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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
'Gorgeous and heightened and fully of glittering icy people' TIMES 'I loved this smart and subtle exploration of modern motherhood and womanhood' Daisy Buchanan 'How can anyone leave someone they love?' Martin Berg is falling into crisis. Decades ago, he was an aspiring writer, his girlfriend was the wildly intelligent Cecilia Wickner, and his best friend was the hellraising artist Gustav Becker. But Martin's manuscript is now languishing in a drawer, Gustav has stopped answering his calls, and Cecilia has vanished – leaving him to raise their children alone. Cecilia: an eccentric wife and absent mother, a woman who was perhaps only true to herself. When Rakel stumbles across a clue as to why her mother left, she sets out to fill the gaps in her family's story and discovers that some questions have no clear answers… __________ PRAISE FOR Collected Works: 'Utterly gripping… a magnificent doorstop of a novel' Guardian 'An assured, bittersweet novel that, like youth, seems to have it all' Financial Times 'Blends the thrill of a mystery with the curiosity and depth of philosophical enquiry' New Yorker 'Eminently readable and engrossing' Spectator 'A real knickerbocker glory of a novel… manages to out-Franzen Jonathan Franzen and is addictive as any box-set' The Crack Magazine 'Thrilling, brilliant and immense in the best possible way' Francesca Reece 'The most convincing work of literary fiction I've read in years… vibrating with intelligence and style' Emily Temple
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1
“This is a big, compelling family drama that’s also a mystery, and also a treatise on art and artmaking and friendship and getting older, and it will suck you in and refuse to let go”
LitHub
“A richly evocative work from a major new talent”
Kirkus Reviews
“A sweeping and complex drama of family, art and sacrifice… Readers will be captivated”
Publishers Weekly
“[A] warm, engaging and funny novel about the inebriation of youth and the sobriety of middle age… a thoroughly enjoyable book”
Ayşegül Savaş, author of White on White
“The hottest debut of the year! If Klas Östergren and Donna Tartt had a love child, who grew up in Gothenburg and became an author, well, there you have Lydia Sandgren”
Akademibokhandeln (Sweden)
“A masterpiece… Tender, and terribly convincing”
Expressen (Sweden)
“A doorstopper of narrative joy, cultivation and linguistic delight”
Borås Tidning (Sweden)
“A book that celebrates the very height of what fiction is”
El País (Spain)
3
martin berg was on his back on the living room floor, hands folded over his stomach. Stacks of paper all around him. Next to his head, a half-finished novel; by his feet, twenty-five years’ worth of napkin notes in big piles. His right elbow touching an anthology of promising writers born in the sixties, the only book he’d ever been published in. Next to his left elbow, several smaller stacks, each tied with ribbon and labelled paris in red marker. And scattered between his head and his elbows, and his elbows and his feet, papers, papers and more papers: written in ink or pencil or typed on a typewriter with notes scribbled in the margins, double-spaced computer printouts, crumpled and coffee-stained, smooth and shiny, some stapled, some held together with paper clips, others loose. The beginnings of short stories, essays, novel synopses, several attempts at plays, notebooks with covers worn after a lifetime in the inside pocket of his jacket, piles of letters.
He’d pushed the coffee table aside to make room.
It was a summer afternoon in the year he was turning fifty. A quivering heat enveloped the city. The windows overlooking the street were open and he could hear laughing children, ringing bicycle bells, the distant bass line of a song he didn’t recognise, a tram clattering down Karl Johansgatan. People were sunning themselves in the park outside, motionless like beached white seals. Earlier, Martin had been seized by an urge to shout at them through the window, but all sound had seemed to stick in his throat. His skin was crawling and there was a sucking sensation in the pit of his stomach, a sinkhole, and his hands were clammy and shaking from too much coffee.
This was a lull in his story. Dead time between two momentous events. The stuff you cut for the sake of pacing. Nothing to do but wait. For the children to come home. For the funeral. For news. It 8was enough to make a person want to reach for a red marker and draw thick lines across the entire page. Cross it all out. Raymond Carver’s editor took the axe to large parts of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, deleted entire endings – the happy ones – and that turned out great.
Maybe he should have tried to uphold normalcy. Seen people, eaten, done a few hours of work. After all, he was still a publisher, and Publisher Berg always had things that needed doing. But instead he’d opted for organising his papers. He’d spent a long time in the attic storage space, which was crammed full of children’s winter coats, a bicycle in need of a new chain, Elis’s old skateboard, Rakel’s ball gown from graduation prosaically wrapped in plastic, sleeping bags, a tent, posters he had to unroll to have a look at, Cecilia’s tattered running shoes. How many pairs of shoes had she worn out, and why hadn’t she just binned them? Martin had kept at it, sweat trickling down his back and thighs because the attic was sweltering. In the end, he’d pulled out a box marked Martin, Writing in what was unmistakeably his own hand.
Martin wasn’t sure how much time he’d spent trying to trace a path from his current position back to some kind of origin. There must have been a crossroads at some point, but for far too long he seemed to have been simply plodding along without a thought to checking his compass. And when had all this time passed? Because it clearly had. His children had grown up. For the first time in decades, he was no one’s guardian. Elis, little Elis, who was travelling around Europe – chaperoned by his older sister, thankfully – was unlikely to move out any time soon. But he’d turned his eyes towards the horizon and sooner or later Martin would have to watch his son pack his waistcoats into boxes and relocate to a commune on Hisingen, where he would listen to Jacques Brel with half-closed eyes, no longer hiding the fact that he was smoking. And then the flat would be completely empty. End scene.
Rationally speaking, Martin thought as he lay on the rug, because he sensed rationality was all he had left at this point, rationally speaking, 9he understood this was part of the process. That children grow up is one of the inevitabilities of life. Thirty years ago, he’d done the same thing himself, but with a more dubious haircut. It was how it went. He just hadn’t been prepared for it happening so soon. He hadn’t pictured the emptiness, hadn’t realised loneliness would spread through the rooms and take over the entire flat while his hair turned grey, his legs got thinner, his hearing failed and the years vanished without leaving anything in exchange.
