After a couple of minutes I was empty, creatively speaking. I got to my feet and went back into the restaurant, and into a new phase in this narrative. (Or rather a parenthesis.)
*
You might think that the longing for love and sex is noticeably absent from this story about a young man. Of course I felt such a longing, I just don’t want to describe it. Literature is overflowing with lost, horny young people, all of them devastatingly dull, and I don’t think I’m capable of producing anything different. Or maybe I’m just a prude.
However, I must now mention Sofia. She was part of the group I had inadvertently enticed in from the street, and after I had performed at her table, we started chatting. She was a year older than me, she was at college, and she looked remarkably like Anna Lindh, chair of the Social Democratic Youth League. An ordinary girl, if such a person exists. The unusual thing about her was that she appeared to be interested in me.
I have never managed to pursue someone to the point where they give in. That would require a completely different self-image, and possibly a different idea of love. How can you trust someone if you have forced them to love you through sheer exhaustion? I don’t know—I’ve never tried.
But Sofia was giving out subtle signals that I picked up, and I heard myself ask, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ Apparently she was planning to spend part of Sunday shopping for a new microwave at John Wall, a stone’s throw from my home. A world record stone’s throw, admittedly, but I asked if she’d like some company. She said yes, and we arranged a time and place to meet.
To summarise, the evening was a great success. Hasse’s party had eaten and drunk as if there were fifteen of them rather than ten, and in general Roberto had done well. Another beer, another toast, another stroll home through dark streets after we had confirmed that I would work Wednesdays and Saturdays.
There was a light on in the laundry block that night too, but whatever they were doing in there, they were doing it in silence. I went indoors and dug out an old copy of Expressen with a picture of Anna Lindh in it. The resemblance was striking. Sofia’s glasses weren’t quite so large, the eyes behind them were a different shape and the face wasn’t so noticeably square, but otherwise she could have acted as a look-alike. I wasn’t sure whether I found this attractive or not.
And was I ready for a relationship? How do you know if you’re ready for anything? It’s only when something is under way that you find out whether you can cope with it or not; up to that point you can only guess.
I switched on the TV and found myself in the middle of Nattsudd. Svante and Björn were sitting around talking rubbish, interspersed with black-and-white music videos. It was strangely relaxing and I felt kind of abandoned when it was over. I folded the newspaper so that it would stand up on its own on the table with the photograph facing me. Then I talked to it. After a while I realised what I was doing, and put the paper aside. Maybe it was time to break out of my loneliness after all. There was every indication that this was the case.
*
One of these days I will write a completely normal love story. One of these days, but not now. What happened between Sofia and me cannot be called love, and yet it occupies a certain period of time in this story and must be told, albeit briefly.
We met at Carl Milles’ Orpheus fountain on Hötorget and had coffee at Kungstornet before we went to John Wall. I found out that Sofia was training to be a childminder, that she had her own apartment in Traneberg, preferred cats to dogs, and had seen every episode of Dallas bar one. When she had qualified she was planning to work for a couple of years before continuing her studies to become an after-school recreation tutor.
When we ran out of conversation, I went over to the jukebox and put on ‘Everything Counts’. It turned out that Sofia was a big Depeche fan, and that ‘Somebody’ was her favourite song. I think that was the critical moment. Definitely.
Sofia bought her microwave and we hugged when we said goodbye at the subway station after swapping phone numbers. When I went home the image of her was imprinted in my head, and I was humming ‘Somebody’. The blue duffel coat with the matching blue woolly hat. She was really pretty, in her own way.
I can’t say I was in love, but by the time I walked into my house I felt a certain sense of liberation, like a shipwrecked sailor who has been drifting on the open sea for a long time, and finally thinks he can see something on the horizon. It might only be a skerry, or an illusion, but at least it gives him a provisional direction. Something small to hold on to.
I spent the evening cleaning. I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t touched the place since I moved in. The hose of the vacuum cleaner rattled away like crazy as I went over the carpet, and it took me several hours to get rid of the layers of dust that had gathered in the corners and on top of all my books. I even changed the sheets, because it was possible that someone might stay over. At some point.
It wasn’t until eleven o’clock that I was able to make a start on myself. I did a thorough job there too, giving myself a good scrub with the sponge, changing the water in the tub, cutting my nails. I had just started shaving when there was a knock on the door.
I lowered the razor and looked in the mirror. My face was covered in shaving foam, and there was no fear in my eyes. In a way this was a good time to tackle the confrontation I had been dreading. The lather on my cheeks was a convenient excuse to keep it short, so I pulled on my bathrobe and went to answer the door.
Elsa was standing outside. I had been expecting the woman with the cold eyes, and had to make a mental adjustment to adopt the right tone of voice. ‘Oh…good evening?’
Elsa looked at my foam-covered face and asked, ‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘No, I was just…’
The bulb in the outside light still hadn’t been changed, so Elsa was illuminated only by the faint glow of my desk lamp. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, but then human shapes began to appear in the darkness behind her, on the steps. Three, four, five—possibly more. Elsa took a step forward so that I couldn’t close the door.
Me and my boys are on parade.
