‘Don’t mention it.’
He closed his wallet with a bang so the weight of responsibility was clearly audible and got to his feet to tower over his two followers. They went up Nybrogatan, three abreast, crossed the square to Sibyllegatan and continued towards Kommendörsgatan. The snow fell.
The two colleagues were returning to their workplace while Ester would walk on to her bus stop. They stopped outside to say goodbye.
‘Thank you for the book and the dinner,’ said Ester.
‘Hope you find it useful.’
‘I’m sure I will.’
He raised his arm in a wave.
‘Best of luck, then,’ he said.
She saw the two of them enter his door. Then she walked along the pavement as she had done so many times before. How many pavements must a person walk down, before she gives up?
‘Best of luck, then,’ she thought, a phrase with all the qualities of a murder weapon. People are created to torment one another. She had underlined that sentence when she read The Idiot not long before.
She halted in mid-step and stood still. She saw all at once with absolute clarity what she must do. And she must do it now. Far too much remained unresolved. This evening was the chance to talk it through. Something had to happen this evening. She went back to the building. He owed her a proper conversation.
The lights were still on in the studio. Ester could wait. She was a little elated by the thought that they could finally talk to each other about everything there’d been and why it had turned out the way it did, and by the prospect of what could happen then, where a frank conversation might lead in the middle of the night and with alcohol in their bodies.
She walked round the block. When she got back they would undoubtedly have finished in there. When she got back the lights would be off and the place in darkness.
When she got back a window had been opened wide and she could hear a game of table tennis in progress.
They were laughing to each other in that polite way you do when you want to like somebody but there’s a vacuum in between, when you feel goodwill but no sense of affinity, when you want to show that you’re having fun together but are not on your own ground and aren’t finding the chosen activity particularly edifying. You take part and show pleasure for the other person’s sake. When everything’s a bit artificial. That was the way they were laughing.
She had laughed like that herself sometimes. But never with him. With him she had never played or pretended or felt uncomfortable. Once he told her he had never shared conversations with anyone as he had with her. Talking was her aphrodisiac, the only one she knew and had mastered. Through conversation she could knock down anyone who shared her appetite for verbal sparring and the exchange of ideas. The conversations between her and Hugo had been erotically charged, never-ending and infinitely rewarding – but apparently not indispensable. People could clearly live without interesting conversations. Their primary need was not verbal-erotic intercourse but absence of inconvenience. That always took priority over the desire for substance and meaning. They bought this freedom from bother at the price of mild ennui.
Ester Nilsson stood on the pavement in Kommendörsgatan with frozen feet and thought that unusually lively activities seemed to be laid on for those who worked there. She waited another hour in her coat of hopelessly inadequate thickness. Then the lights finally went out and the premises were dark except for a faint gleam from a back room. She waited another five minutes. Then she went through the entrance, across the courtyard and up the stairs to his flat.
The smell of the stairwell was as she remembered it, old dust and cold stone. The smell would have been painful, as recollections are, but her sense of expectation was stronger. The door to his flat stood ajar. She knocked.
‘Yes?’ came his voice, friendly and expectant.
She took a step into the hall. How she had longed for this, to talk everything over with him properly, undisturbed, in his home, when neither of them was on their way somewhere else.
She heard him coming to meet her, walking from the kitchen, rounding the corner. Now she saw him, his shining, full-moon face that generally also bore a look of slight doubt and introspection.
Ester started to say something. She had practised it while she was stamping her feet out in the street. It ran: I thought we could have a little talk now, seeing how nice it was this evening. We’ve never had the chance to talk properly about what happened and where we actually stand and what we’re going to do with the beautiful thing we built between us.
That was what she had worked out that she would say.
This perpetual talk that the jilted party feels obliged to engage in. This perpetual talk. The jilter never feels the need to talk.
She, if anyone, should have known that the one walking away feels no pain; the one walking away does not need to talk because they have nothing to talk about. The one leaving is through with it. It’s the one left behind who needs to talk for an eternity. And all that this talk boils down to is repeated attempts to tell the other person he’s made a mistake. That if only he realized the true nature of things he would not make the choice he has, but would love her. The talk is nothing to do with gaining clarity, as the talker claims, and everything to do with convincing and inducing.
