Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  ________

  Henry noticed that something unusual was going on as soon as he came out onto the street. He had quickly thrown on his clothes this Sunday morning so that he could have breakfast with Maud, not waking either Leo or his mother. He didn’t want to be showered with a lot of questions, and he slipped quietly out of the door.

  But there was a strange feeling on the street, and down at the Slussen underground station there was a great throng of people. Entire families were standing on the platform with food hampers, morning newspapers, bags and backpacks. The kids were yelling and shouting, holding footballs and skipping ropes. At first Henry assumed that they were on their way out on their usual Sunday excursions, since he couldn’t even remember when he’d last been up this early on a Sunday morning.

  The train arrived, and the carriage filled up with bellowing people. Henry was pressed into a corner by a smiling old woman who was lugging a good- sized hamper and had four grandchildren with her. ‘We’re leaving in good time,’ said the old woman. ‘Jumping the gun, so to speak,’ she went on, nodding conspiratorially.

  The whole car seemed rampant with Sabbath and conspiracy. Henry couldn’t for the life of him fathom what was going on, what they were so excited about. Mostly he felt sleepy and almost dozed off for real because the train waited at the platform for a long time.

  Finally the train began chugging out onto the bridge towards Gamla Stan at a snail’s pace, and then, suddenly, the starting gun was fired, or the starting signal or whatever it should be called. The whole city started screaming and crying and roaring and whistling, and Henry was instantly wide awake. He didn’t understand what was happening. He stood here gaping like a fool, staring out across Riddarfjärden in astonishment. Every single siren in the whole city was wailing at full blast. Air-raid sirens. They were shrieking of terror and war and black-outs and rationing. A respectable paterfamilias pulled down a window and stuck out his head because the train had now stopped in the centre of the bridge.

  ‘Did they wake you with the phone alarm?’ asked the old woman with the food hamper.

  ‘Phone alarm?’ said Henry.

  ‘Well, then it must have been the loudspeaker van,’ the old woman guessed, giving him that conspiratorial nod again. Henry was slowly starting to understand what was going on. This was long before the emergence of Henri le boulevardier, the newspaper reader and flaneur, the libertine and bon vivant. Henry had been walking around in a fog of desire and longing for Maud, dreaming his way through his school days, and plinking on the piano until late into the night. He hadn’t really been keeping up with the times, and he hadn’t realised that this particular Sunday was the day of the big evacuation exercise. All of Stockholm – as was intended and planned by the vice-governor and the managers at evacuation headquarters – was supposed to rush pell mell down to the shelters and underground stations and buses in order to evacuate out to the Uppland countryside. It was no longer ‘If War Comes’. War had come. It was already a reality, or at least it was at evacuation headquarters. But the panic and terror of war were not particularly evident among the passengers in the underground carriage; it seemed more like a carnival, a publicity stunt and a free Sunday excursion. People crowded together with their footballs and food hampers and thermos bottles, talking and joking quite amiably.

  When the train rolled into the station at Rådmansgatan, a murmuring passed over the platform and into the carriages. A rumour began spreading that the king, His Majesty King Gustav VI Adolf, and the ambassadors and dark-complexioned princes and princesses, were all on their way. It got even more crowded inside the car, if that were possible. Henry was now pressed into his corner and, gentleman that he was, he was holding the little old woman’s food hamper in his arms. He had noticed that all the men, meaning all the decent fellows, were being helpful and chivalrous towards the women and children, playing the expert and hero and criticising evacuation headquarters for its poor planning. The men were telling preparedness stories, and they all thought that everything was moving too slowly; this would never work if the situation were ever for real.

  ‘The king,’ said the little old woman in amazement, her eyes sparkling. ‘The king …’

  ‘It’s probably just a rumour,’ said Henry.

  ‘I suppose he’s never taken the underground before.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he has,’ said Henry. ‘But I’ve got to get off now,’ he went on, trying to give the food hamper back to the old woman.

  ‘Get off?’ said the woman, amazed again. ‘But this train is going to Hässelby. From there we have to take a bus out into the country.’

