Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  The Tre Kronor team wasn’t nearly as weak as the nasty rumours had made out. As usual, every little success crowned new heroes, and the young goalkeeper was praised by all of Sweden. But Henry screamed himself hoarse when the Russian Bear crushed our heroes, making them look like crippled teenagers.

  As usual, this sort of intense interest stayed high for the first few games, but about midway through the championship matches, it felt more like an obligation to load up on peanuts, crisps, popcorn and Ramlösa mineral water to watch some tired, worn-out, injured national teams that just wanted to go home to their wives and girlfriends. But Henry completely refused to acknowledge that every ice-hockey championship got a bit tiresome – until the interest was suddenly re-ignited for the final games – because he was just as childishly delighted every time he heard the Swedish national anthem resound across the ice and wash over our sweaty knights. Sometimes he was even on the verge of bursting into tears out of gentle euphoria.

  After the third game, Leo was definitely worn out, and he no longer bothered to get out of bed. Instead, he stayed in his section of the flat, breathing in the incense. For him it was all a totally meaningless exercise, and he was no doubt right, although that seemed a bit lacking in imagination. It was a game with make-believe rules, but there is so much in life that is based on make-believe.

  It was during these less colourful and intense matches midway through the tournament that Henry actually touched on an enormous abyss when he began lecturing about what he called Leo’s ‘hockey nihilism’. According to Henry, Leo viewed all of life as a game. He’d always been like that. The game was exciting and fascinating and generally worthwhile as long as you accepted the rules, the instructions to which you agreed as soon as you entered the game. As long as you stayed within the rules, you could develop your own expertise and stretch the boundaries of what was permitted, learning to control what was possible, and making what was impossible resemble the possible to a very high degree. But as soon as some small boy in welly-boots jumps into a hockey rink, he breaks the magic of the conditions, he sabotages the performance, and the game becomes ridiculous, childish and meaningless. Leo always wore wellies on the ice because he had never made an effort to master skates. And it was exactly the same thing with chess. The only lasting friendship that Leo had retained over the years was with that accountant Lennart Hagberg in Borås, because their friendship was based entirely on brief, concise, cryptic codes that almost no one other than the two of them could decipher. Their loyalty was completely abstract, and if they accepted the game, they could continue until death finally separated them, or maybe even longer. Leo was a ‘hockey nihilist’ as well as a ‘chess fascist’.

  This was so typical of Henry. He sat there, seemingly totally engrossed in a boring ice-hockey game, and with half an ear he was listening to the cutting remarks that Leo and I were making about how fucking worthless everything happening on the ice was. He pretended not to hear a word we said, just so that he wouldn’t be brought down again. But later everything he had heard re-formed inside him until he managed to construct what was in his eyes an airtight defence of ice hockey or whatever else was in question, even bad ice hockey. Then it would suddenly all come pouring out in one brief outburst in which he could actually be quite brilliant, only to vanish into oblivion once again.

  ________

  Spring lived inside us as nothing more than a notion, a longing and a dream. Each morning we were forced to conclude that there was a clear discrepancy between metaphysical dream and meteorological reality, which in turn caused a frustrated tension that never found any natural release. This disheartening weather situation, known as low pressure, combined with the world politics and ecological intermezzos, known as disasters, laid the groundwork for a suicidal spring that would demand its tributes, its hecatombs, just like the Truth.

  With a sudden breeze behind me I started speeding along again and reached the very last chapter of The Red Room, but then hit a dead calm. Yet that is the predicament of a prose writer – to swing incessantly between a fierce creative euphoria and a paralysing double-sided uncertainty. But, being quite young, I lacked the practice, experience and strength to handle setbacks. I suddenly found myself drifting backwards, down into the listless depression of winter and heaving big sighs.

  This resulted in an excess of libido, to be quite candid. I began devoting more and more attention to Greger’s Grotto, the Shelter and to Leo’s monumental hangover. The Flask and Wolf-Larsson had started in on the digging again, and in April we had all joined forces in a six-man team working three shifts down there. We were proceeding at a rate of approximately three yards a day, heading due west, and each day we set a new record. The earth was loose, dry and easy to shovel. And we were absolutely positive that we were on the right track to find the Treasure.

  It took a long time for Leo to get back on his feet. People had called from the hospital to hear how things were going, and Henry had lied and told them that it was mostly a question of finding him a good job and that should be the end of the matter.

  But it turned out that the hospital was not the only one keeping an eye on Leo Morgan, the poet Leo Morgan. In a literary magazine to which I subscribed, a young literary hotshot had launched a vigorous attack on all of contemporary literature, especially poetry. It was high time to start evaluating the literature of the seventies, and according to the author of the essay, it could be compared to a street-sweeper who here and there finds some dog shit among all the empty beer bottles and discarded condoms – whatever wasn’t empty or used up was downright disgusting. The result was what might be called a general assault on both the politically ‘engaged’ literature and the newly awakened ‘surrealistic’ genre, whatever that meant. The most prevalent method was the oppressive mechanism of ignorance, sloppiness and indolence, which was keeping brilliant young talents from daring to test their wings – not from a fear of heights but because they were scared they would be refused permission to land.

