Hi Ebba. I don’t know if you know, but I don’t think you do. Olof and I have been having a relationship for over three years, taking longer and shorter breaks. The last time we were together was on Sunday a week ago. I love him but the situation is difficult and undignified for the three of us. I’m sorry it turned out this way. / Ester Nilsson
Exhausted, she slumped in the armchair; the wife’s phone was beeping, she was picking it up, reading the message, rereading, reading it a third time slack-jawed, calling Olof in shock, enraged but not yet invaded by the despair that was to come, that was to begin its slow hollowing out and would never quite disappear.
As for Ester, she called Elin and asked if she could spend the evening at her place.
‘Now things can finally start happening,’ said Elin.
‘I’m scared to death of what’s next, of what I’ve done.’
‘I get that. But there’s nothing you can do right now. Come over as soon as you can. I’m cooking.’
‘I want wheat . . . and sugar.’
‘And for that very reason, you’re not getting any. It’s chicken stir fry with spring onions and ginger tonight. You’re going to have real food. You don’t need to comfort yourself any more. You’ve set yourself free and that’s excellent! Now, hurry over!’
The warmth in her friend’s words cheered her up, but the freedom Elin had described sounded gruesome. She was on her way to the subway towards Alvik where Elin lived with husband and child when a text from Olof arrived. Forty minutes had passed. The message was brief and read in its entirety: ‘PIG!!!’
Ebba’s call had probably reached him on the train to Gävle, where he was returning before the start of the working week. Because he was surrounded by people he couldn’t express his denial as brutally as he wished – the company of strangers called for a measure of consideration.
Ester had reached Thorildsplan by the time the next instalment of Olof and the wife’s conversation was transmitted. Now the wife was writing, not as brief a message but still sententious, and dripping with sarcasm besides:
‘Would’ve been quite a tight schedule on Sunday . . . but sure!’
Ester saw that Olof’s strategy, after three or thirty years, was flat-out denial. And the wife was trying to trust him. Clearly he was thinking that if only he could refute one fact, namely that of their carnal encounter a week ago, he could cast doubt over the whole story.
Ester replied to the wife’s message in the spirit of objectivity from which she had decided never to stray.
‘After rehearsal on Sunday. Between seven thirty and twenty to. After which I gave him a lift home to Bondegatan. He should have walked in the door at exactly five to eight.’
At Elin’s, over food and wine, they examined the matter methodically and from various angles.
‘This was bound to happen,’ Elin said. ‘You’ve been on hold for too long. If you still want him, which I hope you soon won’t, you have to find out what happens to your love when it’s exposed to truth and light.’
‘He won’t want to see me after this. It’s over.’
Elin looked into the darkness outside and seemed to be wondering whether or not she should speak her mind.
‘It would be best if it was over inside you, too.’
‘Yes. That would be good.’
‘Unfortunately, Ester, Olof might be getting a kick out of the sneaking itself.’
‘I know.’
‘So, you’ve got what you want. Except it means you and Olof can’t see each other again, and now you have to contend with the part of your relationship that won’t fade. You might be doomed to never being together. You have to find out whether or not that is true.’
‘There are indications that this might be the case. But I don’t understand.’
‘The only way for an unfree person to be free is to keep their true self hidden.’
‘Maybe I should go far, far away for six months and throw away my phone.’
‘But you’d still know his number by heart.’
‘Yeah. Landline and mobile. But what if I get rid of my phone?’
‘Then you’ll buy a new one when the fancy strikes. Or borrow someone else’s.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Going far, far away doesn’t help, we’ve known that for ever.’
‘Nothing helps.’
‘Actually, doing what you did today helps.’
Another text arrived from Ebba. She had changed tack but was still on the offensive. Ester read aloud: ‘“You speak of indignity and yet you do this. Hoping for catastrophe. How dignified is that?”’
Elin shook her head.
Another five minutes went by before Olof called.
‘Should I answer it?’
‘If you want a scolding.’
The ringing faded away, no message was left.
‘We’ll see how time treats those two,’ Elin said.
Ester felt how hope grabbed hold of those statements against her will, filling every space inside her. Perhaps it was but the hope for redress. Another half-hour passed; Olof called again. It was eleven o’clock. Many were the lonely nights over the past years when Ester would have done anything to make him reach out with the eagerness he had shown in these past hours.
‘Well, now it suits him to get in touch,’ Elin said.
‘Do you think he’s angry?’
‘We can be sure of it.’
If Ester had been alone, she would have answered. The wish to hear what he was thinking and to appeal for understanding would have been too strong.
‘Isn’t there any other alternative to him being angry?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think he hates me?’
‘He does right now.’
‘This feels awful.’
‘It will pass.’
‘Or not,’ said Ester.
‘Or not,’ said Elin.
‘We just don’t know how it will turn out. I took a gamble,’ Ester reeled off as if she were reading from a book.
‘A necessary gamble.’
‘I can’t stand not having any control over the outcome.’
‘Who knows how anything will ever turn out? The only difference is that now you’ve taken the initiative you’ve torn it from his hands. For the first time since you two started, you’re the one calling the shots.’
