Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  ‘You are a young writer, yes? Then you must meet Mr Singer. All the young writers must meet Mr Singer!’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I do want to meet him.’

  The ambassador guided me through the sea of people to a little, nodding old man peering out from a corner. He seemed weary and worn-out after having made his way through an ocean of handshakes from the east coast of America to the Baltic Sea in Europe.

  ‘This is a young Swedish writer,’ said the ambassador, pushing me in front of the Oracle.

  ‘Hello, Mr Singer,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, young writer,’ said the Sorcerer. ‘Do you live here?’ he went on, and before I could reply he added, ‘I am Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I live in New York. Very, very nice to meet you.’

  And that was that. Because the next second, as we were shaking hands, a vulture wearing a pearl necklace landed and sank her claws into the febrile shoulders of the little, mouselike man, completely inundating him with a cascade of flattering and admiring phrases. She stuck a pen in his hand and spelled her name, which presumably was prominently entered both in the peerage books and the tax records. She wanted at all costs to have a signed copy.

  After that the rest of the party disintegrated into champagne and smoke and cocktails and Israeli snacks that tasted superb in a rather restrained way. What with one thing and another, and after making a night-time round of the city’s bars, I was now lying in my bed on the morning of the Lucia festival, listening to someone whispering outside my door.

  In a moment this nervous whispering finally metamorphosed into a beautifully sung Lucia song. The door opened and the room was filled with the smell of candles, freshly made coffee, freshly baked saffron buns and ginger-snaps. Henry was the Star Boy, wearing the cone-shaped hat and the shift and everything, while Kerstin was Lucia. It was as impressive as it was surprising. I sat up in bed and received the attendants like a delighted schoolmaster.

  ‘Why all this for little old me?’ I naturally wondered.

  ‘Why not?’ said Henry. ‘Actually, I knew nothing about all this. Not a thing.’

  ‘I was planning to wait on all of you,’ said Kerstin. ‘But that didn’t happen because Leo isn’t here.’

  ‘Let’s go out to the kitchen,’ said Henry. ‘Göring’s old bed isn’t the appropriate place for a pyjama party.’

  No sooner said than done. We went out to the kitchen to drink Lucia coffee and talk about the winter that was fast approaching. Kerstin was going away for Christmas, while Henry and I had decided to hold the fort here at home. We didn’t know much about Leo’s plans, but we were aware that he didn’t care much for holidays or special occasions.

  Henry was immensely pushy and obstinate about wanting to know whether Kerstin had fallen in love with Leo.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Kerstin with her mouth full of Lucia bun. ‘He seems so fragile somehow. But I’m not sure.’

  ‘And no one’s asking you to be sure, either. In any case, it will do the boy good to have a girl like you. It would do anyone good.’

  ________

  Winter arrived all at once. It was going to be a real winter. Overnight all of Stockholm was blanketed by the first snow, and then the frost set in so that it looked as if the snow would stay. The word ‘Wood’ began showing up more and more often on Henry’s daily schedule, and we spent several hours each week going out to search through abandoned Dumpsters and then lugging boards up to the sawhorse in the attic to saw them into manageable pieces.

  There was an impressive and overwhelming consistency about that particular winter – it would linger on well into the following April, although we fortunately didn’t know that at the time, since Henry’s prophecies didn’t reach that far ahead – and it’s always pleasant to deal with consistency. A friend who is consistent becomes increasingly indispensable, and an enemy who is equally consistent becomes more and more something that consistently must be called dispensable. Winter arrived overnight, and then it was here to stay.

  As mentioned, Henry was very superstitious, and he had full confidence in that famous Lapp who carves up reindeer stomachs to predict the weather. We looked through every newspaper to find that Lapp, but we never did find him, and Henry had to prophesy as best he could by relying on his sensitive joints. As a child he had been very hardy in terms of the wind and weather, but by now he went around rubbing his creaky joints. He said it was rheumatism. It ran in his family, and the five years he’d spent roaming through central Europe, waiting in draughty train stations and staying in rented rooms hadn’t made things any better. That was the price he’d had to pay. But it was worth it.

