The people at the other tables, mostly elderly, conversed in low voices, now and then there was a chink of cutlery, a fork against a plate, a spoon against a cup, which then died away in the still air under the treetops.
It felt like we were in the depths of summer. As if we were a part of some Impressionist painting, for no one had captured that feeling better than the Impressionists, and the question was whether it had actually been they who created it. Whether such a feeling had even existed in the world before they came upon it, with all their conceptions of color, light, and shade, their endeavors to reproduce the exact moment. Before that, painting had always been geometric, had always been concerned with the solidity of objects and people, and with the borders between them. That which is here, the ways in which entities that are here are connected, and that which is there, which is to say beyond here, is what such paintings investigate. But in a world sunk into shadow, specked with flickering light, where one thing merges into another, the questions are different. What is visible and what is invisible, what is clear and what is obscure, what can we see and what can’t we see, and, not least, what is this feeling that so compellingly pervades what we see? A writer such as Marcel Proust would be unthinkable without Impressionism, since his entire work is built around the relationship between recollection and oblivion, light and shade, visible and invisible, and the compelling feeling the world, especially the sunken world, yet also the prevailing world of the present, awakens in him, is shaped, if not brought into being, by the eye of the Impressionist. With Cézanne, the question is: what does it mean to see? With the Impressionists, the question is: what does it mean to experience seeing? Regrettably, their radicalism has completely disappeared from our cultural consciousness, now all that remains are the fine colors and the flowers, a fate Proust avoided, his own fine colors and flowers existing in words, and he could certainly never be suspected of appropriating beauty by copying an appealing motif, which incidentally would be one possible definition of kitsch. The fact that art has become so cerebral that everything to do with feelings is left to the simpleminded, is perhaps the best argument there is against progress, for the very reason that such a standpoint, which it seems must take precedence over our human experience, is so stupid and unintelligent as to be truly simpleminded itself. When the imperative of craftsmanship in art was abolished, it was because the idea that art should be about reproducing the world as exactly as possible was deemed old fashioned and therefore no longer necessary. So it was abolished. But one doesn’t have to think too hard in order to understand that this wasn’t the reason that painters and sculptors spent all their time during their crucial formative years of youth copying others or mechanically reproducing models or objects. They weren’t doing it so they could learn to copy reality, because the reproduction of reality has a cutoff point any reasonably talented student would achieve fairly quickly. They were doing it so as to learn how not to think. This is the most important thing of all in art and literature, and hardly anyone can do it, or even realizes it is the case, because it is no longer taught or conveyed. Now everyone thinks art is to do with reason and criticism, that it’s all about ideas, and the art schools teach theory. Which is decay, not progress.
Geir drew his chair back in the gravel and stood up.
“Do you want some water?” he said.
“Yeah, I think I will,” I said. “Can you get me a top-off as well?”
I picked up my coffee cup and handed it to him. It had stains all over it, mostly spots but streaks too, the way my coffee cups always did for some reason, I had no idea why. Other people’s coffee cups tended to be shiny and untarnished on the outside. I supposed it was because I held my lips in a certain way that allowed coffee to dribble between them and the cup, but while I didn’t understand how this could be the case, I was unable to do anything about it; no matter how hard I pressed the cup to my lower lip, there were stains all over it by the time I was finished.
“Where are you going, Daddy?” said Njaal, looking up.
“Just getting some water.”
Njaal got to his feet and went after him, wriggling his hand into Geir’s. I got my phone out of my pocket and called Linda. She answered right away.
“Hi, it’s Karl Ove,” I said. “Are you home?”
“Yes. I just got in the door. Where are you?”
“We’re in Lund. Sitting in the botanical gardens.”
“How nice.”
“Yes, it’s pleasant. But you’re picking the kids up, right?”
“Yes. I’ll go over in a bit.”
“OK, I just needed to make sure. Anyway, we’ll be getting back soon, so I’ll see you later.”
“Did you buy the wine and the prawns?”
“I’ll get them when we get back.”
“I can get them if its easier.”
“No, it’s OK. I’ll do it. See you soon.”
“OK. Bye.”
