Their joy when they see each other again is palpable. They call the boy their precious baby and embrace with him between them.
If love does exist, it is here.
Do you believe in God? She hadn’t intended to ask, but it just comes out. On this occasion: summer. They are sitting in the asphalted yard at Drottninghusgränd with a tray of coffee on a stool between them. Olle has gone for a walk with the precious baby. A vigorous ivy is climbing up the wall.
She is pretty sure that Ricki will say no. In her family no one believes in God, except maybe Aunt Laura. No one talks about him, and no one goes to church. But Ricki answers yes, actually, she does believe.
She wants to know what Ricki means. Do you believe in a kindly old man who fixes everything, with our best interests at heart?
No, Ricki replies, not an old man exactly, more like Spinoza. She doesn’t really succeed in giving a detailed explanation of how she believes in God in accordance with Spinoza.
The harmony, she ventures. Someone must have worked it out. Calibrated it. Made everything miraculously fit together—the circulation of the blood, gravity, the orbits of the planets. Not an old man, more a kind of spirit.
The doves are moving around on the asphalt. The male puffs himself up, the female isn’t interested, runs away. The male tires of the pursuit and pecks at crumbs until he puffs himself up once more and starts chasing a new female. What is she supposed to think about what Ricki is saying?
I believe in a world consciousness, Ricki goes on.
A world sense.
At that point she raises an objection. The world is anything but sensible, it is crazy. The Nazis’ annihilation of the Jews, the murder of the Indians in America, and most recently the Suez Crisis, the British bombed Cairo and then Russian tanks rolled into Hungary and many people believe there will be a third world war.
Absolutely, Ricki interrupts her, picking a flake of pastry off her blouse and popping it in her mouth. Absolutely, people do terrible things. But I still believe there is a world consciousness, and that harmony is the basic template. Balance. You just have to follow that route and do your best.
Route? What route?
I mean love, Ricki replies. Eros is everywhere, even in the most mundane elements of our lives. In sensuality. In joy. Perhaps it is there most of all, and least of all in church. Love isn’t just loving one person after another, you know. But if you love a person completely from the inside, something happens. Love becomes a force.
Eros, Ricki goes on after a while. It can be cooking a meal. Doing the ironing. Anything at all. The simplest of tasks. Eros is when body and soul come together. That is the route, or maybe I should call it the way, she says.
After a brief pause she adds that she would like to have been a Buddhist, a peaceful religion. The sun moves slowly across the courtyard.
No one has ever talked to the girl like this before. It is also the only philosophical conversation she has with her aunt Ricki. It doesn’t last long. It is interrupted by Olle, who has come home and is standing at the window in his shirtsleeves, calling for them to come in. What was it Ricki said? It was so simple that it sounded naive.
What she remembers most clearly afterward is Ricki’s immutable, stubborn confidence. It stuck with her, and it became a counterbalance to all the other stuff, everything that was evasive, half-spoken, embarrassed. But I didn’t understand that until much later: the fact that Ricki was the only counterbalance that was given to me.
To make body and soul come together? Easier said than done. She is with one boy after another. The restlessness consumes her with hungry jaws. It forces her out virtually every night, and the door between body and soul is firmly closed. All kinds of things happen simultaneously, but in separate parts of her.
One evening Dad tests her on her Latin homework. He doesn’t know any Latin, and he finds it entertaining. He is lying on the bed and she is sitting at her desk, explaining the vocative and ablative cases to him. Mom flings open the door; she is furious.
Look at you, lying there making out with your own daughter too!
The front door slams behind her. That’s sick. Dad stays where he is, the Latin grammar open on his chest. It is dark outside. Mom is out there with her lame leg, her jealousy, the state of the roads, and the ditches, the inadequate street lighting, the cars, the poor visibility in the mist.
She forces Dad to go after her.