I was still holding the razor, and for a stressed moment I clutched it more tightly, regarding it as a weapon. Then I realised it was a plastic Bic I was gripping, not a cutthroat, and it dropped to the floor. Elsa and I looked down at the razor, and my tough guy act was shot.
‘Do you want to join us?’ she asked.
‘Join you in…what?’
‘In what we’re doing.’
‘And what are you doing?’
‘It’s hard to explain. You have to see it. Experience it.’
Once again it was as if an inner light had been switched on behind her eyes, making them glitter as she looked up at me. I found the line of dark figures behind her disturbing, and it was difficult to speak. Elsa made an impatient gesture and said, ‘It’s not appropriate for you to live here. Unless you’re with us.’
I assumed the Dead Couple had told the others what had happened two nights ago. Hence the delegation. It’s not appropriate. It wasn’t hard to detect a hidden threat behind Elsa’s choice of words. I glanced over at the laundry block, where the light was on.
‘But what is it?’
‘It’s impossible to explain. But you won’t be disappointed. It’s wonderful.’
If this was about whatever had squeezed out through the crack in the ceiling, then it was hard to make sense of what Elsa was saying. Had I misunderstood? Was this about something else? Something… wonderful? I couldn’t believe it. The glow in Elsa’s eyes, the silent, waiting group. There was nothing healthy about it, and nothing wonderful either.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll come.’ I gestured towards my bathroom and my face. ‘I just need to…’
Elsa smiled and the light in her eyes was turned up a notch as she said, ‘Excellent, that’s excellent. We’ll be waiting for you. Welcome.’ She took a step back and I reached for the handle. Before I could close the door, she said, ‘John?’
r />
‘Yes?’
‘Something else is beginning now. Believe me.’
‘Okay. I’ll be there in a minute.’
I closed the door and heard a crunching sound as the razor was crushed. It didn’t matter—I had no intention of finishing shaving. I went into the bathroom and rinsed my face, then dug Sofia’s number out of my wallet and called her. I jammed the receiver between my shoulder and ear so that I could pull on my underpants and trousers.
Please be home. Please be home.
Sofia answered on the fifth ring. Her voice was hesitant; she probably wasn’t used to getting calls at this late hour.
‘Hi?’
‘Sofia, it’s John.’
‘Oh…hi.’
‘Listen, I need to ask you a favour. I know this is…a bit weird, but can I come over to your place?’
Pause.
‘Now?’
‘Yes, now. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. Something’s happened.’
‘What kind of something? I was just going to bed—I have to be up early in the morning.’
‘Please, Sofia. It’ll take too long to explain, but I can’t stay here, and I don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s urgent.’
I could understand her hesitation. A guy she had met only once had called her up in the middle of the night, begging to come over in a tone of voice that suggested the Mafia were hot on his heels. I got it. But either she was keener on me than I thought, or she was less conventional than she appeared to be, because she said, ‘Okay, come over.’ She gave me the address, and I thanked her from the bottom of my heart before hanging up.
I threw on a T-shirt, jumper and jacket. As I tied my shoelaces I peered out through the gap in the blind. It seemed as if my neighbours had gathered in the laundry block, and I thanked my lucky stars they hadn’t left anyone on guard in the courtyard.
I had no intention of participating in whatever they were up to, because I instinctively knew it had to be something sick to make their eyes shine like that. Something beyond what human beings should be getting involved in. The question was whether they had sensed my attitude, and taken measures to prevent me from getting away.
I switched off the desk lamp and allowed my eyes to adjust to the darkness before I opened the door as quietly as possible. I could hear the low hum of voices from the laundry block, but there didn’t seem to be anyone outside. I locked the door behind me and crept down the steps.
There was no way of reaching the main door without passing the fan of light emanating from the half-open door of the laundry block. I pressed myself against the wall and took a couple of deep breaths, then I made a dash for it.
As I suspected, they were keeping an eye out for me. As I shot past the light I heard someone shout, ‘Hey! Stop! Where are you…’
I yanked open the door and raced through the foyer. I opened the door leading into the street and heard the courtyard door slam shut behind me, then the sound of footsteps pattering across the marble floor. I didn’t stop running until I reached the subway. Ten minutes later I was on my way to Traneberg.
*
This journey marked the beginning of a period of my life that doesn’t have much to do with this story. The most important thing about those two months is how they ended, and for that to make sense, I have to give an outline of what went on.
Sofia met me outside the door of her apartment block, which was usually locked at that time of night. She took me up to her tidy little apartment and offered me a cup of tea. I told her about the threat from my neighbours without giving an explanation. Then we went to bed. Yes, we slept together. No, I’m not going to go into detail, for the reasons I gave earlier.
Sofia got up at six-thirty, and I could see she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the thought of leaving her apartment in the hands of a stranger. But that’s what she did. I went back to sleep, and when I woke at about ten I abused her trust by rummaging through her drawers, searching for short cuts to help me understand who she was.
My search confirmed what I already suspected: Sofia was completely unartificial. I don’t even think that word exists, and yet it’s the most suitable. A little bit different, a little bit complex, but basically unartificial. Let me mention just one detail.
