by Anne Sward
“I know.” I put my foot down.
“Just take it easy. Stay in the inside lane until I say.” Reluctantly I ease up on the accelerator. “You’ve got my life in your hands now, how does it feel?” It feels good. Better than it has in a long time, in fact. I want to pass. He laughs. “Not yet. When I say. You couldn’t wait to get away, it’s obvious.”
He lets me drive until we arrive at the outskirts of town. We mustn’t tempt fate. If anything were to happen he’s the one who would be held to blame. He has both an American and a Hungarian driver’s license. I have had a taste of driving and would prefer not to hand back the wheel, but the fun is over now.
“You’re not even old enough, you’re underage, aren’t you? Not that you look as though you’re not smart, but . . . inexperienced. Inevitable, growing up like that.” In the shadow of the factories. That’s what he calls it. He grew up in Stockholm, Berlin, and Budapest, studied in New York. He’s the same age as Lukas, but so much more sophisticated and confident, and that adds years to his age. He’s been everywhere, done everything. He looks good in neon and looks good without. We glide into a tunnel. I’ve never been in a car underground before, but I read Alice in Wonderland from cover to cover, and this is a darker version of the same thing.
When we have emerged above ground I roll down the window. The smell of the city is the smell of exhaust fumes, new asphalt, frying from the restaurants. This is the best present I could have had, I say, with my hair streaming in the wind and my eyes watering with the cold night air.
“What? Is it your birthday?” he asks, surprised, as he zigzags through the traffic.
Yes. Seventeen.
His apartment is in the Kasernberget district. A concrete block built in the seventies with windows the size of portholes. As we carry in his luggage I think that the ugliest house is the best location—that way you don’t have to look at it. The street sign. I stare at it. Too much . . .
“What?” he asks.
“Strindbergsgatan? Did Strindberg live here? Really?”
He must have. At some time. He lived in lots of different places in the city, but it would hardly have been in this Berlin bunker, Yoel says, displeased. In his presence you are always reminded that the English word “spoiled” has two meanings.
If Lukas could see us now—thank the good Lord that he can’t—he would be beside himself.
“Don’t think about him now,” Yoel whispers. His stomach smells of ylang-ylang, sandalwood, a drop of semen. He slows the pace—to lead and to follow is a simple logic. Sex is about not thinking, he says, as if he knew it’s the only thing I long for now.
It’s so easy for him, not just in bed. Everything was so easy from the moment he opened the passenger door of the car, which a little while ago had been Lukas’s prize possession, and asked me to jump in. Took my virginity in passing, then he took it again and again, before we had time to unload the car, unpack his things, before I even had time to draw back the curtains and look at the view.
Afterward: “Don’t tell me that I was the first? But for God’s sake, Lo, how could I have known? You should have said something, then I would have taken it a bit more . . .”
“What? Steady?”
“Maybe. At least I would like to have known. It’s a . . .”
“Big responsibility?”
“No, but cool, like. Special.” He looks at me doubtfully. “Do you mean to say that you and that Lukas never, not once, he didn’t even try?” Now we are talking about him again and I don’t want to.
Lukas would soon be twenty-four and I had thought that obviously he must do it sometimes. I couldn’t imagine him with anyone else, but there must have been someone, sometime. Who could it have been? Someone at the factory? He never spoke about work when he was off, as if it didn’t exist, other than a slight ache in his shoulders and hands. Perhaps that was why he was so secretive? Because he had someone there? I knew well enough that this wasn’t so, but it was too sad to think that he had never had anything more than he had with me.
Stockholm the first morning: I release myself from Yoel’s hold and launch myself at the window, tear the heavy white curtains apart. There it is. Sparkling like a glass of water in the sun. Stunningly clean and water everywhere with a perfect silhouette against the cyanide-blue late-summer sky.
