She changed books and read some of Hitler’s Table Talk, which he had also recommended. He had wanted to study the book in order to comprehend how things could go the way they did and to learn to recognize the signs in time. Everywhere in the contemporary world he saw signs that Nazism and fascism were continually latent in those societies ruled by parliamentary pseudodemocracy. He saw this particularly clearly when he had been talking to Dragan a lot.
Ester read. She was absolutely not going to call him today. She called. He didn’t answer. Eight o’clock came. She wondered what could explain his not wanting to be with her on their first Friday evening together. She didn’t understand. But one can’t push things. One must never push things. Just be considerate and accommodating yet avoid becoming stifling. There are natural explanations for everything, she thought. He was in a concentrated working phase. He felt secure with her and did not need to keep telling her what he was doing, or making contact, because they were in continuous spiritual contact anyway. They knew where they were with each other.
What she must definitely not do now was to expose herself to the anguish of sending a text message that would go unanswered. The anguish generated by the nonappearance of an answer was something the creators of texts and e-mails could not have anticipated. Or perhaps they lacked that kind of empathy? Your fingers burned after you had texted and experienced the relief inherent in sending something off, which persisted for some minutes afterward, while some hope of an answer still remained. She picked up her mobile more than once and began tapping in a message, but deleted it every time and put the phone down.
When she woke up it was Saturday. She could not work that day either. For her, writing was never escape, it was resistance, and resistance is nothing to escape to. She had to occupy herself with something while waiting for her life to start. She looked at the phone. Perhaps she had it on silent by mistake? No. No one had called, and no text message had arrived unnoticed. She rang herself from her landline to check her mobile was working. Sent herself a text. Everything worked as it should.
She ventured out into the city. It was cold outside. It was around midday, in fact getting on for one. She wandered about, had a Turkish burger in the indoor food market in Hötorgshallen and strolled aimlessly through a few clothes shops, feeling the fabrics between finger and thumb. If he would only get in touch and tell her what was going on, that was all she wanted. He had bought breakfast for her some time between Wednesday morning and Thursday evening. That must mean that he, etc. She went down Kungsgatan, across Stureplan and on down Birger Jarlsgatan. In Rönnells’ secondhand bookshop she saw a book she wanted to give him, but decided to postpone all such purchases until the following week. She did not know whether he wanted any more books from her or whether they would even be seeing each other again. She didn’t understand. The worst part of all was not understanding this thing she was in the midst of, this thing that had her in its clutches. There is no pain like the pain of not understanding.
It was three o’clock and he had not called. She had coffee in a cafe and an extra-large pastry with it, on account of the situation. There was a book in front of her that she was trying to read. It was four o’clock. She went to the cinema to see a film about the CIA, one of those films she never really managed to keep up with but could not work out what she was missing either. As the film was showing she thought how relieved she would be if he rang at that precise moment. All the knots in her body would suddenly loosen as if they had never existed and she would become human again. Not even he could work nonstop. But perhaps this really was an extremely intensive phase.
She did not understand this CIA film, either. The plots were made for the people who wrote them and not for the audience, she thought. They had spent so long writing their scripts that all the events seemed self-evident to them. They wrote the work backward whereas the viewers saw it forward.
Something came into her mind, which she then formulated in the minutes that followed.
The physicists’ problem:
That we don’t remember things that have not yet happened.
The philosophers’ problem:
That we remember something merely because it has happened.
The psychologists’ problem:
That we remember what suits us.
The politicians’ problem:
That people have a memory.
The medics’ problem:
That memory fails us.
The unhappy lovers’ problem:
That the memory of what has happened alters us.
She looked around the movie theater. The audience was sparse but those who were there looked attentive. Perhaps they were the sort who did not spend their time suffering and being tormented, the sort who had a life both now and when the film was over.
All at once she had a very definite premonition and could see in her mind’s eye that she and Hugo would meet that evening, eat, drink, laugh, make love. He would ring her any moment now, bellow cheerily and this nightmare would be over.
“What are you doing this evening? Are you hungry?” he would shout, and she would not reveal with a single sound how she had been feeling — never reproach — but simply say:
“Yes! I’m hungry! What time?”
Within an hour or so they would be sitting in a restaurant and with sparkling eyes he would reach out his hand and touch her cheek. She had been in agonies before, believing it was all over, just before he got in touch. The important thing was to hold on, not hang up.
The realization crashed in on her like a meteorite and its impact was as violent as the one seventy million years earlier that wiped out the dinosaurs. She no longer saw what was happening on the cinema screen in front of her as everything in her body went into reverse in a single dizzying second and the true state of affairs dawned on her. It was obvious yet inconceivable: naturally he was with his woman in Malmö this weekend. The last time had been a fortnight ago and he was there every other weekend, always had been. Atomic clocks could be set by his trips to Malmö. The previous Saturday they had met at Ester’s house and this weekend it was Malmö’s turn again. The thought had not occurred to her even once during the preceding week because the act was too preposterous, but it explained his behavior in recent days.
