My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (63 page)

Thomas said they would invite Linda and me to dinner one evening, I said that would be very nice, got up and took my bag, he got up as well and we shook hands, and since it did not appear that he had seen the envelope containing the money I told him, there’s the money for the photos, he nodded and thanked me as though I had forced him to express this gratitude, and slightly ashamed I went up the stairs and out into the Old Town’s wintry streets.

That was almost two months ago now. I wasn’t much bothered by the fact that no invitation had appeared yet; one of the first things I had heard about Thomas was that he was very forgetful. I am too, so I didn’t hold that against him.

When he sat down at a table at the very back of the room it was as a thin well-dressed man wearing a Lenin mask. I took the yellow Tiedemanns pouch of tobacco from my bag, rolled a cigarette with fingertips that were for some reason so sweaty that shreds kept getting stuck to them, swallowed long gulps of beer, lit the roll-up and through the window saw Geir’s figure passing by in the street.

He spotted me as soon as he came in the door, but still surveyed the room as he walked towards the table, as though searching for other options. Not unlike a fox, one might imagine, incapable of selecting a place where there weren’t several exits.

‘Why don’t you answer your bloody phone?’ he said, stretching out his hand and meeting my eyes for a fleeting instant. I got up, shook hands and then sat down again.

‘Thought we said seven o’clock,’ I said. ‘It’s gone half past now.’

‘Why do you think I wanted to call you? To tell you to mind the gap between the train and the platform?’

‘I lost my mobile at the Metro station,’ I said.

‘Lost it?’ he queried.

‘Yes, someone knocked my elbow and sent it flying. I reckon it must have landed in a bag because I never heard it hit the ground. And a woman was passing with an open bag at precisely that moment.’

‘You’re unbelievable,’ he said. ‘I assume you didn’t ask her if you could have it back?’

‘No-o. Because, firstly, the train arrived at that precise moment and, secondly, I wasn’t sure that was what had happened. And you can’t just ask women if you can have a rummage through their handbags.’

‘Have you ordered?’ he asked.

I shook my head. He took hold of the menu and looked around for a waiter.

‘She’s over there by the pillar,’ I said. ‘What are you going to have?’

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Pork and onion sauce maybe?’

‘Yes, maybe.’

Whenever I met Geir there was always a distance, it was as though he couldn’t absorb the fact that I was there, so he tried to keep me at arm’s length. He didn’t meet my eyes, he didn’t pursue my topics of conversation, he seemed to throttle them by turning his attention to something else, he could be sarcastic and his whole being radiated arrogance. Sometimes that put me out, and when I was put out, I said nothing, which he could easily find it in himself to criticise. ‘My God, you’re hard graft today, you are,’ ‘Are you going to sit there gaping into eternity all evening?’ or ‘Well, you were fun this evening, Karl Ove.’ It was a kind of preliminary psychological skirmish he orchestrated inside himself, for after a while, perhaps half an hour, perhaps an hour, perhaps only five minutes, he changed, cast his defences aside and seemed to attune to the situation, become attentive, considerate and present, and the laughter, hitherto cold and hard, was warm and sincere, in a transformation that also encompassed his voice and eyes. When we spoke on the telephone there were no defences, then we chatted on an equal footing from the moment the receiver was lifted. He knew more about me than anyone else, in the same way that probably, but it was by no means certain, I knew more about him than anyone else.

The difference between us, which had diminished over the years but was never completely erased because it had nothing to do with opinions or attitudes, it was basic character, buried deep in the forever un-influence-able, manifested itself in all its clarity in a present Geir gave me after I had finished writing
A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven
. It was a knife, the model that US Marines use, which couldn’t be used for much else apart from killing someone. He didn’t do this as a joke, it was simply the finest object he could imagine. I was pleased, but the knife, so intimidating with its polished steel, sharp blade and deep indentations to enable blood to flow, remained in its box behind some books on an office shelf. He may have realised how alien this object was to me because when
A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven
came out a few months later, he gave me another present, a replica edition of an eighteenth-century
Encyclopaedia Britannica
– profoundly fascinating for all the objects and phenomena it did not describe since they did not yet exist – which of course was more up my street.

