Strictly speaking, that was his only act of rebellion. He preferred staying with his gang, rather than going along to visit the shopkeeper when they were occasionally invited to dinner. Toby and Saussyr no longer spent time together. The teenagers would sit in separate corners, sulking, sighing and uttering strange sounds. The prospects for a future marriage were dim; in their fathers’ opinion, they didn’t know what was best for them. One day when they did realise what was best, it might be too late.
At first Hanck had a hard time getting used to Toby’s absence, but there was nothing to be done about it; all parents had to deal with the same thing. He listened to the organ. Sometimes that helped, sometimes it didn’t. He felt stupid and overprotective. He thought he had every right to be stupid and overprotective. It was difficult.
During one prolonged power outage the gang was holed up someplace, engrossed in a game. But since the entire city was dark, all the parents began to worry. Hanck sat in the light of a burning lantern, and the hours passed without a word from Toby. He tried to distract himself with all sorts of things, tried to dispel his nervousness, to rein it in, but without success. Finally he grew so impatient that he went out. It would be pointless to try to find his son, but he could at least talk to someone, such as the mother of one of Toby’s friends who lived in the same neighbourhood.
The power came back on just as he was knocking at her door. She asked who it was, and he replied by giving his name. She opened the door, and he stood there squinting at the light, explaining why he was there. He felt more idiotic than he’d ever felt before.
But she didn’t think he should feel that way. She invited him to come in, now that he was there anyway. They had become acquainted during the boys’ school days, meeting at various functions, but had never become good friends. They had exchanged experiences in the way that people do when they have children the same age. A smile might be enough, or a rolling of the eyes.
It turned out that she was single. Hanck assumed that his marital status was just as apparent. They were about the same age, more or less healthy, and conscientious. All the essential prerequisites for something that Hanck had never actually given a thought to until now, when he found himself seated on a prickly sofa in her home, and they both agreed, rather proudly, that ‘Boys will be boys . . . They always manage to find electricity somewhere . . .’
They both felt a sense of relief. At any rate, their loving concern for the children ended up being pushed aside.
A different mood took over. It might be called the magic from a chain of events. The electrical light that suddenly lit up the whole flat was immediately turned off because the lit candles seemed more appealing, more suitable.
Hanck was offered vodka. He gladly accepted a glass, and she kept him company, already halfway through the bottle. Good vodka. Excellent brand. He asked her how she’d got it, giving her the opportunity to incriminate her son’s father, who was involved with ‘transports’.
The more darkness that was cast upon the man, the more light was left over for Hanck. He learned that he ‘wasn’t like that at all’, that she ‘had noticed that the very first time’ and that she often ‘thought of him’ because he ‘seemed so healthy’.
Embarrassed, Hanck had confessed that he felt quite healthy. She said, ‘I am too. Word of honour.’
Then they made love on the sofa, slightly drunk, fumbling a bit, but eagerly, like two timid and lonely people. Hanck was unsure about her and came in a gush on the sofa. She lay on the cushions with her eyes closed as he wiped up after himself.
She changed position, turned onto her side. He crawled in behind her. They lay there, breathing together for a while. Then he reached over her hip and cupped his hand over her knee. It felt like a little skull.
That position, with his hand cupped around warm flesh, made him remember when he had stuck his hand inside the warm incubator and for the first time touched his new-born son. It was more than a memory, it was a reliving of the event. He heard the sounds from the apparatus, footsteps on the filthy asphalt; he noticed the scent, the warm sweetness of the infant.
Everything recurred as clearly as if it had happened quite recently, the encounter that ended with him losing himself in those eyes, the boy’s gaze that had signalled a new direction, an arrow shot into an utterly new sky.
It was just as trivial and unfathomable as what was happening on this worn sofa. The woman who felt his hand cupped over her knee had noticed that he was far away, that his thoughts were elsewhere, that he was filled with the presence of someone else.
And naturally that could be misunderstood. If he had only said something about it, their affair might have ended in another way. His life might have changed, they could have joined forces, shared each other’s burdens, taken care of their boys together. He had nothing against her, after all, and if only she had heard: ‘Just imagine that . . .’ or: ‘This reminds me of . . .’, she would have undoubtedly been willing to interpret it correctly and say: ‘I knew that you weren’t like all the others.’
But he didn’t say anything. He lay there on the sofa, caught up in his thoughts. The sofa’s upholstery prickled his skin, it started to itch. He sat up and scratched his shoulder.
The woman could interpret his silent absence in only one way. She said, ‘So it’s just thanks and goodbye?’
She wanted more, but he couldn’t do it. She did everything possible to get him in the right mood. Ardently. Almost aggressively.
When that didn’t work, she switched to a softer approach. ‘I know!’ she said and turned on a receiver. A retro-channel with music ‘the way it used to sound’. A robust and rhythmic music. ‘Now this is fucking music,’ she said. All the lyrics were about love. She had evidently heard them many times before because she knew a lot of the words by heart and bellowed along with the refrains: ‘Love, love, love . . .’