He doesn’t want to. He really doesn’t want to. She knows that. She sees the look in his eyes: tormented. Then acquiescent. She makes him go out and search for Mom. She remains sitting at her desk. Inside her head she can hear the reverberation of the accusations Mom has probably flung at Dad. And his responses, evasive as usual.
Matter-of-fact, but evasive. She can hear Mom’s obstinacy, the hammer on the nail, bang. Mom’s tongue is horrific, as sharp as a sword, slicing through soft tissue. At last she hears them return, and manages to get her body to obey her once more.
I was furious with Mom. I defended Dad when I spoke to her. It wasn’t Dad I was defending, but myself. I didn’t want to be dragged into it all.
I didn’t want to. Your own daughter. Too. The words offended me.
They sexualized my relationship with my father. As if he would have made out with me! Your own daughter too! For a long time after this incident I pictured myself splitting open my mother’s head with a spike. She fell to the ground, blood spurting everywhere. The vision would come particularly when I was trying to get to sleep: Mom’s skull splintering, the blood gushing out. I wanted to stop seeing it, but it kept on coming back.
It became a compulsion inside my head, like the knife.
And in spite of the fact that I wanted it to stop, I smashed my mother’s skull over and over again. It was a compulsion, but I was the one responsible for it. And this repulsiveness brought with it an unpleasant sense of satisfaction.
Everything happens simultaneously but in entirely separate parts of her. She is a member of the school drama group. They rehearse in the basement. She is the secretary of the well-established school society known as Scenia, and in that capacity she welcomes the actor Max von Sydow down in the basement.
He is accompanied by a journalist and a photographer.
He too used to attend the Cathedral School, and was secretary of the drama group. As the photographer takes pictures she plucks up the courage to ask how one becomes an actor, and he answers in a friendly way. There is a feature in Vecko-Journalen with his remarkable, gnarled face on the cover.
It reminds her of a cross-looking knot on the trunk of a birch tree.
In the background it is just possible to glimpse a shadow, which is her.
She is obsessed with film and theater. She sees Max von Sydow play Peer Gynt, directed by Ingmar Bergman, at the city theater in Malmö. She remembers his raging fury. She would love to have the courage to release such fury.
She remembers the Button Molder, who wanted to melt down and remold Peer’s soul. And the words about how life is like an onion, its layers being peeled away to reveal that it contains nothing. Of course that’s the way it is, she thinks: nothing. Even though she is still in high school, she is a member of the student film studio and the student jazz club, Klubb 52. She plays truant from school to visit the Danish Film Museum in Copenhagen with her friends.
The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari, swathed in mist and spooky smoke.
The murderers are amongst us, with the remarkable Peter Lorre and his terrified, guilt-filled eyes. Viking Eggeling’s films, which consist only of abstract patterns, an ever-changing kaleidoscope, life’s flickering images. Perhaps he is saying that the contours of life are constantly shifting, and this is freedom.
Standing in front of a screen or a stage, she feels free. And that is virtually the only time.
In the middle of winter she hitchhikes to Gothenburg. The roads are treacherous with ice. She has to stand there for a long time in the bitter wind, thumb in the air. She wants to ask Aunt Laura how Ric
ki met Olle. Is that why she goes there, and not because she’s worried?
When she arrives, Aunt Laura doesn’t ask how she got there; she simply offers prawn sandwiches and is as chatty as ever.
And she tells the story of how Ricki met Olle.
To put it briefly: The charter holiday Ricki booked in 1952 was miserable, and Ricki soon regretted her decision. She might just as well have stayed at home and looked after Grandma, thus avoiding her intrusive fellow travelers and tedious visits to museums. On the boat trip to Madeira, she was sharing a cabin with three very talkative ladies.
Seasickness saved her from their company. The sea was rough, the sky overcast. She leaned over the railing, unable to stop throwing up. A man she had never seen before came over and expressed his concern. She tried to get him to go away, but he refused. She waved her hand, but he took no notice.
He placed his hand on her forehead as she vomited.
