‘He says that he understands me. And he wants to hear all the details about you.’
‘Do you tell him?’
‘Of course I do. Should I lie?’
‘No,’ said Henry, ‘you shouldn’t.’
Maud lit her last cigarette of the night, looking somehow relieved, as if she had cleared the air. ‘Now you know everything you need to know about me,’ she said. ‘And maybe after this, you won’t love me anymore.’
Henry took the cigarette from her and deliberately stubbed it out in the ashtray. ‘Oh yes, I will,’ he said, ‘more than ever.’
________
Once again Willis and the Europa Athletic Club became his salvation when faced with total ruin. Henry drowned his sorrow and yearning in sweat and liniment. He devoted the summer to training for the match that Willis had nagged him into entering. It was the Swedish Championships in Stockholm, and Henry had participated in a few sparring matches and actually done quite well. After that the bitter summer had arrived with extra work for the tram system and long, ascetic training sessions down at the Europa Athletic Club. During this period of complete abstinence, Henry reached his absolute peak condition. The Swedish Championships was going to take place just as school started, and he had even arranged for an exemption so that he could train in peace and quiet, right up until the last moment. Even though the principal of Södra Latin was no great fan of pugilism, he couldn’t very well begrudge such a renowned pupil as Henry Morgan a
chance at success. Nor would it hurt the school to have a Swedish champion in its halls. Willis himself had rung up the school to express his thanks for the exemption. He spoke very highly of Henry and had practically guaranteed that he would be sending back a Swedish Junior Master in the welterweight division.
Only someone who has taken on the task of training himself or someone else for such an important event as the Swedish Championships can understand how this type of exertion can affect the mind. Willis had urged Henry to do road-work every single morning and evening, and Henry obeyed, dashing around all of Söder twice a day. He stuck to every detail of his training programme right down to the last moment.
But there was to be no ‘last moment’. The first match was supposed to take place one evening in late August, and that very afternoon – when Henry was home to have a proper meal in plenty of time before the match – the telephone rang. Henry was home alone. Greta was at her job at the community sewing room, and Leo was in school. And as luck would have it, the phone call was from Maud. She had come home.
Henry had been on the receiving end of many punches that summer, heavy blows from dirty sparring partners, but in his indefatigable struggle he had shaken them off. But this blow was too much for him. An hour later he was lying in Maud’s bed in Lärkstaden and all was forgiven.
When the gong sounded, Willis stood there swearing.
________
Henry Morgan’s very last autumn in school took place under the sign of Indignation. The teachers brought the daily papers to class, and that alone was testimony to the fact that something historic was happening. It was not just the fact that girls were admitted to the Södra Latin school; there was something even more remarkable than that – a wall was going up in Berlin. Mile after mile of barbed wire in such huge quantities – or was it a form of extremely charged density? – that it had taken on a quality all its own: an impenetrable wall, the Berlin Wall, Die Mauer. Diplomacy was in high gear, agents were undoubtedly spying like never before, and the communiqués were talking about serious violations, about refugees and about tragedies. The tone became increasingly acrimonious and less diplomatic, and no one could say with certainty how powerful the Soviet Army behind the Iron Curtain might be.
All the teachers in school were discussing Die Mauer from their various professional perspectives. The Wall could be regarded as a mathematical problem: how many bricks could be estimated? The Wall could be viewed as a historical parallel to the Great Wall of China: what does Ulbricht have in common with Shi Huang-Ti or the older emperors’ terror of the Mongols? The Wall could also be regarded from a purely philosophical viewpoint: as a symbol of the West’s eternal schism between good and evil, body and soul.
The teacher who took it hardest was the philosophy instructor, Mr Lans. He saw the Wall from only one perspective: the moral one. He had completely lost all composure and was unable to see even one little crack, a single little glint of light through the Wall. He turned every class into a long and incoherent harangue based on newspaper reports from Berlin and the Wall. Apparently he had a hard time even grasping the concept of splitting an organic entity like a city into two parts, since each part presupposes the other and after the separation inevitably had to remain a mere half, incomplete. And consequently the people in a city in which the natural flow of communication is severed must run into obstructions, confronted by an artificial border, and hence become half themselves, incomplete individuals.
