“I find the impression of mess and the mess itself to be quite congruent,” he said. “But maybe that’s because our place is always tidy. I put everything back right away. It never gets a chance to get out of hand.”
“I’d like it to be like that here too,” I told him. “Only there’s always something that prevents it. It just isn’t possible, apparently.”
“I like it here,” he said. “There’s something relaxing about messiness.”
“As long as it’s not your own,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. “Christina always says I need some chaos around me in order to get things done. Like the war in Iraq. It doesn’t get more chaotic than that. Then I can get to work cleaning it all up.”
“That’s not a bad theory,” I said, closing the cupboard where we kept the glasses and cups, then opening the one next to it where the plates were. “You’ve got no chaos inside you at all, so you need some outside instead. I’m the opposite, chaos on the inside and a need for tidiness on the outside. Only I fall short on the last part.”
“You recreate your chaos, I recreate order. We’re as much geometry as we are psychology.”
“I know,” I said. “Does that mean the living room and hall are OK now?”
“Not quite. I don’t know where things go.”
“Wherever you think’s suitable. As long as it’s out of the way.”
With all the dishes put away, I filled the dishwasher again with what was left, sprinkled some powder in the little compartment, snapped the cover shut, closed the door, and put it on the sixty-degree program. After that I went into the living room, got the vacuum cleaner from behind the door, pulled out the cord, plugged it into the socket, and switched it on. The bag was full, so there was practically no suction at all, I had to put the nozzle on top of everything that was heavier than dust and hair for it to be sucked up. Beads, crumbs, scraps of paper, the odd fruit pastille, little unidentifiable bits of whatever. A small insect scuttled along the baseboard; in Swedish they were called silverfisk, what the Norwegian was I had no idea and had no recollection of ever having seen one before I moved here, though I couldn’t be sure, it sounded wrong that there should be an insect that was only found here. They looked like a little tail with feet, tiny in size, and they lived wherever they could keep themselves hidden; in piles of clothes, underneath mattresses, in the folds of blankets, and in laundry baskets. If I went to the bathroom at night they could be in the middle of the floor, dark against the light-colored linoleum, immediately darting for cover in the nearest place they could find, like behind the baseboard. I squashed the ones I could, but their resources were clearly inexhaustible, since they never at any time seemed to be fewer in number.
Silverfiskarna. A novel by Vilhelm Moberg.
I reached under the sofa with the head of the cleaner, sweeping it back and forth a couple of times, then moved on to underneath the table, which was the area I really wanted to get at, the children had at least one meal a day there. When that was done, I sucked up the dust that had accumulated around the doorsills and behind the doors before switching it off, pulling the plug out, and finally, the highlight of any vacuuming session, pushing the button that made the cord come swishing back at high speed into the belly of the device.
“All done,” I called out, returning it to its place.
Geir came out from the children’s room.
“Are we finished?”
“It’ll have to do. We can always do a bit more when we get home.”
“No need. It looks fine as it is. Shall we get going?”
I nodded.
“Just need to check my e-mails first.”
Njaal came sneaking up on Geir from behind and walloped him on the backside as hard as he could.
“You little terror,” Geir explained. Njaal shrieked with laughter. “I’ll get you for that,” said Geir, reaching out and grabbing him as I squeezed by into the other hall, past all our beach things, which had been dumped against the wall, a green parasol, two folding chairs, a kind of sunbed, baskets full of beach toys, as well as our two big suitcases, one a hard plastic shell, the other soft and made of some kind of fabric, gray and black respectively, and the two drying frames, folded and leaned up against the wall, with yellow and green towels draped on them from when we were at the beach the previous weekend, and the children’s beachwear. The light was dim in the bedroom, the air dense, so I opened the door onto the balcony and left it ajar before sitting down and switching on the computer. I heard them laughing and carrying on while I waited for the computer to start up, stared at the blinds without seeing them, it was Gunnar I was thinking about, and the fact that Linda was coming home and that I had to remember to buy white wine somewhere before we came back.
Right.
I opened my e-mail account.
Gunnar.
Should I wait? I could wait, surely? Wouldn’t the day be ruined otherwise?
If I waited, though, I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.
I opened the message and started to read.
He had signed himself as my father’s brother.
I sat for a moment without moving.
“Are you coming or what?” Geir called from the hallway.
“Just a minute,” I said back, hardly managing to raise my voice so he could hear me. “I’ve got a new message here.”
I heard him approach.
“Didn’t hear you,” he said.
“Another e-mail,” I said.
“Gunnar?”
I nodded.
“Mind if I have a look?”
“Be my guest,” I said.
He stood behind me while he read.
“So shall we go now, then?” he said after a while. “You can’t let this throw you. There’s nothing new in it.”
“True. But now he says he’s got a lawyer. And he’s using the word vendetta.”
I got to my feet.
“It’s really getting to you, isn’t it?” said Geir.
“Yes, it is,” I said.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go to Lund.”