That didn’t put Hanck in the right mood either. ‘We should have lived back then,’ she said. Hanck objected, saying that things actually might have been just the opposite; maybe they had sung and written so much about love out of sheer longing, because it had been such a loveless time.
But she didn’t want to hear that. Her expression made it quite clear that she found such comments tiresome.
‘Want to turn on TomBola?’ It was approaching midnight, and the gigantic woman was bound to be involved in some lengthy foreplay.
Hanck shook his head. He had never felt turned on by her.
‘I know!’ she said, and shouted a string of words at the monitor. It started showing old, renovated movies from that past era of love. Brief stories about encounters between men and women who, seemingly without much ado, found themselves engaged in long, drawn-out acts of explicit copulation. ‘This has got to get you going!’ Hanck heard.
When this stimulation had no effect either, she gave up. ‘I was born in the wrong century,’ she said. ‘Did you see the equipment they had back then?’
Hanck ventured, ‘I’m not sure that everyone was so well endowed.’ His remark was received as sullen jealousy, and so Hanck got dressed and left.
On his way home he heard the prophet of doom chanting on the corner, as usual.
Back then he had taken approximately the same route home through the pleasure district as he did now, as he walked home from the shopkeeper’s premises on this rainy day that had started off so great and got even better.
And it was undoubtedly the same preacher on the street corner who, in apocalyptic terms, was proclaiming that the end was near. His words fell largely on deaf ears. The pleasure-seekers who took his words to heart most likely calculated that they might as well party and carry on for all they were worth.
Hanck was loaded with money. The shopkeeper always paid cash for the machines, straight into his pocket.
In a shop window he saw a red knitted jumper with a turtleneck, the kind that Toby liked. He went in and bought it and had it wrapped up in unusually fancy cellophane. The jumper was guaranteed to be a hit; he knew
that Toby would like it because he’d received similar ones before. The first time the shopkeeper had seen him wearing that type of sweater he said, ‘Oh, a turtleneck!’ Toby had never seen a turtle in his life, so the shopkeeper had drawn one on a piece of paper, and Gerlinde had taken out a soup ladle. The bowl of the ladle was made from the shell of a small turtle, trimmed with silver. The handle was ebony, with a ball of ivory at the end. It was an orgy of extinct materials.
Hanck made it home in good time for lunch. He placed the package with the jumper on Toby’s unmade bed, went out to the kitchen and prepared a simple powdered soup. As he ate, he heard the bells in three different churches strike twelve, one after the other, in the proper order.
In all the years that he’d lived there, he’d never ceased to be surprised by that order. He took it for granted that each church wanted to be heard, since the bells in other places had been taken down because the bronze was needed for other purposes. So functioning bells were rare, and it was preferable that they be allowed to strike without being disturbed by others. Perhaps it was a phenomenon that had started sometime in the past, to the annoyance of many, and then was rectified when some genius came up with the idea of a less synchronous proclaiming of the hour. However the current prevailing order had been decided was beyond Hanck’s comprehension, but he assumed that it had resulted from deep conflicts.
He cleaned up after himself in the kitchen, washed the dishes and meticulously wiped down the worktop. Sometime in the afternoon the chef would come home, hopefully in a good mood, go straight to the kitchen with his food satchel and pull out one delicacy after another, just as he usually did after working at some particularly elegant party.
Then it was important for Hanck to organise his kitchen. The counters had to be shiny, the cooker clean and preferably rubbed with baby oil. Hanck tried to follow all the rules that his son had instituted, and was often royally rewarded.
A brilliant career had been predicted for Toby. Chefs were compared to great magicians and performers. Other artists struggled with their situations, the lack of materials and distribution, but none enjoyed the same status as chefs. To maintain a consistently high level of food preparation was a struggle against the elements and a capricious market. The access to raw materials fluctuated, ranging from minimal to virtually nil. The long tradition that had previously supported the culinary arts had been broken; the gluttony of previous times now existed only among criminals; what had once stood on every man’s table were now exclusive, coveted objects that were auctioned off in premises kept under heavily armed guard.
The father’s constant worry had diminished over time; he was aware of it, both inside and out, like an old faded undershirt that he wore with reluctance, yet it continued to linger. He preferred a cautious pride, an emotion that only the next generation would see defined and described in the great book. But Hanck knew precisely how it felt. He had experienced it, pure and clear, when Toby passed his final exam with the highest marks. Each student had to prepare a dish of his choice that would be judged by a panel of well-known kitchen chefs.
Toby had chosen to make a Consommé à la Royale, a relatively simple and unsophisticated dish, an audacious choice. Hanck took it as a personal compliment from his son. He’d been given a sample portion at home, reverently partaking of twenty-three tablespoons of this heavenly soup, and with misty eyes he had stared at his son’s certificate with its stamped wax seal, printed on real paper with a watermark.
The chef had found immediate employment and now worked for an innkeeper in the archipelago, in a restaurant that Hanck himself had never visited. Reservations had to be made several months in advance.
