Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  ‘Of course, I realise …’ said Kerstin, a little embarrassed. ‘But sometimes I wonder what kind of wet blankets the lot of you are.’

  ‘Don’t go lumping me in with them!’ I said. ‘The Morgan brothers are famous, and famous brothers always get a little screwy.’

  ‘C’est la vie,’ said Henry.

  Kerstin parked the van, switched off the headlights, and set the hand-brake. Then we climbed out into the darkness.

  ‘It looks completely deserted,’ I said.

  ‘I thought I saw a glimmer of light from one of the windows,’ said Henry.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right house?’

  ‘How the hell should I know? I’m just trusting my intuition. It’s led me in the right direction before.’

  ‘It looks like a darling little place,’ said Kerstin in a whisper, as if we were doing something that was strictly prohibited.

  The little summer cabin stood on a bare hill with a view of Löknäs Bay, where the ice hadn’t yet thawed. On the opposite shore another hill rose up, forming a magnificent inlet to the bay. Presumably this was sheer paradise in the summer, with swaying reeds and water lilies and sunshine all day long.

  Henry took a few steps ahead of us, seeming both eager and hesitant at the same time. He was probably very unsure about what he was actually doing at the moment, but there was no longer any turning back. Right now it was purely a matter of going through with it and finding out what was inside that house.

  We slipped and slid our way to the door. Someone had recently shovelled the snow away from the porch, so the place couldn’t be totally deserted. Henry went up to the door and knocked. A faint light was visible in the window facing the bay, but it didn’t look like an ordinary electric light; it seemed like a tiny flickering flame.

  We heard a sound from inside the house, and Henry again knocked on the door. Not a sign of life. We waited for a good couple of minutes in utter, reverential silence but heard only the cold wind blowing through the tops of the fir trees. Then Henry grabbed the door handle and opened the door.

  ‘Hello!’ he shouted into the house.

  ‘Let’s go in and check,’ I said to give Henry courage.

  He went first, and we noticed the stench at once. The rank smell of sweat, paraffin, leftover food and excrement. After passing through an ice-cold, draughty room, we found, at last, the missing Leo. He was lying on a bed asleep under three heavy blankets. The floor all around was covered with empty bottles, all of them the same brand of whisky: Johnny Walker, elegant in a red frock-coat, with pince-nez, a cane and a top hat. Next to the bed was a box with more unopened bottles. The liquor in that house would easily have cost 10,000 kronor.

  ‘I’m going outside,’ Kerstin whispered in my ear, her eyes brimming with tears. Whether it was from sympathy or because of the nauseating stench of ammonia, I couldn’t tell.

  Henry went over to the bed and started shaking Leo. He had suddenly lost all his fear and was now as bold and cocky as a Boy Scout. Things needed to be cleaned up here, and so there was no use standing around in bewilderment, letting ourselves get disgusted because Leo had suffered a minor collapse. With a little bad luck it could happen to anyone. Henry shook Leo’s head and called his name but got no response. Something moved, and Henry gave a start of surprise when another head emerged from under the jumble of filthy blankets.

  It was a terribly emaciated girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty or so, although drugs had given her an appearance worthy of a worn-out pensioner.

  ‘What the hell …’ groaned the girl as she listlessly rubbed her eyes. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she said, as if she knew at once who we were.

  And it turned out that she actually did know who we were.

  ‘I was just about to ask you the same question,’ said Henry, sounding annoyed. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said the girl.

  Henry grabbed her and lifted her skinny body out of the bed, but nearly dropped her in astonishment.

  ‘Do you see what I see?’ he asked me.

  ‘It’s a small world,’ I said.

  ‘At least this world is!’

  ‘Cut it out … cut it out,’ said the girl just as she had on that evening when we’d found her beaten up on our landing and given her a hot bath and watched over her all night long.

  ‘Cut it out,’ said the dark angel again in her toneless, raspy, worn-out voice.

  ‘OK, OK,’ said Henry. ‘I’m Leo’s brother, and we’re here to take him back home to the city.’

