Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  The desk was easily cleared. Everything having to do with my naïve and modern pastiche of The Red Room had gone into the fire, consumed by the flames. I piled up books and other scribblings on the floor, keeping only my own talismans, such as a fox skull that I once found in the woods, a crab shell that I’d been given by a couple of fishermen on the Lofoten Islands, a few large pebbles and an ashtray in the shape of a satyr into whose gaping mouth you flicked the ashes. I needed these talismans so as not to lose sight of myself.

  Then I went to work, toiling away like someone possessed, working at least twenty hours a day with only occasional breaks for food and rest. I had smoked nearly all of my five cartons of unfiltered Camels and felt none the worse for it.

  I recounted everything I knew and was able to find out about the brothers Henry and Leo Morgan, because I felt it was my duty to do so. I can be said to belong to a generation that suffers from an inadequate sense of duty – duty is such a horribly abstract concept that it must be constantly applied to the individual and personal realm in order to become in any way tangible. At the very least, a person has to fulfil his duty to himself. But in this case, I felt it was my absolute duty to tell the truth about Henry and Leo Morgan. Perhaps it was also a form of therapy in order to keep going, the only means I had to endure all the waiting and anxiety, which are the unmistakable trademarks of our era.

  I now knew no more than what I have already recounted, and perhaps even a bit less since occasionally I was forced to extrapolate and embellish, filling in the big gaps. The result of my efforts was that well over six hundred pages lay on the desk in the library. No one had disturbed me, the rest of the world had vanished, the words had simply poured out, and the brothers had been given the monument that they deserved. Now it didn’t matter what happened; they were inviolable.

  I was totally prepared, any day now, to read about Henry and Leo Morgan in the newspaper. It might be something along the lines of: the bodies of two men, aged thirty-five and thirty respectively, were found in a ditch somewhere inland; or that the disfigured corpses of two male individuals, impossible to identify, had emerged from under the ice in some damned river somewhere in Sweden. Or maybe the Cigar Seller – who read every single weekly magazine backwards and forwards – would come storming up with a big feature article in which Henry the idiot candidly discussed his numerous adventures in the underworld now that he was a safe distance away, from an island in the Caribbean. That was where he had always longed to go, and he had apparently managed it because of the enormous sums of money that he had come across on various byways.

  But maybe I had also written all of this down because of another possibility – maybe they really were in trouble and Henry had been forced to use that old submachine-gun. Maybe he had done what he’d always wanted to do to the boundless Evil that held Leo in its grip. Maybe all of this was in defence of a crime that had already been committed, was going to be committed, or simply should have been committed. I wasn’t quite sure, but the possibility existed that in court I would have to present my six hundred pages as a plaidoyer d’un fou et son frère, a defence for the brothers Henry and Leo Morgan, because it was highly likely that they would judged by some sort of jury.

  ________

  At any rate, that was the situation on that day when I could no longer tell the days apart except by first sorting through the piles of newspapers to find the latest issue. It told me that it would soon be Midsummer and that Sweden was experiencing a heatwave. But I didn’t give a damn about that.

  Suddenly the doorbell rang. That damned bell broke through an intense silence that had lasted more than a month. Cold shivers immediately ran down my back.

  The front door was barricaded with a heavy mahogany cabinet, and I no longer had any idea how I’d managed to move it there under my own steam. I shouted through the barricade and the closed doors, asking who it was. My voice creaked and wheezed because I hadn’t used it in a very long time.

  ‘Laundry, Egon’s Laundry,’ I heard from the landing.

  By mustering all my strength and then some, I managed to make a crack between the mahogany cabinet and the front doors so that I could open them for the laundry delivery boy. He gave a start when he saw my capped head appear, and he gave me a very suspicious, scrutinising look, as if we’d never seen each other before. Nor did we exchange many words. I carried the box into the hallway, found some money, and paid him. I hesitantly accepted his fountain pen to sign the laundry receipt, holding it up against the door. All of a sudden I was uncertain what name to write. Finally my own name came back to me; I scribbled it down and then said goodbye to the delivery boy.

