‘So what did they say?’
‘They didn’t exactly jump for joy.’
‘Well, shit, there must be some other way.’
‘I knew they were disappointed when they met me. They were so positive on the phone after they’d read the book, but that was before they met me.’
Kristoffer stopped arguing with him and they sat quietly for a moment. He tried in vain to silence the thought that the publishers’ reaction was a relief to him. Desperately he struggled to shove the envy back into the rubbish-heap it had crawled out of, because what sort of person reacted the way he had done? In an attempt to pull himself together he reached out and patted his friend’s hand. The gesture was so unlike him that Jesper gave a start at the touch.
‘I’m sure it will all turn out fine.’
Kristoffer pulled back his hand and smiled.
‘Shit, I know a real author!’
But the words only intensified his envy. He had always been the one who was more successful; their respective roles had been well-established. Their entire friendship hinged on those unwritten rules, but now the balance had been disturbed. He wanted to go home and keep working on his play, see to it that every critic would end up prostrate with rapture.
‘You’ll have to think of another way to promote the book. Do something that nobody has ever done, so the book gets attention even if you don’t put in an appearance.’
If you think it’s too much trouble, he wanted to add, but didn’t.
‘What would that be?’
‘I don’t know, you’ll have to think about it.’
They said goodbye out on the street, and Kristoffer headed off to buy groceries. He was weighed down by guilt, a despicable person who was incapable of being happy for a friend. The goodness and competence he had always striven for had at the slightest provocation yielded to the selfish instincts that belonged to a second-rate nature. He knew so well that moral value does not come from desire but from duty. And yet he had failed. In an attempt to rectify it he began to mull over Jesper’s dilemma, trying to think of what would make the media notice the book. Inside the supermarket he stopped in front of the magazine racks and read the headlines: I slept with 4,000 women / Booze, sex and total decadence – we were there / Get rich with file-sharing / Sin, gambling and strippers / We can only say Wow! when hot Emma takes off her wet blouse inside / Win a computer! Download all the porn you want!
Kristoffer sighed. Since he was a man and the headlines were aimed at men, he felt humiliated. That just because he was a man he was expected to be an idiot. It wasn’t that he had anything against naked women. Even though he wasn’t proud of it, he did have some well-thumbed magazines in his flat. He lived alone, what was he supposed to do? But he found it insulting that his lowest instincts were appealed to without finesse. He picked up one of the magazines and looked at the masthead. Nothing but men in editorial. He wondered who these men were. Why had they no higher ambitions? And if they had, what was it they wanted? Once he had phoned a newspaper and asked this very question.
‘We have an obligation to our shareholders to focus on what makes people pick up the paper,’ he’d been told. ‘Unfortunately world crises don’t sell.’
Well, Jesper, he thought. This isn’t going to be easy. A headline about Jesper Falk writing a thought-provoking novel about his generation would hardly cause a stampede at the news-stand.
He sidestepped and found himself in front of the shelves filled with women’s magazines. Beautiful eyes – get the sultry look! / Shopping frenzy – 500 best buys / How to walk in high heels / Are breast implants a good idea? The whole thing was so confusing, the fact that all these magazines apparently did sell; the fact that so few women demanded more than this, to feel themselves enlightened.
On the far right he caught sight of the magazines for teenage girls. All the dirt on celebrity girls’ bitching / Vote for Hollywood’s cutest puppy dog / 7 Miss Teens we want to diss / Tricks to make him fall for you. All women in editorial, except for a man or two in production. He wondered how these women brought up their children. Whether in their private lives they were also inclined to stereotype all the gender roles and see to it that their daughters became infantile bimbos, or whether they just did the job as long as it paid.
One more time the thought raced through his head – where were the intelligentsia? Why was it that some people spent so little time thinking and had so few thoughts? Why did they make themselves so insignificant that they were convinced their actions made no difference?
Since the possibility of numbing his mind had been taken from him, he’d had a harder and harder time tolerating reality. Could it be that the human brain needed to be blunted occasionally, so that it could overlook all the stupidity and manage to feel some hope?
‘Are you in the queue or not?’
He was roused from his contemplations and began putting his items on the conveyor belt. With a new supply of frozen dinners he headed home. His thoughts had given him a new idea, and he was feeling good again, ready to keep working on his play.
The door to his building was in sight when he decided to turn on his mobile. He had three new messages. One from the theatre, wondering how it was going; the second from Jesper. It wasn’t until he listened to the third one that time stood still. He put down his bag of groceries and had to lean against the wall.
Something about a will in which he was named the sole beneficiary.
9
The smell of an apple. To be able to reach out his arm and pick it up, move it towards his face and breathe in its aroma. The lightning-quick displacement to a lost time; a magical gateway to the realm which normally lay dimmed by decades of change, but which in an instant could be resurrected.
Axel Ragnerfeldt looked at the bright green apples lying in the fruit bowl. Just as inaccessible as if they were still in the land of their origin named on the little label stuck to them. He consoled himself with the fact that they surely no longer had any smell, injected and manipulated as they were to withstand the long journey halfway around the world. They were not like the apples of his childhood, carefully harvested from the lone tree in their allotment, to be converted into golden juice and holiday apple sauce. The meticulously tended garden with potatoes, turnips and other practical vegetables, and some occasional extravagances such as snapdragons, columbines and sweet violets sneaking into the rows. Mamma hurrying about her thousand tasks and father’s steady hammer-blows, proud and precise. The little shed that slowly grew beneath his rough hands. Six square metres, but more precious than the most magnificent palace. He recalled the regulations posted: The allotment gardens are primarily intended for the great number of labourers and their like who live in the city in poor circumstances and have difficult living conditions.
‘Bliss’, they had named it, the little plot that like an oasis offered them solace from the cramped flat with one room and kitchen a stone’s throw away: the little wooden city with its simple dwellings in the gap between Ringvägen and Blekingegatan streets, built as an emergency solution to the acute housing shortage after the First World War, though it remained until the end of the sixties.
Fill your head with knowledge, boy, it’s the only thing that can take you out of here.
There was a knock at the door. He had never understood why they bothered. Since he’d ended up at the nursing home he could neither welcome anyone nor send them away, and he found their knocks insulting. As if rubbing it in. He heard the door open behind his back. Somebody came in but said nothing, so he didn’t know who it was until she appeared in his field of vision. He didn’t remember her name; everyday details often slipped his mind, perhaps because he wasn’t interested. Only things that happened long ago had sharp contours. Maybe that was his brain’s way of protecting him. His body had become a closed space in which he was locked inside. Without doors or windows and beyond all human contact. Monotonous days that came and went and had to be endured. His entire prize-winning intellect had moved into the little finger of his left hand, which sometimes obeyed his orders but lately had more often proved unco-operative. Trapped in a body he couldn’t move, but whose sensations of pain were intact. After hours in the same position the pain was unbearable. And yet he couldn’t ask for help. Then his only salvation was to escape into the past.