My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (31 page)

‘I went ballistic,’ she said. ‘I think I wanted to kill her. I pummelled away at her. We fought for maybe ten minutes. I tipped the fridge over her. But she was stronger. Of course she was stronger. In the end she sat astride my chest and I gave up. She rang the police and they came to take me back to hospital.’

There was a pause. I looked at her, she met my gaze, quickly, like a bird.

‘I’m ashamed about this,’ she said. ‘But I thought you should know at some point.’

I didn’t know what to say. There was an abyss between the place she had been then and where we were now. At least that was how it felt. Perhaps not for her though?

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think it was clear in my mind then, either. But I remember the process. I had been manic for several weeks at the end of the summer. One evening Mikaela came to my place, I was crouching on the worktop reciting numbers. She and Öllegård took me to the acute psychiatry clinic. They gave me some sleeping tablets and asked me if Mikaela would have me at home for a few days. Afterwards, over the autumn, one phase alternated with another. And then I hit the buffers in a depression that was so vast I didn’t know if there was a way out. I avoided everyone I knew because I didn’t want anyone to be the last person to see me alive. The therapist who attended me asked if I had suicidal thoughts, I just burst into tears and she said she couldn’t be responsible for me between therapy sessions and so I was admitted to the clinic. I’ve seen the papers of the admission meeting. Several minutes pass between my being asked a question and my answering, it says, and I can remember that. It was almost impossible for me to speak, impossible to say anything, the words were so far away. Everything was so far away. My face was a stiff mask. There was no expression in it.’

She looked up at me. I sat down on the bed. She put the cup down on the table and lay back. I lay beside her. There was a heaviness in the darkness outside, a kind of body to it that was alien to a midsummer night. A train rattled across the bridge by Ridderfjärden.

‘I was dead,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t that I wanted to leave my life. I had already left it. When the therapist said I was going to be admitted to the clinic I felt relief that someone wanted to take care of me. But when I got there it was all totally impossible. I couldn’t stay. And that was when I began to hatch a plan. My sole chance of getting out was a day permit to fetch clothes and so on from my flat. Someone had to be with me, the only person I could think of was my mother.’

She fell silent.

‘But if I’d
really
wanted it I would have succeeded. That’s what I think now. I wouldn’t have needed to open the window; I could have thrown myself through it. It wouldn’t exactly have made much of a difference. But the care I took . . . Yes, if I had really wanted to, with all my heart, it would have worked.’

‘I’m happy it didn’t,’ I said, running my hand through her hair. ‘But are you afraid it will happen again?’

‘Yes.’

There was a silence.

The woman I rented the bedsit from was making a noise on the other side of the door. Someone coughed on the roof terrace above us.

‘I’m not,’ I said.

She turned her face to me.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No. I know you.’

‘Not all of me.’

‘Of course not,’ I said, and kissed her. ‘But it will never happen again, I’m sure of that.’

‘Then I’m sure too,’ she said with a smile, and put her arms around me.

The endless summer nights, so light and open, with us drifting between a selection of bars and cafés in various parts of town in black taxis, alone or with others, the drinking not menacing, not destructive, but a wave raising us higher and higher, it started slowly and darkened imperceptibly, it was as though the sky was attached to the earth, and the light airiness had less and less room, something filled it and held it firm, until at last the night was still, a wall of darkness descended in the evening and rose in the morning, and the light eddying summer night was no longer imaginable, like a dream you try in vain to recapture on waking.

Linda started at the Dramatiska Institut. The introductory course was hard, they were thrown into all kinds of difficult situations. I suppose the idea was that it was best to learn from their experience under pressure as they went along. When she cycled up to the school in the morning I went to the flat to write. I had woven the story of the angels into a story about a woman in a maternity ward in 1944, she had just given birth, her mind drifted hither and thither, but it didn’t work, the text was too remote, the distance too great. Nevertheless I continued, slogged through page after page, it didn’t matter, the most important, no, the only focus in my life was Linda.