  ‘My mum has rheumatism too,’ he said. ‘Mum! Mum …’

  ‘What about your mum?’ I asked.

  ‘When did I last ring my mother? It must have been several weeks ago!’

  ‘No kidding!’

  ‘We’ll be going over to see her soon to have Christmas lunch, just so you know. She pops over to Storm Island for Christmas. She’d be deeply hurt if we didn’t show up.’

  So we were all invited to Christmas lunch with the Morgan boys’ mother, but it proved to be a hell of a job trying to get hold of Leo. He’d been gone for over a week now, and no one knew where he was. Henry tried several phone numbers of various free spirits, but without success. Finally we had to go off to the Christmas lunch without Leo; he seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth.

  Mrs Greta Morgan didn’t really look the way I’d pictured her. She was much smaller and thinner, and she greeted me with an almost entreating handshake and said that it was very nice to meet me. She had heard such good things about me. Like any good mum, she had outdone herself with the lunch spread on that Saturday just before Christmas. She had even gone to the State off-licence and bought half a bottle of blackcurrant aquavit. She went to that shop at most once a year, when she would actually return the bottle from the previous year. Henry thought that was splendid. No one returned bottles to the State off-licence for the sake of the money; it was a matter of principle. Bottles were not to be thrown away. Bottles should be become part of the natural cycle, just like people. Mamma Greta listened and shook her head at her son. He was never going to grow up.

  So this was their old boyhood home – a dark two-bedroom flat on Brännkyrkagatan, and one of the rooms was usually kept closed up. That was the boys’ room, filled with things that Henry and Leo had left behind. For some inexplicable reason, Greta had kept the room untouched, deciding not to use it for anything else. The room had such a strange air about it. Attached to the wall next to the bed was a bast mat to protect the pale wallpaper. Still taped to the mat were photos of the boys when they were kids, as well as pictures of Charlie Parker, Ingemar Johansson, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. On brown-stained wall shelves stood a large number of model aeroplanes, cars and boats along with old schoolbooks, children’s books and photographs. One picture showed the happy family some time during the late fifties. There stood the Jazz Baron, just the way I’d seen him in a couple of photo cavalcades from the great era of Swedish jazz. There stood Greta, wearing a beautiful dress that she’d made herself down at the community sewing room on Mariatorget. There stood Henry with a swollen cheek that he’d no doubt acquired down at the Europa Athletic Club. And there stood Leo, so small, birdlike and enigmatic.

  On a bench next to the bed was the cumbersome old radio from Philips in Holland, the one that Leo had received from his paternal grandfather, and next to it was an aquarium in which listless bubbles were the only sign of life or movement.

  It was like some sort of museum, a monument to a brotherly harmony and concord that was nothing more than a maternal dream. It seemed to me that every little thing could be easily traced back to one of the boys. All these items were the signatures of the two brothers, their indelible fingerprints. It felt almost as if they were sitting there somewhere under the beds. They were united for all eternity through these objects left behind.

  I was standing there staring at the
aquarium when Henry came into his childhood room. A dull, diffuse shadow suddenly began moving in the sludge at the bottom of the aquarium, like a ghost from the past.

  ‘That is one of the world’s oldest aquarium fishes,’ Henry bragged. ‘In Stockholm, at any rate. There are some old bream out in Bromma that are older. But this fish is at least seventeen years old.’

  ‘It’s Leo’s, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yup. He got it when he was a teenager, if I remember right.’

  Henry traipsed around, occasionally poking at things in the room. He snorted once in a while and then picked up the picture of the happy family from the late fifties. He pointed at each person with his stubby index finger, one after the other, and told me exactly what I had already figured out. I listened to him patiently, because this was really important. I had never seen Henry Morgan as serious, almost resolute, as he was when he walked around and talked about the things in that room from his boyhood. Each piece of furniture bore its mark, and each mark had a story. Boys’ rooms tend to get quite worn out over time. Just like the boys themselves.

