Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  ‘I’m leaving the country,’ said Henry. ‘Going over to Copenhagen. I can play in a quartet there if I like. You know how things have been … It’s been hell for me.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Greta as she stopped preparing the food. ‘But why haven’t you said anything before now?’

  ‘I’ve tried to take care of things on my own. This is my solution.’

  ‘Running away? That’s your solution?’ said Greta. ‘Yes, well, I suppose that’s always been your solution. You’re just like your father. But you’re absolutely crazy. You’re going to bring the police down on me …’

  ‘I’m not going to bring the police down on you. I’m going to leave the country and stay there until … until …’

  ‘Leave the country!’ Greta sank down at the kitchen table, and it occurred to Henry that he was always making sure that women would cry for his sake, although he didn’t know why.

  ________

  ‘These seven years will go fast, said the boy who was given a beating the first day of his apprenticeship.’ Those were supposedly the last words that Greta said to her son.

  Henry stood in the hallway, dressed for travelling, holding a suitcase and his coat. He didn’t want to prolong the process, because then he would just start having doubts. He cracked open the door to Leo’s room and looked at his little brother for what would be the last time in a long while. Henry was going to miss his brother, but he doubted that the prodigy would miss him.

  Greta came up with an old proverb as a means of encouraging both herself and Henry, and then he was off. He walked down to Hornsgatan and rang the bell of his grandfather’s flat. He needed money.

  Henry’s grandfather stayed up late at night now that his wife was dead. He had started living life again with his odd gentleman’s club, the WWW, and other secret projects that he never wanted to talk about.

  ‘Henry, my boy,’ said his grandfather. ‘You’re absolutely crazy, but I’ve always had a weakness for crazy men. Come in!’

  Henry went into the flat; the whole place smelled of cigars. His grand father had been sitting in front of the smouldering fire, reading. He was just thinking of going to bed.

  ‘Copenhagen, you say,’ said old Morgonstjärna. ‘Very pleasant city, but you should try Paris, of course. That’s where I was last, let’s see now …’ And then the old man began telling anecdotes from his dissipated days on the Continent, and Henry felt compelled to listen.

  Two hours later he was back out on the street. Old Morgonstjärna had given his grandson a thousand kronor in cash, along with his blessing and a hint that the boy would eventually be needed back home. Only later would he find out the reason.

  Henry said goodbye to Stockholm, to Greta and Leo, to his grandfather and Maud and W.S. and to everything that had so far held him there. He hurried off so as not to change his mind or succumb to doubt.

  IF WAR COMES

  (Leo Morgan, 1960–62)

  The evening was dark and dreary; it was drizzling outside. Everyone was staying indoors. It was now a new decade, and people stayed inside at first, until they realised that it would soon be a world-famous decade and it was uncool to stay inside.

  Leo Morgan was in the sixth grade and had plenty of homework, assignments that he always completed flawlessly in the evenings after dinner. On this particular evening he was supposed to be studying for a maths test. It was a dark night, very appropriate for difficult equations. He’d gone down to Verner Hansson’s flat to get help with several problems, but Verner’s mother refused to let Leo in. She told him that Verner was sick. Leo could hear Verner moving around in his room, and that made him curious, even though his friend’s mother had made up her mind and there was nothing to be done about it. Verner had the strictest mother in the whole building. She was on her own – just like Greta – but she’d been that way all along. Verner’s father had disappeared years and years ago, and Verner claimed that he was a seaman living on an island in the South Pacific. He would be going there to join him as soon as he finished school. Verner liked ‘Hansson’, as he called his father, even though he’d never met him. Verner liked anybody who simply disappeared, as in those cases that were occasionally reported in the newspapers, about a boy who was supposed to go out to get wood one evening, just as he’d done on every other evening, and then simply disappeared and never turned up again. And it was always at least sixty miles to the nearest town, and there wasn’t a single trace left behind …

  Verner Hansson loved to brood over these mysterious cases. He already had a whole collection of them – a kind of archive of missing persons in which he had filled in all the information he could find from the newspapers. They were horribly exciting. Verner had no lack of appreciation for the effects.

