The ceremonies were to begin as soon as the chef gave the signal. The table was set and the candles were lit in the candelabras, their light shimmering on a couple of bouquets of red tulips, heralding Christmas. Everything looked extremely impressive down there in the cellar.
‘I was told seven, and seven it is,’ said Greger, the first to show up.
‘Welcome, Greger,’ said Henry. ‘May I offer you a drink?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Greger, and assumed a diffident pose, with the drink in his hand.
He was dressed in his very best, and he even had a red rose in his buttonhole.
Then the rest of the gang arrived very punctually: the Flask wearing a jacket and checked shirt; Wolf-Larsson in a checked blazer, parking his German shepherd in the corner; the Philatelist in an old grey suit; Birger wearing a bow-tie; and finally the Fence Queen, who drew a whistle and a muted round of applause. The evening’s queen wore a long black skirt with a glittering Lurex top, a pearl necklace and long earrings.
Everyone was quickly in high spirits, thick clouds of smoke swirled round the vaults, and Birger gave a long, magisterial evaluation of Henry’s welcome punchbowl. He totted up full marks – he was a connoisseur of most things, after all – and Greger’s eyes sparkled with admiration.
Henry slipped upstairs to the kitchen while the rest of us warmed up with drinks and some rather gluttonous small talk. The Philatelist had made a few excellent deals that autumn, and the Furniture Man was doing better business than ever. Things were looking up for the shop-owners in the Rosendal Större neighbourhood, and we all drank a toast to the good times ahead.
‘Dinner is served!’ Henry bellowed as he came downstairs with the steaming black soup, fresh from the stove. ‘Please sit down, everyone!’
A minor commotion ensued, of course, as all these gentlemen had to be seated at the table. The Fence Queen was given a place of honour, right across from the host, so that everyone could have a good view of her. The rest of the gang sat down wherever they could find a place. I ended up between Wolf-Larsson and Birger.
The black soup was delicious, the wine loosened our tongues even more and the guests uttered long sighs over the soup’s aroma, which was both bitter and delicate at the same time. Birger was one of those stylish types who spooned his soup the opposite way, just to appear a bit more refined. He seemed to be moving his spoon away from him the whole time.
‘Look at him and his fancy manners,’ said Wolf-Larsson.
‘You say that every year,’ replied Birger.
‘No fighting now, boys,’ said the Fence Queen, who never lost control of her admirers.
‘No, cheers and welcome, one more year,’ said Henry, raising his glass.
‘Skål, counts and barons!’ said Birger.
‘Skål!’ roared everyone in unison.
Then the host and I disappeared as soon as it was high time for the goose, the main course, which was crackling away in the oven upstairs. We were met with thunderous applause when we placed the two geese on the table and the delicious aroma began wafting through the cellar.
‘Hooray!’ shouted Greger.
‘You two are amazing!’ said the Fence Queen.
‘Bravissimo!’ said Birger.
Henry carved the geese and distributed an equal share of the morsels to one and all. Served with baked potatoes, apple sauce, Brussels sprouts, four different kinds of jelly, carrots, peas and a gravy made from dripping and two litres of reduced cream, the dinner was a gourmand’s delight without equal. We shovelled down the food, sighing, groaning, bemoaning the limitations of our stomachs, sighing even more, and enjoying ourselves to the hilt. The toasts became more frequent, the heat more oppressive; ties were loosened, jackets removed and sweat poured from our brows. The sweat became mixed with shiny goose fat, and the sighs were interrupted by clacking jaws, smacking lips and the constant gurgling of the wine.
Greger was the first to unfasten his belt; the rest of us followed his lead, and by the third round the Fence Queen was the only one behaving in a somewhat dignified manner. She handled her liquor well even though all the men, of course, wanted to drink a toast to her.
Birger had, naturally, put together a poem in honour of the celebratory occasion, and as soon as he was feeling a bit tipsy, he tapped his glass. Everyone began shushing each other in order to establish a semblance of order and attentiveness.
