We walked hand in hand down Strandgatan. The surface of the water out to the island of Skeppsholmen was wreathed in darkness. Moreover, when only a few lights were on in the houses it created a singular rhythm in the town, it was as if it came to an end, merged into the periphery and nature, only to pick up again on the other side of the water where the Old Town, Slussen and all the sheer cliffs towards Södermalm lay glittering and twinkling in the murmuring wind and sea.
Linda told me some anecdotes about the Royal Dramatic Theatre, where she had practically grown up. While her mother had worked there she had sole responsibility for Linda and her brother, so they had often been with her to rehearsals and performances. For me this was mythological, for Linda trivial, something she preferred not to talk about and quite definitely would not have done now had I not asked her directly. She knew everything about actors, their vanity and their tendency to burn themselves out, their angst and their intrigues, she laughed and said that the best of them were often the most stupid, the ones who understood least, that an intellectual actor was a contradiction in terms, but even though she despised the play-acting, despised their gesticulations and pomposity, their cheap, hollow, volatile lives and feelings, there was little to which she gave higher priority than their stage performances when they were at their best. She spoke, for example, with passion about Bergman’s production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which she had seen countless times as she was working in the theatre wardrobe at that time, the fantastical and fairytale-like elements in it, and also the baroque and burlesque aspects. Or Wilson’s production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play at Stockholm City Theatre, where she worked on the dramaturgy, which of course was purer and more stylised but equally magical. She had wanted to be an actress herself once, reached the final round of auditions for the Theatre School two years in a row, but when they didn’t take her the last time, that was fine, they would never take her, so she turned her attentions in a different direction, applied for the writer’s course at Biskops-Arnö, and made her debut there with the poems she had written the year after.
Now she told me about a tour she had been on. The Royal Dramatic Theatre, Bergman’s travelling company, they were stars wherever they went, and this time it was to Tokyo. Tall, noisy and drunk, the Swedish actors piled into one of the city’s finer restaurants. There was no question of removing shoes or adapting to their surroundings in any other way, they swung their arms about, stubbed out their cigarettes in the sake cups and called loudly for the waiter. Linda, in short skirt, with red lipstick, black hair in a page cut, cigarette in hand, a little in love with Peter Stormare, was only fifteen years old and must have seemed grotesque to Japanese eyes, as she put it. But of course they didn’t bat an eyelid, they just tripped quietly around them, not even when one of them burst through a paper partition and fell flat on his face.
She was laughing as she told me.
‘When we were about to leave,’ she said, glancing towards Djurgårdsbrunn, ‘a waiter came over to me with a bag. It was a present from the chef, he said. I looked down into it. Do you know what it was?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It was full of small live crabs.’
‘Crabs? What was that supposed to mean?’
She shrugged.
‘I don’t know.’
‘What did you do with them?’
‘I took them to the hotel. Mum was so drunk she had to be helped home. I caught a taxi on my own, with the bag of crabs by my feet. Back in my room I ran cold water into the bath tub and put the crabs in. They crawled around all night while I was asleep in the adjacent room. In the middle of Tokyo.’
‘What happened then? What did you do with them?’
‘The story ends there,’ she said, squeezing my hand while looking up at me with a smile.
There was something about Japan and her. For her poetry collection she had been awarded a Japanese prize, of all things, a picture with Japanese characters, which until recently had hung above her desk. And wasn’t there also something faintly Japanese about her wonderful small facial features?
We went up towards Karlaplan, with its circular pool, in the middle of which there was an enormous fountain during the summer months, but which was dry now, the bottom covered with withered leaves from the tall surrounding trees.
‘Do you remember the time we went to see Ghosts?’ I asked.
‘Of course!’ she said. ‘I’ll never forget that.’
I knew that — she had stuck the theatre ticket in the album she had started making when she became pregnant. Ghosts was Bergman’s final production at the theatre, and we went to see it before we really got together, it was one of the first things we did, one of the first things we had shared. That was only eighteen months ago, but it felt like a whole lifetime.
She gazed at me with that look of affection that could make my heart melt. It was cold outside: a raw biting wind was blowing. It made me think how far east Stockholm actually was, a hint of something foreign, quite unlike where I came from, although I was unable to put my finger on what it was. We were in the richest district in Stockholm, and it was absolutely dead. No one went out here, the streets were never busy, yet they were broader than in any other part of the centre.
A man and a woman with a dog came towards us, him with his hands behind his back and a large leather hat on his head, her in a fur coat with the little terrier snuffling ahead.
‘Shall we go for a beer somewhere?’ I asked.
‘Let’s,’ she answered. ‘I’m hungry too. What about the bar in Zita?’
‘Good idea.’
A shiver ran through me, and I drew the coat lapels tighter around my neck.
‘Brass monkeys tonight,’ I said. ‘Are you cold?’
She shook her head. She was wearing the enormous Puffa jacket she had borrowed from her best friend, Helena, who last winter had been as pregnant as Linda was now, and the fur hat I had bought for her when we were in Paris, with two furry pompoms dangling from it.
‘Is it kicking?’
Linda placed both hands on her stomach.
‘No, the baby’s sleeping,’ she said. ‘It invariably does when I go for a walk.’
‘The baby,’ I said. ‘A tingle goes through me when you say that. Most of the time it’s as if I haven’t quite clicked that there’s a human being inside you.’
‘But there is,’ Linda said. ‘I already know the baby, or so it seems. Do you remember how angry it got when they did that diabetes test?’
I nodded. Linda was at risk as her father had diabetes, so she had been given a kind of sugary mixture, the most nauseating and foulest medicine she’d ever had, she said, and the baby in her belly had kicked like crazy for more than an hour.
‘That must have given him or her a jolt,’ I said with a smile, glancing towards Humlegården, which started on the other side of the street. There was something bewitching about the atmosphere here at night, with domes of light illuminating in some places the trees with their heavy trunks and spread branches, and in others the wet yellowing grass carpet, in between which it was pitch black. But it was not bewitching as in a forest, more like the bewitching atmosphere of a theatre. We followed one of the paths. In some places there were still small piles of leaves, otherwise the lawns and paths through them were bare, much like the wooden floor in a sitting room. A jogger shuffled around the statue of Linné, another came sprinting down the gentle slope. Beneath us, I knew, lay the enormous storehouses belonging to the Royal Library, which towered up before us. A block further on was Stureplan with the most exclusive nightclubs in the city. We lived a stone’s throw from Stureplan, but it might just as well have been in another part of the world. People were shot in the streets down there without us knowing anything about it until it was in the newspapers the day after; international stars dropped by when they were in town; the whole of Sweden’s business and celebrity elite put in an appearance there, which the whole country read about in the evening papers. People didn’t queue up to get in, they stood in a line, and then the security guards walked round and pointed at those who were allowed to enter. I hadn’t seen this cold hard side of the town anywhere before, and I had never experienced such a clear cultural divide. In Norway almost all distance is geographical, and since the population is so small, the way to the top, or to the centre, is short everywhere. In every class at school there is always someone who reaches the top within some field, or at least in every school. Everyone knows someone who knows someone. In Sweden the social distance is much greater, and since the countryside has been depopulated and almost everyone lives in towns, and anyone who wants to be someone goes to Stockholm where everything of any significance happens, this is extremely conspicuous: so near, yet so far.