Craig shook himself. The incongruity of his fancy, here on a Stockholm pavement, before a co-operative housing structure, struck him fully, and as being ridiculous, and he banished the daydream. Emily and the rest had disappeared into the building. Craig found his brier pipe, packed it, and Indent Flink was waiting with the match.
‘What do you think of our co-operatives?’ asked Flink.
‘I admire them,’ said Craig, drawing on his pipe, ‘as I admire a nation with no slums. I think it’s advanced and a great gift for the majority. But I’m a writer, an individualist, and I suppose I’d rather live in a tent, simply to be alone and not belong and be levelled off, because I prefer ups and downs.’
‘It will interest you that our co-operatives have even got into the writing game,’ said Flink.
‘In what way?’
‘The co-ops publish a magazine, and they publish books at lower cost. They even sponsor a yearly lottery to raise money for maybe three dozen deserving writers.’
‘You mean there’s that much interest in authors here?’
‘Enormous interest,’ said Flink. ‘There are seven million people in Sweden. Sixty-five per cent of all adults are regular book readers.’
‘Remarkable,’ said Craig.
‘Our problem here is the critics. Everything succeeds or fails on the reviews. If they are good, a book becomes a best seller. If they are bad, we can dump our stock in the canals. The Perfect State got unanimous raves. What irked me was that the raves were not only for its literary merit, but, I suspect, because a story of Plato gave the critics a chance, in their articles, to display their own erudition.’
Craig laughed. ‘I suppose that does happen.’
‘I am sure,’ said Flink seriously. ‘It happened with each of your books. The critics used them all to show off themselves. I believe this sometimes influences even the Nobel Committee. Jacobsson was telling me about the contest for the second Nobel literary award in 1902. There were many nominees considered behind closed doors-Anton Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen-but who were the final contenders in the last ballot? Theodor Mommsen, eighty-five years old, with his five-volume History of Rome, and Herbert Spencer, eighty-two, with his ten-volume A System of Synthetic Philosophy. So there they were for the Nobel literary prize, a German historian and an English philosopher-and not Chekhov or Ibsen. Mommsen was elected and given the prize. Why? The Nobel Committee said for his artistry. Compared to Ibsen? For myself, I suspect a prize for Mommsen was an advertising for the Nobel judges, of their own erudition and scholarship. Possibly, this same egotism worked in your favour, too. I don’t know.’
Craig and Flink paced before the co-operative building, discussing publishing and books and public taste, discussing the cynical and morose outlook of Swedish writers (a rebellion against the idyllic welfare state), and the taste of Swedish writers for Faulkner and Kafka and Gottling and their distaste for the valentines of Ingrid Påhl, until, presently, Mr. Manker emerged with his conducted tour.
Leah burst forth towards Craig, taking his arm and attention possessively, and bubbling on about soundproof rooms and stainless steel and garbage-disposal equipment. Feigning a show of interest, Craig covertly sought out Emily Stratman. A quarter of an hour before, he had wished she would turn around so that he might enjoy her fully. Now she was turned around, in his direction, across the lawn. She wore a high-necked pale blue sweater beneath the suede jacket and over the tight skirt. Her bosom, rising and falling slightly-had they climbed stairs or was it the day?-was spectacularly abundant, and Craig was unaccountably pleased as he enjoyed it, and her, in the sun.
They drove on now, with Mr. Manker at his voluble best, fluently reciting capsule histories of this museum and that gallery and endless chapels of worship. On lovely Helgeandsholmen-Holy Ghost Island-he idled the car, and they considered the unlovely, Germanic Riksdagshuset or Parliament Building, and learned that it had been established in 1865, and that the aristocracy had been oppressive (did Count Jacobsson squirm ever so little?) and allowed only ten per cent of the population to vote until after the fall of the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs, so recently, when universal suffrage and true democracy finally came to backward Sweden.
They drove farther through Stockholm-‘a community of twelve islands connected by forty-two bridges’, recited Mr. Manker-until they reached an immense underground garage, known as Katarinaberget, and they were told that this had been specifically constructed as a shelter to protect 20,000 persons against nuclear explosions. Now, for the first time, Craig was fascinated by a projection of the future.
‘We hope that people will take the lesson of your book, Armageddon,’ said Indent Flink to Craig, ‘but if they don’t, you can see, we are ready to survive.’
‘How many of these have you got?’ asked Craig.
Mr. Manker replied. ‘We now have four of these huge atomic bombproof shelters in Stockholm, to save fifty thousand people, and, in all, nineteen such large ones throughout Sweden, and also thirty thousand small ones, to hold all together over two million people. The rest of the people we could evacuate in minutes from the cities to rural areas. The subterranean shelter you observe here has electricity, heat, water, and food, even preparations for schools. Much of our heavy industry-Bofors and Saab-make their anti-aircraft and jet aeroplanes in subterranean factories carved into granite hills. Other nations only speak of civil defence; we in Sweden have already acted on it.’
‘Perhaps you shall inherit the earth,’ said Stratman glumly, ‘and by then, you can have it.’
Emily stared at the cavernous underground garage. ‘It’s awful,’ she murmured.
‘But why?’ asked Mr. Manker. ‘We are so proud of this-’
‘I don’t mean what you think,’ said Emily quickly. ‘Of course, you’ve done the sensible thing. I mean’-she waved her hand toward the shelter-‘the completed cycle, the irony of going back to where we came from, Neanderthal man scooping out his pre-historic caves, except now, the caves are air-conditioned.’
Solemnity had settled on all of them, and Count Jacobsson was anxious not to have the afternoon spoiled. ‘Now you must see the lighter side of Stockholm,’ he announced. ‘Mr. Manker, will you kindly drive us to Djurgården and Skansen?’
Concentrating on his new goal, the attaché manœuvred the large car through the busy mid-afternoon traffic, conforming to the left-lane drive that unnerved all but the Swedes. He continued eastward through the city, until gradually be began to shed the traffic, and they drew closer to the vast pastoral island known as Djurgården.
Easing up the pressure of his foot on the accelerator, Mr. Manker slowly circled the vehicle around a clustering of odd and elaborate buildings. ‘We call this Diplomat’s City,’ said Jacobsson. ‘Here you will find most of the foreign embassies and legations. There, you see the Italian Embassy-’
As each was identified, it amused Craig to reflect on how each Embassy took on the character of its nationals abroad. The British Embassy was staid and sturdy brick, aloof, dignified, conservative and no-nonsense, like the majority of its nation’s travellers. The United States Embassy, across the way, squatted high on a small cliff. It was a modernistic horror, awkwardly trying to belong to the country it was visiting by imitating that country, and failing miserably, so that it was finally no more than a caricature of an American abroad trying desperately to be a part of Sweden.