And one day it would all be over. Leaving behind nothing but stacks of paper.
Martin closed his eyes and pictured Gustav Becker, even though it was important not to think too much about Gustav. Especially not Gustav laughing, his thin fingers closing around a cigarette, his eyes holding Martin’s until Martin looked away.
Martin looked to his right (papers), to his left (papers), and then turned his attention back to the ceiling again. So white and untouched, so unwritten! 10
Contents
Part 1
The Great Library of Alexandria12
13
1
his alarm jerked him awake. It was March and still pitch-black outside. Martin heaved himself up, turning his bedside lamp on and the alarm off. A text from his son, sent at 3.51 a.m., lit up the screen of his phone. Coming home. NB I decline to be celebrated.
Martin sighed. Elis had marked the eve of his birthday at the House of Jazz – which apparently was no longer a place for middle-aged couples looking to take a turn on the dance floor – and somewhere between the bar and home he’d evidently felt it necessary to remind his dad not to sing to him in the morning.
On his way to the bathroom, he knocked on his son’s door and was rewarded with a muffled grunt.
“Happy birthday,” Martin said.
He turned on the coffee machine. He fetched the newspapers from the hallway floor. He made toast and boiled an egg. Just as he was about to start on the arts section, his youngest appeared, walking straight over to the sink, filling a glass with water from the tap and downing it.
Elis had grown at least a foot in the past few years and it was becoming increasingly obvious he had his mother’s lanky, blonde physiognomy. Martin’s primary contribution to Elis’s genome was brown eyes and, according to Gustav, a tendency to sulk while pretending not to.
“Fun night?”
Elis nodded and downed another glass of water.
“Do you want your presents now or later?”
His son pondered that for a few moments, then his ribcage convulsed as he held back violent gagging. “Later,” he groaned and dashed off towards the bathroom. 14
Martin finished his coffee and went to get dressed. He studiously avoided the mirror on the wardrobe door. He was well aware how he looked. The hair on his chest was turning grey. His calves were scrawny, his knees knobbly. The fact that he worked out three times a week at Gothenburg’s most expensive gym seemed to make no difference. It was a futile attempt to keep the inevitable at bay. His body had betrayed him, pretending to carry on as usual when in reality it had given itself over to ageing. Little by little, while he wasn’t looking. In the olden days, he could start drinking at lunchtime, smoke incessantly, and then wake up the next morning to realise it was the day of the Gothenburg Race, which he’d only signed up to run for a laugh in the first place, find his running shoes and cross the finish line in under two hours. It had lulled him into thinking that was how the human body works. And then it had been taken away from him, bit by bit, without him noticing.
Black trousers, black jacket. Martin Berg dressed like a person receiving absolution for his sins.
*
As usual, he was the first to arrive at the offices of the publishing company. He liked the way the lights flickered to life, the way the day woke up and unfolded before him.
Stuck smack in the middle of his computer screen was a Post-it note. VENUE 25th ANNIVERSARY – IS FRILAGRET OK??? Written, judging by the neat, rounded letters, by Patricia, their intern. A memory of an email he hadn’t replied to stirred at the back of his mind. He moved the note to the edge of the screen, already home to an array of other notes reminding him about things he wouldn’t get to until they were urgent and completely unavoidable. It didn’t seem to matter how hard he worked: the number of things that had to get done now remained constant. Their twenty-fifth anniversary party was still three months away.
Martin leaned his forehead against his fingertips and listened to the humming of the hard drive booting up. Elis had a French test today. 15He’d probably done his studying while queueing to get into the House of Jazz.
His son’s grades were concerning in that they were neither outstanding nor awful. If they’d been awful, that would have at least been a fact neither one of them could deny. But Elis’s grades hovered around the meridian of mediocrity, because at some point Elis always got tired of whatever he was supposed to be doing. He put his pen down and proceeded to gaze out of the window instead of going over his answers one last time. Whenever he was asked to try a bit harder, he sighed and adopted a put-upon air – as though you were asking him to pull down the moon or tame a polar bear – and said: Yes, fine, I will. And Martin could hear his own voice climbing in pitch as he talked about the job market and getting a university degree, and god only knew what would happen to Komvux now that Björklund had been given free reign with his senseless ideas, and how important it was that Elis realised that this was important. The kind of thing he’d never had to badger Rakel about. Rakel had always had top grades across the board.
The front door slammed shut and brisk footsteps approached.
“Good morning!” Per hollered. He always sounded like he meant it. Martin must have failed to show enough enthusiasm, because a few minutes later his partner entered his office with two cups of coffee. Per Andrén was dressed in a maroon jacket, a pale-pink shirt, and a polka-dot tie, and he was an incorrigible morning person.
“Why so glum, friend? Look what arrived yesterday,” he said, handing over a book. “Doesn’t it look terrific?”
On a whim, they’d decided to publish a new edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s diaries. The latest edition was far from sold out, but another publishing company had a big Swedish-language Wittgenstein biography coming out before the end of the year, which they hoped might generate a burst of interest in the Austrian philosopher. They’d hired a historian from Södertörn University to write a new introduction.
“Lovely,” Martin said. The hardback was heavy and handsome, with silk ribbon bookmarks and generous margins. He opened it and 16stroked the wood-free, slightly yellow paper, but avoided reading any part of the text, just as he had avoided giving it a final once-over before it was sent to print.
Per was beaming. “Amir did a great job with the old text block. You should tell him that.”
“I suspect you already have.”
“He wants to hear it from you.”
Martin let out a surprised chuckle. “You think?”
“The young people prefer to hear it from you. Anyway, get that coffee down you so you’re awake when the rest of the gang arrives.”
