Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  The new year of 1979, an election year and the International Year of the Child, started off bitterly cold. The frost hung on, and we very slowly recovered from the terrible flu, which not even the snorting, huffing, puffing family physician, Dr Helmers, was able to treat. Henry Morgan went around grumbling about how few Christmas cards he had received. His women had all forgotten him. A glittery card arrived from Maud on Friggagatan, along with an extremely tacky family photo from Lana in London, and that was about it. The cards were displayed on the table in the sitting room next to the hyacinths. Leo and I received no cards at all.

  Things did get better after order had been restored, when the newspapers began arriving as usual, and as people all around us started working as usual, and we were finally able to get out of bed, as usual.

  But the newspapers were reporting the kind of stories that made us actually wish the holidays had continued. The news was not the least bit uplifting. Skåne was struck by a disastrous snowfall. The snow had literally buried houses and cars, and people had to be evacuated with the help of the military’s emergency forces. This was followed by a mixed bag of tragedies and fiascos. The head of Volvo landed in hot water when the Norway deal fell through, and there was talk of a scandal because small, miserly investors in the Association of Share Investors had been able to block it. I got to thinking about how the matter would be handled by editor Struve in The Red Room. And Levin, that sly fox with all his insider information and his multifarious contacts within the financial world would present his own, sensational interpretation of the defeat.

  The global crisis and depression acquired an all-too-obvious correlation to our own personal daily life, even though we did our best to keep out the world in order not to go under. After a few weeks all the Christmas food was gone. The pantry, the storeroom and our wallets were empty, and we could see no sign of improvement.

  It was now a cold and nasty afternoon, and we actually didn’t have even an öre to spend on food. And we wouldn’t until Henry received his allowance – everything had been upset by the damned holidays – while I was waiting to be paid for various articles, but the money never came. Every piggy bank had been smashed in our frenzied hunger, our bankbooks were depleted, and there wasn’t a single acquaintance who hadn’t adopted the attitude of a more or less wounded creditor.

  But neither Henry nor I – Leo wasn’t to be counted on when it came to anything financial – had any desire to take on any sort of bourgeois work that was more lucrative. We were both completely engrossed in our extremely serious artistic projects, which absolutely must not suffer. The rhythm was perfect, the pages were pouring out of me in a steady stream, and from the piano room an increasingly exuberant succession of notes could be heard. Greger’s Grotto was easy to dig in, and life had undoubtedly never had a more solid or appealing structure than during that time, which in an official sense offered nothing but cold and poverty, crisis and war.

  Yet it did put a strain on our spirits that we didn’t have decent food to cook. Henry’s enormous stock of luncheon vouchers had completely run dry, and he went around casting suspicious glances at Leo, because the vouchers had disappeared rather swiftly ever since he had come home. Henry suspected that Leo had been selling luncheon vouchers in order to rustle up some cash. No one knew what else he could be living on. Leo was hopeless with money. He had once raked in 25,000 kronor all at one go, but that money was long since spent – used for booze or parties or otherwise misappropriated.

  So, there we stood in the kitchen on that cold afternoon, trying at least to keep the heat going in that draughty flat. We each heaved a big sigh, and Henry massaged his hungry stomach as he inspected the pantry and fridge for the fifth time in two minutes.

  ‘Not even a crust or a piece of crispbread. Nineteen hundred and seventy-nine. This can’t be true. The fridge has never been this empty, not even when it was new.’

  ‘We’ll have to go and visit someone’s mother,’ I said. ‘It’s the only solution.’

  ‘Things will work out. Just you wait and see,’ said Henry. ‘Just think if someone in this damn city rang us up and invited us to dinner. But they won’t. There’s nothing but disasters in this bloody country. Just think of Italy. They’re always having disasters, but at least it’s warm there. Ah, una idea! Bene, bene! Sacramentito idioto! Meatsa-ball!’

  The man lit up like a gastronomic sun. He had an idea. He went into the pantry and began singing a very seductive tune: ‘Niente pane / niente pasta / ma siamo tutti fratelli / per un po’ di formaggio …’

  ‘Cute,’ I said.

  ‘A popular Italian song,’ said Henry. ‘No bread, no spaghetti, but we are still brothers because we have a little cheese. Real cute. Luco Ferrari, ’64.’

  ‘But what exactly does it have to do with us?’

  ‘Take it easy, amigo. This is going to be a southern Italian dish. They’re poorer than we’ve ever dreamt of becoming, being, or however you say it. Po’ di patata / pochino di formaggio / nella casa di Bocaccio …’ he went on in a high, shrill voice like some sort of pizza maker. And then he threw together a dinner that tasted mostly of onions and thyme, but at least it filled a couple of hungry stomachs. And that was an admirable thing.

  After the meal we each retreated to our own rooms and devices. I sat in the library, casually reading passages from several volumes of Notorious Tales of Life and Manners. Intimate Life Through the Centuries in Stories and Pictures. The six beautifully bound books were among the highlights of old Morgonstjärna’s library, and Henry claimed to have read the whole set from cover to cover. There was no reason to doubt him. De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Diderot’s The Nun bore obvious traces of Henry’s slobbering curiosity. He claimed to have hunted in vain for Brantôme’s The Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies because he always wanted to read books in which he could recognise himself.