  But on this particular evening in October 1960, Leo was not allowed to visit Verner because his mother had made up her mind, and so there was nothing to discuss. That’s why Leo’s maths homework took a little longer, and he had a hard time getting started on his Swedish assignment. He had been asked to write a little ‘treatise’, as the teacher (who had a penchant for the Old Testament) called the essays, about his herbarium. He had chosen the topic himself even though the assignment was mandatory. Now he was sitting in the glow of the lamp, leafing back and forth through his herbarium, trying to say something about how he collected plants, or tell a few anecdotes about the Storm bluebell, the most glorious of all flowers.

  He described the damp June mornings when he got up as early as he could to go out into the meadows and look for plants. The dew was still cold and fresh, he wrote. But it was hard to write about the herbarium from Storm Island, because no matter how he started off, it always ended with that terrible Midsummer when the red accordion gleamed in the morning sun and the wails of the people blended with the ravenous cries of the gulls, and Gus Morgan lay on the beach, drowned. Leo would grow frightened and feel sick at the mere thought of all that, and he had no desire to write about it. But he had to come up with something, and that was how he happened to slip into poetry. Leo wrote a few brief verses about his herbarium, even though he knew that it was absolutely ridiculous to write poetry. But Leo’s poems were in a class by themselves; they were in some ways quite old- fashioned and formal. There was no love in them, and that was good.

  He felt quite pleased. At least now he had something to show the teacher with the penchant for the Old Testament, who would undoubtedly express his approval of a lad who happened to write in verse. Leo went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of milk. Greta was sitting out there, mending stockings and listening to the radio. They were broadcasting a tribute to Jussi Björling, and Greta looked tearful. She thought it was so sad when he died. Jussi had the kind of voice they would never hear again.

  The world-famous tenor was known as ‘Jussi’ to every Swede. And Greta, just like every other woman, grieved for him with genuine love. She was sniffling over her mending basket filled with an endless number of worn stockings as well as socks with holes in the heel and toe. She was filled with the golden voice of Jussi, and it gave her eyes a remote and dreamy look that Leo had never seen before. He wondered what she was dreaming about. She couldn’t very well know that on that evening a new poet was born in the North, a skald whose poems would be set to music and recorded on vinyl by a well-known opera singer. If Jussi had still been alive, he might have recorded them too – that’s something we’ll never know.

  The radio programme with Jussi Björling ended and the news came on. It was most unpleasant. Greta said that she was glad Leo did his homework and stayed inside in the evenings. Everyone seemed to have gone crazy. Young children were sniffing paint thinner and running amok, dangerous both to themselves and to others around them.

  Leo knew what she was talking about. It was that murder at the Hammarby Athletic Field. They had found a ten-year-old boy lying behind a shed that morning, and there was talk of a sexual killing. The boy’s father had found the body. Leo got the shivers at the mere thought of it.
/>   Greta carried on mending her stockings, slightly absentmindedly, while Leo went back to his desk, the herbarium and his secret poems. Perhaps he was sitting there polishing his draft of ‘So Many Flowers’, when he was suddenly interrupted as a pebble struck the windowpane. He flinched with alarm and looked out. Down on the street that was wet with rain stood Henry, waving. He had forgotten his keys, of course. He often forgot his set. Leo opened the window and tossed down his own keys. Henry caught the keyring in his soft cap. He was whistling ‘La Cucaracha’, and he took several elegant cha-cha steps on his way to the front entrance. Leo was still sitting on the windowsill, looking out at the street, when he heard Henry rush into the kitchen to raid the refrigerator. Henry was still whistling ‘La Cucaracha’, tapping out the beat on the cupboard doors in the kitchen so it echoed through the whole building.