‘It’s going to be a frightful winter and spring,’ Ester said.
‘Time is your friend. Whatever the outcome, time is your friend.’
‘I’m so tired of time. So tired of waiting.’
‘But you’ve also been in the upper stratosphere of emotion, you’ve had moments of unsurpassed joy and intensity. How many of us have ever had that kind of experience, do you think?’
‘Most people.’
‘No, no way. Time is on your side however it goes with Olof.’
Under a celestial sparkle, Ester arrived home late at night and turned on her computer out of habit. There were two emails from Olof, each written right after the unanswered phone calls. The first was brief: ‘You’re pleased with yourself, aren’t you, having destroyed my life. You are in fact the most disgusting person I’ve ever met.’
The other was longer and less coherent. It was about how much he loved his wife and that Ester had to be out of her mind to think that he’d ever been interested in her. It began with him saying that ‘now’ he’d ‘read up on stalking and stalkers’ (This evening? Ester wondered, ever faithful to people’s will to truth) and had ‘spoken to his friends about it’. And so he’d come to understand that this was the condition from which she suffered.
So she was his stalker. She’d anticipated a lot, but her imagination hadn’t stretched to a fantasy this bizarre. Olof as Ester’s innocent victim – an honourable, hard-working husband who’d spent years being stalked by a madwoman, a crazy poet. This was the story he’d settled on. The email contained many more epithets. Ester wasn’t only a stalker but also ‘psychotic, psychopathic and a crazy cunt’.
She read it and read it again with an almost bemused distance. This was more dishonesty and charlatanry than she thought was possible to muster for even such a profoundly divided person.
The world around her seemed to be asleep. The darkness outside was mighty. How often had she sat in this chair by this computer in a darkness this dense seeking statistics on how common divorce was in married couples where one partner was unfaithful and how long it usually took. She had sought probabilities and empirical evidence in which she could lay her unhappiness to rest.
Now she was a block of ice. What Olof had written was too wretched for it to cause her much pain. But in spite of the serious allegations and uxoriousness, his tone was now askew. In the middle of this catastrophe, it was as though he didn’t feel what he was writing, but was figuring out which feelings he should be feeling. Here and there a coaxing turn crept in with the spite, as though he was incapable of not enticing and intimating as he pushed her away. In the middle of a tirade, he exclaimed: ‘I thought you were a humanist!’ and ‘I would never have thought this of you.’
Ester read the email one more time and noted that the word ‘crazy’ was redundant after the previous three words (psychotic, psychopath, and stalker), but for a change Olof apparently wanted to delimitate. Maybe he liked the alliteration of ‘crazy cunt’. If nothing else, this was a tried and tested epithet for women against whom one needed to invoke antipathy, and perhaps the email wasn’t for her, but was a receipt of his innocence, to be shown to anyone who needed convincing.
One month passed. More messages of the same character arrived from Olof and the wife. They consisted of psychological diagnoses, denials and belittlement. Then it quietened down.
Ester considered disavowal as a phenomenon. If disavowal weren’t so human and common then it wouldn’t constitute one of the pillars of the earliest Christian myths, she thought. This made Olof’s actions less grotesque. She wanted to avoid passing judgement on him, she who wanted to share her life with a man who was capable of such a thing. As long as confession was impossible, for reasons that were unknown to her, he was forced into disavowal, and with disavowal it had to follow that Ester was nuts. No other alternatives were offered. This had a logical consistency. What was hard to understand was why the association with Ester was so shameful, and how a marriage he’d handled so carelessly could be so important. But this was nothing other than her eternal question loop.
She’d heard that there’d been a few rounds of Olof’s wife leaving him and coming back. One frozen night in February six weeks after the incident Ester was at the pub with some dear friends after a reading of Charles Reznikoff’s poetry at a small publishing house in a basement on Linnégatan. The pub happened to be the one on Kommendörsgatan where she and her ex-lover Hugo Rask had briefly been regulars a long time ago. The party of four had just been given their menus when Olof’s ringtone began to play, the one she’d assigned to him and him alone and that accompanied his name and number. She still hadn’t got around to deleting it. Surprised, overexcited and curious as to what he could possibly want, she excused herself and went out on the snowy pavement to answer. The location meant nothing to her any more other than as the fading memory of a street corner that used to make her pulse race. Olof Sten, on the other hand, still meant far too much to her. She answered by stating her full name and waited for him to announce his errand.
‘Why’d you do it?!’ he screamed.
The question surprised her, the answer should have been obvious, but it also elated her, for it implied that he didn’t believe any of the things he’d accused her of being. It was important to her that she and Olof preserve the truth in their hearts, that the disavowal was not inside him. With each passing day, it had felt all the more humiliating.
‘There a few ways to answer that question,’ she said. ‘Various levels of answers. Which level are you interested in?’
Olof wasn’t interested in Ester’s levels, and even less in re-encountering her sophisms.
‘Why’d you do it?!’ he repeated using the same monotone scream.
‘Because I’d had enough. And all of my previous methods proved to be useless.’
