My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (58 page)

We had joined the path running alongside the lake and into the forest. The wind had laid bare great swathes of ice. In places it was as shiny as glass and reflected the dark sky like a mirror, in others it was grey, greenish and grainy, like frozen slush. Now that the train had passed and the warning bell had stopped ringing there was almost complete silence in the forest. Just some rustling and cracking as branches rubbed or the occasional thwack. The squeaking of the buggy wheels, our own brittle footsteps.

‘At the hospital there was one thing they said which became important for me,’ Linda continued. ‘It was a simple matter. But what they said was that I had to try to remember I was actually fed up with myself when I became manic. That I was deeply depressed. And just that, the thought that I existed, helped. This is a lot of what it’s about, completely losing sight of who you are. In fact. And I think this might have been the most significant reason for it going so far. I had never actually lived. Had never had an inner life, that is. It had always been an external life. And things went fine for a long time, I pushed it further and further, and then in the end it wouldn’t go any further. It came to a stop.’

She looked at me.

‘I think I was pretty ruthless in those days. Or there was something ruthless inside me. I had cut myself off from others, if you know what I mean.’

‘I think that’s true,’ I said. ‘When I met you for the first time you had a completely different aura from today. Yes, ruthless, that fits. Attractive and dangerous is what I thought. I don’t think that about you now.’

‘I was on my way down. It was during those weeks it happened, that I started to lose control. I’m so pleased we didn’t get together then! It would never have worked. It couldn’t have worked.’

‘No, probably not. But I was a bit surprised when I found out exactly how romantic you were, I must say. And how close you want those who are around you. How important it is for you.’

We were silent for a while.

‘Would you rather have been with me when I was like that?’

‘No.’

I smiled. She smiled. Around us all was perfectly still, apart from the occasional whoosh as the wind gusted through the forest. It was good to walk here. For the first time in ages I had some peace in my soul. Even if snow lay thick on the ground everywhere and white is a bright colour, the brightness didn’t dominate the terrain, because out of the snow, which so sensitively reflects the light from the sky and always gleams, however dark it is, rose tree trunks, and they were gnarled and black, and branches hung above them, also black, intertwining in an endless variety of ways. The mountainsides were black, the stumps and debris of blown-down trees were black, the rock faces were black, the forest floor was black beneath the canopy of enormous spruces.

The soft whiteness and the gaping blackness, both were perfectly still, all was completely motionless, and it was impossible not to be reminded of how much of what surrounded us was dead, how little of it all was actually alive and how much space the living occupied inside us. This was why I would have loved to be able to paint, would have loved to have the talent, for it was only through painting this could be expressed. Stendhal wrote that music was the highest form of art and that all the other forms really wanted to be music. This was of course a Platonic idea, all the other art forms depict something else, music is the only one which is something in itself, it is absolutely incomparable. But I wanted to be closer to reality, by which I meant physical, concrete reality, and for me the visual always came first, also when I was writing and reading, it was what was behind letters that interested me. When I was outdoors, walking, like now, what I saw gave me nothing. Snow was snow, trees were trees. It was only when I saw a picture of snow or of trees that they were endowed with meaning. Monet had an exceptional eye for light on snow, which Thaulow, perhaps the most technically gifted Norwegian painter ever, also had, it was a feast for the eyes, the closeness of the moment was so great that the value of what gave rise to it increased exponentially, an old tumbledown cabin by a river or a pier at a holiday resort suddenly became priceless, the paintings were charged with the feeling that they were here at the same time as us, in this intense here and now, and that we would soon be gone from them, but with regard to the snow, it was as if the other side of this cultivation of the moment became visible, the animation of this and its light so obviously ignored something, namely the lifelessness, the emptiness, the non-charged and the neutral, which were the first features to strike you when you entered a forest in winter, and in the picture, which was connected with perpetuity and death, the moment was unable to hold its ground. Caspar David Friedrich knew this, but this wasn’t what he painted, only his idea of it. This was the problem with all representation, of course, for no eye is uncontaminated, no gaze is blank, nothing is seen the way it is. And in this encounter the question of art’s meaning as a whole was forced to the surface. Yes, OK, so I saw the forest here, so I walked through it and thought about it. But all the meaning I extracted from it came from me, I charged it with something of mine. If it were to have any meaning beyond that, it couldn’t come from the eyes of the beholder, but through action, through something happening, that is. Trees would have to be felled, houses built, fires lit, animals hunted, not for the sake of pleasure but because my life depended on it. Then the forest would be meaningful, indeed so meaningful that I would no longer wish to see it.