  ________

  The Christmas lunch was as good as Christmas lunches always are, especially at the start of the holidays, before everyone grows tired of the food. Henry sang drinking songs, and the aquavit made us all merry and warm. After a while Greta managed to forget that Leo hadn’t shown up, or at least she put a good face on it; this was something she was used to, after all.

  Afterwards she gave us more than twenty pounds of preserves and pâtés, sausages and ham, salad and herring, and there was nothing we could do but accept it and say thanks. Greta didn’t want us to starve, and the prospects were good that with all that food we wouldn’t.

  In the stairwell Henry decided that he wanted to look in on Verner. He always did that around Christmas time.

  ‘He goes out a bit now and then. Verner, I mean. But he likes it if someone looks in on him once in a while.’

  ‘It’s too awful,’ said Greta, looking as sorrowful as only a mother can. ‘I don’t understand what has become of our boys.’

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ said Henry. ‘They just need some peace and quiet for a while. Then everything will be fine. I promise you.’

  Greta smiled and smoothed down her apron without replying.

  ‘Well, well,’ she said then. ‘I suppose whatever happens, happens. Thank you for coming, anyway, the two of you.’ And in the midst of all that solemnity she suddenly produced yet another terse old proverb from Storm Island: ‘That was a nice party, said the old woman when she buried her husband.’

  We wished her a Merry Christmas and left. Downstairs on the third floor Henry rang the bell to the Hansson flat. He gave it two quick jabs, just as he’d always done. It took at least a minute before the door opened. Verner’s mother was the one who opened it. She looked very tired and gave us a rather strained smile.

  ‘Hi, Henry,’ she said in a toneless voice. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘About this same time last year,’ said Henry. ‘Is Verner home?’

  ‘Verner … no, Verner’s not home,’ said the woman, and even an innocent little child could have seen right through her.

  ‘Does he have his own place now?’ asked Henry, slightly puzzled.

  ‘Well no, he stays here sometimes, or else with friends, his buddies.’

  ‘All right, well, tell him hello, at least. Tell him to give me a ring.’

  ‘I’ll do that …’ she managed to say before we heard a crash and a groan and a scratching sound coming from the room beyond the hallway.

  ‘Merry Christmas, and thanks for stopping by,’ she said and then slammed the door.

  Henry didn’t look the least bit surprised, but he shook his head bitterly.

  ‘What a bloody mess,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Verner sits locked up in there, drinking and solving classic chess problems. He’s got the sharpest mind in the whole city. But he’s like a child who’s been sent to sit in the corner. It’s impossible to reach him anymore.’

  Verner was a man who had once been a boy. As a boy he had had to be protected from the nasty world. As an adult, it was just the opposite – the world had to be protected from him. That was his awful fate.

  ________

  One day Henry wrote down only one thing on the daily schedule: Christmas cleaning. Considering the size of the flat, over two thousand square feet, it looked as if the cleaning could easily go on for several days, if we were going to make a thorough job of it. Every single rug had to be taken down to the courtyard for beating, the floors had to be washed and waxed, and so on.

  We got started straight after breakfast, and Henry swore furiously at the fact that Leo was so conveniently away, because that bastard was never home when anything useful had to be done. A little work would have done him good. Henry took on the job of beating the rugs, while I went around with an old Nilfisk vacuum cleaner that had definitely seen better days. That’s how the morning passed. After that we focused on the cupboards, the library and the wardrobes, which all had to be cleaned of any vermin.

  In the service corridor there was a long row of wardrobes that served only as storage space for old junk, the sort of abandoned things that can take several years of an archaeologist’s life to evaluate. Henry claimed to have made a valiant effort, although without any real success. There were all of his grandfather Morgonstjärna’s clothes, as well as his paternal grandmother’s clothes and shoes, some hatboxes filled with letters and several bureaus containing odds and ends. Henry cautioned me about going through the wardrobes because once you started, you could get held up – it was so damned easy to get sidetracked.