  As soon as I closed the door, I went over to the big, gilded, full-length mirror in the hallway to examine my appearance. I hadn’t shaved in ages, and I’d never in my life had such a thick beard. Maybe the blow to my head had upset my hormonal balance; maybe I was finally on my way to becoming more masculine, more grown-up.

  By this time my hair had grown out, at least, and I could get rid of the cap, tossing it up onto the hat shelf. My face looked extremely thin under the beard, and I had acquired some ridiculous spasms, some sort of tics, under my eyes. The twitching went on incessantly but was extremely subtle. Even so, the tics seemed to disfigure my whole face, and that annoyed me. But that was presumably the price this whole business had cost me, damage that I would have to learn to tolerate. Perhaps the tics were just vexing enough that they would make my face more interesting, make me look mature and experienced. That’s the sort of thing that women always appreciate.

  After a general inspection of my physical state in the mirror out in the hallway, I went into the bathroom and took off my stinking blue overalls and climbed into the shower. Then I shaved with great devotion and felt myself liberated, illuminated and baptised.

  Next I headed for the wardrobe, where I put on nice clean clothes. I found a shirt in the laundry box. It was a blue-and-white checked shirt with the initials ‘W.S.’ embroidered under the manufacturer’s label inside the collar. It fit me perfectly. Strangely enough, my neck seemed to have grown bigger into the bargain. My collar size had never been this big. I didn’t have a tie that matched the shirt, so I went into Henry’s room and opened his wardrobe. I found a thin burgundy number that looked good against the shirtfront, under which my heart was fighting a battle that was a bit more fierce than usual.

  For me nothing more remained but deep silence and a long period of waiting, or so I thought. My main interest was once again transferred to that gilded mirror with the cherubs in the hallway. I could spend hours studying my own image, trying to figure out what had happened. My hair had regained its previous appearance, my cheeks looked hollow, but no more than was tolerable, my complexion was pale and sallow, and under my eyes I had those tics.

  I would soon be twenty-five years old, I had spent a quarter of a century on this earth, and perhaps I would still be here another quarter of a century later. It sounded like a very long time, but it didn’t particularly feel that way. It felt as if I hadn’t learned a thing, nothing at all during those twenty-five dramatic years between the Cold War of the fifties and the Iranian revolution of the seventies. I still felt ignorant and inexperienced, and it didn’t matter that the image in the mirror said something completely different. It showed a lean, squinty-eyed young man who looked as if he’d been through fire, though without going up in flames.

  I knotted my tie over and over again, trying to teach myself how to make that perfect Windsor knot the way Henry Morgan always did. I thought I was making progress and looked quite respectable. It felt luxurious to walk around wearing a suit and tie all day long without accomplishing a thing. I pretended not to notice that I was on my way to falling apart, that I was on my way to becoming seriously ill. If I fell apart, I was going to do it with dignity; Henry Morgan would have approved.

  Not even a whole year had passed since I’d first met him, and I’d known Leo for barely six months. Everything had happened so fast t
hat it felt as if we’d been brothers all our lives. One measly little year, I thought. Exactly one year earlier I was a whole different person, so much younger, so much more naïve and considerably more gullible. I had jumped at the chance to take the job at the golf course that my friend Errol Hansen from the Danish embassy had arranged for me. I had spent a whole summer sitting on various lawnmowers and tractors, and in the evenings I had hung out with Rocks at the bar. I had tackled huge projects that were equally noble and grandiose, just like every other angry young literary firebrand. I was bitterly forced to admit that art and history would get along fine without me.

