She knew imagery and symbolism were formidable tools, but she didn’t see the point in using them to illuminate the beauty and strength of a tragic saga. If they could have a real relationship, why resort to poetics? All he had to do was unshackle himself and take that step. Dreaming and symbolism were superfluous; everything they might want together was within reach. But Olof didn’t share this view, so the fantasy of the castle was his gift to her.
‘Should we go to Skansen?’ asked Olof and stood up before Ester was clear over his intentions of seeing her over the summer.
Embracing each other, they wandered around Skansen. They kissed in front of the seals. By the flamingos, Olof took out the camera his children had given him for his birthday, and Ester asked him to take a picture of them. Olof said no, he couldn’t have Ester on his camera. They rested on a bench. Olof had an ice cream, Ester was watching her weight. Then they took the 47 to Norrmalmstorg. There they changed buses and parted at Slussen. Ester had thought they’d spend all evening and all night together now that they had the chance, but Olof had to clean the apartment. She offered to help. He said he wanted to be on his own. She was about to say that she could go with him and be there while he was being on his own, but held her tongue at the last second and returned home to disharmony’s dark little dwelling.
At ten the next morning Olof called, wanting to see her again. So they went for a walk in Hellas and dipped their feet in the cold water, spent the day, evening and night together. The next day was the same, as was the next, they didn’t let the other out of sight. On one of these evenings when they were sitting at Olof’s eating fettuccine with a mushroom and Bolognese sauce for dinner, he dealt her a blow:
‘I don’t know why you carry on as you do, Ester. With married men. Why do you allow yourself to be satisfied with so little? You can’t get what you want if they’re married.’
Again, his statement was performative, an act in itself. His choice of words could be relatively arbitrary, as long as they worked to create distance. She shouldn’t be getting any ideas, the speech act said, just because they’d spent a number of close, tender days together and he’d shown his dependence on her.
‘I don’t carry on with married men,’ Ester said dully. ‘But to find the men who interest me I cast the net as wide as possible.’
‘Married men can’t give you what you’re longing for.’
‘You give me a lot of it. When you choose to.’
‘But that’s not enough for you.’
‘Of course not; I want to have a real relationship with the one I love.’
‘But that’s what married men can’t give you.’
‘None of the men I’ve chosen have been Catholic.’
The air felt icy this mild summer’s eve. Olof reached for the wine bottle’s neck, stroked it fondly but absently.
‘I just don’t understand why you agree to these terms. You’re worth more.’
‘Give me better terms, then.’
‘I have my situation. But there are others.’
‘Others? Do you really not understand me at all?’
Olof cleared their plates and put them on the counter.
‘This is wrong,’ he said, his back to her. ‘I’m treating you unjustly.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m taking advantage of your feelings for me.’
Ester corrected him; she thought she detected a flaw in his thinking:
‘But you can’t take advantage of me, can you? We love each other. So you’re not taking advantage. Taking advantage means that even though you don’t feel anything, you draw benefit from the other’s feelings.’
It didn’t occur to her that this might be what he was admitting; it didn’t occur to her because it was illogical. Why would he expose himself to risk and pain if he didn’t love her? It didn’t add up. Thus, he could not be said to be taking advantage of her.
Olof looked out over the rooftops, gazing into the distance. When he didn’t confirm her assertion, but appeared to be holding fast to his own, Ester went to the hall and put on her shoes and her outerwear.
‘Are you leaving?’
‘Yes. Of course. I can’t stay here and allow you to keep taking advantage of me.’
‘But you could stay the night.’
Who would reproach Esther for not losing faith and hope under these conditions? There could only be one reason for him not ending it, even though he knew he should: she was the woman for him. Ester Nilsson had a little too much confidence in a person’s internal stability and constancy to be able to orienteer in this world.
They spent this night and the next together. Recently they’d been spending more consecutive nights together than ever before. After all that had happened, shouldn’t it mean something? And when they were lying close together, Olof whispered:
‘Put your arm like this instead, so we can be even closer.’
Even closer? They were as close as could be.
‘I can’t get my head around it,’ he said. ‘We meet by chance at a read-through and now we’re lying here after all these months. It’s unbelievable.’
No, when a beloved whispers such words, who can blame Ester for her eternal deductions and conclusions? It was obvious that she was witnessing his resistance crack. This was exactly as contradictory it seemed. The fear of life-changing love made you keep it at arm’s length until you couldn’t any more. Isn’t this what she’d been reading and hearing everywhere?
‘Each time it’s like meeting for the first time,’ he went on. ‘My nerves are always wracked before our dates.’
He said her name and touched her cheeks, pushing himself inside her with a deep breath, moving carefully while his clear eyes met hers, free from intrigue and foul play. And Ester believed that in this moment, they had stumbled past the point of no return. This was it. Just one more summer.
