My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (56 page)

Oh, this fulfilled me, it was sublime, it was the world opening up.

Vidar got out of his car in Gnesta station car park as the train pulled in and he was waiting for us with a little smile playing on his lips as we walked towards him a moment later. He was seventy-something years old, had a white beard and white hair, was a touch stooped but in robust health, which was borne out by his tanned complexion, a product of a life spent very much outdoors, and the sharp, intelligent, yet somewhat evasive, blue eyes. I knew next to nothing about what he had done in life, apart from the little Linda had told me and what I could deduce from appearances. Although he touched on many topics in the course of a weekend, it was rare for them to include anything about himself. He had grown up in Finland and still had family there, but spoke Swedish without an accent. He was an authoritative but in no way domineering man who liked to socialise with people. He read a lot, both newspapers, which he scoured from front to back, and literature, in which he was uncommonly well versed. His age revealed itself perhaps first and foremost in the viewpoints he stoutly defended; although there were not many, they could, as I had seen, occupy a great deal of space. These sides of his personality didn’t affect me, only Ingrid and Linda, whom he treated as one, and Linda’s brother. I suppose this was partly because I was new to the family and partly, I assumed, because I liked to hear him talk and was actually interested in what he had to say. The fact that our conversations were one-sided, as my contributions amounted to no more than questions and an unending series of short responses such as ‘Yes,’ ‘Oh, yes,’ ‘Really?’ ‘Mm,’ ‘I see,’ ‘How interesting,’ seemed to me only natural, for we were not equal, he was twice my age and had a long life behind him. Linda didn’t really understand this. Many was the time she called for me or came to get me, convinced that I needed to be saved from a boring conversation I was too polite to extricate myself from on my own. Now and then this was indeed the case, but more often than not my interest was genuine.

‘Hi, Vidar,’ Linda said, pushing the buggy behind the car.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘
Trevligt
to see you again.’

Linda lifted Vanja out, I folded up the buggy and put it in the boot, which Vidar opened for me.

‘And now the car seat,’ I said, passing it through the rear door, lifting Vanja in and attaching the seat belts.

Vidar drove as many older men did, hunched over the wheel, as though the few extra centimetres closer to the windscreen were decisive for good vision. In daylight he was a good driver – that spring, for example, we had been with him for four hours in one stretch when we went to Idö, where his country house was – but as darkness descended over the roads I felt a lot less secure. A few weeks ago we had almost run over one of the neighbours walking by the gravel track. I saw him from afar and assumed Vidar had done so as well and hadn’t changed course because he was going to veer away a few metres before. But this wasn’t the case, he hadn’t seen him, and only a combination of my shout and the neighbour’s presence of mind – he jumped into a bush – prevented an accident.

We turned out of the station car park and onto the main road, which was the only one in Gnesta.

‘Everything all right with you?’ Vidar enquired.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Can’t grumble.’

‘We had frightful weather last night,’ he said. ‘Several trees keeled over. Then the power went at home. But I suppose they’ll fix it during the morning. What was it like in town?’

‘Well, there was a bit of a wind as well,’ I said.

We turned left, crossed the little bridge and came to the huge field where white hay bales were still piled up by the road. After a kilometre we turned off again and drove onto the gravel track through the forest, which mostly consisted of deciduous trees, between whose trunks a meadow looking like a small lake was visible on one side, bordered by bare rock and a swathe of evergreens growing over it. Hardy longhorn cattle grazed here all year round. A hundred metres further on there was a grass track leading up to Ingrid and Vidar’s house, while the road continued for a couple of kilometres or so until it ended by grassland in the middle of the forest.

Ingrid was waiting for us outside the house when we arrived. She hurried over to the car as it stopped and opened the rear door where Vanja was.

‘Oh, my little sweetheart!’ she said with her hand on her bosom. ‘How I have been looking forward to seeing you!’

‘Just pick her up if you want,’ Linda said, opening the door on the other side. While Ingrid lifted Vanja and held her out to have a look at her and then hugged her, I removed the buggy from the boot, unfolded it and pushed it towards the front door.

‘Hope you’re hungry,’ Ingrid said. ‘Because lunch is ready.’