  Morgan the courtesan stuck his head in the door of the library late that night, beaming like the sun itself.

  ‘I’m going to pop over to see Maud on Friggagatan,’ he said. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back. Tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow. You’ll have to handle things here the best you can, on your own.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, engrossed in eighteenth-century eroticism.

  ‘Look after Leo if he sees fit to show up. Cheerio, old chap!’

  ‘Bomb Bavaria, Biggles!’

  ‘I will,’ Henry promised, and he was gone.

  ________

  With admirable accuracy Henry had again made himself scarce just when the laundry was due to be delivered. Right now the delivery boy from Egon’s Laundry was standing at the door with two big wooden boxes filled with linen and a dozen of Henry’s white and striped cotton shirts. By this time he had managed to convince me of the pleasures of sending out the washing – it was a marvellous feeling of pure and unadulterated luxury to use my index finger to slit open the delicate paper band that kept a fragrant and properly pressed shirt neatly folded – so I couldn’t avoid my own responsibility for the bill. Henry had managed to convince me of quite a few things, and consequently I shared a piece of the pie.

  I was in a real bind, and the only thing I could think of to do was to invite the delivery boy in for a cup of coffee and then surreptitiously dash over to the Furniture Man and cadge a hundred kronor from their day’s take.

  A vigorous discussion was going on at the Furniture Man that day. It was Thursday, and they were in the process of arguing about the football pools. The Furniture Man and Henry shared a standing points system, and they had actually won close to five thousand kronor a couple of years back, which wasn’t bad. Henry was usually in charge of submitting the bets, but he was gone at the moment, and I had no idea where he kept their complicated points system. I promised to try and find it.

  But the heated discussion went beyond that; it had to do with purely existential matters. Over the past few days the newspapers had carried a story about the insane nineteen-year-old who
worked at the East Hospital in Malmö. He had poured the cleaning agent Gevisol into the fruit juice of geriatric patients, causing many of them to die. And after horrible suffering. A matter of twenty-five to thirty individuals had allegedly been murdered in this utterly horrendous way, and Greger and Birger down at the Furniture Man couldn’t understand what was happening to the country.

  ‘Sweden is sick,’ said Birger.

  ‘It’s all the fault of that bitch with the assisted dying,’ said Greger. ‘She’s the one who started the whole thing. Without her, that kid never would have thought up such a damned evil thing to do.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Birger. ‘We would never had thought up anything as perverse as that when we were kids!’

  I was in full agreement with both of them, but I was a bit stressed because by now the delivery boy up in the flat was presumably starting to wonder about the laundry bill. I couldn’t really throw myself into the discussion; instead I tactfully asked about borrowing a hundred-krona banknote.

  Birger and Greger were amenable, and Birger wrote up a proper IOU, which I signed. Then I dashed back to the delivery boy, paid the bill and heaved a sigh of relief.

  For some strange reason, everything always got so complicated and messy whenever Henry was away visiting Maud on Friggagatan. He had managed to make himself indispensable in all sorts of connections – even though that was the last thing he wanted to be – and this time he had gone off without turning in the football bets.

  I went to talk to Leo. He had come back home after a brief sojourn with some pals of his, and I found him at his desk. He looked to be in fine form, sitting there scribbling in a black workbook. Leo didn’t know where the prototype for the football-pool system was either, but he guessed that Henry probably had it in his wallet and would see to it that the bet was placed in time, no matter where he happened to be. We took solace in that idea and thought no more about the matter.

  Leo was going through a good period at that time. Calm and composed, he sat there in his two-room quarters, which reeked of incense, and actually resumed work on his long poetry suite Autopsy. That made me happy. I had, of course, read through his old poetry books. There were worn copies of them in his paternal grandfather’s library – old Morgonstjärna had naturally been enormously proud of Leo’s success – and I wanted to ask the poet about a number of things I had observed. But Leo had no desire to discuss those books anymore. They were passé, immature, half-baked, abortive attempts. In his opinion he had had no idea what he was doing when he wrote them back in the sixties. It was only now, after several journeys, both long and short, into silence at the psychiatric hospital that he truly understood things.

  From what I could understand, he had been following the debate about assisted dying. He had saved various newspaper articles and pinned them up on the wall over his desk. Otherwise he no longer read newspapers; he thought they were stupid. If I understood him correctly, he maintained that death was our only truth, and that only the person who experienced his own death could truly see himself and the rest of the world. That was what his poem was about, and all poems had to be paradoxical.

  But for my part, I didn’t have the stamina to spend so much time thinking about death. I confess that I was cowardly; I was afraid of the subject and preferred to talk about something else, such as the daughters of football-pool kings. Leo understood me, and besides, he had nothing against that particular topic.