  The next moment a police car drove up to the front door. The vehicle came zooming around the corner and slammed on the brakes in front of their doorway on Brännkyrkagatan. Two solemn-looking officers leapt out of the car and somehow managed to get inside without keys. It may have taken all of a minute – Leo sat there brooding over what could have happened, who might be fighting today, who might be drunk or sick or something like that – until the policemen came back out. They had Verner between them.

  Utterly silent and composed, Verner Hansson walked between the two broad-shouldered cops, who yanked open the car door and quite brutally shoved their quarry inside. Leo started sweating all over; his face was flushed, the blood was roaring in his head, his legs started to shake. He couldn’t fathom what was going on. What had Verner Hansson done to be arrested by the police like a murderer?

  Leo slapped his hand to his feverish forehead. He pressed his head against the cool windowpane and tried to think rationally, to reason his way to what sort of serious crime Verner might have committed. Then Leo happened to think about the keys. They collected keys. They had been doing it for a long time, and by now they no doubt had more than two hundred different keys altogether. They were very useful.

  There was something magical and exciting about keys. To find the right key on the ring and discover that it fit a lock, and to feel the tumblers’ solid graphite clacking when the key turned was always a sensual experience. The height of excitement came from opening a door that had been closed for an eternity, a door which they had no right or authority to open. There was some sort of indelible affinity between the lock and the key that could never be disturbed, no matter where they were, or how many oceans separated them. The two parts, stationary and mobile, belonged together, the one presupposing the other. Much later, in the collection Façade Climbing and Other Hobbies, (1970) Leo would return to this blood kinship of metals in an homage to Gösta Oswald when he made use of his words about ‘the patented solitude of the key’.

  But all this had taken place a good ten years earlier, and Leo was now thinking in bewilderment about the keys that he and Verner Hansson had acquired, a considerable collection, just like Verner’s stamp collection and Leo’s herbarium. The boys had found the keys on the street, they had stolen keys from secret drawers and they had traded keys with other collectors. Verner and Leo had no trouble opening most of the attic storage rooms in the neighbourhood, and once a building supervisor had actually come to them for help. That was much cheaper than sending for a locksmith, since this firm worked for free, provided they were henceforth given carte blanche to the old man’s attic.

  But not all supervisors were so liberal-minded. Many were afraid of break- ins and vandals. And there were plenty of hooligans who sat up in the attics, smoking or sniffing paint thinner or messing about with their girlfriends. Maybe the supervisors thought that Verner and Leo were behind all the attic break-ins that had been happening over the past few years, when vandals had been killing cats in the spin-dryers and starting fires to keep warm.

  Leo couldn’t make head or tail of any of this. He sat down at his desk and heard Henry whistling like an idiot out in the kitchen. It was still ‘La Cucaracha’. Henry had been working on his boxing, and he was probably shoving down at least fifteen sandwiches with soft cheese, Kalles caviar and three bottles of milk, all the while dancing the cha-cha-cha. He didn’t know a thing about what was happening with Verner. Nor was he going to find out anything, because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  In the bottom drawer of Leo’s desk there was a metal cash box with a combination lock. He took out the heavy box, opened it and pulled out a keyring with seventy-five keys on it. Verner had one just like it. The police had probably confiscated it, as evidence. So there was no escaping it. It was too late. But they still hadn’t found Leo’s keys. He took the keyring and climbed up onto a stool in a corner of the room. With sweaty hands he unscrewed the cover on the vent and cast one last loving glance at the heavy keyring, which had allowed him free access to so much. Then he threw the keys into the air shaft. They fell more than ten yards, landing in a spot where no one would ever look.

  Leo had done away with one of his most prized possessions. He felt a trembling pass through his body – it was the fierce sensual pleasure that comes from an act of sacrifice and repudiation. There was no going back. There was no longer any reason to be such a fusspot; something told him that it was pointless to be a fusspot.

  ________

  The business with Verner Hansson and the police remained a mystery until Verner’s mother came up to see Greta a few days later. She was having trouble with Verner, and she needed to get things off her chest. Both women were alone with their boys, after all; they were in the same boat, so to speak.