The day was upon them when Olof was to leave and not return until the autumn. They hadn’t arranged to see each other, but Ester couldn’t imagine not seeing Olof one last time, so in the morning she walked to the Nature Company on Kungsgatan and bought hiking gear to the tune of a thousand kronor. Olof had mentioned that he’d be going hiking at the end of August with an old friend from drama school and had asked Ester for tips on how best to prepare. So he could practise during the summer’s test hikes in Kullaberg, she bought him a cup, compass, map, special socks, belt, water bottle, a book about Abisko, where he was going, and trekking food. With all of this in a large plastic bag, she went over to his place. From the street, she called to ask if she could come up and say goodbye. With pounding dread, she ascended four flights in the cool stairwell; he’d sounded gruff on the phone.
And it was indeed the day of recoil. Olof was in a foul mood, immediately apparent in how he opened the door, just a close-fisted crack that she had to widen herself, and then she was greeted with his back as he made his way to the other room where he was still packing. Her kiss landed on his cheek because he’d turned his face away.
As she handed him his presents, she could tell that buying them and coming here today had been a mistake. Troubled, Olof merely glanced at the gifts.
‘How sweet of you,’ he said and set aside the bag.
He went back to his luggage, added a pair of jeans, a linen blazer and the polished loafers he’d worn in the winter when he’d visited her. He responded to her silence with that irate, sardonic look, and she sensed the source of his irritation: the demands made by her sheer presence, her insistent claims and lofty principles, her singular difficultness.
‘What are you up to today?’ Olof asked.
‘This. Saying goodbye before the summer.’
The precision of his distancing methods was astounding. Experts should be flocking to him, Ester thought – psychologists, sociologists, economists and politicians – to study the ur-form of ambivalence and the perfect technique for rejecting someone while holding on to them, never letting them go and never letting them in. Olof had perfect command o
f it; it had to be natural, for he was hardly capable of devising these methods himself or perceptive enough to have studied others in order to copy their methods. His techniques had to be an evolutionary by-product of something else that was steadily and systematically working towards unknown goals inside him.
What were the goals? That was the question. What did he want to achieve with his behaviour? Ester thought he wanted to love, but didn’t dare.
All of Olof’s gestures and statements on this, their final day, were intended to tear them asunder. Ester was burning in the flames of her own misfortune and yet wanted to spend these final hours with him.
He rummaged through his things. And like a child who finally has a friend over, he offered Ester whatever he was finding in drawers and hiding places: small pieces of jewellery, stones, souvenirs, books.
Once he’d told her that he had a hard time with partings and goodbyes. Maybe that’s why he was so uneasy today, she thought. He didn’t want to be apart, didn’t want to travel, but wanted to keep her here with him by giving her his things.
Ester joined Olof, who was taking a break on the bed, and held him. He refused her caresses but asked her to accompany him to the train. First he’d visit Ebba in Borlänge for a few days and then he’d weave his way through the countryside towards north-west Skåne.
They took the number 3 bus to Tegelbacken. As it turned towards Katarinavägen, right where Fjällgatan opens up and Stockholm’s splendour shines for all to see, Olof looked at Ester and said:
‘So what’s your summer going to be like?’
Ester froze in the heat. The question was full of violence. Maybe he was being cruel because she’d been so puppyish with her hiking gifts and her yapping. She saw the mechanisms in play yet kept on yapping, because she wanted to break through to another level, one where they were true to each other and thoughtful, where neither was dog nor master. She wanted to act as if they were already there even though this had never worked.
‘My summer will be filled with longing,’ she said.
‘But you have tons of friends. You can see them.’
I’m not going to reply, Ester thought. I’m going to get off at Slussen and find someone who can prescribe me a pill that will erase everything my heart has ever felt and everything stored in my brain. She looked out of the window. Gröna Lund was in action. Olof had visited the amusement park once with a young woman he was courting. Since he’d recounted the episode, Gröna Lund had pained Ester.
They got off at Tegelbacken and walked to Central Station. Olof’s long strides carried him ahead of her, and he disappeared into Pressbyrån’s kiosk in the main hall without checking to see if Ester was with him, so she went to the top of his platform. When he turned up with his evening paper, drink in hand, he said:
‘People might see us.’
‘Which people?’
‘I feel uncomfortable being here with you.’
‘Then just bloody stop feeling uncomfortable! Or don’t ask me to come with you to the train in the first place.’
With instant regret, he took her hand.
‘Be well, Ester. Talk to you later.’
He disappeared into the train. The platform’s chill pushed through her light summer clothes. To reach Klaraberg’s sunny viaduct, she walked along the platform for the trains to Arlanda Airport. When she was on the street, unsure of where to go and which of her friends to call to ease her sorrow, a text arrived. Olof wrote: ‘This is tough for me, too. Hugs, O.’
Three minutes passed. He must have written it as soon as he’d sat down. He didn’t usually write ‘hugs’. Olof, she thought, was like faulty electrical wiring running through her life. Shocking her each time she brushed against him, but also the source of her energy. She answered warmly and wished him a lovely summer – her eternal trust in good deeds begetting good deeds, that the means and the end were one and the same, that the only way to encourage decency was by being decent.
Ester told her friends she’d be spending Midsummer with her mother. She told her mother she’d be spending it with friends, so her mother wouldn’t worry about her well-being. On Midsummer’s Eve she was home alone, finding fellowship only with the television. On Midsummer Day, she read a book, and continued to ignore the growing chaos of her apartment. On the Sunday she travelled to Hellasgården and traced the routes she usually took with Olof.
