So she took it easy, rubbed herself dry and, still steaming, lay down on the bed to finish sweating and cool down. Ironed a blouse and with it donned a pair of stiff new jeans, some socks she had never worn before and a V-neck jersey of a colour that matched the checked pattern of the blouse.
Her hand did not shake as she made the call, it had no need to. They were to be in touch when she was back from Paris, he had urged her to do it, and now she was home, so she was doing it.
It’s too easy to say ‘Maybe speak when you’re back’ with half a continent in between. It’s too easy. The content and meaning of the words are too large in relation to how simple they are to utter. No. Wrong track. Like anybody in love, Ester Nilsson laid too much emphasis on the content of the words and their literal meaning and too little on plausibility and her overall judgement. It was part of her profession to assess plausibility and to make overall judgements, and she was good at her profession but that, of course, was an area in which her emotional life was not involved.
Admittedly the content of the sentence he had spoken, ‘Maybe speak when you’re back,’ was not much to go on. It was a standard, polite phrase to someone who was away on a trip. It could mean that you’d be back in touch with each other in a week, or two months. The phrase did not so much express its content as a simple acknowledgement between two people: ‘We know each other, we’ve no scores to settle, this isn’t the last time we’ll be talking.’ But when the phrase was said to someone filled with yearning it was brutal, a sloppy combination of cowardice and guilt, solicitude with nothing behind it.
In her heated state, Ester was unable to see that utterances could be as light as ash and just as burnt-out. They were scattered lazily, fell, came drifting down. Words were not enduring monuments to intentions and truths. They were sounds to fill silences with.
Happiness seldom exists in the experiencing of happiness. It resides in the expectation of happiness and almost only there. Since the evening before, she had been happy.
After what she judged to be eight rings he answered, his voice turned away.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘It’s me.’
His hello was guarded and her voice instantly became strained because her throat constricted and the vocal cords tightened.
‘How are you?’ she croaked.
‘Oh, I’m fine?’
She heard the question mark, its dreadful chill. She sensed a sewer of contempt. He might just as well have come straight out with it: ‘Why are you ringing again, don’t disturb me, we spoke yesterday, what is it you want of me?’
‘I’m doing a bit of work,’ he said more mildly, having registered how tense and stifled she suddenly sounded.
‘That’s good. Working, I mean. I did some work on the plane. Other than that I haven’t done much today. It’s Sunday, not that that matters, but it’s a good excuse if you want a rest.’
She refrained from hanging up abruptly, solely to avoid drawing attention to how ridiculous she felt. She said:
‘Going all right?’
‘What?’
‘Your work.’
‘It’s going as usual. We’ve lots to do. We need to get in a good few hours today. The whole team’s assembled. We’ll be working into the night.’
The freshly ironed blouse clung damply to her back and the inside of her elbows. Don’t humiliate me, she thought, I can hear your subtext, I’m not going to gatecrash.
‘Did you want anything in particular?’ he said.
‘No. Nothing in particular.’
He laughed that embarrassed laugh.
‘Well, I’m back,’ she said.
‘Ah yes. Right.’
‘I was to call when I got home.’
‘Oh yes, you were in Paris.’
‘Yes, I was in Paris.’
There was silence for a brief but discernible moment. ‘
Did you have a good time?’
‘No. Because my head and my body came with me.’
He made a sort of humming sound, sensing intimacy in the offing, and wanted to break off. She could hear all she needed to hear to understand definitively that she had to walk away and not spare this man another thought. But the knowledge did not penetrate as far as her autonomous system of insight. It stopped at a more superficial level where excuses feed on whatever they can get hold of. In the never-ending battle between insight and hope, hope won, because insight cost too much to incorporate and hope made it easier to live.
‘I wanted to ask if you fancied having dinner,’ she said dully.
‘Tonight! No, it’s impossible!’
They were exclamation marks of sheer dread.
‘No, I didn’t mean tonight.’
‘It’s out of the question.’
Shame pulsed at its steady, even pace.
‘You said yesterday we should be in touch when I got home. That was why I called. The only reason. Otherwise I naturally wouldn’t have.’
‘No problem. I’ve got to get back to work now. All the best. Bye now.’
Two months passed. It was spring, the season that reveals grimy surfaces and clogged corners. Everything was exposed by the keen rays of the sun. Grief cannot remain acute indefinitely. It soon gets moved to the day ward and then to the rehabilitation clinic. Ester anaesthetized herself with company and people she would not have spent time with had she been harmonious rather than half dead. She did everything in her power to avoid being alone with herself, asking acquaintances and friends to stay over so she could avoid feeling the darkness of the night taking up residence in her.
