to speak it to now. But � and now I raised a forefinger to
show that there was something important I'd left out � the
woman in the house had an old crystal ball hidden away in a
cupboard in the bedroom. Once, many years before, she'd
made her living as a fortune-teller in a large amusement park
at Lund. Now she got out the crystal ball and foretold that
one day Poppy would become a famous tight-rope walker.
So, she began to train her to balance on everything from
planks and ropes to buckets and tubs, and one day she was
ready to show her skills to a real ringmaster. This was thirteen
years after Poppy had first knocked on her door. The old
woman had read in the newspaper that a famous foreign
circus had arrived in Stockholm, and one day the pair of
them travelled to the city to try their luck. It was the same
circus from far away that had come to Stockholm thirteen
years earlier, but Panina Manina no longer had the faintest
recollection of ever being part of a circus. The foreign
ringmaster was impressed by the Swedish girl's abilities and
so she became part of the circus. Neither Panina Manina nor
the ringmaster had any idea she was really his daughter.
Maria was giving me a quizzical look. She had always
been especially interested in how I ended my stories. Per-
haps she was particularly concerned this time as there was a
pair of small ears between us.
Now, I went on, blood is thicker than water, as the saying
goes, and maybe that was why the ringmaster and Panina
Manina hit it off right from the start. At all events, Panina
Manina made up her mind to travel back with the circus to
the faraway land, where she soon became a famous tight-
rope dancer. One evening when she was performing on her
tight-rope high above the ring, she threw a quick glance
down at the ringmaster who was standing in front of the big
circus orchestra with a whip in his hands, and there and then
she realised that the ringmaster was really her father, so she
hadn't quite forgotten him after all. Such insights are often
called 'moments of truth', I explained. In her confusion,
Panina Manina lost her balance and fell, smack-bang-
wallop, right down into the ring. When the ringmaster
came rushing up to see if she'd hurt herself, she stretched up
her arms to him and with a loud, heart-rending wail cried
out: 'Daddy! Daddy!'
Poppet peered up at me in astonishment and laughed, but
I didn't think she'd understood much of what I'd been
saying. Not so Maria. She glared at me furiously. It was
obvious she hadn't liked the final line of the fairy tale.
The sun was about to set on our little family reunion. We
packed up our things and walked to the tram. For a time the
little girl skipped along the path in front of us. 'Daddy,
daddy!' she muttered. Then Maria took my hand and
squeezed it. I noticed her eyes were full of tears. When we
got down into the city again, we went our separate ways.
That was the last time I saw Maria and the child. I've never
heard from them since.
Writers' Aid
Twenty-six years later, I sit before a large double window
looking down at the coast and out across the ocean. The sun
is low in the sky, and a gossamer of gold leaf has settled over
the bay. A boat carrying a handful of tourists is heading for
the breakwater. They've been to inspect the emerald-green
cave a few miles down the coast.
As for me, I've been for a long stroll through the many
lemon groves and on up the Valley of the Mills high above
the town. The people here are friendly and kind. A woman
dressed in black leant out of a window and offered me a glass
of lemon liqueur.
I'm on my guard. Up in the valley I didn't meet a soul,
but whether because of that or despite it, I still didn't feel
safe. Several times I stopped and looked behind me. If any-
one has followed me from Bologna, this narrow valley
bottom with all its old, derelict paper-mills would be the
perfect place to finish me off.
For safety's sake I keep the door of my room locked. If
anyone got in they could easily push me out of a window.
The sills are low, it's a long way down to the old coast road
and the traffic is heavy. It might look like suicide or an
accident.
There aren't many guests here. Besides me, only three
couples and a German of about my own age went down to
dinner. Presumably it will get busier in a few days' time,
over the Easter weekend.
The German sent me expectant glances. Perhaps he
wished to make contact as we were the only two on our
own. I wondered if I'd seen him before. I speak fluent
German.
Before I went to bed later that evening, I took care to
lock my door. I avoided the bar. I have my own supply of
alcohol in my room. There's already one empty bottle in the
corner. Should I feel lonely, I've always got Metre Man to
talk to. He has a tendency to pop up as soon as I feel in need
of company. I've been here four nights.
The Spider has been caught in his own web. First he spins
a trap of finely woven silk. Then he loses his footing and gets
stuck to his own web.
*
It strikes me now, as I write, that Maria betrayed me utterly.
In a way she excelled me in cynicism. She must have known
that I'd never be able to love another woman and she also
made sure there was no going back. She'd placed something
between us.
It's the first time I've thought of Maria in this way. It
surprises me. As if only now I've begun to pull myself
together after my mother's death. Father died a year ago. I
believe I was very fond of my mother.
I continue to live with the feeling that there is something
important I've forgotten. It's as if all my life I've tried hard
not to remember something that happened when I was very
young. But it's still not completely buried, it goes on
swimming about in the murky depths beneath the thin ice
I've been dancing on. I no sooner relax and try to get hold of
the thing I'm trying to forget, than a good idea materialises
and I begin spinning a new story.
