My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (20 page)

Oh, wretched me.

A constant stream of new people walked past the gateway. The light from the lamps hanging from cables above the street glinted on padded jackets and carrier bags, tarmac and metal. A faint hum of footsteps and voices traversed the space between the lines of houses. Two pigeons stood motionless on a first-floor window ledge. Water collected in heavy drops at the end of the rail on the awning projecting from the wall and every so often detached themselves and fell to the ground. I had put the book into my rucksack, and now I took out my mobile phone from my jacket pocket to see what the time was. The display was dark, so I turned it on as I began to walk. A message came in. It was from Tonje.

Have you arrived? Thinking about you.

Those two sentences made her feel close. The image of her, the woman she was for me, completely overcame me for a moment. Not just her face and manner, the way it is when you think about someone you know, but everything her face could be, all the indefinable features, incredibly clear nonetheless, which a person radiates to those who love them. But I wasn’t going to answer. The whole point of leaving was to get away from her, so as a wave of sorrow at everything washed through me I deleted the message and clicked back to the clock screen.

16.21.

I had just over half an hour before I was to meet Geir.

Unless we had said half past four?

Had we?

Shit, we had! We were meeting at half past four, not five.

I turned and set off at a run. After a couple of blocks I stopped to regain my breath. The man sitting with the arrow-shaped board in his hands looked at me with listless eyes. I took that as a sign, and turned into the street where the arrow was pointing. When I reached the crossroads at the other end, sure enough the railway station was right in front of me, and on a wall down a short side street I spotted a yellow sign saying Arlanda Express. The train to the airport. It was 16.26. If I was going to be punctual I would have to run the last stretch as well. Across the street, into the airport train terminal, along the platform, into the entrance hall, past the kiosks and cafés, benches and left luggage lockers and into the main concourse, where I stopped so out of breath that I had to lean forward and support myself with my hands on my knees.

We had agreed to meet by the circular railings in the middle of the concourse, where you could look down at the lower floor. When I straightened up to look for the railings, I saw the clock on the wall stood at exactly half past.

There.

I chose a somewhat circuitous route, right over by the line of kiosks, and waited by the wall some distance away so that I could see Geir before he saw me. It was twelve years since I had seen him, and even then maybe only four or five times over two months, so from the moment he had answered my email and said I could stay with him, I had feared I wouldn’t be able to recognise him. ‘Recognise’ is perhaps an inappropriate term in that I didn’t have a single picture of him. When I thought about Geir it was not his face I visualised but the letters in his name – Geir that is – and a vague memory of someone laughing. The only scene I remember with him was in the bar at Fekterloftet in Bergen. Him laughing and saying, ‘You’re an existentialist!’ Why I should remember that of all things I had no idea. Perhaps because I didn’t know what an existentialist was? And was flattered because my opinions fitted into a well-known philosophical category?

I still didn’t know what an existentialist was. I knew the concept, could cite a few names and a time, but was unable to recall the precise definition.

The king of approximation, that was me.

I took off my rucksack and placed it on the floor between my feet, rolled my shoulders as I watched the people at the railing. None of them could be Geir. If anyone appeared answering to the vague description I had remembered I would go over to him and hope he recognised me. At worst I could ask, ‘Are you Geir?’

I looked up at the clock at the end of the concourse. Five minutes late.

Had we said five after all?

For some reason I was sure he was the punctual type. In that case it must have been five we had arranged. I had seen an Internet café in the entrance hall, and after waiting a bit longer I went there to confirm my suspicions. I also felt a need to read his email again, gauge the tone, then perhaps the impending situation would seem slightly less unfamiliar.

The language problems I’d encountered so far resulted in my confining what I said to the girl behind the counter to:
Internet?
She nodded and pointed to one of the computers. I sat down, logged into my email site and saw there were five new messages, which I skimmed. All of them from the editorial staff at
Vagant
. Even though it had not been more than twenty-four hours since I was sitting in Bergen, it felt as though the discussion between Preben, Eirik, Finn and Jørgen on screen was taking place in another world where I no longer belonged. As though I had crossed a line, as though in fact
I could not return
.

I was there yesterday, I told myself. And I still haven’t decided how long I will be staying here. I can return in a week if I like. Or tomorrow.

But that was not how it felt. It felt as if I would never return.

I turned my head and looked towards the Burger King. On the nearest table a paper cup of Coke had been knocked over. The black liquid had formed a long oval puddle and was still dripping from the table edge onto the floor. At the table behind, a man was sitting with his knees pinched together and eating as if it were a punishment: for a few seconds his hand sped between the carton of chips, the small tub of ketchup and the chewing mouth, then he swallowed, grabbed the hamburger with both hands, put it to his lips and took a large bite. While he munched he held the hamburger as if at the ready, a few centimetres from his mouth, and then took another bite, wiped his lips with the back of one hand and lifted the beaker of Coke with the other, glancing at the three black-haired teenage girls chatting round the adjacent table. One of them looked in my direction, and I glanced first at the entrance, where two uniformed flight attendants came through the door into the concourse, each with a roller bag in tow, and then back at the computer screen, with the sharp, rapidly fading click-clacking sounds of their heels in my ears.

What if I never returned? I had after all been longing for this. To be here, alone, in a foreign town. No ties, no one else, just me, free to do what I wanted.

So why this feeling of heaviness?

I clicked on Geir’s emails and began to read.

Dear Karl Ove,

An altogether excellent idea. Uppsala is, as you say, a university town, very much so. The town can be compared with Sørland at the turn of the century, a place to send your children so that they can learn how to roll their ‘r’s properly. Stockholm is one of the world’s most beautiful capital cities, anything but relaxed though. Sweden as such is a fantastic paradox, on the one hand known far and wide for its open borders, on the other Europe’s most segregated country. If you don’t fancy Uppsala, I would recommend you live in Stockholm. (Whatever you choose they’re only 40–50 minutes apart by train and one goes every half an hour).

