Hugo had never distanced himself from any of the malice to which Dragan’s refined thinking inadvertently led. He had too much of a taste for provocation as a lifestyle to repudiate violence and oppression in the name of revolt.
What was strange about Hugo Rask, thought Ester Nilsson, was that the only thing to attract him more than provocation was being loved by the public. It was pulling him apart, because at the same time he could not bear being loved by the public, believing it to signal complicity, cowardice and indifference in the face of the raw truths which no present day had ever had the courage to confront but which the future always saw uncomfortably clearly, with an indulgent smile at the narrow outlook of times past.
With defiant pride, Dragan and Hugo had lined up behind Milošević in Serbia. This was still viewed as an embarrassing blot on the artist’s public image, something that had to be touched on in any tribute article so the writer could not be accused of playing down the artist’s poor judgement and unforgivable lapse, or perhaps it was the complexity of his soul. It was a stance that had come at some cost, including several cancelled exhibitions. Ester once asked him about it, and received the answer that he was not interested in anything that was held in wide affection, was uniform or imposed by the elite. She was not offered any arguments in support of his position. She wanted to ask more, wanted to hear how he reconciled such slogans with being so desperately anxious personally for the public’s affection.
But she had swallowed her questions in order not to jeopardize their fragile intimacy.
Dragan made his entry to the party in a black suit, black polo-necked sweater and the elegant black shoes he had been wearing the first time she met him. He gave a malicious wave in her direction.
‘So you’re here too?’ he said.
The fact that Hugo was surrounded by his own people even here at the party considerably reduced her opportunities for wondering out loud about all those unanswered phone calls and other things that had failed to happen. His face shone like a round red cheese when he saw her, a nervous, uncomfortable, round red cheese. From that point he was always half turned away, making off somewhere, as if in fear of questions. When he finally met her eye he did it with an insouciance that was almost brazen.
‘Have you missed me?’
The question was entirely rhetorical, a laboured game.
‘Yes. I have. A lot.’
Her words thudded clumsily to the floor between them and died. She did not return the question, to avoid hearing the answer and seeing him discomfited by the need for evasion.
‘Shall we try the buffet?’ he said.
‘I already have,’ she said. ‘It’s delicious.’
‘Oh, um,’ he said, apparently disconcerted by the fact that she had thought he was addressing her. He indicated with a nod and a gesture that the invitation was meant not for her but for the friends he had brought with him, famished after their day’s strenuous labour among set pieces and constructions designed to deceive the eye.
His spite was not deliberate or studied. It was simple omission, inability, fear disguised as considerate behaviour. Ester left them to it and went to talk to other people, kept her distance.
As the party began to feel past its prime, she sought him out again. She had weighed it up and reached the decision that she would rather be brushed off than fret about not having tried. He was discussing something with a journalist, one of the arts editors. Dragan was standing with them. All three were laughing, in relaxed agreement over something. Ester put her hand on Hugo’s back. He looked at her with eyes that were swivelling round in their sockets in search of an emergency exit. Somewhere inside herself she understood that this was answer enough, but she could not bear it. She took him to one side and asked:
‘Shall we go back to my place?’
She steeled herself not to offer him freedom at the same time. If he wanted to run away he would have to organize it himself.
‘If we’re going, it had better be my place,’ he said.
She wanted to say they should forget all about it, but stayed silent.
They went out into the street. The streetlights gleamed coldly in the black-white night. They walked three blocks to a more major road, where a taxi soon came along. It struck her that this was exactly where she had been when, bathed in spring sunshine, she took the call asking her to give a lecture on him. Now it was night and winter in the same spot. He held the back door of the car open for her and they got in. She took his hand to give it a squeeze but the hand squirmed like a captured maggot, trying to extract itself from hers without making it too obvious.
Unsolicited gifts can be appalling in their demands, their expectations, their sticky demonstration of the giver’s solicitude. It was not impossible that he looked on her pressurizing hand as such a gift. He tried to stroke her fingers but it was more like rubbing. He seemed in the grip of some great torment that transmitted itself through his hand.
She did not understand what that torment could be. She did not think she was demanding anything unreasonable. Freedom was a virtue and she honoured it, but she could not offer freedom from closeness. What she could offer, on the other hand, was the freedom to be closer to her than anyone else, and the freedom to escape his loneliness. What could be more beautiful?
The taxi stopped at the front entrance of his building. He let go of her fingers, took out his wallet, paid. Had it been up to her they would have taken the bus, so she let him pay.
The third night. Three nights in five days can’t be put down to mistake, whim or aberration. They climbed the stairs to his inhospitable little den for this, their third night. They undressed, their bodies joined. They went to sleep. Morning came again. Their bodies joined again. But something was wrong. Something was wrong the whole time.
He kept his blinds closed round the clock; except for a broken slat where the light shone in you could not tell whether it was night or day, clear or overcast.
The light coming through the gap showed that it was now morning. He touched her in the right ways. He knew how you show that you want to be present, but he was absent, and tense and evasive with it, afraid that by talking they would find a vein from which difficulties would come gushing forth.
He was soon dressed and ready to go, before she was, even though they were in his flat. It looked as though he wanted to get out so he could breathe, as if he were escaping to an oxygen cylinder.
‘There’s bread and cheese,’ he said.
‘Aren’t you going to have anything?’
‘I’ve got to get down to the studio and work. I think there’s coffee as well. I did some shopping.’
‘Who for?’
‘You said breakfast was important to you.’
She kissed his closed lips and he went. So he had been out to buy breakfast for her after Wednesday morning’s foray to 7-Eleven, that is, he had planned to bring her here again. In that case, why was he behaving so strangely?
The sense of desolation in a flat that your lover has just left is the most complete sense of desolation that exists. It hit her now.
It’s not worth it, she felt.
It’s always worth it, she thought.
Worth it or not, I can’t give it up, she thought and felt.
She sat down to eat in his untouched kitchen. Piles of newspapers were stacked along the lower parts of the walls, several years’ worth of the Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet review sections. He was doubtless saving them because there was an essay or opinion piece he had not managed to read at the time but imagined he would get round to later.
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 a
n 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.
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