Gave her water afterward. Wrapped his coat around her. Ricki was shivering and shaking, and he took care of her. Was that Olle? Yes. Aunt Laura’s tone grows warm. Did she sleep with him in a cave? Laura is taken aback. Olle was on the same boat to Funchal, on his way to sell ladies’ underwear.
However, they had to say goodbye to each other, because he was married. Married? She didn’t know that. Yes, he was married to a woman in the Canaries. When Ricki got home from her holiday she called Laura and told her all about it. At long last she had found a man she wanted, but he was tied to someone else. Uncle Elis was dead and Laura was lonely; Ricki often went to Gothenburg to seek solace with her sister.
In blizzards and in sunshine. When she couldn’t bear it anymore. She was exhausted and in despair, and Laura did her best to console her.
Ricki as Niobe, all tears.
A grieving Andromache who has lost her Hector.
She has never seen Ricki like that. She can’t even imagine her calm aunt behaving that way. But she listens to Laura’s story like a five-year-old entranced by a fairy tale. She needs a story with a happy ending. After a long wait, over a year, Olle wrote to say that he was free and on his way to Sweden. They got married and had their precious baby.
Laura makes up a bed for her in Uncle Elis’s room.
She tosses and turns, she can’t sleep. What if Olle hadn’t gone up on deck that night when Ricki was seasick? What if she had chosen a different destination? What if he had stayed in the lounge with the other passengers, enjoying a few drinks?
Just one tiny detail and they would have missed each other. Was it the fortune-teller’s prediction that made them meet up?
It was probably because they were both open to love. Which is just as much of a miracle as a prediction being fulfilled. Maybe predictions should be regarded as suggestions for new roads to take, different thoughts to consider. A prediction can make new aspects of life appear. At that moment, believing in miracles seems to her to be eminently sensible.
Life is a series of glissandos. Disharmonies. It is an uneasy music, but sometimes a particular note can be heard. A soft clarinet, a fragile violin.
Sometimes she can hear it. The rest of the time she is nothing more than a cycling paper doll, tossed up by the wind into the great skies that cover Lund, sunshine yellow and dizzying. There is another life, there has to be.
She and her boyfriend manage to get into a dance at the Academic Society; she starts laughing so hard she can’t stop. She gets drunk on laughter. They are dancing in the big room at the Ateneum and a fantastic band is playing. Suddenly a woman—slightly older and a student—comes up to her and throws her arms around her.
Honey, I hope you always stay this happy.
She stands there on the dance floor, completely taken aback. Her arms drop to her sides and she watches the woman walk away. What an odd thing to happen. And what a lovely thing to say. It was so nice to be hugged by a strange woman, who seems to know something about life, maybe something sorrowful and bitter.
But did she think the girl was happy, just because she was laughing?
Yes, she has a boyfriend. He is in his final year at high school, he is interested in literature and introduces her to the writers of the 1940s: Sven Alfons, Karl Vennberg, and Axel Liffner, who are so modern that the school’s history of literature course doesn’t get as far as them (although Alf Henriques does; she buys his book on modern literature from Gleerups).
They usually hang out on his bed, reading aloud to each other. He particularly likes Ingemar Gustafsson, the author from Lund who later becomes Leckius. His novellas are improbable and make her head spin.
There’s the one about the man who is born inside a nutshell, lives his life, and dies there. It captures perfectly that feeling of being shut in. A tale about being depressed.
The boy doesn’t understand what she means. The radiator is humming. They soon move on to caressing each other. He teaches her a lot of useful things, like the best way to handle a penis.
She appreciates the knowledge. She likes him too. He is good and kind and gives her rides on his Vespa. But she doesn’t tell him about the drama at home; sometimes it seems like a fight to the death.
There is just one occasion, when he is in her room, and they hear her parents’ angry voices from the living room; she unexpectedly lets out a dry sob. She hears herself say that she thinks her parents are going to split up.
