Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  There were also a number of small oak and mahogany tables, some with tops made of a yellowish marble from Africa, called giallo antico, according to Henry. And on the tables stood scores of small plaster busts and porcelain statues, as well as rocks and unknown minerals that the dandy had collected during his feverish travels around the globe.

  He was a globetrotter, you see, a cosmopolitan with weighty dignity, and his travelling trunks up in the attic were covered with decals from every little backwater in the world, any place that could offer a decent bar and a British country club. In reality he was the permanent secretary for the society of the WWW – Well-travelled, Well-read, Well-heeled – a small, jocular club of older, cultivated gentlemen who played billiards and cards and drank whisky.

  ‘I’m especially proud of this television,’ said Henry, patting an unwieldy set with doors that could be closed in front. ‘Grandfather was one of the very first to have a TV. We would make a pilgrimage over here on Saturday nights to witness the miracle. He never got a new one. It still works perfectly, though only on the state channel, One. But that doesn’t matter. I’ve never been interested in the other channels.’

  The rest of the flat was decorated in the same heavy, dull, dark style in which turn-of-the-century wallpaper, Biedermeier chairs, functional lamps made of stainless steel, Persian rugs and huge pieces of furniture made of walnut and rattan and leather swallowed up the sunlight coming through the windows. Anyone who lived here needed no predisposition to depression. In a mere minute you could dash from room to room and draw the thick curtains to create your own night-time at any hour of the day, any season of the year. Henry said that it sometimes made him feel anxious.

  ‘Night exists in this flat as a perpetual possibility,’ he said. ‘All you have to do is draw the curtains and pretend, that’s all that’s required.’

  I remember that he sounded uneasy, uncomfortable.

  Henry mostly made use of his bedroom and the Studio, which was the name of the room with the grand piano. It was an old Malmsjö piano, and the sound was supposedly as fine as that of a Bösendorfer Imperial, or so he assured me. Maybe it was the acoustics that did it. As I mentioned, there was nothing more in there than a couple of pedestals with palms and a sofa with black tassels. The sound could roll around as it pleased.

  I went back to my bedroom and started hanging my clothes in the wardrobe. I made up Göring’s old bed with my own linens and hung up a couple of photographs of myself and my family. I realised that I needed to phone my family and tell them that I had moved.

  The dawn was gentle and indulgent; it rose up over the galvanised roof, and Henry had called in Spinks, who was now sitting on his knee and purring.

  ‘My God,’ said Henry, ‘what a match. There’s going to be a lot of talk from Willis now. He’s met Ali. He went with the club and watched Ali train in the summer. He has his autograph on a shirt in his office. What a lot of harping there’s going to be at the Europa after this.’

  Henry was utterly elated after the Match. It was now mid-September, and we’d gone to the Royal Tennis Hall to watch the televised transmission of the Ali vs Spinks fight. The master had put Spinks, the title-holder, in his place, making use of all the rules of the game. He led off with a jab, kept him at a distance, and picked up point after point the way a magician brings in the applause. There was no shuffling, no rope-a-dope, just pure boxing, a show without tricks. The only secret was practice and expertise.

  I was already completely exhausted from all the preliminary matches and we’d had a couple of beers before the main event, and now, at dawn after the Match, fatigue had given way to sheer desperation. But Henry didn’t seem ever to have heard of exhaustion; he just kept talking and talking.

  ‘Did you see his left hook? I mean, did you really see it? I didn’t. It was just too fast, pure and simple. It’s unbelievable that Spinks could even stay on his feet!’

  ‘No, I didn’t see the left hook,’ I said. ‘But pretty soon I’m going to be seeing stars.’

  ‘There’s going to be a lunar eclipse tonight,’ said Henry. ‘That’s what the Cigar Seller said, at any rate. We’ll have to check it out.’

  ‘Of course we will. But first I need to get some sleep.’

