My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (49 page)

‘You don’t need to change anything,’ I said. ‘It’s completely finished.’

‘Is it good, do you think?’

‘Oh yes. Brilliant.’

I placed the headset on the player, stretched and blinked a few times.

‘I was moved,’ I said.

‘By what?’

‘His life is a tragedy, in a way. But when he talks about it, he fills it with life, we know this is a
life
. With a value all of its own, irrespective of what happened to him. Obvious perhaps, but it’s one thing to know this and another to feel it. And I did when I was listening to him just now.’

‘I’m so pleased,’ she said. ‘So perhaps I don’t need to do any more than adjust the sound levels. I can do that on Monday. But are you sure?’

‘As sure as I can be,’ I said, getting up. ‘Now I’m going for a smoke.’

Downstairs, in the backyard, the wind was cold. The only two children in the block, a boy of nine or ten and his sister of eleven or twelve, were kicking a ball to each other by the gate at the other end. Intense loud music was coming from the Glenn Miller Café beyond the wall in the street behind them. Their mother, who lived alone with them on the top floor and looked seriously tired, had the window open. From the characteristic clinks and clunks I could hear she was washing up. The boy was plump, and probably to compensate had his hair cropped to make him seem tough. He always had blue bags under his eyes. When his sister had friends at home he performed ball tricks or ostentatious climbing feats on the monkey bars. On evenings like this, when they were alone and she had nothing better to do than play with her brother, he was happier, more energetic and keener to play well. Now and then they shouted and screamed up there, sometimes all three of them, but usually it was just him and his mother. I had seen the father come a couple of times to collect them – a small thin sickly guy with a moustache who obviously drank too much.

The sister went to the fence and sat down. She took a mobile phone from her pocket and it was so dark where she was sitting that the blue light of the display lit up the whole of her face. Her brother began to kick the ball against the wall, again and again. Bang. Bang. Bang.

His mother poked her head out of the window.

‘Will you stop that!’ she yelled. The boy bent forward quietly, picked up the ball and sat beside his sister, who turned away without changing the focus of her attention for a second.

I looked up at the two illuminated towers. A stab of tenderness and pain went through me.

Oh Linda, oh Linda.

At that moment the neighbour who lived next door to us came through the entrance. I watched her as she lightly closed the gate behind her. She was in her fifties and the way that women of this age are nowadays, that is with a certain artificially maintained youthfulness. She had a mass of dyed blonde hair, was wearing a fur jacket and pulling a small inquisitive dog on a taut leash. Once she had told me she was an artist, although I was none the wiser about what it was she did. She wasn’t exactly the Munch type. Sometimes she could be very chatty, telling me she was going to Provence in the summer or had a weekend trip to New York or London planned. Sometimes she said nothing and could walk past me without saying a word. She had a teenage daughter who had given birth at the same time as Linda and whom she bossed around.

‘Weren’t you going to give up smoking?’ she asked, not slowing her pace.

‘The clock hasn’t chimed twelve yet,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’s going to snow tonight. You mark my words.’

She let herself in. I waited, then threw my cigarette end in the flower pot someone had put by the wall for this purpose and followed. My knuckles were red from the cold. I bounded up the stairs three at a time, opened the door, took off my coat and went into Linda, who was watching TV on the sofa. I leaned forward and kissed her.

‘What are you watching?’ I asked.

‘Nothing much. Shall we watch a film?’

‘Yes, let’s.’

I went to the DVD rack.

‘What would you like to see?’

‘No idea. You choose.’