She was not stoical but in shreds, totally frayed. One evening she decided to ring Per, the man she formerly lived with but had abruptly left six months earlier. She didn’t know why she was ringing; her fingers ran ahead of her consciousness. Per said he still loved her, he missed her terribly and everything had been grey since she left. Ester was moved and touched and said she was grateful for the years they had had together. Then Per asked why she was calling and there was something knowing and sharp in his tone. He was as well aware as she was that nothing of that kind happened by chance, it corresponded to internal emotions. Ester said she had just wanted to talk for a while. The next day, Per called twice and asked if perhaps they should try again. On the third day his voice was shrill and he asked what she thought gave her the right to disturb what little equilibrium he had been able to salvage after months of suffering and despair. Ester found it hard to accept she could mean that much to Per, she didn’t think it had seemed that way over the years and therefore she didn’t really believe him. Moreover she was fully occupied with her own suffering and her own despair. His misery had little genuine effect on her. To her, it seemed unreal.
The girlfriend chorus was kept very busy. It interpreted, comforted, soothed, exhorted and indicated new directions of travel. She had to break free, it said, and she repeated: I’ve got to break free from this idiocy.
One day, it said, Hugo might turn up at her door with a bunch of flowers, you never knew. But she had to wait until he was ready and be open to life in the meantime.
The girlfriend chorus shouldn’t have said that, because she immediately felt the hope of this happening seize hold of her and become the only thing she cared about.
‘Do you think it’s possible?’ she gasped. ‘Do you think it could really happen that one day I’ll find him at my door and he’ll have changed his mind?’
‘Everything’s possible but you mustn’t think about it,’ said the chorus.
It was an abortive piece of advice, impossible for her to follow. If there were even the slightest chance, Ester would think of nothing else and live in parenthesis until that day arrived.
Something that had been of crucial importance to her had been nothing but a way of passing the time for Hugo. There were short periods when she dwelt on this thought. Then she deleted it, in order to hold out. In April she wrote two long letters and posted them. She wanted to explain herself and understand. She wanted to put into word
s what she had felt and why she had acted and thought as she did, wanted to say that his actions had shaped hers, that no one acts without also reacting, that he had given her good cause for making her assumptions.
She did not expect an answer, nor did she get one.
There were days when life was bearable and the pain point shrank to a pinhead.
She read a book about the Holocaust that had just come out, she wrote poems about her misery, which were exceedingly bad but she kept them all the same. She did her five runs a week. Spring progressed. Her legs had clocked up a considerable number of kilometres since the new year.
Towards the end of May she was sitting in a cafe at Östermalmstorg. It wasn’t because of its proximity to Kommendörsgatan that she had ended up there, she persuaded herself. Or rather it was, of course, she conceded. She still gravitated to his district sometimes.
A Christian festival and holiday weekend lasting from Thursday to Sunday was approaching. It was warm and desolate in town. She sat reading over a cup of coffee, able once again to sink into a text, particularly when she was not at home in solitude but, like now, among people and buzz and life. She was in her book, but not so deeply that she missed seeing out of the corner of her eye a coat that she recognized, a shabby green outdoor jacket. There was something about the way the body moved, too, a certain bagginess about both his body and his style. She thought she really must stop seeing him everywhere. Hugo Rask never went to cafes. But here he was now, coming in, approaching her table, raising a hand in greeting and smiling uncertainly.
Ester put down her book on the table, cover uppermost; it was Chekhov’s The Lady With the Dog. He had once said that she ought to read it. She recalled the moment when she heard him say it and how the warmth between them had felt at that moment of encounter, the way she had been looking out over banks of snow and parked cars as he mentioned the book. Some images just incomprehensibly froze into place. That was six months ago.
Now she was looking out over the paved square, but there was light, there were sap-filled patches of green, what little was planted there plus all the shoots forcing their way through cracks and holes to make their way up to the sun and growth. It was all fresh, nothing past its prime.
Hugo asked how she was, cautiously as if he suspected the answer might have something to do with him, but he evidently wanted to ask anyway. She replied that she was in the final phase of her marathon training. Just the same way as he had used her running in that dreadful way back in February, she used it against him now.
But he wanted to be more intimate and get past the small talk. He sat down, took off his jacket and asked what training in the final phase involved. She didn’t think he was interested but answered out of politeness that she went for five runs a week, one of them a two-hour run at an easy pace, the others pushing herself to varying degrees. It was your pulse rate that was important and that morning she had done interval training for forty minutes in total.
He asked why she wanted to run marathons. His eagerness and the way he was enquiring into details felt compensatory; he thought he ought to make an effort, take the initiative. Ester was nonplussed. Their liaison had been rent apart long before and it all seemed rather belated.
But wasn’t this what the girlfriend chorus had said, that one day in three months’ or three years’ time he might turn up at her door with a bunch of flowers and have thought things through properly? Hope took a crazy little leap inside her.
She replied that she ran marathons because it was interesting. There was no other way of finding out or investigating what happened to your body and head after thirty kilometres and then after thirty-five. It was a sort of study.
Hugo said that as studies went, it sounded taxing. To him, the dividend seemed hard-earned and negligible.
‘But clearly I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Since I do it.’
His coffee came. He nodded his thanks.
‘I didn’t really mean to come in here. But I saw you sitting here, so I did.’
