My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (25 page)

‘Only a bit. No, I write. And then I swim in the pool at Medborgarplatsen every day.’

‘Do you? I swim there too. Not every day, but almost.’

We smiled at each other.

I took out my mobile and checked the time.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to go soon,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘But we can meet again, can’t we?’

‘Yes, we can. When?’

She shrugged. ‘You can just ring me, can’t you?’

‘Yep.’

I put the manuscript and the mobile phone in my bag, and got up.

‘I’ll phone you then. Nice to see you again!’

‘
Hej då
,’ she said. Bye.

Bag in hand, I strode down the street, alongside the park and into the broad avenue where the flat was. Nothing had changed, we hadn’t changed anything; when we took our leave it was all as it was before we met.

But what had I been expecting?

We weren’t going anywhere after all.

I hadn’t asked about flats, either. Or contacts. Nothing.

I was fat as well.

After arriving home I lay back on the water bed and studied the ceiling. She had been completely different. She was almost like a different person.

At Biskops-Arnö perhaps the most striking feature of her personality had been her determination to go as far as she had to, which I had sensed at once and was deeply attracted by. It had disappeared. The hardness, bordering on ruthlessness, yet as fragile as glass, was gone too. There was still something fragile about her, but in a different way, this time I hadn’t thought that she could be crushed or go to pieces, as I had then. Now her fragility was joined by a softness, and her indifferent side, which said you’ll never get close to me, had changed. She was shy but somehow also open. Hadn’t there been something open about her?

The autumn after we had been to Biskops-Arnö she had got together with Arve, and through him I had heard what happened to her in the winter and spring. She had gone through a manic-depressive phase, was eventually admitted to a psychiatric hospital, that was all I knew. During the manic periods she had rung me twice to ask if I could get hold of Arve. I did both times, asked his friends to tell him to call me, and when he did I could hear he was disappointed it was actually Linda trying to contact him. And once she rang just to talk to me, it was six o’clock in the morning, she told me she was about to begin a creative writing course, and was leaving for Gothenburg in an hour. Tonje was awake in the bedroom, wondering who would ring at this crazy hour, I said, Linda, you know, the Swede I met, who’s with Arne. Why would she ring you? Tonje asked, no idea, I said, think she’s going through a manic-depressive phase.

We couldn’t talk about any of this.

And if we couldn’t talk about this, we couldn’t talk about anything.

What was the point of sitting there and saying hi, hi, erm, erm, how are you?

I closed my eyes and tried to picture her.

Had I felt anything for her?

No.

Or yes, I liked her and perhaps I felt some tenderness for her, after all that had happened, but there was no more to it than that. The rest I had put behind me, quite definitely.

Best like that.

I got up, stuffed my trunks, a towel and some shampoo in a bag, put on my jacket and walked to Medborgarplatsen, into Forsgrénska Badet, which was almost empty at this time of day, changed, entered the swimming hall, onto the block and dived in. I swam a thousand metres beneath the pale March light that fell in through the large window at the end, to and fro, up and down, under the water, over the water, without thinking about anything but the number of metres, the number of minutes, all while trying to perform the strokes as perfectly as possible.

Afterwards I went to the sauna, thought about the time I tried to write short stories based on small ideas, like a man with a prosthetic limb in the swimming pool changing room, without knowing what, why or how.

What had been the big idea?

A man tied to a chair in a room, in a flat, somewhere in Bergen, in the end shot through the head, dead, but still alive in the text, an ego that lasted well into its funeral and the grave.

Gesticulating, that was what I had been doing.

And for so long.

I wiped the sweat from my brow with the towel, looked down at the rolls of fat sagging from my stomach. Pale and fat and stupid.

But in Stockholm!

I got up, went to the showers and stood under one.

I knew no one here. I was utterly free.

If I left Tonje, if this was the path I was to take, I could stay here for a month or two, perhaps all summer, and then go to . . . well, wherever I felt like going. Buenos Aires. Tokyo. New York. Go down to South Africa and take the train to Lake Victoria. Or Moscow, why not? That would be fantastic.

