My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (47 page)

‘That’s cosier now, isn’t it?’ she said with a smile.

‘Yes, it is,’ I said. Opened the wine and poured it into one glass.

‘Shame you can’t have any,’ I said.

‘I suppose I could have a mouthful,’ she said. ‘To taste it. But I’ll wait until the food’s ready.’

‘OK,’ I said.

On the way to the kitchen I stopped by Vanja’s bed again. Now she was lying on her back, with her arms out, as though she had been thrown there from a great height. Her head was as round as a ball and her short body more than well padded. The health visitor who examined Vanja suggested last time that we should try to slim her down. That maybe she didn’t need milk
every
time she cried.

They were crazy in this country.

I supported myself on the bed and leaned over her. She was sleeping with her mouth open and exhaling little wheezes. Now and then I could see Yngve in her face, but only in flashes; otherwise she didn’t have the slightest resemblance to me or anyone in my family.

‘Isn’t she lovely?’ Linda said, stroking my shoulder as she passed.

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Whatever that means.’

When the doctor had examined her, a few hours after birth, Linda had tried to make her say she was not only a lovely child but an
especially
lovely child. The doctor complied, but Linda was not happy with her low-key response. I had glanced at her in some surprise. Was this how maternal love expressed itself, forcing all considerations to cede to it?

Oh, what a time this had been. We were so unused to dealing with small babies that every little operation was a mixture of anxiety and pleasure.

Now we were more used to it.

In the kitchen the butter in the pan was smoking and had turned dark brown. Steam was rising from the saucepan beside it. The lid was banging against the edge. I put the two pieces of meat in the pan with a hiss, removed the potatoes from the oven and slid them into a bowl, drained the water from the broccoli, kept it on the hotplate for a few seconds, turned the steaks, remembered I had forgotten the mushrooms, got out another frying pan, put them in with two tomato halves and turned on the heat full. Then I opened the window to get rid of the frying fumes, which were sucked out of the room at once. Placed the steaks on a white dish with the broccoli and poked my head out of the window while waiting for the mushrooms. The cold air settled on my face. The offices opposite were empty and dark, but on the pavement below people drifted past, well wrapped up and silent. Some sat around a table at the back of a restaurant, which had to be doing badly, while the chefs in the adjacent room, invisible to them but not to me, shuttled back and forth between worktops and stoves, their movements unerring and fleet. A little queue had formed in front of the entrance to the adjacent jazz club, Nalen. A man wearing a cap got off the Swedish Radio bus and went through the door. Something hung from some string around his neck, probably an ID card. I turned and shook the pan of mushrooms to turn them over. Almost no one lived in this district, it consisted of office buildings and shops in the main, so when they closed at the end of the afternoon street life died. People walking here in the evening were going to restaurants, of which there was a plethora. Bringing a child up here was unthinkable. There was nothing for them.

I switched off the hotplate and put the small white mushrooms, which were now streaked with brown, on the dish. It was white with a blue line round and outside that there was a further line, of gold. It wasn’t very attractive, but I had brought it here after Yngve and I had divided the few items dad had left behind. He must have bought them with the money he got when he divorced and mum bought his share of the house in Tveit. He bought all his household requirements in one fell swoop, and something about that, the fact that everything he possessed stemmed from the same period of time, divested it of meaning, it had no aura other than one of recent domesticity and a solitary existence. For me it was different: dad’s goods and chattels which, beyond this crockery service, consisted of one pair of binoculars and one pair of rubber boots, helped to preserve him in my memory. Not in any strong, clear sense, it was more like a regular confirmation that he was also a part of my life. In my mother’s house objects played a very different role. There was, for example, a plastic bucket that they had bought some time in the 1960s when they were students and lived in Oslo, which had been placed too near a fire in the 1970s and had melted on one side into a form, I thought as a boy, that resembled a man’s face, with eyes, a crooked nose and a twisted mouth. This was still
the
bucket, the one she used when she washed something, and still it was the face I saw when I went to fill it with water and not a bucket. First hot water and then soap were poured onto the poor man’s head. The ladle she stirred porridge with was the same one she had used to stir porridge for as long as I could remember. The brown plates which we ate breakfast from when we were there were the same ones I had eaten breakfast from when I was small, sitting on the kitchen stool with my legs dangling down, in Tybakken in the 1970s. The new items she had bought were added to the rest and belonged to her, unlike dad’s possessions, which were expendable. The priest who buried him mentioned this in his sermon, he said that you have to ground your gaze, ground yourself in the world, by which he meant that my father had not done this, and he was absolutely right. But it was several years before I understood that there were also many good reasons for loosening your grip, not grounding yourself at all, just letting yourself fall and fall until you were ultimately smashed to pieces at the bottom.

