My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (18 page)

Misology, the distrust of words, as was the case with Phyrros, Phyrromania; was that a way to go for a writer? Everything that can be said with words can be contradicted with words, so what’s the point of dissertations, novels, literature? Or put another way: whatever we say is true we can also always say is untrue. It is a zero point and the place from which the zero value begins to spread. However, it is not a dead point, not for literature either, for literature is not just words, literature is what words evoke in the reader. It is this transcendence that validates literature, not the formal transcendence in itself, as many believe. Paul Celan’s mysterious cypher-like language has nothing to do with inaccessibility or closed-ness, quite the contrary, it is about opening up what language normally does not have access to but which we still, somewhere deep inside us, know or recognise, or if we don’t, allows us to discover. Paul Celan’s words cannot be contradicted with words. What they possess cannot be transformed either, the word only exists there, and in each and every single person who absorbs it.

The fact that paintings and, to some extent, photographs were so important for me had something to do with this. They contained no words, no concepts, and when I looked at them what I experienced, what made them so important was also non-conceptual. There was something stupid in this, an area that was completely devoid of intelligence, which I had difficulty acknowledging or accepting, yet which perhaps was the most important single element of what I wanted to do.

Six months after I had read Geir’s book, I emailed him and asked if he would like to write an essay for
Vagant
, where I was on the editorial staff. He said he would, we emailed back and forth, all in formal and factual terms. A year later, when from one day to the next I left Tonje and my life with her in Bergen, I emailed to ask if he knew of anywhere to live in Stockholm; he didn’t, but I could stay at his place while I was looking for something. Sounds good, I wrote. Fine, he wrote, when are you coming? Tomorrow, I wrote. Tomorrow? he wrote.

Some hours later, after a night on the train from Bergen to Oslo, and a morning on the train from Oslo to Stockholm, I schlepped my bags from the platform down to the corridors beneath Stockholm Central in search of a left-luggage locker big enough to take them both. I had spent the whole journey reading to avoid thinking about what had happened in the preceding days, all of which was the reason for my departure, but now in the midst of the thronging crowds of people heading to or from commuter trains it was impossible to suppress my unease any longer. Feeling cold to the depths of my soul, I walked down the corridor. After stowing the two bags in separate lockers and putting the two keys in the pocket where I normally kept my house keys, I entered the toilet and washed my face with cold water to make myself feel more alive. I studied myself in the mirror for a few seconds. My face was pale and slightly bloated, hair unkempt and eyes . . . yes, my eyes . . . staring, but not in an active outward-facing fashion, as though they were looking for something, more as if what they saw was drawn into them, as if they sucked everything in.

Since when had I had such eyes?

I turned on the hot-water tap and held my hands underneath it for a while, until the heat began to spread through them, tore off a sheet of paper from the dispenser and dried them, threw it in the bin beside the sink. I weighed 101 kilos and had no hopes for the future, but now I was here, that was something, I thought, and then went out, up the steps and into the concourse, where I stood in the middle, surrounded by people on all sides while I tried to devise some kind of plan. It was just past two o’clock. I was due to meet Geir here at five. So I had three hours to kill. I had to eat. I needed a scarf. And I ought to have a haircut.

I walked out of the station and stopped at the taxi stand. The sky was grey and cold, the air damp. To the right was a jumble of roads and concrete bridges, behind them a lake, behind that a line of monument-like buildings. To the left, a broad street full of traffic; directly in front of me a street which some way off swung left alongside a filthy wall, beyond that a church.

Which way to go?

I placed one foot on a bench, rolled a cigarette, lit it and started walking down to the left. After a hundred metres or so I stopped. It didn’t look promising, everything here had been built with the cars which whizzed past in mind, and I turned and went back, tried the road ahead instead, which led into a wide avenue with an enormous brick department store on the other side. Beyond that was a kind of square, sunk into the ground as it were, from which rose a large glass construction on the right.
KULTURHUSET
it said in red letters, and I went in, took the escalator up to the first floor on which there happened to be a café, bought a baguette with meatballs and red cabbage salad and sat down by a window from where I had a view of the square and the street in front of the department store.

Was I going to live here? Was this where I lived now?