On the Monday, right after the lunchtime news, a text arrived from Olof, ending their relationship. The reasons he gave were their many fights and her constant dissatisfaction, as well as feeling like a scoundrel around his wife.
‘I can’t take it any more,’ he wrote.
Disappointment is a wasteland, physical devastation, burned-out vigour where all that remains is a singed smell. As she walked scores and scores of kilometres through Stockholm in the months that followed, Ester Nilsson wished for mankind’s demise, in particular the demise of Ebba Silfversköld.
Summer was made for families with old inherited mansions in the archipelago and half-timbered houses by the sea, where the owners sat on the veranda slowly destroying their livers. It was tedium in the guise of relaxation and the anticipation of life beginning again in autumn. Summer was what had to be endured. And there was something about heat that Ester couldn’t stand.
One day in mid-July she walked from Kungsholmen all the way to the gardens of Rosendal. There she bought a jar of posh jam and pale sourdough bread as a treat before continuing to Djurgården, sweating, and finding the bag rather cumbersome to carry. She should’ve bought the bread and jam on the way back, she shouldn’t have bought them at all. Treating yourself didn’t help; there was no help for the abandoned. Love’s foundations must be excised at a cellular level, she thought.
In a conversation with Elin, she dwelled on Olof’s low self-esteem as a reason for what had transpired, the esteem that had been destroyed in childhood, and for which Ester had to show understanding when faced with his whims and fancies because he pushed her away when he was most desirous and rejected her when he was most afraid of approaching wonder. Elin listened and interpreted along with her. But in the end she said it might be simpler than all this: Ester might just have met a real shit.
It was like being filled with cement.
After an hour, Ester called Elin and said that maybe it was that simple, maybe Elin was right, but she asked her to please not use that word again, because all that would happen if she did was that Ester would withdraw from her.
‘I understand,’ said Elin. ‘There are always reasons why we end up the way we do and anyway, we know that no one is only one thing.’
‘Thank you, dear Elin. Yes, that’s precisely what we know.’
Weeks passed. The gulls screeched outside the windows as she lay in bed wondering how Olof could choose Ebba Silfversköld over her. She offered something completely different to Ebba’s hollow quips and nervy laughter. She knew Olof knew this, and such knowledge could unleash anxiety so deep it made you want to be rid of the problem and the decision. Her next thought was a given: she should reach out to Olof to see if he was satisfied with the break-up. If he was, she’d never bother him again. However, she thought it unlikely considering how close they’d been in the previous weeks, how he’d sought her out, needed her, how he’d caressed her and spoken to her about their exceptionalism, and whispered that it all was unbelievable. Breaking up after these gestures of love suggested a strain so great that the decision could only have been made in haste. But if he’d changed his mind, he’d never dare tell her. He’d rather spend the rest of his life regretting than risk giving her the upper hand. So, she’d have to dare. Pride would not be allowed to determine their future. She, with her strength, had to take it upon herself to be vulnerable and risk making a fool of herself.
As always in the space between their encounters, the heart forgot all the negatives that the mind still recalled.
So after the summer, Ester rang Olof. He sounded happy about it, grateful even. She began to rush and rumb
le inside, imagining that the divorce had taken place over the summer. He asked how she was doing. She said she was well, and the summer was good, she’s been in the archipelago, which she had. One cold, rainy day she and Lotta had taken the ferry to Ut Island and had been gone for twelve hours.
With the muted tone he often assumed in moments of intimacy and mutual understanding and that made Ester feel chosen and close, Olof said:
‘It was good of you to call.’
She asked if she could invite him for lunch at the Opera Bar. She’d received an award the week before to write a book about the intellectual history of subjectivism and its political roots, but it could stretch to buying Olof lunch, too.
‘It was in the terms and conditions. Write a book and invite Olof Sten to lunch.’
His laugh was warm; he wanted to meet the very next day.
At five to one, Ester arrived at Kungsträdgården wearing a new autumn skirt and new patterned tights. The graphite blouse was also new and it matched the skirt. It was late August, too hot for tights and too cold for bare legs. But the pattern was nice. Each year, Ester tried to usher in the arrival of autumn by wearing too many layers.
It was an ordinary day. No sun, no cold, and the sky’s white haze had something uningratiating about it. They were to meet at one o’clock. As the delicate clang of St James’s bells began, Ester was at their meeting point, slightly obscured by a tree. She was looking at her legs, wondering if the pattern on the tights wasn’t too much after all.
One minute past the hour, Olof texted to say he’d be five minutes late. Because Olof only made as much effort as his needs and interests demanded, she knew he felt like he’d run out of credit: he didn’t usually let her know if he was going to be five minutes late.
The statistics were in their favour. People got divorced after the summer. And it was just before a divorce that one desperately and abruptly cut out all temptations to show resolve and that what one had was good enough. How many summers could Olof last in this marriage? Maybe it was already broken and that was why he’d been so pleased and sounded so devoted when she’d called.
Acts of Infidelity Page 17