Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  ‘Goddammit,’ groaned Henry. ‘As if we didn’t have enough problems. What should we do? Call the police?’

  ‘Not on your life,’ I said. ‘Then we can calmly wait for her thirty pimps and pals to show up to thank us for snitching. Very funny. Do you have any other bright ideas?!’

  The only thing we could agree on was to load the girl into the flat along with all the planks, joists and other lumber. Then we groaned from exhaustion and sank down onto chairs in the hallway to ponder our find.

  ‘I wonder who she is,’ said Henry.

  ‘She’s certainly sleeping soundly, at any rate.’

  Henry leaned over her to see if she smelled of alcohol, but she didn’t.

  ‘Other substances,’ he surmised.

  ‘Should we drag her down to the Maria clinic?’

  ‘I’ve seen this sort of thing before,’ Henry claimed. ‘She’ll come round in a while. Although we ought to give her a bath.’

  ‘Too bad Leo isn’t home. He’d know what to do about something like this.’

  I don’t really know what came over us, because in reality we weren’t very good gentlemen that winter, but on that Shrove Tuesday in February we were both struck with some kind of charitable insanity or good Samaritan frenzy. All of a sudden we were busy taking off the clothes of that mistreated girl while hot water was slowing filling up the bathtub. Henry really laid it on thick by contributing some scented oil and bubble-bath.

  ‘No … cut it out, cut it out …’ groaned the girl when she was naked and we carried her thin body to the bathroom. ‘Not again … Leave me the hell … alone …’ she went on.

  Henry spoke to her soothingly and said that we weren’t going to hurt her, but she didn’t understand a thing; the words never entered her consciousness. She was in a foetal stage and could only take in purely physical sensations. As we cautiously lowered her body into the warm water her protests grew weaker and the grotesque face took on an almost peaceful expression.

  We were a bit clumsy, and embarrassed at the same time, because we didn’t know how scrupulous we should be. We had no experience in this area. Henry rubbed her feet as lovingly as if they were his own, although he asserted that there were professionals who could cure all sorts of ailments simply by manipulating the feet. But in this case it probably had more to do with the fact that he wanted to stick to whatever could be lifted up out of the bubble-bath. I bathed her swollen eye.

  The girl didn’t even wake up when we dried her off with a large bath towel and put her to bed in the guest room under starched fresh sheets.

  ‘She’s really out of it,’ said Henry. ‘Damn, this isn’t good. It’s an omen about something. Something really terrible is going to happen. I can feel it. And it’s not just my usual rheumatism this time.’

  I rarely took very seriously his harping about rheumatism, horoscopes and occult portents, but that night, as he sat there looking at the girl’s bruised and yet largely peaceful face immersed in a deep sleep, with the swollen eye bulging like some awful medallion above her cheek, I couldn’t help feeling a little uneasy. Henry sounded so damn prophetic, and in a moment of weakness I was prepared to give in, to agree that this really was a sign that something was going to happen that winter. The girl could be a dark angel, sent to us as some sort of harbinger.

  ‘We need to keep watch over her tonight,’ said Henry. ‘I’ll light a candle for her, a tall and beautiful candle, and keep watch.’

  ‘I suppose that’s best,’ I said. ‘If she wakes up she might think she’s already dead.’

  ‘I’ll read to her from the Bible,’ Henry went on, sounding as pathetic as a zealous army chaplain.

  ‘The Bible?!’ I said. ‘Why the hell would you read from the Bible? Why don’t you ring for the Pentecostals, Imsen or Målle, at the same time!’

  ‘Don’t be so superficial, Östergren. I’m going to read to the young girl about grace. She needs a little grace, as do we all. I’m going to say a mass for a nun.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But now I wash my hands of this whole thing. I’ll come to relieve you at two a.m.’

  It was already late, and we agreed on a preliminary schedule for the night. I went to bed wearing pyjamas, socks and a night-cap because of that incipient ear infection. I read some appropriately encouraging words by Cervantes and thought about Spain for a while, but it got too cold to have my hands above the covers, so I went to sleep instead.