He took out a polysleeve containing a few sheets of paper and passed it to me.

‘It’s just three pages,’ he said. ‘Could you read it and tell me if it’s better?’

I nodded, pulled the sheets from the sleeve, stubbed out my cigar-ette and began to read. It was the opening of the essay I had been looking for when I went through his manuscript. It was based on Karl Jaspers’ concept of
Grenzsituationen
, border situations. The point where life is lived at maximum intensity, the antithesis of everyday life in other words, close to death.

‘This is good,’ I said when I had finished.

‘Sure?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Good,’ he said, replacing the papers in the sleeve and dropping it in the bag on the chair beside him. ‘You’ll get more to read later.’

‘I’m sure I will.’

He pulled his chair closer, rested his elbows on the table and folded his hands. I lit another cigarette.

‘Your journalist rang me today, by the way,’ he said.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘Oh, that
Aftenposten
guy.’

Since the journalist was writing a portrait he had asked if he could talk to a couple of my friends. I had given him Tore’s number, who was a bit of a loose cannon in that respect, likely to say anything at all about me, and Geir’s, as he knew more about my present situation.

‘What did you say then?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? Why not?’

‘Well, what should I have said? If I’d told him the truth about you, he would have either not understood it or totally distorted it. So I said as little as possible.’

‘What was the point of that?’

‘How should I know? It was you who gave him my number . . .’

‘Yes, so that you could say something. Anything, I told you, it doesn’t matter what they print.’

Geir eyed me.

‘You don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Well, actually, I did say one thing about you. Perhaps the most important, in fact.’

‘And that was?’

‘That you have high morals. Do you know what the idiot answered? “Everyone has.” Can you imagine that? That’s exactly what they
don’t
have. Next to
no one
has high morals or even knows what they are.’

‘That just means he has a different interpretation of morals from you.’

‘Yes, but he was only after a bit of scandal. A few anecdotes about how drunk you once were and stuff like that.’

‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘We’ll see tomorrow. It can’t be
that
awful. This is
Aftenposten
after all.’

Geir, sitting on the other side of the table, shook his head. Then his eyes went in search of the waitress, who came over at once.

‘Pork and onion sauce, please,’ he said in Swedish. ‘And a pale Staropramen.’

‘I’ll have the meatballs, please,’ I said and raised my glass. ‘And another of these.’

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ the waitress said, putting her tiny notebook in her breast pocket and heading for the kitchen, which you could glimpse through the ever-swinging doors.

‘What do
you
mean by high morals?’ I asked.

‘Well, you’re a deeply ethical person. There is an ethical foundation at the base of your personality and it is irreducible. You react in a purely physical way to inappropriate behaviour, the shame that overwhelms you is not abstract or conceptual but a hundred-per-cent physical, and you cannot escape it. You’re not a dissembler. Nor a moralist though. You know I have a predilection for Victorianism, their system with the front stage where everything is visible and a back stage where everything is hidden. I don’t think that kind of life makes anyone happier, but there is more life. You’re a Protestant through and through. Protestantism, that’s inner life, that’s being at one with yourself. You couldn’t live a double life even if you wanted to, it’s not something you can make happen. There’s a one-to-one relationship between life and morality in you. So you are ethically unassailable. Most people are Peer Gynt. They fudge their way along life’s road, don’t they? You don’t. Everything you do you do with the uttermost seriousness and conscientiousness. Have you ever skipped a line of the manuscripts you read, for example? Has it ever happened that you haven’t read them from the first page to the last?’

‘No.’