  When I later met Franzén the publisher, he managed to convince me otherwise. He assured me of my great talents as a satirist, and he got me to write an entire pastiche of Strindberg’s novel The Red Room, in honour of the hundredth anniversary of its publication. That too had gone through the fire, but unlike myself it had burned up and turned to ashes. It felt like only yesterday, that late summer evening by the pool at the golf course country club when Franzén and I came to an agreement over drinks. We stood there spouting off about grand plans for the future as we stared at Wilhelm Sterner, the secret benefactor of the club – non videre sed esse – who came sailing into the cocktail party wearing his impeccable light summer jacket, like some sort of unreal zeppelin that was not in touch with the ground. Maud the courtesan had stood in his shadow, looking supremely indifferent. I’d never had a chance to study her at closer quarters.

  And then the Trouble started. I was the victim of a burglary at my flat. During the festival with Bob Dylan in Göteborg, the thieves managed to make off with practically everything I owned, except for my two typewriters and a few odds-and-ends of little value. And then everything else happened. I hung out at the Europa Athletic Club trying to box my way out of my depression, met the whiz-kid Henry Morgan, and moved into this flat on Hornsgatan. Hardly a year later I found myself mixed up in a tragedy, a scandalous story of the highest order. I had paid a high price. The result was strange obsessions and tics under my eyes, as well as a sort of testament that was more than six-hundred typed pages in which I attempted to redress the wrongs of the Morgan brothers and create a monument to the Truth. It had turned into a bombshell, and to allow it to be published would presumably be equal to committing public suicide.

  The secret would no doubt remain within the gloomy walls of this enormous flat, at least for the time being. For my part, all that was left was deep silence and a long period of waiting, or so I imagined.

  ________

  The waiting turned out not to be very long at all, whatever it was that I was waiting for. I was standing in front of the mirror with the cherubs, looking at the tics under my eyes, when the doorbell rang. The sound made me shiver. I shouted through the barricade and the closed doors to ask who it was. There was no answer, so I shoved the huge mahogany cabinet aside a bit so that it was possible to peer through the glass doors at the landing. It appeared to be a woman standing there, so I dared open up unarmed. What then ensued was one of those moments of long-lasting silence when you manage to think about a lot of things – you manage to formulate your last wishes in verse, count to ten thousand, or bite all your fingernails, if that’s what you want to do. I stood in the doorway, clinging to the door handle. She stood motionless on the landing and didn’t say a word.

  I knew immediately who she was, and she knew immediately who I was. I hated her and it occurred to me that I ought to kill her. That would be the only acceptable revenge. But death was impossible. It took only a cursory, passing glance to realise that this woman was absolutely inviolable. No matter how much you might hate her, you had to be prepared to forgive her and never harm so much as a hair on her radiant head.

  She looked exactly the way I remembered her, a former real hot number that I had seen from a distance at the country club and in a couple of faded photos that Henry had always carried in his wallet. There really was something particularly Asian about her appearance. She might have been the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She carried her forty years with all the mature elegance that could make a king give up his kingdom. Her long, chestnut-brown hair had a few light streaks in it, the arc of her eyebrows, her nose, mouth, chin – all her features had been sketched by an inspired God and Creator at His very best. Here stood His homage to humanity. The black dress with its two red cherries set off her deep tan, so unusual for the time of year, without making her seem overly robust in any vulgar or exaggerated way. There was a glint of restlessness in her eyes, of restrained ardour and passion, which gave her perfection a very delicate, appealing, human cast. She smelled of patchouli oil, and her appearance was as precisely balanced and chic as the role demanded. Her shoes and handbag bore the monogram of a world-famous designer, and presumably this citoyenne du monde had purchased her entire wardrobe from original designs, and at all the proper places. She was intimately familiar with the great cities of the world, she had practically grown up in embassies in New York, London, Paris, Vienna, Munich, Tokyo, Jakarta and so on.

  It may have been several minutes that we stood there studying each other in deep silence, like two heavyweights at the weighing-in before a match, appraising the slightest move of the opponent. But there would never be any match, not between the two of us. No one would dare harm a hair on her head. I myself was already lost, punch-drunk.

  She was the first one to speak, breaking the intense silence in the doorway.

