Willful Disregard

by Lena Andersson

  “So workers can’t make ethical assessments for any other reason than their own profit?” said Ester. “Can’t think of anything but themselves and their interests? Can’t pay regard to the whole, or to the lives of others?”

  Hugo inserted a toothpick between two of his teeth and turned toward Eva-Stina to ask what she wanted for dessert. Sorbet, came the answer. Hugo wanted chocolate fondant. So did Ester but with such tension between them she could not have the same as him and had to settle for panna cotta.

  “Mayakovsky was in favor of the Soviet state,” said Hugo once they had ordered. “Read ‘My Soviet Passport.’ ‘Envy me — I happen to be a citizen of the Soviet Union.’ ”

  “Let’s hope he wouldn’t have written that if he’d known what we know.”

  Hugo Rask cast a longing look out into the winter night, where the falling snow could be clearly seen under the street lights. Big, round flakes. For a few seconds, Ester was seized by the feeling of having had the chance to resume a relationship with him but having thrown it away by coming across as overbearing, sharp-tongued and polemical.

  Now he’ll choose her instead of me, she thought. This was the moment I lost him and crushed the fragile shoot that had started to regrow. Taking us both out to dinner was a test, and here and now he realized definitively that he didn’t want me. His final doubts, which he wanted to examine one last time tonight, evaporated right here.

  Her face flushing, she said:

  “Well naturally, it all depends on one’s perspective.”

  How hideously unnecessary to get into a discussion of Stalin and the Taliban.

  She regretted doing it. She didn’t regret doing it.

  She still couldn’t live with someone who thought in catchphrases and kept to the sleek outer layer of activism so as never to have to descend to the labyrinth of investigation.

  The waitress was approaching with more food, and his smile broke through like fire from green timber. They quickly ate their desserts and then he produced his wallet like some rich businessman in a cartoon and paid for all three of them.

  “You needn’t,” said Ester.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  He closed his wallet with a bang so the weight of responsibility was clearly audible and got to his feet to tower over his two followers. They went up Nybrogatan, three abreast, crossed the square to Sibyllegatan and continued toward Kommendörsgatan. The snow fell.

  The two colleagues were returning to their workplace while Ester would walk on to her bus stop. They stopped outside to say good-bye.

  “Thank you for the book and the dinner,” said Ester.

  “Hope you find it useful.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  He raised his arm in a wave.

  “Best of luck, then,” he said.

  She saw the two of them enter his door. Then she walked along the sidewalk as she had done so many times before. How many sidewalks must a person walk down, before she gives up?

  “Best of luck, then,” she thought, a phrase with all the qualities of a murder weapon. People are created to torment one another. She had underlined that sentence when she read The Idiot not long before.

  She halted in midstep and stood still. She saw all at once with absolute clarity what she must do. And she must do it now. Far too much remained unresolved. This evening was the chance to talk it through. Something had to happen this evening. She went back to the building. He owed her a proper conversation.

  The lights were still on in the studio. Ester could wait. She was a little elated by the thought that they could finally talk to each other about everything there’d been and why it had turned out the way it did, and by the prospect of what could happen then, where a frank conversation might lead in the middle of the night and with alcohol in their bodies.

  She walked round the block. When she got back they would undoubtedly have finished in there. When she got back the lights would be off and the place in darkness.

  When she got back a window had been opened wide and she could hear a game of table tennis in progress.

  They were laughing to each other in that polite way you do when you want to like somebody but there’s a vacuum in between, when you feel goodwill but no sense of affinity, when you want to show that you’re having fun together but are not on your own ground and aren’t finding the chosen activity particularly edifying. You take part and show pleasure for the other person’s sake. When everything’s a bit artificial. That was the way they were laughing.

  She had laughed like that herself sometimes. But never with him. With him she had never played or pretended or felt uncomfortable. Once he told her he had never shared conversations with anyone as he had with her. Talking was her aphrodisiac, the only one she knew and had mastered. Through conversation she could knock down anyone who shared her appetite for verbal sparring and the exchange of ideas. The conversations between her and Hugo had been erotically charged, never-ending and infinitely rewarding — but apparently not indispensable. People could clearly live without interesting conversations. Their primary need was not verbal-erotic intercourse but absence of inconvenience. That always took priority over the desire for substance and meaning. They bought this freedom from bother at the price of mild ennui.

  Ester Nilsson stood on the sidewalk in Kommendörsgatan with frozen feet and thought that unusually lively activities seemed to be laid on for those who worked there. She waited another hour in her coat of hopelessly inadequate thickness. Then the lights finally went out and the premises were dark except for a faint gleam from a back room. She waited another five minutes. Then she went through the entrance, across the courtyard and up the stairs to his flat.

