He looked at me.
“You are joking, I take it?”
I shook my head and he burst out laughing.
“I was pretty impressed that you could pass your written exam after only reading up the night before. Now I understand things a bit better.”
“I keep telling myself I should brush up a bit on road signs. Only I can’t bring myself to do it. I have my license now, don’t I?”
“Here we are,” he said, and signaled left, turning onto a short ramp that led into a parking area.
After the rush of wind from the road, the air into which we stepped seemed oddly still. It shimmered in the heat above the asphalt, but was otherwise as calm as the waters of a small inlet, and we were beneath the surface, if that was what it was.
One day in the middle of the nineteenth century in one of the villages that line the Vestland fjords, during the hay harvest, the sun shining as it was now, when all the villagers were hard at work in the fields, a disaster occurred. Everyone died, and no one was spared to tell what happened. They were found the next day. A young man who was meant to be working for his uncle that day discovered them. The house was silent when he got there, he went in, his uncle’s wife lay dead on the floor of the kitchen, her face twisted almost beyond recognition, her eyes bulging, the blood had run from her ears and nose. He rushed out, up the steep hill, whose grass was only half mown, and there he came upon a group of men who looked like they were resting, only they turned out to be dead too, presumably struck down on the spot, with exactly the same appearance as the wife in the house. Bulging eyes, blood seeping from their orifices.
It was the beginning of a novel. Something had happened, no one knew what, and after a few generations it became just a tale, eventually, in our day, all but forgotten.
But then it happened again. And someone, the novel’s protagonist perhaps, stumbled upon the tale and uncovered the connection.
Yes. The unfathomable depths of the fjord beneath its blue-green surface, the green sides of the valley, so exceptionally intense in color, the white-clad tops of the fells under blue, cloudless sky. The grass tickling against moist skin, the steady hum of insects. The scythe that sang as it mowed, the clatter of its metal against the sharpening stone, the feeling of vast silence beneath it all, evoked by the fells and the fjord and the sky together. And then, disaster.
I stood there, staring down the street as Geir opened the trunk, took out Njaal’s yellow balance bike and assembled it. The black jeans I was wearing stuck to my skin, and my feet, encased in tight black man-made fiber and the black leather of my shoes, were so hot and slippery with sweat it was like they hardly belonged to my body at all, but were creatures in their own right. Two blotchy red brothers, perspiring stokers of coal.
Njaal got on his bike and gripped the handlebars tightly, feet planted on the ground. The bike was made to look like a lion, with a face painted on at the front and a little tail at the back.
“That’s a cool bike you’ve got there, Njaal,” I said.
He was so proud he didn’t know where to look.
“Yes,” he said eventually.
Then he set off, paddling along, scooting faster and faster across the parking lot. Geir checked to make sure the car door was locked, put his keys in his pocket, and went after him.
“Not too far ahead, Njaal!” he shouted. “And keep to the sidewalk!”
As he reached the curb he stopped abruptly by putting his feet down hard on the ground.
“Impressive technique,” I said.
“Yeah, he’s really good,” said Geir.
“What do you want to do? Are we hungry?”
“Let’s see the cathedral first, eh? Then grab some lunch afterward.”
“Sounds good.”
It was the air that had gone. Sucked up from the earth by some thunderous implosion, first a rumbling in the distance, then louder and louder, the wind picking up as the noise increased, until suddenly, as they stood bewildered and anxious, everything went totally silent. Not a sound was heard. They looked at each other, all was still and they found themselves unable to breathe. They dropped to their knees. Clutched their throats. The blood thumped in their veins. Their stomachs turned. Eyes wide and staring. They fell to the ground, twisting and writhing like worms. And all in silence. The life vanished from them, one by one, and there they lay, motionelsss one and all. Everyone in the fields, everyone in the houses. All the birds, and all the animals. And then, perhaps seven or eight, maybe ten minutes later, the air returned in an earsplitting tumult, as when a dam is opened and the water comes crashing down on the dry riverbed.
But what then?
What would happen then, and why?
Njaal scooted along, now behind us, now in front, as we walked toward the cathedral that rose up so serenely over the rooftops as if it were the most natural thing in the world. All around us people strolled with their shopping bags, and on a square we crossed they were sitting on benches and at café tables, some with bikes parked in front of them, students most probably, while cars rolled sedately by, their tires rumbling gently over the cobbles. There was an ambience of peace and tranquillity about the town, bordering on the slumberous. It was hard to imagine that Malmö was only minutes away by train, life there was so very different. Malmö was a working-class city, built not for the eye or the mind, but for the body, with its long rows of identical brick buildings, its streets a busy turmoil of life and contrasts. Lund was complete, and probably nearly always had been, built up around a small number of more or less permanent structures established by the church and the university, institutions concerned with preservation, whereas Malmö had been built up around production. In Lund it was the town that shaped the people, in Malmö the people that shaped the town. The fact that Bergman’s main character in what was perhaps the best of all his films, Wild Strawberries, journeyed to Lund, was surely by no means incidental, for the journey is the journey toward death, and while life may be fluid, death is stable and immutable, and of all places in Sweden Lund would have to be closest to such a state. The people of Lund were of course just as alive as the people of Malmö, and their town just as alive; the difference was between the expected, that which is already established and which people merely populate, and that which is created in the moment. It was a matter of forms and roles.