What was it about nihilism that could draw minds to it in this way?

In the bedroom Vanja started to wail. I poked my head through the door and saw her standing with her hands around the rails and jumping up and down with frustration as Linda dashed across the floor towards her.

‘Food’s ready,’ I said.

‘Typical!’ she said, lifting Vanja up, lying on the bed with her, raising her sweater on one side and loosening the bra cup. Vanja instantly went quiet.

‘She’ll be back to sleep in a few minutes,’ Linda said.

‘I’ll wait,’ I said, and went back into the kitchen. Closed the window, turned off the fan, took the dishes and carried them into the living room through the hall so as not to disturb Linda and Vanja. Poured some mineral water into a glass and drank it in the middle of the floor while looking around. Some music wouldn’t be a bad idea. I stood in front of the CD racks. Picked out Emmylou Harris’s
Anthology,
which we had played a lot in recent weeks, and put it on. It was easy to protect yourself against music when you were prepared or just had it on as background, because it was simple, undemanding and sentimental, but when I was not prepared, like now, or was really listening, it hit home with me. My feelings soared and before I knew what was happening my eyes were moist. It was only then that I realised how little I normally felt, how numb I had become. When I was eighteen I was full of such feelings all the time, the world seemed more intense, and that was why I wanted to write, it was the sole reason, I wanted to touch something music touched. The human voice’s lament and sorrow, joy and delight, I wanted to evoke everything the world had bestowed upon us.

How could I forget that?

I put down the CD box and went to the window. What was it that Rilke wrote? That music raised him out of himself, and never returned him to where it had found him, but to a deeper place, somewhere in the unfinished?

It was unlikely he had been thinking about country music . . .

I smiled. Linda came through the door in front of me.

‘Now she’s asleep,’ she whispered, pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Ah, lovely!’

‘It’s probably a little cold now,’ I said, sitting on the opposite side of the table.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Can I start? I’m famished.’

‘Go on,’ I said, poured a glass of wine and put some potatoes on my plate while she helped herself to meat and vegetables.

She chatted about the projects chosen by colleagues in her class whose names I barely knew despite there being only six of them. It had been different when she started the course, then I met them regularly, up at Filmhuset and in various pubs where they gathered. It was a relatively mature class, many were in their late twenties and already established. One of them, Anders, was in
Doktor Kosmos
, another, Özz, was a well known stand-up comedian. But when Linda became pregnant with Vanja she took a year off, and then she found herself in a new class which I didn’t feel like getting to know.

The meat was as tender as butter. The red wine tasted of earth and wood. Linda’s eyes glinted in the glow from the candles. I put my knife and fork down on the plate. It was a few minutes to eight o’clock.

‘Do you want me to listen to the documentary now? I asked.

‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ Linda said. ‘You can do it tomorrow, you know.’

‘But I’m curious,’ I said. ‘And it’s not very long, is it?’

She shook her head and got up.

‘I’ll get the player then. Where do you want to sit?’

I shrugged.

‘There perhaps?’ I said, motioning towards the chair by the bookshelves. She took out the DAT player, I fetched a pen and paper, sat down and put on the headset, she raised her eyebrows, I nodded and she pressed play.