  The alarm clock rang at two, and it took more courage than usual to get out of bed. It was still a night with frost on the inside of the window, and I don’t want to boast, but I did find the courage. After I threw on my clothes and flailed my arms about to get warm, I tiptoed over to the guest room and opened the door. Henry the army chaplain was dozing in his chair in the light from the tall candle and the fading glow of the woodstove. He was holding the girl’s hand, exactly as if he had been trying to tell her fortune in the dark.

  At his feet lay a volume of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. Apparently nothing had come of reading from the Bible or holding a mass for a nun. Instead he had read a story aloud, as if for a daughter who was ill and couldn’t sleep. Maybe the one about the little match girl; it seemed a likely choice, and Henry was so hopelessly sentimental. The girl herself hadn’t heard a word, of course.

  Henry awoke when I gave him a little pat on the shoulder, mumbled something incoherent, and then went off like a zombie to his own room. The night passed without incident. The cold dawn of Ash Wednesday slowly rose over Stockholm, and the girl still slept heavily, though her breathing became more and more regular.

  ________

  The cold retained its iron grip on Stockholm, and every single evening we had to go out and find wood for the stoves. Otherwise we would have died, plain and simple.

  One evening when we were out on just such a mission – absurd as it sounds, officially it’s a crime to take anything people throw into skips, so just to be safe, we carried out all our operations after nightfall – we were struck by a completely devastating thirst in the midst of our work. We were busy sorting through boards over at Mariaberget, but we decided to take a break and go over to Gropen to have a beer and thaw out in the warmth of the bar.

  We had no sooner sat down in a booth with a lager for each of us when Henry gave me a poke with a sharp elbow and nodded significantly towards the table next to us. I glanced over there, and in the dim, sleazy light I actually saw none other than our little protégée, the dark angel whom we had nursed like our own daughter on that dreadful cold night a couple of weeks earlier.

  She had recovered nicely. Her face looked quite lovely, and she seemed to have put on a few pounds, all in the right places. After our intensive treatment, she had started talking, with all the speed of an expert commentator at an ice-hockey match which never took place, so to speak. She had jabbered and rambled on and on about everything in her whole life, when a single sentence would have sufficed, since it was not exactly a pretty story. In any case, then she had left us, and without thanking us for our help, but that didn’t matter because by then we were happy to get rid of her.

  Yet here she now sat in Gropen with a beer in front of her. She may not have looked like someone in a ladies’ magazine, but she was alive, anyway, and laughing at the jokes that a pockmarked bruiser was serving up.

  ‘It’s him,’ muttered Henry out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The guy who beat her up!’

  ‘How the hell do you know that?!’

  ‘I know how the game is played. Just listen to them.’

  I tried to listen to what they were talking about. Their conversation was filled with promises and hopes and a whole lot of cold numbers. He was apparently going to start earning money again, and the girl said that she trusted him. He promised that everything was going to be fine. The situation was quite clear.

  Henry and I didn’t have much time to brood over the matter before I felt the girl’s eyes fixed on me, pinning
me to my seat as if she were trying to remember something. She squinted and turned her head and glared like an inquisitive kid.

  ‘Hi,’ I said to her.

  ‘I know you,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose you do,’ I said.

  ‘You …’ she said. ‘Oh shit, yes … What’s your name again? You’re on TV, aren’t you?! I’ve seen you lots of times!’

  Henry doubled over, trying to stifle a laugh, while I tried to keep a straight face, thinking that ingratitude is the world’s reward. On the other hand, I’m used to being taken for someone else – it’s been that way all my life.

  ‘What’s the name of that damn programme you were on?’ the girl asked. ‘Check it out for yourself,’ she said to the pockmarked bruiser who stuck his enormous head out of the booth and stared for a long time without being able to place the celebrity either.