The house was small and old. There was forest on all sides of the property, apart from at the front, where there was an open field. In the evenings and at dawn the deer would emerge there from the forest on the other side and frolic. I had also seen foxes running and hares leaping around. Originally the house had been a smallholding and it still bore the marks: even though the two rooms constituting the house had been augmented with a kitchen and bathroom annexe, Ingrid and Vidar still didn’t have many square metres to live in. The living room was dark and crammed with all sorts, and in the bedroom behind there was scarcely space for much more than two built-in beds and some shelves of books on one wall. In addition, there was an earth cellar some way behind the house, a newly erected cabin with two beds and a television, and at the very top of the plot a combined workshop and wood store. When we came to stay Vidar and Ingrid moved into the cabin so we had the house to ourselves in the evening. There was little I liked better than being here, lying on the bed near the coarse old wooden beams with the starry sky visible through the window above, surrounded by darkness and silence. The last time we had been here I had read Calvino’s
The Baron in the Trees
, the time before that Wijkmark’s
The Draisine
, and what made both of these reading experiences fantastic must have been as much to do with the surroundings and the atmosphere I was imbued with as the actual content of the books. Or was it rather that the atmospheric space these books created had a special resonance in the world in which I found myself? For I had read a novel by Thomas Bernhard before Wijkmark and nothing in it came even close to charging me in the same way. No space was opened to me in Bernhard, everything was closed off in small chambers of reflection, and even though he had written one of the most frightening and shocking novels I had read,
Extinction
, I didn’t want to look down that road, I didn’t want to go down that road. Hell, no, I wanted to be as far from that which was closed and mandatory as it was possible to be.
Come on! Into the open, my friend
, as Hölderlin had written somewhere. But how, how?

I sat down on the chair by the window. A pot of meat broth was steaming in the middle of the table. A basket of fresh home-made bread rolls beside it, along with a bottle of mineral water and three cans of
folkøl
, Swedish low-alcohol beer. Linda put Vanja in the baby seat at the end of the table, sliced a roll in half, gave it to her and then went to warm up a jar of baby food in the microwave. Linda’s mother took over and Linda sat down next to me. Vidar sat on the opposite side of the table rubbing his bearded chin between thumb and forefinger and watching us with a little smile on his face.

‘OK,’ Ingrid shouted from the kitchen. ‘Just start all of you!’

Linda stroked my arm. Vidar nodded to her. She began to ladle soup into the bowls. Pale green rings of leek, orange slices of carrot, yellowy pieces of kohlrabi and large grey pieces of meat, with reddish fibres in places, shiny, bluish surfaces in others. The flat white bones it was attached to, some smooth like polished stones, others coarse and porous. All swimming in the hot broth, in the fat that would stiffen as soon as the heat was gone, but which was floating around now like small almost transparent beads and bubbles in the cloudy liquid.

‘It’s as delicious as always,’ I said, looking at Ingrid, who was sitting beside Vanja and blowing on the food for her.

‘Good,’ she said, and met my eyes fleetingly, then put the plastic spoon in the plastic dish and held it to Vanja’s mouth, which, for a change, was as open as a fledgling chick’s. When we came here Ingrid would automatically take over everything to do with Vanja. Food, nappies, clothes, sleep, fresh air, she wanted to do the lot. She had bought a high chair, children’s plates and cutlery, feeding bottles, games and even an extra buggy, which was always here ready for use, as well as all the jars of baby food, baby porridge and purée in the cupboard. If we were short of something, if Linda for example asked for an apple or was concerned that Vanja might have a bit of a temperature, she jumped on her bike and cycled the three kilometres to the shop or chemist and returned with apples or a thermometer or temperature-reducing medicines in the little basket on the handlebars. And when we came here she had carefully planned and done the shopping for all the meals, which often consisted of two courses for lunch and three for dinner. She got up when Vanja woke at six, baked some bread rolls, perhaps went for a walk with her and slowly began to prepare lunch. When we got up at nine there was a lavish breakfast table set, with fresh rolls, boiled eggs, often an omelette if for example she had it in her head that I liked them, coffee and juice, and when I sat down she would always put the newspaper she had bought for me by my place. She was extraordinarily positive, extraordinarily understanding about everything, the word ‘no’ didn’t exist in her mouth and there was nothing in the world she couldn’t help us with. Her freezer was filled with an infinite number of tubs of ice cream and plastic buckets of herring as well as various meals she had made and labelled: Meatball Sauce, Jansson’s Temptation, Beef and Potato Stew, Rissoles, Stuffed Peppers, Stuffed Pancakes, Pea Soup, Lamb Chop with Crispy Wedge Potatoes, Beef Bourgignon, Salmon Pudding, Cheese and Leek Pie . . . If there was a chill in the air and she was out walking with Vanja, well, she was quite likely to go to a shoe shop and buy her new boots.