Once upon a time, Martin would have been concerned to learn that thirty years down the line he’d be spending more time with Per Andrén than with any other adult. They’d got to know each other in the bloom of their youth, when they made up the weaker half of a rock band. Martin had been convinced he was a skilled guitarist, and that conviction had for a long time obscured the fact that he did not have much in the way of musical talent. Per had had no such conviction to lean on. Bent so low over his bass only his hopelessly non-punk hairdo showed, he’d sweated, fumbled and floundered, sometimes looking up with an expression of deep bewilderment on his full-moon face. The skin on the fingers of his right hand had refused to develop any callouses and he’d been forever plagued by blisters. But he’d read every issue of culture magazine Kris several times from cover to cover, knew everything about new Swedish literature and came from three generations of entrepreneurs. The publishing company had been his idea. Left to his own devices, the thought would probably never have occurred to Martin.
Per and his wife frequently invited Martin over for dinner, in the past few years even more frequently than before. They passed off these dinners as informal, spontaneous get-togethers (“Want to come over for a bite on Saturday?”), but it was always a three-course affair with several guests, flickering candles, vaguely intellectual conversation, 25-year-old port from some tiny farm outside Porto to which the Andréns had dragged their surprisingly obliging children the summer 17before. Martin had long since caught on to the fact that they always made sure to invite a woman who was single and of a socially acceptable age. Martin preferred the term unmarried; he’d always felt single had a pathetic ring to it. It was a word that tried to cover desperation with forced cheerfulness. It was a status communicated between the lines: “My ex-husband and I used to…”, “It was back when I lived on Brännö with my ex-husband.”
He always called Cecilia Cecilia. What other choice did he have?
And Per always shot him a resigned look across the table.
The rest of the company’s employees arrived. First on the scene was Patricia, the intern, who started every day by wiping the dust off her computer screen and whose desk was so tidy it made you wonder if she ever did any work. But she had a knack for layout and proofing, never missed an inadvertent line break or incorrect punctuation mark, and whenever she ran into a problem, she tackled it with an Excel sheet. Martin had found her hard to figure out until she confessed that Wuthering Heights was one of the formative reading experiences of her life. Patricia, he mused, was definitely not a Cathy, and she would surely never go for a Heathcliff in real life. But something in her neat and tidy soul yearned for disaster, madness and the longing that suffused Brontë’s novel.
Sanna came sweeping in next. She’d been their editor since back when they ran the company out of an old factory building, had landlines and smoked indoors. Now, she shouted hello to everyone and no one in particular, tossed her yoga mat into a corner, kicked off her boots to don slippers and went to the kitchen to pour herself a bowl of cereal that she ate standing up in three minutes flat.
Martin came in for more coffee just as Sanna shoved the dishwasher closed with her foot.
“I read Karin’s manuscript,” she said. “It’s very long.”
“I’ve talked to her about making some cuts.”
“What does ‘some’ mean? I was thinking, like, twenty-five per cent. Would that offend her, do you think?” 18
Martin pondered that. “It might. Why don’t we have a look at it together later?”
Sanna sighed and poured coffee into the biggest mug she could find.
Back in his room, Martin spent some time searching for their first edition of Wittgenstein’s diaries. These days, Berg & Andrén published about twenty titles a year, and he was running out of room on his shelves. Balancing on one of the Lamino chairs, he found what he was looking for on the top shelf, dusty and slightly faded. Other than that, the book was in remarkably good shape, considering that it had been printed on a shoestring budget in 1988. The back was glued and the paper cheap, but, even so, it possessed a kind of austere elegance. The cover was a deep shade of chestnut, with the title and author’s name in black. The blurb on the back ended with a line about the translation having been done by Cecilia Berg (b. 1963), PhD Candidate in Intellectual History at Gothenburg University. The new edition just said: Translation: Cecilia Berg.
“Amir!” Martin hollered when he spotted the young man passing his door on his way to the kitchen. Amir stopped dead. His shirt was buttoned all the way up, but his hair was dishevelled. If Martin knew their production manager, he’d commuted to work in a sleepy daze from which he had yet to fully emerge.
“Great work on the Wittgenstein book,” he said.
The other man visibly relaxed and a smile spread across his face. “Really?” He was a few years older than Rakel, closer to thirty than twenty-five. He’d joined the company as an intern, kicking off his career with genuine horror at their website (“When did you last update this? You’re joking?”). Then he’d sorted it out the way he sorted out everything: sequestered behind headphones that didn’t leak a note of whatever it was he was listening to, his eyes glued to the screen, a constant tapping from the keyboard. By the time Amir’s internship was coming to an end, Per had been convinced the company would fall apart without him, so he hired him and bought him a ridiculously expensive computer. 19
Martin nodded. Amir said thank you and continued towards the kitchen.
The day passed as most days did: a string of emails and phone calls, cups of coffee, meetings and decisions. After lunch, Martin met with an author to discuss her still virtually unwritten novel. Her debut had received widespread praise and several awards, and now the anxious creature was paralysed by expectations. Martin considered telling her it wasn’t all that important – her first book had sold well, but they still had several boxes of the paperback edition left downstairs – but that could easily have the opposite effect. In Martin’s experience, the carrot and stick method worked as well on writers as it did on children, but you had to say the right thing at the right time. Lisa Ekman was sitting on the edge of the sofa with her jacket still on, fiddling nervously with a box of snus while she outlined her new project.
“So, it’s about a girl going off to university,” she said, her eyes on Gustav’s big Paris painting. “She kind of moved there on a whim, and she meets a guy and a girl. It turns into this super dramatic love triangle, but I’m not sure about the ending. Well, I have a few ideas. I was thinking I’ll write it this summer.”
“Sounds great,” Martin said, using his kind voice. “Why don’t you send it to me when you’re a bit further along and we’ll talk more then.”
Then he paced around Per’s office, discussing a book about the Swedish art scene in the 1980s. They’d planned on using Nils Dardel’s The Dying Dandy for the cover, but apparently Natur & Kultur were publishing a Dardel biography and had their eye on the same painting. Per suggested one of Gustav’s paintings, since Gustav had had his breakthrough during the eighties art bubble. Which was a good idea, on the face of it. But they ran the risk of Gustav having a problem with being “commodified”, though he would obviously never just come right out and say it. He would say yes because it was Martin asking. Then he’d be grumpy and difficult and stop talking. Martin would want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and say come off it, it’s just a bloody book, if you don’t want your sodding painting on the cover, just say so. 20
“And he might be offended if we don’t ask him, as well.” Martin heaved a sigh. “To be continued. I have to swing by the butcher. It’s Elis’s birthday and he’s requested lamb chops.”