The pupils agreed and swore at the Russians. Henry fully agreed because he himself had felt incomplete, like half a person, all summer long. Maud had been away, down in Rio de Janeiro, where her now-remarried mother was living. Henry had been working on the trams and training at the Europa, filled with a greater longing than he had thought possible. That was why the Swedish Championships had turned out the way they had.
His longing had become transformed into a horrible jealousy. It became absolutely impossible for him to accept W.S., and Henry could still picture that image of the virile, energetic and, in his own special way, imposing man at the height of his career. He assumed that the man, in turn, saw Henry as a little shit, a mere boy who was allowed to play with the capricious Maud whenever he liked because W.S. was the one who possessed the funds and the priceless paternal power over Maud. W.S. was the one she turned to whenever she felt weak or miserable because he was an experienced man with his feet on the ground, a man with both a future and a past.
Henry got furious whenever he thought about what he had to put up with. He couldn’t fathom why he didn’t make greater demands than he did or why he actually seemed to accept sharing a woman with another man – exactly as if a Berlin Wall went right through Maud, as if she had her own east and west sections, to which the men in her life had been consigned, never allowed to look over at the other side.
Maud had sent him a few letters from the infinitely beautiful Rio de Janeiro during the summer, and she wrote that she longed for Henry, that she would be home sometime towards the end of August. She arrived home on the very day that Henry was planning to become the Swedish Junior Champion in the welterweight division, when the Berlin crisis was at its height, and the balance of terror seemed to be making Europe fall apart, yet again. And Europe did fall apart – or rather the Europa Athletic Club in Hornstull did. In a roundabout way Willis let Henry know that henceforth he could stay away from both the Europa and from boxing altogether. Willis was bitter, and Henry was too. But there were more important things in life than boxing.
Of course nothing turned out the way Henry had imagined. He felt completely weak at seeing Maud again, as if all his strength and resources ran down into his feet. Maud was tanned and looked somehow rather indistinct, almost unreal. She had suddenly become a mulatto, and he had to get to know her all over again, explore her and find out as much as he could. He didn’t go rushing over with some sort of ultimatum as he had planned. He scratched at the door, was admitted and rewarded like a big, wet, faithful dog.
And that was how the whole autumn passed, under the sign of Indignation. Maud had barely returned home and got Henry into more or less top form again, and the Berlin Wall had barely penetrated into everyone’s indignant consciousness as a tangible reality of bricks and barbed wire before the disaster with Hammarskjöld blared its fateful headlines.
All of Sweden was suddenly plunged into a state of national mourning, and if Dan Waern, locked out from winning the gold medal at the Rome Olympics, had up until then resembled an abused saint, it was a saint of
the lowest order. When Dag Hammarskjöld crashed and lay dead in Ndola Free Church in the central African jungle, it looked as if all hope had come to an end in this world. The only Christ figure of any significance and with a sufficiently strong halo and the requisite credentials to be the United Nations’ general secretary had crashed most prosaically into the African bush like some popular musician, leaving posterity with a sense of astonishment that would immediately change to the most profound sense of bitterness and loss. Where should anyone direct his hope when such a fine spirit, such a genius, such an enthusiast, burning with such purity and honesty, intent on the best for humanity, could simply leave us behind without warning?
