Vera asked, eyes searching, if Ester wanted him to leave her alone. In that case, she just had to say so, for few people persisted in contacting someone who’d asked not to be contacted.
The conversation stopped there.
He kept his word and got in touch when he was back. And so they took their trip around Kullabygden in Ester’s car. First they visited Flickorna Lundgren on Skäret, a cafe Olof said was famous. For what? Ester wondered. Her sandwich was dry and didn’t fill her up and the coffee was bitter. Olof ate chocolate cake with cream. Ester only had the sandwich. It was a meagre lunch after a morning run and with five hours having passed since breakfast, but on days like this she needed less energy; her body seemed to produce all the substances it needed it on its own.
They sat in the floral splendour and bumble-bee buzz of the cafe’s garden, chatting.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ asked Olof.
‘Marvellous.’
‘What are you thinking about right now?’
‘I’m thinking about how life isn’t made up of individual events,’ said Ester.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Events are like a photo album. Or like an anthropologist’s description of a foreign people.’
‘Isn’t everything that happens in life an “event”?’
‘Do we see it like that? According to both the anthropologist and the photo album all people seem to do is dance rain-dances, have birthdays and crayfish parties, celebrate Midsummer, adorn ourselves before these celebrations, bring down a beast, eat cake, get married, celebrate Christmas, go on holiday, perform rituals. But events like this don’t make up a life, they’re the exceptions, and that’s why we attach importance to them through photography and notation. It’s the stream of consciousness in between that constitutes life, and that’s where cultures are practised. Life happens in the intervals, when the ethnographer isn’t describing and the family’s camera isn’t out.’
Olof waited for her to summarize and explain, but she looked out over the neatly trimmed lawn with its fruit trees and roses. He shifted uncomfortably on the chair.
‘Is what we’re doing an interval or an event?’
Ester smiled at Olof but didn’t feel that she had permission to touch him even if their forearms had happened to collide during the car journey and neither made the slightest effort to move their arm out of the way.
‘What would you say it is?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘If it was just you or me, this would be both an event and an interval. The pinnacle of love is when two states can be united, event and interval.’
Flowers perfumed the air, the bees were on a stubborn hunt. Ester could hardly name one flower, but they smelled delightful nonetheless. Scent preceded language. But perhaps perception was refined through classification and one could more keenly sense a scent one could distinguish? The day that Ester found peace, had a longed-for body always near and a constantly available brain to share thoughts with, that was the day she’d start learning these things – flowers, trees, birds and nature’s every name. It would have to wait until then, at present she didn’t have it in her to expand her impressions and areas of interest. The onrush of life was something she had to keep at bay, not contend with and give her full attention to.
They drove on through the landscape. The little Twingo turned out to be a good romantic-investment. Two months old and it had already aided many encounters that wouldn’t have come to pass without it. Olof showed her out-of-the-way sights and small seaside roads. They drove through Rekekroken and Arild and stopped by an art gallery near the water. Finally they reached Himmelsberg where they parked in order to make their way to the Nimis and Arx sculptures. They had to descend a steep, uneven hill to get to the beach.
The artist himself was on site, building his eternal driftwood piece. They chatted with him and he said he was about to take part in an exhibition themed around the dog in art. They wished him good luck and then bounded down the boulders towards Skälderviken’s bay. The sun was just hot enough so as to go unnoticed, nature was lush and luxuriant, the animal life boisterous. Ester observed a remarkable little bird, who under a black beret and atop a pair of stumpy orange legs the colour of its beak was grimly observing a leggy bird’s bobbing tail as it nervily searched for food. She pointed and said:
‘Do you think that one lost its legs in a brawl at sea?’
Olof shaded his eyes with his hand, looked in the direction she was pointing and said:
‘No, it was probably roughed up while on shore leave.’
Ester loved the lightness and inclination with which he joined in on her games and whims, loved it so much, it pounded and whined.
‘Someone thought that if you’ve got those flame-coloured legs, you can’t have them all to yourself, and launched an attack,’ Olof continued and mimed the attack with his hands.
‘But the beret,’ she said, ‘where did that come from?’
‘The better question is how it lost its brush and easel and its legs. Someone was jealous of its talents and its beauty.’
Skälderviken’s bay sparkled in Olof’s eyes. He was entirely focused on her and she thought he might tell her something big and important about their time together before the day was done.
A while later, they were driving towards Nyhamnsläge in tepid silence. Their fellowship had shattered with one blow when Olof announced that he should go home and finish painting the frames before Ebba came down on Tuesday.
‘You seem upset,’ he said as they passed Krapperup.
‘Not upset. Just gloomy about what almost happens, but doesn’t. It has felt like you’ve really wanted something with me lately. I thought we were going to eat dinner together tonight. Cook at yours and, well, more. It was set up for that.’
‘You’ll never be satisfied.’
‘No, I won’t. Not as long as this is our arrangement. I would have thought that was quite obvious. Why should I be satisfied?’