The film was only halfway through. She sat on while the blackest anguish she had ever felt rolled through her in wave after wave of arsenic and lead.
Why was she staying? Because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go anyway, in that moment at which her suspicions had been confirmed. She might just as well sit in a cinema.
After the film she walked up to his street. The weather was raw and drearily gray, no temptation to evening strollers. The streetlights were on, the shopkeepers were switching off the lights in their back rooms, locking up with jangling bunches of keys and sighing with relief at the prospect of their free Sundays. Ester headed toward his block to find out for sure.
The reason it had taken her so long to realize was that she could not understand how a person who did that sort of thing looked on life and on other people. Her whole idea of humanity as one, and psychically homogenous, had been rocked to its foundations. This way of dealing with the material world was too strange.
Even from a distance she could see that the studio was bolted and barred. Clearly she had still been nourishing a glimmer of hope in spite of everything, because the certainty inflicted more pain. It was only when he was away that the studio was shut up and the wrought-iron outer gate was locked. There were no sets being built here this evening. She went across the yard and up to his flat and peered in through the letter box. No light anywhere.
Hugo had given her to understand there were people at work in the studio from morning to night and every day, weekends too. He had let her believe he was a busy man, a relentlessly working artist who was not to be disturbed and on whom no one could place any demands because he was working for art, which was all about how human beings behave toward one another, about cas
ual evil, the exercise of power and powerlessness. But just now he was taking a rest from that.
There were patches of ice on the ground and the wind crept stealthily along the streets, whipped round corners and jabbed its malevolent needles into necks and wrists. The temperature hovered between melting and refreezing. Slush by day, a thin crust of ice by evening.
Once again she walked from his studio to the bus. As she took her seat she got out her phone and started composing a text message. She had finished it by the time she got off the bus a quarter of an hour later and she sent it off with no thought of refraining. It was a highly condensed communication, as strained as dread and panic become when they conceal themselves behind haughtiness. Its tone exuded contempt rooted in self-respect. It was a message you could cut yourself on. And she censured him with all the justification of the scorned.
But it was text, it was not her, it was her as text. In the physical world there was neither haughtiness nor self-respect. In this physical world, she was on the point of collapsing into a loose heap.
A brief triumph presented itself, however, once the message was sent. Both the act of writing it and the opportunity of directing her anger at him in hard, well-formulated thrusts eased the pain for a while. And it was contact, some form of human encounter that broke the unbearable silence. He would read the message and think of her, and answer.
But no answer came. Nothing came at all. Saturday evening went by. Sunday went by. On Monday morning, thirty-six hours had passed without a word from Hugo. It was a perfect demonstration of how to kill a person by social means.
She went down to the Central Station in the middle of the day and positioned herself where the Malmö trains came in, but it was futile. There were hourly arrivals and her chances of striking lucky were slim. Crowds of people came streaming off the many carriages of the train toward a host of underpasses, exits and stairways, and she did not see him. She stood there waiting for two hours, three arrivals. Then she went back home and wrote an e-mail in which she drily analyzed the whole sequence of events.
“The more you stay silent the more I speak, it’s Hegelian,” she wrote, and was embarrassed by her own pretensions but left them in anyway. She put forward all the objective eventualities she could think of to account for his acting as he had, and set out all the conceivable and self-critical points of view, future prospects and interpretations that her imagination could muster, except one: that she had no right to an explanation. She drew the line there. She wrote that she understood that you couldn’t speak the truth if you lived in a world where you would be punished for it, and that her moral rules were perhaps too strict for him to want to speak the truth. She suggested that she had gone too fast and not listened to his needs or tempo. But she considered she had the right to an explanation because they had a contract with one another. He had assumed responsibility by entering her body; that amounted to holding out to her the prospect that something had to be carried through. Hence she had rights, and they included hearing his explanation.
She left no perspective unexplored except the one that said she had no rights. It did not occur to her to have such a dispassionate relationship with life or to have such contempt for herself. Elements in the girlfriend chorus found it hard to put up with this lack of acceptance, or, as Ester saw it, this lack of self-contempt. They, having put so much effort into eradicating their needs in order to please, or behaving properly and not disturbing anyone, were irritated by Ester’s self-righteousness in not realizing that she was not wanted. He owes you nothing, they told her. She examined their argument and found that she did not share their analysis.
Strength and competence arouse admiration, but not love. It’s the shortcomings in a person that inspire love. But those shortcomings are not enough. They have to be complemented by autonomy and self-distance. Flaws create affection, but sooner or later aggressions will be generated by the very thing that arouses affection. Pure deficiency is in its helplessness as impossible to love as steely strength.
