Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  Henry went around swearing and cleaning up and washing off banknotes for several days before they found it advisable to send Leo to the hospital. Ironically enough, it was 1 May 1975. The cab driver was very helpful, and without protest Leo allowed himself to be led down to the waiting cab. Unfortunately, the driver managed to get them caught up in a demonstration on Hornsgatan. It was May Day, after all, and more than 50,000 people were on their way towards Norra Bantorget to demonstrate in celebration of the victory in Vietnam. It was a historic day.

  Leo Morgan, child star, poet, Provie, philosopher and failed reporter saw nothing of the demonstration. He was already deep inside his silence. It would last for over a year.

  Part III

  Gentlemen

  (Stockholm, Winter 1979)

  Presumably there is sunshine over Stockholm today, on this early summer day in Sweden, in the Year of the Child, the election year of 1979. It’s quiet and everything seems to shimmer in that overheated sort of way. But this vast flat is as cold and gloomy as ever. The curtains have been drawn for weeks, perhaps months.

  ‘Be my Boswell!’ was a standing exhortation from Henry Morgan whenever we sat in front of the fire in the Chippendale chairs – how many fires we lit and watched die out during that winter! – and he savoured the words, enjoyed hearing his own voice, urbane as he was and a master of the art of conversation, intoxicated with his own splendid qualities and either a good wine or a cheap cognac. For my part, patient listening was required. I sat there resting my eyes on the two Parian figures from the Gustafsberg Company that flanked the fireplace. I didn’t know which I should give more attention, ‘Truth’ or ‘Falsehood’. One was beautiful, the other was amusing, if nothing else.

  Fortunately I committed a good deal to memory, because I am just as notorious a listener as Henry is a notorious liar. He salted his stories with fantasies that belonged to another world, perhaps a bygone era. Both Morgan brothers were utter anachronisms. If there had existed a Gentleman’s Magazine as in Dr Johnson’s day, I would undoubtedly have been a correspondent as well. But there is no longer room for such undertakings. Nor is there a place for either Henry or Leo Morgan.

  I have always harboured a certain admiration for mythomaniacs and liars, of which there are numerous kinds. There are mythomaniacs who wind themselves up and start out cautiously with some innocent little anecdote which then expands into an absolutely implausible story. And there are more modest mythomaniacs who surround themselves with completely ordinary little white lies that wouldn’t impress even a small child given to fibbing. No one has any desire to refute them. Least of all me.

  The mahogany desk in this magnificent, darkened library is now becoming cluttered with books, small notes, and stacks of paper that have literally rolled out of my typewriter. Only on a few small surfaces can I glimpse the dull sheen of wood under all the dust, coffee stains and cigarette ash. The wastepaper basket adorned with mysterious Tarot cards is filled with empty, crushed packs of Camels. It reeks in here; it smells of an unlikely blend of filthy animal and great literature. T.S. Eliot would have felt quite comfortable in this room.

  It’s been a long time since I was able to tell the days apart, or calculate the date or the amount of time I’ve spent in this self-imposed exile. The telephone is silent, disconnected. The front door is still barricaded. The hallway is flooded with flyers and newspapers that I have to wade through every time I need to go to the bathroom or if I merely want to park myself in front of the gilded mirror with the cherubs to study my image, which has undergone an eerie transformation.

  I’m still repulsive. My hair under the ridiculous English tweed cap has started to grow out, and I’ve acquired a sparse, unbecoming beard that looks as if it might at any moment come loose and free itself from my haggard face. But I’m unable to control the subtle little tics under my eyes. They seem at times charming; at other times they disfigure my entire visage, which feels nerve-racking, since that’s apparently the price that this whole business has cost me. It’s the type of damage that a person has to learn to bear. But my twenty-five years are too few. I think I’m too young to give up or to conclude with resignation that I’ve done my part, I’m past my prime, washed up.

