Leo followed the boat with his eyes as it moved across the quiet bay where an endlessly cautious breeze rippled the water and a few gulls silently began their morning fishing. Maybe they plan to put in at some skerry, thought Leo. Maybe they were going to row out to Snake Island (which was full of snakes) just so that Henry could show that he dared handle poisonous reptiles, because he certainly did. A few summers ago – Leo couldn’t remember exactly when it was – Henry had kept his own snakes in a cardboard box, just to show that they wouldn’t bite as long as you treated them kindly. Greta nearly went crazy when she found out about it. She threatened to throw the box in the sea, although nobody knew how she was going to do that, since she didn’t dare go near it. But Henry promised to take the snakes out to Snake Island, and that was what he did.
Leo hated snakes too, and he was always afraid that a snake might be in the grass in the meadows where he gathered plants. That happened once, and Leo had stood there, completely hypnotised by the reptile basking in the sun. It was bright morning sunshine, and the snake seemed to stir in the heat, but Leo couldn’t run away. He was incapable of taking even a single step. He stood absolutely motionless for an hour, until the snake quietly wriggled down into the grass and disappeared. Then the spell was broken, and Leo dashed home, refusing to go out for several days. Henry promised to take care of any snakes he saw, and Leo imagined that his brother had some sort of secret pact with all snakes, because they never did bite him. Many years later – when Leo was attending Södra Latin school and had started writing poetry – he felt an affinitiy with the famous writer of The Snake, Stig Dagerman, and it was probably no accident that one of his nicknames in school was the Snake. It was a provocative moniker – it’s easy to spread fear, but difficult to do it nicely. A snake frightens by means of its enigmatic precision, its secretive cogency. A snake is a brindled ribbon, a cable loaded with poisonous terror that can paralyse an entire barracks of full-grown men. A snake is silent; no one can hear its heart or is moved by its eyes, because a snake has no need for solace.
Perhaps it was on this very Midsummer night that Leo pledged the snake his hate-filled devotion because he realised abruptly that he was inconsolable. Suddenly – without any warning except that a single Storm bluebell could be heard ringing to alert everyone to the disaster – this Midsummer’s Eve became terribly bright and clear and permeated by a merciless light, as the inconceivable always is. Leo had just arrived home from the rocks when the alarm sounded. Suddenly people started screaming in loud, shrill voices for help. Leo heard a great wailing coming from the beach a short distance away, and he rushed over there. He could see his father’s red, chrome-plated accordion gleaming in the morning sun from where it had been placed on a rock near the shore. He could see his grandfather and Nils-Erik and several women; they were dragging something out of the water. Greta was nowhere to be seen, but Leo heard everyone repeating her name. Someone had to go and find her. When Leo’s grandfather caught sight of the boy, he shouted for him to stop, to stay where he was, or to go home or any damn place but here. ‘The poor boy,’ Leo heard one of the women say, and she came hurrying over to him. She picked him up in her arms and wept, saying that it was so dreadful, so terrible, and Leo noticed that the old woman smelled of coffee, freshly made coffee. She wept and sobbed against Leo’s little shoulder, pressing her face against him, and in between sobs she talked about Leo’s father, the Jazz Baron, and she said he had been such a fine man, so cheerful and all. And then Leo didn’t hear another sound. Leo heard nothing and said nothing, but he saw everything that he shouldn’t have seen as clearly as if it were all an illustration in Gulliver’s Travels.
