Ester and Hugo looked at the women.
‘You never laugh like that when I tell you something,’ he said.
He stroked Ester’s arm and she felt the beating of her heart.
‘I’ve never had reason to,’ she said.
‘Mm, because we have a more serious relationship.’
He looked at her, clear-eyed and with no ulterior motive. One of the cafe staff wiped a table, another placed an espresso in front of a woman in a suit, who unfolded a copy of the Financial Times.
‘We haven’t got a relationship, have we?’
‘But we’re serious. We would have a serious relationship if we did have one. And anyway, we have laughed together, a lot.’
‘Yes we have, actually.’
The only weapon of someone who loves is to stop loving. However messy and demanding their love may have seemed to its object, it goes against the grain to be deprived of it, even though the object may never have wanted it in the first place. It is the balance of power that is shifted by the new indifference, and the fear of appearing foolish and ordinary in the eyes of the one who formerly did the loving.
‘Do you remember that time we were round at my place last winter?’ she said.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Do you remember what we had to eat?’
‘You served chicken. In a creamy sauce.’
‘Crème fraiche with white wine and Gruyère cheese.’
‘Not all that many plants in there.’
He made a self-satisfied little sound. She noted the way he was deliberately reeling her in by means of those precise little references to their shared past, and was glad.
‘It had a reddish colour.’
‘There was paprika in it,’ she said. ‘How interesting, you remember with your eyes. You really are a visual artist through and through. I remember with my ears, and with my eyes only if they see the printed word. And a few other body parts, I remember with those as well.’
His jacket, way too warm for the season, was on again because they were about to go. The fact that he had taken it off was all part of the effort and compensation for all the coats previously left unremoved, she thought.
‘I don’t only remember with my eyes, either,’ he said.
Don’t do this, thought Ester. Don’t drag me into this again. I’m just starting to break free.
But she loved the way his eyes glistened when he was talking about memories of their encounters and she felt very close to him.
‘It was paprika that made it look red,’ she said again.
‘It was delicious. Didn’t I bring a chair with me, too? Have you still got it?’
‘I sit on it every day.’
‘Well it’s good to know I made some kind of contribution, at least.’
‘I’ve never understood why you went to bed with me three times after months of prevarication and then just disappeared. I’ve never understood how you could do that, and why you would never talk to me about it when I asked you to.’
He averted his head and his gaze followed a decrepit couple who were walking very slowly, supporting each other.
‘There’s no point my trying to explain. You already know the answer to all my questions and you’ve got all your objections ready.’
‘It’s a shame you see it that way. I’m very curious to hear your thoughts on the subject and I’d really like to hear your version. But maybe I interpret events differently from you. And maybe that’s what you want to spare yourself?’
They were standing in Östermalmstorg, down by the turning area where Humlegårdsgatan meets Nybrogatan. She held out her hand as if for a handshake. They had never shaken hands since the first time they met, back in October. With some hesitation he took her hand, since the gesture had something distanced and final about it.
He made sure they were looking each other in the eye and said:
‘I shall really think about this, Ester. This you and me thing, us.’
She heard him say it. She didn’t mishear. She wanted to ask him to repeat it and wished she had recorded it, but she hadn’t imagined it. She had heard correctly.
‘What did you say?’
He looked at his watch. It was time to part. He had to get back to his life and she to her non-life. With it being a long weekend, she presumed he would be making the trip to see his woman.
‘I’m just going to the off-licence,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
She thought: This is the time to walk away and not look back.
She went with him to the off-licence. It was very busy. While they were waiting for his turn in the queue she asked what he was doing this weekend; it extended over four days.
He said he was going up to Borås.
It could be stupidity or a pure reflex action that made him resort to that fib again after he had just told her about the woman down in Malmö. But Ester thought: What he’s telling me now is that I needn’t imagine that other relationship is hugely important; that there’s a chance and I should hold on and wait.
She did not think of the way one can lie out of respect, misjudged but humane, of the way – out of fear of the other’s anguish and insistent dependence – one can say lots of things one doesn’t mean, to be kind, to spare a tormented individual from the brutal insight of how she is rated, and from the self-evident fact that one does not want that other person near, not in the way she wants. Nor did she think that he was saying what he said because it is disagreeable to talk of one’s intentions and actions in front of people who offer silent or explicitly moral verdicts on everything, based on emotions and justified by that exacting weakness, and then to have to supply a volley of common-sense reasons for them.
‘I shall go to Leksand as well,’ he added, and it sounded like a relief to him to be able to say it.
The queue numbers ticked forward. She wondered which observations it would be wise to refrain from just now. This was how he had talked at the beginning of their association, Leksand, Borås, as if the travelling itself would impress her, make him seem exciting and independent, as if such places drew attention to the absence of awkward ties in his life by conveying how freely he travelled, and alone. He was like a child who by saying ‘Leksand, Borås’ instead of ‘Malmö, banal relationship’ believed himself to be saying: I haven’t done anything! I’m innocent!