One Sunday we were having lunch at an Östermalm café called Oscar near Karlaplan, we were sitting outside, Linda with a blanket over her legs, me eating a club sandwich, Linda a chicken salad, the street was Sunday-still, the bells below us had just pealed for the church service. Three girls sat at a table behind us, two men a little way behind them. Some sparrows were hopping on the tables closest to the road. They seemed quite tame, approached the plates left behind with small hops, nodding their whole heads as they poked their beaks into the food.

Suddenly a shadow plummets through the air, I look up, it is an enormous bird, it screams towards us, brushes the table of small birds, grabs one of them in its claws and soars upward again.

I turned to Linda. She was staring into the air with her mouth agape.

‘Did a bird of prey just take one of the sparrows or was I dreaming?’ I asked.

‘I’ve never seen anything like that before. It was horrible,’ Linda said. ‘In the middle of town? What was it? An eagle? A hawk? Poor little bird!’

‘It must have been a hawk,’ I said, laughing. The sight had excited me. Linda looked at me with smiling eyes.

‘My grandfather on my mum’s side was bald,’ I said. ‘He had only a corona of white hair left. When I was small he used to say the chicken hawk had taken it. Then he demonstrated how the hawk had set its claws in his hair and flown off with it. The proof was the corona that was left. And for a while I believed him. I squinted into the sky looking for it. But I never saw it.’

‘Not until now,’ Linda said.

‘I’m not sure it was the same one,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said with a smile. ‘When I was five I kept a little hamster in a cage. In the summer we went to our summer house, where I used to let it free. I put the cage on the lawn and let it potter around in the grass. One morning while I was on the terrace watching it, a bird of prey dived down, and whoosh, my hamster was on its way up through the air.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Yes.’

‘How terrible!’ I laughed, pushed my plate away, lit a cigarette and leaned back. ‘Grandad had a gun, I remember. Sometimes he used to shoot crows. He injured one of them – that is, he shot off a leg. It survived and it’s still at the farm now. At least, according to Kjartan, it is. A one-legged crow with staring eyes.’

‘Fantastic,’ Linda said.

‘A kind of avian Captain Ahab,’ I said. ‘And grandad patrolling the ground like the great white whale.’

I looked at her.

‘What a shame it is you never met him. You would have liked him.’

‘And you would have liked mine.’

‘You were there when he died, weren’t you?’

She nodded.

‘He had a stroke, and I went up to Norrland. But he died before I arrived.’

She grabbed my cigarette pack, looked at me, I nodded and she took one.

‘But it was my grandma I was close to,’ she said. ‘She used to come down to Stockholm to see us and took charge of everything. The first thing she did was to clean the whole house. She baked and cooked and was with us. She was really strong.’

‘Your mother is too.’

‘Yes. In fact, she is becoming more and more like her. I mean, after she stopped at the Royal Dramatic Theatre and moved into the country it’s as if she’s resumed her life from those days. She grows her own vegetables, makes all her own food, has
four
freezers full of food and produce she’s bought on offer. And now she doesn’t care what she looks like, at least not compared with how she was before.’

She looked at me.

‘Have I told you about the time my grandma saw red northern lights?’

I shook my head.

‘She saw them when she was out walking. The whole sky was red, the light billowed backwards and forwards, it must have been beautiful, but also a bit doomsday-like. When she came back and told us no one believed her. She barely believed it herself, red northern lights, who’s ever heard of that? Have you?’

‘No.’

‘But then, many, many years later, I was out with my mother in Humlegården late one night. And we saw the same thing! We have the northern lights here now and then, it’s rare, but it does happen. That night they were red! Mummy rang grandma as soon as she was home. Grandma cried. Later I read about it and discovered it was a rare meteorological phenomenon.’

I leaned across the table and kissed her.

‘Would you like a coffee?’

She nodded and I went in and ordered two coffees. When I returned and put her cup in front of her she was looking up at me.