‘No, and there’s something in that. You can’t fudge anything. You
can’t
. You’re an arch-Protestant. And as I’ve said before, you’re an auditor of happiness. If you have some success, generally something others would die for, you just cross it off in the ledger. You’re not happy about anything. When you’re at one with yourself, which you are almost all the time, you’re much, much more disciplined than me. And you know what I’m like with all my systems. There are unmapped areas in your mind where you can lose control, but when you don’t go there, and nowadays invariably you don’t, you are absolutely ruthless in your morality. You are exposed to temptations far more than me or anyone else. If you had been me you would have lived a double life. But you can’t do that. You are doomed to a simple life. Ha ha ha! You’re no Peer Gynt and I think that is the heart of your nature. Your ideal is the innocent, innocence. And what is innocence? I’m right at the other end. Baudelaire writes about it, about Virginia, do you remember, the picture of pure innocence, which is confronted with the caricature, and she hears coarse laughter and realises that something dishonourable has happened, but she doesn’t know what. She doesn’t know! She folds her wings around herself. And then we’re back to the painting by Caravaggio, you know,
The Cardsharps
, where he’s tricked by all the others. That’s you. That’s innocence as well. And in that innocence, which in your case also lies in the past, the thirteen-year-old you wrote about in
Out of the World
, and the crazy nostalgia trip you have for the 1970s . . . Linda has some of this too. How was it she was described? Like a mixture of Madame Bovary and Kaspar Hauser?’

‘Yes.’

‘Kaspar Hauser, he’s the enigma of course. Now I never met your previous wife, Tonje, but I’ve seen photos of her, and although she’s not like Linda there was something innocent about her, her appearance. Not that I think she is innocent, necessarily, but she gives that impression. Innocence of this kind is typical of you. Purity and innocence don’t interest me. However, it’s very clear in you. You’re a deeply moral and a deeply innocent person. What is innocence? It is that which has not been touched by the world, that which has not been destroyed, it is like water into which a stone has never been thrown. It’s not that you don’t have lusts, that you don’t have desire, for you do, it’s just that you conserve innocence. Your insanely huge longing for beauty comes in here as well. It wasn’t by chance that you chose to write about angels. That’s the purest of the pure. You can’t get purer than that.’

‘But not in my novel. There it’s about the bodily, the physical side of them.’

‘Well, nevertheless, they are the very symbol of purity. And of the fall. But you have made them human, allowed them to fall, not into sin, but into human-ness.’

‘If you take an abstract view of this, in a way you’re right. The thirteen-year-old, that was innocence, and what happened to it? It had to be made physical.’

‘What a way to put it!’

‘Yeah, well, OK. She had to be screwed then. And the angels had to become human. So there’s a connection. But all this takes place in the subconscious. Deep down. So, in that sense, it’s not real. I might be heading in that direction, but I’m not aware of it. Of course, I didn’t know I had written a book about shame before reading the blurb on the cover. And I didn’t think about innocence and the thirteen-year-old until long after.’

‘It’s there though. Perfectly obvious and not a shred of doubt.’

‘OK. But hidden from me. And it strikes me there’s something you’re forgetting. Innocence is related to stupidity. What you’re talking about is stupidity, isn’t it? About ignorance?’

‘No, no, far from it,’ Geir said. ‘Innocence and purity have become a
symbol
of stupidity, but that’s nowadays. We live in a culture where the person with the most experience wins. It’s sick. Everyone knows which way modernism is going, you create a form by breaking up a form, in an endless regression; just let it continue, and for as long as it does, experience will have the upper hand. The unique feature of our times, the pure or independent act, is, as you know, to renounce, not to accept. Accepting is too easy. There’s nothing to be achieved by it. That’s more or less where I place you. Almost saint-like, in other words.’

I smiled. The waitress came with our beer.

‘
Skål
,’ I said.

‘
Skål
,’ he said.

I took a long swig, wiped the froth from my mouth with the back of my hand and put the glass on the beer mat in front of me. There was something uplifting about the light, golden colour, it seemed to me. I looked at Geir.

‘Saint-like?’ I repeated.

‘Yes. Saints in the Catholic faith could have been close to your way of believing and thinking and acting.’

‘You don’t think you’re going a little too far now?’

‘No, not at all. For me, what you do is utter mutilation.’

‘Of what?’