The boyfriend looks astonished. I’m just being silly, she says. She feels as if she is exaggerating, trying to make herself look important, as if she were fishing for his sympathy. She immediately pulls herself together and dismisses what she said. Soon they are laughing over something; later she can’t remember what it was.
But that relationship doesn’t last either.
Maybe it’s precisely because things are good between them. Because they could simply carry on like this, with no real effort. She thought that would be unbearable. Maybe he was too stable. Too reliable. Too thoughtful. Simply too good. But it was mostly because he couldn’t numb her anxiety. She seeks those who are torn to pieces. Those who are broken.
She feels at home with them. In a bitter wind that excoriates her soul. As usual she grieves when it’s over. No one loves her. She doesn’t even love herself.
Everyone is in disguise. Everyone wears a mask. No one is honest. Including her. That’s the way life works. That’s why she likes the theater.
Behind the masks lies the power. It can’t be seen, but it’s there. It makes the teachers afraid, especially the young trainee teachers. They all know it exists, but it remains hidden while other things are discussed. Democracy. Evil in the Soviet Union. Just about anything, although nothing really hangs together.
One can see life as a series of appearances onstage.
And accept the role one is given.
Or roles; there are many, all different. She knows that. Why not accept that one is playing roles? And stop regarding oneself as a stern judge. In the spring of her third year she is given the lead in Scenia’s school revue, a role she completely adores.
First of all there is the disguise itself, the costume.
She is to wear a black dress, close-fitting with a low neck. She makes it herself out of black acetate lining, which is cheap. The fabric is slinky and hard to handle and slips through her fingers as she sits at Mom’s Elna. Ninne has to help her pin it when she tries it on in front of the mirror.
She takes it in a little, then a little more. She is going to wear Lund’s most provocative dress. Her heels will be as high as the Empire State Building. She cycles all the way to the shoe store in Lomma, which sells remaindered factory stock, and her heels are so high that she can hardly walk in them.
She is going to wear a black top hat. She wants to be able to toss her hair over her shoulders. She aims to look like Juliette Gréco, who sings Boris Vian and Jacques Prévert in the nightclubs of Paris. She hasn’t heard her sing, but she has seen photographs of her. She will be just like Gréco. French, alluring, depraved.
With black eyebrows, zinc-
white lips and a mouche on her cheek.
They rehearse in the basement, then as the performance grows closer they move into the music room, which is in an annex in the schoolyard and has a stage. The revue is being written by a group of fourth-year students—daring dialogues about the teachers, provocative lyrics set to well-known jazz tunes. She practices her numbers with the band, which is made up of her school friends.
A piano. A bass. A drum set. A saxophonist who also plays the clarinet. The boys are going to wear T-shirts with horizontal stripes and top hats. They are very kind and transpose the music for her to hide the deficiencies in her voice.
She’s no singer. Mom made that clear to her right from the get-go. She has eaten chalk to try to make her voice deeper and avoid the choral singing.
But if you don’t believe in yourself, you’re no one. Better to behave as if you did. Put your trust in God or the Devil. Believe in miracles. She decides that is exactly what she is going to do. She is going to sing, bellow, roar.
The main thing is to be magnificent. And dramatic. She has a kind of talent for the latter, and that is the role she is to play. Seductress, femme fatale. Temptress. Slut and siren. She feels honest in this role. All roles contain elements of the truth.
Not the whole truth, but elements of it. No roles are wrong if you are honest. And who said you can’t choose your own? During rehearsals she becomes a different person. It is overwhelming. She is also desperate to be seen. The tall beech tree in the schoolyard is just coming into leaf, but the evenings are mercilessly cold. They practice clambering up a tall, rickety ladder from the yard to the music room on the second floor.
The audience will use the normal entrance and the staircase. Dizziness, butterflies in her tummy. Everybody shivers at the foot of the ladder, but they are warmed by their nerves, stage fright, and anticipation.
A Fortune Foretold Page 12