I closed my eyes and soaped my hair. Rinsed it, went in and opened my locker, dressed.

I was free if I wanted to be.

I didn’t
need
to write any more.

I put the towel and my wet shorts in the bag, went out into the grey chilly day, to Saluhallen, the food hall, where I had a ciabatta roll leaning against a counter. Went home, tried to write a little while hoping that Geir would come earlier than he had said. Went to bed and watched TV, an American soap, fell asleep.

When I woke it was dark outside. Someone was knocking at the door.

I opened up, it was Geir, we shook hands.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘How was it?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Where shall we go?’

Geir shrugged while walking round and inspecting all the ornaments inside, stopping in front of the bookshelves and turning.

‘Isn’t it strange that you find the same books everywhere you go? I mean, she’s around twenty-five, isn’t she? Works at
Ordfront
, lives in Söder? But these are the books she’s got and no others.’

‘Yes, very strange,’ I said. ‘Where shall we go? Guldapan? Kvarnen? Pelikanen?’

‘Not Kvarnen at any rate. Guldapan maybe? Are you hungry?’

I nodded.

‘Let’s go there. The food’s not bad. Good chicken.’

Outside, it felt as if it could start snowing at any moment. Cold and raw and damp.

‘Come on then,’ Geir said as we strode along. ‘Good in what way?’

‘We met, chatted and left. That’s pretty much how it was.’

‘Was she how you remembered her?’

‘We-ell, bit different maybe.’

‘In what way?’

‘How many times are you going to ask that?’

‘I really mean it. What did you feel when you saw her?’

‘Less than I thought I would.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Why? What sort of sodding question is that? How can I know? I feel what I feel. It’s not possible to identify every tiny fluctuation of the soul, if that’s what you believe.’

‘Isn’t that what you make your living from?’

‘No. I make my living from all the embarrassing situations I have been put in. That’s different.’

‘So there are fluctuations then?’ he said.

‘Here we are,’ I said. ‘We’re eating, isn’t that what you said?’

I opened the door and went in. The bar was in the first room, the dining room in the second.

‘Why not?’ Geir said, and walked through the café. I followed. We sat down, read the menus and ordered chicken and a beer when the waiter came.

‘Did I tell you I’ve been here with Arve?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘When we came to Stockholm we ended up here. Well, first of all we were up at what I gather now must have been Stureplan. Arve went in and asked if they knew where writers drank in Stockholm. They just laughed at him and answered in English. So we wandered round for a while, it was terrible actually, for I held Arve in great esteem, he was an intellectual, was at
Vagant
from the very start, and then we met at the airport and I couldn’t say a word. Next to nothing. Landed at Arlanda, couldn’t speak. Came into Stockholm, found the accommodation, said nothing. Went out to eat,
nada
. Not a word. My only chance, I knew, was to drink my way through the sound barrier. So I did. A beer in Drottninggatan, where we asked someone where it was good to go out, they said Söder, Guldapan, and so we took a taxi here. I drank spirits and started to open up. A few words here and there. Arve leaned over to me and said, that girl’s looking at you. Do you want me to go so that you can be alone with her? Which girl? I asked, that one, Arve said, and I looked at her, and shit, she was so good-looking! But it was Arve’s offer that had the most impact. Wasn’t it a bit odd?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘We got rat-arsed. So there was no longer any need to talk. We wandered round the streets here, it was getting light, I had barely a thought in my head, then we found a beer hall and went in, there was a great atmosphere, and I was out of my head, chucking beer down while Arve talked about his child. Suddenly he was in tears. I hadn’t even been listening. And then, there he was, with his hands in front of his face and his shoulders shaking. He was sobbing his heart out, I thought from somewhere deep inside me. Then they closed, we took a taxi to somewhere further up, they didn’t let us in and we found a large open area with a kiosk at the end, it might have been Kungsträdgården, could well have been. There were some chairs which had chains attached to them. We lifted them above our heads and hurled them at the wall, ran wild, completely out of our heads. Strange that the police didn’t come. But they didn’t. So we took a taxi to our lodgings. The following morning we woke up two hours after the train had departed. But we didn’t give a shit anyway, so it didn’t matter. We made our way to the station, caught the next train and I talked all the way back. I was unstoppable. It was as if everything that had been inside me for the last year came out. Something about Arve made it possible. I don’t know quite what it was, or is. A kind of enormous tolerance in him. Nevertheless, he got the whole story. Dad dying, the hell it had been, the debut and everything that came with it, and after I had told him that, I just went on. I remember us waiting for a taxi at the station, not a soul around, just Arve and me, him looking at me, me talking and talking. Childhood, teenage years, I didn’t leave a stone unturned. Just me, nothing else. Me, me, me. I ladled it all over him. Something about him made that possible, he understood everything I said and thought, I had never experienced that with anyone else before. There were always limitations, attitudes, assertion needs that halted what was being said at a certain point, or led it in a certain direction, so that what you said was always reshaped into something else, it could never exist in its own right. But Arve, it seemed to me on that day, was a truly open person, as well being curious and constantly striving to understand what he saw. But there was no ulterior motive about his openness, it was not a damned psychologist’s openness, nor was there any ulterior motive about the curiosity. He had a shrewd eye for the world, so it appeared, and like all those who have accumulated experience, by and large what remained was laughter. Laughter was really the only appropriate way to confront human behaviour and notions.