Yesterday morning I had been at home in Bergen.

Yesterday, that was yesterday.

Tonje had accompanied me to the train. The artificial light above the platforms, the passengers outside the carriages, who were already prepared for the night and talking in hushed voices, the rolling of suitcase wheels over the tarmac. She cried. I didn’t, just hugged her, brushed the tears from her cheeks, she smiled through the tears and I boarded the train, thinking I didn’t want to see her walk away, didn’t want to see her back, but I couldn’t stop myself, peered out of the window and watched her walk down the platform and disappear through the exit.

Would she stay there?

In our house?

I took a bite of the baguette and looked down at the black and white checked square to divert my thoughts. The line of shops on the other side was black with people. In and out of the doors to the Metro they went, in and out of the tunnel to the gallery, up and down the escalators. Umbrellas, coats, jackets, bags, plastic carrier bags, rucksacks, hats, buggies. Above them cars and buses.

The clock on the department store wall said ten minutes to three. Perhaps it would be best to have a haircut now to avoid having to rush it at the end, I thought. Going down the escalator, I took out my mobile phone and perused the names saved under contacts, but I didn’t feel I could ring any of them, there was too much that would have to be explained, too much that would have to be said, too little in return, so emerging into the dreary March afternoon again with a few heavy snowflakes falling, I switched it off and put it back in my pocket before heading down Drottninggatan on the lookout for a hairdresser’s. Outside the department store a man was playing the harmonica. Or rather, he wasn’t playing, he was just blowing into the instrument with all his might while jerking his body backwards and forwards. His hair was long, his face ravaged. The immense aggression he radiated flowed straight into me. As I passed him fear pounded in my veins. Behind him, by the entrance to a shoe shop, a young woman was bending down over a buggy and lifting up a child. It was swathed in a kind of fur-lined bag, with its head wreathed by a fur-lined hat, and staring straight ahead, seemingly unaffected by what was happening to it. She squeezed it to her chest with one hand and opened the shoe-shop door with the other. The snow that was falling melted as it hit the ground. A man was sitting on a folding chair holding a large sign proclaiming that fifty metres to the left there was a restaurant where you could buy a planked steak for the sum of 109 kroner. Planked steak? I wondered. Many of the women passing by looked alike: they were in their fifties, wore glasses, coats, were plump and carrying bags inscribed with Åhléns, Lindex, NK, Coop or Hemköp. There were fewer men of the same age, but many of them looked alike too, albeit in different ways. Glasses, sandy hair, pallid eyes, greenish or greyish jackets with a touch of casualness about them, more often thin than fat. I longed to be alone, but there was no chance of that, and I wandered up the street. All the faces I saw were of strangers, and would continue to be so for weeks and months as I didn’t know a soul here, but that didn’t prevent me from feeling that I was being watched. Even when I lived on a tiny island far out into the sea with only three inhabitants I felt I was being watched. Was there something wrong with my coat? My collar, shouldn’t it be turned up like that? My shoes, did they look the way shoes should? Was I walking a bit oddly? Leaning too far forward maybe? Oh, I was an idiot, what an idiot. The flame of stupidity burned bright inside me. Oh, such an idiot I was. What a stupid, idiotic bloody idiot. My shoes. My coat. Stupid, stupid, stupid. My mouth, shapeless, my thoughts, shapeless, my feelings, shapeless. Everything was spongy. There was nothing firm anywhere. Nothing solid, nothing vital. Soft, spongy and stupid. Oh fuck. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, how stupid I was. I couldn’t find any peace in a café, within a second I had taken in everyone there, and I continued to do so, and every glance that came my way penetrated into my innermost self, jangled about inside me, and every movement I made, even if only flicking through a book, was likewise transmitted outwards to them, as a sign of my stupidity, every movement I made said, ‘This is an idiot sitting here.’ So it was better to walk, for then the looks disappeared one by one, admittedly they were replaced by others, but they never had time to establish themselves, they just glided past, there goes an idiot, there goes an idiot, there goes an idiot. That was the chorus as I walked. And I knew it didn’t make sense, this was of my own making, inside myself, but it didn’t help, because they still got inside, into my inner self, they rumbled around inside me, and even the most maladjusted of these people, even the ugliest, the fattest and the shabbiest of them, even that woman with the drooping jaw and the vacant idiot-eyes, even she could look at me and then say there was something wrong with me. Even her. That was how things were. There I was, walking through the crowds beneath the darkening sky, through falling snowflakes, past shop after shop with illuminated interiors, alone in my new town, without a thought as to how things would be here, because that made no difference, it really didn’t make any difference, all I was thinking about was that I had to get through this. ‘This’ was life. Getting through it, that was what I was doing.