‘It’s not your style, old man,’ Toby had said. ‘It’s very luxurious.’ He had described the innkeeper as temperamental and something of a drunk. But he had nine daughters.
Hanck had to make do with the leftovers. Toby brought home food that ordinary people hadn’t even heard of before. Fillets from animals that you saw only in imaginary pictures, or read about in stories. Shellfish and fish from secret seas.
Vegetables from underground fields. Once he sneaked out half a bottle of wine that they had drunk with particular ceremony. That was what Hanck could look forward to now. This time Toby had gone to the outer archipelago a week earlier to prepare an ‘especially brilliant menu’, as he said. That often meant that the leftovers would be more elegant than the guests.
The chiming of the church bells at three o’clock would not happen on that afternoon. The mechanism that made the bells chime was driven by electric current, and the entire electrical net in the central part of the city would short-circuit due to a local overload. But that was still a couple of hours off.
Hanck devoted himself to cleaning up his workshop, dusting off the shelves that were starting to look alarmingly bare. He had only a few machines left to inspect and sell. The inventory had lasted a long time. The machines that he had once bought in one lump purchase had provided for him and Toby for many years. His son was now able to stand on his own two feet, and Hanck would have to get by on whatever servicing and repairs might bring in. It was not a brilliant future; the machines were much too good and durable for that. But he wasn’t worried.
His life was becoming marked by stronger and more contradictory emotions. Relief because the responsibility that he had assumed for the upbringing of his son could now be considered over. And regret, for the exact same reason. Pride and relief on the one hand, regret and melancholy on the other.
Prey to such conflicting emotions, he might suddenly pause for a moment somewhere in the flat and then suddenly find himself holding a tool in his hand, or a dust-rag, or a piece of clothing that belonged to his son which he had meant to hang on a hook or put away in a wardrobe. Right now he had paused with a smelly old cushion in his hand.
One afternoon Hanck was sitting alone in Apoteket, having a drink at a window table, with a view of the street. He saw Toby come walking from Vinterplatsen, slowly, seemingly aimless. He had stopped right outside the restaurant, and Hanck had the only sensible impulse – to tap on the glass and catch Toby’s attention.
But just as he raised his hand towards the window to knock, he stopped himself, only a centimetre away from the thick pane. His impulse reined in, everything spontaneous and natural faded away to a fumbling at the air, lacking all impetus.
There was something in the boy’s expression that made him hold back, something he had never seen before, at least not as clearly or distinctly. A lost, awkward uncertainty; a young person’s view of the world, a total lack of what might be called ‘a convincing manner’.
Toby was at home in those neighbourhoods, he wasn’t lost in that sense of the word. It had to do with something that Hanck had perceived, something that touched him so deeply that he found it impossible to complete the impulse that had seemed so natural.
Toby had stood out there on the pavement a long time, and Hanck realised that the situation would only get more difficult to interpret the longer it lasted, if the boy should later discover his father behind the window, with a full view of the pavement outside.
The only thing Hanck wanted to do was to break this event, to get up from the table and go out to give his son a big, wordless hug, just to show that he was still there. Hanck did manage to get to his feet, with a sudden feeling of warmth in his breast from some sort of ‘empathy’.
But when he went outside, his son was gone. The sense of loss he had seen in his son’s eyes was now his own.
And that was often how things were lately. The only thing that could remedy the situation was some sort of stronger input.
He listened to the organ.
There were pauses, service pauses written into the composition, but the manner of interpreting and conveying the music by the twelve organists on duty had become the norm for how long a pause could last without losing the music. The longest pause had lasted for seven months and, according to those in the know, had been precisely indicated in the score. T
he twelve organists had executed the pause in accordance with the same playing schedule as usual, sitting on the bench and counting out beats, keeping the pause alive with their own heartbeats.
Hanck remembered well when the long pause was broken as a mighty tone was struck that was heard through the open church doors and in the broadcast over the whole city, leading to popular rejoicing, as if at a great declaration of peace.
He was soon lost in his thoughts, sitting there calmly, listening for the mighty tone when the bells of the nearby churches would chime three, one by one and in the proper order.
But there was no chiming at three that day.
Because it was then that the power went out. The broadcast fell silent, and the flat went dark. The sky was a leaden grey above the city, and the only sound was the pattering of raindrops against the windowpane.
At first Hanck was annoyed and irritated, but when he realised that the outage was going to last for a while, he became furious.
He had been sitting on the sofa for a while, in the dark, in the silence, when there was a knock on the door. It couldn’t be Toby; it was too early, and he had a key. Annoyed, and with adrenaline already coursing through his body, Hanck went out to the dark hall and opened the door. He saw two dark silhouettes on the landing, and the beam of a pocket torch that had just lit up his nameplate and was now aimed at the floor. At the edge of the beam of light he saw the leg of a pair of trousers. Lavender fabric.
If he had still been wrapped in the organ’s magic movement of increasing anticipation, he would have been more defenceless and would have been brutally yanked back to reality. But right now he was more wary, already prepared for conflict, unpleasantness.
The Hurricane Party Page 10