  So on the night after the Match there was a lunar eclipse. When it was properly dark we went up to the attic. It was a big attic with a high ceiling and separate storerooms for each flat. Henry had his own sawhorse in his attic area where we could saw wood.

  A ladder led up to a hatch in the roof, and we climbed up in the light of a torch. Henry opened the hatch and clambered out onto the roof.

  ‘Careful now, my boy,’ he urged me.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m scared of heights.’

  ‘All writers seem to be. My brother, Leo, gets dizzy just looking at a globe. It’s true! He’s ready to pass out at any moment.’

  We climbed up onto the roof and looked at the moon. It seemed eerie and terribly huge. As we sat up there on the roof, shivering, the moon disappeared completely behind the earth’s shadow. Only a faint yellowish-red outline remained, and it was easy to imagine how that sort of natural phenomenon could drive people insane in the past.

  ‘In the past?!’ exclaimed Henry. ‘Isn’t it driving you insane right now?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ I said.

  ‘I think it’s eerie, damned repulsive,’ said Henry, and he began howling when the eclipse was at its worst.

  Henry howled long and loud, just like a real moon-lunatic would sound, while I tried to shush him, but without success. After a while Spinks came padding over to us, peering at Henry in bewilderment and taking several careful steps to the side.

  But it’s true, at any rate, that a lunar eclipse can make anyone a bit anxious. It seems so final and monumental.

  _______

  The autumn got off to a flying start in mid-September, but I was having a hard time getting myself going. I was having big initial problems with the pastiche of The Red Room, and I was already feeling a bit stressed. Franzén, the publisher, rang up now and then to give me a push. True to his word, he had plunked down ten grand on the table, so at least I had money to live on for some time to come.

  Henry did everything in his power to make me feel at home. He kept to his part of the flat most of the day, walking around in dirty overalls and whistling. He was good at whistling in overalls, and that’s why he wore them, or so he claimed. In reality that turned out not to be true at all, but everything in its proper time. More about Henry’s overalls later.

  I tried to install myself in the old dandy’s library, but I couldn’t seem to settle down properly. Henry and I were consciously trying to keep the world at a distance, to lock ourselves in – he had a very clear vision of the two of us as a couple of creative dynamos who needed all manner of peace and quiet in order to generate the vital Art – but the doors were too thin.

  One day in September the police decided to storm the buildings occupied by squatters in the Mullvaden district, and since I had friends there, I went over to watch.

  The police had blocked off Krukmakargatan, which runs the length of the Mullvaden district, and there were cops in every doorway, talking to people who loved cops or hated cops or just wanted to talk.

  Towards evening people began surging forward en masse, pushing against the police barrier. It turned into a real circus. Fire-eaters and troubadours were in charge of the entertainment, reporters trotted about interviewing surly constables and outraged sympathisers collected rubbish and lit a fire. The fire department and mounted police were instantly on the spot, and all of a sudden the whole neighbourhood seemed to be invaded by scores of imitators from King of the Royal Mounted. Horses trampled their way through the seated crowds and hysteria began to spread.

  As I mentioned, it was a chilly evening; autumn had really taken hold. I went up to the flat to have some soup and warm up before the battles later that night. Henry was home, staring at the old TV set. He was watching a programme abo
ut Jean-Paul Sartre, and in a number of scenes they showed the old existentialist at demonstrations. Henry started bragging about Paris in ’68, when he personally saw Sartre on the street. He had even asked the Oracle a question.

  ‘Don’t you want to come over to Mullvaden instead?’ I asked him.

  ‘Are they still trying to clear them out?’

  ‘It’s a damn circus with tons of cops and fakirs. Don’t you want to come along?’

  ‘I’ve had enough of cops.’

  ‘Are you a coward?’

  ‘A coward? Me?’

  ‘That’s what it seems like,’ I said and went out to the hall to bundle up in a couple of layers of warm clothes. ‘It’s obvious that we have to support the occupation,’ I shouted towards the sitting room where Henry was slouched in front of Sartre.

