m going to be here for a while.’
‘I don’t need to go home.’
‘But I’m sure you have better things to do.’
‘Not really.’
They found a café on the square where they could have lunch, and afterwards they got back into Laura’s car. She’d changed her mind and was going to drive home. That’s when it happened. Max leaned over to kiss her, and it all happened so fast. She willingly took off her trousers and knickers and let him come inside her. It was sex of the mechanical sort, sex as a way of warding off everything that was frightening – sex because the world around them, with all of its conventions, no longer existed. The only thing left was a great white roar. Sex that was cramped and awkward, sex in the midst of a snowstorm with Radio Vega playing in the car. When they’d finished, Laura put her clothes on again, and Max said ‘thank you’. Then she drove off, and he went back to the hospital.
As he sat next to his mother’s bed, he thought that maybe some sort of proviso allowed a person to be unfaithful under certain circumstances, for instance if a state of shock made the man in question not responsible for his actions. Ebba lay in bed, breathing quietly. As he looked at her, Max felt a darkness spreading through him, a feeling of loss. It was somehow incomprehensible that he should find himself in this situation right now, that he’d reached this point, a moment that he’d imagined many times over the course of the years, though it had always been something abstract and remote. It was true that Ebba had never lived nearby – visiting her required a drive of several hours – but she had been there the whole time, like an awareness in the back of his mind, a constant presence in hi
s life. And now he would be forced to carry all their shared memories alone, his memories of his mother and father, of his childhood, and one day they would cease to exist altogether. When that happened, what would be left of the life he’d lived?
He fell asleep on the bus ride home. Now, as he stood in the kitchen, he doubted that anything at all had happened with Laura. It felt like a memory that didn’t fit in.
‘Do you love her?’
When Katriina came into the kitchen, Max avoided looking her in the eye. It was like they were juggling several balls at once. He felt guilty, and yet he didn’t. He couldn’t muster any real regret about what he’d done. The situation had simply demanded it.
Right now Max was doing what came easiest to him. He was packing a bag with his tennis gear. It was still lousy weather outside, with the temperature around minus 20º Celsius. The icy wind bit at his cheeks, his whole body, as he ploughed his way through the world. He could have used a pair of skis.
He opened the doors to the tennis hall and breathed in the familiar smell of linoleum, sweat and sports drinks. It was Monday evening, and when he went into the locker room, he said hello to Jorma, who – from what Max understood – worked in a small theatre in Berghäll. He’d often heard Jorma talk about the difficult directors he worked with, about actors who drank and about scandals in the Finnish theatre world. Max didn’t know much about that world since he rarely went to see a play unless Katriina made him go. But he liked listening to people in different professions to his own; it gave him a new perspective.
Standing at another locker was Juha. Max knew he’d been diagnosed with cancer a year ago, but he’d regained his health and had now married a young woman from Belarus. It was common practice for everyone who came to the tennis hall to gossip about anyone who didn’t happen to be present. In that way, all the information circulated in an eternal loop, so that no one could ever be sure whether he might be the current subject of gossip.
Juha never talked much, but he was a hell of a tennis player. He had the unusual gift of being able to deliver a backhand shot that was nearly as perfect as his forehand. And his physique gave no clue that he could move so fast. He also had a powerful serve. Max could see why a young woman would be attracted to him; maybe his physical prowess was not limited to the tennis court.
A highly physical and aggressive game of tennis didn’t always mean that the player had an aggressive personality. On the contrary, many people seemed to reserve their aggression for the tennis court. But if an individual displayed a fierce, competitive streak when he played, it was likely that he was equally competitive in his personal life. An unscrupulous attitude could carry you a long way in a tennis game, but in Max’s experience, the best players had it in their blood. They played tennis as if they were performing a ballet, approaching every aspect of the game intuitively. Those kinds of people were often good at everything they did, as if they possessed a certain musicality. Max had seen it in some of the younger men with whom he occasionally played tennis, a sort of natural superiority that also managed to come across as generous.
When Max played, it was a matter of endurance. Of refusing to give up, even though the lactic acid in his legs made him want to lie down on the ground from pain and exhaustion. Of never missing a shot, but at the same time not taking any unnecessary steps. That was what had carried him through thousands of tennis games. Staying on the court in all situations, until his opponent finally gave up.
‘Do you love her?’
twenty-eight
RUSS STAYED THE NIGHT AT Eva’s flat. When he went back to his tent in the morning, she went with him.
‘Looks like there’s a lot to be done here,’ said Eva as she looked at all the Occupiers who had just got up and were starting to go about their daily routines, whatever they happened to be. Snow had covered Russ’s tent in the night, and he began shaking it off. She felt sorry for him, even though she realised he didn’t want her sympathy.
‘I’ll manage,’ he said, as if reading her mind.
He lifted the tent poles and kicked at the sandbags, which were piled high all around the tent. A man came over to Eva and asked her for change. She dug through her pockets and found a few coins to give him.