  The thin little creature sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed her eyes. She didn’t seem to comprehend much of what was going on. She sat there and rolled her eyes, rocking back and forth as if the whole world were spinning round.

  ‘Fuck off,’ she said again. ‘Not now!’

  ‘What do you mean, not now?’ asked Henry. ‘It looks like the two of you are trying to drink yourselves to death!’

  The girl groaned and toppled onto the floor. I propped her up against the bed, shoving aside empty bottles and mouldy tins of baked beans and ravioli that smelled of puke, to be quite blunt.

  Henry went back to trying to shake some life into Leo. He lifted his eyelids and slapped him hard on the cheeks, but without response.

  ‘You were just drinking, weren’t you?!’ said Henry, turning to look at the girl on the floor. ‘You didn’t take anything else, did you, goddammit?!’

  The girl was still sitting on the floor looking dazed. She rolled her eyes and obviously didn’t comprehend a thing.

  ‘Do you have any syringes here?’ Henry shouted right in her ear.

  ‘Do I?’ she said, slurring her words. ‘I have my own,’ she went on, sounding almost proud.

  ‘What about Leo? Is he on drugs?’

  ‘That guy?’ she slurred. ‘He just drinks …’

  Henry went outside to get some snow. He came back with the snow and with Kerstin, who wasn’t looking too good. Her face was streaked because she had been standing out there bawling.

  We rubbed snow in Leo’s face, and only then did he begin to show any sign of life. He grimaced at the cold snow, started spitting and suddenly pulled his head out of my grasp and laboriously opened his eyelids a little. He muttered something completely incoherent, moaned and then tried to turn over to face the wall, but he couldn’t manage it.

  Without warning the girl on the floor gave a start, leapt to her feet and began jabbering just the way she had done when she came to in our flat, like an auctioneer, in a loud, shrill, strained voice. She didn’t seem in a bad mood at all – quite the contrary.

  ‘You have to see! You have to see what we’ve done!’ she shouted. ‘You have to come with me and look, look, look at what we defied …’

  Henry and Kerstin and I glanced at each other and then looked in surprise at the girl, who with jerking, spasmodic movements was trying to interest us in something they had dared.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘We’re not here to hurt either of you. We’re going to drive back to town soon.’

  ‘You have to … it’s nothing but shit, the whole thing!’ the girl went on and then literally careered out the open door.

  ‘Klasa,’ said Henry. ‘Go out there with the girl and keep on eye on what she’s doing. We’ll try to get Leo down to the van.’

  ‘OK,’ I said and dashed after the girl into the dark.

  I could hear her furious chatter from the slope leading down to the ice, and I could make out a well-worn path with a snow-covered railing that probably functioned fine in the summer. But right now, in the deep snow, it reached about as high as my ankles. The path led down to the water and was icy and slippery. I had to make a special effort not to fall and really hurt myself, but the drugged girl flew down the slope with all the force and superhuman power that certain insane individuals can sometimes possess temporarily.

  But down at the ice I managed to catch up with her and grab her emaciated arm, although she then tore hers
elf free and ran right out to the middle of Löknäs Bay. I’ve always had a great respect for ice, and I’m not experienced in deciphering where it will hold or break, but this was no time to stand around arguing with my fear. Right now it was a matter of catching that girl, and she had dashed out to stand in the middle of the bay. That’s where she stopped, not even out of breath.

  ‘What the hell is this all about?’ I asked.

  ‘You have to see … You have to see,’ she said, and then I noticed a hole in the ice that someone had made in the middle of the bay. It was just enough for a winter dip, and the skinny girl could have easily jumped into the water at any moment. I stood poised to stop her if that was what I was supposed to witness.

  But the girl seemed crazier than ever. Without warning she started jumping on the ice next to the hole. She jumped with both feet, stamping as hard as she could, up and down in an incredible frenzy.

  ‘Jump … Jump …’ she urged me, panting.

  I was cold and shivering, and my shoes were soaking wet. I had no intention of jumping around like an idiot in the middle of ice that might give way at any time. I refused to do as she said, which made her furious, and then she slapped me across the face.

