Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  ‘And Luther was a surly devil,’ I asserted. ‘He got rid of a whole lot of holidays—’

  ‘You don’t say!’ said Henry, giving me another one of those pop-eyed indignant looks. ‘Well, I’ll be damned. I never thought about that … It’s true that in France I thought a good deal about converting, although it seemed so incredibly ambitious. I’m not really that type …’

  ‘I just don’t like Luther, that’s all there is to it,’ I said.

  ‘And that’s something worth thinking about,’ said Henry.

  This conversation took place on the bus heading for Skog Cemetery – we were going out there to light our respectful candles. Dusk descended over the highway as Henry lapsed into pangs of anguish about Luther.

  ‘Don’t think about him now,’ I said. ‘Don’t let him ruin the day!’

  Out at Skog Cemetery the graves were already lit up. We were caught up in a deeply spiritual and ritualistic mood as we purchased our pine torches at the entrance. Everyone was quiet, talking in low voices, and not even the flower-sellers seemed especially high-spirited, even though they were doing a brisk business in candles and spruce boughs.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Henry at the gates. ‘It makes you feel all weak at the knees.’

  The torches and candles cast their flickering light over the headstones, making names emerge from the dark, from the silence, and from oblivion. Candles burned on the ground, over the hills and gullies, in the forest and in the glades. The candles rippled into infinity – for a brief time a solemn eternity surrounded the individual names and factual data. For a few hours on that November evening, the stone-carvers’ work glittered like the undying light in our prayers.

  People were wandering like disembodied overcoats along the paths between the graves. Everyone spoke in hushed and subdued voices, lighting their candles, meditating with clasped hands, their faces shimmering, the headstones glittering and their breath swirling away in prayers and frost.

  We stood there a long time, staring out at all that splendour, until we found the right pathway, the one leading to the Morgonstjärna family monument. It was a well-tended affair, with a tall stone displaying an eroded family crest.

  Henry lit the torch with his Ronson lighter – turned up high like a blowtorch – and set it at the base of the headstone. He read all the names in a loud and clear voice, ending with his father, Gus Morgan, 1919–1958, and his grandfather, Morgonstjärna, 1895–1968. After he’d read the names, he stood perfectly still for a long time with his hands in his coat pockets. It was cold and a nasty wind was sweeping in from the Hungarian steppes. His cap was pulled down so he could meditate in peace and quiet. Of course I couldn’t feel the same deep emotion, but I was even more touched by that undulating sea of flickering flames moving through the woods and into eternity itself.

  ‘Hi everybody!’ said Henry abruptly, shattering the solemn mood. ‘I hope you’re all doing well, wherever it is that you are.’

  He stared down at the light, the headstone and the little frozen trellis rose climbing up over the gilded names.

  ‘All of you must think it’s a rather trivial and comical ritual, what we’re doing down here, or up here, however you look on the matter from wherever it is that you are. I suppose it is banal, but what’s a person to do?’

  He turned to face me and repeated, ‘What’s a person to do?’

  ‘We have to carry on,’ I said. ‘That’s our only chance – to carry on.’

  ‘At moments like this,’ said Henry, looking out at the sea of lights, ‘at moments like this it’s so easy to have doubts about the whole thing. Everything seems so meaningless … It seems so petty to toil and rush around in the few brief years that are allotted to us; it’s so seldom that we pause to look around us and take stock of what we’re really doing … It’s a judgement, a harsh judgement, a penance …’

  ‘You shouldn’t look at it that way.’

  ‘No, that’s exactly it. A person shouldn’t give in. That’s what the others have done, who …’

  An icy wind swept through the cemetery, and we started shivering in the cold.

  ‘It’s cold on Earth,’ said Henry, as if presenting an excuse to leave.

  ‘You sound so odd,’ said a voice from the darkness next to the grave. ‘Just like a real pastor.’

  A girl, or rather a woman, appeared from behind the headstone. She smiled and continued to extol Henry’s eloquence.