Next, Olof said that he really shouldn’t be seeing her at all if everything had to be so complicated, but he framed it as a question, a question she was meant to answer.
‘Isn’t this all just getting really hard for you?’ he clarified.
Ester held her tongue.
‘I should stop seeing you?’
‘If you think it best.’
‘I guess so.’
‘Maybe you should also think about why you can’t keep away?’
They’d arrived at his house. He invited her in with an indistinct wave, and because the turn was always right around the bend, she went in. There were tins of paint on the plastic-covered floor; the house appeared to be undergoing minor renovations. She sat down in an armchair and waited for some sort of decision about where to go from here with all the ambiguity and the summer ahead of them.
Through the open door facing the backyard, a voice on a loudspeaker could be heard. It seemed to come from a travelling circus but they hadn’t noticed one on their way back. Olof slumped in the other armchair.
‘You look pensive,’ Ester ventured.
‘I’m wondering what’s out there making that noise.’
‘It’s someone on a loudspeaker.’
‘What could it be?’
She looked at his listless, draping body. Everything was at stake between them and Olof was thinking about the noise outside.
‘Oh, I’m knackered,’ he said and demonstrated exactly how knackered by making his body even more limp and letting it slide out of the armchair.
‘And yet we’ve been sitting all day,’ he went on. ‘Must be the sun.’
Ester got up and left. At the door, she turned around.
‘I love you, Olof Sten. It’s hard to understand for all involved, but that’s how it is, and I’ll continue to for a while. But not indefinitely.’
She walked down the steps and got in the car. She was putting it into gear when she saw him in the doorway, pleading and forlorn. He seemed to want to say some
thing to her. But he said nothing, did nothing. He just stood there.
The summer trundled on. Ester took each sunny day one at a time, and finally autumn was in the offing. Back in Stockholm at a bookshop on Odengatan specializing in psychology, she procured a volume on pathological ambivalence. She read it in one sitting. Olof displayed all the symptoms. After that she read Freud’s case study on the Rat Man, and the one on how ambivalence distorts the soul. For a long while, she felt discontented and despondent, then she thought that the more neurotic he was, the more he needed love to heal. In Åhlén’s department store she bought a book that was stacked in piles and bore the title Women Who Love Too Much. Ester displayed all the symptoms.
By the start of September, she and Olof hadn’t been in contact since their outing in Kullabygden two months earlier. The book she’d translated about arithmetic by Gottlob Frege arrived from the printers, and after some deliberation she sent a copy to Olof. It wasn’t anything he would read, but that wasn’t the point of sending it. The point was being in contact again, breaking the silence. She slipped in a card at the flyleaf that read:
I translated this. I think I mentioned it in the spring.
Might be of interest to you. Ester
Vera warned her against this sort of stunt. Olof had to be the one to get in touch after the summer, otherwise it wasn’t worth anything and she wouldn’t be any the wiser. Vera was right, thought Ester and got in touch anyway, because she couldn’t stand the emptiness he left behind, particularly because she didn’t believe that it corresponded with his innermost desire.
Olof thanked her immediately with a letter in return and apparent joy that she’d been in touch. Ester had no doubt that he’d been worrying about her having disappeared from his life. As a result of this exchange, a new phase began. It was as if everything had been reset and they could start again. Short texts and telephone calls with observations about life and the times began to be exchanged. Ester’s joy spiked, if temporarily, each time they contacted each other. The autumn became tolerable. It felt as though they were repairing something broken, building for the future.
Some time into October, Olof suggested she come and see his show in Norrköping, which had been on for a month. They agreed on a date a week later. And the world became beautiful, Ester’s life regained its lustre. She sorted things in the attic and threw away old clutter. She gave money to those in need, helped the frail cross the street and didn’t get irritated at their slowness in the check-out queue.
The day before they were to meet, Olof called and said that Ebba had been given compensatory leave and was coming to Norrköping on the night of their date.
He recounted this with an unnatural and forced matter-of-factness.
‘Isn’t it unbelievable that your wife managed to pinpoint the only date in the entire autumn that you and I had decided to see each other?’
‘Female intuition.’
He sounded as though he was relaying one of his wife’s qualities that even Ester should appreciate.
‘The betrayed need to develop their intuition, female or not.’
‘Ebba isn’t being betrayed. You and I, we’re not in a relationship.’
‘But then what is she developing an intuition about, if it’s no big deal that I’m coming to see you? What, with this special female ability of hers, is she catching a whiff of? What do you suppose she’s sensing?’
‘You’re pushing me again with your sophisms or whatever they’re called.’
Ester couldn’t bear to speak, leaden as she now was. But her question was clearly relevant because Olof tried to explain himself.
‘By intuition, I mean that Ebba might be sensing an indistinct threat. She thinks we have a relationship even though we don’t. Doesn’t mean she has any reason to feel this way.’