  ‘All right,’ I said, and started jumping. I thought it was best to play along.

  We jumped and stamped on the ice with all our might, and I saw a look of delight gradually appear on her face. The bitter cold of the evening made the cracks in the ice shriek. There was a whistling and screeching around the ice, a slapping and snapping like broken strings, and the echo ricocheted far away over the hills and bays. The moon cast its blue light across the ice, which shrieked and howled in its plaintive misery, and when it echoed best into the infinity beneath the deep blue sky, the howling would pass from the metallic pain of the ice into flesh and blood, the fur and pulse of animal throats: the foxes were answering the howl of the ice! Each time the ice shrieked in torment and cast its elegiac echo over the area, a fox would answer with a long howl. And each time the fox replied, the wild girl would find more strength to jump and stamp, making the ice shriek anew, and then the foxes would answer again in this furious dialogue between the moon, the tortured ice, the crazy girl and the frightened foxes.

  I felt as though I’d found myself right at the edge of the outermost boundary of what was possible.

  Just like any tragic opera, every story of respectable rank ought to have some sort of clou, that is to say a zenith or peripeteia, a turning point, although nowadays people prefer to call it by the more popular term: climax. Without either boasting or taking great pains to sort out and chart the reality we were struggling with up in that flat on Hornsgatan, I can say that the clou of our story occurred during several hectic and feverish days at the end of April, in the election year and Year of the Child, 1979.

  ‘What time is it?’ was the first sentence that Leo Morgan said after returning from the valley of the shadow of death where he had spent the past month. Henry took this as a definite sign that his brother was on the road to recovery.

  We both stood there watching Leo as he lay on his bed and gradually came out of the fog. Occasionally he would squint his eyes at the troublesome light from some chance ray of sunshine, then he would fall back into a trance, exhausted from the effort, cleansed of all strength and vitality, his awareness at nil, far beyond anyone’s reach.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked one day as we stood there, keeping watch over him. Ignoring the metaphysical aspects – perhaps he had drunk himself beyond all sense of time and space – Henry replied very concisely:

  ‘Twelve-thirty in the afternoon on the twentieth of April, 1979.’

  Leo seemed to comprehend the answer and groaned. He rooted around in bed until he ended up on his side in a restful position and opened his eyes to look round the room.

  ‘You’re home, now, Leo,’ said Henry in a loud, clear voice. ‘We’ve brought you home.’

  ‘Mm,’ murmured Leo. He didn’t seem to have any objections.

  ‘You haven’t been feeling very well,’ said Henry. ‘But that’s over now. Klasa and I are going to see to it that you get back on your feet. Aren’t we, Klasa?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, a bit annoyed at the way Henry was talking. It sounded as if he were speaking to a dying man in a hospital.

  The patient immediately fell asleep again, and Henry and I very quietly returned to our own activities, calmly and cautiously, so as not to disturb the restorative slumber of our ward. In any case, he was on the road to recovery, and the worst of the withdrawal had passed with surprising ease. I had expected delirium and climbing the walls and horrible roars in the middle of the night and so on, but nothing like that happened.

  We had driven back to Stockholm with the two rescued wrecks from the summer cabin in Löknäs on Värmdö. The girl reluctantly allowed us to put her in the car, where Leo lay like a big sack on the back seat, sleeping the whole way home. We drove the dark angel over to the Maria outpatient clinic, and we hadn’t heard a thing from her since. We assumed that she was being well taken care of.

  Henry then immediately contacted the family physician, Dr Helmers, who showed up at once with a large array of injections – B vitamins and other special treatments for withdrawal – that would make life a bit more tolerable for us and for the patient. Huffing, puffing Dr Helmers was the only family physician I’ve ever seen who looked exactly the way an old family doctor should look. He had bifocals, grey hair and perfect teeth. There was an air of weighty authority in the way he held his shoulders, and he had a quite vigorous stride for his age. Naturally he knew everything there was to know about the Morgonstjärna family – he was intimately familiar with all the childhood illnesses the boys had been through, and he was the one who had sat by their paternal grandmother’s bed when she died in the bedroom that would soon become the WWW Club’s most distinguished billiard room. Dr Helmers claimed that the old woman had raved about light, just like Goethe himself, when death stood at the door – but then he was also a very well-travelled, well-read and well-heeled gentleman, who was once a member of the Club, of course.

