My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (39 page)

‘But why compare Sweden and Norway?’ Anders asked after a while. ‘Nothing happens here. It’s cold and horrible as well.’

‘Anders wants to go back to Spain,’ Helena said.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ Anders retorted. ‘We should have moved. All of us. What actually keeps us here? Is there anything?’

‘What is it about Spain then?’ Linda asked.

He opened his palms.

‘You can do what you like. No one bothers. And it’s so lovely and hot. There are some wonderful towns down there. Sevilla. Valencia. Barcelona. Madrid.’

He looked at me.

‘And there’s a slight difference in the level of football. The two of us should go down and see
El Clásico
. Stay overnight. I can fix the tickets. No problem. What do you say?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ I said.

‘Sounds good to me,’ he snorted. ‘Let’s go, man.’

Linda looked at me and smiled. ‘You go, I’d be pleased for you,’ her look said. But there were other looks and moods, I knew, which would appear sooner or later. You go and enjoy yourself while I sit at home alone, they said. You only think about yourself. If you go anywhere it should be with me. All of this was in her eyes. A boundless love and a boundless anxiety. Fighting for domination all the time. Something new had appeared in recent months, it was tied up with the imminent arrival of the baby, and lay inside her, a mutedness. The anxiety was delicate, ethereal, flickering through her consciousness like the northern lights across a winter’s sky or lightning across an August sky, and the darkness that accompanied it was weightless too, in the sense that it was an absence of light, and absence has no weight. What filled her now was something else, I thought it had something to do with earth, it was earthy, a taking root. At the same time I considered it a stupid mythologising thought.

Nevertheless. Earth.

‘When is
El Clásico
then?’ I asked, leaning across the table to fill Anders’ glass.

‘I don’t know. But we don’t have to go and see that match. Any of them will do. I just want to see Barcelona.’

I filled my glass and poked out the meat from the back of the claw.

‘Yes, that would be good,’ I said. ‘But at any rate we’ll have to wait for a week after the birth. After all, we’re not men from the 1950s.’

‘I am,’ Geir said.

‘Me too,’ Anders said. ‘Or at least on the fringes. If I could have done it, I would have paced the corridor during the birth.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ Geir asked.

Anders looked at him, and they laughed.

‘Has everyone got something to drink?’ I asked. After they had nodded and thanked me, I collected their plates and carried them into the kitchen. Christina followed me with the two serving platters.

‘Can I help you with anything?’ she asked.

I shook my head and briefly met her eyes before looking down.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But thank you for offering.’

She went back, I filled a pan with water and put it on the stove. Outside, rockets were making fizzing sounds and exploding. The little patch of sky I could see was occasionally illuminated with glittering lights, which showered across it and extinguished themselves as they fell. From the living room came laughter.

I placed two black cast-iron pots on hotplates and turned the temperature setting to maximum. Opened the window, and the voices of passing pedestrians below rose in volume at once. Went into the living room, put on some music, the latest Cardigans’ CD, good background ambience.

‘I won’t even ask if you need help,’ Anders said.

‘Such nice manners,’ Helena said, turning to me. ‘
Do
you need any help?’

‘No, no, everything’s fine.’

I stood behind Linda and rested my hands on her shoulders.

‘How nice,’ she said.

Silence. I thought I should wait until the conversation got going again.

‘I had lunch with a few people at Filmhuset just before Christmas,’ Linda said after a while. ‘One of them had just seen an albino snake. Think it was a python or a boa constrictor, one of the two. Completely white with a yellow pattern. Then someone else said she
used
to have a boa. At home in her flat, as a pet. An
enormous
snake. Then one day she had a shock because it was lying beside her in bed, stretched out to its full length. She had always seen it coiled up, you see, but now it was as straight as a ruler. She was petrified, and so she rang Skansen Zoo to talk to someone who dealt with snakes. Do you know what he said? Well, good job she rang. In the nick of time. Because big snakes stretch out like that when they’re measuring up their prey. To see if they can swallow it.’

‘Ugh, oh, Christ!’ I said. ‘Ugh, shit!’

The others laughed.

‘Karl Ove’s afraid of snakes,’ Linda said.

‘That’s the nastiest story I’ve ever heard!’

Linda turned to me.