She put Chekhov in her bag.
‘Is it as good as I remember it?’ he said.
‘Very good. Exceptional, in fact.’
‘Thank you for your letters,’ he said. ‘They were sensitive, elegant.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘One of them was simply beautiful.’
The other one had contained some reproaches in the form of questions interspersed with the tokens of love.
‘I don’t remember what I wrote,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Sorry I didn’t answer them.’
‘Are you?’
‘I should’ve answered. But I’ve had so much work on all spring. And it isn’t over yet.’
She could sense the effort it took for him to say that. And she realized he wanted absolution from his guilt because he had extended a hand, and that he now thought it up to her to grant it to him. She had never known anybody, in fact, who had admitted their guilt and also been able to bear it.
Well-dressed people crossed the square with foodie treats for the weekend in bags from the Östermalmshallen market.
Ester would not allow him to discharge his debt by playing down the pain his actions and lack of replies had caused her. She resisted hard when the reflex action of making things easy for him tried to kick in. Having not offered him the relief he sought, she fully expected some kind of accusation or spiteful comment to follow.
And it did. He said:
‘You knew I was seeing another woman.’
‘No. I didn’t know. You never told me about her and you denied it when I asked. It was no thanks to you I managed to work out that she existed. And naturally I thought you’d left her when you came to me. I thought that was why you came then rather than earlier. I thought you were waiting to settle old business. I thought that was what one did unless one was a bigamist. It’s OK being a bigamist of course, but you have to make it clear. But until further notice, one at a time is presumably the implicit ground rule.’
‘But that would mean breaking up!’
‘Yes?’
‘But that’s so awkward and such a hassle.’
He sounded genuinely perplexed.
‘Well the alternative turned out pretty awkward and bothersome too, for me.’
‘All this having to talk about everything and be honest and transparent, it’s only a convention,’ he said. ‘A suffocating totalitarian imposition, a restriction we inflict on one another. To demand that a person with whom one has had physical contact give up everything from that moment on is tyranny. To demand that, after this physical contact, he never again be allowed to keep anything for himself is not only petty bourgeois, but also indicates a total lack of respect for the freedom of the individual, which you generally esteem so highly.’
Ester found that it hurt both to blink and to swallow.
‘I can’t contradict you,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately.’
‘Must be the first time.’
He laughed. But she didn’t.
‘I can’t contradict you in any way except to say that one party’s freedom is sometimes the other’s distress.’
It was a lovely afternoon, the kind you only get in May. The wind caressed the sun umbrellas, making the fabric ripple indolently; it was warm, almost hot, yet still fresh as it breezed in through the open window. The weather was pleasant enough to sit outside but Ester preferred both eating and reading indoors.
‘Who is she?’
‘Who?’
‘The woman you meet up with as regularly as clockwork but conceal and never talk about?’
‘We’ve known each other decades.’
‘What does she do?’
‘Teach. History and social sciences.’
‘Secondary level?’
‘Upper secondary.’
‘She lives a long way from here?’
‘It’s nice to get away.’
‘To hide from everything and everyone. Have a secret life so you can keep ev
eryone at a mental distance, even her. If you have more than one woman, or man, you need never be really close to anyone. Never be on equal terms, never lay yourself open to anything, you can manipulate power so you never end up the subordinate but have always got someone else to go to. A sort of existential hedging of bets.’
‘I like it on the train.’
‘A person who starts lying about the little things is soon lying about everything, about his whole life. And is forced to live behind a screen.’
‘I’m not lying. Not telling the whole story isn’t lying.’
‘Don’t you want to live with her properly?’
‘She wants that. Wants me to move down there with her.’
‘But you don’t?’
‘When I’m eighty perhaps.’
‘Does she know you’ve got other women?’
‘I’m sure she does.’
‘I’m not, unless you’ve actually talked about it. People don’t. There’s no way of knowing. You ought to tell her.’
‘Why hurt people?’
He stroked his chin, starting from his cheeks, and it made a rasping sound.
‘What were you imagining when you just gave up on me last winter, overnight?’
‘You’ve got your life ahead of you,’ said Hugo. ‘I haven’t.’
The age difference, well, it was a valid argument she supposed, and the only one she could not do anything about. It was the first explanation he had given her that was the result of some reflection.
For a very brief space of time she had a presentiment that one day she would be thoroughly tired of this story and indifferent to its outcome. She sensed that she would look back in amazement on her struggle and the fact that she had thought him worth it. And on that day she would thank her lucky stars at having escaped his company. It was a fleeting thought among others. She found him pitiful, planted there so heavily on his chair, admitting his own vulgarity, his cheerless life and his fear, which he attempted to ennoble into broad-mindedness.
Two women sat down at the empty table next to them. One of them was telling a story and the other was laughing loudly, lapsing into silence for the next bit and then bursting out laughing again. The one talking seemed satisfied with the merriment but embarrassed by the shrillness of the laugh, trying to get her companion to tone it down by speaking more mutedly herself.
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