  Here and there brown and white envelopes lie amid the jumble. I care as little about them as I do about the summer outside. The intended recipients are still gone, vanished without a trace, and no one is even properly searching for them. They live on only through this artificial respiration of mine, a sort of literary moth-proof sack for eternal preservation. I have to keep going as long as I can, even to the point of collapse, as long as I can still see them relatively clearly in the feverish haze before me, as long as I can hear their voices, and as long as I can feel their love and hatred sending sparks through this gloomy flat.

  In one of the newspapers in the hallway I recently noticed a picture that somehow reminded me of Henry Morgan. It showed an East German shot-putter who is currently considered to be the world champion in his field. There was something about that quite repulsive gargantuan beast that reminded me of the refined gentleman, Henry Morgan. Perhaps it was the haircut and the powerful neck. The world record is supposedly twenty-four yards, by the way.

  I could easily fill at least as many yards of shelf space with writings about the Morgan brothers. It would be a worthy monument. I am undoubtedly on the track of their enemy.

  ________

  The Advent calendar was the old-fashioned kind, dusty and faded and with pale glitter showing in the deep blue darkness of the holy night where the star showed the way to Bethlehem. Outside the manger – where an exhausted Mary and a proud Joseph tended to their as-yet-nameless baby boy – knelt the three Wise Men who had wandered on foot from the lands of the East with their gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. They were three good men who would soon betray the ruthless Herod for the sake of the Son of Man. The shunned king would grow angry, an outcry would be heard from the women who mourned their murdered male offspring, but the Wise Men would go free. They were inviolable in their wisdom.

  The Advent calendar hung in the kitchen in the vast flat on Hornsgatan, in Södra Malmen in Stockholm in 1978, where three very wise men were still looking to the heavens above for a sign. They were the brothers Henry and Leo Morgan, along with myself, their humble and in some respects secret historian. In late November during that sombre autumn, Henry had found the Advent calendar in an old tobacco shop that sold surplus inventory from the fifties, and he had pinned it up on the pinboard in the kitchen. He said that it was a picture of us. We were three deputies, three gentlemen who had taken on the vicarious suffering that would relieve our fellow humans of their burdens. But we would not be destroyed, because we too were inviolable in our wisdom.

  It was true that Henry Morgan could forecast the weather by the ache in his rheumatic joints, read his destiny in his rough hands, point out portents, find good premonitions and bad omens, although he would never be any sort of prophet – but it would soon turn out that we were not the least bit inviolable.

  After Leo’s return ‘from America’, Henry and I tried our best to maintain the routines that we had established for ourselves – it was our only chance of surviving, of producing anything, of pretending that we meant something in the world. Each morning Henry, true to form, would pin the page from his notebook on the pinboard in the kitchen, filling in all the hours of the coming day with various activities. The list might say: ‘breakfast, practice, digging, coffee break, practice, lunch, shopping, ring up so and so, newspaper, dinner …’ along with the times when each item was to take place. From a practical standpoint, each list offered some small spelling mistake because he was dyslexic – just like the king, he would tell himself in consolation. At any rate, the schedule lent the day a nice rhythm and a special feeling of importance, as if we actually were employed and utilised by someone, a higher power or a lower boss, it didn’t make any difference.

  Leo neither could nor wanted to follow such a regime
n. He refused to assign the day any special schedule in advance. He took the day as it came, institutionalised as he was, and each day arrived for him like some ominous registered letter from some malicious authority. His living quarters reeked of incense – that was his gift to Jesus – and he never got out of bed in the mornings. He could lie in bed all day long with his hands clasped behind his head, whistling tunes, staring up at the ceiling and doing nothing. That was his regimen and we let him keep it. It could have been worse, much worse.

  Nothing was the same now that Leo had suddenly returned. Henry tiptoed around much more cautiously, as if he were afraid of disturbing the idler, and he showed almost exaggerated respect. Perhaps he also felt a bit ridiculous because he had lied and said that Leo was in America even though he was actually in a psychiatric hospital. But I didn’t give a damn about that, so we didn’t discuss the matter.