“I thought he was a vegetarian now?” Per said. “I guess he has a special opt-out clause for lamb.”
It was still light out. Martin couldn’t remember the last time he’d left work before sunset.
As he gathered up his things, his eyes fell on a pile of books he’d brought back from the London Book Fair. He was going to have a look at the English and French titles himself, but there was a German novel in there he’d have to outsource. He immediately thought of his daughter. She could certainly take on a reader’s report.
Martin found the book at the bottom of the pile. It was called Ein Jahr der Liebe, which was decipherable even to someone with his shaky German. A Year of Love. Not a great title. But he’d known its German publisher Ulrike Ackermann for years and she’d sounded unusually adamant when she handed him the book. “It’s a beautiful novel,” she’d said. “I really think it would be a good fit for you.” That remained to be seen. It was just shy of two hundred pages. Rakel should be able to get a report done in a few weeks.
Even though he didn’t understand a word, Martin read a few lines, and, in his mind, he heard Cecilia’s voice.
2
A din of voices rose towards the domed ceiling of the market hall. Coats were unbuttoned, scarfs unwrapped and gloves held in one hand as customers leaned across counters to talk to clerks. Martin was waiting for his lamb chops to be cut and wrapped when he caught a glimpse of a woman out of the corner of his eye. She was the right height, and her hair was cut in a curly bob, and for a second he felt like he was falling through the floor. Is that—
No, Martin told himself. It never was. He shook his legs one at 21a time to regain control over them. As soon as the woman turned around, any similarity would be gone. Look, now she’s moving…
And her face was a stranger’s, as he’d known it would be. She had sharp eyes and determined creases between her nose and her mouth. She was holding a pair of powder-blue suede gloves and carrying a handbag in the crook of her arm, and was probably about to go home to her family in Askim or Billdal where she would sit down with a glass of wine, feel annoyed at her husband clattering in the kitchen – he was always so loud, no matter how she tried to explain that it hurt her ears, that it was painful – and ask her children about school without listening to their answers.
She met his eyes and he looked away, as though he’d just been looking around and happened to linger on her for no reason. He quickly paid for his lamb chops and hurried outside.
The sun was low in the sky. Martin stood in a ray of golden light with his eyes closed until his pulse slowed. He was going to walk home. That usually helped.
The ice was still thick on the canals and cold winds blustered up and down the city streets. Ploughs had piled dirty snow on street corners and in the parks. The ink-stroke branches of bare trees reached up towards a pale-blue sky. Martin passed Hagabadet, where he regularly submitted to strict regimens on various exercise machines. Every time he stepped through the front door, he remembered what the nineteenth-century building had been like before it was converted into a spa and gym, touched the memory the way you’d touch a talisman. Back then, it had housed an obscure record label you could only reach through an intricate back-door route, to which Gustav had dragged him once to borrow money from some mate of his. Since they were there anyway, they’d been allowed to hang out for a bit, nodding along appreciatively to spiky electronic music and sipping vermouth out of plastic cups. The pools down in the spa section had been empty then, and sometimes improvised theatre performances had echoed between the tiled walls.
These days, the courtyards of the Haga neighbourhood were fenced off and tidy, the local children wore striped jumpers, and the cobbled 22streets were filled with people out for a Sunday stroll and tourists eating oversized cinnamon buns. Sprängkullen was a university building now, not an underground nightclub. His only friends who still lived here had stopped smoking weed and become architects. And the only people who frequented Hagabadet were Martin Berg and others who could afford to pay 1,700 kronor a month to run on a treadmill. At first, he’d felt naked and ridiculous in his gym tights and T-shirts made of synthetic materials that claimed to breathe and wick away moisture (where to?). His gym shoes had been immaculate and looked brand new since he’d never worn them outside. He tried not to think about what his 25-year-old self would have thought. After a while, he’d begun to see the beauty of going to the gym. It wasn’t unlike work: the same principles applied. You put in a certain amount of effort, x. That generated a certain result, y. Sometimes, y was just maintaining the status quo – no weight gain, no fall in revenue. It could take quite a bit of work to keep y constant. In fact, keeping y constant was no small feat. In order to increase y, you had to increase x. Annoyingly, the relationship between the two was not linear; in the world outside Hagabadet, you could increase x indefinitely without any effect on y at all. At the gym, the relationship was closer to linear. You sweated on a cross-trainer for thirty minutes and it had a direct impact on your physique. It was a straightforward fact to cling to in a world where such things were becoming increasingly rare.
And afterwards, there was a pleasant kind of exhaustion. He’d read until Elis came home around ten, slamming the door and barely saying hello. Tired enough not to enter into any kind of discussion, only fleetingly note that his son was heating up lasagne in the microwave and bringing it to his room. Tired enough to fall asleep after turning the lights out. Tired enough to sink into a narcotic darkness until his alarm went off again and pulled him back up to the surface.
The cold air cleared Martin’s head. He’d always enjoyed walking. He’d walked and walked through Paris until he could get around without a map, and over the years he must have walked tens of thousands of 23miles through Gothenburg. And yet, despite all that walking, there was one street he never found himself on.
Kastellgatan was actually located at the heart of Martin’s walking pattern. He passed Järntorget Square every day. He often walked up Linnégatan or down Övre Husar. Sometimes, he had to get from one of those streets to the other, via Risåsgatan or Majorsgatan, for instance, but no matter what route he chose, he never ended up on Kastellgatan. It had been that way for over a decade, with one glaring exception, that time he accidentally found himself in Cecilia’s old flat.