  ‘I take it that you’re Klas,’ she said in a deep voice, an alto.

  ‘Um-hm,’ I said. ‘And you must be Maud.’

  I stuck out my hand, and hers was very soft and slightly damp. She was clearly not lacking in nerve.

  ‘We can’t stand here all day,’ I said. ‘Would you like to come in?’

  ‘If I’m not disturbing …’ she said.

  ‘How could you be disturbing me?’

  ‘I just thought, if you were working, since you’re a writer.’

  ‘Not at the moment. Right now I’m unemployed.’

  ‘You look as if you were going to celebrate something special, dressed in that suit. Oh, is this what the place looks like!’

  ‘Haven’t you ever been here before?’

  ‘Never,’ said Maud. ‘Henry wanted to keep it all to himself.’

  Maud’s perfume spread its scent over the hallway, which was otherwise filled with rubbish and smelled terrible.

  ‘Were you scared?’ asked Maud, nodding at the imposing mahogany cabinet that barricaded the doors to the flat.

  ‘Scared?’ I said. ‘Oh, I was just going to do some cleaning, as you can see.’

  ‘Would you be willing to show me around?’ she asked. ‘I’ve always wondered what it looked like in here.’

  I led the way into the dark sitting room and suddenly started chattering as if possessed, like some kind of maniac or museum guard on drugs, without thinking about what I was actually saying. I hadn’t talked to anyone in more than a month, and Maud listened politely. We walked through the sitting room with the armchairs, the Chippendale furniture that old Morgonstjärna had won in a poker game from Ernst Rolf back in the thirties, the fireplace with the two statues of Truth and Falsehood, the Persian rugs, the cracked lampshades with the long dangling fringe, Leo’s chess table, the ashtray on a stand, the table with the top made from yellowish African giallo antico marble, the palms on their pedestals and everything else that filled up the room, giving it a certain museum-like quality.

  Then we strolled through the dark and gloomy service corridors to the piano room with the sofa with the black tassels. There we could study Henry Morgan’s composition on the sheets of music that he had strewn all over the floor, leaving them there as if for only a brief moment. Maud wanted to see his bedroom, and I showed her everything she asked to see, even Leo’s two rooms, which still reeked of incense. They too had been abandoned in the greatest haste, as if at an air-raid warning or an earthquake.

  I talked myself hoarse, going on non-sto
p about the weather, about the flat, about various details, about Henry and Leo Morgan, as well as a good deal about myself.

  ‘The whole place is so dark and gloomy,’ said Maud. ‘Why do you have all the curtains drawn? Do you think there’s a war going on?’

  ‘It’s just supposed to be like this,’ I said curtly. ‘Night exists in this flat as a perpetual possibility.’

  ‘But it’s the height of summer outside!’ said Maud. ‘As pale as you are, it would do you good to get a little sun.’

  Without considering my view of the matter, she went over to the windows in the sitting room and opened the curtains. Light came pouring in, and I was instantly blinded and had to squint. Suddenly the flat was exposed in all its decrepitude. It had become unbelievably cluttered and filthy. The flat was in a state of decay, and of the very worst kind. Henry would have exploded with fury if he had come home, and presumably he would have thrown me out on the street. There was even an old decorated branch, withered and dried-up, left over from Lent, lying in the corner.

  ‘Now it’s starting to look like something,’ said Maud. ‘Although it’s not at all the way Henry described it.’

  ‘What did he say it was like?’

  ‘Threadbare,’ said Maud. ‘Exceedingly threadbare …’

  The sitting room suddenly looked quite different, in the new light. I caught sight of things and objects that I had never noticed before, possibly because it had always been so dark. Maud walked around looking at the art. She seemed to be making discoveries, finding a Lundquist here and a Nordström there. I followed her, listening to her very knowledgeable comments, as if she had taken that pleasant curving walk a thousand and one times between Bukowski’s Gallery on Arsenalsgatan and Svenskt Tenn on Strandvägen – and I suppose that she probably had.