‘How are you going to get between Borås and Leksand quickly enough to be able to spend time in them both?’
‘By train.’
The house in Leksand was the symbol of his autonomy. He had been there alone when he needed to find himself, and when there he was not linked to any woman. He knew that she knew it. It represented his dream of getting by without the power of women over him. It had happened before that he had gone off to Leksand to show how free and unfettered he was. Why had he done it? Perhaps because she made him see his situation from her own severe point of view and realize that he was ridiculous. Had this struck her she would have approved, for she had been wronged and her point of view was therefore the right one.
What she missed was that even if her view of the matter was the most reasonable it was not perceived as such, but only as a sign of rigid irreproachability. Which generates shame, which leads to lies. People lie to be free. People lie because they will not be left in peace if they tell it the way it is. People lie because other people assume the right to confront them in the name of truth. Lying as an escape from irreproachability turns into an act of resistance to an honesty with totalitarian expectations. Ester Nilsson would have seen that, if only she had not been so involved in the story herself. It was so entwined with pain and disappointment that certain observations were bound to be overshadowed by her own empirical evidence.
For some, lying is also an addiction, with all the components of an addiction. Hugo Rask could not resist telling untruths if he got the chance, in order to avoid being the object of loving individuals’ entire catalogue of rights and programme of reforms, in order to hide from the eyes of the world,
which he both craved and could not endure.
But maybe it would be asking too much of Ester in this situation to realize that he said what he said not because he was wavering, but so that she would not think him pathetic. All Ester heard was that he had just said something unprecedented, namely that he would think through their relationship, that he might want to be with her, that the age difference had been the only hurdle. In other words, that there had not been anything wrong with the relationship or with her.
She stood in the off-licence in Nybrogatan with Hugo, wishing that his number would never tick onto the screen. She would have liked to stand there for the rest of her life, and then she heard him say something even more unprecedented.
‘I’ll show you Leksand sometime.’
There was a roaring in her head. His gaze met hers, naked, pure and sincere. Then it was his turn to be served. He bought four bottles of red. They went to his studio and at the entrance they embraced and said goodbye.
Then Ester walked all the way home. She could have walked a hundred kilometres that evening. The pavements were drenched in saturated afternoon sun, rich in promise with summer on the doorstep. ‘I’ll show you Leksand sometime,’ she heard over and over again. ‘I’ll show you Leksand sometime.’
He couldn’t make such pledges without meaning something by them. It was impossible.
However, the new possibility that had opened up only took the form of more waiting. She wanted to get her life going, get it going right away, but she was left waiting again.
Love, the real big thing, was a battle and an intoxication, that was how she accounted to the sceptical for this relationship being so complicated and demanding, and bringing her only suffering and no joy. The girlfriend chorus sometimes contradicted her, saying love was harmony and that you were considerate to each other, not this endless toil she felt obliged to engage in.
People who said that didn’t understand. The harmony would come once she had toiled for it. You had to earn it. You had to suffer and struggle in order for pleasure to arrive and then be worth something.
After the weekend she called him, even though she had intended to wait until he rang. She managed to hold off for a day, the Monday, but no longer. He answered quickly in a happy, or cheerful, voice. Again it was the ingratiating, obliging voice of a child that wanted to show it had done everything right and not told any lies.
Hugo said the sun had been shining in Leksand.
Perhaps it had, she thought, but not on him.
The crucial thing for her interpretation of events, however, was noting that he still seemed to be in the same state of mind as when they met a few days previously. He was not dismissive and surly. He still seemed at pains to play down the other liaison by talking about Leksand. That meant he was not standing by his woman, calculated Ester, which in turn meant he did not love her but was open to other options, she also calculated, which meant that he had not made up his mind, which meant there was a chance and that it was a substantial one.
It did not strike her that disloyalty could be a character trait and that whoever was at his side would be exposed to it. With Ester, it would all be different.
He asked whether she had done much running over the weekend and she replied that she had run forty kilometres since they last met. Her training still lay like something semi-permeable between them, a prerequisite for, yet a barrier to, their proximity.
‘That’s a whole marathon!’ he exclaimed.
‘But spread over three sessions,’ she said.
Why was she ringing him today? Because she hoped for an answer to the deliberations he had promised to undertake? Not really. That wasn’t realistic. She was ringing because the itch was back, the malarial love itch that is always latent once it has invaded the cell system, lying ready to break out at any time.
The mood that had gradually developed through the spring, in which she had finally resigned herself and stopped thinking in terms of tactical manoeuvres, no longer counting the hours of nobly restraining herself from making that call, evaporated in the half hour their meeting in the cafe lasted. When the brain perceives contact as possible, every hour is too long. That is the state of enslavement. The state in which the prospect of intoxication takes over the organism.