That was many years ago now, during a period when he’d spent a lot of time with a fairly pleasant graphic designer. She kept dragging him to open houses, possibly to demonstrate her independence. “I’ve been thinking about buying a flat,” she’d say, and Martin could never figure out whether she was trying to communicate something else. Either way, there was always something wrong with the flats they went to see. One was on the ground floor, one had a dark-green kitchen. Too expensive, too small, too new. While she talked to estate agents about pipes and balconies, Martin strolled around other people’s homes, staged to make them look like someone-lives-here-but-not-quite, amusing himself by trying to identify the algorithms of the open house. There were always pots of fresh herbs with the price tag still on in the kitchens. Certain kinds of cushions had always been placed just so on the sofas. A tealight always burned on the bathroom sink.
His presence was, in all honesty, pointless, and consequently he very nearly didn’t accompany her to that particular open house. But then he did because if he ever did say no, it would likely be the first no of many.
“There you are,” said the graphic designer – whose name was Mimmi – when they met up on Skanstorget. She gave him a stressed peck on the cheek and set off up the street. “I just have to double-check the address,” she said. As she rummaged through her handbag, a kind of quiet certainty took root in Martin. It’s going to be number 11.
“Eleven!” Mimmi said and pulled on him to make him move. “What’s the matter with you? It’s not one of the buildings sinking into the mud, is it?” 24
They climbed the stairs, which spiralled upwards like the inside of a seashell. There were three doors on each of the six floors. It was a one in eighteen chance. His pulse quickened and he heard Mimmi’s voice as if from a great distance: “I think it’s the top floor.”
They reached the final landing, and there it was, Cecilia’s door. It was held open by an estate agent’s sign and a bucket of blue shoe covers.
A young man in a polyester suit appeared and extended his hand, and while Mimmi took care of the social niceties, Martin entered the flat.
Spotlights gleamed overhead and the worn linoleum flooring had been replaced with tiles. Martin popped his head into the bathroom, but of course there wasn’t a trace of the cracked sink or the portrait of Haile Selassie and his inevitable lions. Nothing but white tile. A bowl of limes was sitting on the kitchen counter. The parquet floor in the main room was polished and the walls freshly painted. The bed was covered with a mountain of cushions and a white sofa swelled along the entire wall where Cecilia’s bookcase had once stood.
But the view – it was like a time warp. Tin roofs and chimneys, Skansen Kronan, the river, the cranes.
He stood by the window while Mimmi inspected baseboards and mullions with a critical eye. She broke up with him a few weeks later, because it was “really weird” that he still insisted on wearing his wedding ring. “My therapist says I have to work on my boundaries.”
And he’d thought to himself: This whole thing, it’s just a waste of time anyway.
3
When he got home, Martin found his daughter in the kitchen. With her elbows on the table and her chin in her hand, Rakel was bent over a book, so absorbed she didn’t notice him. Cecilia had been exactly like that, too. It was like they flipped a switch. Heard nothing, saw nothing. There was no knowing what was going on inside. When Rakel was little, he’d had to say her name again and again, and when his voice 25got loud enough to prompt a reaction, she had glared at him and slunk away to do whatever she’d been asked to do – pick up her toys, make her bed.
Now, she gave a start and offered to help with dinner.
“That’s okay,” he said. “What are you reading? Freud? Beyond the Pleasure Principle? My goodness. For university, I’m hoping?”
She pushed the book away but left it open. “Is that a sceptical tone I detect?”
“Not at all,” he said and dumped potatoes into the sink. But he had to admit it: he’d been surprised, not to say leery, when Rakel had insisted on studying psychology a year or two ago. The programme itself wasn’t the problem – he’d been told it was as difficult to get into as law or medical school – it was the fact that she wouldn’t be using her obvious talent for texts and languages. All that time she’d spent learning German, and what was she doing with it? Reading some old head shrinker’s theories about the sexual urges of humankind?
Martin had thought her year in Berlin would nudge her in a more literary and publishing-related direction. He could probably have got her an internship with Ulrike at Schmidt Verlag if she absolutely had to go off to Germany. But even though she almost never turned down the occasional reader’s report, that was the full extent of Rakel’s interest in Berg & Andrén. Imagine if he had had her opportunities at the age of twenty-four! If Abbe had been a publisher instead of a former sailor and if he, Martin, had been able to step right into a world of literature and education…
“Why are you looking so unhappy?”
“There are a lot of green potatoes in here… Hey, actually, I have something for you.” He wiped his hands and went to fetch the German novel. “I’m wondering whether this is something we’d want to translate. Why don’t you have a read and let me know what you think?”
“I don’t know if I have the time,” she said, her eyes on the blurb.
“There’s no rush.” That wasn’t entirely true. Knowing Ulrike Ackermann, she would start badgering him about it relatively soon: she needed to know if they were interested or not. 26
“I have a lot on at uni right now. I’m supposed to write an essay about that.” She nodded at Freud.
Martin watched her hands as she flipped through the pages, thin hands with long fingers, just like Cecilia’s. Other than the hands, though, she looked more like him.
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” he scoffed. “What is there really beyond the pleasure principle?”
“Humankind’s relentless journey towards death and dissolution, it would seem.”
“Cheery. Hey, would you mind checking if we have any cream?”
*
After dinner, the little group scattered quickly. Elis slipped out to celebrate his eighteenth birthday again and Martin bit back his objections as he had the unpleasant realisation that the words he’d been about to say – “Should you really be going out again?” – were a direct quote from a prissy old pop song. His mother, Birgitta, who had long since been transformed into Nana, refused to let him call her a taxi since she could just as easily take bus number three all the way home. Rakel was meeting friends at the Haga Cinema.
“A film?” he said. “This late?”
“It’s a bar, too, Dad,” she sighed.
Their voices echoed in the stairwell until the door slammed shut behind them. Then absolute silence descended. And even after Martin put all the leftovers into various plastic containers, even after he loaded the dishwasher and did the rest of the washing-up by hand, even after he poured himself a glass of wine and played Billie Holiday on vinyl, the hands on the clock seemed barely to have moved at all.