‘He dreams about snakes. He can hurl the duvet on the floor and trample on it in the middle of the night. Once he sat up and
leaped
out of bed. Stood absolutely still, as if paralysed, and stared. What is it, Karl Ove? You’re dreaming. Come to bed, I said. There’s a
slange
there, he said. A snake in Norwegian. There isn’t an
orm
, I said. A snake in Swedish. Come to bed. And then he said, full of contempt, “When you say
orm
it doesn’t sound quite so dangerous!”’

They laughed. Geir explained to Anders and Helena the difference between
orm
and
slange
in Norwegian – the former was a worm. I said that I knew what was coming, the Freudian interpretation of dreaming about snakes, and I didn’t want to hear, and so I went back into the kitchen. The water was boiling, and I added the tagliatelle. The oil in the two pots was spitting in the heat. I sliced some garlic and put it in, took the mussels from the sink, dropped them in and placed the lid on top. Soon it began to rumble and roar. I poured in white wine, chopped some parsley and sprinkled it in, took the mussels off the hotplate after a few minutes, put the tagliatelle in a colander, fetched the pesto and everything was ready.

‘Oh, how lovely that looks,’ Helena said as I entered with the plates.

‘It’s not exactly difficult,’ I said. ‘I found the recipe in Jamie Oliver’s cookery book. But it’s good.’

‘It smells fantastic,’ Christina said.

‘Is there anything you can’t do?’ Anders said, staring at me.

I looked down, forked out the soft content of a mussel, it was dark brown with an orange stripe along the top, and when I bit, it crunched like sand between your teeth.

‘Has Linda told you about our
pinnekjøtt
meal?’ I asked, looking up at him.

‘
Pinnekjøtt
? What’s that?’

‘Traditional Norwegian Christmas food,’ Geir said.

‘Sheep’s ribs,’ I said. ‘You salt them and hang them up to dry for a few months. My mother posted me some.’

‘Mutton in the post?’ Anders queried. ‘Is that another Norwegian tradition?’

‘How else would I get it? Anyway, my mother salts them and hangs them up in our loft at home. It tastes fantastic. She promised to send me some for Christmas. We were going to have them on Christmas Eve, Linda hasn’t tried them, and for me it is unthinkable to celebrate Christmas without ribs, but they didn’t arrive until the 27th. So I unpacked them, we decided to have another Christmas dinner that evening, and in the afternoon I went to work steaming the meat. We set the table, white cloth and candles and aquavit and everything. But the meat never cooked, we didn’t have a pot you could close tightly enough, so all that happened was that the whole flat reeked of sheep. In the end Linda and I went to bed.’

‘Then he woke me up at one!’ Linda said. ‘And we sat here, on our own, in the middle of the night eating Norwegian Christmas food.’

‘That was great, wasn’t it?’ I said.

‘Yes, it was,’ she said with a smile.

‘
Was
it good?’ Helena asked.

‘Yes. It might not have looked good, but it was.’

‘I thought you were going to tell us a story about something you couldn’t do,’ Anders said. ‘But this was nothing short of an idyll.’

‘Cut the man a bit of slack,’ Geir said. ‘He’s made a career of telling people what a failure he is. One wretched tragic episode after another. Shame and remorse all down the line. This is a party! Let him talk about how clever he is for a change!’

‘I’d like you to talk about a defeat, Anders,’ Helena said.

‘Remember who you’re talking to!’ Anders said. ‘You’re talking to someone who was rich once. I mean really rich. I had two cars, an apartment in Östermalm, an account heaving with money. I could go on holiday anywhere I wanted, when I wanted. I even had some horses! And what am I doing now? Making ends meet with a bacon snacks factory in Dalarne! But I don’t sit around bloody moaning like you do!’

‘Like who do?’ Helena asked.

‘Like you and Linda, for example! I come home and you’re sitting there with your cups of tea on the sofa whinging about everything under the sun. Every conceivable and inconceivable feeling you have to struggle with all the time. It’s not that complicated. Either things go well or they don’t. And that’s good too, because if they don’t then they can only go better.’

‘The strange thing about you is that you never want to know where you are,’ Helena said. ‘But it’s not a question of a lack of insight. It’s that you don’t want to see. Sometimes I envy you. I really do. I struggle so much trying to understand who I am and why what happens to me actually happens.’

‘Your story’s not so different from Anders’, is it?’ Geir said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you also had everything. You were employed at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, you got the main roles in big productions, great film roles, and then you dropped everything and left. And that was also a pretty optimistic act, if you ask me. To marry an American New Age guru and go to Hawaii.’