While I slept I really must have landed on my backside in another world. The city is a forest of light and sound and motion. I can’t remember when I last felt so small, perhaps the time Papa carried me in his arms over the field in the worst thunderstorm of the summer. He didn’t dare carry me on his shoulders in case a flash of sheet lightning were to seek out the top of my wet head. Scared and with my eyes shut, I had rushed straight out into the field of grain—too small to be seen as I raced around in a vicious circle of panic. The movement in the grain revealed where I was. Papa caught me, comforted, scolded, saved, and carried me in a rough grip through the nightmarish thundering light.
Whether it is the world that has grown while I slept or I who has shrunk in my sleep—it has all taken my breath away. He laughs and kisses me between the eyes, a typical Yoel gesture. My fascination for Stockholm is clearly very moving, like a mole who sticks her head up for the first time and sees the light. He shows me the view from Söders Höjder. Just that I call it “Söders Höjder” makes him kiss me again between the eyes.
“It’s just the most fantastic thing I’ve ever seen,” I whisper.
“But you’ve never seen anything, honey: railway, lake, same old countryside, same old . . . what’s his name now? Lukas?”
I lay my fingers on his lips. I can’t rid myself of the feeling that I am a deserter, a heartless, heartless traitor.
“You know we live in the ugliest building in the whole city,” he says, to bring me back down to earth.
“But I like it.” That, according to Yoel, is because I was born between two factories. Four factories, to be precise. To be exact: four factories, a railway, an industrial park, and a hydropower station.
I don’t know if he was a child who had too much love, but he must at any rate have had too much of everything else. Nothing is really good enough for him; the apartment is way beneath his dignity. At the moment he is too broke to live the sort of life he thinks he deserves. If only he hadn’t made himself impossible with his papa. That is the risk with fine families—it is easy to be banished from them, he says. Monthly maintenance withdrawn. His father has taken his support away.
—
“What would’ve become of you if I hadn’t come and rescued you?” I hear him say one day when we are eating breakfast in bed, so late in the afternoon that it’s beginning to get dark again. The mud-king’s daughter? A factory moth spinning an endless thread in the darkness of the wool factory? Eternal virginity? Shriveled up. The croissant in my mouth swells up like a ball of cotton wool the more I chew. I know that he’s joking. But all the same.
“I don’t come from the country. I come from the outskirts.” It wasn’t true countryside, because we had streetlights, but it wasn’t true village either, because the road wasn’t paved. It had something of a bad reputation, along with those of us who lived there. The houses weren’t so well cared for, the gardens not so well tended, like the children. If only the railway hadn’t cut through the view of the rolling landscape, if only the sound of the long freight trains hadn’t shattered the conversations at the kitchen table. In late winter the lake always overflowed and the fields lay under water and the local flowers had ugly names like bog asphodel, frogbit, waterweed, water plantain, pod grass. The smallness of everything made it more noticeable that we didn’t belong there, Lukas and I. If only our family circumstances had been normal, we might have given the illusion that we fitted in. But not even that.
“Factory moth,” Yoel says, or do I just read it in his eyes? He himself is of a nobler species, without necessarily being more sensitive: a spinner of silk and s
atin, sharp and alluring features. Self-assured, unequivocal. The sophisticated type who has lived and traveled and knows his culinary French. In a restaurant he sends food back if it is not to his taste, and expects to be compensated for his disappointment. Loves everything ending in confit, which I eventually gather just means that it is cooked in its own fat. It sounds unappealing, but he maintains that duck confit is as near as you can get to heaven. And coeur de filet, the heart of the filet, is the thickest and best part. It is the part of me he will never have, but he doesn’t want it anyway.
A playful and relaxed prelude, is that all we are for each other? If we make love early in the evening, he goes out afterward, seems to be hungry for something that isn’t available at home. I’m too young to go with him, too young for the only places it is worth going to—he gets in everywhere, people know that he is no pauper, at least not in the pub.
Every time I try to imagine what Lukas is doing just now, I see him by Gábriel’s coffin in his black mourning shorts, the only thing he wore at the end. Funeral for close family and friends—what do you do if the close family and friends consist of one person? A very simple ceremony?