  ‘Ask him for his autograph,’ he said, sniggering. ‘Shit, I sold my TV. But I promise to buy a new one!’

  Henry and I downed the rest of our drinks and went back out to the street to complete our mission. The last I heard of the girl was:

  ‘It’s a bitch that I can’t remember which programme it was!’

  ‘Fuck it,’ said the bruiser. ‘I’m going to buy a new TV. Tomorrow.’

  Perhaps she really was a harbinger, that nameless girl whom we’d found on the landing. Perhaps she was sent to us as a foreboding dark angel whom we were supposed to nurse and then send off into the world. Because it was no easy or trouble-free time that we were about to enter.

  We had opened our own private income-tax-return agency the weekend that China marched into Vietnam and the whole world seemed about to be torn apart. Henry Morgan was no financial genius, and I was even worse, so we had set up our makeshift office in the library. We swore and calculated and read aloud and quoted from the confusing tax forms that had come with the newspapers but without really bringing any sort of clarity to the whole matter. I alone had eighteen different sources of income, and Henry was not far behind. He also wanted to be discreet and secretive about his income, so he refused to give me full insight into his affairs. The most significant amount was his monthly appanage, which was paid out from a trust fund. Added to that were a host of smaller entries from various odd jobs and his wages as an extra for different film companies. In principle it was much the same sort of hodgepodge for me. Finances were not the strong point of two gentlemen like us who were so removed from the world. And besides, the idea was to cheat with a certain amount of elegance; neither of us wanted to acknowledge our deceit.

  But on that Sunday morning when we could read that China had entered Vietnam and a Third World War would soon become fact, it seemed so superfluous to be sitting there wrestling with a hundred kronor here and fifty kronor there. No matter how slipshod we were, we still belonged to the absolute lowest income group, and that seemed very unfair.

  Henry was perhaps a bit more upset than I was, because he always went to extremes, no matter what the mood in question – euphoria as well as depression. The Soviet Union had, of course, issued a sharp warning to China, urging the Chinese to withdraw their forces immediately, because the Russians had signed a defence treaty with Vietnam and were therefore obligated to intervene in some manner.

  ‘What a hell of a Sabbath!’ said Henry, sighing. ‘The world is undeniably sick. It practically makes you want to vomit!’

  ‘It does seem undeniably superfluous to be sitting here with our pitiful income, having to report every öre,’ I said morosely. ‘It’s just like Beckett, Samuel Beckett.’

  ‘I think I need to go to church today,’ said Henry. ‘Go and listen to a sermon and the whole rigmarole. That’s the only thing to do in light of today’s situation.’

  ‘Just don’t say that to Leo,’ I told him. ‘I can’t face an argument today.’

  ‘Fuck that bastard and his peace-loving friends in the East.’

  ‘That might be a bit harsh. There’s no need to be an ass about it!’

  ‘What a damn mess there’s going to be after all this. How the hell are they going to make sense of anything now? The Russians have been nasty for a long time, and now the Chinese are nasty and malevolent as well. Who are they going to worship now?’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s not God, anyway.’

  ‘Don’t try to pull my leg. I’m a weak man,’ said Henry.

  ‘But I wasn’t being sarcastic,’ I assured him. ‘I just can’t understand why you suddenly want to go to church.’

  ‘Don’t give me your hatred for Luther again,’ said Henry. ‘I don’t buy it anymore. Never mind that he threatened damnation, you can always obtain grace.’

  ‘Don’t you have to die first?’

  ‘Not at all! They sure don’t teach you much in school these days, do they?’

  ‘As soon as you feel pressured, Henry, you have to start taking evasive action. Do you realise that? You hit below the belt. It’s the same every time anyone tries to have a serious conversation with you. You can never give a serious answer. You always have to hit below the belt.’