Around the bend, perhaps twenty metres ahead of us, came a man dressed in a red anorak. He had a ski stick in each hand. It was Arne.

‘Hi, so it’s you out walking, is it!’ he said as he got closer.

‘Hi, Arne. Been a long time,’ Linda said.

He stopped beside us and cast a glance into the buggy. The scandal didn’t appear to have crushed him.

‘She’s so big,’ he said. ‘How old is she now?’

‘Turned one two weeks ago,’ Linda said.

‘Really! Time goes so quickly,’ he said, meeting my gaze. One of his eyes was rigid and filled with water. In recent years he had been plagued by all manner of illness, there had been a brain tumour, and after it had been removed he hadn’t been able to shake the taste he had acquired for morphine, so he was taken into rehab for a while. When this was over he suffered a stroke. Now it was pneumonia he’d just had, wasn’t it?

But even though he looked wilder and more ravaged every time I saw him, even though he walked with greater difficulty and his movements were slower, he did not seem any weaker, there was no shortage of energy, a lust for life still burned inside him, he marched on with all his defects, and he still put to shame what could have been said about him two years ago, that he hadn’t got long left. It must have been this spark, this lust for life, which had kept him going. Almost anyone else exposed to what he had experienced would have been two metres under the ground.

‘Your book’s going to be translated into Swedish, Vidar told me,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘When? I really don’t want to miss it.’

‘Next autumn they’re telling me, but it’ll probably be the autumn after.’

‘I’ll wait then,’ he said.

How old was he? Late sixties? It was hard to say, there was nothing old-man-ish about him, the one eye that worked glinted with youthfulness, and even though it was the sole feature of his face that did and even though other parts were wrinkled and worn, bloodshot and blotchy, life shone through in other ways, most of all in his enthusiastic tone of voice, which was forced into a slowness that didn’t suit it, but also in the total impression he gave, his aura, which strangely enough, despite all the resistance his body offered, appeared indefatigable. He had grown up in an orphanage but hadn’t wandered off the straight and narrow like his friends. He had played football at a high level, at least if you believed what he told you, and worked as a journalist on
Expressen
for many years. Furthermore, he had published several books.

His wife always sent him indulgent glances when he made comments, in the way that all women married to boys do. She was a nurse and was approaching the limits of her tolerance, for in addition to an ailing husband she had to look after their child, who had just had twins and needed lots of support.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you, Linda, and you, Karl.’

‘Same to you,’ I said.

He raised his hand to his brow and then he set off, his sticks raised high with every stride he took.

His rigid watering eye, which had stared ahead during the whole conversation, might have belonged to a troll or some mythological creature, and even though I didn’t have the image constantly in front of me the feeling it generated lasted all day.

‘He didn’t exactly seem crushed, did he?’ I said after he had disappeared round the bend and we had started walking again.

‘No,’ Linda said. ‘But it’s never easy to see how people really are.’

Another roar sounded in the distance, from the other side now. I sat Vanja up as she lay blinking in the buggy, and turned her so that she could see when, soon after, the train sped past us between the trees. It didn’t go by unnoticed; she pointed and shouted as it passed, so close that a thin layer of powdery snow was blown against my face, to melt in a trice.

