The publishing house had said they would publish it, and I was tempted, but also enormously unsure, not least after having had Erik Thure read it. He called me late one evening, both his mood and choice of words peculiar, as though he had had a few drinks so as to be able to say what he had to say, which was simple, it’s no good, it isn’t a novel. You have to tell a story, Karl Ove! he said several times. You have to tell a story! I knew he was right and that was what I started doing on this, my first day of work in 2004, as I sat at my new desk looking at the blank screen. After grafting for half an hour I leaned back and glanced at the poster behind the desk, it was from a Peter Greenaway exhibition I had been to in Barcelona with Tonje many years ago, some time in my former life. It showed four pictures: one of what I had long thought of as a cherub peeing, one of a bird’s wing, one of a 1920s pilot, and one of a corpse’s hand. Then I looked out the window. The sky above the hospital on the other side of the road was cloudless and blue. The low sun glistened on the panes, signs, railings, car hoods. The frozen breath rising from passersby on the pavement made them look as if they were on fire. All tightly wrapped up in warm clothes. Hats, scarves, mittens, thick jackets. Hurried movements, set faces. My eyes wandered across the flooring. It was parquet and relatively new, the reddish-brown tone at odds with the flat’s otherwise fin-de-siècle style. I noticed that the knots and grain, perhaps two meters from the chair where I was sitting, formed an image of Christ wearing a crown of thorns.
This was not something I reacted to, I merely registered it, for images like this are found in all buildings, created by irregularities in the floors, walls, doors, and moldings — here a damp patch in a ceiling looks like a dog running, there a worn-through coat of paint on a doorstep looks like a snow-covered valley with a mountain range in the distance above which clouds appear to be gushing forth — but it must have set something going in me because when I got up ten minutes later and went over to the kettle and filled it with water I suddenly remembered something that had happened one evening a long time ago, deep in my childhood, when I had seen a similar image on the water in a news item about a missing fishing vessel. In the second it took to fill the pot, I saw our living room before me, the teak television cabinet, the shimmer of isolated snowflakes against the darkening hillside outside the window, the sea on the screen, the face that appeared in it. With the images came the atmosphere from that time, of spring, of the housing estate, of the seventies, of family life as it was then. And with the atmosphere, an almost uncontrollable longing.
At that moment the telephone rang. It startled me. Surely no one had my number here.
It rang five times before giving up. The hiss of the kettle boiling grew louder and I thought as so often before that it sounded as if something was approaching.
I unscrewed the lid of the coffee tin, put two spoonfuls in my cup, and poured in the water, which rose up the sides, black and steaming, then I got dressed. Before going out I stood in such a way that I could see the face in the wooden flooring. And it really was Christ. The face half-averted, as though in pain, eyes downcast, the crown of thorns on his head.
The remarkable thing was not that the face should be visible here, nor that I had once seen a face in the sea in the mid-seventies, the remarkable thing was that I had forgotten it and now remembered. Apart from one or two isolated events that Yngve and I had talked about so often they had almost assumed biblical proportions, I remembered hardly anything from my childhood. That is, I remembered hardly any of the events in it. But I did remember the rooms where they took place. I could remember all the places I had been, all the rooms I had been in. Just not what happened there.
I went into the street with the cup in my hand. A slight feeling of unease arose within me at seeing it out here, the cup belonged indoors, not outdoors; outdoors, there was something naked and exposed about it, and as I crossed the street I decided to buy a coffee at the 7-Eleven the following morning, and use their cup, made of cardboard, designed for outdoor use, from then on. There were a couple of benches outside the nearby hospital, and I walked up to them, ensconced myself on the ice-covered slats, lit a cigarette, and glanced down the street. The coffee was already lukewarm. The thermometer outside the kitchen window at home had shown minus twenty that morning, and even though the sun was shining it could not be much warmer now. Minus fifteen, perhaps.
I took the mobile phone from my pocket to see if anyone had called. Well, not anyone: we were expecting a child in a week’s time, so I was prepared for Linda to call at any moment and say things were on the move.
At the intersection by the top of the gentle incline the traffic lights began to tick. Soon after, the street below was free of cars. Two middle-aged women came out of the entrance below me and lit up. Wearing white hospital coats, they squeezed their arms against their sides and took small, stabbing steps to keep warm. To me they looked like some strange kind of duck. Then the ticking stopped, and the next moment cars shot out of the hilltop shadow like a pack of baying hounds into the sunlit street below. The studded tires lashed the tarmac. I put the mobile back in my pocket, wrapped my hands around the cup. The steam from the coffee rose slowly and mingled with the breath from my mouth. On the school playground that lay squashed between two blocks of flats twenty meters up from my office the shouts of children suddenly fell quiet, it was only now that I noticed. The bell had rung. The sounds here were new and unfamiliar to me, the same was true of the rhythm in which they surfaced, but I would soon get used to them, to such an extent that they would fade into the background again. You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?
This was the question I asked myself, sitting in a suburb of Stockholm drinking coffee, my muscles contracting with the cold and the cigarette smoke dissolving into the vast mass of air above me.
The shouts from the school playground came at specific intervals and were one of the many rhythms that traversed the district everyday, from the time the traffic began to get heavy in the morning until, as if emerging on the other side, it began to lighten in late afternoon. The workmen gathering in cafés and bakeries for breakfast at half past six, with their protective boots and strong, grimy hands, their folding rulers tucked into trouser pockets and their constantly ringing mobile phones. The less easily identifiable men and women who filled the streets in the following hour, whose soft well-dressed exteriors said no more about them than that they spent their days in some office, and could equally well have been lawyers as TV journalists or architects, could equally well have been advertising copy writers as clerks in an insurance company. The nurses and orderlies the buses disgorged in front of the hospital, mostly middle-aged, mostly women, with the occasional young man, in groups that increased in size as eight o’clock approached, then decreased until in the end there was only a pensioner with a wheelie bag alighting onto the pavement during the quiet mornings when mothers and fathers began to appear with their strollers and the street traffic was dominated by vans, trucks, pickups, buses, and taxis.