‘Well, it wasn’t a great career move,’ Helena said. ‘You’re right about that. But I followed my heart. And I don’t regret anything. Nothing, really!’

She smiled and looked around.

‘And Christina has the same story,’ Geir said.

‘What’s your story then?’ Anders asked, looking at Christina.

She smiled and raised her head, swallowing the food she had in her mouth.

‘I was at the top almost before I had begun. I had my own clothes brand and was chosen as the best designer one year. I was selected to represent Sweden at the London Fashion Fair. I was in Paris with a collection—’

‘A TV crew came to our house,’ Geir said. ‘And Christina’s face was on some enormous drapes, no, enormous bloody
sails
at the front of the Culture House. There was a six-page feature article about her in
Dagens Nyheter
 . . . We were at receptions where the women serving were dressed as elves. Champagne flowing everywhere. We were so unbelievably happy.’

‘What happened then?’ Linda asked.

Christina shrugged.

‘No money came in. The success had no base. Or not where it should have been. So I went bankrupt.’

‘But at least you went with a bang,’ Geir said.

‘Yes,’ Christina agreed.

‘The last collection was the nail in the coffin,’ Geir said. ‘Christina had hired a giant marquee and had it erected in Gärdet. The tent was a copy of the Sydney Opera House. The models were supposed to arrive on horseback across the open field. She had got them from the Royal Life Guards and the mounted police. Everything was on a grand scale and costly. She hadn’t cut any corners. Huge punchbowls of burning ice, you know, drifting smoke, and everyone was there. All the TV channels, all the major newspapers. It looked like the set of a blockbuster movie.

‘And then it began to rain. And I mean
rain
. It pelted down, it was insane.’

Christina laughed and put her hand to her mouth.

‘You should have seen the models!’ Geir went on. ‘The men’s hair plastered to their skulls. All their clothes drenched and bedraggled. It was a total fiasco. But there was something stylish about it too. Not everyone can fail in
such
a glorious manner.’

Everyone laughed.

‘That was why she was designing slippers when you first came to our place,’ Geir said, looking at me.

‘They weren’t slippers,’ Christina said.

‘Well, whatever,’ Geir said. ‘One of their old models of a shoe suddenly became a sales hit because Christina wore them at a fashion show in London. She earned nothing. So the design was a small consolation. That was all that was left of the dream.’

‘I haven’t been at the
top
exactly,’ Linda said. ‘But the little success I’ve had follows exactly the same curve.’

‘Straight down?’ Anders asked.

‘Straight down, yes. I made my literary debut, and that was of course a fantastic event in itself, not that it was sensational for others in any way, but it was big, and wonderful for me, and then I was awarded a Japanese prize, of all things. I’ve always loved Japan. I was supposed to go there to receive it. I’d bought a Japanese phrasebook and so on. Then I fell ill. I was incapable of coping with anything, and certainly not a trip to Japan . . . I’d written another series of poems and at first it was accepted. I went out to celebrate after they told me, but then the acceptance was withdrawn. I went to another publisher’s with it and
exactly
the same happened there. At first the editor rang and said it was fantastic and they would publish it. It was so embarrassing, I told everyone about it . . . then he rang to say they wouldn’t be publishing it after all. And that was that.’

‘That’s just so sad,’ Anders said.

‘Oh, it didn’t matter,’ Linda said. ‘Now I’m pleased it wasn’t published. It’s not a big deal.’

‘What about you then, Geir?’ Helena asked.

‘Do you mean, am I a beautiful loser as well?’

‘Yes.’

‘We-ell, I suppose I could say that. I was an academic wonderboy.’

‘Even though you say so yourself?’ I said.

‘No one else will. And I
was
. But I wrote a thesis in Norwegian based on fieldwork in Sweden. That was not a clever move. It meant that no Swedish publisher was interested, nor were any Norwegian ones. Nor did it help that I wrote about boxers, without looking for social explanations or excuses for what they did, I mean, that they were poor or underprivileged or criminals or some such thing. On the contrary, I thought that their culture was relevant and appropriate, much more relevant and appropriate than the feminised middle-class academic culture. That was not a clever move either. It was still turned down by several Norwegian and Swedish publishers. I got it published in the end by paying for it myself. No one read it. The marketing, do you know what it was? I spoke to a woman at a publishing house one day and she told me that she read my book every morning and afternoon on the Nesodden-to-Oslo ferry and she thought that someone was bound to see the cover and become curious!’