  ‘I couldn’t help listening,’ she said. ‘You sounded like a real pastor, and it was so beautiful that I almost started to cry.’

  The woman now emerged on the pathway, and she turned out to be an elegant lady of twenty-five or so, dressed entirely in black and with a mourning ribbon on the collar of her coat.

  ‘My father died a month ago.’

  Henry took out his cigarettes and offered them to us. We each took one, saying nothing. She was the first to break the silence.

  ‘Are you going into town?’

  We both nodded, shivering.

  ‘Do you have a car? If not, I can give you a lift.’

  ‘Thank you very much, my defenceless child,’ said Henry, in the hope that the paternal pastor-like tone would strike home. But it didn’t really. As it turned out, the woman in question was definitely not some sort of defenceless little lamb. She had a glaring yellow van with PICKO’S emblazoned on the sides. She was one of those girls who was clearly not born yesterday. The type who races around the city in a Picko’s delivery van. I think hers was number 8, just like a certain successful basketball player.

  Henry completely lost his head when the woman led us over to the glaringly bright vehicle.

  ‘You drive a delivery van?!’ he exclaimed in surprise. ‘That’s the …’

  ‘Hop in, boys!’ she said. ‘What are your names, by the way?’

  Henry introduced himself very properly, as usual, with a handshake and a click of his heels, and he nodded at me and told her my name without expounding any further.

  ‘I’m Kerstin Bäck,’ she said.

  ‘All right, Kerstin,’ said Henry. ‘Just take it easy now. The roads are probably slippery.’

  Kerstin drove like an angel, shifting as eagerly as a racing-car driver. She had an amazing feel for the pedals, and Henry alternated between surreptitious glances at the speedometer and at the lively play of the pedals. Or maybe it was her knees; I had my suspicions.

  ‘It’s true what you were saying,’ said Kerstin when she got the van up to speed. ‘What you said about things being meaningless. It can feel so absurd, all this … this striving that we get involved in. I don’t really know what all that striving is for.’

  ‘Who does know?’ Henry interjected.

  ‘But you’ve got to keep fighting. You can’t just see emptiness in everything.’

  ‘A person has to pretend,’ said Henry. ‘A person has to pretend all the time that there’s something beyond the mountains. Otherwise everything becomes empty and cursed …’

  But in fact Kerstin didn’t seem exactly paralysed by a fear of death either. She came very close to sending all three of us back to Skog Cemetery with a number of death-defying manoeuvres to overtake other cars.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked us near Slussen.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ said Henry. ‘Maybe go and get some coffee.’

  ‘Good,’ said Kerstin. ‘Gamla Stan?’

  Without waiting for our assent, she stepped on the gas and headed up Slottsbacken, manoeuvred the van into a parking space intended for motorbikes and disabled drivers and jumped out.

  We trotted over to the Kristina Café and ordered three coffees with cinnamon rolls and biscuits. It was very crowded and noisy, and our reverent mood was soon sent packing. Life had once again seized hold of us with its thirst, appetites and desires. But Henry couldn’t resist adopting that sermonising tone – I’m convinced that he still thought Kerstin could be softened up that way – and he said that he respected women dressed in mourning; in
his opinion they had a special dignity about them.

  ‘I’m going to take off this mourning ribbon soon,’ said Kerstin. ‘I can’t stand hearing any more condolences.’

  ‘Are you all alone now?’

  ‘Yes, my mother died five years ago. I thought I’d never get over it. But I did. Pappa took it even harder than I did. And now he’s gone too. I can’t really picture him as … as dead. He was so great.’

  Our coffee arrived, and Henry offered us another round of cigarettes. Out of sheer delicacy of feeling he kept quiet for a change.

  ‘My father was so full of ideas,’ said Kerstin. ‘He started a private betting company; that was back in the twenties. In Göteborg. People were betting like crazy. Then times got hard and the state started its own Football Betting Service, and he had to come up with something new. So he turned to bicycles and cars. Pappa was one of the first car dealers in town. I wish you could have met him; it would have been an experience you never forgot.’