________
Exactly twenty years later Henry Morgan and I stood in Skog Cemetery, lighting candles for the dead. It was All Saints’ Day, and Henry told me that he had bellowed like a lost calf at the funeral. He had tried to be manly and hold back his tears, but without success. That was the end of a long period of hellish trials and tribulations. In a single moment that Midsummer night had become inexplicably clear as he rowed the girl home from the skerry, where they had used up a whole packet of condoms, lying on a sailcloth spread out on a slab of rock. He noticed as soon as they stepped ashore on Storm Island that something was wrong. He said goodbye to the girl who, with smudged make-up and stains on her clothes, stumbled home. Straight after that he found out what had happened while he was off on the skerry making love. Henry was overcome with such a sense of shame that he nearly went out of his mind. He ran amok in the boat-building shed and hacked off parts of the Ark, which stood there, a fraction of a dream realised. If his grandfather hadn’t wrestled him to the ground and disarmed him, he might have managed to wreck the whole thing. After this intermezzo, Henry seemed to turn himself inside out, and he put even greater effort into repairing the damage. He chopped and sawed and scraped for over twenty-four hours without rest, trying to restore the vessel as best he could. The whole time, tears poured down his cheeks, which perhaps prevented him from making measurements and cuts and lines as exact as his grandfather’s.
Leo, the little ten-year-old, reined in his own emotions and tried to console his mother as much as was possible. She clung to the little boy, calling him her angel. He stood in the very centre of the tragedy, even though it felt as though he found himself in the eye of a hurricane. He seemed untouched by the whole thing, as if he had won some share of perfection instead of losing something fragile and transient. Everyone agreed that the boy with the thin, aged face, with the sorrowful, solemn eyes, was worthy of admiration.
Grief quickly spread over the whole country, and Greta became a celebrated widow; there were many who shared her sorrow. Naturally there was some speculation about the premature death of the Jazz Baron. Certain malicious voices tried to claim that his death was no accident, but that was just spiteful gossip. The Jazz Baron was actually just entering his prime; he had glimpsed the light of the dawning of his life, and he had had no reason to feel despair.
‘JAZZ BARON DEAD’ was the headline in the biggest morning newspaper, and the well-known music critic devoted no less than twelve inches of column space plus a photo to the memory of Gus Morgan. In the article he praised the Baron’s ‘characteristic warm and lyrical tone, which for so many represented jazz itself in Sweden; a meeting between the violent nation to the west and our Nordic gentleness – proof both of the Baron’s strong originality and the universality of the music …’ The critic ended with words that were equally reverent and poignant: ‘The Parnassus of Swedish jazz has lost its baron, its crown prince.’
THE COURTESAN
(Henry Morgan, 1961–63)
Everyone was talking about the Match down at the Europa Athletic Club. All of Stockholm, all of Sweden, maybe even the whole world was talking about the Match that day. Henry Morgan, as usual, was whistling ‘Putti Putti’, which was somewhere in the middle of the Top Ten, as he kicked the slushy, heavy, slippery snow off his shoes and greeted Willis, who was changing a light bulb. ‘Now you’re our only hope,’ said Willis. ‘It’s going to be a while before we have a new champion.’
‘If we ever do,’ said Henry. ‘Ingemar will never recover from this, never.’
Everybody had listened to the Match on their radios, the third and final encounter between Ingo and Floyd – the ‘Decisive Moment’, as the spectacle in Miami Beach was called. The knockout in the sixth round had come like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky. The newspapers were talking about a fourth match, but people in the business knew that as far as Ingo was concerned, there could never be a rematch. He was too smart for that.
Henry had spent half the night lying in front of Leo’s marvellous Philips radio. Leo himself was already asleep by the time the Match got started because he wasn’t the least bit interested in boxing. Leo liked flowers.
In spite of Ingo’s defeat, the lads were down at the Europa, training as usual. It was all a matter of becoming the new Ingo, as the posters said, and maybe it was only now
that this had become clear to some of them. Because only now was there actually an ‘old’ Ingo.
‘Come on now!’ Willis urged as Henry put on his sparring gear. ‘You need to get with the programme. You haven’t been here in a while.’
‘I’ve been studying,’ said Henry in apology.
‘I’m not going to fall for that studying excuse anymore,’ said Willis. ‘You’ll have to come up with something better than that.’
‘I will,’ said Henry.