‘Then why are you sneaking around?’
‘I’m not sneaking. But Ebba has an especially jealous disposition.’
‘Or she has a husband who makes it seem that way. Maybe it’s completely normal for her to want to know what the person closest to her is up to.’
Olof pondered what Ester said while Ester pondered her disappointment.
‘Can you come next week instead?’
‘Busy all week, I’m afraid.’
It was true. The entire following week was booked with trips and lectures.
‘As you know, I don’t want to have a relationship with you,’ said Olof.
‘I’ve gathered that.’
‘Not a romantic relationship, that is.’
‘Have a good time with Ebba.’
She was about to hang up but heard that familiar hesitation on the line, his softness when faced with her hardness. The two of them were like iron filings and magnets, helplessly oriented to each other.
‘Talk to you later, Ester. Talk to you later.’
She called Fatima and told her what had happened. Fatima thought Ebba might not actually be going to the theatre that night, was it even feasible? Wasn’t this him just getting cold feet when faced with seeing her and realizing what it would mean to pick things up again with Ester, Ester with her bid for an all-encompassing relationship and a love of epic proportions.
‘I’m not blaming you,’ said Fatima. ‘I’m exactly the same.’
‘I don’t understand what he’d get out of wavering and then having to lie to be left in peace. But if you’re right, I have to shut it down.’
‘Shut it down if you can.’
At Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology Ester Nilsson had studied technical physics and later philosophy. Among the students, there was a disproportionate number of orienteerers compared with the general population, but by that time, she’d given up the sport. It happened abruptly. She was a goal-oriented orienteerer until the Christmas of her eighteenth year when she unlaced her shoes and never returned to the forest. This decisive break came on Christmas Eve when she was at home watching a television documentary about Georg Henrik von Wright and heard him describe something called ‘the problem of induction’; that we can’t say anything about the world with certainty using observational data alone. She hadn’t known it was so complicated to determine what knowledge was, but the insight made her body tingle as the world suddenly spread out before her, waiting to be discovered. She’d hardly anticipated that the problem of induction would come to fill her days from then on. She had been lazing on the sofa wearing her exercise clothes with the TV on when the programme started and had no desire to go out into the dark, her drive to train had been waning; she told herself she would only watch the programme for a little while, but stayed put until the end an hour and a half later and skipped her training session that day and the next because she was on the hunt for a library that was open over the holidays. The problem of induction was fascinating, but something else that Wright had said caused her to make this decision. He’d talked about sitting on his own in concentrated thought for at least three hours a day. Roughly the time an elite athlete spent training. It dawned on Ester Nilsson that the brain’s abilities did not stem from brilliance, an innate unattainable distinction, but from the same source as the body’s abilities: practice and more practice, toil, effort, always pushing a little harder. Everything could be improved upon and drilled.
She realized that she had to make a choice while there was still time.
Since that day she’d spent her time and energy on intellectual work in order to understand the world. Included in this were romantic projects that had occupied her for years. Only on the surface did these appear wasteful, directionless and like a deviation from her cerebral activities.
She earned a decent living with her intellectual offerings. The money went on books and telephone bills. It had been a while since the Twingo had inspired a romantic excursion, so she was mainly using it to shuttle friends to Ikea. Other than that, she only drove it when it needed to be re-parked ahead of street cleaning days.
Nothing really interested her apart from what was consuming her with destr
uctive force. A month had passed since their last conversation when she, on a day when the desolation was worse than usual, had called Olof to ask how he was doing. He was fine, and her? She was fine, too, she lied so as not to pressure him or seem demanding. And it helped, because they set another date for her to come and see his play.
On that date, she drove to Norrköping from Arvika in Värmland where she’d held a lecture for high-school students about writing anti-lyrical poetry. Her heart was not jubilant, but it was relatively light. More than four and a half months had passed without them having seen each other. She feared nothing for she expected nothing. See him on stage, have a chat after, re-establish contact: that was all she saw before her. It would have to do for now.
When she arrived at the theatre after hours in the car, she went to the ladies’ in the foyer, splashed some water on her face and armpits, changed out of her wool sweater and into a blouse and jacket. Then she took a lap round the theatre to have a look. The walls were golden and the chairs a dark red plush. The play was about a century-old bourgeoisie and its preoccupation with honour and glory; she wasn’t familiar with the playwright’s work. Olof’s role was one of the larger ones. Ester didn’t take her eyes off him during the performance, which lasted an hour and a half without an interval.
They’d agreed to meet afterwards at the stage door. Ester waited for him in the quivering light of a crescent moon. She was nervous. And then he came walking towards her in that laid-back way of his, as though retreating from every attack the world might launch at him, while emanating an air of indifference.
That old devotion dug its claws into her heart, but Olof was less reverential.
‘Hey,’ he said, his mocking smile materializing through the dark, the smile that said Ester Nilsson was a funny sort for having driven all the way to Norrköping just to see him for a little while.
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