It takes some time before I understand what the smell is. Only sense it at night, when I try to sleep and there is nothing to distract me. It is the smell of the summer in the house with Gábriel that has clung to me. Showering and washing my clothes doesn’t help. It’s embedded far up in my nostrils, inaccessible, until in the end it subsides, like a sorrow you can no longer bear.
The harsh light of summer has changed. Gentler and softer, like Yoel’s laugh. Mañana, he says, and I try to learn from him. We will do it tomorrow, everything can wait, everything but the moment that must be enjoyed while it lasts. Now, only now.
Playing and caressing and deceiving. I straddle him in the Hiroshima four-poster bed. Promise him eternal fidelity under a cloud of creamy white tulle. We laugh. Make love a bit more in the pale light from the Sodom bedside lamp. Order Chinese food in small white cartons delivered to the door. I have never eaten Chinese food before, never had food delivered to the door, only seen it in films. Yoel opens the door naked, but the Chinese man doesn’t let his mask slip. It is called losing face in Chinese, Yoel explains, and he gives him a generous tip, “keep the change” . . . Money burns a hole in Yoel’s pocket . . . We are on fire and make love and fuck behind the Gomorrah silk curtain. Love is like lighting a cigarette on a burning curtain, an exaggerated gesture, an excessive risk. Be careful, Lo, I hear Mama say . . . I like the kissing afterward with the taste of sweet-and-sour sauce. Even when I take him in my mouth he tastes of sweet-and-sour sauce. I have started to write down in my oilcloth-covered book the words you need to know when you are with Yoel. Sweet-and-sour. Fellatio. Mañana.
I am making love to a moth. He weighs nothing, lifts me off the sheet, we levitate, revolve, transpire. I give him a hard-on, he gives me goose bumps, I give him . . . well, what? He has everything already. I can only give him the one thing he doesn’t have—myself.
“People like you don’t grow on trees, Lo. Or maybe you do, a very rare sort,” he whispers, thrusting so deep inside me it hurts.
A man’s penis is enlarged during dream sleep and on physical contact. I look at him to check and, yes, that is correct. On the other hand, if impotence can be cured with the smell of cinnamon, as they say on the radio, a scent from childhood, a mother’s baking, that can’t be proved with Yoel, he’s not at risk. Sometimes he gets hard while he’s frying eggs or when he’s shaving or talking to a friend on the telephone, even when he’s sitting staring at his dissertation.
“I want to have you, can’t you see?”
“Put a bag of ice on it.” I have promised to say no to him next time I distract him while he is studying. But I don’t say no. If it isn’t me, it will be some other craving that disturbs him. This thesis will never be finished, and it isn’t my fault. Coitus a mammilla. The urge to play.
“Slowly,” he whimpers, when I try to swallow him too fast. It is so powerful that we can hardly move, a blackout of pleasure, la petite mort. Yoel is fluent in the language of love.
—
“I love you,” I say and don’t mean it. It is so easy to say.
“I love you too,” he whispers and doesn’t mean it either. Storms and accidents don’t touch us. I am naked apart from some black pieces of jewelry around my wrists and neck. Some cheap trash he has bought me for fun, magnetite, jewels for those on the way down—and I go right to the bottom with him, not deep, because he has no depth. He says that himself, and laughs with all his crooked white teeth.
He requires nothing of me. Not like Lukas. There are things Yoel wants, but it isn’t a need, not dependency, just desire. He fills me up and at the same time he makes me feel lighter than ever before. But when I want to dance on his feet, he complains that I’m too heavy, and when I want to go out with him, he says that I’m too young. At least for the places he wants to go to. Kisses me between the eyes and goes.
—
When we’re drunk we’re useless in bed, but the day after we can keep going for hours. There’s no greater aphrodisiac than a moderate hangover, I soon learn. The ease with which Yoel moves through his life, I’m waiting for it all to be overturned. Is there really no cloud on his horizon?