They ate breakfast together in the tent University. There were about a dozen people inside, discussing the ongoing battle with the City and the property owners. The City still wanted to remove the Occupiers, saying that they were interfering with traffic. Another claim was that the tents were responsible for an increase in crime in the area and for hurting local business.
‘The ironic thing is that we’re taking care of people the City hasn’t been able to help. That’s why it’s important we never leave this spot. And it doesn’t really require a lot of us. What we need are tents. The tents are our most important symbols, they show that the area is occupied. That this is a place where people live,’ said a woman wearing a knitted cap with earflaps and a windproof winter jacket. She was holding a cup of tea in her hands and looked as though she was in her early forties. Eva thought the woman seemed used to this kind of meeting, like a professional grassroots activist.
‘But what principles are we going to follow?’ asked a guy who Eva recognised from her previous visit. He was the one who had stopped by the tent when she was talking to Russ.
‘I know we’ve discussed this many times before, but we should have some sort of general rules. Should food for the homeless be given a higher priority than paying expenses? Should we really put all our energy into keeping the soup kitchen running? That’s not why we’re here. That’s not why this whole thing started. The question is whether there’s a more effective way to get out our message.’
Everybody had turned their attention to him. The woman with the cup of tea shrugged.
‘No manifesto.’
The others seemed to agree with her. They waved their hands about in a manner that Eva now knew was their way of expressing approval.
When she got home to Bethnal Green an hour later, without Russ, Eva found Malik waiting outside the door. He had his finger on the button to the intercom and was letting it ring nonstop. His head was pressed against the wall.
‘Hi, babe,’ he said, slurring his words.
‘Stop that. Don’t you know that if I don’t answer, I must not be home? What do you want?’ she said.
‘Just wanted to come over and see you. Can’t I drop by to see a friend?’
He was high, or drunk, or maybe just nervous. He scratched his neck and seemed to be having a hard time staying upright, even though his whole body was now leaning against the door.
‘Why are you here?’ asked Eva. ‘The last time you came over, you called me a cunt.’
‘I just need a place to sleep.’
‘Is that why you’ve been hanging out with Russ? Because you’re homeless? Why don’t you go home?’
Malik looked at her as if he didn’t understand the words, or as if she’d asked a question that was incredibly stupid and funny. It seemed weird to her that Malik – who had so much money – didn’t just get a hotel room if he couldn’t go home. On the other hand, and this was something she’d noticed during their affair, he was the kind of person who craved company. Despite all his talk about art history and ‘fucking Saatchi’ and bragging about his wild life, when it came right down to it, Malik didn’t seem to have any friends outside college. Was that why he acted like such a tyrant in class? Because he had no idea how to behave normally with other people?
Reluctantly Eva opened the door and let him in. She knew that Natalia wasn’t home; otherwise she never would have invited Malik in.
He headed right for the fridge and took out a beer, drinking half the bottle in one gulp. Then he sank on to a kitchen chair and stared at the table.
‘Eva, I need to tell you something. And you have to listen closely. There are maybe five – no, three – artists in my generation who really mean something, who have it in them, who have what it takes. I’m one of them. I could h
ave shown at the MOMA and sold out the whole fucking second floor. I could have lived in that fucking building in Lower Manhattan with that whole Julian Schnabel clan if I hadn’t been so fucked over by the establishment. One mistake. Just one! A guy makes a fucking little mistake and it’s all over.’
Eva was still standing in the hallway. She hadn’t even had time to unbutton her coat. She was just about to ask ‘What mistake?’ but he spoke first.
‘You know what it is?’ he asked. ‘You know what it takes?’
‘No,’ replied Eva. Slowly, she took off her coat and hung it on a hook as she tried to think how she could get Malik out of the flat.
‘It takes adaptation,’ he snarled, his eyes fixed on the table. ‘Simple Darwinism. You have to adapt! Remember that! And another thing. That fucking auction house … millionaires who get bored with stocks and reserves and shit and want to own some fucking unique object that will keep its value. Do you know what auction houses are, Eva?’
‘No.’
‘They’re funeral homes. The art dies. Why do you think artists want nothing to do with them?’
He got up, went into her room, and flung himself on to her bed. Eva wanted to throw him out. She’d never seen him in such a pathetic state.
He leaned over to look at her art books and picked up the thick volume on the Pre-Raphaelites, flicking his index finger through the pages. He licked his finger and leafed through more pages until the book suddenly fell out of his hands. It landed on the floor with a bang, which for some reason made him giggle uncontrollably.
‘All women are whores. Do you know that?’
Eva had never been so afraid of Malik before. Right now she was alone in the flat with him, and there was no one she could call to ask for help. She shouldn’t have let him in. She closed the door to the bedroom and left him lying on the bed. After a while, as she was sitting in the kitchen and thinking about phoning her mother, she heard a sound from the bedroom. Was he crying? Was the great Malik Martin crying?