  ‘I have to get off at Odenplan,’ said Henry, thinking that Odengatan led up to Lärkstan where Maud lived. He had no intention of going all the way out to Hässelby.

  The door opened and the platform outside was teeming with people who surged forward to get on; no one was getting off. Henry couldn’t move. He tried to wriggle and squirm his way forward, but he was wedged into a vice of evacuated flesh.

  ‘What are you trying to do, kid?’ asked a hero, paterfamilias and the proud owner of a bass voice.

  ‘I want to get off here,’ said Henry calmly.

  ‘Off?!’ said Bass Voice. ‘Dammit, kid, we’re going out to Hässelby and from there we take a bus out to the country. Nobody’s getting off here!’

  Henry was getting desperate. People kept crowding in from the platform, and he couldn’t get off. When he realised that he was simply a prisoner in an evacuation manoeuvre, he took the food hamper back from the old woman and sighed deeply. The only thing he wanted, the only thing he had been thinking about for the last few days, was to see Maud. And just when he wanted to get off this damn train, the whole city had decided to play war, pretending that all of Stockholm had to be evacuated. Henry started laughing. He laughed so hard that sweat ran down his forehead, and the little old woman stared up at him uneasily while Bass Voice stared down at him and shook his head.

  Henry stayed trapped in that carriage all the way out to Hässelby. By then the ‘War’ was in full swing. In silence he had gone through every imaginable swear word, and he was determined to take the first train back. As soon as he stepped out onto the platform, Bass Voice grabbed hold of him.

  ‘Hey kid, could you give me a hand? Do you mind?’ he said, pointing to the handle of an enormous suitcase that he had brought along on the underground.

  ‘What do you have in there?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Clothes, kitchen utensils, essential items,’ said Bass Voice solemnly. ‘I’m doing a test.’

  ‘I see,’ said Henry.

  Bass Voice looked so stern and surly that Henry didn’t dare refuse to help him. Together they carried the heavy, cumbersome suitcase out to the square where scores of buses were waiting, their engines running. Bass Voice gave his wife and three children brief, precise instructions to go left, then right, steering them towards just the right bus. Apparently he liked giving orders. They shoved the suitcase into the luggage compartment of the bus, and Bass Voice exchanged a few words with the driver about the bus, and which particular features were not especially satisfactory. Bass Voice also liked buses.

  ‘Is everybody here?’ he rumbled, checking inside the bus. His whole family replied in unison, ‘Yes!’ All the other families immediately followed his lead, the fathers yelling and the children and wives answering. There was a hell of a lot of shouting.

  Henry started heading back to the underground. Just outside the station, he saw Leo and Verner walking along. They had caught the train just after Henry, and they were equipped to the teeth. Verner was also taking this whole evacuation thing very seriously, while Leo was just following along. They waved a copy of the booklet If War Comes, and showed Henry that they had brought along every single thing you were supposed to have. They seemed very pleased with the whole operation and disappeared into the throngs of evacuees. Henry took the underground back to Odenplan. He was already very late.

  Maud wasn’t home. Hen
ry rang the doorbell over and over again, but no one answered, and once again he worked himself into a sweat by swearing. He swore at all the damn pretend-wars and the pretend-heroes going around with suitcases filled with lead, and he hated all of Stockholm like the plague. He yearned to get away. To Paris. That’s where he would go, sooner or later. There they damn well didn’t play war. If there was a war, it was the real thing.

  Henry sighed for the twenty-fifth time that day and started walking down the stairs in resignation. But in the hallway luck was with him; he happened to hear voices coming from the cellar. Necessity is the mother of invention as well as of a certain genius. Henry put two and two together and realised that everyone in the building was, of course, down in the cellar, also playing war.

  And right he was. Henry went down to the cellar, and there sat all the tenants, drinking coffee and eating buns and having a very pleasant time. Henry was welcomed heartily.

  ‘This is all so exciting with the war,’ said Maud in his ear. ‘It feels as if we only have a few short hours together today before you have to go off to the front.’