  It was in one of these wardrobes that I found the submachine-gun. The bottom drawer of one of the bureaus was locked, and I got nosy. The key ring hanging in the kitchen had keys to the attic and cellar as well as a good many keys that didn’t seem to fit anywhere, like most key rings. Henry was down in the courtyard, conducting a veritable concert with the rug beater, so I swiped the key ring and eventually found a key that fit. I pulled out the drawer and was instantly struck by the way the smell of stale mothballs was mixed with the smell of grease and oil. I lifted up a rough piece of jute and saw the old gun lying there like some cold and frozen snake.

  The submachine-gun was the old-fashioned type, the slightly heavier and more cumbersome model that was in use before the M-45. It was grey, and the mechanism seemed sturdy and reliable. Like most Swedes, I lacked any familiarity with guns except for what I had gleaned from national service. But I couldn’t help noticing how well-kept this gun was. It was lying inside a mothproof bag, of course, but something told me that the contents of this particular drawer had not been forgotten, although the contents of all the other dusty drawers inside the wardrobes had.

  When I’d satisfied my curiosity and looked my fill at the old gun, I closed the drawer, hung the keys in the kitchen and went back to cleaning. When Henry came up from the courtyard with a couple of newly beaten rugs, I felt embarrassed and nearly blushed. Of course, he didn’t notice. And eventually I had plenty of other things to occupy my thoughts.

  ________

  Soon the whole flat smelled of soap and floor polish, and we had done a great job. There were three big cardboard boxes from the forties full of decrepit Christmas decorations, and it took us almost two whole evenings to put everything in its place. We outdid each other with lively arrangements of groups of little elves, mistletoe and candle-holders. An experienced housewife couldn’t have done any better.

  Henry and I had made a gentlemen’s agreement – we would protest against the buying frenzy by not giving each other any Christmas presents, not even symbolic ones. But there were still a million other things to purchase if we were to survive the holiday as respectable bachelors. We made extensive lists of what we ought to buy, what we wanted to buy and what we could reasonably expect to be able to buy, considering the state of our finances. Through our combined efforts – without even consulting me Henry s
acrificed a world history in a dozen volumes with half-calf bindings – we managed to scrape together a nice sum to spend on food and drink and other types of supplementary solace.

  On 23 December we each went on a buying expedition in separate parts of town. I was home by six in the evening and started making dinner. The door slammed and I thought it was Henry coming home. But instead it was Leo, and he looked quite wretched.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I asked. ‘We’ve been looking for you for weeks.’

  ‘For weeks?’ said Leo and sank down onto a chair at the kitchen table without taking off his outdoor clothes.

  I was thinking of telling him at least to take off his running shoes before he tracked a load of sand and salt into our newly cleaned flat, but I decided not to complain because I didn’t want to seem a fusspot, like Henry.

  ‘I’ve been with a couple of buddies,’ said Leo.

  ‘You seem really tired.’

  Leo didn’t reply. He just glared at me as I stood there at the stove, frying pork and boiling brown beans.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘Is there any grub?’

  ‘Of course there is.’

  Henry still hadn’t shown up, so we decided not to wait with dinner. We opened a whole bottle of Renat and several Christmas beers to have with the pork. Leo downed two shots of aquavit on an empty stomach and without uttering a word. I didn’t feel like initiating any sort of interrogation, so I didn’t say anything either.

  ‘So how are you, anyway?’ he finally asked me, using that nagging and pigheaded tone of voice that truly drunk people sometimes have.

  ‘What do you mean, how am I?’

  ‘How are things up here, I mean, with Henry? Can you put up with him?’

  ‘Of course I can. Why shouldn’t I?’

  Leo chewed slowly, snorting and shaking his head, as if there were something very basic that I just didn’t fathom.