  ________

  One afternoon at the end of November I ascertained with satisfaction that I had produced no less than a hundred and fifty pages of my modern pastiche of The Red Room. The story had taken on a certain solidity, the characters were doing things that seemed entirely natural. Arvid Falk had freed himself from his schoolmistress, rented his own little flat in Söder where he could bide his time, and resumed writing without the burdensome feeling that he was neglecting anyone or anything. He had become close friends with Kalle Montanus, Olle’s lad from the country, and fresh breezes were blowing through the coterie at Berns.

  It was a sultry, wet afternoon, and all of Stockholm was steaming like a witch’s cauldron of smoke, soot, sulphur and curses. It was a day when you felt cold no matter how much you worked. Henry came upstairs in his dirty overalls just before dinner, and I suggested that we go down to the Europa Athletic Club for a while. It was not a scheduled activity, but Henry was not a rigid sort of person by any means. He was always open to suggestion.

  We packed up our boxing trunks and walked down Hornsgatan to the Europa, which by then was starting to clear out, but Willis was always there until closing time. Henry immediately expressed his condolences. Willis was feeling blue.

  It so happened that Gene Tunney had departed this life in November 1978. His life story was undoubtedly not the most romantic boxing story that history can present – a clever boy and a marine with a sophisticated interest in literature, and so on. His was not any sort of underdog story like that of Jack Johnson or Joe Louis or Rocky Marciano. But it so happened that Willis had met Tunney in person and received a photo showing himself and the brilliant technician who had made Jack Dempsey put his gloves on the shelf. The picture was taken just after the Second World War somewhere in New York, and it was on the wall in Willis’s little cubbyhole at the Europa Athletic Club. Tunney looked truly handsome; for that matter, Willis did too. They were two men in their prime, and perhaps Willis felt that he was getting old now that the man of action standing beside him in the photo from New York had passed away.

  ‘He was a damned cultivated person,’ said Willis, nodding at the faded picture. ‘In that way he wasn’t like any other boxer. All great boxers have been philosophers in some way or other; they have to be philosophers. But Tunney was special. He was smart enough to know when to pack it in. We actually didn’t talk much about boxing. I remember that he was interested in Jussi Björling and wondered if I knew him. And he liked politics.’

  ‘Aren’t we actually an awful lot alike?’ asked Henry, taking up a position under the picture of Tunney.

  ‘It’s one thing to know when to pack it in, Henry,’ said Willis. ‘But you never got properly started.’

  ‘It’s not too late. I can spar with anyone in the country. On any day you like!’

  ‘Watch out that Gringo doesn’t hear you!’

  But Gringo wasn’t at the Europa that evening, so we were allowed to train in peace, without any cock-fighting. I started getting stabs of pain around my heart after half an hour and felt a bit depressed. When your heart races you always feel a bit uneasy, and it wouldn’t slow down, so I decided to take it easy. Henry was going at it at the same pace as usual, and if you saw him all alone like that you would be prepared to agree: he could undoubtedly spar with anyone in the country. At least for several rounds.

  ________

  The autumn had reached its optimum greyness, and there was nothing but rain and nasty weather on the day the alarm sounded. I was sitting in the library, working; Leo was lying in his bed, breathing in incense; and Henry was plinking on the piano when the doorbell suddenly rang and someone pounded on the door.

  ‘Come … quick … Greger … tunnel …’ panted an exhausted Birger. ‘You have to… have to come down there!’

  Birger had run up all the stairs, and since he was a bit pot-bellied, it had sapped him of strength. He was covered in mud and his face was black like a real miner’s.

  ‘Calm down, Birger,’ said Henry. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘It … caved in,’ panted Birger as he began trotting back down the stairs, taking small mincing steps.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ bellowed Henry and dashed after him. He tried to ask Birger a little more about what happened, but the only thing I could catch was that Greger was still inside, behind the cave-in.

