Chapter 4: Fourth Action
A dense fog hindered his sight as he attempted to open his eyes. He lay in bed on his stomach, his hands buried beneath. He couldn’t feel them, they were numb. He thought about turning to his back, but somehow his body didn’t want to move. He tried to open his eyes again in vain. It seemed that his body and mind were separate entities unwilling to co-operate. He perceived his surroundings completely though, his brain formed a picture of the bedroom, he could see himself in bed in a twisted position, see the greyness outside through the curtains. There was no point in getting up anyway, he mused. He wouldn’t go outside in the pouring rain, and what was there to do inside? He could watch television or go down to the workshop and meddle with the computers or peruse stupid politics and dull sports in the newspaper. Or he could read a book like Gina. He heard her turn the pages, and knew it was her Sunday morning pastime. She read the most amazing books. In one of them there had been this woman, the victim of society. She fell incurably in love with her teacher, who had been married. Then she met another guy, and finally she got pregnant. Of course, she hadn’t known who had been the father, and for all this the male chauvinist society was responsible. Or so Gina had explained on one grey day in October many years earlier. It had been the first and last time he engaged in an argument about social issues with her. He had to point out the fact that the woman individually had some influence on how she lived her life, and not all woes had been due to men. Her response to his reasoning had been demolishing.
He would sure have a cup of tea if she cared to bring him. But it was always him who made coffee for her in the mornings when she was at home, and not in some overseas fashionable metropolis. She just had to wait this time, he pondered, because he wasn’t getting up. It made him feel good to think that she was waiting; waiting for something he wouldn’t give her. Making her feel the way he had felt many times.
It would have been nice to be a bear, he thought, for then he could sleep through the months and months of greyness. He would only wake up when the flowers blossomed, and the ice melted on the mountains. He would live a short but free life. Yes, he thought, it would be much better to live a short and eventful life than a long and boring one.
He could hear her sip. Did she prepare the coffee for herself? His arms started moving, they heaved him and after twisting his neck and getting his eyelids loose he saw her reading a book and sipping a coffee indeed. “Have some tea for me?” he asked coarsely, sounding a bit demanding.
She looked up from the book and said: “If you want your tea, go and make yourself.”
He fell back to the bed; this wasn’t the welcome he needed after a rough night. What kind of a wife did he have, he asked himself. She rarely showed compassion or tenderness. She always had to have her way; he was never strong enough to withstand her desires or fads. He had to watch her silly TV programmes, talk shows and reality shows, even in the bedroom when he tried to get a good night’s sleep. He had to swallow her occasional monologues about her independence and rights. He had to do the cooking and washing. Actually all the housework... But a cup of tea?! Would it have been such a difficult thing for her to make if she had made a coffee for herself anyway?
“It would be nice if you made me a cup of tea,” he said. “I’m really tired.”
“You are always tired, and you always want to sleep. 8 hours is not enough, you need 12 hours,” she was irritated. “You sleep through your life,” she nagged as she slipped into her slippers and left the room. In a short time she was back with a cup in her hand that she tossed to him almost spilling the contents on the bed. “It’s past eleven. You two must have had a good time yesterday,” she said scornfully.
He drank his tea, and stared at her as she returned to reading her book. If he recalled correctly, she had gone out last night as well. In fact, she went out on all Saturday nights. He couldn’t remember that he had ever complained about that.
He sat up in bed. “Yes, we had a good time yesterday. Real good,” he added.
“Wonderful,” she said. “I have nothing against you going out, but Gregers isn’t the type you should choose. He’s too wild, and beastly.”
“I thought you wanted me to be with him. The promotion, remember?”
“Yes, in daytime, but not at nights. He drinks a lot and may speak a lot of nonsense into your head.”
He looked at her inquisitively. He was beginning to feel the upper hand. “He said absolutely nothing about you and Werle. But I know.”