  That angry young literary hotshot from Uppsala saw very little chance of improvement – thanks a lot, I thought to myself – but did offer a reprieve to several authors who tragically enough were no longer on the scene, so to speak. He listed a few names and enquired about Leo Morgan, ‘who was actually ten years ahead of his time in his solitary march with a bomb and Artaud, Genet and an eternal Eliot in his knapsack as he went on his botanical expeditions through the swamps of anxiety in the post-war period.’

  Naturally I rushed elatedly into Leo’s incense-filled rooms, waving the literary magazine, in order to cheer up the poet a bit. He was in demand, and if he would just go back to that black workbook with the draft for Autopsy, I would take on the job of marketing it. Any publisher would be eager to publish it.

  ‘Have you got a smoke?’ asked Leo apathetically.

  ‘You shouldn’t smoke in bed,’ I admonished him.

  Leo was no longer interested in any literary discussions. He scanned through the praise of the young literary hotshot and then dropped the magazine to the floor with a yawn. He hauled himself out of bed and put on his bathrobe. We went out to the sitting room to have a smoke and look at the impressive grey outside the windows. We each lit a cigarette while Leo shivered. I was completely at a loss.

  ‘Why the hell do you stay in this madhouse?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose I’m just as much an idiot myself,’ I said.

  ‘That might …’ said Leo, ‘that might actually happen if you don’t watch out.’

  He gave me one of those long, dark, lingering stares of his that could make anyone feel uncertain and puzzled.

  ‘You’d better watch yourself, my boy,’ he said, slapping me on the shoulder. ‘You’re undoubtedly going to be somebody important, and you need to be careful. There’s so much that you don’t know about.’

  ‘There’s so much that I don’t want to know about.’

  ‘But you can’t avoid it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘What can’t I
avoid?’

  Leo took a drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said evasively. ‘Insanity, maybe. It’s taking hold all around.’

  ‘I’ll just have to try to protect myself.’

  ‘That won’t help. It can slip through concrete.’

  ‘I still have quite a few dreams left,’ I said. ‘There are also glimmers of light. It’ll soon be spring, and good things do happen.’

  Leo snorted, but it didn’t sound totally patronising.

  ‘What kind of glimmers of light?’

  ‘Resistance,’ I said. ‘Some sort of counter-citizens who refuse to accept evil – punks who defend Kurds, youths who defy Nazis at upper-class schools in Östermalm, action groups … There’s always something, dammit!’

  Leo stared for a long time at the Persian rug that had a long path worn thin between the tables and armchairs in the sitting room over to the chess table.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘I suppose there always is something. But there’s so much that you don’t see. A person sees only what he wants to see.’

  ‘So what do you want to see?’

  ‘It’s always easy to define what’s negative. I don’t need any utopias to survive. I can afford to be a pessimist.’

  ‘I don’t believe that. I think that utopias are indelible.’

  ‘You’ve been listening to Henry too much. He’s like one big, blue-eyed utopia.’

  ‘But he’s perfectly harmless.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure about that. You have no idea how many lies and myths he’s created around himself.’

  ‘And I don’t want to know. I’ve always liked mythomaniacs.’

  ‘One day you’ll find out,’ said Leo. ‘It’s best to be prepared.’

  ________

  Now the big, gloomy flat was filled with all the scents of Easter: from newly budding branches and lilies, and from the garlic and thyme of the Easter lamb. We went around suffering from the cold in our Higgins cardigans, and we suffered through the interminable Good Friday. We suffered with Jesus and we suffered with Leo. We watched all the feature films on TV about the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, and on one of the most sombre evenings during Easter there was a programme about Henry’s colleague, Allan Pettersson.

  ‘Dammit, Allan has had a hell of a time,’ said Henry.

  ‘Do you know him?’ I asked.

  ‘Know and know,’ said Henry. ‘No one really knows Allan, but I’ve gone over to visit him a couple of times. He looked through a number of things that I’d written. That was long before he became popular.’

  ‘So what did he think?’

  ‘Oh, Allan is rather difficult. He didn’t say anything special.’

  The programme clearly gave Henry pause, and he couldn’t stop whistling that whimpering theme from the Seventh Symphony. He said that he was thinking of writing a letter to Allan to tell him that it was a damn good programme. But then he decided not to, saying that it wouldn’t sound right, not genuine enough. It was so hard to be positive without sounding ingratiating.

  And anyway, positive signs were few and far between. We went around outdoing each other with sighs that got deeper and deeper. The evenings were never sufficiently enticing to lure us out, and no work seemed sufficiently interesting to hide us from the world.

  Henry suggested a drink in secret – somewhere that Leo wouldn’t notice the fumes – and dug out half a bottle of whisky from his wardrobe. We locked ourselves in the billiard room and played a listless game in almost total silence. Henry just hummed now and then to draw attention to a few of his best shots. I still didn’t have a chance, and I blamed the chalk. In spite of his depression, Henry had not lost his sense of discipline, and whoever saw him might have thought he was a man in his prime. His tie was meticulously knotted, he was impeccably shaved, the parting in his hair was perfect, and his jacket had classically casual wrinkles.

