‘But it’s a fantastic flat, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s in Bastugatan. It’s one of the best addresses in the whole of Stockholm.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I can go and talk to her anyway.’
‘She’s very interested in Norwegian literature.’
I took her name and telephone number, rang, she picked up at once, just pop round, she said.
The flat really was fantastic. She was young, younger than me, and the walls were plastered with photographs of one man. It was her husband, she said, he was dead.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.
She turned and walked through the flat.
‘This is your room,’ she said. ‘If you want it, that is. You’ve got your own bathroom, own kitchen, and then there’s a room with a bed, as you can see.’
‘Looks great,’ I said.
‘You’ve got your own entrance as well. And if you want to write, you just have to close the door here.’
‘I’ll take it,’ I said. ‘When can I move in?’
‘Now, if you like.’
‘So quickly? Right, I’ll bring my things over this afternoon then.’
Geir just laughed when I told him.
‘It’s impossible to come here without knowing a soul and get a flat in Bastugatan,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible! Do you understand? The gods like you, Karl Ove, that’s for sure.’
‘But Caesar doesn’t,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, Caesar does too. He’s just a little envious, that’s all.’
Three days later I rang Linda, told her I had moved, did she fancy a coffee? Yes, she did, and within an hour we were sitting in a café on the ‘hump’ overlooking Hornsgatan. She seemed happier, that was my first thought as she sat down. She asked if I had been swimming today, I smiled and said no, but she had, at the crack of dawn, it had been fantastic.
So we sat there stirring our cappuccinos. I lit a cigarette, couldn’t think of anything to say, thinking this would have to be the last time.
‘Do you like the theatre?’ she asked.
I shook my head and told her the only plays I had seen were traditional performances at the National in Bergen, which had been about as captivating as watching fish in the aquarium, and a couple at Bergen International Theatre Festival, among them a production of Faust in which actors wandered across the stage mumbling and sporting big black noses. When I said that, she said we would have to go and see Bergman’s production of Ghosts, and I said OK, I’ll give it a go.
‘Have we got a date then?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sounds amusing.’
‘Do bring your Norwegian friend along,’ she said. ‘And I can meet him as well.’
‘Right, I’m sure he’d love to come,’ I said.
We stayed for another quarter of an hour, but the silences were long, and she was probably dying to leave as much as I was. In the end, I put my cigarettes in my pocket and got up.
‘Shall we buy the tickets together?’ she asked.
‘Can do,’ I answered.
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘Half past eleven here?’
‘Yes, that’s fine.’
For the twenty minutes it took to go from the hump to the Royal Dramatic Theatre we barely exchanged a word. It felt as though I could say everything to her or nothing. Now it was nothing, and presumably that was the way it would stay.
I let her order the tickets, and once it was done we started on the way back. The sun flooded the town in light, the first buds had appeared on the trees, there were people everywhere, most of them happy, as you are on the first decent days of spring.
As we crossed Kungsträdgården she squinted into the bright low rays of the sun at me.
‘I saw something odd on TV a few weeks ago,’ she said. ‘They were showing CCTV footage from inside a large newspaper kiosk. Suddenly one of the shelves started smoking. At first there were a few small flames. The assistant was unsighted where he stood. But the customer by the counter could see. He must have known something was going on because while he was waiting for his purchases to be rung up he turned to the shelf. He couldn’t help but see the flames. Then he turned back, took his change and left. While there was a fire burning behind him!’
She looked at me again and smiled.
‘Another customer came in and stood by the counter. By now the fire was well alight. He turned and looked straight at the flames. Then he turned back, finished what he had to do and went out. But he looked straight at the flames! Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you think he didn’t want to be involved?’
‘No, no, not at all. That wasn’t the point. It was that he saw the flames but couldn’t believe what he was seeing, flames in a shop, and so he trusted his brain more than his vision.’
‘What happened after that?’
‘The third person, who came in straight afterwards, shouted, “Fire!” as soon as he saw it. By then the whole stand was ablaze. By then it was impossible not to see it. Odd, eh?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
We had reached the bridge leading to the island where the Royal Palace was and zigzagged through the tourists and immigrants standing and fishing off it. Now and then over the following days I thought about the story she had told, gradually it detached itself from her and became a phenomenon in itself. I didn’t know her, knew as good as nothing about her and the fact that she was Swedish meant that I couldn’t interpret anything from the way she spoke or the clothes she wore. An image from her poetry collection, which I hadn’t read since that time at Biskop-Arnö and had taken out only once, when showing her photo to Yngve, was still imprinted on my brain, the one of the first-person narrator clinging to a man like a baby chimpanzee and seeing this in the mirror. Why that of all images had made an impression I didn’t know. When I arrived home I took out the collection again. Whales and land and huge animals thundering around a sharp-witted and vulnerable narrator.
Was that her?
Some days later we went to the theatre. Linda, Geir and I. The first act was terrible, truly wretched, and in the interval, sitting at a terrace table with a view of the harbour, Geir and Linda chatted away about quite how terrible it had been, and why. I was more sympathetic, for despite the small, cramped feel of the act, which coloured the play and the visions it was supposed to be depicting, there was an anticipation of something else, as if it was lying in wait. Perhaps not in the play, perhaps more in the combination of Bergman and Ibsen, which ultimately had to produce something? Or else it was the splendour of the auditorium that fooled me into believing there had to be something else. And there was. Everything was raised, higher and higher, the intensity increased, and within the tightly set framework, which in the end comprised only mother and son, a kind of boundlessness arose, something wild and reckless. Into it disappeared plot and space, what was left was emotion, and it was stark, you were looking straight into the essence of human existence, the very nucleus of life, and thus you found yourself in a place where it no longer mattered what was actually happening. Everything known as aesthetics and taste was eliminated. Wasn’t there an enormous red sun shining at the back of the stage? Wasn’t that Osvald rolling naked across the stage? I’m not sure any more what I saw, the details disappeared into the state they evoked, which was one of total presence, burning hot and ice-cold at once. However, if you hadn’t allowed yourself to be transported, everything that happened would have appeared exaggerated, perhaps even banal or kitsch. The master stroke was the first act, everything was done there, and only someone who had spent a whole lifetime creating, with an enormous list — more than fifty years’ worth — of productions behind them, could have had the skill, the coolness, the courage, the intuition and the insight to fashion something like this. Bright ideas alone could not have brought this off, it was impossible. Hardly anything I had seen or read had even been close to approaching the essence in this way. As we followed the audience streaming out into the foyer and onto the street, not one of us said a word, but from their distant expressions I could see they had also been carried away into the terrible but real and therefore beautiful place Bergman had seen in Ibsen and then succeeded in shaping. We decided we would have a beer at KB, and as we made our way there the trance-like state wore off to be replaced by an elated, euphoric mood. The shyness I would normally have felt at being so near such an attractive woman, which was further complicated by the events of three years ago, was suddenly gone. She talked about the time she had accidentally nudged a floodlight stand during one of Bergman’s tests and got to feel the sharp edge of his tongue. We discussed the difference between Ghosts and Peer Gynt, which were at opposite ends of a spectrum, one mere surface, the other mere depth, both equally true. She parodied the dialogue between Max von Sydow and Death and talked about individual Bergman films with Geir, who had gone on his own to see the Cinemathek performances, all of them, and had consequently seen the classic films that were worth seeing, while I sat and listened, happy about everything. Happy to have seen the play, happy to have moved to Stockholm, happy to be with Linda and Geir.