There’s no point talking. Honest answers are never forthcoming, to show consideration. One betrays and is betrayed and there’s nothing to talk about because there are no obligations when the will is not to hand. What is done out of compassion is worth little if the other party hopes it is done out of love.
Ester did not have time to say what she had planned, but she made a start:
‘I thought we could . . .’
Then she registered the expression on his face. It was the expression of someone who has just swallowed a snake.
Hugo was expecting someone. But not her. The words that came out of his mouth were tactless with panic and dismay, or whatever it was he was now feeling.
‘Someone else . . . is coming . . . Eva-Stina’s . . . coming.’
Ester slammed the door and ran down the stairs, all but sliding down the banisters to avoid a meeting in the stairwell with the second woman, who was the first. She must still be in the studio, seeing to something. Perhaps she was putting the final touch of paint to a set piece.
Definitive answers are easier to deal with than diffuse ones. This is to do with Hope and its nature. Hope is a parasite on the human body, which lives in full-scale symbiosis with the human heart. It is not enough to put it in a strait-jacket and lock it up in dark corners. Starvation rations do not help either; a parasite cannot be put on a diet of bread and water. The supply of nourishment must be completely cut off. If Hope can find oxygen, it will. There can be oxygen in a poorly directed adjective, a rash adverb, a compensatory sympathetic gesture, a bodily movement, a smile, a gleam in an eye. The hopeful party will choose to remain oblivious to the fact that empathy is a mechanical force. The indifferent party automatically shows care, for self-protection and to shield the person in distress.
Hope has to be starved to death if it is not to beguile and bedazzle its host. Hope can only be killed by the brutality of clarity. Hope is cruel because it binds and entraps.
When the parasite Hope is taken from its carrier the Host, the carrier either dies or is set free.
Hope and its symbiosis, it must be said, do not believe in a change in the innermost will of the beloved. The hope that inhabits the human heart believes that this will is already present; that the beloved really – actually – wants what he pretends not to want, or does not want what he pretends to want, but has been misled by the evil world around him into wanting; in short, that things are not as they seem. That the tiny glimpse of something else is the truth.
That is what Hope is.
When Ester got home that night she went through her normal pre-bedtime routine. It was a year since Hugo had come round for dinner. They had eaten a reddish dish and he had gone to the window once an
hour to smoke. In a week’s time she would have endured a year of suffering. It would intensify and become more concentrated for a few days now, but it was purer and less unclear.
There was nothing left to understand.
‘Love, famously, is blind. People in love can lose even the most basic critical faculties and become capable of monumental self-deception. Hardly a new story, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this particular myopia as astutely and entertainingly explored as in this stunning novel . . . every word packs a punch; every other sentence is so wise and funny that it begs to be quoted. Andersson’s gift for conjuring atmosphere and emotion out of small quotidian mishaps is extraordinary’
Julie Myerson, Guardian
‘Dry wit and sharp insight . . . If she sees an intellectual pretension, she pricks it’
The Economist
‘Brilliant and unflinching on obsession, on desperation, on the stuff of how people are capable of being to each other. Andersson writes smart, sharp-eyed and often witheringly funny prose; nobody gets out of this situation with their pride, or their public persona, intact. Which is what makes it such addictive reading’
Belinda McKeon, author of Tender
‘Wilful Disregard is cruel but also cruelly funny, a crystal clear statement of hope and its desire and the soul’s incurable loneliness’
Svenska Dagbladet
‘A brilliant, razor-sharp novel about love’
Aftonbladet
‘A creepy, lucid dissection of the tangled psychology of love’
M Magazine
Wilful Disregard
Lena Andersson (b.1970) is a novelist and columnist for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest morning paper. She lives in Stockholm where she is considered one of the country’s sharpest contemporary analysts. Wilful Disregard is her fifth novel and won Sweden’s prestigious August Prize.
First published 2015 by Picador
First published in paperback 2016 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2016 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-4472-6895-6
Copyright © Lena Andersson 2013
English translation copyright © Macmillan Publishers International Limited 2015
Cover Images © Kumi Yamashita, 2015.
Cover Design by Justine Anweiler, Picador Art Department
The right of Lena Andersson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Originally published in 2013 as Egenmäktigt förfarande – en roman om kärlek by Natur & Kultur, Stockholm.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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