After she had cleared the table I sat there alone listening. I already knew her father’s story, but it was something else to hear it from his own mouth. His name was Roland and he was born in 1941 in one of the towns up in Norrland. He grew up without a father, with his mother and two younger siblings. His mother died when he was fifteen and from then on he was responsible for his little brother and sister. They lived alone without any adult support except for a woman who came to clean and cook for them. He went to school for four further years, became what was known in Sweden as a
gymnas
engineer, started working, played football in his free time, as goalkeeper for his local club, and thrived up there. At a dance he met Ingrid; she was the same age as him, had been to a domestic science college, worked as a secretary in a mining company office and was exceptionally beautiful. They became a couple and got married. Ingrid, however, had acting dreams, and when she was accepted for drama school in Stockholm, Roland abandoned the whole of his former life and moved with her to the capital. The life that awaited her, as an actress at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, had nothing to offer him, there was a gulf between his life as a goalkeeper and
gymnas
engineer in a provincial Norrland town and the one he had now, as the husband of a beautiful actress on the country’s most important stage. They had two children in quick succession, but that was not enough to keep them together, they soon divorced and straight afterwards he fell ill for the first time. The illness he had was boundless and caused him to fluctuate between manic heights and depressive abysses, and once it had him in its grip it never let go. From then on he was in and out of institutions. When I met him for the first time, in the spring of 2004, he hadn’t worked since the mid-1970s. Linda had not met him for many years. Even though I had seen photographs of him I still wasn’t ready for what was awaiting me when I opened the door and he stood outside. His face was utterly open: it was as though there was nothing between him and the world. He had no protection against it, he was wholly defenceless, and to see that hurt you deep into your soul.

‘So you’re Karl Ove, are you?’ he said.

I nodded and shook his hand.

‘Roland Boström,’ he said. ‘Linda’s father.’

‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ I said. ‘Come in!’

Behind me stood Linda with Vanja in her arms.

‘Hi, dad,’ she said. ‘This is Vanja.’

He stood quite still and looked at Vanja, who looked back, equally still.

‘Oohh,’ he said. His eyes glistened.

‘Let me take your coat,’ I said. ‘Then we can go in and have a cup of coffee.’

His face was open, but his movements were stiff, almost mechanical.

‘Did you do the painting?’ he said as we entered the living room.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He went to the nearest wall and stared at it.

‘Did you do the painting, Karl Ove?’

‘Yes.’

‘You made a grand job of it! You have to be very precise when you paint, and you have been. I’m painting my flat now, you see. Turquoise in the bedroom and creamy white in the sitting room. But I haven’t got any further than the bedroom, the back wall.’

‘That’s good,’ Linda said. ‘I’m sure it’ll be lovely.’

‘Yes, it will be, that’s for certain.’

Something I had never seen before had come over Linda. She adapted to him, she was subordinate to him somehow, she was his child, she gave him attention and her company while also being above him in the sense that she was constantly trying to hide – although never quite succeeding – her shame. He sat down on the sofa, I poured the coffee, went to the kitchen for the cinnamon snails we had bought that morning and returned with a dish. He ate in silence. Linda sat beside him with Vanja on her lap. She showed him her child. I had never imagined it would mean so much to her.

‘Nice buns,’ he said. ‘And the coffee was good too. Did you make it, Karl Ove?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you got a coffee machine?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good,’ he said.

Pause.

‘I wish you all the best,’ he went on to say. ‘Linda’s my only daughter. I’m happy and grateful that I can come and visit you.’

‘Do you feel like seeing some photos, dad?’ Linda asked. ‘Of Vanja when she was born?’

He nodded.

‘Take Vanja for a bit, will you,’ she said to me. The hot little bundle was placed into my arms, her eyes rolled on the brink of sleep while Linda got up and went to the shelves for the photo album.

‘Mhm,’ he said to every picture he was shown.

When they had been through the whole album he stretched out a hand for his cup of coffee on the table, raised it to his mouth in one slow, careful, well-considered movement and drank two big gulps.