He could watch a film. He could read something. He could, and now he felt the stirrings of something akin to enthusiasm, get back to his William Wallace project.
Standing in the bay window overlooking the cobbled slope and rickety wooden houses of Allmänna Vägen, he formulated his arguments 27for commissioning new translations of William Wallace. But Per would sigh and take off his glasses, round tortoiseshell frames he’d bought right before everyone else started wearing round tortoiseshell frames. Even Elis had a pair now, notwithstanding that his minute visual impairment hadn’t bothered him in the slightest during his spectacle-averse secondary-school years. Per, on the other hand, had a relatively strong prescription, and his glasses always came off whenever he offered criticism or a dissenting opinion. “I’m not sure that’s such a wise move, financially speaking,” he would say.
“But the old translations are very inaccurate…”
“But would anyone read them even if they were good?”
And then they’d go round and round like they always did: Martin arguing that Wallace was a forgotten genius, Per replying that he was just forgotten, period. Martin offering examples of successful new editions of forgotten works, Per countering with less successful cases. Martin advocating thinking beyond the bottom line, Per pointing out that you have to kill your darlings. Possibly, he’d say, possibly, they could consider it if Wallace somehow became topical. If there was a biopic or some such. But at the moment, he was just an interwar writer overshadowed by Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce.
These days, almost all publishing decisions were Martin’s to make, but when it came to Wallace, Per was uncharacteristically unyielding.
Martin sighed, and, unable to decide what to do with the time that remained before he was tired enough to go to sleep, he wandered around the flat. When he and Cecilia moved in at the end of the eighties, the building on Djurgårdsgatan had housed at least two communes, their neighbours had grown marijuana in the yard, and the entrance had constantly been covered in graffiti. Since then, their neighbours on the floor below, a family whose fights and parties they’d heard through the floor, had moved away to fight and party somewhere else. When the building became a co-op, the students and the dubious characters in the studio flats vanished, replaced by better-groomed youths who helped out on yard-cleaning days. The alcoholic on the first floor was gone, a direct result of the more tight-laced parents in the co-op (not Martin) 28making common cause to demand intervention against his mangy but largely harmless German Shepherd because they claimed it “frightened the children”. After the turn of the millennium, the number of punk rockers having hungover barbecues in the shared courtyard had hit zero and the garden had become a picture of rural idyll. Around Christmas, there were advent stars in every window. No one had a satellite dish.
Martin wandered from the window to the living room and from the living room to the hallway. The door to Elis’s room stood ajar. He pushed it open and paused on the threshold. He could barely remember what it had looked like when it was his study.
Judging from the decor, the room was undergoing a metamorphosis, stuck between one stage of the life cycle (larva) and another (butterfly). The walls were painted the friendly light-green colour he and Elis had picked out almost ten years earlier, and scarred after ten years of ever-changing posters and a confused period in secondary school when Elis was interested in graffiti, a highly unsuitable hobby for someone as anxious as he was. The pop stars of previous years had been forced to make way for a reproduction of Magritte’s pipe and two film posters. One was Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, showing Jules and Jim running across a bridge, jackets flapping, hard on the heels of Jeanne Moreau, whose Cathérine had a pencilled-on moustache and her hair tucked into a man’s cap. The other, Lost in Translation by Sofia Coppola, featured a disillusioned Bill Murray sitting on the edge of a bed. Everybody wants to be found it said above the title.
Martin sat down on Elis’s bed, facing Bill Murray.
Elis had always kept his room in exemplary order. When he was a little boy, his comic books had been immaculately stacked and his Transformers tidily lined up. His bed had been made with military precision. These days, that meticulousness showed in his apparel: rows of neat shirts and 1950s trousers with pleats hung on a clothes rack next to a blazer he’d bought off eBay after a week of obsessive indecision and almost never wore.
The desk had been purchased for a shorter, slimmer person. A stapler, a hole punch, a tape dispenser and a pencil holder were standing 29at attention along one edge. A white, slightly worn-looking MacBook was placed at a right angle to a small stack of books. Martin tilted his head so he could read the authors’ names: Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. Imagine that! When Elis was younger, he’d only ever read when he had to, except for Harry Potter, which he liked but seemed to consider an isolated occurrence rather than a sign that there might be other books out there he could enjoy. Consequently, Martin had been surprised the first time – maybe six months ago – he saw his son frowning over Journey to the End of the Night, his blackcurrant jam toast tilted at a precarious angle.
“Is it for school?” Martin had asked over the edge of his newspaper.
“Hmm?” had been Elis’s reply.
“Céline,” Martin had said with a nod to the book. Elis had read something like twenty pages out of four hundred and fifty. “Is it for school?”
“No, I borrowed it from Michel.”
Martin poured himself more coffee. Was he supposed to know who Michel was? Was he remiss for not knowing? Was it a boy or girl, even – Michelle? And which gender would be less troubling?
“Who’s Michel?” he asked.
“A friend. He studies comparative literature,” Elis offered in a fit of communicativeness.
“At university, you mean.” It wasn’t entirely easy to imagine the teenage Elis in conversation with a literature student, but his son nodded.
“I thought you didn’t like Céline,” Martin said, opening the paper back up.
“No, this is great.”
“But unless I’m misremembering, you thought Journey to the End of the Night was ‘a bit slow’ for you.”
Elis looked up with equal parts irritation and genuine confusion. “What are you talking about?”
Martin was just about to inform his son that he’d given him Journey to the End of the Night for his sixteenth birthday, well meaning and 30invested in his intellectual development as he was. Elis had read a few pages before announcing his verdict. Perhaps, he’d said, he needed to be a bit older before tackling that kind of book. “Like… thirty or something like that.” And if Elis went to his room and took a good look at that godforsaken floating shelf just below the ceiling, he would find the book there. The first Swedish edition from 1971 (Gebers), with an inscription on the flyleaf.
“Never mind,” he said instead.
Elis raised his eyebrows and returned to his book.
