Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  But as soon as he took pen in hand, the knowledge that he was dyslexic meant that he would take extra pains to make everything sound as elegant as possible. He would use scores of old-fashioned, formal, anachronistic expressions, as if he were addressing His Royal Highness or a judge or some other authority who was a strict adherent of convention.

  This striving for a formal linguistic cogency and his efforts to write with an elegant script caused him to seek out words whose meaning he definitely did not understand. He had evidently just heard them somewhere and was much too lazy to find out what they really meant.

  And so he ended his peculiar letter to his battered friend with these not entirely unambiguous lines: ‘I ask you voluntarily, so that the police might not have access to this information, to burn this letter and allow said letter to remain between us until such time as further information appears, or until such time as death should part us. In all kindness, I weep and wish you success, Yours, Henry Morgan.’

  For a while everything came to a standstill. After I had spent a couple of days under observation, I was discharged from the hospital with certain restrictions: no partying, no straining and I was supposed to keep laughter to an absolute minimum. Otherwise I was free to do as I pleased. I took a cab home and managed to get through the front door of the building without being seen; my shaved and bandaged head had given me a slight aversion to light.

  Things were exactly the same as usual in the flat on Hornsgatan, even though everything we had tried to build up had been lost. I walked through the enormous flat without finding any signs of life from the Morgan brothers. I planned to wait for their return, a return which, it turned out, was never going to happen.

  For a while everything came to a standstill. For the first day I was on tenterhooks, expecting at any moment to hear the redemptive sound of the phone ringing or the liberating slamming of doors. Or to encounter Henry, who would tell me that the matter had been cleared up and we could now put the whole thing behind us. But nothing happened. Everything was nice and quiet, and I started getting a little restless.

  My life had begun to revolve around one very sad point – the big mirror in the hallway. Approximately once every half hour I would go out there, switch on the light and stare at my shorn image in the mirror, examining the stitches under the compress and trying on various caps that might hide my embarrassing state. I decided on an English tweed number.

  I was standing in front of that mirror – it was a magnificent, full-length affair with a gilded frame and cherubs at the top – when I heard a small military band booming down on the street. I was curious, so I went into the sitting room, pushed the curtains aside, and caught sight of a big demonstration moving past down on Hornsgatan. It was probably some minor political party, some less successful group that was in charge of organising the march, because the participants couldn’t have numbered more than two or three thousand.

  It was May Day. I couldn’t for the life of me understand how I had totally managed to forget the date. The huge flat was plunged into darkness – I shied away from the light because it hurt my eyes and gave me a headache – behind the big, heavy curtains, and the depressing chiaroscuro seemed more vexing than ever. But now, at least, I saw that it was May Day, even though spring still hadn’t really made its appearance yet. It looked rather cold and windy down on the street. I opened the window slightly but felt no desire to go out. I wondered for a moment what place I would have taken this year, which procession I would have chosen if I were in any position to choose, but I wasn’t. I no longer had a choice, or so I imagined.

  So I watched the demonstration until the brass section and the drums of the military band had faded into eternity. The last I saw was a big banner with a number of heads – one yellow, one black, one white and one red – that were supposed to portray oppressed peoples. The heads sat on shoulders, the shoulders held up arms with hands and the hands held guns that they would use against their oppressors.

  All of a sudden a thought occurred to me. I went out to the kitchen, found the old key ring with all the mysterious keys, and then went to the wardrobe in the service corridor. At the very bottom of a sideboard, one of the drawers was locked. I unlocked the drawer and pulled it out. But of course the drawer was empty. The gun was gone.

  All that was left of the submachine-gun was the rough, greasy jute cloth. The magazine and ammunition were also gone. If the drawer hadn’t smelled of gun oil, I could easily have denied ever having seen that gun. But the smell was unmistakable. The gun that had lain in that drawer like a cold, gleaming reptile had finally gone away.

  Whatever accounts Henry was planning to settle, he was most likely going to make a thorough job of it. There was no longer any doubt about the matter – this was extremely serious.

  ________

  After a week of complete rest, I was feeling quite fidgety. Under cover of darkness and wearing a fisherman’s knit cap, I had slipped out to buy supplies at grocery shops that were open late. That was all I had seen of the world in the immediate vicinity. I had carefully read every newspaper backwards and forwards, hoping I might find something that would cast some light on all the mysteries, but there was nothing. I had studied every classified ad in the ‘Personals’ column and tried to decipher cryptic codes such as: ‘79.04.28. Wait as usual, dock-berth 12’. But I decided it was unlikely that it had anything to do with me. I had also watched every single newscast on TV, but the reports dealt only with revolutions on continents entirely different from my own. There was nothing about prospective ministers of industry or their spring-cleaning. I was in the midst of a nightmare, a hallucination. I pinched myself, took deep breaths, jogged and sparred through the service corridors and tried all the classic methods to confirm that I was wide awake, although restless.

  After a week of asceticism, I’d had enough. I put on my fisherman’s knit cap and went down to the Furniture Man to have a chat with Greger and Birger. They had been working down in Greger’s Grotto, the Shelter, and were wondering what had become of us upstairs.