“Bye,” I said, then pressed the red key and put the phone back in my pocket just as Njaal and Geir emerged again from the little pavilion-like structure that housed the actual café. Njaal was holding a glass in both hands, taking small, cautious steps, it was an important job he’d been entrusted with, while Geir walked behind him with a cup of coffee in one hand and a glass of water in the other.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll pay for the water, seeing as you got lunch.”
“Ha ha.”
He sat down, took the glass Njaal had been carrying, and downed its contents in one. His face glistened slightly with perspiration.
“Is it time we were heading off soon?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I called Linda. She just got in.”
He checked the time on his phone.
“Christina should be arriving soon as well. Drink your coffee and we’ll get going.”
“One more smoke,” I said. “Then we’ll go.”
Njaal picked up his bike and got on. I took the last cigarette out of the pack and lit up, crumpled the empty pack in my hand and looked to see if there was a garbage can close by. There wasn’t.
“You’re not to bike in the park here,” said Geir. “Wait until we leave.”
“Why?” he said.
“People are eating! You wouldn’t want people biking around in your lunch either, would you?”
“No,” he said with a chuckle.
Geir looked at me.
“You’ve gone quiet,” he said.
“That’s what Arvid always used to say, I remember. In Bergen. You’ve gone quiet, have you shit your pants or something?”
“Here we go again.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I was thinking about what we were talking about yesterday. About being a dad.”
“Yeah?”
“My principle is whoever wants something the most should do it. And whoever that is decides everything. When Njaal was born, Christina could hardly sleep at nights in case she missed something. She had a superb job at the opera, but she quit that to spend as much time with Njaal as possible. Her doing all the practical stuff isn’t because she’s a woman, it’s because it actually means something to her. If she’d been eager to do something else it all would have been different.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Not only does she put more into it than me, she also gets a lot more out of it. It’s highly meaningful to her.”
“I remember running through the streets to send off a roll of film for developing when Vanja was born, and then running all the way back. I didn’t want to miss anything either.”
“But you wouldn’t want to stay home full-time for three years, would you?”
“No.”
“It’s so easy to get swallowed up in all the softness and warmth, so easy to think that’s all there is. But we don’t create anything in that space other than more softness and warmth. I see it as a weakness. That’s why I have no respect for men who just wander into all that. Everyone hails them for doing it, but all they’re act
ually doing is shirking a responsibility. A major responsibility, at that. I agree with Karen Blixen when she says you can’t go chasing the Holy Grail with a baby carriage. You can’t have both. There’s only one kind of masculinity. You’re either more of a man or less. That’s fucking it. There’s no such thing as masculinities in the plural. Oh, how I despise that word. It makes me want to throw up. There are certain words that absorb everything about an age that you don’t like. That’s one of them. I can’t take it. The same goes for women too, of course. There’s only one femininity. Mind you, if this were the sixties, when men went to work and women stayed at home, I could well imagine me staying at home with Njaal. It’s the thought of a prevailing ideology, a consensus idea governing my life, that I can’t stand.”
“But if that’s true, it’s just a protest. I mean, if the point is just to do the opposite of everyone else, then you’re just as trapped as all the others.”
“You’re right. I take it back. The point is just that it’s totally absurd for other people to be telling me what I’m supposed to be like with my own son. You know, when I was in Iraq, during the war there, while the bombs were coming down, I was interviewed by a journalist from Aftonbladet. Do you know what he asked me?”
I shook my head.
“Who does the dishes at home? Can you believe that?”
“What did you tell him?”
“I refused to give him an answer. Anyway, we’ve got a dishwasher.”
“You call that little tin can a dishwasher?”
“Don’t underestimate it. We never argued over anything as much as we did over whose turn it was to do the dishes. As soon as we got a machine to do it, it was problem solved.”
“Small machines for small problems.”
“Why do you think he asked me that? I’ll tell you. He wanted to know if I was a good person or a bad person. If I did the housework, I was a good person. If I didn’t, I was a bad person.”
“Mm,” I said. “Shall we get going? I’m done now.”
We got up and left the café area and walked back through the park. I stopped where a tree had been cut down and stood for a moment reading the sign that had been put up next to it. It said the tree had died from a disease that had hit almost every tree of its kind in Skåne.
Bloody hell.