‘I have written a little homage to … to the goose and the chef …’ he started off, slurring his words.
‘Let’s hear it!’
‘Shh … I will recite it from … from memory. “What role do the words of the poet play / when a goose graces the table on St Morten’s Day …”’ Birger began. I’ve actually forgotten the rest because by that time no one was particularly lucid.
The wine, the heat and the food had made me drowsy, and I couldn’t really keep up with everything anymore. But Birger was bemoaning – and this much I dare assert with certainty – the paucity and inadequacy of words when confronted with a table set for a goose feast, and he didn’t waste the opportunity to find rhymes for goose and gravy and giblets. At that point someone pointed out that he did the same thing every year, and that the rhymes actually belonged to the singer, Povel Ramel.
Birger was a bit upset by this inconsiderate response, but he kept his good humour. Glasses were raised to toast one thing after another, and the gentle glow of reconciliation settled over the cellar vaults. During the pause between the goose with wine and the coffee with cognac, all of us lads went out to the courtyard to take a leak in the fountain under the maple tree. It was a mild, starry evening in late autumn. The fresh air felt good, and we could see a little patch of the star-strewn heavens above the courtyard, a small corner of the universe, framed by the façades of four buildings. If you stood there staring long enough, you felt as if you were flying up from the courtyard, into eternity. That’s what the Flask claimed he had once done.
‘I stood here for half an hour, staring straight up at the sky. Then I lost my footing and just seemed to fly upwards. I woke up in the bicycle shed several hours later. But of course, it was fucking late at night … ha ha ha …’
We laughed our heads off at the Flask’s Ascension and then went back down to the Inferno to stuff ourselves from a stockpile of pickled ginger on top of all that goose fat.
We were all sitting there sipping our cognac, in the best of moods. The table, as is customary, had taken on the look of a battlefield, cluttered with coffee cups, glass platters, ashtrays, toppled empty wine bottles and soiled napkins. Abruptly an icy wind blew through the room, a gust from the outside world, as a lost angel threw open the door and swept away the haze, the smoke, the alcoholic fumes, the laughter and the atmosphere – the whole mood, plain and simple.
He was suddenly just standing there in the vaulted room. I didn’t know who he was, of course, but I instantly recognised him because I’d seen him plenty of times in the city – all the places where anything was happening. He had been at the Gärdet Festivals and the Elms demonstration, he had hung out at the art school in Stockholm and turned up at all sorts of events. And I remembered him from the Bob Dylan concert in Göteborg in the summer. We had ended up sitting next to each other – this skinny introverted guy had merely sat there, his eyes half-closed, motionless and preoccupied.
Of course I had no idea what this man was doing here at our private goose banquet in the cellar. My first guess was that he had heard sounds coming from the courtyard and had come in search of a drink. But it turned out I was completely wrong.
‘Leo?!’ said Henry in surprise. ‘Leo?!’ he said several more times until he got up from the table to shake hands with his brother and welcome him home. ‘But how in hell?!’ he wondered, looking like one big question mark.
Leo was not at all how I’d imagined him. According to Henry, we were supposed to be so alike. But I didn’t think that seemed true at all. Leo was much taller than Henry and seemed almost emaciated. His cheeks were hollow and he had the gr
ey skin of a heavy smoker, stretched tight over his cheekbones. His eyes flickered nervously beneath the curly black hair hanging over his forehead. His response to Henry’s welcome was quite restrained.
So this was Leo Morgan, the child prodigy who became the cherished poet of the youth movement in the early sixties – the Provie, occupier of the student union building, avant-garde musician, author and exposer of the most rotten forces in society. What he was now, at the present time, I had no idea. And that was probably fortunate for me.
The rest of the gang all knew Leo Morgan well. They greeted him with a respect that was hard to fathom, as if he were some sort of social inspector. Leo gave me a nod when Henry explained who I was.