Barely a kilometre later, by a railway embankment, the path came to an end. The field on the other side, where horses grazed in the summer, lay white and untouched like a tablecloth between the trees. To the left, in the east, there was a clump of houses, behind them a path, and if you followed it you came to a beautiful large manor owned by Olof Palme’s brother. One summer evening Linda and I had been out for a bike ride and we ended up there, lost, pushing our bikes down the gravel road between the houses where a white-clad party was sitting outdoors and eating with a view of the great lake and Gnesta town centre far on the other side. However careful I had been to look in another direction, I still had the image of the party on my retina: them sitting there so Bergman-like on the white garden furniture and eating, between austere white farmhouses and modern red office buildings, in the midst of the green rolling Södermanland countryside.

I took Vanja from the buggy and held her in my arms as we turned to walk back the same way we had come.

Arriving half an hour later on the incline in front of the house, we heard loud voices coming from indoors. Through the kitchen window I saw Ingrid and Vidar standing on either side of the sitting-room table shouting at each other. I suppose we had come earlier than they had expected, and the snow had muffled our arrival. It was only when I stamped my boots a few times on the front doorstep that the voices stopped. Linda took Vanja, I pushed the buggy into the garage beside the house that Vidar had built in the spring and summer. When I returned he was standing in the hall and putting on his overalls.

‘Well?’ he said with a smile. ‘Did you walk far?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Just a little way. The weather’s really grim!’

‘Yes, it is that,’ he said, stepping into tall brown rubber boots. ‘I’m just off to fix a few things.’

He slipped past me and walked slowly up the slope to his workshop. In the kitchen, which started half a metre from where I was removing my outdoor clothes, Ingrid had put Vanja in a high seat by the worktop while she peeled potatoes. I put my hat and gloves on the hat shelf, kicked my boots off against the door frame, she put a bowl of water and some plastic measuring spoons in front of Vanja. That could occupy her for hours, I knew. I hung my coat on a hanger and pushed it between all the other jackets, capes and coats hanging there and walked past them.

Ingrid looked upset. But her movements were considered and calm, her voice to Vanja was gentle and kind.

‘What’s for dinner? Something nice?’ I asked.

‘Lamb,’ she said. ‘Wedge potatoes. And red wine sauce.’

‘Ah, that sounds good!’ I said. ‘Lamb’s my favourite.’

‘I know,’ she said. Her eyes, enormous behind glasses, regarded me with a smile.

Vanja smacked the set of measuring spoons against the water.

‘You’re having a good time here, Vanja, aren’t you,’ I said. Tousled her hair. Looked at Ingrid. ‘Has Linda gone for a lie-down?’

Ingrid nodded. From the sleeping alcove, which was out of eyeshot, although no more than four metres away, came Linda’s voice: ‘I’m in here!’

I went in. The two beds were at ninety degrees to each other and took up almost all the room. She was on the one further away with the duvet pulled up under her chin. Even though the curtains were not drawn it was dim, almost murky inside. The dark coarse-wood walls soaked up all the light.

‘Brr!’ she said. ‘Are you going to have a nap?’

I shook my head.

‘Think I’ll do some reading. But you sleep.’

I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair. On one wall there were photos of Vidar’s children and grandchildren. The other was covered in books. An alarm clock and a photo of Vidar’s youngest daughter were on the windowsill. I always felt uncomfortable in other people’s bedrooms, I always saw something I didn’t want to see, but that was not the case here.

‘I love you,’ she said.

I leaned forward and kissed her.

‘Sleep tight,’ I said, got up and left the room. Found the books I had packed, couldn’t face Dostoevsky, too difficult to get into at this moment, instead took a biography about Rimbaud which I had long thought I should read and reclined with it in my hand on the sofa under the window. What excited my interest was his Africa connection. That, and the times in which he lived. I wasn’t so bothered about his poetry, except for what it could say about his unusual, unique character.

In the kitchen Ingrid was chatting to Vanja while she worked. She was so good with her, managing to turn even the worst chore into an exciting adventure, not least because she put aside her own needs when they were together. Everything was about Vanja and her experiences. But there was no sense of it being a sacrifice, the pleasure she reaped from it seemed to be deeply heartfelt.