  The smell of the stairwell was as she remembered it, old dust and cold stone. The smell would have been painful, as recollections are, but her sense of expectation was stronger. The door to his flat stood ajar. She knocked.

  “Yes?” came his voice, friendly and expectant.

  She took a step into the hall. How she had longed for this, to talk everything over with him properly, undisturbed, in his home, when neither of them was on their way somewhere else.

  She heard him coming to meet her, walking from the kitchen, rounding the corner. Now she saw him, his shining, full-moon face that generally also bore a look of slight doubt and introspection.

  Ester started to say something. She had practiced it while she was stamping her feet out in the street. It ran: I thought we could have a little talk now, seeing how nice it was this evening. We’ve never had the chance to talk properly about what happened and where we actually stand and what we’re going to do with the beautiful thing we built between us.

  That was what she had worked out that she would say.

  This perpetual talk that the jilted party feels obliged to engage in. This perpetual talk. The jilter never feels the need to talk.

  She, if anyone, should have known that the one walking away feels no pain; the one walking away does not need to talk because they have nothing to talk about. The one leaving is through with it. It’s the one left behind who needs to talk for an eternity. And all that this talk boils down to is repeated attempts to tell the other person he’s made a mistake. That if only he realized the true nature of things he would not make the choice he has, but would love her. The talk is nothing to do with gaining clarity, as the talker claims, and everything to do with convincing and inducing.

  There’s no point talking. Honest answers are never forthcoming, to show consideration. One betrays and is betrayed and there’s nothing to talk about because there are no obligations when the will is not to hand. What is done out of compassion is worth little if the other party hopes it is done out of love.

  Ester did not have time to say what she had planned, but she made a start:

  “I thought we could …”

  Then she registered the expression on his face. It was the expression of someone who has just swallowed a snake.

  Hugo was expecting someone. But not her. Th
e words that came out of his mouth were tactless with panic and dismay, or whatever it was he was now feeling.

  “Someone else … is coming … Eva-Stina’s … coming.”

  Ester slammed the door and ran down the stairs, all but sliding down the banisters to avoid a meeting in the stairwell with the second woman, who was the first. She must still be in the studio, seeing to something. Perhaps she was putting the final touch of paint to a set piece.

  Definitive answers are easier to deal with than diffuse ones. This is to do with Hope and its nature. Hope is a parasite on the human body, which lives in full-scale symbiosis with the human heart. It is not enough to put it in a straitjacket and lock it up in dark corners. Starvation rations do not help either; a parasite cannot be put on a diet of bread and water. The supply of nourishment must be completely cut off. If Hope can find oxygen, it will. There can be oxygen in a poorly directed adjective, a rash adverb, a compensatory sympathetic gesture, a bodily movement, a smile, a gleam in an eye. The hopeful party will choose to remain oblivious to the fact that empathy is a mechanical force. The indifferent party automatically shows care, for self-protection and to shield the person in distress.

  Hope has to be starved to death if it is not to beguile and bedazzle its host. Hope can only be killed by the brutality of clarity. Hope is cruel because it binds and entraps.

  When the parasite Hope is taken from its carrier the Host, the carrier either dies or is set free.

  Hope and its symbiosis, it must be said, do not believe in a change in the innermost will of the beloved. The hope that inhabits the human heart believes that this will is already present; that the beloved really — actually — wants what he pretends not to want, or does not want what he pretends to want, but has been misled by the evil world around him into wanting; in short, that things are not as they seem. That the tiny glimpse of something else is the truth.

  That is what Hope is.

  When Ester got home that night she went through her normal pre-bedtime routine. It was a year since Hugo had come round for dinner. They had eaten a reddish dish and he had gone to the window once an hour to smoke. In a week’s time she would have endured a year of suffering. It would intensify and become more concentrated for a few days now, but it was purer and less unclear.

  There was nothing left to understand.

  LENA ANDERSSON is a columnist for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest morning paper. Considered one of the country’s sharpest contemporary analysts, she writes about politics, society, culture, religion, and other topics. Willful Disregard, her English-language debut, is her fifth novel and winner of the 2013 August Prize, Sweden’s highest literary honor.

  SARAH DEATH is a translator, literary scholar, and editor of the UK-based journal Swedish Book Review. Her translations from the Swedish include Ellen Mattson’s Snow, for which she won the Bernard Shaw Translation Prize. She lives and works in Kent, England.