“I need to speak to Yngve first,” I said.
“OK,” said Geir, and followed me back out of the bedroom. Njaal had been standing with both hands on the door handle looking in at us. I took the phone out of the charger and pressed Yngve’s number as I crossed the floor, opening the door of the balcony before it even started ringing.
“Hello,” said Yngve.
“Did you get that e-mail?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m writing a reply right now.”
“A reply?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Listen. He’s putting forward a whole load of accusations against me. It’s completely unreasonable what he’s doing. I’m going to tell him so.”
“What do you think you’re going to achieve by that?”
“I don’t know. But I need to tell him now that he’s gone too far and it’s not going to be without consequences. He can’t say whatever he likes just because he’s angry. Besides, I’m not you. And nor is Mom.”
“I’m really sorry I got you into this mess,” I said.
“What you did is the reason he’s reacting, but it’s not your fault he’s taking it out on us. And you can hardly be to blame for his reaction being so completely out of proportion either.”
“I’m sorry all the same.”
“We lose an uncle, that’s all.”
I went in and dropped the phone back in the charger, then looked at Geir, who had sat down on the chest, or whatever it was called, that we had in the hallway.
“I just need to read it again,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” he said. “Come on, I don’t want to be sitting here all day. You’ve already read it, for Christ’s sake!”
I didn’t say anything, but went back in and sat down in front of the screen again.
“Right, we’re off!”
Geir called out.
“I’m ready now,” I called back, switched off the computer, got up, and went into the hall. They were outside on the landing, waiting at the elevator. I put my shoes on, got my sunglasses from the study, then remembered we needed to go out the back way, and went into the kitchen again.
“Now what?” Geir shouted after me. I didn’t answer him, lifted the trash bag out of the bin under the sink, tied a knot in the top, picked up the other full bag I’d left up against the wall on top of some newspaper, and went out to the elevator. Njaal, who was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a white sleeveless top, held his nose as we went down.
The elevator came to a gentle halt in the basement, I held the two trash bags in one hand and opened the door with the other. I rummaged in my pocket for the key, then realized I’d forgotten to lock the door upstairs. But then again, what did we have of any value? Three computers, that was it. The TV was from the eighties, only a very nostalgic thief would want to run off with it.
“Yes?” said Geir.
“Won’t be a minute,” I said. “Just wait here.”
My fingers finally got hold of a key, allowing me to retrieve the bunch from my pocket. I tapped the key card against the panel until the green lamp flashed and there was a click as the door unlocked. My energy was almost gone as I walked the fifteen meters down the passage to the door, after which came the stairs, then another door into the refuse room.
I stopped and placed my palm against the cold wall, wanting to put my face against it as well, and if I’d been on my own I might have. Instead I put my hand, which had already absorbed some of the coldness of the wall, to my forehead. Geir and Njaal stopped in front of the door and stared at me just as I was about to go on.
“Is this it?” Geir asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It took me weeks to find my way around down here with all these doors.”
“There are four,” he said. “How difficult can that be?”
I didn’t answer him, opened the door, and went up the stairs.
“You can wait here,” I said. “I’m only tossing the garbage out.”
The stairs on the other side of the heavy steel door were black and slippery, presumably from the liquid that forms in the bottom of garbage bags, deposited by months, perhaps years, of minor leakages. The smell was pungent and mellow at the same time. Ventilation ducts were suspended from the ceiling, the rest was bare wall. I opened the lid of the nearest garbage container, which was big enough to conceal an entire dismembered family, and slung the bags over the side. I felt sick, my whole body was aching. I couldn’t trace it back to anything specific – something in particular that I’d done wrong – it had to do with everything, me in my entirety, and for that reason it couldn’t be helped. Even if I did retract the damn book it wouldn’t make any difference. Apart from pleasing Gunnar and making him think he’d put me in my place, perhaps even crushed me, and that justice had been done. His demands were justified, his rage was justified, and it was the sheer force of it all I was unable to withstand, it pinned me to the ground, took me apart, rendering me and everything about me worthless. Worthless. Even my own children vanished in his rage, even they lost their worth, for I was the only father they had, a person unable to keep himself in check, whose outline was blurred, so fundamentally lacking in empathy, he could destroy the lives of others without even knowing.
When I came out of the refuse room they were waiting in the light of the open door. Which is to say that Geir was standing there, holding the door open, while Njaal had gone outside into the yard that lay in the deep shadow of the tall building at whose foot he stood. He stared at a small white van that was reversing. Probably deliveries to the back door of the Chinese takeaway; the delivery man would knock on the door as hard as he could with a length of piping left there for the purpose, and if he was lucky one of the people who worked there would come out after a minute or two. Boxes containing canned soft drinks, canned goods, and noodles.
Njaal ran across the yard and out onto the sidewalk, where the light was bright and warm.
“Mind the road!” Geir shouted. “Stay on the sidewalk!”
Njaal sent us a look as if to say he was being underestimated.