I ran my eye along the row. When I bought films it was always with the idea that they should broaden my horizons. They should have their own special imagery I could assimilate, or forge a relationship with places whose potential I hadn’t considered or be set in an unfamiliar time or culture. In short, I chose films for all the wrong reasons, because when evening came and we wanted to see one of them we could never be bothered to watch two hours of some Japanese event from the 1960s in black and white or the great open expanses of Rome’s suburbs, where the only thing that happened was that some stunningly beautiful people met who were fundamentally alienated from the world, as tended to be the case with films of that era. No, when evening came and we sat down to watch a film we wanted to be entertained. And it had to be with as little effort and inconvenience as possible. It was the same with everything. I hardly read books any more; if there was a newspaper around I preferred to read that. And the threshold just kept rising. It was idiotic because this life gave you nothing, it only made time pass. If we saw a good film it stirred us and set things in motion, for that is how it is: the world is always the same, it is the way we view it that changes. Everyday life, which could bear down on us like a foot treading on a head, could also transport us with delight. Everything depended on the seeing eye. If the eye saw the water that was everywhere in Tarkovsky’s films, for example, which changed the world into a kind of terrarium, where everything trickled and ran, floated and drifted, where all the characters could melt away from the picture and only coffee cups on a table were left, filling slowly with the falling rain, against a background of intense, almost menacing green vegetation, yes, then the eye would also be able to see the same wild existential depths unfold in everyday life. For we were flesh and blood, sinews and bone, around us plants and trees grew, insects buzzed, birds flew, clouds drifted, rain fell. The eye which gave meaning to the world was a constant possibility, but we almost always decided against it, at least it was like that in our lives.

‘Are we up for
Stalker
?’ I asked, turning to her.

‘OK as far as I’m concerned,’ she said. ‘Put it on and let’s see.’

I inserted the DVD in the player, switched off the ceiling light, poured a glass of red wine, sat down beside Linda, took the remote and chose the language of the subtitles. She cuddled up to me.

‘Does it matter if I fall asleep?’ she asked.

‘Not at all,’ I answered, putting my arm around her.

I had seen the introduction with the man who wakes up in the dark damp room at least three times. The table with all the small objects shaking as a train passes. The man shaving in front of the mirror, the woman who tries to hold him back but fails. I had never got much further than that.

Linda placed her hand on my chest and looked up at me. I kissed her, and she closed her eyes. I stroked her back, she held me tight, almost clung to me, I laid her down, kissed her neck, cheek, mouth, rested my head on her bosom, heard her heart pounding, removed her soft jogging pants, kissed her stomach, her thighs . . . She looked at me with her dark gaze, with her beautiful eyes which closed as I penetrated her. We don’t have any protection, she whispered. Do you want to get it? No, I said. No. And when I came, I came inside her. That was all I wanted.

Afterwards we lay close to each other for a long time without speaking.

‘Now we’ll have another child,’ I said at length. ‘Are you ready for that?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh yes. I am.’

The next morning Vanja woke at five as usual. Linda brought her into our bed to sleep for a few more hours with her while I got up, took out my laptop and started to work on the translation on which I was writing a report. The work was tedious and unending, I had already written thirty pages, and that about a short story of no more than one hundred and forty. Nevertheless, I was looking forward to the work and enjoyed sitting there. I was alone and working on a text. I needed nothing else. Then there were the little moments of pleasure: putting on the coffee machine, hearing the gurgle of water trickling through, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, standing outside in the darkness of the backyard before anyone had got up, drinking a cup and smoking the first cigarette of the day. Back upstairs and working while the gap between the houses gradually grew light and activity increased in the street. This morning the brightness of dawn was different and with it the atmosphere in the flat, for a thin layer of snow had fallen in the night. At eight o’clock I switched off my laptop, put it in my bag and walked to the little bakery a hundred metres down the street. The shop awnings along the line of buildings flapped above me. On the road the snow had already melted, but it was still on the pavement, peppered with the footprints of those who had wandered past during the night. Now the street was deserted. The bakery was tiny and run by two women of my age. Stepping inside was like stepping inside one of those noir films from the 1940s in which all the women, even those working in kiosks or washing floors in office blocks, are strikingly beautiful. One of them was red-haired, with white skin and freckles, pronounced facial features and green eyes. The other had long dark hair, a slightly square face and friendly dark blue eyes. Both were tall and slim, their bodies flecked with flour. On their foreheads, cheeks, hands or aprons. Newspaper cuttings on the wall told of how they had swapped their creative professions for this, which had always been their dream.