In a corner of the living room stood a decent-sized music system. Amplifier, equaliser, record deck and a double cassette deck. Next to this was something that I first thought was a poster, but when I took a closer look, I found it was a cassette shelf.
Sofia had taken a poster of a sunset with palm trees in the foreground and cut it up into one hundred and twenty pieces, which she had then inserted into the spines of one hundred and twenty cassette tapes. She thus had a collection of tapes that together formed a panorama. There was nothing written on the spines, but when I took out a tape at random, there was a neatly written track list.
A mixtape. Dead or Alive, Madonna, Wham!, Modern Talking and so on. Depeche, of course. I looked at several more cassettes, and they were all mixtapes. Some tracks were repeated two or even three times. Since the record case contained only a few albums, I guessed that Sofia recorded songs from the radio, then edited with the help of the double tape deck. That says something about her, even if I’m not entirely sure what.
I found milk in the fridge and muesli in the cupboard, and ate a bowl sitting at a tiny kitchen table as I tried to decide what to do next. Sofia and I hadn’t discussed how we were going to proceed. Moving into her apartment didn’t feel right, but I couldn’t see any other option. In which case I would need to fetch a few things from home, in spite of the fact that I would have preferred not to go anywhere near the place. I needed my magic paraphernalia, though, if nothing else.
I hung around until the afternoon, then wrote Sofia a note: Thanks for last night. I’ll come back this evening if that’s okay. Not as late as yesterday. After a moment’s hesitation I added Kiss kiss, John and placed the note on the kitchen table. I washed up my bowl, made the bed and left the apartment.
*
The raid went well. I was alert with every step I took, and anxious while I was inside the house, gathering up my things faster than necessary. But no one knocked, and as far as I’m aware, no one saw me. Even if my neighbours were displaying behaviour typical of a cult, they hadn’t yet reached the paranoid stage. I left Luntmakargatan with four plastic carrier bags filled with clothes, toiletries, my magic paraphernalia and a few LPs.
I stopped at the intersection of Tunnelgatan and Sveavägen. I hadn’t grasped how desperate my situation was until that moment. There I stood, homeless and at a complete loss, with my belongings stuffed into four carrier bags. I didn’t want to be in Sofia’s apartment when she got home—I wanted to give her time to see the note, realise I hadn’t stolen or broken anything, maybe start to miss me a little bit. Or at least wonder what had become of me.
For the want of a better option, I hauled my bags off to the City Library. The October wind sliced through my clothes, and I remembered my thoughts of a week or so earlier. The lack of cohesion and meaning, the essential numbness of life. At least then I had been on the way home to my house; now I was even more disconnected. I could be blown away like an autumn leaf, and no one would care. Fucking neighbours. Fucking crazy sick-in-the-head Scout Leader neighbours.
I sat in the reading room getting warm for quite a while before I took a stroll around, picking out a book here and there. Malone Dies by Beckett, Nausea by Sartre, and The Autists by Stig Larsson. Among others. The choice says something, about both my state of mind and my pretensions. I sat down at the table where I had left my bags and started reading Malone Dies.
The effect was unexpected. I had chosen to wallow in misery, but the book was so rich in black humour that I began to feel excited. I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. The tone seemed like a possible approach to life. I had finished reading it by the time the library closed, but took it out on loan along with the other books so that I could read it again. Ye
t another carrier bag.
I called Sofia from a phone box, and there was no hesitation in her voice when she said that I was welcome. I fought my way to the Odenplan subway station in the biting wind, and things didn’t seem quite so depressing.
That evening we had a proper conversation. I told her I knew things had moved way too fast, but this was due to circumstances beyond my control. I explained that my neighbours were giving me a hard time because I didn’t have a legal tenancy contract.
Sofia didn’t seem entirely convinced, but said it was okay for me to stay with her for the time being. I offered to pay a share of the rent—I felt I had no choice—but fortunately she said that would be putting things on too much of a formal footing. We would wait and see.
The entire discussion had such a practical tone that I thought maybe we should shake hands when it was over. Instead we kissed, and so on. Afterwards we stayed in bed and I showed Sofia the books I’d borrowed. She hadn’t read any of them, and asked what they were about.
‘It’s hard to explain,’ I said.
‘But they must have a plot?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘So what happens?’
‘Not much. It’s mainly…ideas.’
‘That doesn’t sound very exciting.’
‘No. You’re probably right.’
It’s hard to work out why we fall in love with someone, and almost equally hard to work out why we don’t, even when we’re trying to. And I really did try. I thought Sofia was sweet, I enjoyed her company and I liked living in her apartment, but during the two months our relationship lasted, I can’t say I was in love.
I suppose it’s the small things, character differences that pile up over time and become an insurmountable obstacle, until we realise that we’re never going to reach one another. Not properly. Let me give you an example.
Sofia was involved with the Social Democratic Youth League in Sundbyberg. One evening a week or so after I’d moved in, she was on her way to a meeting about more or less the same topic as the lecture at the Workers’ Educational Association: the future path of social democracy.