  ‘That’s exactly how it is,’ said Henry.

  ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen,’ said the building supervisor, raising his voice a notch. ‘It all went very well, and we’d like to thank Mrs Lindberg for her wonderful buns and Mrs Bäck and Mrs Hagström for the coffee. We certainly hope that we never have to go through the real thing but that we’ll see a little more of each other in civilian life. That’s the most important thing we’ve learned.’

  The coffee guests, that is, the evacuees, loudly applauded the supervisor’s speech, and the manoeuvre was officially over. Maud and Henry went up to her flat. As Henry hung his coat on the coat-rack, which tilted against the wall, Maud was already on her way to the bedroom.

  It was some time at the end of April in 1961 – the best of times for this odd alliance – and after breakfast Maud was sitting on the floor in front of the TV wearing her bathrobe, with a teacup between her legs. Henry was completely absorbed in watching the royal warship Wasa as she surfaced. The dive boss Fälting could be seen gasping for air through the hose, and the navy band struck up a tune with extra vigour. People were cheering and applauding. The TV cameramen at Lodbrok kept the cameras rolling.

  For almost everyone, it represented a revelation from the historic depths of three hundred and thirty-three years ago – an oak hull dripping with sludge and water, filled with cannons, kegs of aquavit, copper coins, ceramic bowls, passglasses, cutlery and sculptures. And as she reached the surface, orders and corrections were released from the commander, shouted when she heaved onto her port side in the middle of the Thirty Years War in Stockholm. She began taking on water through her gun ports, and panic erupted in full force. The catastrophe was inevitable.

  But for Henry, this was not a moment when something was being revealed. Not at all. For him it was quite the opposite. When the royal warship Wasa came to the surface that day, he was utterly absorbed in the historical event, but to his eyes something was not being dragged up out of the stinking muck. Instead, something was sinking, flooding, being consigned to history. He watched everything with his indefatigable curiosity, but his thoughts were far, far away. He was thinking about the Ark, the ship that he had tried to build out on Storm Island. His maternal grandfather, the Boat Builder, got the whole project started, and every summer they had worked on that ship, which they were going to sail around the world. Henry read about Joshua Slocum and Hornblower and escaped into his dreams. In his dreams he planed every plank, making the seams tighter and tighter, until disaster struck and everything came to an end out there on Storm Island.

  The Ark was never completed. It was still out there in one of the boathouses, half finished, crumbling away and unreal, like some monumental elk skeleton that you come upon in a forest glade and the foxes have eaten it clean so that the ribs are pointing up towards the sky, just like the bare framework of a keel. The Ark lay out there on Storm Island, where the last remnants of his mother’s family wandered around in bewilderment like degenerate fools, waiting for summertime visits and the post and fresh provisions. Henry had harboured a dream of going back, exactly as if nothing had happened, to get his grandfather drunk on aquavit, shake some life into the old man, dress him in his stinking longjohns, and lead him down to the boathouse to finish the Ark. But the water surrounding Storm Island would be forever poisoned. In the coves it was putrid and stagnating; the seaweed floated dead and decomposing down in the deep, in the dark deep. The Ark would remain an elk skeleton, nibbled bare by voracious hyenas so that its ribs pointed towards the sky like the framework of a keel, like an accusation, a reminder of sorrow and eternal unrest.

  Only now, as Henry lay there in Maud’s flat, watching the royal warship Wasa rise to the surface amidst the cheers of the crowd, could he drown the Ark, let it sink to the bottom, settle into the muddy grave vacated by the Wasa. The dream of the Ark belonged to his childhood, and Henry wanted to leave it behind because he was feeling strong and intoxicated with love.

  Henry started laughing when the music suddenly ceased and the crowd fell silent. For one dizzying moment everyone was quiet and seemed to be wondering: what have we really done? Almost ashamed at having awakened a woman from her three hundred and thirty-three years of slumber, in which she most certainly should have been allowed to remain. Henry laughed loudly, and then his laughter changed to a quiet hissing; tears fell from his eyes, and he felt liberated, washed clean, exonerated.