My own consciousness causes me anxiety more and more
often. It's like a phantom I can't control.
It was all that imagination of mine that frightened Maria,
too. She was fascinated, but frightened.
*
When Maria had left, the world was my oyster, there was a
feeling of freedom about it. It was a long time before I
re-established my contacts with girls and I'd given up my
studies because I felt far too adult to be a student. Never,
since my mother died, had the world seemed so wide open.
I often thought about the young writer who'd stood
me a bottle of wine and paid a hundred kroner for the
book synopsis. I had dozens of similar pieces at home. His
novel was published a couple of years later and got good
reviews.
I hung about a bit in Club 7, or in the arty Casino bar, or
the Tostrupkjelleren which was the journalists' watering
hole, as well as that huge painters' studio-cum-restaurant,
Kunstnernes Hus. It was easy to get talking to people. Soon I
knew everyone in town who was worth talking to. The
problem was that at that early stage I was perennially short of
money.
I was considered a bright young spark teeming with ideas,
and that was no more than the truth. The people I talked to
were always older than me. Many of them were dreamers
and idlers, and most had artistic ambitions, or at least artistic
pretensions. To me they seemed narrow-minded. A few had
published an anthology of poems or a novel, others said
they 'wrote' or that they 'wanted to write'. If they didn't
say this they felt they lacked legitimacy. These were the
people amongst whom I conducted my earliest trans-
actions.
When anyone I was drinking with said that they 'wrote'
or 'wanted to write', I would sometimes ask what they
wanted to write about. In most cases they couldn't say. I
found this puzzling. Even then � and increasingly since �
I found something comic about the way society spawns
people who are both able and willing writers, but who have
nothing to offer. Why do people want to 'write' when they
openly and honestly admit that they have nothing to impart?
Couldn't they do something else? What is this desire to do
things without being active? In my case the situation has
always been the reverse. I've always been gravid, but have
never had any wish to produce offspring. The last is meant
literally, too. The episode with Maria was about something
quite different. She was the one I needed.
I kept a diary at the time. But it was not for public
consumption, merely a few jottings I made for my own
benefit, a kind of musing. In it I wrote:
I shall never write a novel. I wouldn't be able to concentrate on
one story. If I began to spin a fable, it would immediately suck in
four or eight others. Then there would be a veritable cacophony to
hold in check, with dense layers of frame stories and a myriad of
interpolated histories with several narrators on different narrative
levels, or what some people call Chinese Boxes. Because I'm unable
to stop thinking, I can't prevent myself from spawning ideas. It's
something almost organic, something that comes and goes of its own
accord. I'm drowning in my own fecundity, I'm constantly at
bursting point. New notions bleed unendingly from my brain.
Perhaps that's why I've taken a liking to bar stools. There I can
relieve myself.
And so a symbiosis grew up. I found it easy to hatch out
new ideas and associations. It was much harder not to. But it
wasn't like this for the people who wanted to 'write'. Many
of them could go for months or years without finding a
single original idea to write about. I was surrounded by
people who had an enormous desire to express themselves,
but the desire was greater than the expression, the need
bigger than the message. I saw an almost limitless market for
my services. But how was the business to be organised?
On the very day Maria left for Stockholm, I went into town
with some of my work. It was a collection of twenty
aphorisms. I wanted to test the market, and I wanted to try
out my own sales pitch. My idea was to trade the aphorisms
one by one: a beer for each, for example. I have to admit the
aphorisms were good, very good indeed. So I was willing to
swap an exceptionally elegant aphorism for half a litre of
beer � and thereafter evermore to forget that I had penned
it. It was largely a question of finding the right person, and
that was dependent on my ability to strike up a discreet
conversation. Now I had a pressing motive: I'd used up my
last few kroner on Maria and had no money to go out
drinking.
Late that afternoon I bumped into an author in front of
the National Theatre, whom for these purposes I shall call
Johannes, and who was some fifteen years older than me.
We'd spoken on many previous occasions and I knew he
regarded me as a genius. I think he'd already realised that
his writing could benefit from a chat with me. He'd once
asked me when I intended to make my debut. He asked
this in a voice that would have been better suited to an
enquiry about my sexual debut. 'Never,' I'd replied. I told
him I'd never make my literary debut. This made a deep
impression on him. Few people said such things in those
days.
I asked Johannes if I could buy him a drink. I didn't
mention that I had no money. If it all went wrong, I would
have to leave the discovery for when the bill arrived. No
one had ever caught me in a lie. But I was pretty confident
things would work out. Although it hadn't been my
intention, I made up my mind to offer him the entire
collection of aphorisms because the notion that Maria was
gone had again washed over me and I couldn't chance not
having enough to drink that evening. From Johannes' point
of view the aphorisms could prove to be worth a fortune. If
he used them properly and eked them out with material of
his own, they'd give him a new identity. He had published
two novels in six years and neither was particularly good. In
the early seventies it was rare for a novel to contain twenty
aphorisms.