‘I understood that, and while taking advantage of it, for I was not strong enough to resist all that his openness gave me, it also frightened me.

‘He knew something I didn’t know, he understood something I didn’t understand, he could see something I couldn’t see.

‘I told him.

‘He smiled.

‘“I’m forty years old, Karl Ove. You’re thirty. That’s a big difference. That’s what you’ve noticed.”

‘“I don’t think so,” I said. “There’s something else. You have some sort of insight into things, which I lack.”

‘“Tell me more! Tell me more!”

‘He laughed.

‘His aura was centred around his dark intense eyes, but he was not himself dark, he laughed a lot, the smile barely left his slightly twisted lips. His aura was strong, he was the kind of person whose presence you noticed, but it wasn’t a physical presence because you simply didn’t notice his light slim body. At least I didn’t. Arve, he was a shaven head, dark eyes, a permanent smile and a hearty laugh. His reasoning always led, for me, to unexpected conclusions. The fact that he had opened up for me was more than I could have hoped for. All of a sudden I could say everything that I had kept inside me so far, and more, for it was as if it had rubbed off on me. Now my reasoning set off on expected paths, and the feeling it gave me was one of hope. Perhaps I was a writer after all? Arve was. But me? With all my ordinariness? With my life of football and films?

‘How I prattled on.

‘The taxi arrived, I opened the boot lid and babbled away, hungover and the worse for wear. We put our two bags in, got in the car, I babbled the whole way through the Swedish countryside to Biskops-Arnö, where the seminar had long started. They’d just had lunch when we rolled out of the taxi.’

‘And that was how it continued?’ Geir asked.

‘And that was how it continued,’ I said.

A man stepped forward and introduced himself as Ingmar Lemhagen. He was the course director. He told me he had enjoyed my book and that it had reminded him of another Norwegian author. ‘Who?’ I asked, he smiled wryly, said it would have to wait until we went through my texts in the plenary.

I pondered. Had to be Finn Alnæs or Agnar Mykle.

I deposited my bags outside, went into the hall, shovelled some food onto a plate and devoured it. Everything swayed, I was still drunk, but not so much that I didn’t feel my chest bursting with the excitement and pleasure of being there.

I was shown to a room, dropped off my luggage, went over to the building where the course was being held. That was when I saw her. She was leaning against the wall, I didn’t say anything to her, there were lots of people around, but I looked at her, and there was something about her I wanted, the second I saw her, it was there.

A kind of explosion.

We were put in the same group. The group leader, a Finnish woman, said nothing as we took our places, it was some sort of teaching trick she was employing, but no one was taken in, everyone was silent for the first five minutes, until it became too unpleasant and someone took the initiative.