This new, Céline-reading Elis seemed to have replaced the old Céline-rejecting Elis more or less overnight. Suddenly, his son was walking around in a ratty old cardigan from a charity shop and letting his hair grow into its natural halo of curls, then one day the tremulous voice of Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel could be heard through his closed bedroom door. New playlists began to appear on his Spotify account. It was Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, France Gall, Juliette Gréco: anything with a wavering gramophone sound, the fragile echo of long-gone Parisian autumns and boulevards lined with yellow plane trees.
Even so, Elis showed no sign of wanting to partake of his father’s reservoir of knowledge about dead, male, European authors. Elis acted like he was the first to ever read The Stranger, as though The Stranger were a cool new rock band older generations in general, and Martin, in particular, shouldn’t pretend to know anything about. (Martin felt like asking: “Where do you think the song title ‘Killing an Arab’ comes from?” But it was unclear whether Elis had ever even heard of The Cure.)
The irony was that this Michel, who Elis spoke of as some kind of mythological figure, had led Elis down the same track Martin would have liked to guide him down himself. Elis had shied away and tried to escape, but his flight had led him full circle back to what he’d been running from. He’d accepted the brick that was Journey to the End of the Night from Michel only because it was from him.
And Martin watched his son struggle through Céline, put on braces and a waistcoat, do his French homework with his bottom lip slack 31with concentration – and take up smoking, at which point the whole thing became less endearing.
“They’re not mine,” Elis said when he was confronted with a packet of Marlboro Lights Martin had found in a jacket pocket. “They’re Oskar’s. He can’t keep them at home because his mum’s like the Gestapo and goes through his stuff. Like certain other parents, apparently.”
“We’ve talked about this.”
“But they’re not mine! Ask Oskar. Here. Call him. Check for yourself. But don’t tell his mum, or she won’t pay for him to get his driving licence.”
Martin looked at Elis, at the phone he was holding out, then back at Elis.
“That’s Oskar’s business,” he said at length. “So long as you’re clear on our rules.”
“I’m not allowed to drink, smoke, do drugs, get a tattoo or ride a motorcycle until I’m eighteen,” Elis said. He’d closed his eyes in a very convincing impression of the long-suffering son while he listed Martin’s commands off on the fingers of one hand.
“Yes. Once you turn eighteen, you’re an adult and, unfortunately, I won’t be able to make decisions for you any longer. I can only hope your risk assessment has matured a little by then.”
“You’re such a weirdo.”
He’d thought to himself: There have to be rules. No one is going to say I let them run wild. That I didn’t look after them.
If the kids had a smoke from time to time, if they did the whole beret-melancholy-cigarette thing, maybe that wasn’t so bad in and of itself. (Come on, Gustav groaned.) Martin had taken up smoking as a teenager himself, and his parents hadn’t even tried to stop him. (“For god’s sake,” Gustav said. “It was the seventies. The heyday of the ever-glowing cigarette.”) Then he’d carried on smoking until he realised he was about to turn forty. It was the kind of epiphany that came in two stages: first, the intellectual stage, and then the emotional, more cudgel-to-the-head stage. His body had reminded him of certain 32fundamental facts about ageing. He’d been devastatingly out of shape. He’d had the idea that he should grow a beard. So he’d braced himself and quit, all in all a torturous and sad process. Not that torturous and sad processes were necessarily something to fear, but the more torturous and sad they were, the greater the risk of not quitting at all. The only person Martin had ever seen quit cigarettes in that complete, relentless way, without being pregnant or suffering from some kind of lung disease, was Cecilia.
The way Martin saw it, the biggest problem was that young people didn’t understand that they were going to die. They operated under the illusion that they had all the time in the world. That nothing could happen to them. That life would continue to unfold before them like an endless red carpet: welcome, we’ve been waiting for you, flashing cameras, applause. In reality, cigarettes were a small symbolic death, a reminder of the death that comes for us all, but since these young people couldn’t wrap their hormone-soaked brains around the concept of DEATH, much too focused on reproduction to have any notion of the polar opposite of procreation – lonely, indifferent death – they were as unable to fathom the inherent destructive power of tobacco as they were to grasp that alcohol and drugs were like physical manifestations of the inevitable disassembling of the body that can only end one way. They were stupid enough to confuse carefree smoking, drinking, and drug-taking with living. They were generation upon generation of tiny James Deans, driving towards the edge of a cliff, thinking that meant they were alive, when in fact it meant they were just one brake pad away from dying.
The same lack of judgment and thought was responsible for tattoos. What, Martin wondered, was the point of branding your body for all eternity? What did people hope to achieve by it? The question was whether carefully planned tattoos weren’t worse than the insipid butterflies and Chinese characters dreamed up on a whim. Spontaneous idiocy was more forgivable than the belief that at any given moment anyone could know something about themselves that was so important to communicate to an older version of themselves that they had to etch 33it into their flesh. Young people usually thought they were shrewder and more experienced right now than they’d ever been before, which, granted, might well be true. But it rarely occurred to them, despite all their shrewdness and experience, that this belief stayed constant and that they were, therefore, constantly contradicting themselves.
Elis had pinned a photograph to the wall next to the head of his bed. Cecilia on her back on the sofa, reading the paper. A baby sleeping on her chest and her pitching the paper like a tent above it. Her face was turned towards the camera and her eyes shone.
It’s just that, Martin mused, the baby in the picture wasn’t Elis. They’d got rid of that sofa in 1989. The infant must in fact be Rakel.
Martin studied Cecilia’s black-and-white face. She looked on the verge of speaking.
Then he stood up and left the door ajar exactly like he’d found it.
He could call Gustav in Stockholm. As a matter of fact, he could go to Stockholm – he could book a ticket, maybe early tomorrow morning, get on the train, come back Sunday night. Screw it. He could stay until Monday. They could go out for dinner and have a couple of pints and talk. The air would be clearer and colder there.
Gustav didn’t pick up, but it was late on a Friday night; he was probably out. He didn’t own a mobile phone. Martin left a message. Then he stood by the window, staring out at the dark streets and the park.
Higher Education 1
I
INTERVIEWER: [clears his throat] So, Martin Berg, when did you decide to dedicate your life to literature?
