Prime Minister Tage Erlander (in office 1946–1969) famously described a modernist social structure, also known as the welfare state, as an addiction. That was not what he said, but that was the gist of what he said when he spoke of the dissatisfaction of rising expectations, a psychological law of nature. You got what you had been lacking and were grateful for a brief moment. But you soon adjusted to it, considered it the norm and started to view it as a minimum standard. Your expectations grew and it took more and more to produce the feeling of satisfaction. Running water, nutritious food, a car and more spacious housing were not enough. Bigger, more sweeping reforms were needed to make you feel as good as you had before. The dose had to be higher and be administered more frequently.
Ester was not happy despite the union of their flesh. She did not think he had made his intentions clear. She was anxious about what would happen next.
After breakfast on that first morning of their new phase she went out and ran fifteen kilometres. She was training for the Stockholm marathon and did one long-distance run every week. She did this on Sundays. As an amateur on the periphery of a community she did the same as everybody else, and everything the advice columns urged her to. Marathon runners did one long run a week, generally on Sundays because most of them were at work during the week. She could do her own training run any day she liked but she, too, chose Sundays. Later in the spring she intended to increase the distance to twenty kilometres, heeding the advice, but fifteen was enough for now. Ambition levels had to be balanced against the risk of injury.
When she got home she hurtled to the telephone without even waiting to take her shoes off. No messages. He had neither called nor sent a text. For her suffering not to become acute, the liquid level of love needed constant topping-up.
Her emotional life was now subject to the dissatisfaction of rising expectations. The only advantage of this is that after a time, the disappointment can turn into another law of nature, namely the delight that sinking expectations take in the tiniest positive detail.
But the poison was in him, too. He rang that afternoon. The call came from a landline number she did not recognize. He had lost his mobile phone, he told her, or rather, left it on the back seat on his way home that morning. The taxi firm had promised to return it to him as soon as they had a driver coming that way. He was so eager to be in touch, she thought, the exhilaration fizzing in her breast, that he had taken the trouble to look up her number so he could ring her that very same day, on no particular pretext. He sounded uncomfortable and that particularly pleased her. Could it be the case, she thought, that his absent-mindedness in mislaying his phone was the result of feeling punch-drunk?
They told each other what a wonderful night it had been. She told him about her training run and how easy it had been, because you weigh so little when you are happy.
It had not been easy at all, but it would have been if she had known he was going to call.
He said he had tried to bury himself in the study of cave paintings in modern-day France, a subject that had interested him for some time, but he had not been able to concentrate at all.
‘I can’t concentrate either,’ she said. ‘Haven’t got a thing done today.’
He gave a doubtful laugh, said he was tired and that perhaps they ought to sleep tonight, not having done much sleeping the previous night, that is, sleep apart.
‘Perhaps that would be best,’ she said.
This put her in a quandary. She could not decide whether he had said they should sleep apart in order for her to contradict him, or because he actually wanted to. In short, she didn’t know if she should insist or if that would seem nagging and clingy. She remained passive to be on the safe side, so as not to be a bother or to let her reproachfulness show.
He was working day, evening and night on his next piece of video art. But when they spoke on Sunday they had agreed, or had some sort of implicit understanding, that they would meet on Tuesday. They had not set a time, however. He perceived time differently from her. She was accustomed to exact times and mutually agreed meetings, appointments that one kept.
From five o’clock on Tuesday she sat at home, waiting for a signal that he was ready. She thought they would start by going out to dinner and then go up to his place, sit on the sofa and then go to bed.
She waited, not knowing what time he had anticipated they would meet, or even whether they definitely would.
He was working. He was always hard at it, working.
He rang at around midnight. He was finished. And ready. She had cleaned her teeth, had a shower, put on clean clothes and had time to swear, and curse him loudly to herself. Now, she dashed straight out and ran full pelt to the bus stop, the taste of iron in her mouth. She ran from his stop at Karlavägen, too, tapped in the door code he had given her and took the steps two at a time. He received her with a wine glass in his hand and a beaming face, stroked her arm up and down, and gently took her hand.
‘May I show you what I’ve been up to?’
She looked carefully at everything he showed her in the studio.
‘I don’t understand how one can have this sort of talent,’ she said, ‘how one learns to do it.’
‘It’s nice to hear you say that,’ he said. ‘You’re usually so critical.’
‘Critical, me? I’m no expert on this sort of thing and I view it with love because it’s you who made it.’
‘Ah. Yes.’
He seemed embarrassed but at the same time, and primarily, proud of his domain and its theatrical set pieces.