* * *
“The people in your subdivided community have fled from exactly that in Malmö,” said Geir as we crossed the area in front of the church. “They’ve built themselves a little Lund out there. You’re right to call it death.”
“The average age must be seventy,” I said.
“Ugh!” he said. “How the hell you could ever be so stupid as to buy that little dolls’ house out there, I’ll never know. It’s exactly what I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from.”
“And with so little success,” I said.
We stopped and looked up at the church exterior, whose Romanesque weightiness appeared not to strive toward the heavens in the way of the great Gothic churches, appeared not to want anything but this, endeavoring instead to make the best of its own place. The distinction here was not between down and up, but between in and out.
“Fantastic church,” said Geir.
“Do you want to go in?”
“Yes. Where’s the entrance? This way or that?”
“We went in the other side when we were here,” I said.
We walked around the side of the church. Geir turned and called out to Njaal, who was perhaps forty meters behind, scampering along on his yellow lion bike. On the other side was a park. Green trees rose from green grass and stood motionless with their swells of foliage, through which not a breath of wind passed. Njaal came biking past.
Where were the children? Had I forgotten them? Were they at home in the apartment?
No. I’d dropped them off at the nursery.
Or was that yesterday?
No. I was certain of it. We tidied up after I got home. They weren’t there then, they wer
e at the nursery.
“There’s a door over there,” said Geir. “It can’t be the main entrance though.”
“No, they usually put the main entrance at the front in the olden days,” I said.
“Your irony only reflects poorly on yourself,” said Geir. “You’re the one who’s been here before.” And then, abruptly: “Njaal!”
“Yes,” Njaal shouted back, by now some way farther down the path that led through the park.
“Come here!” Geir called. “We’re going inside!”
“OK,” said Njaal, and came paddling back toward us. I gazed at the enormous blocks of stone, which had once been light in color, but which now in places were almost black. At the base they were green.
“Leave your bike here, we’re going inside the church now,” said Geir.
“I want to take it with me,” said Njaal.
“It’s not allowed, you little terror. No bikes in God’s house.”
“No balance bikes, anyway. Pedals would have been different.”
“What?” Njaal looked up at me.
“Karl Ove’s only joking,” said Geir. “Leave your bike and come here!”
He did as he was told and we went into the church, which seemed so much bigger and vaster than it looked from outside. Here there was any amount of striving to the heavens.
I wasn’t in the mood for churches and wandered around halfheartedly, sitting down on a pew after a short while, not even trying to identify myself with what the surrounding imagery expressed. Geir and Njaal disappeared from sight, when they appeared again they came up to tell me they’d been down in the crypt. I went outside for a cigarette, Geir wanted to look around a bit more, so I sat down on the steps and stared out into the park, the smoke of my cigarette a wispy cloud about my head while I thought about the new idea I had for a novel, how it might connect up with what little I already had. The dystopia. The world that never was. The man who grew up in a place where Nazism constituted the social order. Why Nazism? I’d seen a picture not long before, from a Nazi propaganda poster, depicting a bridge in a mountainous landscape, and it was so stirring and filled me with such an odd sense of longing that I wanted to investigate it. To create just such a world. I knew instantly that the lower-middle-class horror of the subdivision gardens in some way joined up with that image. I’d read another article, in Dagens Nyheter, about the biological manipulation of animals, dealing partly with an experiment in the sixties when a team of scientists had implanted electrodes in the brain of an ox and succeeded in making it walk and stop – a picture showed how the ox, which had come running toward the scientist, had halted abruptly in front of him when he flicked a switch on the box he held in his hand; and partly with an ongoing experiment with a fly in which they had implanted a light-sensitive gene from an eel which allowed them to steer it, albeit not minutely or with any exactness; every time someone directed a light at the fly it took off. What these experiments stood for was horrendous and shook me to my very foundation. The problem was that it belonged to our time, structurally, politically, socially, the whole mentality of it, and that its myriad meanings would evaporate as soon as I tried to insert it into another, counterhistorical reality. Perhaps what I had were two different novels. That would become apparent to me as I went along, I thought to myself. The world was so big and diverse that opposite forces were always at work somewhere, no particular outcome was ever guaranteed, the future was wide open and uncertain, and if the sun went down in that future, it would go down on us, not on those who were to come; for them it would rise.
“There he is, all on his own, the friendless wretch,” said Geir behind me.
I turned.
“Are we ready for some lunch now?” I said.
He nodded and I got to my feet. My legs felt like they were shaking, but it was only a sensation. I tossed my cigarette onto the gravel as Njaal got back on his bike and we walked off, me with my inner being in turmoil, Geir in good cheer, I assumed, since he was twirling his key strap again and trying to tell me how marvelous the church had been inside. Friendless, he’d said, and the situation I was in returned to me. Gunnar’s awful e-mails. The lawyers poring through my manuscript. The court case that lay ahead. The newspaper headlines.
“You seem a bit miserable,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry. I’m not the best of company.”