I walked on and caught up with them at the entrance gate. We followed the fence for a bit before crossing the road and entering a picturesque little street of small, low houses with flowers growing up their walls. As we got closer to the car, and thereby the apartment in Malmö, I felt a rising sense of unease, back to the apartment meant back to the book. I smoked a cigarette, it was something to do, and doing something took attention away from my thoughts, if not much then a little bit at least, and that was better than not at all. I smoked, I stared at the things around me, trying to think about them instead, and checked my phone that no one ever called.
“When was Linda picking the children up?” Geir asked, the parking lot maybe fifty meters ahead of us.
“About now, I should think,” I said. “Why?”
“So someone will be home when Christina gets there.”
“She has a cell phone, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Is she getting the train from Båstad?”
“No, the way I understood it she was getting a lift with someone who was coming this way.”
Christina had taken a course for school photographers and was going to be taking photos of school classes in the Stockholm area all autumn. She had done the same thing the year before, and the money she had earned during that period had kept them going all year. Geir no longer had his job at the university, and the unemployment benefit he had been getting for a while had stopped. The book he had sacrificed everything for, which wasn’t yet finished, and which on my advice he had submitted to first one publisher, then another, so that they might be involved at the earliest possible stage of the process, had been turned down by both. I had no idea how they managed to get by, but he said it was just a matter of discipline. They did all their shopping at Willys, where they bulk-bought discount goods, and with anything else, such as books, CDs, and DVDs, he would spend hours looking for the cheapest price online. I had no idea what they did about clothes, but Christina was a trained designer, and my guess was that they bought secondhand and that she mended and adjusted.
Geir pressed the key, the car lights flashed with a beep. I opened the door and got in while he opened the trunk for Njaal’s bike. I tipped my head back and closed my eyes. Outside, the sound of Geir rummaging in the trunk was neutral, a noise like any other, rising and spreading out into the air, but inside it was different, it was the sound of something going on in the car, in some way belonging to it. The difference was immense. What was going on outside seemed safe and unthreatening, whereas what was going on inside was something one was defenseless against.
* * *
Outside the car windows, Malmö began to materialize. The big housing blocks on the edge of the city, which in Malmö were of yellow brick, loomed up. Rows of windows, rows of balconies, and between them parking lots and lawns. The quiet residential areas of detached homes where the well-off lived were on the other side of the city, by the sea. That’s what money bought, lots of space and distance from others. But not too much space and not too much distance. In the forests you could have as much space as you wanted and there could be miles to the nearest neighbor, but no one with money would ever dream of living there. Space and distance were valuable only if there were other people nearby who had a lot less space and lived a lot closer to each other.
We drove past supermarkets, car dealers, shopping centers, gas stations, rows of buildings gradually appearing on each side, the shops to begin with selling cheap and simple commodities, becoming increasingly expensive and more exclusive the closer we got to the city center. Here were people, milling along the sidewalks, striding past the windows, cars passing in the streets with windows of their own, traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, squares and sidewalk cafés, little parks, big parks, a canal, a railway station. Hotels with flags flapping at their entrances, sports shops, clothes shops, shoe shops, electrical dealers, furniture shops, lamp shops, carpet shops, eyewear shops, bookshops, computer shops, auction houses, kitchenware dealers. Picture-framing shops. Chinese restaurants, Thai restaurants, Vietnamese restaurants, Mexican, Iraqi, and Iranian restaurants, Turkish and Greek restaurants, French and Italian restaurants. McDonald’s, Burger King, pizza joints. Cafés, cinemas, a concert hall. Theaters, an opera house, nursery schools, record shops, bus stations. Unemployment offices, linen shops, a hospital, an old people’s home, doctors’ offices. Opticians, ear specialists, heart and lung specialists. Dentists, orthopedists, psychologists, psychiatrists, pipe-fitting firms. Funeral parlors, DIY shops, home interior shops, photo shops, banks, yoga studios, pubs, flower shops, health shops, amusement arcades, tobacconists, camping and outdoor stores, children’s clothes shops, baby shops, massage institutes, car rental firms, pet suppliers, toy shops, churches, mosques, schools, information points. Hair transplant institutes, law firms, advertising agencies. Hair salons, nail studios, pharmacists, clothes shops for fat people, surgical appliance shops, workwear dealers, garden