‘I remembered another strange story,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps it isn’t so strange. But it seemed like it was. I was on one of the islands outside Stockholm. Walking in the forest on my own. Above me – and it wasn’t far above either, directly above the trees – I saw an airship gliding through the air. It was quite magical. It came from nowhere and floated above the forest and was gone. An airship!’

‘I’ve always been fascinated by airships,’ I said. ‘Ever since I was little. For me, it’s as close to fantasy as I can imagine. A world of airships! Oh, it does something to me, that does, but I’m damned if I know what. What do you think it is?’

‘If I’ve understood you correctly you used to be fascinated by divers, sailing boats, space travel and airships when you were a boy. You said once that you made drawings of divers, astronauts and sailing boats, didn’t you? Was that all?’

‘Yes, more or less.’

‘Well, what can one say about that? An insatiable travel bug? Divers, that’s as far down as you can go. Astronauts, that’s as high as you can go. Sailing boats, that’s a long way back in our history. And airships, that’s the world that never materialised.’

‘I suppose that’s right. Not as a big, dominant mode of transport anyway. It was more on the periphery, if you know what I mean. When you’re small you’re full of the world, that’s what life’s all about. It’s impossible to resist. And you don’t have to, either. At least not always.’

‘Well then?’ she said.

‘Well what?’

‘Do you long to get away now?’

‘Are you crazy? This summer must be the first since I was sixteen that I haven’t.’

We got up and headed towards Djurgården Bridge.

‘Did you know that the first airships couldn’t be steered, and so to solve the problem they tried to train birds of prey, falcons I suppose, but perhaps eagles as well, to fly with long cables in their beaks?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘All I know is that I love you.’

Even during these new days, which in quite a different way from previously were filled with routines, there was a great feeling of freedom for me. We got up early, Linda cycled off to school, I sat writing all day, unless I popped up to Filmhuset and had lunch with her, and then we met again early in the evening and were together until we went to bed. At the weekends we ate out and got drunk at night, in the bar at Folkoperan, which was our local, or at Guldapan, another favourite haunt, at Folkhemmet or the big bar in Odenplan.

Everything was as it had been, yet it wasn’t, for imperceptibly, so imperceptibly that it seemed as if it wasn’t happening, something in our lives lost its lustre. The fire that drove us towards each other and into the world no longer burned as bright. Atmospheres could spring up. One Saturday I awoke thinking how nice it would be to have some time for myself, visit some second-hand bookshops, go to a café and read the papers . . . We got up, went to the nearest café, ordered breakfast – porridge, yoghurt, toast, eggs, juice and coffee – I read the papers, Linda stared down at the table or into the room, said at length, do you have to read, couldn’t we talk? Yes, of course, I said, closing the newspaper, and we chatted, it was fine, the tiny black spot in my heart was barely noticeable, a little hankering to be alone and read in peace without anyone demanding anything of me was forgotten in a flash. But then came the time when it wasn’t, when on the contrary it led to ensuing atmospheres and actions. If you really love me, you have to come to me without demands, I thought but didn’t say, I wanted her to notice on her own.

One evening Yngve called, he was wondering if I wanted to go with him and Asbjørn to London, I said, yes, of course, perfect. As I rang off Linda was watching me from the other side of the room.

‘Who was that?’ she asked.

‘Yngve. He wanted me to go to London with him.’

‘I hope you didn’t say yes?’

‘I did. Shouldn’t I have done?’

‘But we were going to travel together. You can’t travel with him before you travel with me!’

‘What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with you.’

She looked down at the book she was reading. Her eyes were black. I didn’t want her to lose her temper. But to have the disagreement hanging in the air was intolerable for me, I needed clarity.

‘I haven’t spent a moment with Yngve for an incredibly long time. You have to remember I don’t know anyone here except your friends. Mine live in Norway.’

‘Yngve has just been here, hasn’t he.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘Just go then,’ she said.

‘OK,’ I said.

Afterwards, when we were in bed, she apologised for having been so uncharitable. It didn’t matter, I said. It was nothing.

‘We haven’t been apart since we got together,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it’s time we were.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘We can’t live on top of each other for the rest of our lives,’ I said.