‘Love is not cool and scrutinizing,’ said Ester. ‘Surely you must see the difference?’
He took her hand in his again, pointing with the other one.
‘It’s called trompe-l’œil,’ he said, looking at her to observe how the term went down and whether it would be insulting to translate it or inconsiderate not to.
‘You know about trompe-l’œil?’
‘Never seen it but I’ve heard about it. Striking effect.’
‘It means “deceive the eye”.’
It involved painting the sets with distorted proportions and in small sizes so that what was represented would appear in realistic perspective in the picture. Great cities or expanses of landscape could spring from something the size of a matchbox.
They embraced beneath his sets. He explained that these were intended to deceive the eye with regard to distance, size and ultimately the whole of existence. They were poetic truths, built to make the eye see the world as it was although everything was false, or stage-managed.
They went across the courtyard and upstairs to his flat. The banks of snow were dirty white and shone dimly in the gleam of the pale lights.
He entered without a key, telling her he always left the door unlocked because there was nothing to steal. Then he took off his work clothes and had a shower while she looked round. It was the first time she had been in his home. It was scarcely a home, more like sleeping quarters. Everything was provisional, including the rack where he hung shirts and jackets, which stood near his bed. Wardrobes were evidently not for him.
It was as if he were travelling, or on the run. From what he had said and what she now saw, Ester sensed more about his mentality. She realized he thought of the future as a state completely removed from the present. The future was something that would follow great change and bring rest. One day, real life would begin, once he had finished all this work. Soon he would have time to get to grips with everything, once that solo exhibition was out of the way and that retrospective. That was his ideology, and his view of society too; deep down, he was a revolutionary utopian. Paradise was not merely a word.
It was one way to spend a life. You could get a lot done while you waited for life to begin.
When Hugo came out of the bathroom, Ester was already lying under the cover.
‘That looks cosy,’ he said, abandoning his towel on a chair by the bed and lying down by her, skin against skin.
‘This is the supreme
moment,’ she whispered. ‘The supreme moment in human life. This encounter. The greatest thing there is.’
He answered her with his hands.
On waking the next morning they fumbled for each other and started all over again. Their coupling was briefer but as ardent as before. It was eight o’clock and the working day was waiting. He observed that he had nothing to eat in the flat, a possible indication that his earlier comment about breakfast as mere nutritional refuelling did have some kind of validity for him and had not just been an excuse to avoid intimacy. She hoped as much, and felt everything pointed to it. She wondered whether she should suggest right now that they see each other again that evening and not leave things to run their course so it was all just more waiting and she could not make other plans.
But she could not quite bring herself to.
He asked her to come with him down to the 7-Eleven store on the corner. There he had coffee and a croissant while she had coffee and a bread roll, solid rye with no filling. It was one of the more rudimentary breakfasts in her life.
They perched beside each other on tall stools at a shelf-like table under the window, looking out over an intersection and the morning activity of a city street. They said little. When they did speak, it was about generalities, things they could see, how the coffee tasted and what was on the menu. They were neither friends nor lovers. They asked each other what they had planned for the day, in the way you do when you don’t belong together even though you are sleeping with each other, that is, when one party has decided how things are to be on that score but not said so openly, believing it is meant to be inferred.
Ester had no wish to tell him what she would be doing that day. She did not know what she would be doing and the question was of so little interest. She wanted him to ask: What shall we do today? What would you like us to do today? Not the rejection of: What are you doing today?
Hugo talked about the weather and the temperature, the fact that it was perishing cold and a hard winter, and that many found the cold difficult. She said:
‘It’s exactly halfway through the winter.’
Then she thought she ought to say that she liked the winter, but there was no space for such a remark. What she liked did not feel relevant; they were not engaged in getting to know each other, after all.
A complete lack of contact prevailed between them, a ghastly alienation. He was sitting beside her in a public place and thus not disowning her. He was eating breakfast with her the morning after, albeit a basic one. It should have been a matter of simply falling into it. But they were strangers to each other. This encounter was its own outward incarnation. It had no real content and was therefore bursting with other, unspoken content.
‘What happens if your colleagues see us together?’ she asked.
He appeared not to understand the question.
‘I mean if they see us like this in the morning, now, at eight o’clock.’
‘But we don’t talk about that sort of thing.’
She found his answer peculiar, somehow illogical. The important thing, surely, was what the others knew and how significant that was for him? Whether they talked about it or not ought to be a secondary issue. She considered starting a discussion of his answer, analysing it thoroughly and thus finding another way of letting all the disappointment she felt come bubbling out. He downed the rest of his coffee and dismounted from his stool.
‘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.
Wilful Disregard Page 5