He smiled in a way that was both proud and embarrassed at the same time and then started to jab at the pads that Willis was wearing over his hands. Willis set great store by Henry Morgan because from the very first he could see that there was something special about this good-for-nothing. As if Henry had been born to box. He was no slugger; he was powerfully built in the neck and shoulders, but that didn’t make him a palooka. He possessed a suppleness, a nimbleness, a mobility, as well as the proper amount of imagination – without those things he would have just been an ox, a bruiser. And besides, Henry had rhythm. His father, the Jazz Baron, had been pals with Willis because the old master’s help was required by a number of less reputable pubs and dives to keep order at the door. The Jazz Baron played every pub in town. Willis was no jazz expert, but when the Baron played, he couldn’t help listening. The Jazz Baron had something special. Everyone knew that he came from a posh family, but he was so unpretentious, like a regular person. It was a shock when he passed away. The newspapers wrote of an accident, and there was no reason for anyone to think otherwise.
Willis had taken on Henry and got him started on boxing in order to help him get over his father’s death. When Henry put on the gloves, it was almost as if he was playing the piano – his whole style was harmonious and steady. There was nothing abrupt, desperate, strenuous or superficial about Henry’s boxing style. Willis had never needed to go after him with the pruning shears, as he used to say. When greenhorns turned up at the Europa, he always took out the pruning shears. He had to trim and prune the lads down the way a gardener prunes his shrubs to give them the proper form.
But Henry Morgan was already trimmed and pruned; his gloves fit precisely the way they should. In his case there were other concerns, because he was not a trainee without problems. The problem with Henry was that as soon as he was scheduled to fight a match, they had to have a backup ready. Henry would train for a match, get charged up like never before and get into the best possible physical shape, but then when the fight was actually going to take place, he would frequently simply disappear, swallowed up by the earth. No one would know where Henry was, and the only thing to be done was to bring in the best available replacement, who always lost, causing the Europa Athletic Club to record yet another defeat.
But on those few occasions when Henry actually did go through with it, he would do his utmost. Of the dozen or so bouts that he fought, he lost only once. That was in Göteborg, against a guy from Redbergslid. It was a snobbish club.
‘Come on, keep going!’ bellowed Willis. ‘You’ve got another minute to go!’
On the wall was a filthy egg-timer that Willis set for three minutes so the lads could train doing rounds. In the pauses Henry kept bouncing around with a springy step to keep his heart-rate up. He was feeling a bit heavy but tried not to show it because he’d been smoking too much, staying up late at night, and Willis didn’t want to hear stuff like that. Henry refused to admit that he wasn’t feeling good, because he didn’t want to upset the old man. Another match was coming up.
‘I have plans for you, Hempa,’ said Willis. ‘You should be able to fight in Göteborg again.’
‘I don’t like those Göteborgers,’ said Henry. ‘They fight all wrong.’
‘Don’t give me any of that damn whining,’ said Willis sullenly. ‘There’s a tournament a few weeks from now. You can get in some tough sparring towards the end. Then we have the Swedish Championships in the autumn. I’ve signed you up, so you’ve got nothing to say about it, OK?’
‘I suppose not,’ said Henry and sighed.
After the training session, he knotted his tie as meticulously as usual in an elegant Windsor knot and studied himself in the mirror. He had a tiny scratch on his neck, extending down a few inches from his ear. He knew he hadn’t got that from any glove.
________
It was dark and slushy out on the street, and it had started to freeze again. Snow was falling, heavy and muffled. The trams, cars and buses were struggling through the slush on Långholmsgatan where the number four was heading for Västerbron. Henry shoved his cap down a bit on his wet hair and pulled an elegant silver cigarette case from his jacket pocket. Using his equally elegant Ronson lighter, he lit a cigarette butt that didn’t go with the stylish case. Only long, fresh, innocent cigarettes were intended to be inside that case, as they had been when it was in the possession of the man with the initials W.S.
Henry strolled along Hornsgatan down to Zinkensdamm, where he bought an evening paper, and then turned onto Brännkyrkagatan. In front of his building he picked up some wet snow, packed it into a ball and pitched it at Verner’s window up on the third floor. Verner had already become a bit ‘otherwise’. Henry waited for a while and then saw Verner’s head appear in the window. Verner was shaking that head of his at being disturbed while he was labouring so assiduously over his homework. He didn’t come back. Verner was not pleased.