  It was one of the old wooden supports that had given way, right at the end of the slope down towards the passageway. Greger had slammed into the support when he made a run with the wheelbarrow to make it up the slope, and that did it. Dirt, sand and rocks had caved in on top of him, dividing the passageway into two parts in which one of them lacked both a beginning and an end. That was where Greger was now, if he was still alive.

  Without any further palavering, Henry started digging with a shovel, and as soon as there was space, Birger and I joined him.

  ‘Shouldn’t we at least ring for an ambulance?’ said Birger anxiously.

  ‘Are you crazy!’ shouted Henry. ‘And put an end to seventeen years of toil?!’

  ‘But it’s not worth it, Henry,’ said Birger. ‘The damn treasure isn’t worth this kind of risk!’

  ‘Shut up and keep shovelling,’ muttered Henry between spadefuls. ‘We’ve got to hurry it up.’

  We dug and shovelled for close to an hour until we could finally lift up the old support again and open up a free passage about one and a half feet high into the tunnel.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’ shouted Henry into the darkness. ‘Greger! Greggg-ggger!’

  We heard only our own heavy breathing as we tensely waited for a reply, some small, pitiful, frightened sign of life from Greger. But there was nothing. Not a sound.

  ‘Dammit!’ said Henry. ‘We have to dig down half a yard so I can get inside.’

  ‘That damn Greger,’ said Birger. ‘This is so fucking typical of him. Everything he touches turns to disaster. And now my whole suit is ruined …’

  After another half-hour we had removed enough sand, rocks and dirt that it was possible to wriggle into the next section of the tunnel. Henry took a heavy pocket torch with him, shining it into the black hole.

  ‘Whoops … what the hell?!’ they heard from down there in the dark. ‘What in …’

  ‘What is it, Henry?’ shouted Birger. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Quiet!’ was the response, and then the beam of the torch vanished completely.

  Birger was jumping up and down with curiosity, and even I had a pulse rate that was undoubtedly 150 per minute.

  ‘Have you got a smoke, Birger?’ I asked, and the charmer pulled out a badly battered pack of Pall Malls. We each lit a cigarette and smoked without saying a word. Birger was nervous and had a hard time standing still.

  ‘He was a good guy, that Greger,’ said Birger. ‘He was a simple person, unpretentious but first-rate. His old man died when he was a lad, you know, but strangely enough he’s always managed to get by.’

  Birger sounded as if it were time to forget about Greger. But that wasn’t at all the case. Greger was alive and presumably feeling better than he had in a long time. After we’d waited ex
actly as long as it takes to smoke two king-size Pall Malls, we heard signs of life from below in the shaft. We heard voices, laughter and clattering, as if from two delighted fishermen on their way home from a salmon stream.

  Soon the torch-beam reappeared, followed by Henry Morgan’s dishevelled hair. He looked like a very happy boy who had just reeled in a monster of a fish.

  ‘What happened?’ Birger and I exclaimed in unison.

  ‘Just come with me,’ said Henry. ‘One at a time.’

  Birger and I could hardly contain ourselves. We threw ourselves headlong down into the dark, landing on the other side of the mound that had been created by the cave-in. There stood Henry, receiving us like Virgil himself, the companion and guide to the underworld.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said tersely and led the way.

  The path diverged into a cavity that was previously hidden and that must have been part of an even older passageway than the one Henry’s paternal grandfather had found. The furthest part of the cave ended in a portal made of timbers the height of a man, creating an opening to a new artery heading due west.

  ‘Be careful here!’ Henry would say now and then.

  The passageway continued for approximately twenty yards until it stopped at a sharp angle facing another portal that was completely covered with earth and sedimentary formations that looked like veins of coal. There at the entrance sat Greger, puffing on a cigarette and generally looking cocky. In his hand he held something that looked like a worn tin cup. He had chipped off a bit from the rim of the cup, which gleamed. Unmistakable flashes were coming from the rim of that old cup, cutting through the darkness of the ancient cave like a telegram of joy, prosperity and a bright future.