‘Isn’t that what you make your living from?’
‘No. I make my living from all the embarrassing situations I have been put in. That’s different.’
‘So there are fluctuations then?’ he said.
‘Here we are,’ I said. ‘We’re eating, isn’t that what you said?’
I opened the door and went in. The bar was in the first room, the dining room in the second.
‘Why not?’ Geir said, and walked through the café. I followed. We sat down, read the menus and ordered chicken and a beer when the waiter came.
‘Did I tell you I’ve been here with Arve?’ I said.
‘No.’
‘When we came to Stockholm we ended up here. Well, first of all we were up at what I gather now must have been Stureplan. Arve went in and asked if they knew where writers drank in Stockholm. They just laughed at him and answered in English. So we wandered round for a while, it was terrible actually, for I held Arve in great esteem, he was an intellectual, was at Vagant from the very start, and then we met at the airport and I couldn’t say a word. Next to nothing. Landed at Arlanda, couldn’t speak. Came into Stockholm, found the accommodation, said nothing. Went out to eat, nada. Not a word. My only chance, I knew, was to drink my way through the sound barrier. So I did. A beer in Drottninggatan, where we asked someone where it was good to go out, they said Söder, Guldapan, and so we took a taxi here. I drank spirits and started to open up. A few words here and there. Arve leaned over to me and said, that girl’s looking at you. Do you want me to go so that you can be alone with her? Which girl? I asked, that one, Arve said, and I looked at her, and shit, she was so good-looking! But it was Arve’s offer that had the most impact. Wasn’t it a bit odd?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘We got rat-arsed. So there was no longer any need to talk. We wandered round the streets here, it was getting light, I had barely a thought in my head, then we found a beer hall and went in, there was a great atmosphere, and I was out of my head, chucking beer down while Arve talked about his child. Suddenly he was in tears. I hadn’t even been listening. And then, there he was, with his hands in front of his face and his shoulders shaking. He was sobbing his heart out, I thought from somewhere deep inside me. Then they closed, we took a taxi to somewhere further up, they didn’t let us in and we found a large open area with a kiosk at the end, it might have been Kungsträdgården, could well have been. There were some chairs which had chains attached to them. We lifted them above our heads and hurled them at the wall, ran wild, completely out of our heads. Strange that the police didn’t come. But they didn’t. So we took a taxi to our lodgings. The following morning we woke up two hours after the train had departed. But we didn’t give a shit anyway, so it didn’t matter. We made our way to the station, caught the next train and I talked all the way back. I was unstoppable. It was as if everything that had been inside me for the last year came out. Something about Arve made it possible. I don’t know quite what it was, or is. A kind of enormous tolerance in him. Nevertheless, he got the whole story. Dad dying, the hell it had been, the debut and everything that came with it, and after I had told him that, I just went on. I remember us waiting for a taxi at the station, not a soul around, just Arve and me, him looking at me, me talking and talking. Childhood, teenage years, I didn’t leave a stone unturned. Just me, nothing else. Me, me, me. I ladled it all over him. Something about him made that possible, he understood everything I said and thought, I had never experienced that with anyone else before. There were always limitations, attitudes, assertion needs that halted what was being said at a certain point, or led it in a certain direction, so that what you said was always reshaped into something else, it could never exist in its own right. But Arve, it seemed to me on that day, was a truly open person, as well being curious and constantly striving to understand what he saw. But there was no ulterior motive about his openness, it was not a damned psychologist’s openness, nor was there any ulterior motive about the curiosity. He had a shrewd eye for the world, so it appeared, and like all those who have accumulated experience, by and large what remained was laughter. Laughter was really the only appropriate way to confront human behaviour and notions.
‘I understood that, and while taking advantage of it, for I was not strong enough to resist all that his openness gave me, it also frightened me.
‘He knew something I didn’t know, he understood something I didn’t understand, he could see something I couldn’t see.
‘I told him.
‘He smiled.
‘“I’m forty years old, Karl Ove. You’re thirty. That’s a big difference. That’s what you’ve noticed.”
‘“I don’t think so,” I said. “There’s something else. You have some sort of insight into things, which I lack.”
‘“Tell me more! Tell me more!”
‘He laughed.
‘His aura was centred around his dark intense eyes, but he was not himself dark, he laughed a lot, the smile barely left his slightly twisted lips. His aura was strong, he was the kind of person whose presence you noticed, but it wasn’t a physical presence because you simply didn’t notice his light slim body. At least I didn’t. Arve, he was a shaven head, dark eyes, a permanent smile and a hearty laugh. His reasoning always led, for me, to unexpected conclusions. The fact that he had opened up for me was more than I could have hoped for. All of a sudden I could say everything that I had kept inside me so far, and more, for it was as if it had rubbed off on me. Now my reasoning set off on expected paths, and the feeling it gave me was one of hope. Perhaps I was a writer after all? Arve was. But me? With all my ordinariness? With my life of football and films?
‘How I prattled on.
‘The taxi arrived, I opened the boot lid and babbled away, hungover and the worse for wear. We put our two bags in, got in the car, I babbled the whole way through the Swedish countryside to Biskops-Arnö, where the seminar had long started. They’d just had lunch when we rolled out of the taxi.’
‘And that was how it continued?’ Geir asked.
‘And that was how it continued,’ I said.
A man stepped forward and introduced himself as Ingmar Lemhagen. He was the course director. He told me he had enjoyed my book and that it had reminded him of another Norwegian author. ‘Who?’ I asked, he smiled wryly, said it would have to wait until we went through my texts in the plenary.
I pondered. Had to be Finn Alnæs or Agnar Mykle.
I deposited my bags outside, went into the hall, shovelled some food onto a plate and devoured it. Everything swayed, I was still drunk, but not so much that I didn’t feel my chest bursting with the excitement and pleasure of being there.
I was shown to a room, dropped off my luggage, went over to the building where the course was being held. That was when I saw her. She was leaning against the wall, I didn’t say anything to her, there were lots of people around, but I looked at her, and there was something about her I wanted, the second I saw her, it was there.
A kind of explosion.
We were put in the same group. The group leader, a Finnish woman, said nothing as we took our places, it was some sort of teaching trick she was employing, but no one was taken in, everyone was silent for the first five minutes, until it became too unpleasant and someone took the initiative.
I was aware of her the whole time.
What she said, how she spoke, but most of all her presence, her body in the room.
Why I don’t know. Perhaps the state I was in made me more receptive to what she had or the person she was.
She introduced herself. Linda Boström. Her debut had been a collection of poems called Gör mig behaglig för såret, she lived in Stockholm and was twenty-five years old.