And to be even more precise: of my life as it had turned out so far.
2
‘I can understand that you both need to get away from it all,’ Eugen Bergman had said, peering over the rim of his remarkably outdated spectacles. ‘What with that mad woman and all the rest of it. And the literary timing is just about right as well. However it turns out, we shall be able to sell it.’
This is not going to be an account of what has happened in the past, these unstructured notes — no more than what is necessary in order to understand the present. In so far as I have any ambitions at all, that is just about as far as they go. You write — and read — in order to understand things, that’s something I’ve often tried to convince myself about. There is a lot that I shall never understand: recent happenings have proved that more conclusively than I might have wished, but surely one should try to throw a bit of light on things? I’ve started to do that far too late — but you ought to do something while you’re waiting for death to carry you off, as one of my colleagues used to say on particularly bleak Monday mornings at the Monkeyhouse. Although I’m beginning to get confused already, words and times are becoming unclear. Back to Sveavägen in Stockholm, exactly one month ago. Eugen Bergman.
‘However it turns out?’ said Martin, as if he had failed completely to understand the indulgent irony in what the publisher had said. ‘Can I remind you that I’ve been sitting on this material for thirty years. If your bean-counters can’t grasp the value of that, there are bean-counters in other publishing houses who will.’
‘I’ve already said that we shall publish it,’ said Bergman with one of his wry smiles. ‘And you’ll get your advance. What’s the matter with you, old chap? I can assure you it will be translated into seven or eight languages without further ado. They might even put it up for auction in England. Get on your bike, for God’s sake — you have my blessing. And the deadline will be the end of April next year. Mind you, I’d quite like to read bits of it before then, as you know.’
‘Fat chance,’ said Martin, then nodded at me: ‘No bastard gets to read a single word until it’s finished.’
It was time to leave, that was obvious. We’d been no more than ten minutes in the room, but needless to say everything had been prepared meticulously in advance. Bergman has been Martin’s publisher for twenty years, and is one of those old-fashioned, solid-as-a-rock types. That’s what Martin always used to say, in any case. Every new contract — there haven’t been all that many, only six or seven if I remember rightly — has been confirmed in Bergman’s office. Sign on the dotted line, shake hands, then sink a drop or two of amaro from one of the slightly worse-for-wear little glasses he keeps hidden away in one of his desk cupboards: that has always been the routine, and it was the routine that Friday afternoon at the beginning of October as well.
The sixth, to be precise. An Indian summer day if ever there was one, at least in the Stockholm area. I’m not quite sure why Martin had insisted on my being there, but presumably because it was a rather special occasion.
If so, it wasn’t difficult to understand why.
To celebrate the fact that we were still together. That the turbulence of the last few months had not been able to undermine the solid base of our marriage. That I stood behind my husband, or wherever it was that an independent but good wife was expected to stand. By his side, perhaps?
And I admit that ‘insisted’ is not the right word. Martin had asked me to be present, that was all. Eugen Bergman has been a good friend of both of us for many years, even if we haven’t actually been socializing together very much since the death of his wife, Lydia, in 2007. So it was not the first time I had visited that messy office of his in Sveavägen. By no means, and on most of my visits we had drunk a few drops of amaro.
When we left the publisher’s Martin announced that he had several other meetings booked in, and suggested that we should meet at Sturehof about six o’clock. Although if I preferred to go straight home I could have the car, as taking the commuter train was no problem as far as he was concerned. I said that I had already arranged to meet this Violetta di Parma who was going to stay in our house while we were away — something he ought to have known as I had mentioned it in the car on the way to town that morning — and that Sturehof at six o’clock would be fine for me.
He nodded somewhat absent-mindedly, gave me a quick hug then continued walking along Sveavägen in the direction of Sergels Torg. For some reason I remained standing there on the pavement, watching him weaving his way through the crowds of unknown people, and I remember thinking that if I hadn’t happened to get pregnant when we spent Christmas with his awful parents thirty-three years ago, my life would have turned out differently from the way it did. So would his.
But that was a thought about as banal as an itchy finger, and it lacked significance or comfort.
I enrolled in the Department of Literary History in the autumn term of 1976. I was nineteen, and my boyfriend and first love Rolf enrolled at the same time. I studied literature for two terms, and I might have continued longer if Rolf hadn’t been killed in an accident the following summer, although I can’t be certain of that. I kept feeling at regular intervals that studying literary texts through a magnifying glass was not my true calling, and although I passed the exams without much difficulty — albeit without achieving top marks — I convinced myself that there were alternative arenas in which my life could take place. Or however you might like to express it.
Rolf ’s death was naturally a crucial factor. He was the one of us who had been a bookworm enthralled by literature. He was the one who would recite Rilke and Larkin at night after six glasses of wine, he was the one who took me to seminars organized by the Arbetarnas Bildningsförbund — the Workers’ Educational Association, or the ABF as it was called — and the Asynja book club, and he was the one who would spend the last few kronor he possessed on half a dozen second-hand copies of Ahlin, Dagerman and Sandemose at Rönnell’s antiquarian bookshop rather than ensuring that we had enough to eat over the weekend. We never got as far as pooling our financial resources — and if we had done it would certainly not have been without its problems.
But in the middle of August 1977, Rolf fell to his death fifty metres down a cliff in Switzerland, and so we never got round to considering such a venture. I abandoned my literary studies and after a few months of mourning, during which I spent part of the time living with my parents and the rest working as a night receptionist at a hotel in Kungsholmen, I signed up for a sort of media studies course at Gärdet in January, and that was the direction my career took. I was given a job by Swedish Television eighteen months later, and that was my workplace until three months ago — apart from two sessions of maternity leave and an occasional project at some other institution.
It feels odd, being able to sum up one’s life so simply; but if you miss out your childhood and all the things you thought were so important at the time, it’s straightforward.
Barely a year after Rolf ’s death I went to a garden party in the Old Town. It was the middle of July 1978. I somewhat reluctantly accompanied one of my fellow students on the media studies course, and that was the evening when I met Martin. I was the one who was reluctant, not my fellow student, and that had been the way of things throughout the year. I was not in mourning for just one death, but for two. An old one and a new one — I shall come back to that later — and dealing with one’s sorrow is by no means a simple matter.