“I know!” he shouted back.
“All right,” said Geir. “It looked like you didn’t, that’s all.”
He twirled his key strap around his finger.
“Are you going to start whistling now?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Your body language is so cheerful.”
“It’s a nice day. The sun’s out and I’m on my holidays. Of course I’m cheerful! Not even a misery guts like you can alter that.”
He started whistling.
Fifteen meters ahead of us, Njaal had stopped next to their car, a red Saab from some time in the nineties, which meant it was anything from ten to twenty years old. I hadn’t a clue about cars, and the nineties were like yesterday to me. That twenty years had gone since they started was incomprehensible.
“Ouch!” said Njaal, putting his hand against the bodywork.
“You didn’t think of parking in the shade?” I said.
“Like you would have done, you mean?” said Geir.
“If I were as anal as you, yes.”
He laughed and unlocked the car, strapping Njaal into the child seat while I got in the front of the boiling-hot vehicle. In front of the three cars in the parking area at the bottom of the cul-de-sac was a tree, its leaves glittering in the sunlight, and on the other side of it lay Föreningsgatan, along which I’d walked a couple of hours earlier with Vanja, Heidi, and John.
Geir got in, shut the door, and put the key in the ignition. I fastened my seat belt, discovering the sunglasses I’d slipped into my pocket. I put them on. They were Polaroids and I’d bought them on the Lido in Venice the previous summer. I liked them, there was something of the seventies about them. Vanja had said I looked like a thief. I liked that too.
Geir pulled his seat belt across his chest and clicked it into place, released the hand brake, threw the car into gear, and pulled slowly away down the road. There was something rash about his driving; not that he drove too fast or took chances, it was more his movements when he was behind the wheel, the abrupt way he looked over his shoulder when changing lanes, the suddenness with which he flicked the indicator, as if only just remembering at the last minute, or the way he kept glancing to all sides on straight stretches of road. Most people I knew drove as if they were at one with the vehicle, as if the instruments and controls were an extension of their own bodies, but Geir drove like he was operating some unfamiliar machine.
“Which way?” he said.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I usually just go straight on until there’s a sign out of Malmö. It tends to work OK; the motorways take you out of town, and they all connect up in one way or another.”
“You don’t say,” he said. “Well, I like to know which way I’m going. Still, render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s.”
“I’ll render you in a minute,” I said.
“I refuse to laugh. Not even a smile for that.”
We passed the Konserthuset, following the wide, avenue-like road in the direction of Värnhemstorget, a ribbon of glittering cars reflecting the sunlight from their various parts, a wing here, a windshield there, a bumper or a door handle.
Geir pressed a button on the inside of his door and my window slid down. The wind rushed in as if through a funnel.
“You’ve got the technology, I see,” I said. “What year’s this thing from, anyway?”
“Two thousand one.”
“Two thousand one? I reckoned it was from the nineties. You mean it’s only eight years old?”
He nodded. I looked up at the signs above the roadway.
“The highways are that way,” I said. “Any will do, it doesn’t matter.”
“Gothenburg or Stockholm or Ystad or Copenhagen or Trelleborg?”
&n
bsp; “Take your pick. The worst that can happen is we end up having to go back.”
He sighed.
“Go with Gothenburg, then, if it means that much,” I said.
“I will, then.”
We approached the big junction where four different roads converged, all multilane. I glanced at the faces in the cars alongside, the way they were all in their own worlds, as if unaware that they were barely half a meter away from other people, separated from them only by a transparent sheet of glass.
The lights changed, the first cars pulled away, and a few seconds later the movement was transmitted to us. Our line of vehicles snaked onto the on-ramp, its members accelerating onto the motorway according to individual preference, soon drawn out over several hundred meters of road. Geir kept to the inside lane, observing the speed limit, meaning that we were continually overtaken as meter upon meter vanished beneath us and the landscape outside changed from the built-up topography of the city, almost devoid of vegetation, to the more open lots of industrial sites and car dealers, fenced off from each other by tall wire mesh.
“What did I tell you?” I said with a nod toward the sign telling us the Lund exit was a kilometer up ahead.
“I never said you couldn’t get lucky,” said Geir. “How are you doing, Njaal? All right?”
“Yes.”
“Shall we have an ice cream when we get to Lund?”
“Yes.”
We passed from rural landscape to industrial sites, then residential areas, and eventually found ourselves in the city center, which was markedly smaller than Malmö’s; the buildings were lower, the streets narrower, the pace slower. Geir’s head was going back and forth between the side windows and the windshield as he scouted around for a place to park, hopefully still keeping an eye on the traffic around us.
“There’s a big parking lot in the center, I seem to remember,” I said. “If you keep going straight, I’m sure we’ll find it.”
Instead of doing as I said, he signaled right.
“But it’s down there!” I said. “Look, just around that corner!”
“It’s no entry. You see that big round sign there?”
“Oh, is that what it means?”
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 33