“Are you going to start apologizing for that now as well? As far as I’m concerned, you can be as miserable as you like. Everything has its value.”
“No, the moods of others can hardly be said to seep in and affect you,” I said. “You’re always yourself, regardless.”
“What you’re saying is I’m thick-skinned. You said that yesterday too.”
“But you are.”
“If you say so. How about that place?” he said, indicating a restaurant maybe twenty meters up a side street we were passing.
“Can’t we sit outside?” I said. “So I can smoke?”
“Sure. On the square, then? There were some outdoor cafés there.”
We went over and sat down at a table inside a roped-off serving area. A girl in her early twenties was sitting at a neighboring table with a woman I supposed was her mother, about fifty years old. Apart from them the place was deserted. The girl was typing on her phone, the mother smoking and staring out over the square.
“Do you want pizza or spaghetti?” Geir asked Njaal, who had produced a toy car from somewhere and was now playing with it on the edge of the table, his chin supported by his hand, elbow on the table.
“Spaghetti,” he said.
“Good,” said Geir. “How about you?”
“I don’t know really. Carbonara, I think.”
“Nice choice. I’ll go with the carbonara as well.”
He put the menu down on the table. The waitress came over and we ordered. While we waited for the food, Geir expounded on the concepts of sensitivity and insensitivity. He pointed out how odd it seemed that I, with my wish to write about all that was authentic, and who had written so freely about death and the body, had not written about sex. I was too sensitive, he considered.
“I’m discreet, that’s all,” I said. “Besides, as I see it sex is overamplified in our culture.”
“Overamplified?”
“Yes. Do you remember what you told me once, about the guy who vanished in a huge avalanche and was buried alive under meters of snow?”
“I do. You often come back to that, don’t you?”
“Yes, because he disappeared to go jerk off. It’s a superb illustration of our sexual urge.”
“The way it exerts itself on every situation?”
“No, the minuteness of it. It’s so incredibly small. A tiny little ejaculation in a huge mass of snow. Sex is completely out of proportion, we give it so much space and attach so much meaning to it, but in actual fact it’s nothing. Totally verging on zero.”
“I may be a fool, but I’m not an idiot!” he said in English. “We’re talking about the way it is. Not the way we want it to be. You want life to be big and meaningful. Noble, even. Sorry. It is small and lonely. It’s never going to be better than that orgasm in the snow. Sex and death, that’s all there is.”
“Then why do you even bother talking to me, if that’s the case? Shouldn’t you be at home jerking off? Or sticking your head in a bucket and putting a gun in your mouth?”
“What do you know? I often jerk off when I’m talking to you.”
“So that’s where those funny noises come from. I thought it was the dog slobbering over its dinner.”
“We haven’t got a dog.”
“No, exactly. The truth’s always something else.”
“Good point,” he said, and smiled the way a person who is basically rather pleased with themselves may sometimes smile, as if they can hardly contain their pleasure.
The waitress came over from the counter with a plate of pasta in each hand. I looked at the table, there was a basket of bread on it, and a small b
ottle of olive oil; had she put them there without my noticing?
“Two carbonaras,” she said, putting two plates down in front of us. “Yours is on its way,” she said to Njaal.
“Have some bread while you’re waiting,” said Geir, handing him a piece. He took a bite as he watched a pigeon wander about between the tables, then glanced up at me.
“It’s all about the difference between is and ought to be,” I said.
“Do you remember what Pessoa says? ‘How can I face Leopardi’s atheism with gravity and pain when I know this atheism may be cured by sexual intercourse?’”
“Yes, but that’s just it. I can accept reducing things down in order to get to some form of truth, but what I don’t understand is why that reduction always has to end in sex.”
“The reason you don’t understand it is because you’re an aesthete. You shun what is base. You shy away from the body. You know what Luther wrote?”
“No.”
“Dreams are untruthful. Shitting the bed, that’s the only truth.”
* * *
After we’d eaten, we strolled toward the botanical gardens. In the middle of the park there was a small pond full of water lilies, and next to it a little café where we sat down and had coffee in the flickering shade beneath a tree. There were some ducks whose young – which last time I was here, with Linda in the early summer, had been small and fluffy – had grown considerably while they had retained their youngness, the offspring of both animals and humans had awkwardness in common, as if, because of their sudden size, something monstrous had come over them. Of course, Njaal wasn’t bothered about such things, he chased them around for a while, trying to get close enough to pet them, but every time he got near they scuttled away, their heads held still on relatively slender necks, and eventually he lost interest and began tossing stones into the pond instead, until Geir told him to stop, and he sat down in the gravel by the table to play with his car again.
I thought about something Vanja often asked, about why grown-ups never played. She couldn’t grasp that we found it tedious, and the conclusion she drew was that in that case she never wanted to grow up. Life was running around and laughing, playing with long-maned plastic ponies and little Japanese figures with big eyes, swinging on swings, spinning on carousels, climbing in trees, splashing in wading pools and pretending to be a whale, a shark, a fish. Not sitting in a chair reading a newspaper, looking serious. Or, like now, sitting still at a table and talking, with long pauses in between where nothing was said and no one did anything.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 34