We went down to the Casino. Luckily it wasn't very full,
but those present were actors or authors - topped up with
regulars who aspired to be actors or authors. We found a
quiet corner.
After a while I repeated one of the aphorisms from
memory. 'Who wrote that?' Johannes asked. I pointed to
myself. Then I gave him another one. 'Fabulous,' he said. I
reeled off yet another. 'But I thought you said you didn't
write?' he queried. I shook my head. I told him I'd said that
I'd never make my debut. I explained that I didn't want to
be an author. Now it was his turn to shake his head. Within
those four walls the statement 'I don't want to be an author'
had probably never been uttered before.
Every clique and sub-culture has its own set of self-
evident assumptions. The circle Johannes moved in didn't
contain anyone who said he didn't want to be an author;
eventually, and only after many years, one might conceiv-
ably acknowledge it as something one couldn't achieve. It's
not the same everywhere. There are still rural enclaves in
odd backwaters of the world in which the opposite assertion
would sound just as demented. Doubtless there are still some
farmers who would be incensed if the heir apparent came in
from the outlying fields or the hay-making one day and
announced that he wanted to be a writer.
Nowadays most secondary school pupils say they want to
be famous, and they mean it too. Just twenty years ago such
a statement would have been seen as quite brazen. Cultural
norms can be turned upside down within a single gener-
ation. In the fifties and sixties you couldn't go round with
impunity saying you wanted to be famous when you grew
up. You were grateful to become a doctor or a policeman.
If you did aspire to fame, you'd have to explain exactly
what you wanted to be famous for: the contribution had
to precede the fame. This doesn't happen now. First you
decide to be famous, then as an afterthought, how you'll
achieve it. Whether you deserve the fame or not is a virtual
irrelevancy. At worst, you make your way as a bastard on a
TV docusoap, or, descending into the ultimate slime, break
the law in some sensational way. But I've pre-empted
this development; it's as if I've known that one day
being famous would become vulgar. I've always eschewed
vulgarity.
'You're quite a character, Petter,' Johannes said.
I placed the twenty aphorisms before him, and Johannes
drank them in. He exuded envy.
'You wrote these yourself?' he asked. 'You didn't get
them from someone else?'
I shrugged demonstratively. The very idea of taking stuff
that others had written and passing it offas my own was such
an anathema that I found it hard to hide my disgust. I didn't
even lay claim to the things I had written.
I'd got him interested, that was obvious, but I still had
some complex manoeuvring to do. I had decided to do the
deal properly and there is always something special about the
first time. I was aware that I was in the process of establishing
a permanent business. I was being put to the test - this was
to be my living. If I failed now, it would be more difficult
next time.
I told him that, under certain conditions, he could have
the twenty aphorisms to use as his own. He gawped: 'Are
you mad, Petter?'
I gave him a quick lecture. I made him understand once
and for all that I was serious about not becoming a writer.
He grasped that I was the victim of some rare kind of
bashfulness. I told him I couldn't bear the thought of living
in the public gaze, that I felt happier in the wings, that I
would never exchange my anonymity for money. I went on
to predicate this on a more contemporary political ideal as
well. 'I've come to the conclusion that it isn't right to stand
out,' I said. 'Why should an articulate elite raise their heads
above the masses? Isn't it better for everyone to have a
collective working spirit?' I spoke of the rank and file and of
the grass roots, and maybe I used the term 'on the shop
floor', which was then a very resonant expression, a really
forceful idiom. I also mentioned medieval artistic anonym-
ity. 'Nobody knows who wrote some of the old Norse
myths,' I said. 'And in the end, Johannes, does it really
matter?'
He shook his head. Johannes was a Marxist-Leninist.
Then I quickly added that the path I'd chosen for myself
was strictly a personal position. I said I'd read both his novels
and that obviously I could see the value of someone be-
coming the mouthpiece of the people, only that it wasn't
me.
It had begun to dawn on Johannes that he might soon be
standing out in the street in possession of those twenty
aphorisms. But there was still a lot to arrange, and I tackled
the pecuniary side first. I told him I was hard up and that I
was willing to sell the aphorisms for fifty kroner apiece, but
that he could buy all twenty for eight hundred. At first I
thought I'd pitched it too high. Eight hundred kroner was
a lot of money in those days, both for students and authors.
But Johannes didn't look as if he was going to back out.
After all, they were twenty uncommonly pithy aphorisms �
I'd spent a whole morning working them up. I said that
naturally he was free to choose the ones he liked best and
pay for them individually, but on the other hand it really
did seem a shame to split them up. I'd had Johannes
specially in mind and didn't like the thought of relinquish-
ing my copyright in things I'd written to more than one
person.
'Super,' said Johannes. 'I'll buy the lot.'
The Ringmaster's Daughter Page 10