  Dr Helmers was in full agreement that Leo, too, should be nursed and treated at home if at all possible. He had very little use for new forms of therapy or penetrating experiments with the human psyche. Leo would do best if he received the excellent, thorough care that a good home could offer. But the fact of the matter was that Henry Morgan’s home was perhaps not a particularly good home for a mutist or a catatonic. That’s why things had turned out the way they had, with a couple of sojourns in Långbro Hospital. But this time – when it was ‘only’ a matter of alcohol – there was no discussion of the matter. Leo would get back on his feet, and if the situation turned critical, we should just ring Dr Helmers, day or night.

  But everything proceeded relatively pain-free. Leo lay in his trance, sweating heavily and raving a bit. He had convulsions, possibly some type of vascular spasms, but they never got out of hand, and the attacks would be followed by peace and calm and the deepest Sleeping Beauty slumber. After four days he asked us what time it was, and then Henry considered the situation resolved – Leo had come safely into harbour, the storm had subsided, and the two assiduous nurses could shake hands and feel satisfied with their efforts.

  ‘Not bad for two amateurs,’ said Henry.

  ‘We’re not out of the woods yet,’ I said, being the born sceptic that I am.

  ‘Don’t bring me down!’ muttered Henry. ‘Don’t bring me down as soon as there’s some hope!’

  ‘OK, I’m sorry I said that,’ I admitted. ‘We’ve done a great job, and we should be pleased.’

  That was followed by a couple of days of intense care for Leo, intense work for us, and equally intense longing for the spring that would not come. Dr Henry & Co. took turns bustling about in the long and lugubrious servant corridors between the kitchen and Leo’s two-room quarters, with herbal tea for Leo, special porridge for Leo, health-food nectar for Leo and all the magic
brews and medicines and world-famous preparations that would get his sabotaged organism to start functioning again. We made steady progress and noted down everything from his appetite to the smell and shape of his bowel movements on a temperature chart pinned up on the pinboard in the kitchen.

  Nor did our Art seem to suffer any harm from what had happened. I turned out approximately five pages a day and seemed to be homing in on Arvid Falk’s downfall and defeat with great precision. Behind the piles of notebooks, the notes on scraps of paper, the phrases and dialogues, the gloomy descriptions from a depressing winter, I could discern an end – a massive coda, an overwhelming final chord that would take the sting out of the satire and pass beyond the pathetic into a deep, profound and genuine tragedy.

  The same was true for Henry, according to his own testimony. ‘Europa, Disintegrating Fragments’ emerged from fifteen years of playing jazz clubs in Stockholm, a hissing harmonium with the Quakers in Denmark, a pub piano in London, a piano in a Munich bar, a grand piano at the Mossberg estate in the Alps and at Bop Sec in Paris. It resembled a magnificent synthesis of one person’s entire experience of the history of European suffering. In any case, that was how the composer himself expressed it. I had not yet been allowed to hear the piece.

  ________

  The annual World Championship games in ice hockey began, and we decided to let up on our work schedule a bit for the sake of our mental health and the coverage of the Tre Kronor Swedish team. Nasty rumours were circulating about a particularly weak young team that hadn’t trained properly before the annual tournament. Before the opening game, we very nervously laid out a spread of peanuts, crisps, popcorn and Ramlösa mineral water – in a show of solidarity with Leo – in front of the enormous TV set in the sitting room. The armchairs were drawn forward to front-row seats, and Henry had convinced Leo that he absolutely had to get out of bed to watch ice hockey. Leo had acquiesced and now sat in an armchair, wrapped in a blanket with his feet on a footstool. He had his weary, gloomy eyes fixed on the Soviet test pattern.