  The flat was full of daffodils, called Easter lilies in Swedish, and the flowers gave off a strong scent of martyrdom and vicarious suffering. Henry had suffered. He’d thought he would always suffer, that he’d never win a reprieve or solace from a great love. But now it had come to him as he sat there watching an ancient ship being raised from the sea floor. The daffodils’ scent signified suffering, but Maud’s scent signified life and desire.

  She didn’t notice that he was crying when he approached her from behind. She was lying on the wall-to-wall carpet in front of the TV with her eyes fixed on the royal warship Wasa as Henry gently uncovered her body, the way only a figurehead of sea-drenched oak is otherwise uncovered.

  ________

  Henry attended Södra Latin school. He had started there as a young pup several years after the suicide of its famous pupil, Stig Dagerman, and the panicked reactions to Alf Sjöberg’s movie Frenzy and the book The Snake were still sending out their terror-filled shadows from the cast-iron banisters and over the walls. Henry had grown up there in the ranks of schoolmaster discipline at the boys’ school, with queues of thick sweaters and suede jackets and well-scrubbed necks, which over the years got bulkier until the jackets were replaced with coats and the boys played at being young men, going to cafés and smoking. They hung around outside the girls’ school on Götgatan, where elegant little ladies from the suburbs south of Söder peeked out, giggling behind the curtains and waiting for invitations to the dances at the boys’ school. It was a boys’ school full of discipline and manly rituals, and I assumed that Henry did quite well there. He was a pianist and boxer, but he was also the one to cheer the loudest when it became apparent that the first girl, under the new school ordinance and with full parliamentary rights, was going to set her dainty foot through the massive school doors to attend classes, which up until then had been reserved for males. That was in the autumn of 1961.

  But in the spring of that year the boys’ school was enjoying its last hurrah. Henry went around whistling ‘Putti Putti’, and he was sleeping more soundly than usual during his classes. He was living a hard life with a mature woman, that young Morgan.

  His quartet had naturally been booked for the graduation parties. Henry couldn’t fathom how he was going to endure another year of school as some half-baked loudmouthed graduates came trotting through the heavy doors, out onto the stairs under the school clock, drunk and merry, with tears mixing with powder, perfume and punch. Proud parents had given the quartet instruct
ions about where to sit on the traditional flatbed lorry carrying the celebrating graduates through the city. The group had also been instructed not to start playing until such and such a moment, but Henry didn’t give a damn about any of that. He was playing guitar because no one dared haul a piano up onto the flatbed lorry, which had pissed him off. That’s why he didn’t give a damn about whether the arrangements suited those who were paying for them or not. He had made up his mind that tonight he was going to eat a lot and drink a lot, free of charge and then head home to Maud. She was going away. She had wept and made Henry weep too. Maud was going away and would be gone all summer.

  Henry’s quartet went through the entire prescribed repertoire of graduation songs, and no one heard how false they sounded, nor did anyone care. The graduate, a harmless type from Enskede, was giving a decent party at his home. The quartet played, and during the breaks Henry drank a great deal. He had a good-sized drink sitting behind the music stand on the piano the whole time. It was a typical assembly-line piano, mostly intended for show, that had been handed down and was out of tune.

  After the banquet, there was going to be a dance, and everyone had agreed that they wanted to dance the swing and the foxtrot to Elvis, and so the quartet was dismissed. Henry received fifty kronor from the proud father who, sounding tearful and grateful and lofty all at the same time, tried to articulate a few polite phrases to thank the musicians and wish them good luck.

  Henry got a lift to Hötorget from some equally tearful and sentimental relatives wearing their old graduation caps, yellowed with age. He took the route through Tunnelgatan, whistling ‘Spin My World’ in the tunnel. It echoed magnificently, as if heralding a decisive, final farewell.

  Maud was wearing a suit, an elegant suit, and a polo jumper. Henry realised at once that ‘He’ had been there. Henry was a bit drunk and in despair, but he tried to hide it. He didn’t want to ruin this evening, which would be their last one for an indefinite amount of time.