  ‘You go ahead and take care of the practical side; I’ll look out for the theoretical,’ he muttered sullenly, because he didn’t like being accused of cowardice. Though he’d never be much of a theorist.

  So I went back to the Mullvaden district just as King of the Royal Mounted launched a raid on the peacefully seated crowds, and a girl I knew had a tooth kicked out by an agitated gelding. A horse’s hoof smashed right through the guitar belonging to a troubadour, who went totally berserk and started jabbing at the horse’s arse with the splinters that remained of his dear old Goya guitar. The crowd surged across the street, bodies moving between the legs of the horses, police whips cracking, batons flailing. It was starting to look like an actual riot. Flashbulbs went off on all the cameras. The reporters were licking their lips.

  After several minor skirmishes, the situation returned to the status quo. The police went back to their positions, and the demonstrators sat still. The whole neighbourhood reeked of horse droppings.

  And it went on like that, hour after hour, in the long waiting period before the final confrontation, which didn’t happen until much later. In the meantime, the Opposition racked up one point after another. The police could do nothing but stay back. From a moral point of view, the passive resistance was superior.

  I couldn’t help thinking about The Red Room. Olle Montanus was inside one of those occupied buildings, shivering. He was going to live on in my version of The Red Room, or maybe it would be a son, a hunched little lad who is the spitting image of his father. He arrives in the capital from the country to attend his father’s funeral. My pastiche of The Red Room was going to start where Strindberg’s novel ended. It would be 1978–79, and Olle’s boy Kalle Montanus would be lounging inside an occupied flat in the Mullvaden district. That was brilliant! He would be sleeping soundly, that boy, sleeping and dreaming about a better world and not worrying about a thing, until a pimply provincial imbecile from his own home town came storming through the door to wake the idler lying on the sofa. They would recognise each other and start arguing about an old loan. That’s how it would start.

  ‘Tea with rum,’ said someone behind me, giving me a poke in the back. My musings about The Red Room were abruptly cut off, and I turned around to see Henry in full battle attire. ‘Tea with rum,’ he said again, and handed me a thermos cup of the aromatic drink.

  ‘So you came after all!’

  ‘Sartre is so heavy. He’s too damned heavy in the long run. I think I’m actually more the practical type.’

  _______

  We had been diligently practising ‘The Drop Drips’ and several other popular tunes, and we knew our repertoire almost too well. It sounded too professional, not amateurish enough, and Henry feared that we’d deliberately have to mess things up a bit in order to sound truly authentic.

  The day had now arrived for our part in the film. Following concise instructions from Lisa at the film company, we took the train up to Söderhamn one morning, arriving around noon.

  According to Henry, the stars were in our favour. He had read in his horoscope that something great and overwhelming was going to happen that very day. ‘Be careful, because you’re playing with powerful forces.’ That’s what it said, and Henry had interpreted it as unequivocally in his favour.

  A whole new world opened to me: the frantic and glamorous world of film. Henry was a stickler for etiquette, and he saw to it that we were received in a manner befitting the real giants. True to form, he was wearing clothes that made him fit in perfectly with his role, à la naturelle, so to speak. The props department found nothing to add or remove or polish up with regard to his appearance. To top it all off, he had recently gone to the barber and had his hair cut in that boyish style with a parting, which he had sported ever since the early fifties.

  Things were much worse for me. Henry cheerfully left me in the hands of the make-up artist, but first he took her aside and had a minor quarrel with her.

  ‘But I can’t. You know that,’ she kept repeating, while Henry kept insisting and nagging at her until finally she gave in and promised him something. I could only guess what it might be. They had known each other for years.

  The make-up artist was naturally a bit annoyed when she returned to lowly me and my hair. In a matter of minutes she managed to cut my hair down to the very beginning of the sixties, before the Beatles got rich and hairdressers got poor.