One of his former girlfriends seems to have the same unequivocal attitude to life as he does. She comes past sometimes and has a glass of wine on her way somewhere else. Treats me as if I were a home helper who is having a break between cleaning the toilet and ironing shirts and quite possibly sexual services that in her world are clearly part of that sort of job. She has always bought something incredibly expensive that she wants to try on and show off, after Yoel like a fool has helped her with the zip. It’s the only time he ever appears to be an idiot; we all have someone who is more than a match for us, and she is his.
I start to feel very ill at ease when I see her through the peephole.
“You’re such a loser still living here,” she says and gives him an air kiss without touching his cheek. She never touches anyone, he says, except possibly when she has to lie with someone to . . . well. At least once every six months so that her boyfriend doesn’t tire of her, and now and then with someone who can give her something she wants. The one-night stands seem to be reserved for what they can give her outside the bed rather than in it.
I listen, my ears like cupped batwings. She isn’t bothered that I’m listening, perhaps that’s the intention—just as the whole time she can obviously see me, though she never looks directly at me. She spreads disquiet with her mere presence in Yoel’s kitchen, has the ability to use up all the oxygen in the room. Always the same pattern: she sweeps in, asks him to open a bottle of wine, takes three sips and leaves the rest, rapidly sums up everything that has happened to her since the last time. Her life is a triumphal procession and we have the honor of being the audience. I glance at Yoel while she’s talking. Have the feeling that he is actually dazzled by her successes and that the apparently self-inflicted disasters awake his sympathy. Then she relates her human conquests—man or woman, it’s not all that important. However, it’s never a question of sex. Sex is just the means, tried and tested, a win every time.
—
Several times a day I lace up my gym shoes and stuff a little money into my pocket, coins and small notes that I find all over in the apartment.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.” Kiss him as I go past, taking long strides, eager to be moving. It’s like having a dog, according to Yoel, a dog that takes itself out. I have nothing against being a dog. Adaptable, independent, always on the move.
“I miss you when you’re not here . . . but you’ll come home when you’re hungry, won’t you?” Yes. I’ll come home when I’m hungry, but first I have to sniff around the whole town.
Stockholm is a dream from which I don’t want to wake. The water doesn�
��t smell at all like the lake at home, not fermenting sludge, if anything an acrid chemical smell of diesel and oil. At the beginning I managed to ignore everything that was ugly. In Yoel too.
Wallpaper with ominous eczema-colored flamingos in the bedroom, kitchen chairs in poison-yellow plastic that make me lose my appetite, on the wall above the bed Warhol’s Car Crash in shocking pink. The monotone repetition and the garish colors express a moral and an aesthetic emptiness that is a goal in pop art, he recites. The monotone repetition and moral emptiness swim above us every time we make love; the cars crash at the same moment he twists my head backward.
The days with him float like music in a piano bar, hardly noticed. Neither of us goes out to work. He has money, so we manage, and if he has none, then he sorts it out one way or another. Yoel the fixer, trickster. Money is something to be handled with discretion, not something you talk about. If you have it, you spend generously on yourself and others. If you don’t, you lie low for a while and don’t grumble about it. Behave as if nothing has happened, it’s just a downswing.
Lukas talked about money all the time. For him the downswing was perpetual, mental, or even in the blood. He was oppressed by it. Often talked about what he would do if he ever became rich, though we both knew it would take a miracle for him to become rich, and miracles never happen. That’s why they’re called miracles.
For Yoel the crises are never serious. He can afford to have a laissez-faire attitude to everything, can always call and bow and scrape a little and get his mama to write a blank check for him when the bills are piling up or he has found something expensive he wants for himself. Yoel the bon vivant, the dandy.
If there is a single cloud in his sky it is his parents, though it is more of a light cloud that at regular intervals passes by and is gone. The family meets twice a year, dispassionately. Gathers together in a large apartment on Riddargatan that’s empty the rest of the time. His mama travels from Budapest, his papa from Berlin. To play at being married. The whole thing is topped off in a weekend, punctually and dutifully.