‘How’s your mother?’ she asked. ‘Is she OK?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ I said. ‘She’ll soon have finished her dissertation, from what I understand.’

I wiped some soup off my chin with the serviette.

‘But she won’t let me read it,’ I added with a smile.

‘I take my hat off to her,’ Vidar said. ‘There aren’t many sixty-year-olds with enough curiosity left to study at university, that’s for sure.’

‘I think she probably has mixed feelings about that,’ I said. ‘She’s always wanted to, you see, and she does it when her career’s almost over.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Ingrid said. ‘It’s not easy what she’s done. She’s tough, your mother is.’

I smiled again. The distance between Sweden and Norway was much greater than they imagined, and for a moment I saw my mother through Swedish eyes.

‘Yes, perhaps she is,’ I said.

‘Send her our regards,’ Vidar said. ‘And the rest of the family as well, by the way. I liked them so much.’

‘Vidar has been talking about them ever since we were there for the christening,’ Ingrid said.

‘There were some real characters!’ Vidar said. ‘Kjartan, the poet. He was an interesting and unusual man. And what were they called, the people from Ålesund, the child psychologists?’

‘Ingunn and Mård?’

‘Exactly. So nice! And Magne, wasn’t that his name? Your cousin Jon Olav’s dad? The director of development?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.

‘A man with authority,’ Vidar said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And your father’s brother. The teacher from Trondheim. He was a fine man too. Is he like your father?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘He’s probably the least like him, I would say. He’s always kept his distance, and I think that was a smart move.’

There was a pause. The slurping of soup, Vanja banging her cup on the table, her gurgles of laughter.

‘They still talk about both of you,’ I said, looking at Ingrid. ‘Especially the food you made!’

‘It’s so different in Norway,’ Linda said. ‘It really is. Particularly on 17 May. People were wearing traditional costumes and medals on their chests.’

She laughed.

‘At first I thought it was meant to be ironic, but no, it wasn’t. It was quite genuine. The medals were worn with dignity. No Swedes would do that, that’s for certain.’

‘I’m sure they were proud,’ I said.

‘Yes, precisely. But you wouldn’t catch a Swede admitting that, nowhere, not even to themselves.’

I angled the bowl to spoon up the last remnants of the soup as I looked out of the window, at the rectangular snow-covered meadow beneath the grey sky, the line of black deciduous trees on the edge of the forest behind, broken here and there with luxuriant green spruces. The dark dry twig-strewn forest floor in which they grew.

‘Henrik Ibsen was obsessed with medals,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t a decoration for which he was not willing to grovel. He wrote letters to every conceivable king or regent to get them. And then he wore them at home in his living room. Strutted round with his little chest plastered with them. Heh heh heh. He also had a mirror in his top hat. So he sat in his café surreptitiously staring at himself.’

‘Did Ibsen do that?’ Ingrid asked.

‘He did,’ I said. ‘He was extremely vain. And isn’t that a much more fantastic form of excess than Strindberg’s? With him it was all about alchemy, madness, absinthe and women’s hats, which is just the typical artist myth. But with Ibsen it was bourgeois vanity taken to an extreme. He was a great deal madder than Strindberg.’

‘While we’re on the subject,’ Vidar said, ‘have you heard the latest about Arne’s book? The publishers have withdrawn it.’

‘And they were probably right,’ I said. ‘There were so many errors.’

‘Yes, I suppose there were,’ Vidar said. ‘But the publishers should have helped him with them. After all, he’d been ill. He couldn’t draw a line between his own fantasies, wishful thinking and reality.’