Henry seemed suddenly a bit dispirited and subdued by this interruption, because it had come as such a surprise. He hadn’t been expecting Leo to come back home. They sat down at one end of the long table, talking quietly and sensibly to one another. No one could hear what they were talking about. I assumed that Leo had a great deal to report from America, although the scene didn’t look as you’d imagine when someone comes home from a long trip and starts telling tall tales about his adventures in faraway lands. Usually you’d expect wild gestures and loud laughter, but this conversation looked more like a discussion in some political party headquarters about future strategies for a debate.
The two brothers spent a long time talking together, and the party soon took off on its own; one skål to the counts and barons followed another. Henry had been scrupulous about purchasing several bottles of Grönstedts Extra, a very fine cognac, which soon lent extra pep to the celebration. The boys got caught up in fiery discussions about the world situation, and the Fence Queen really cut loose and began tap-dancing to prove that she had once been a dancer.
It was late by the time Leo finally ended up sitting next to me at the table. He’d had quite a lot to drink; he looked composed but worn-out and tipsy. He wanted to know how I was doing and what I was working on. I told him that I was writing a modern version of The Red Room, that it was going splendidly and that I was doing fucking great.
‘So how was it in New York?’ I asked him. ‘Henry has been on the lookout for letters, but none ever arrived …’
Leo’s expression turned dark and gloomy, both menacing and absolutely vacant. He fixed his eyes on the candelabra on the table. He didn’t speak for a long time.
‘Hmm, well,’ he said. ‘It was intense. Fucking intense. The buildings were full of magma, as if the whole city were built on top of a volcano. It glowed and throbbed in all the windows and shopfronts, and I kept thinking that it would leak out somewhere. I spent most of my time at the cinema …’
‘I see,’ I said, a little bewildered. ‘I see.’
‘Do you believe that?’ Leo asked without taking his eyes off the candles.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Believe what?’
‘The part about the buildings,’ said Leo with a smile.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Because I’ve never been there,’ said Leo. ‘I’ve never been to America.’
I sniggered, feeling a bit of a fool, because I didn’t know what was wrong with this man.
‘What the hell are you laughing at?’ he said sullenly.
‘I have no idea,’ I said.
‘I was locked up in an asylum,’ said Leo. ‘I was locked up in an asylum …’
Part II
Brothers
HERBARIUM
(Leo Morgan, 1948–59)
My heart no longer strikes/it strikes back …’ That was what it said in a fragment that I found in Leo’s two-room quarters, redolent with incense, a couple of days ago. And there’s reason to doubt that his heart is striking at all today. As poetry, the words bear the unmistakable signature of Leo Morgan, a stamp that guarantees Royal Purveyances to Hell – that is the life-blood of Morgan the demiurge, the shaman and the wizard, incised like the revelatory code, the final signal for all our psychic forces to go on the attack, brandishing our consciences, loaded with live cartridges, all over our innermost cavern walls, dripping with cold sweat from the stalactites of our tears.
Like all present-day magicians, the man ended up spending some time in an insane asylum. At Långbro Hospital, on the outskirts of Stockholm, there is a file on the patient Leo Morgan, born 28 February 1948, with an allegedly complete record of the case. Naturally I haven’t had access to the document. Unlike the case history of that Nazi and idiot Hermann Göring, Leo’s records are still confidential, but I’m neither stupid nor without contacts. I’ve been able to ascertain that in this instance it’s a matter of something that without exaggeration might be called a ‘whitewashed account’ – a medical account that has been corrected and censored after the fact. For that reason I venture to call it an ‘allegedly’ complete report.
To reveal right now why someone went in and changed the report would, of course, be getting ahead of my story; it would also give this account an inappropriate anticlimax. This is by no means some sort of thriller; nor is it a psychiatric dissertation. Actually, I have only a vague idea of who might have had an interest in intervening by censoring and altering the facts, which upon cursory examination hardly seem to warrant such a serious offence. But then, nothing is what it seems to be upon cursory observation.
Leo Morgan was thus taken in hand and admitted for psychiatric treatment at Långbro Hospital in May 1975. The doctors’ first diagnosis was catatonia. This meant, among other things, a total inability to act, a type of petrifaction or mutism, an utter lack of communication with the outside world.