Henry’s philosophy teacher at school, Mr Lans, was a sensitive soul. Like a seismograph-programmed Weltschmerz, he suffered all the torments of hell during the Berlin crisis, sinking deeper and deeper for every brick that was added to the Wall, as if he were forced, out of pure automatic necessity, to react, to respond, to answer for, as he might formulate the situation in his utter bewilderment. He was as thin-skinned as a young poet, and he hadn’t become any more hardened by the Cold War. Instead he had sunk ever deeper into the wretched existence of humanity, as naïve as a good-hearted liberal. Just when he had licked the worst wounds after the erection of the ‘Wailing Wall’, Dag Hammarskjöld had got into a plane destined for Moise Tshombe and a possible Peace, and then the plane crashed into the jungle as if Satan himself were sitting at the controls. That was too much for Mr Lans. He could see no scrap of light in life; there was no mercy, no solace, no help within sight. As regents, heads of state, archbishops and kings mourned, as students and the entire Swedish populace began a national period of mourning, flying their flags at half mast and lining up to observe minutes of silence to honour the memory of the saint, Mr Lans had called in sick. No one knew for sure where he was. Some claimed to have seen him standing at attention at the citizens’ procession to Gärdet, but that may have been just a rumour. Hammarskjöld was barely laid to rest before it was time for the school to fly the flag at half-mast again, this time to honour the memory of Mr Lans. And the stir it caused was at least as great. There was talk that he had chosen his own death, and various rumours described everything from Japanese hara-kiri – he had talked so much about Far Eastern ideas, after all – and hanging, to slit arteries and a pill overdose.
Deep down, no one really wanted to know the truth. Mr Lans would soon become canonised as a local saint, and among the students he was something of a hero, the perfect combination of courage and gentleness. He had reacted strongly to the evil in the world, admitting that he was weak, and yet he was as brave as Hemingway, who had recently put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Not that it was actually described that way, but anyone with even a shred of imagination could read between the lines. That was what he must have done. A hunter like Hemingway doesn’t die from an accidental gunshot wound. The same was true of Mr Lans. He was a ‘gracious matador in the arena of life’, as it said in the obituary written by the somewhat maudlin poet, Henry Morgan.
________
Young Henry mourned his teacher but didn’t give a thought to suicide during that autumn of 1961. The fact that he would never be a new Ingo or Lennart Risberg in the boxing world didn’t matter. But he did think about murder, plain and simple. He once again found himself wrapped around Maud’s little finger; he was allowed to visit at her whim, whenever it suited her and her arrangement with W.S. This was more than Henry the pup could stand, even though Maud, both to her credit and to her ultimate detriment, could assure her young lover that the situation was not like that at all.
Autumn passed with this strange sort of passion, and winter was knocking at the door. By November it had already snowed, but this was just a portent. It looked as if they wouldn’t have any snow for Christmas, but back then Henry Morgan was not the type to go around brooding over the weather. Henry was completely blocked; he couldn’t find any resolution to the question of whether he should put up with the constant shadow of W.S. He had seen the man in a photo – sometimes he sneaked another look in Maud’s album whenever he was sure that he wouldn’t get caught – and she continued to offer him clothes and valuable items, which unerringly ended up at the pawnshop. By now they had added up to quite a lot – everything from the elegant cigarette cases to thick gold bracelets, cufflinks and tie tacks with gemstones. He knew that they amounted to a sizable sum, no doubt more than a couple of thousand kronor, and he was starting to get a bit worried. In some sense he had sold all his honour.
Henry might go over to see Maud one evening, feeling as if he were being guided there by an unknown power – which sometimes had nothing at all to do with love or desire – almost as if W.S., the shadow man, were driving him forward by constantly shoving him in the back.
But as soon as he reached Maud’s flat, everything changed. He felt at home and forgot all about his doubts. They would sit and chat in front of the TV like a married couple. Maud said that she was happy. She desired him, she showered him with praise and flattery and gifts, and he felt the light caress of her favour across his chest each time he was there, like the tickle of a peacock feather – desire and displeasure became meaningless scholasticism.