Ester got no answer, regardless of whether she felt strong, weak or ridden with flaws. The whole week passed with no sign of life from him.
Her breathing was shallow and she felt permanently tight across the chest. Every evening she took the bus to his street. Lights shone from the windows once more and work was in progress in the studio. The person she had gone to sleep and woken up with, and two weeks ago had laughed with and talked to for hours, was now someone she had to stand and look at from a street corner, like before it all started.
On the Friday, a week after the last time they had seen each other, that last morning a thousand years ago, she made a decision and once more took the bus to his place. Enough was enough; she was not prepared to accept any more of this cowardly evasion.
It was six in the evening. She entered the studio without ringing the bell, and went upstairs. There on the first floor, behind the big, solid desk, she found him working. He looked over his glasses, neither dismayed nor afraid nor glad. He said:
“You’re here.”
“Yes. I am.”
He rested his elbows on the table, held his hands loosely clasped, and did not reveal what he was thinking. Ester asked if they could talk, said it was vital, and though he showed no great enthusiasm they crossed the road to the local restaurant where they used to sit by candlelight. It was now an unfamiliar place in her eyes. But the staff greeted them warmly as two regulars and immediately prepared their favorite table in the corner.
She heard him tell the waitress that they wouldn’t be staying very long.
Still on his feet, he ordered a glass of wine for himself. The waitress waited attentively but discreetly for another order. And when it did not come she moved toward the kitchen. At the same moment Hugo gave Ester a quick glance and said perhaps she wanted something as well? She nodded.
Hugo sat on the edge of the chair with most of his body weight on his lower legs and feet, he twisted and shuffled and looked at anything but her, poised for a hasty exit.
She saw it, but what she felt was love. There was no longer any need for explanations. Everything she had wanted to ask, all those breathless ideas, turned out to have been an excuse to spend time in his company. She wanted them to keep seeing each other, that was the long and the short of it. She wanted to have a relationship, that was all. She missed him enormously, it was as simple as that. She wanted them to sit together, talking for hours, and then go on home to his place and wake up in the morning with a long Saturday stretching before them. When they were together she lacked for nothing.
“I’ll have to get back soon,” he said, his flickering gaze bouncing briefly into her own. “Lots to do. A terrifically intense phase of work.”
The illusion shattered and the coolness returned. The meeting she had obtained by force had to be justified and explained anew with harsh imperatives like morality and the need to understand, not with the softness of her thoughts a moment before.
She had a good mind to say he had been in a terrifically intense phase of work the previous weekend, too, but decided not to be sarcastic. One always came to regret sarcasms.
“I did all I could to make contact,” she said.
“I noticed.”
There was silence while she absorbed this snide remark.
“Why didn’t you answer?”
“What bit was I meant to answer, given everything you were asking? You were wondering about so much. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many questions all in one place.”
“I texted you as well. And phoned.”
“Yes. You did.”
“Do you mean the e-mail I sent on Monday?”
“I don’t know what day it came. It wasn’t feasible to answer all those questions.”
“Do you think there might be a reason why I’ve had so much to wonder about this past week?”
“No idea.”
“No. Sometimes it’s difficult to see how things are connected.”
He emptied his glass in
a couple of hurried gulps.
Her breath came in little gasps.
“The reason I had so many questions was that your behavior’s been incomprehensible. For three months we’ve been seeing each other and developing some kind of intimacy. It culminates in three erotic encounters that I assume we both considered inevitable. Three erotic encounters in the space of six nights. Since then your behavior has been obnoxious, and what’s more, obnoxious in a singularly mysterious way. So I’m left guessing. Anybody wanting to torture a person only has to do what you’ve been doing to me this past week.”
He said nothing. Twirled his empty glass, scanned the restaurant. He didn’t look as though he felt any sense of guilt and he didn’t appear to be keeping quiet because he was unsure what to say. All he wanted was to get out of the shackles she had put on him and he was keeping quiet in the way one does with somebody who isn’t going to understand in any case, who inhabits another world with different rules of play, pointless to discuss because of the gaping chasm in between.
“I’ve been desperate all week. I don’t know what to do.”
“If you’re down you ought to go and talk to someone.”
“I am talking to someone. Right now.”
“Someone who knows about these things. A professional.”
“Who knows about broken hearts? There’s one person who can help me with my problem, and that’s you.”
“I’m afraid I’ve got to get back to work now.”
From the dull tone of his voice and the tired look in his eye she could detect that awareness of inadequacy again. An inadequacy that had ossified into an abstract loathing of women for their eternal amorous demands on a person like him, with bigger things to think about, their prattle and possessive impositions tossed out like lassos, always excused in their view by their tenderly throbbing hearts.
Willful Disregard Page 7