‘I’ve been very clear about never wanting to make a life with you. I was a victim of my carnal desires.’
‘The only thing you’ve been clear about and a victim of is your ambiguity.’
‘Well, yes, because you’ve nagged me so much.’
‘So you’ve given up on the idea that I’m your stalker?’
Throughout the conversation, she’d been pacing and had carved a path in the slush.
‘You and I have never had a relationship,’ Olof screamed.
Could it be, Ester wondered, could a person’s language centre exclusively be composed of ready-made phrases from the collective factory that was society and history? Olof chose phrases that were a decent fit for the situation, but seemed to have no emotional connection with their meanings. That’s why it could sound the same each time, but grate with the mood and occasion.
‘If we never had a relationship, and you never wanted to be with me, and I’m your deranged stalker, does that mean that I raped you each of those times we slept together?’
Olof deliberated in silence.
‘Yes. I would say that.’
‘You would say that.’
‘I would. It must be so.’
The pub cast its cosy glow on the passers-by. From inside, Ester’s friends were giving her wondering looks. She signalled to them that everything was OK.
‘And what does that make you, Olof? Year after year, you asked a lunatic who was stalking you to come to your home and travel around Sweden to see you, all to have the pleasure of being raped by her. Regular as clockwork you visited the madwoman who was harassing you at her home, savoured her dinners, conversation and caresses, eagerly undressed in front of her and let your body be embraced. After the dinners and conversations, you were raped and stayed until morning when you were raped anew only to ask for a lift home from the very same lunatic. And when you, shortly after Midsummer each year, managed to free yourself from this psychotic rapist you made sure your “intellectual fellowship”, as you called it, continued. You called her in the middle of the night sometimes just to have a chat about this or that, and you kept praising her company. You scheduled dates, directed her plays, fixed and arranged and carried on. Olof, I don’t think you should wait. You have a duty to put yourself at the disposal of researchers, not just in psychology, but in sexology, sociology and gender studies, too! There must be very few people who have praised sexual congress in rape as you have, and few who have expressed such a degree of appreciation for time spent with a crazy person, their stalker besides. It must be unique the world over.’
Olof listened, said nothing, did not hang up. Ester got the impression he was enjoying this, as he had always enjoyed it when Ester schooled him. Like an obedient dog, tone and steadfastness meant everything, the words hardly mattered. Perhaps this explained all that seemed unresolved between them. Ester Nilsson with her precise relationship to language had fallen in love with a man for whom words were only variations of sounds; whereas she strove for the precise verbal representation of each event, Olof used sound pictures and compound words that he’d learned fitted together. In spite of all this, she still had that feeling about cogs.
‘There’s one thing I’ve been wondering,’ she said, ‘and that I’m curious to know if your wife asked you about when you lied to her and disgraced me. Why didn’t you call the police if you, for several years, had a stalker on your heels? Is it because you wanted to direct the lunatic’s plays first? Just one more production, you thought, then I’ll call the police and tell them I’m being stalked by the playwright I’m collaborating with.’
Olof muttered, neither troubled nor ill at ease, but interested and half-tickled.
‘Doesn’t Ebba wonder why you never, during all these years, told her about your difficult situation?’
‘She knows
I’m scared to death of you. That’s why I didn’t say anything.’
‘You’re what?’
‘Scared to death.’
‘Scared to death? I would be too if I were dishing up your lousy lies. Scared to death of people thinking I have a stunted brain.’
‘You’ve destroyed my life.’
His tone was probing, as if he were testing the thought. He said his lines with greater ease. The longer the conversation, the more it sounded like he was partaking in a simple seminar where different stances were being assumed for the sake of argument. No, not a seminar, it was role play, of course.
‘Olof, why did you call me tonight?’
‘To tell you I want nothing to do with you.’
Ester burst into laughter, in the true sense of the phrase, for her laughter was like those thousand splinters of unbreakable glass, which breaks nonetheless when put under certain strain.
‘You know, it is exactly this habit of yours to call me to say that you don’t want anything to do with me when that was made clear a long time ago, that makes it tempting to believe that it is contact you want. You call me to say that you don’t want to talk on the phone with me. You sleep with me to show your indifference to my body. You eat dinner with me so you can tell me you’re not really hungry.’
‘Ebba left me.’
‘She’ll come back.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Take it easy, Ebba won’t be able to live without you for very long. If she could, she would have left your meagre, mendacious company just as I’d have given up on your meagre, mendacious company had I been able to. Sit tight, Olof, your wife will return to you. People get stuck with each other.’
‘Only you would want to live in your world of truth, Ester Nilsson. Have you considered the tyranny of absolute transparency?’
‘Yes, Olof Sten, I’ve thought about that much more than you. But a little of it can be good, an ounce in any case. Constant lies and manipulation are tyrannical, too.’
Ester prepared to hang up. She was exhausted. Most of all she wanted to go home, but she couldn’t just leave her friends. She could see they’d already eaten most of their meals. Then Olof said, as if nothing of what had happened had happened, as if nothing that had been said during this conversation had been said, as if the halves of his brain didn’t correspond and had no idea of what the other part was doing or saying.
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