Henry and Verner had been great pals when they were kids. Back then Verner’s room – he had his own room because he was an only child and his mother was also on her own – reeked of Meta fuel-tablets from his steam- engine. He had been given a whopper of a steam-engine as a Christmas present. Being the inventor that he always was – although this was long before the pimply teenaged upstart Verner Hansson created the Association for Young Inventors at the Södra Latin school – he had constructed a number of different accessories that could be attached to the steam-driven apparatus. There were saws, planes, jingling bells and a whole lot of other totally meaningless equipment that basically just moved.
Henry was nowhere near as technically talented as Verner, but he had a real gift for tinkering with anything that moved. Verner and Leo, on the other hand, could carry on for days and weeks at a time, putting together lifelike models of buildings, aeroplanes and cars. It was precisely this obstinate tenacity that united them, although it also separated them from all the other impatient, glassy-eyed, noisy kids in the neighbourhood. Afterwards they would set the meticulously built models on their shelves, occasionally casting satisfied glances at their creations.
But Henry had no patience for such things. His models were always sloppy, half-finished monstrosities. The aeroplanes had to be tested no matter what the risk, tossed out the window from the fifth floor to be smashed to smithereens on the pavement below, always to Henry’s great surprise. His model cars had to go out in the traffic, where they were pulverised beneath the tyres of real-life Fords, and consequently Henry didn’t own a single model that he had put together himself. On the other hand, his creations weren’t really worth saving. He always thought that it was all right to paint over unsightly joints and other mistakes that he made when he hastily and eagerly scraped, sawed and filed off either too much or too little by turns. But that only made the mess even worse. Paint and varnish, strangely enough, had the effect of making the mistakes stand out even more distinctly than before.
So Henry was quite a bungler and, from what I understand, he didn’t get much better over the years. But if someone caught him, pointed out how he had cheated – it might be the woodworking instructor or some poker player – he could always wriggle his way out of a bind by talking; he could drive anybody crazy. Therein lay his great talent. Perhaps the Ark – that big ship that he had started building with his grandfather on Storm Island in the archipelago – was the only exception. But that boat was never finished either.
Verner was probably the only person who was absolutely immune to Henry’s subterfuges and excuses. Verner c
ould see right through him. That’s why he never forgave Henry when he took apart his steam-engine to give it an unnecessary cleaning, and then never managed to make it run again. Verner was utterly furious and resolved never to forgive Henry, but that didn’t bother Henry in the least. He just kept on fiddling with anything that moved. He had also discovered that there was something else that moved, and did so much better than a steam-engine. Henry had started playing Dixieland. He had formed a school band and won admirers who moved in a considerably more exciting way than a trivial and childish steam engine.
Henry arrived home just in time for dinner. Leo emerged from his room, leaving behind his homework or his stamp collection or his herbarium, and not saying a word of greeting to anyone. He had too much to keep track of in that head of his. Greta gave Henry a long look as he sat down at the kitchen table. She didn’t need to say a word – he knew exactly what she wanted to hear, but he wasn’t going to comply. She just wanted to hear a few words about where he was spending his time all those evenings when he didn’t come home. Last night he’d come home in time for the match between Ingo and Floyd, and that was no doubt the only reason he came home at all. She simply wanted to hear a few meagre words confirming that he wasn’t doing anything stupid at night. Lately so many stupid things were being done in town during the night-time. She had read in the papers about that horrible Spilta gang in Östermalm that assaulted people and stole things and snorted drugs and robbed people and got into all sorts of other mischief. In Björns Trädgård there was another gang, while the Subway Gang ravaged the underground system. It seemed as if the whole city had been taken over by gangsters. The police were at a loss and no longer seemed able to maintain order. Things were so bad that even the rockers could hold their own hot-rod mass in the church on Liljeholmen.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 15