  ‘That’s what it sounds like,’ said Henry.

  Kerstin was sad again, and she started to cry. She buried her face in her hands and wept and sniffled.

  ‘I … can’t … help … Oh ..,’ she sobbed.

  ‘There, there,’ said Henry, handing her a newly pressed handkerchief.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Kerstin, blowing her nose hard. ‘Whoops! Oh shit!’ she shouted. ‘SHIT!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Henry and I asked in unison.

  ‘I’ve lost a lens,’ said Kerstin. ‘The contact lens in my right eye. SIT STILL, SIT ABSOLUTELY STILL, DON’T MOVE!’

  Henry and I sat at the table as if frozen, not even daring to breathe as Kerstin cautiously unfolded Henry’s handkerchief and examined every little fold. Then she inspected herself, her mourning clothes, the table, the chairs and the floor. Cautiously she got down on the floor and crawled around on the carpet like a near-sighted pooch, swearing her head off.

  ‘Fuck these lenses to hell,’ she cursed, and Henry sniggered. ‘They cost over five hundred kronor each, these fucking lenses!’

  Kerstin finally found the lens in her coffee cup. She fished it out with a spoon and went to the ladies’ to wash it off as best she could.

  ‘Strange bird,’ said Henry. ‘A really strange girl.’

  ‘I’m speechless,’ I said.

  ‘I’m in love,’ said Henry demurely. ‘I’m in love again,’ he sang softly.

  I didn’t dare tell him that I was too. Maybe not head over heels, but at least a little lukewarm, halfway there, at least up to my shoulders.

  _______

  Of course this turned into a song too. It wasn’t until Henry received my lovingly rhymed lyrics to ‘The Girl with the Contact Lenses and Mourning Ribbon’ that he realised that I too had fallen for her. She had given Henry her phone number in the café in Gamla Stan, and she had said that she definitely wanted to see us again, and soon. Henry was on cloud nine all the way home. I kept my love to myself, although the song that I wrote and handed over to Henry so that he could set it to music spoke for itself. There was no doubt about the matter – only a poet who was truly in love could write like that.

  Henry sat at the piano for an hour with the new song and then summoned me, giving me a smirk as soon as I appeared.

  ‘These are powerful lyrics, Klasa,’ he said. ‘Fucking powerful.’

  ‘Thanks, Hempa. I’m really glad you think so,’ I said, sitting down on the sofa with the black tassels to smoke a cigarette.

  ‘But I’m getting a sense that the songwriter himself has very hot feelings for the subject, if I may say so … It’s pure adulation.’

  I was embarrassed and blew smoke towards him, swine that he was, sitting at the piano.

  ‘That could be,’ I said.

  ‘Woo-hoo,’ Henry hollered into the piano. ‘I guess we’ll have to share her. Chastely and innocently. Jules and Jim …’ he went on as he started playing that Jeanne Moreau song, and he even knew half the words.

  ‘Be serious!’ I said, annoyed because I didn’t want him to make fun of my tender song of praise. ‘Play it properly.’

  ‘OK, forgive me,’ said Henry, pulling himself together. ‘Here goes.’

  And he played the song, which was the best one the two of us had written so far. A rather melancholy ballad about a girl with contact lenses and a mourning ribbon who is grieving for her father, a betting-pool king from Göteborg. It was so easy and rewarding to make up rhymes for that city.

  The goose banquet was without a doubt the high point of the year for the treasure hunters. One day in early November Greger came up to ask about the arrangements – he had been sent by Birger, of course – and Henry informed him that the arrangements would be exactly the same as usual. Greger was given the task of relaying the invitation to the other guests.

  The fact that the arrangements were going to be exactly the same as always signified a very ceremonious event with the so-called black soup (made from goose giblets), a couple of nicely roasted geese, a suitably heavy wine, dessert and cognac with the coffee. It was a costly party, and consequently Henry suggested that I select a number of volumes from the library that we could sell for a couple of thousand kronor.