So why was she ringing him today?
To be in contact. She thought she had better give some reason for seeking that contact and asked whether he felt he could make some kind of judgement . . . preliminary of course . . . she realized he couldn’t know . . . but perhaps just a rough idea . . . a cautious estimate . . . of how long he needed to think about it?
She wondered whether she could invite him to her apartment again, maybe fish this time, zander perhaps, with riced potatoes and a green salad dressed with a good olive oil, plus a dry wine to go with it. Then coffee and chocolate cake, not ice cream but a succulent chocolate cake with a high cocoa content that she’d make herself. Or would a chocolate mousse be more elegant than a chocolate cake? And what was best to follow fish? There were particular rules and regulations for things like that, heavy as a counterpoint to light, sour contrasting with sweet.
She heard a hesitant cough, and then he said:
‘Think about what?’
There was no sarcasm in the question. He didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘You were going to think about you and me.’
She could hear the neurons firing in his cerebral cortex as he searched his memory. Then he found what he sought and said:
‘It’s not something one can think over that quickly. That kind of thing takes time, you know.’
Of all the comments he could have made this was the worst, because everything in existence wants to live and hope is no exception. It is a parasite. It lives and thrives on the most innocent of tissue. Its survival lies in a well-developed ability to ignore everything that is not favourable to its growth while pouncing on anything that will feed it and help it to live on. Then it ruminates on these crumbs until every trace of nourishment has been extracted from them. Now hope was gnawing with divine frenzy. For a few short seconds she was weightless.
‘I’ll give you all the time you need,’ she said, but had no time to finish her sentence before he cried out:
‘Ohhh! A bird just flew into the window here. Nasty. I think it’s broken its neck.’
She heard his chair scrape.
‘Nature’s so brutal! Poor bird. I’d better deal with it. It’s lying here in pain, cheeping.’
Ester could visualize the bird. It must be lying outside on the narrow metal window sill that was just a few centimetres wide. It seemed a physical impossibility for it to have fallen straight down and, what was more, not toppled over the edge if it had been flying at such speed as to injure itself so badly. But perhaps it had happened some other way.
She wondered how the bird could have chosen such an inconvenient moment.
‘It’ll soon be summer,’ she said. ‘You’ll be going away I expect?’
‘Yes, it’s summer now,’ he said, making it sound like something inherently wonderful.
‘I loathe summer,’ Ester said.
‘I’m not surprised. You’re so critical of everything other people like.’
‘I do seem to have the best of reasons for that.’
She rang off. They had no contact for months.
After the marathon, the first weekend in June, she felt such a strong urge to send him her finishing time, 3.45.27. That and nothing else. And maybe also 27°. And maybe also: ‘Legs ache.’ And maybe also: ‘Do you want to meet up this week?’
She wrote it all, then deleted it.
Every day she made the bed. She had read that this indicated inner stability. Then she lay on top of the covers in her hot apartment while the hours accumulated. Through the permanently open windows she could hear the summer sounds of the wasps, flies and seagulls.
She forced herself to work but had nothing to say.
An acquaintance had suggested she read Maya
kovsky’s correspondence with Lili Brik. She read it and saw that everybody loved and wept in the same way and for much the same reasons, everybody betrayed and was betrayed in the same way and everybody thought: No one has ever loved like this before or suffered such agony. Everybody was unique in the same way. In every time and every place.
Sections of the girlfriend chorus were irritated when she told them about this Russian consolation and said she seemed to think she was finer, grander and more sensitive in her pain.
‘It’s kind of like, you and the Poets. But every heart has its tale to tell, don’t go thinking you can love more than all the rest.’
She found this misunderstanding hurtful because the insight Brik and Mayakovsky had given her was just the opposite, that she was not alone and her pain was not special. And besides, she was a poet herself. It was unpleasant not to be understood by your close friends but to be rebuked as conceited. When she wanted to share her enthusiasm about something she had read and thought she could do this with the notion of absolute trust, because she felt at ease with the person she was talking to and not obliged to crop all the bits that stuck out and flopped over the sides, not thinking that these could be used against her.
But she had to learn that you could not let anybody see the full picture of what was going on inside you. Trust like that did not exist. Everyone had a cranny in which scepticism and distaste could lurk, a secret aversion nurtured by anxious supervision, envy and common-or-garden rancour, in which they stored away all their thoughts as they listened to the most candid of confessions.
You had to love a person tremendously to tolerate her hunger.
Ester often went to the cinema that summer. Fled to the temple of those who were too timid for life, the domain of the troglodytes. One afternoon she saw Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. Afterwards she wanted to talk to Hugo about it. She wanted to talk to Hugo about everything but particularly this film, which he claimed in an interview to have been deeply influenced by.
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