  ‘I want to thank you for your help, Greger,’ I said. ‘If you hadn’t taken care of me, I probably would have died. At least that’s what the doctor said.’

  ‘Hey, it was nothing,’ said Greger proudly. ‘I just happened to find you up there in the doorway. Don’t mention it.’

  ‘I assume I was completely out of it.’

  ‘You certainly were out of it, my boy. A hell of an unlucky fall.’

  ‘I don’t remember a thing.’

  I shook hands with Greger and made him feel like he was a real life-saver. He practically had tears in his eyes.

  ‘So when is Henry coming back?’ he asked. ‘He didn’t say how long he’d be gone. We’re starting to get a little worried about the football pool.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But you don’t have to worry about the football pool. He promised to take care of all the usual things.’

  ‘We’re used to him being gone now and then,’ said Birger, winking. ‘He’s got that bird that he likes to see.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, going along with him. ‘He’s only human, after all.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve always said,’ replied Greger. ‘He’s an artist, that Henry. And an artist needs the support of a woman. He’s probably got cold feet about the concert, so he needs a little comforting from a woman.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Who wouldn’t?’

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. I could feel the sweat trickling down my forehead under the prickly knit cap, and I felt as if I might faint at any moment. I left Greger and Birger to their delusions. I discovered that I had started to lie, bluster and spout falsehoods quite deliberately, just like Henry Morgan. I was incapable of telling the truth.

  I had been forced to become a fraud.

  ________

  A letter arrived from chief accountant Lennart Hagberg in Borås, addressed to Leo Morgan. The accountant had made his chess move, and I was going to have to reply. Ev
en up to the last minute Leo had kept his head and taken piece after piece away from his white opponent. Hagberg in Borås had only four pawns, a rook and a knight left, in addition to his king and queen. Leo had lost only three pawns and a knight. There was a total of twenty chess pieces left on the board, and if I didn’t make a big blunder, I could probably keep playing the game a good bit into the summer. Hagberg had moved his knight to safety because it was being threatened by a black pawn – a defensive move. Since I had never been a very good chess player, it took some time to come up with something. Finally – after smoking several cigarettes and pacing restlessly, deep in thought, between the chess table and the armchairs in front of the fireplace – I consulted several old chess books from the section on games and gambling in the library. I immersed myself in some classic games that lacked any similarity to my own, and several hours later I typed up an offensive diagonal with a bishop that once again threatened Hagberg’s knight. Then I sealed the envelope and put in on the shelf for ready for posting.

  ________

  The daily papers kept pouring in through the letterbox, and as soon as I heard it bang shut – sleep came to me only in brief intervals – I would climb out of Göring’s old bed to get the newspapers and subject them to a thorough scrutiny. Manic fortune hunters and sleazebags generally published their codes under the ‘Personals’ heading, but I found nothing of interest.

  Not a news item, not an ad, not a marital engagement, not an obituary escaped my critical examination. Soon I had memorised even the entertainment ads. And it was then, in the first week of May, that I happened to think of the Södra Theatre. Henry was supposed to give his concert there in the middle of May, but the performance undoubtedly had to be considered in jeopardy due to unforeseen events.

  At dawn I lay awake, brooding and anguished. I didn’t know whether it would be a service or a disservice if I rang the theatre to cancel. The magic date was relentlessly approaching, just as unpleasant days always do, and the odds of the performance actually taking place were dismal, to say the least.

  After making an attempt to think things through logically by listing all the risk factors, I concluded that it would be best to ring the theatre and cancel the whole thing. If Henry came back, he would most likely be in no condition to be dragged up on stage to make his debut as a composer and solo pianist before the elite of the Swedish music world. The invitations and programmes with my lyrical introduction hadn’t yet been written, much less printed.

  I thought it best to ring the theatre. I stated the purpose of my call to the switchboard operator, who connected me to the director. I introduced myself very politely as a personal friend of the pianist Henry Morgan, and using rather elegant phrases, I got around to the point that he would be unable to give a performance in mid-May, as planned.

  ‘Henry Morgan?’ said the programme director. ‘Henry Morgan? In mid-May, you say?’ he went on, apparently starting to leaf through some form of booking schedule.

  ‘Unfortunately, I don’t remember the exact date,’ I said. ‘But he booked it a long time ago.’

  ‘Henry Morgan?’ the programme director repeated. ‘I’ve never heard of any Henry Morgan. Let’s see now … mid-May. Guest appearance of the Russian ballet … the twelfth and thirteenth … Pupils from the Swedish Drama School … the fifteenth … Comic opera … the eighteenth … He’s not part of the comic opera, is he?’

  ‘Comic opera?’ I said. ‘Not as far as I know …’

  ‘Hmm … well, let’s see. The nineteenth … twentieth … twenty-first … Anniversary performance as a benefit for Höstsol … The twenty-fifth …’ the programme director continued energetically, rattling off the PR hype for one event after another without finding any Henry Morgan.

  ‘I think it was supposed to be on a Wednesday,’ I said, feeling confused.

  ‘A Wednesday, you say … No, I can’t find anything about a Henry Morgan, and if he had actually booked a date, I would have noticed it before. Are you sure that it was at the Södra Theatre? There are so many theatres in town,’ he went on as if I were an idiot.