  After this assault on my head, I had to put on the disgusting grey Terylene trousers, the uncomfortable nylon shirt and string vest, the nappa tie and the pointy shoes that I had dreaded right from the start. But if you’re in a film, that’s what you do. Some actors starve themselves for weeks to play a lean character. Some directors torture their actors, alternately criticising them and flattering them to achieve just the right effect. A little hardship was all part of the job. Movie stars didn’t just sit in directors’ chairs with their names printed in gold on the back, drinking champagne. Garbo was probably the only one who slipped out of a cab, perfectly dressed and made-up just before the clapperboard signalled the start of a scene. At least that’s what Birger at the Furniture Man shop claimed, and he was a Garbo aficionado. But more about that later.

  ‘Sharp!’ said Henry about my new look. ‘You’re punk. Ask them if you can keep those duds. You look really with it.’

  Henry moved around the studio as if he’d never done anything else, conversing with the film-makers, the lighting crew, the technicians, and all the other extras, whose family he had belonged to for so many years. Everyone respected him, and they laughed and nodded their heads as soon as he approached.

  ‘So here’s Klasa, my new discovery. A real natural talent,’ he said, pushing me in front of the director, whose name was Gordon and who proved to be disappointing. He didn’t match my expectations at all. I’ve always imagined directors as egocentric demons who whip and abuse their co-workers. But this Gordon was a totally different type, and presumably of the new school. Gordon padded around whispering, and he seemed ashamed of the fact that it was his insignificant self who happened to be in charge of the whole show. He had a hesitant, awkward and excessively sweaty handshake, and he thought I would be perfect.

  ‘You, you, you … look exactly like one of my childhood friends,’ he said. ‘They, this … this film is, in a way, damned personal, you know. I need to get, get hold of this piece of myself,’ he went on until someone else demanded his attention.

  Henry seemed to share my opinion of Gordon, but we didn’t let on and roamed about the old auditorium, checking out the girls. This particular scene was supposed to depict preparations for a school dance, with the atmosphere a bit agitated and nervous. Nervousness and anticipation were precisely the words for the mood that Gordon was spreading around him. No one knew anything, and if Lisa hadn’t been the type of person she was, the film would undoubtedly never have been made.

  After nearly four hours of waiting and whispering, it was time for the first take. The stars, professionals who were the box office draw, were not in the least bit annoyed. They were experienced actors who knew that making a film means waiting. One of my favourite actors was playing the principal of the school. He emerged from his
dressing room with great dignity. Everybody fell silent in his presence and lowered their eyes. And even though he was downright repulsive in his sovereignty, people flocked to him as if to a dangerous precipice that they simply couldn’t resist peering over.

  Gordon whispered a few instructions, moving everyone into the proper groupings, and Henry and I took our places on the stage where we were supposed to pretend to practise ‘The Drop Drips’ and other obsolete hits.

  The first take was a disaster. Henry and I performed perfectly, but the dress of the young leading actress flipped up in the back. Gordon thought it was actually a damn fine effect, but the skirt was a bit crooked. After about five more takes of this scene, the dress finally sat the way it should.

  ‘I think it’s a wrap, by God,’ said Gordon, and so the whole thing was over.

  I hadn’t even really got into the mood yet. We’d been practising for weeks, after all, and then the scene took only a paltry few minutes.

  ‘So that’s the life of an extra,’ said Henry. ‘Now we’ll go and pick up our wages.’

  We collected our wages from a harried factotum and discovered that our modest contribution added up to a couple of thousand kronor.

  ‘And half the scene will end up getting cut. In the best case we’ll end up flickering past like a couple of phantoms in the background. But that’s how it is. You have to be humble if you’re an extra. You’re there, but you’re invisible.’

  ‘Non videre sed esse,’ I said.

  Henry gave a start and looked at me with incomprehension. Then he launched into a monologue about the innermost being of an extra, which was something incredibly remarkable. It’s often some extra or a stupid little minor role that you remember most from a film. There was something magnificent about that, in Henry’s opinion, and he wondered if he ever ought to accept a real role. He was truly thriving in the background. It was there that he could create music so beautiful that it was destructive.