stores, exchange bureaus. Musical instrument shops, computer game shops, bus card kiosks, radio, TV, and hi-fi dealers, sausage stands, falafel bars, suitcase and bag shops. The whole of this enormous world, teeming with detail, was divided into intricate, finely meshed systems that kept everything apart, at first by its very division into sectors, which meant that rubber tap washers, for instance, were to be found in a different place than nylon guitar strings, and a novel by Danielle Steel in a different place than a novel by Daniel Sjölin, which was a kind of rough, initial sorting, then by infusing the various goods or services with value, thereby grading them in ways no school could ever teach, and which therefore had to be learned ad hoc, outside any school or institution, and which furthermore were forev
er in a state of flux. This was the difference between a pair of McGordon jeans from Dressmann and a pair of Acne jeans, or a pair of Tommy Hilfiger jeans and a pair of Cheap Monday jeans, Ben Sherman or Levi’s, Lee or J. Lindeberg, Tiger or Boss, Sand or Peak Performance, Pour or Fcuk. It was what sort of signals a novel by Anne Karin Elstad sent out compared to a novel by Kerstin Ekman, and how both of these related to a collection of poetry by Lars Mikael Raattamaa, for instance. The reason why reading Peter Englund was a bit more exclusive than reading Bill Bryson, albeit not by much. The reasons why one could no longer express fascination and enthusiasm about Salman Rushdie without seeming culturally adrift, left behind in the late eighties, while V. S. Naipaul was still accepted. The knowledge that meant I could go into a clothes shop and buy the jeans or suits that were now held to be superior, though not by all, select the books in the bookshop that gave me the greatest degree of cultural credibility, purchase the music in the record store that was deemed more than averagely sophisticated, even when it came to traditions and genres I didn’t know much about, like jazz and classical, I’d picked up enough to get by, perhaps even in some lucky circumstance to pass for a true connoisseur. This was the way with almost everything. I knew perfectly well what kind of sofa sent out what kind of signals, and the same was true of electric kettles and toasters, running shoes and schoolbags. Even tents were something I would be able to appraise, at least to a certain extent, in terms of what kind of signals they sent out. This knowledge was not written down anywhere, and it was hardly accepted as knowledge at all, it was more an assurance regarding the way things stood, and it fluctuated according to the social strata in such a way that someone from the upper classes would be able to frown on my sofa preferences and the sofa knowledge I was thereby demonstrating, just as I in turn would be able to frown on the taste in sofas of people belonging to a lower status group than myself, not in any way denigrating them as human beings, because I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing, but their sofas. I might not say so out loud, for fear of seeming judgmental, but I would think, God, what an awful sofa. Such knowledge, which applied to nearly all brands and their practical and social significance, was immense, and, I occasionally thought to myself, not that different from the knowledge so-called primitive peoples once possessed, where they not only knew the name of every plant, tree, and bush in their surroundings but also what kind of properties they had and what use could be made of them, or the knowledge people of our own cultures possessed only a few generations ago, for instance in the eighteenth century, when most people also knew the names of all the plants and trees in their vicinity, and the names of all those who lived in the villages they lived in, both the living and several generations of the dead, just as they were familiar with and able to identify by name all localities, great and small, in their surrounding area. Naturally, they knew the names of the tools they used and the work they were appropriate to, and of all the animals, their various parts and organs. This knowledge wasn’t something they considered, nor was it ever made a show of in any way, since basically they were unaware of its existence as such, so closely was it bound up with their own being. Such is the case too with the immense knowledge we ourselves possess, of the difference between strong and mild mustard, for instance, a grilled or a fried sausage, a sausage with cheese in it or one with bacon wrapped around it, a bread roll or the kind of potato pancakes we Norwegians call lomper, raw or roasted onions at the gas station’s grill stand, or of the difference between the various kinds of mustard in our supermarkets, like the French Dijon mustard, or English Colman’s, or the particular variety that belongs to Skåne, not to mention wines, which are so culturally expressive and so extremely saturated with social meanings. Like the people who went before us, we don’t give a thought to the knowledge required for us to get through the day, we don’t see it, it’s a part of us, it’s who we are. Our world is this: Blaupunkt over bluebell, Rammstein over rowan, Fiat over foxglove.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 35