I found a hairdresser’s I hadn’t seen when I passed by the first time, in a passage beside the big department store. I just had to take a seat. No wash, my hair was moistened with water from a spray. The hairdresser, an immigrant, a Kurd I guessed, asked how I wanted it, I said short, indicated with my thumb and first finger how short I had in mind, he asked what I did, I said I was a student, he asked where I came from, I said Norway, he asked if I was here on holiday, I said yes, and that was it. My locks fell on the floor around the chair. They were almost completely black. That was strange because when I looked in the mirror I had fair hair. It had always been like that. Even though I knew my hair was dark I couldn’t see it. I saw fair hair, as it had been in my boyhood and teens. Even in photos I saw fair hair. Only when it had been cut and I saw it separately, against white floor tiles for example, as here, could I see it was dark, almost black.

In the street half an hour later, the cold air gathered around my shorn head like a helmet. It was almost four o’clock, the sky almost pitch black. I went into an H&M shop I had spotted earlier to buy a scarf. The men’s department was in the basement. As I was unable to find the scarves after searching around for a while I went to the counter and asked the young girl standing there where they were.

‘
Ursäkta
?’ she said in Swedish.

‘Where do you keep the scarves?’ I repeated in Norwegian.

‘
Jag fattar tyvärr inte vad du säger
,’ she answered, before saying, in English: ‘I’m sorry. What did you say?’

‘The scarves,’ I said in Norwegian, holding my neck. ‘Where are they?’

‘Do you speak English?’ she said. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Scarves,’ I said in English. ‘Do you have any scarves?’

‘Oh, scarves,’ she said. ‘We call them
halsduk
. No, I’m sorry. It’s not the season for them any more.’

Back in the street, I wondered for a second whether to go into Åhléns, as the large department store was called, to look for a scarf there, but rejected the idea, I had been through enough idiocy for one day, and instead started to walk up the street again, towards the boarding house where I had stayed two years previously, for no other reason than that it was better to walk with a goal than without. On the way I passed a second-hand bookshop. The shelves inside were tall and so close to each other that there was barely room to turn around. After casting an indifferent glance at the spines of the books I was about to leave when I caught sight of a Hölderlin on the top of a pile at the corner of the counter.

‘Is this for sale?’ I asked the assistant, a man of my own age who had already been eyeing me for a while.

‘Of course,’ he said blankly.

Sånger
it was called. Was that perhaps a translation of
Die vaterländischen Gesänge
?

I flicked through to the colophon page. The year of publication was 2002. So it was quite new. But there was nothing about the title there, so I skimmed through the afterword, stopping at every word in italics. And yes. There it was:
Die vaterländischen Gesänge. Hymns of the Fatherland
. But why on earth had they translated the title as
Sånger
?

It didn’t matter.

‘I’ll take it,’ I said, again in Norwegian. ‘How much do you want for it?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘How much does it cost?’

‘Let me have a look and I’ll check . . . A hundred and fifty kroner, please.’

I paid, he put the book in a little bag and handed it to me with the receipt, which I shoved into my back pocket before opening the door and leaving with the bag dangling from my hand. Outside it was raining. I stopped, took off the rucksack, stuffed the bag in it, put the rucksack back on and continued along the brightly illuminated shopping street, where the snow which had been falling for several hours had no left no trace other than a grey slushy layer on all surfaces above ground level: roof projections, windowsills, the heads on the statues, floors of verandas, awnings, which sagged making the canvas bulge close to the outer frame, tops of walls, dustbin lids, hydrants. But not the street. It lay black and wet, glistening in the lights from windows and street lamps.