  Since I often frequented antiquarian bookshops and always read the reports in Book Auctions magazine, I had an inkling about what the market prices might be. I chose a number of reference and speciality books and went back and forth, calculating, adding and subtracting. I rang up dealers and got tips on some absolutely unfindable French books, L’histoire de la Comédie Française in four thick volumes.

  But then I came up with a brilliant choice – The Swedish Tourist Bureau’s Annual Report, collected and in perfectly preserved condition from its very beginning in 1886 up until 1968. It was a fine collection, two yards of shelves about Swedish terrain, history, cultural miscellany, canoe expeditions and bicycle trips throughout the realm. I was sure we could get at least fifteen hundred for it.

  Excellent, brilliant, in Henry’s opinion, and we loaded the eighty-two volumes into a couple of empty boxes and went over to the Furniture Man to borrow a vehicle. We didn’t have to go far to get a nice offer, but Henry wanted to try a really high-class and respectable antiquarian shop, so we headed for Ramfalks on Hamngatan.

  ‘A thousand,’ said the man behind the counter as he leafed through a couple of the books.

  ‘You know what?’ said Henry the salesman. ‘We had an offer of two and a half on the phone. Although that was in Uppsala. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to drive out in the country just for a couple of hundred extra. Seventeen fifty is what I want …’

  ‘I don’t know …,’ the bookseller fussed. ‘That sounds like a lot. But of course … they’re fine-looking volumes …’

  ‘Fine-looking volumes?’ Henry repeated. ‘They’re first-rate volumes, for God’s sake! No one has ever even touched them. Well? Shall we say two thousand even?’

  There was not much more arguing – the bookseller acquiesced because he really had no choice when confronted with Henry the salesman, who quickly got him to realise that an antiquarian bookshop without the Swedish Tourist Bureau’s Annual Report going back to 1886 was not an antiquarian bookshop worth mentioning.

  With those two delightful banknotes in hand we took off and headed straight for the Hötorg indoor marketplace, where Henry had a buddy who sold meat and wild game. He was a hefty guy weighing over fifteen stone, with the brawny arms of a bouncer and wearing a bloody apron. It turned out that he’d been a boxer in the past, and a very good one.

  ‘Nice to see you, kid,’ said the meat-seller. ‘So did you see Ali vs Spinks? What a fucking fight! Geese? Two of them? You should have rung ahead, Hempa. I never could figure you out. Two geese?! On the spur of the moment! No way.’

  ‘What the hell?!’ cried Henry, his face pale. But the meat-seller merely laughed and shook his head. Then he pulled two nice-looking birds out of the cooler and flung the goods onto the counter with such force that it shook.
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br />   ‘Flew up from Skåneland yesterday all by themselves, ha, ha, ha,’ chuckled the meat-seller.

  ‘Nice going,’ muttered Henry. ‘Nice going for an idiot like yourself.’

  After this exchange of pleasantries we made a good number of other purchases at the marketplace, and we returned home with the Furniture Man’s van packed full with six big boxes. It had cost us just over fourteen hundred kronor, and Henry was very pleased.

  Roasting a goose is no job for a novice, and roasting two geese is no job for two novices. But with common sense, a good cookbook and an endless amount of patience, we managed to complete the task successfully. Henry had done all this before, but he always forgot how to do it from one year to the next.

  Some time around three in the morning we were done. There sat two splendidly roasted geese, stuffed with innards and bread crumbs, dripping with grease and emanating such a heavy aroma that just inhaling it made us feel full.

  _______

  The goose banquet turned out to be a memorable event. We put a long table in one of the cellar rooms that looked like a regular medieval vault with its walls roughly plastered white, little niches for burning candles, and benches fastened to the side walls. We set the table with a coarse linen cloth, rolled napkins and fine china.

  The kitchen up in our flat was total chaos. Henry was flailing his bartender arms around, his apron covered with goose fat, gravy, giblet soup, spices and flour. He was in high gear, having the time of his life. I thought it best to keep out of the way and take care of the other arrangements, the atmosphere or ambiance, down in the cellar.