  ‘You’ve been listening to Leo too much,’ said Henry bitterly. ‘That’s his standard argument. That’s what he says every time there’s something going on, that I hit below the belt. But dammit all, Klasa, we need to stay calm right now. We can’t start getting desperate just because the Chinese are crazy. I respect you, and you have to respect me. All right?’

  ‘Sure, all right.’

  Henry actually did go to church, and he came back home in a significantly better mood. The pastor had spoken some extremely well-chosen words. Henry was a good man at the Maria Magdalena congregation; he wasn’t the least bit removed from the world, if anyone should imagine that he was. He could handle an issue in the proper manner, sum up the whole thing, and get it to flow into a calm and gentle sense of hope, which was exactly what Henry Morgan needed.

  In any case, we finished our income-tax returns on that black Sunday when it looked as if a Third World War were right around the corner, and everyone was just waiting to hear the news about what was going to happen.

  Henry was quite brilliant that afternoon, and I don’t know whether it was because of the pastor’s comforting words or because of our argument that morning. Maybe it had been gnawing at part of his brain, because he really did make an effort not to behave evasively or to dismiss things. Henry the cineast was a big fan of Ingmar Bergman, of course, and he drew my attention to the scene in The Serpent’s Egg in which Inspector Bauer is interrogating Abel about his sins and Abel wonders why there’s such a fuss about his lowly person when the whole world is in flames. Inspector Bauer then says that he’s just doing his job, that everything around him is in chaos because people aren’t tending to their jobs. He’s just trying to create a little patch of order in the appalling chaos of the twentieth century, and that’s the only reason that he can even manage to survive.

  There was something grand in that dilemma, and Henry thought it was exactly the same thing that was preoccupying us that afternoon: we were creating order in our finances, amid our little private chaos, perhaps to maintain a little patch of order in the midst of the vast, public Chaos that had befallen us and every other vulnerable citizen of the world.

  Henry felt that as a mature man he ought to do his duty, but that was no reason for him to call himself reactionary, as Leo and I had. I thought that I understood him, even though all that talk about duty above everything else led my thoughts back to the old days of one-krona coins and scouting expeditions.

  ________

  As usual, Henry had pinned up his daily schedule on the pinboard in the kitchen since it was his intention to carry out his routines, do his duty and arrange for a little patch of order in the midst of life’s chaos.

  On Monday, when we were supposed to take over from Greger and Birger down in the passageway, we were met by a strange sight. Greger was lugging around some big boxes filled with tinned goods, packaged foods, clothing and blankets. He dragged these es
sentials into the grotto that bore his name, where he had already placed electric lights and spare lamps that ran on paraffin oil.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ asked Henry.

  ‘It’s Birger,’ said Greger curtly.

  ‘What do mean “Birger”?’

  ‘This is all Birger’s idea, the whole thing. He was the one who said we should do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘The war,’ Greger went on, just as cryptically. ‘The war!’

  What this was all about began to dawn on us as we stood there in bewilderment, watching as Greger busily created an air-raid shelter down there, underground. Just then Birger showed up to inspect Greger’s efforts, and he had an air of rigid self-confidence about him. He was completely convinced that the Third World War was going to break out any day now. Once the Russians started out, the Bear could reach Sweden overnight. It was best to take precautions, and Greger’s Grotto was just as good an air-raid shelter as anywhere. It had good ventilation and it was dry, discreet and private.

  ‘I’ll take responsibility for this, Henry,’ said Birger a bit arrogantly. ‘We’ll lay in provisions for at least two weeks, enough for ten people. I’m including the three of you from upstairs.’

  ‘OK then, boys,’ stammered Henry. ‘I’ll leave it to you.’ He tried to sound as serious as the current situation warranted. ‘It looks like if you’ve already done a great job.’

  ‘We won’t lack for anything by the time we’re finished,’ said Birger.

  ‘We reckon we’ll be done by this afternoon,’ said Greger solemnly.

  ‘Around five,’ Birger clarified. ‘After that, any damn thing can happen in the world, but we are going to survive. I’ll see to that!’