  Sobbing hard, Mrs Hansson told Greta that Verner had rung the police himself and confessed that he was the one who had murdered that ten-year-old boy at the Hammarby Athletic Field. The police had come right over to pick up the murderer – that was what Leo had witnessed from his window – but they had brought him back after only an hour. He wasn’t telling the truth. Verner had just rung the police in order to go to the station and ‘see what it was like’, as he put it. The real murderer was a nineteen-year-old who had been sniffing paint thinner. The police told Mrs Hansson that these ‘types’ always turned up, confessing to murders they hadn’t committed; it was actually quite common. The police also said that they were extremely impressed with Verner’s knowledge of people who had gone missing, people the police were looking for, all those unsolved mysteries that no investigator could explain. The police told Verner’s mother that she should be on the alert because Verner might ‘be harmed’ by spending too much time on these things – it wasn’t really normal.

  Mrs Hansson sobbed and was in utter despair because she thought that her beloved son was such an idiot. She didn’t know what she was going to do. Greta didn’t have any advice to give either; all she could think of was that Verner should be allowed out of his house arrest. It was doing the boy no good to be locked up in his room. Mrs Hansson hesitated for a long time before she went downstairs and let out her little Dr Mabuse.

  ________

  One of the poems in Herbarium (1962) is called ‘Excursion’. It was presumably written some time in the spring or summer of 1961. The poem has a sort of refrain – once again the magic of repetition constantly used by Leo Morgan – which goes like this: ‘We dress for war / prepare ourselves carefully / the soldiers are sleeping in the woods.’ At first glance it might look as if a little boy is asking his mother to help him prepare for a hike, some sort of outing in the woods. The refrain is preceded by elegant flower depictions, a salute to all that grows – just like most of the poems in Herbarium – but these particular lines take on a charged meaning when we read: ‘we’re going down into a vault / where nothing grows / not even the flowers of evil’.

  The poem is basically about a mother and son who are going down to a shelter during an air raid. The mother is desperately trying to hurry, while the child wants to calm the woman. This emerges as a shock at the end, when the dressing of the child, done so lovingly, suddenly appears
clearly as something done in panic, amidst sirens wailing above the rooftops and crying and screaming and moaning. Perhaps Leo had help with the sophisticated arrangement of the material, the explanation that is withheld and then suddenly turns everything upside down. At any rate, it’s a very strange poem, with allusions to Baudelaire, with whom the poet had apparently become acquainted through his teacher in school. Leo Morgan had become literary.

  The idea of the air-raid siren had its origin in the evacuation exercise that was carried out in Stockholm in 1961. It was the very same exercise that Henry, completely unawares, had got caught up in on that Sunday when he slipped out early in the morning to visit his beloved Maud and have breakfast tête-à-tête.

  At the very moment that the air-raid siren started wailing up on the roof, Verner rang the doorbell of the Morgan family flat. Verner Hansson had been up early to pack his gear, exactly as it said you should do in the booklet If War Comes. He had an enormous grey backpack waiting in the hallway. Leo was ill-prepared and had to put up with a good many comments from Verner, who was hastily squeezing a pimple in front of the hall mirror.

  A little while later the boys went down to the underground and headed out towards Hässelby, all according to plan. They too heard that the king was supposed to be travelling along somewhere, although no one knew exactly where. That didn’t make it any less exciting. Verner had read a lot of books about the Second World War. He could tell gripping stories about the French Resistance, and he said that he too was thinking of joining the Resistance when the war came. It was that word ‘when’ with regard to war that made Leo a little uneasy. He didn’t like the fact that Verner should so coldly assume that there would be a war. Verner never said ‘if ’ war comes; he said ‘when’ war comes.

  Of course Verner had brought along the booklet If War Comes, and they sat and leafed through it during the trip. It had been distributed to every household in the spring, and the new version was illustrated with drawings that showed exactly what to do in various emergency situations.