Catatonia display similarities with autism. A psychosis may underlie the symptoms, some form of trauma, one or more experiences that have never been sensibly explained or given full expression. The soul accumulates questions, hatreds and passions, ultimately channelling everything into a total or partial passivity.
A number of doctors have given their opinion regarding the Leo Morgan case, and some state in the medical record that in his childhood the patient was latently autistic but that he had intuitively sought out channels and outlets for the traumatic energy. It was when these outlets stopped functioning, or as one doctor formulated it, ‘when the channels became once again silted up with the rubble of frustration’ – some doctors are true poets! – that his illness would erupt in full force.
Maybe there was some reason for all this. Doctors are generally com petent people, and what I’ve found out on my own shows a number of similarities with the ‘whitewashed report’. But, strangely enough, only one of four doctors looked in the patient’s poetic work for the key to Leo’s petrified door. This testifies to a lack of imagination on a grand scale, as well as wholesale failure on the part of the psychiatric hospital. I myself view his poems as self- explanatory, not to mention an inescapable and essential part of his case history.
But what are undeniably the most important and crucial elements are the facts that have been whitewashed, censored by some higher-up, a doctor in the hands of a disembodied Power. The Leo Morgan case is just one small episode in a multifaceted and, for a novice such as myself, immensely comprehensive story which, among those in the know, is called the Hogarth Affair. The history of Sweden in the twentieth century boasts of a number of ‘affairs’ in which royal swindling, military espionage or corporate manipulation were uncovered, brought to light – at least in convenient proportions – only to be later added to events labelled ‘scandals’. These types of affairs and scandals occur at regular intervals in all societies, civilised and corrupt alike. There is something inevitable about it and, in some sense, desired. And when the whole thing is over – which means when the convenient scapegoats have been publicly pilloried or placed under lock and key – the most zealous defenders of justice and democracy start pounding their chests and raising shrill, boastful voices to praise their own and the system’s magnificent capacity for self-purification. That’s part of the picture when it comes to a scandal: one hand washes the other, preferably to the t
une of a national anthem.
But the Hogarth Affair is different from other affairs by virtue of the fact that it has not yet been brought to light; time after time it has been hushed up. And according to the suspicions that have been communicated to me, it has been kept secret at the cost of three human lives and a couple of million Swedish kronor in bribes, as well as at least one case of insanity. And that’s where Leo Morgan comes into the picture, even though, as I mentioned, he stands on the outermost periphery of the whole thing.
The central figures in the Hogarth Affair – incidentally, it got its name from one of the members of the Well-travelled, Well-read, Well-heeled Club, the journalist Edvard Hogarth – are either deceased or highly active potentates and magnates within the business world and public administration. Presumably it is there, in the whirlwind of corruption and effective blackout, that we need to begin the search for the people who intervened to censor Leo Morgan’s medical account. The trail ought to end, at any rate, at the Griffel Corporation’s palace, in the room where CEO Wilhelm Sterner himself reigns. But this is a job for a journalist with a cast-iron stomach and nine lives; not for me.
What I have to say about my friend Leo Morgan starts off quite innocently, like any other reverent biography of a poet. But it gets better, as arsonists supposedly say. That too is undoubtedly just a pack of lies.
________
Measles, scarlet fever, German measles, chicken-pox, whooping cough, croup – all those long, drawn-out vaccination processes for so-called childhood diseases with their hallucinogenic peaks of fever, their prickling rashes, itching pustules and devastating instructions … Shouldn’t every biography begin with just such a list of illnesses when the little creature, for the first time, makes real contact with a state other than what we call normal? The manner in which every person endures his childhood illnesses is highly individual. The patient that the family doctor – the eternally old, reliable, huffing-and-puffing Dr Helmers – examined, Leo Morgan, displayed exactly the same symptoms for every type of illness: an irregular pulse, weakness bordering on death and an absolutely non-existent will to get better.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 11