  ________

  Only a thin and delicate membrane separates us from catastrophe. Great tragedy is always part of the calculation, and every ordinary, trivial undertaking has to be planned with consideration for the various risk factors – just as truly big and comprehensive strategic military manoeuvres as well as peaceful civilian enterprises handle the risk of a defeat with the same cautious approach as they handle the chance of success. But what makes our era a bit special is the existence of something resembling an international league that is solely preoccupied with the calculation of risk factors and risk results, in order to produce deeply depressing sums which, if transformed into real practice, could with one blow mean the end of all life on earth. And we citizens no longer need to look for portents in the sky, because the threat is with us at all times, legislated, regulated and fine-tuned with mathematical precision so that every individual will have his allotted share, his small dose of the punishment. Unfortunately, Adam may have been able to hide from God, but his sons and daughters today cannot escape, no matter how forsaken they may feel, they are always seen.

  The thin, delicate membrane that separates us from catastrophe burst for a brief moment one evening in the middle of January, in the Year of the Child, 1979. It was a Saturday evening, and it was cold. I was sitting in front of the fire in the sitting room, reading about Cyrano de Bergerac. Leo was sitting at the chess table, stirring a wine toddy. And Henry hadn’t yet come home from visiting Maud on Friggagatan.

  All of a sudden everything went black. The whole flat fell silent and went black. At first, of course, we thought that a fuse had blown in the cellar, since that had become routine over the years when the tenants were overburdening the ageing power system. But out on Hornsgatan everything was also dark and silent. The whole city seemed suddenly at a standstill. People lit candles in their windows and looked outside with curiosity, searching for an explanation, but just then there were no explanations. The cars down below were suddenly driving more slowly and cautiously because the street was dark and dangerous, as if they were in enemy territory, an occupied part of town.

  ‘It must be war,’ said Leo quite calmly as we peered out across the completely blacked-out city.

  ‘That does seem possible,’ I said, listening for the muffled droning of enemy bombers.

  At that moment Henry came home, slamming the doors.

  ‘Goddamn, what a mess,’ he said. ‘I took the stairs to get some exercise. If I’d taken the lift, I’d still be stuck in it. The country is in crisis, you can bet on it. Light some candles, dammit all. I can’t even see my hand in front of my face.’

  We rummaged around in the storeroom for candles and filled the whole flat with candlelight. We turned on the battery-powered radio to see if there were any reports about what had happened. But the music was just pouring out, the same as usual. There was no denying the fact that it all felt exciting and stimulating, like just the right sort of adventurous interruption to a daily life filled with toil and routine. The fragrant candles filled the rooms with their dramatically flickering light, infusing the flat with life and movement.

  Henry smelled as if he had just bathed, and he looked exceedingly rested. He poured himself a wine toddy, then went over to stand at the window facing the street and looked out.

  ‘I wonder if the Beagle Boys are busy right now. There can’t be a single alarm functioning the way it should in this darkness. Never mind all the thieves they’re probably dealing with!’

  ‘We really ought to go out,’ said Leo. ‘There must be a lot of panic in some places.’

  ‘The underground isn’t running, and all the damn restaurants are blacked out … Ha!’ said Henry. ‘I’d really like to see that!’

  Henry was actually right with regard to the Beagle Boys. The power was out for about half an hour, and when it later came back on, the burglar alarms all over town went off. The next day the morning newspapers reported that a high-voltage transmission line up in Norrland had gone down, and the black-out had extended all the way south as far as Copenhagen. It was like a foretaste of The Catastrophe. For a brief moment the possibility had penetrated the delicate bubble, merely as a small reminder, a faint warning.

  The really serious snow arrived in February, en masse – it literally came pouring down for a couple of days, and then there was chaos again. The snow-removal department fell apart at the same time as it was being criticised for not having the situation under control. And the newspapers, as usual, showed a contrite city commissioner sitting on a park bench near the city hall, talking about how the bud
get had seen better days.

  Both Greger and Birger down at the Furniture Man had worked for the snow-removal department, back in the good old days when the guys would get out a shovel and start digging for dear life. After accomplishing their mission, they could collect their wages at the nearest cigar shop. Every worker had his own territory and did an irreproachable job, but that was long ago; these days they had to get out on the street, each with his own shovel, for purely humanitarian reasons. Of course they had to clear the pavement, because Greger and Birger were both decent citizens. People shouldn’t have to suffer just because the damn snow-removal department didn’t show up.

  It was a matter of taking responsibility, of course – the responsibility that was theirs as consummate gentlemen – and that was also what the big fight in our flat ended up being about, during the first week of February.

  Leo and I were going to go to a big demonstration against Stockholm’s lousy environment. A bunch of environmental groups had joined forces with a group that lived in the Järnet district down by Erstagatan, where buildings were about to be torn down by a fanatic contractor who was completely in love with demolition. Furthermore, an investigation had shown that our Hornsgatan was one of the most toxic streets in the city. The lead content of the air from car emissions exceeded the acceptable limits, even in America.

  We tried to recruit Henry, but he was sulking and had no desire to come along.

  ‘I’m bloody well not going out to demonstrate,’ he kept saying over and over again. ‘I think the air smells good in this town. I’ve always liked big cities.’

  ‘But you can’t very well go around talking about responsibility for this and responsibility for that if you won’t ever take a real stand in public,’ said Leo.