  I put down the phone without saying goodbye, without even thanking him for his help. I’ve felt tricked and duped many times in my life, but this was the worst.

  ________

  The fire in the woodstove cast its flickering light over the darkened bedroom with Göring’s old bed, the copperplate engravings of various themes from Shakespeare’s plays, the photographs of my relatives, the picture of Henry, Leo and myself standing on the street which now seemed unbelievably old, and other objects that suddenly seemed terribly foreign, as if I had just picked them up at random somewhere.

  I stuffed page after page, sheet after sheet into the stove, and it ignited nicely. The Red Room was burning brightly. I burned everything, a whole winter’s toil and hard work, as if in a trance or some sort of stupor, fully aware of what I was really doing and yet completely out of it.

  The Red Room was burning brightly, and I would interrupt my pyromaniac activity now and then to go out to the hallway to look at myself in the mirror. I wanted to be seen by someone, it didn’t matter who, myself or someone else, it made no difference. Then I went back and continued to place in the stove page after page, sheet after sheet, in perfect numerical order. It no longer meant a thing to me.

  Franzén the publisher didn’t even sound surprised when I rang to tell him that nothing was going to come of the book. The Red Room had burned up and turned to ashes. He could have a sack of ashes if he liked. But he declined. He told me that he was going to spread a rumour that I had gone insane, and I told him to go right ahead. He said he would send over a contract to cancel the project and he never wanted to see me again. Then he told me, quite rightly, to go to hell.

  ________

  The idea had been germinating in the back of my battered head for a long time, and now it was going to be realised. I would erect a monument to the Morgan brothers.

  A warm and sultry wind was blowing. Spring had finally taken hold on the other side of the thick curtains that covered every little aperture in the flat. Over the course of a single day I proved to be extremely efficient in planning my feat with ice-cold shrewdness.

  I went down to Söder Hospital to have the two stitches removed from the crown of my head and tried to act like a completely normal convalescent. Then I collected a good thousand kronor in National Health Insurance money and went to the nearest grocery shop to buy enough tins of food for a minor war – ravioli, meatballs, Bullen’s Lager sausages, stuffed cabbage rolls, split-pea soup, vegetables, potatoes and other packaged provisions. I lugged everything up to the flat, stored it all in the appropriate places, and then dashed down to the Furniture Man and lied my head off to Greger and Birger. I told them that I’d heard from Henry. He was going to be gone all summer, but then he’d be home and everything would go back to normal. We were just supposed to keep digging down there in Greger’s Grotto, taking the route that we’d mapped out. We had his blessing. Greger, the Flask, Wolf-Larsson and the Philatelist seemed very pleased with the news, and I got out of there with my honour intact, as planned.

  Next I went over to see the Cigar Seller. He was the most difficult of the lot, that fox.

  ‘Cute cap you’ve got there,’ he said at once, and the pin-up dame behind the counter smiled her most seductive smile. ‘They’re so fashionable right now, those caps. Cuckoo’s nests, isn’t that what they’re called? But it’s a bit hot for them at the moment, isn’t it? Hee, hee.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Hmm, I see. So where’s that Morgan been keeping himself? We haven’t seen him in a long time.’

  ‘Out travelling,’ I said. ‘Henry has gone out travelling again.’

  ‘You don’t say. And where’s he off to this time?’

  ‘Back to Paris. Paris and London,’ I said.

  ‘Ah … well, he’s like a fish in water over there,’ said the Cigar Seller, giving me that disgusting, insinuating sm
ile of his. ‘It’s a sad thing about Leo.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That he had to go back in,’ said the Cigar Seller as he circled his index finger at his temple. ‘That he couldn’t take care of himself …’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said curtly. ‘In any case, I’d like five cartons of straight Camels, no filter.’

  ‘Five cartons of straight Camels,’ repeated the Cigar Seller as if it were an everyday occurrence. Then, ‘Five cartons?!’

  ‘That’s right. Five cartons,’ I told him again.

  The Cigar Seller winked at the pin-up dame, who rummaged around in the stock room, attired in her long, low-cut dress. She was back at once with five cartons, and the Cigar Seller gave me an incredulous look.

  I didn’t offer any further comment, just paid for my five cartons, no filter, thanked him and left. The Cigar Seller was shaking his head, and I’m sure that he would once again be making a circle with his index finger at his temple and then start spreading a rumour that I had gone insane and was planning to smoke myself to death.

  Time passed, one day flowed into another, losing its contours; dirty dishes and rubbish had collected in squalid, mouldy, stinking piles in the kitchen; the hallway was awash with heaps of unread and untouched morning newspapers; and beneath the English cap, my hair had finally grown out to a relatively decent length.

  I had set to work with the frenzy and accuracy that only a monomaniac who had first been betrayed, then manhandled and finally shorn, could possess. I had locked and barricaded the front door, drawn all the curtains in the already dimly lit flat, disconnected the telephone and isolated myself in the library on Hornsgatan in the middle of Stockholm, in the middle of May, during the election year and Year of the Child, 1979.