As for flats, bedsits and rooms for rent, they are by no means easy to get hold of. It’s worse if anything in Uppsala because of all the new students. Difficult, though not impossible. Off the top of my head I can’t think of anyone with a room to rent, but I’ll ask around. Since you, if I’ve understood correctly, are not moving for good, but to begin with only until the end of the year it should be possible to get hold of what is known here as a ‘second-hand flat’. There are agencies that specialise in them. Have you contacted SFF, the Swedish Writers’ Union, by the way? It is not inconceivable that they have flats for foreign writers or at least that they know someone who does. If you want I can ring round to agencies, associations, etc.

Today is Saturday 16 March. Would you like to come over one weekend, or perhaps better midweek when everything’s open, just to see whether you like it here? Or have you already decided? In which case, next week I’ll start to enquire about available flats at the beginning of next week. At all events, you’re welcome to stay here whether you’re on holiday or flat hunting.

Looking forward to seeing you,

Geir

Karl Ove,

Unless you’re already on the train, give me a ring as soon as you’re in Oslo or Stockholm! Don’t waste your money on a hotel, and don’t be shy. I have selfish reasons for this – you speak fluent Norwegian. My vocabulary is shrinking. Incidentally, Uppsala University was founded in 1477.

My number in Stockholm is 708 96 93

Geir

So you don’t like phones, eh? Let’s say the main railway station then (where your train arrives) at five this afternoon. There’s a circular railing (in local parlance, the poof ring) in the middle of the concourse. I’ll meet you there. But call me if you get held up! (You can’t object to phones that much.)

Geir

That was the correspondence. I didn’t doubt the sincerity of his offer to let me stay with them, but still I found it hard to accept. Meeting somewhere for a cup of coffee would have been more appropriate for the circumstances. On the other hand, I didn’t have anything to lose. And he did come from the island of Hisøya.

I closed the email and cast a glance at the table where the three girls were, before grabbing my rucksack and getting to my feet. The one doing the talking spoke with a kind of aggrieved passion, immensely self-assertive, and was applauded with the same passion. If they hadn’t been speaking I would have thought they were around nineteen. Now I knew they were closer to fifteen.

The nearest of them turned her head and met my stare again. Not to offer me anything – it was not an open look – but to confirm that I was looking at her. Nevertheless it opened up something. A flash of something like happiness. Then, as I went to the cash desk to pay, the thunder of consciousness followed. I was thirty-three years old. A grown man. Why was I thinking as if I was still twenty? When would these youthful fancies leave me? When my father was thirty-three he had a son of thirteen and one of nine, he had a house and a car and a job, and in photos of him from that time he looked like a man, and from what I could remember he also behaved like a man, I thought as I stepped up to the counter. Placed a warm hand on the cool marble surface. The assistant rose from a chair and came over to take payment.

‘How much is it?’ I asked in Norwegian.

‘
Ursäkta?
’

I sighed.

‘What does it cost?’

She glanced at the screen in front of her.

‘Ten,’ she said.

I handed her a creased twenty-krone note.

‘That’s fine,’ I said, walking away before she had a chance to answer with another
Ursäkta?
, which this country seemed to be awash with. The clock on the wall in the main concourse said six minutes to five. I took up my old position and watched the people hanging around the rail. As none of them fitted the little I had to go on I allowed my gaze to wander among those walking through the station. From the kiosk on the other side came a short man with a large head and an appearance so unusual I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was in his fifties, his hair was a yellowish colour, his face broad, nose large, mouth slightly askew and his eyes were small. He looked like a gnome. But he was dressed in a suit and coat, in one hand he held an elegant leather briefcase, tucked under his arm he had a newspaper, and perhaps another personality was thrusting forth beneath the metropolitan exterior, which meant that my eyes were glued to him until he disappeared down the stairs to the platforms where the commuter trains departed. Suddenly, again, I saw how old everything was. Backs, hands, feet, heads, ears, hair, nails: every single part of the bodies streaming through the concourse was old. The buzz of voices rising from them was old. Even their pleasure was old, even the wishes and expectations of what the future would bring were old. Yet new, for us the future was new, for us it belonged to our time, belonged to the queue of waiting taxis outside, belonged to the coffee machines on the tables in the cafés, belonged to the shelves of magazines in the kiosks, belonged to the mobiles and iPods, the Goretex coats and laptops carried in their bags through the station and into trains, belonged to the trains and automatic doors, to the ticket machines and illuminated boards with changing destinations. Old age had no place here. Yet it completely dominated everything.

What a terrible thought that was.

I stuck a hand in my pocket to check the locker keys were there. They were. Then I patted my chest to feel for my credit card. It was there.

In the thronging masses before me a familiar face appeared. My heart beat faster. But it wasn’t Geir, it was someone else. An even more remote acquaintance. A friend of a friend? Someone I had gone to school with?

I grinned as it clicked. It was the man from Burger King. He stopped and looked at the departures board. Between the thumb and first finger of the hand carrying the briefcase he was holding a ticket. As he checked the time on the board with the time on his ticket he raised the whole briefcase towards his face.

I glanced at the clock at the end of the concourse. Two minutes to. If Geir was as punctual as I assumed, he should be somewhere in the station by now, and I systematically scanned all the figures in the approaching crowd. First left, then right.

There.

Surely that had to be Geir?

Yes. It was. I remembered the face when I saw it. And he was not only walking towards me, he also had his eyes fixed on me.

I smiled, wiped my palm over my thigh as discreetly as I could, and reached out as he stopped in front of me.