At first Henry felt completely inferior and uncultured – which, in a sense, he was – like the son of a servant woman who couldn’t even muster enough ambition to become anything, to strive, bemoan his lot, or improve himself. All he wanted to do was dabble, play the piano in his quartet, box and live his life. Yet he shied away from any test of strength, he recoiled from the vast deeps, any possible defeat. But Maud took him in hand and over time he learned that a defeat was not the end. She took Henry the mongrel along to the Modern Art Museum and brought his wild brain face to face with the disciplined intoxication of the most modern art. Jazz was played at the Modern, and occasionally Henry would sit in with the Bear Quartet, which was gradually becoming a legendary group. Especially since the pianist that Henry occasionally replaced was living a life that bore witness to a deep angst, a world-weariness, and desperate creative convulsions.
It was Maud’s ambition to discipline Henry, to use the pruning shears on him, as Willis would have said. Henry owed Willis a debt of gratitude, and he owed Maud a debt of gratitude too, even though she claimed that she was the one in his debt. Or rather, she said that she would be half a person without him, that she wouldn’t be able to stand it. She said this so often, and showered him with so many things that he almost grew a bit weary of it all. Her generosity could so easily turn into a sort of meaningless sacrifice, a reckless extravagance.
From time to time he also had a slight inkling of the fragility that Maud talked about often yet managed to conceal so magnificently. It might happen when she discovered a pimple on her face and instantly picked up a mirror and compact to camouflage the imperfection. She did so in a frightened, distressed fashion, afraid of being caught with something shameful and degrading.
Perhaps it was this façade of perfection hiding a desperate longing for eternity that made Henry so fascinated; exactly like Scott Fitzgerald’s screen-plays in a Hollywood on the brink of collapse – a dream made manifest and a warning of destruction, all at the same time.
________
Esprit d’escalier is the proper and most exact expression for what Henry experienced each time he left Maud to go to school or home or simply out somewhere because he couldn’t stay at her flat. Esprit d’escalier means that you think of something you should have said in the hallway too late; instead, you think of it in the stairwell on your way out. As when you run into a genuine arsehole in town, someone who is really insolent, and five minutes later you come up with just the right cutting and crushing remark that would have put the lout in his place.
Whenever Henry left Maud, he most often wanted to say that he couldn’t stand things any longer. Henry had never been jealous before he met Maud, nor had he thought that he ever would be. He’d never had any reason to feel that way, but now it h
ad taken him over, remorselessly. It felt like a churning voice, a shadow, a breeze sweeping over the pavement as he walked, something that was always keeping pace with him – he could never stop and let it move past, nor was he able to run away from it.
Many people have tried to handle a love triangle, but I wonder if it’s even possible. An ordinary relationship between two individuals – as hard to capture, as hopelessly unpredictable as two people can be – is difficult enough. Having to take into account another party makes the situation doubly tricky. Especially when someone like me knows only one of the people involved: Henry, the narrator, the liar and the deceived deceiver.
Thinking about W.S. was like imagining a sibling that he had never met. In some country and some city there was a person who shared his own blood, the blood he thought he was sharing with Maud. There was another person who met Maud in the same way he did, who talked about him, thought about him, maybe was even jealous of him, but he had never met the man.
Henry wore shirts on which the initials W.S. had been embroidered under the manufacturer’s name inside the collar. Henry was given things that belonged to W.S., which he promptly pawned, providing him with the means to live well for a while. Maud claimed that neither Henry nor W.S. was such a complete man that either of them was sufficient on his own. She needed both of them.
During the first winter months of 1962 – when peace came to Algeria and the Swedish hockey team Tre Kronor won gold in the world championships in Colorado Springs – Maud and Henry started engaging in fierce arguments that had their origins in mere trifles. Quite often Henry would sit in with the Bear Quartet when they played at new galleries that were popping up here and there in the city. The modern artists whose work was on display insisted that the Bear Quartet should play for the opening festivities, and Henry would sit in because the regular pianist considered himself helplessly locked into his own fate – which in so many ways coincided with that of other jazz stars – and his only purpose in life had become to fill in, with black accuracy, his own demise, which resembled a map with a big X on Norra Cemetery.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 20