MARTIN BERG: [leans back in his chair, folding his hands around one knee] Wow – well, I suppose I never really decided. It was more like something I’d always known. I guess there must have been a time in my childhood when I wanted to be a firefighter or some such, but other than that it’s as though this was the only option open to me. So I never had a choice.
INTERVIEWER: Like fate?
MARTIN BERG: Yes. You could say that.
*
Martin Berg was born in an eventful year. A wall had been built through the heart of Europe. Marilyn Monroe died tangled in her sheets with barbiturates in her blood. Eichmann was hanged in Jerusalem. The Soviets tested nuclear weapons in Novaya Zemlya. At a kitchen table on Kennedygatan, a young librarian by the name of Birgitta Berg was reading about the Cuban Missile Crisis in the morning paper while the column of ash at the end of her cigarette grew longer and longer.
But no one was obliterated in thermonuclear war that year either. Instead, new nations multiplied around the world as colonial powers relinquished their grip on their protectorates. On dance floors, young people writhed rhythmically in a new kind of dance. Astronauts were blasted into orbit, because if we weren’t going to blow each other to pieces, we could at least compete for supremacy in space. 35
And in Gothenburg, new neighbourhoods were sprouting where until then there had been forests and meadows. Dust billowed from demolition and building sites, banging and clanging rang out from the wharves, and a clutch of cranes were silhouetted against the sky. Ships glided out towards the inlet, surrounded by tugboats, the first step of their journey across the seas.
And Birgitta jumped when her son began to wail, as though for a minute she’d forgotten he was there.
*
Martin’s father had been christened Albert, but that was a name that only existed in official records and his sailor’s discharge book. He was a lean man of average height, dark-haired and brown-eyed, his torso covered in tattoos that over time had turned the same shade of blueish green as the sea itself. Abbe’s father had been a riveter at Götaverken who died when an iron girder fell on his head. “A sober man would have had the sense to jump out of the way” was all his mother had to say about it. She became the sole breadwinner, and at fifteen Abbe had to go to sea. After a few years of odd jobs, he found permanent employment with Transatlantic.
Abbe was a quiet man who usually hung back on the outskirts of raucous groups, doing crossword puzzles and enjoying his snus. He was good at every type of board game and known as a wily chess player. He often won at poker but seemed indifferent to it. He rarely read books but frequently read newspapers. He was the person people called on when something had to be translated into English, French, Dutch or German. Languages were as compliant as wrenches and screwdrivers in the hands of Albert Berg.
One night in the late fifties, he met Birgitta Eriksson at the Liseberg dance pavilion. There was something so dizzyingly random about the meeting that eventually led to Martin’s existence – that Abbe asked a woman to dance, for once, and that Birgitta accepted, for once – that Martin was never able to think about it without trepidation; they 36could just as easily have continued down their respective paths in completely opposite directions. Anything could have become of them, but what they did become was a couple.
In the small number of photographs that existed from that time, Birgitta looked vaguely like Esther Williams. She was pretty but looked very proper; there were no dazzling smiles, no coy glances over the shoulder, no sparkling film star eyes. Instead, she wore an absent expression, as though her mind were elsewhere and she’d stumbled into what was happening in the present (the picture-taking) quite by accident. In their framed wedding picture, which was collecting dust on the dresser in the TV room, she was holding an armful of roses she didn’t seem to know what to do with. Abbe looked vaguely awkward in his rented suit and a shirt that was too tight around the collar.
One time, Abbe had pointed out the places he’d visited on a globe Martin had been given for Christmas the year he turned seven: Antwerp, Le Havre, New York, Rio de Janeiro. There was an unsettling amount of ocean between the tiny dot that marked Gothenburg and the much larger squares that marked the final destinations. Martin’s mother took him down to the docks to watch his father’s ship leave, and it was enormous, so large Martin was convinced it was going to collide with the new bridge. Icy terror rushed through him and was made even worse by the fact that his mother looked so calm. But then the chimneys slowly glided under the bridge as if it was nothing and Martin relaxed and didn’t even protest when his mum took his hand to go back home.
The word Atlantic had a dual ring of adventure and danger to it, while the Pacific sounded gentler. The North Sea had to be stormy and cold, but on the other hand it was closer, and, on his globe, that sea seemed small enough for land always to be reassuringly near. And the size of the ship was comforting, too, until Aunt Maud told him about the Titanic, thinking her nephew would appreciate an “exciting reallife story”. After that, Martin spent his evenings wide awake in bed, thinking about icebergs and shipwrecks, about how easily even big 37ships could be swallowed by the sea. Tens of thousands of feet it would sink, down to a seabed no daylight had ever reached.
But eventually, the day always came when he heard the heavy footfall in the hallway, the voice that vibrated on lower frequencies than any other in the house, the jingling of coins being emptied onto the hallway dresser. (If he was lucky, he’d find one-kronor coins among all the odd ones that were the wrong size and had holes in the middle.) Then followed a week or two of Abbe being home. He was never loud and rarely angry, and yet Martin played more cautiously when he was around. He would sit in the garden swing seat with his paper and a beer. Martin watched him through a hole in the bushes at the far end of the garden, where there was a leafy cave just large enough for a young boy.
For a long time, that was the way of the world: Mum and Martin, and a dad who came home but then invariably disappeared again. Martin played with the other children in the neighbourhood, learned to read, was served tea every day at five, went to bed and was read a story, though not always one most people would consider a children’s story. Consequently, Martin had nightmares several nights in a row about turning into an insect like Gregor Samsa, and for a long time he pondered what was really wrong with Mrs Dubose.
But then one day Mum began to look unwieldy and to wear big dresses he hadn’t seen before. One night, Dad told him he was taking a job at a printers and was going to be coming home every night from now on. Mum explained that Martin was going to have a little brother or sister. He pushed his mash around his plate. One Saturday, Aunt Maud came to babysit him.
“They’ll be bringing your sister home soon,” she said, leaning down from her ominous height.