  Defeated, I sank down on a chair in the billiard room and stared listlessly out the window, sucking on a cigarette. I coughed and then asked Henry how much he really thought he could handle.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he replied at once. ‘What you mean by “handle”?’

  ‘Don’t play dumb,’ I said as I replaced my cue in the rack on the wall.

  Henry realised that I was serious, and he leaned against the windowsill and looked out across the rooftops. Maybe he was looking for some little star, a streak of light, something to wish on.

  ‘We all have our limits,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’m able to stretch mine rather far. A little too far. At least that’s how it seems sometimes.’

  ‘Have you talked to Leo? I mean really talked to him?’

  ‘About what? Of course! I talk to Leo every single day!’

  ‘There’s so much that is … unexplained. Where did he get all that whisky out at the cabin? What sort of pals does he have who want him to drink himself to death?’

  ‘Pals …’ said Henry, throwing out his arms and shrugging his shoulders to show that he had no idea.

  ‘We can’t just go around as if nothing is happening and keep quiet about all this, can we? I’ve tried to talk to him without seeming overly nosy. But it does no good. He’s closed up like a clam, and he turns everything against himself like a boomerang.’

  ‘That’s how he’s always been. Leo is a pro at defending all sorts of impossibilities. He was on his way to getting a doctorate in philosophy, for God’s sake!’

  ‘But you can be just as impossible, Henry.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’ve heard that all before, ad nauseam. You don’t have to repeat what Leo says like you’re some kind of parrot.’

  ‘The two of you talk exactly the same way. You always just shift the blame to someone else.’

  Henry was still standing at the window with his back to me, and he kept shrugging his shoulders like some defiant child who can’t defend his actions.

  ‘Don’t you see,’ I said, ‘that I just want to know what you’re thinking, how you manage to endure this fucking mess. I personally don’t know how I’m going to stand it.’

  ‘Then move somewhere else!’ said Henry sullenly.

  ‘I don’t mean to bring you down,’ I said. ‘I assure you, it’s just that I take this whole thing very seriously.’

  ‘Don’t you think that I do too?!’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you,’ said Henry, and now he was getting really worked up. ‘Let me tell you this: if I didn’t take this whole thing seriously, Leo would be in some loony bin on a fucking disability pension, holed up somewhere without a friend left on this earth, and I’ll be damned if anyone can claim that I’m taking this matter too casually. And let me tell you something else,’ he went on, jabbing his index finger at me, ‘if I really gave in to all these depressions, we would have starved to death this winter.’

  And then, without warning, Henry dashed out of the billiard room and disappeared into the kitchen regions, only to return with a loudly purring Spinks in his arms.

  ‘There’s one thing you should know, Klasa,’ he said. ‘I’m not some damn intellectual, and I can’t fill my speech with lovely phrases the way the two of you can. I like things like this,’ he said, and he dumped Spinks onto the middle of the billiard table.

  Spinks instantly stopped purring and crouched down in a pose that was both playfully curious and tense, with his bushy tail slowly moving back and forth, sweeping over the green felt.

  Henry the animal trainer pointed out a corner of the billiard table to Spinks and picked up a couple of balls. He rolled the spheres cautiously towards Spinks, who stopped them with his paw, shoved them straight into a pocket and then waited for the next ones. The trick was repeated over and over again, and I didn’t really get the point, at least not at the time. It’s only now, much later, that I can grasp what was so grand about that scene: the harried and always slightly affected Henry Morgan in the role of the animal trainer, and
his ever-devoted friend Spinks who does what he’s been taught to do because he knows that it will pay off. How many hours had it taken to get that trick down pat! An absolutely meaningless trick which had, of course, fascinated Henry for days and nights on end, and which still made him equally surprised, almost happy.

  I would like to remember him that way – as a man with inexhaustible resources and talents that he squandered on pure nonsense, purely symbolic feats undertaken for their own sake.

  ________

  ‘Let’s try one last gasp, Klasa,’ said Henry. ‘Let’s take a break and go into town. We might get a little sunshine today.’

  We’d had a midday thaw for a couple of days. The snow and icicles were briskly dropping from the roofs, and the streets had dried out and were filled with dusty gravel. Occasionally, above the grey cloud cover, it was possible to see that the sun actually did exist and that it might peep out at any time.

  ‘Let’s pop downtown, just to check things out,’ said Henry. ‘Surely there has to be a little spring in the air.’

  So we strolled towards town, walked across Slussen, along Skeppsbron in a cutting wind, and stopped for a while in the middle of Ström Bridge to look down at the wild current.

  It was an afternoon at the very end of April, and there were scores of people out walking. Presumably everyone was looking for signs of spring, but, except for an occasional crocus, we all had to make do with the fact that the women had left their fur coats at home. It was as good a sign as any that things were about to change. The skating rink in the King’s Garden was deserted, worn out, uneven and now of no further interest.

  ‘I didn’t go skating even once this year,’ said Henry.

  ‘Me neither,’ I said. ‘What did we actually do this winter?’

  ‘That’s a good question,’ said Henry. ‘But dammit all! We have irons in the fire, my boy. Things are going to start happening now.’