Yngve had done it because he wanted a better life. Dad did it because he wanted a radically different one. That was why I wasn’t worried about Yngve, and actually never had been, he would always manage.
Vanja had fallen asleep in the buggy. Linda stopped, laid her on her back and glanced at the board on the pavement outside Blå Porten showing the meal of the day.
‘In fact, I am hungry,’ she said. ‘How about you?’
‘We could have some lunch,’ I said. ‘The lamb meatballs are good.’
It was a nice place. There was an open area in the middle, full of plants with a fountain, where you could sit in the summer. In the winter the centrepiece was a long corridor with glass walls. The only downside was the clientele, which for the most part consisted of cultured women in their fifties and sixties.
I held the door open for Linda, who pushed the buggy in, then grabbed the bar between the wheels and lifted it down the three steps. The room was just over half full. We chose the table furthest away in case Vanja woke up, and went to order. Cora was sitting at the window table at the back. She got up with a smile when she saw us.
‘Hi!’ she said. ‘How good to see you both!’
She hugged first Linda, then me.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘How are things?’
‘Good,’ Linda said. ‘How about you?’
‘Good. I’m here with my mother, as you can see.’
I nodded to her mother, whom I had met once, at one of Cora’s parties. She nodded back.
‘Are you here alone?’ Cora asked.
‘No, Vanja’s over there,’ Linda answered.
‘Oh yes. Are you going to be here for a while?’
‘Ye-es, I think so…’ Linda said.
‘I’ll come over afterwards,’ Cora said. ‘Then I can have a peep at your daughter. Is that all right?’
‘Of course,’ Linda said, and went to the end of the counter, where we took our turn in the queue.
Cora was the first of Linda’s friends I had met. She loved Norway and all things Norwegian, had lived there for some years and was prone to speaking Norwegian when she was drunk. She was the only Swede I had met who understood that there were big differences between our two countries, and she understood in the only way it could be understood, physically. The way people bump into each other in the street, in shops and on public transport. The way people in Norway always chat, in kiosks, queues and taxis. Her eyes had widened in surprise when she read Norwegian newspapers and saw the tone of debates. They really give each other a tongue-lashing! she said with enthusiasm. They give it everything they’ve got! They’re not afraid of anything! Not only have they got every opinion under the sun and the courage to say things no Swede would ever say, they also do it while going at each other hammer and tongs. Oh, how liberating that is! Her reaction made it easier to get to know her than Linda’s other friends, who were sociable in quite a different, formal and more polished way, not to mention the office collective where she had got me in. They were kind and friendly, often invited me to lunch, and just as often I declined, apart from a couple of occasions when I sat silently listening to their conversations. On one of the occasions they were discussing the imminent invasion of Iraq and the neighbouring eternal conflict between Israel and Palestine. Discussing is perhaps not the right word; it was more like small talk about the food or the weather. The following day I met Cora, and she told me her friend had resigned her post at the collective in a fury. Apparently there had been a heated exchange of opinions about the relationship between Israel and Palestine, she had lost her temper and resigned her post on the spot. And sure enough, her place had been cleared the next day. But I had been present! And I hadn’t noticed anything! No aggression, no irritability, nothing. Only their friendly chatty voices and their elbows sticking out like chicken wings as they plied their knives and forks. This was Sweden, these were the Swedes.
But Cora also got annoyed that day. I told her that Geir had gone to Iraq two weeks before to write a book about the war. She said he was a conceited egotistical idiot. She wasn’t a political person, so I was surprised by her violent reaction. In fact, there were tears in her eyes as she cursed him. Was her empathy that strong?
Her father had gone to the war in the Congo in the 1960s, she said then. He had worked as a war correspondent. It had destroyed him. Not that he had been injured or anything like that, nor that the experiences had shaken him in such a way that he bore mental scars; more the opposite, he wanted to go back, he wanted to have more of the life he had lived there, close to death, a need nothing in Sweden could fulfil. She told us a strange story about how he had ridden a motorbike at a circus afterwards, the motorbike of death she called it, and of course he had started drinking. He was destructive and had died by his own hand when Cora was young. The tears in her eyes were for him, she was grieving for him.
Fortunate then that she had such a strong, authoritative and strict mother?
Well, not necessarily… My impression was that she viewed Cora’s life with some disapproval, and Cora took that more to heart than she should. Her mother was an accountant, and it was clear that Cora’s wanderings in a vaguely cultural landscape did not quite correspond to her expectations of what constituted a suitable life for her daughter. Cora had earned her corn as a journalist on a variety of women’s magazines, although that didn’t leave much of a mark on her self-image, and she wrote poems, she was a poet. She had been to Biskops-Arnö, the writing school where Linda had also been, and she wrote good poetry from what I could judge; I heard her do a reading once and was surprised. Her poems were neither language poetry, which most young Swedish poets went in for, nor delicate or sensitive, like those of the others, but something else, unrestrained and exploratory in a non-personal way, written in expansive language it was difficult to associate with her. She remained, however, unpublished. Swedish publishers were infinitely more budget-conscious than their Norwegian counterparts and much more careful, so if you didn’t align yourself perfectly with the literary surroundings you didn’t have an earthly. If she held her nerve and worked hard she would succeed in the end because she had talent, but when you looked at her, endurance was not the first quality to leap up at you. She was given to self-pity, spoke in a low voice, often about depressing matters, although she could also turn on a five-øre piece and be lively and interesting. When she drank she could take centre stage and make a scene, the only one of Linda’s friends who would. Perhaps that was why I found her so congenial?
Long hair hung down on either side of her face. The eyes behind the small glasses had a kind of dog-like melancholy about them. Whenever she drank, and occasionally when sober as well, she expressed her great admiration for and feelings of identity with Linda. Linda never really knew quite how to react.
I gently stroked Linda’s back. The table we were standing beside was covered with cakes of all shapes and sizes. Dark brown chocolate, light yellow custard cream, greenish marzipan, pink and white meringue kisses. A little flag with the name on every dish.
‘What would you like?’ I asked.