The red-haired woman came from behind the counter when the doorbell rang, I said what I wanted, one of the big sourdough loaves, six of the wholemeal rolls, two cinnamon snails. I pointed at the same time, because even the simplest Norwegian words were met with a ‘What?’ She put everything in a bag and rang up the total on the till. With the white carrier bag in my hand, I hurried back to the flat, wiped the snow off my feet on the hall mat, heard as soon as I opened the door that they were up and sitting in the kitchen having breakfast.

Vanja sat waving her spoon in the air and smiled at me when I entered the room. She had porridge all over her face. It was a long time since she had let us feed her. I reacted instinctively, wanted to wipe up the mess – from her face as well – I didn’t like her sitting there all sticky. It was in my blood. Linda had criticised my reaction from the very beginning, it was important there were no rules or restrictions as far as food was concerned, it was a sensitive area, she should be allowed to do exactly what she wanted. Of course, Linda was right, I did understand, and on a purely theoretical level I could accept the greediness, the freedom and the soundness of a child being allowed to eat noisily and make a mess, but on a practical level my first impulse was to modify her behaviour. That was my father in me. He didn’t tolerate as much as a breadcrumb on the table when I was growing up. But I knew that, I had experienced it myself and hated it with every fibre in my body, so why did I instinctively want to persist at all costs?

I cut some slices of bread, put them in a basket with the rolls, filled the kettle and sat down to have breakfast with them. The butter was a little hard, and as I tried to spread it with the knife the bread tore. Vanja was staring at me. I spun my head round and fixed my eyes on her. She gave a start in her chair. Then, fortunately, she began to laugh. I did the same again, looked down at the table in front of me for a long time until she had begun to give up hope that anything would happen and thought my mind was busy elsewhere, then, as quick as a flash, I stared into her eyes, they widened with alarm and she jumped in fright. Then she burst into laughter again. Linda and I laughed too.

‘How funny our Vanja is,’ Linda said. ‘You’re so funny, you are! My little bunny rabbit!’

She leaned forward and rubbed her nose against Vanja’s. I grabbed the culture section of the newspaper lying open on the table in front of Linda, took a mouthful of bread and chewed as I scanned the headlines. On the worktop behind me the kettle boiled and switched itself off. I got up, put a tea bag in a cup, poured the steaming water over it, went to the fridge to get a carton of milk, then sat down. Dunked the tea bag a few times until the brown billowing liquid slowly issuing from it had completely changed the colour of the water. Poured in a splash of milk and flicked through the paper.

‘Have you seen what they say about Arne?’ I said, looking at Linda.

She nodded and gave a little smile, but to Vanja, not me.

‘The publishers are withdrawing the book. What a defeat.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Poor Arne. But he only has himself to blame.’

‘Do you think he knew it was lies?’

‘No, not at all. He didn’t do it intentionally, I’m sure. He must have thought that was how it was.’

‘Poor devil,’ I said, raising the cup and sipping the mud-coloured tea.

Arne was one of Linda’s mother’s neighbours in Gnesta. He had written a book about Astrid Lindgren, which had come out this autumn, loosely based on conversations he’d had with her before she died. Arne was a spiritual person, he believed in God, although not in a conventional sense, and it must have surprised many people that Astrid Lindgren shared this unconventional belief in God. The papers were beginning to take an interest in the affair. No one else had been present during the conversations, so even if Lindgren had never expressed such attitudes to anyone else it could not be proved that they had been fictionalised for the occasion. But there were other things in the press, among them Arne’s readings of Lindgren, which turned out to be anachronistic: at the time he said that he had read
Mio my Mio
the book hadn’t been published. And so it continued throughout his book. The Lindgren family denied that she had such attitudes; she could not have said this. The papers did not leave Arne with much honour, the subtext was that he was a liar, as good as a pathological liar, and now the publishing house had decided to withdraw the book. The book that had kept Arne going for the last few illness-plagued years and of which he was so proud.