“Not again,” she sounded angry. “I thought we had been through this at least a dozen times. Of course, he said nothing, as there was nothing to be said.”
After a second’s pause of hesitation he murmured: “I overheard them. I mean the Werles the other night. They were talking about us, and Werle admitted it. Everything.”
She looked fiercely at him. She threw the book on the ground and jumped out of bed. “How dare you? Are you calling me a liar?”
“No,” he was annoyed at himself for being unable to confront her and was once again retreating. He was afraid of losing her, he just wanted her to come begging for forgiveness that he then could gallantly grant her. This would have made him feel good.
“And what if?” she asked on the offensive. “You have no right to question my life, especially the things that had happened before I met you. What difference would it make?”
“It would make all the difference,” he said recapturing some momentum.
“Fine, if that’s what you want. But I’m not going to scramble in front of your knees.” She hoisted her head with pride. “I’m not sorry for what happened, I wouldn’t do anything differently. And if you couldn’t digest this possibility all the years we have been together then I have nothing to say.”
She strutted back and forth, he watched her from bed. He didn’t know what to say. He lost his momentum, and wished he wouldn’t have breached the topic at all. He was too exhausted to argue. He had difficulty finding the right words when he was emotionally unbalanced. Being a woman she was much better in her speech anyway. He needed more ammunition.
“Did you know that our daughter, 15-year-old Hedvig is having a sexual relationship?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“She’s having sex.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m starting to get frightened of you. You are losing your mind.”
“Last night when I came home she was masquerading naked,... then this ugly, disgusting, tattooed guy, who must be like 20 appeared from her room also naked. But I’m losing my mind, am I?”
“Was it Frederik?”
“Who?”
“It must have been. She’s fond of him, and he’s a really nice guy. We should be happy that she chose him to get to know her body better.”
He was speechless. Gina obviously had nothing against 15-year-olds having sex. But he had. Especially, if it was his daughter. And Frederik, or whatever his name was, looked everything that he didn’t want Hedvig to get involved with. The type mothers had protected their daughters from in the old days, that is, in the time of the dinosaurs. He was obviously a dinosaur, a freak of evolution that either was left as a remnant or so was reborn with defective genes. Genes not belonging to a fast-paced modern society.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, Hjalmar,” Gina said as when a grown-up rebukes an infant. “You want to possess women. And you have such old-fashioned views about life. And all you achieve is that you chase away those who are close to you. Why do you think Hedvig left this morning so early?! She wouldn’t tell me, but now I can imagine your behaviour last night.” She became reticent for some time. She continued more mildly: “I didn’t tell you certain things, because I knew it was better for you not to know.”
“Better?” he was stupefied. “Better for whom?” he repeated questioningly.
“For us. For you.”
He wished Gina was wrong, but he had to admit that suspecting and knowing were light years apart; suspicion entailed t
he possibility of incorrect judgement of the input. Knowing dispersed the vague likelihood of being wrong. And it hurt. It hurt to know the truth. What should he do with it? He had told himself many times that if he ever got clear evidence that Gina had been with chief Werle he would immediately end their relationship regardless of everything. He had made an oath he would. Should he now live up to his promise, and with that throw away his happiness or should he back down and admit defeat, and never again take a look at himself in the mirror because of the shame? Could he deny what he was? And what was he anyway? A family man? A computer man? A madman? Perhaps Gina was right, and he wanted to possess them. Maybe he was too stubborn to see that he was a relic of the past. He should let society tell him what was right and what was wrong. Life would be so cosy if he could. But he couldn’t. The memories surged from the past yet again, the dinosaurs shouted NO from the abyss; even though their skeletons had petrified long time ago, their spirits lingered. He stood up in his pyjamas that he felt awkwardly hang from him and was paralysed.
“I knew it would make you upset back then, but it’s abnormal that after nearly twenty years, you still can’t let go. All these years we shared our lives, and now you want to dig up the past. What’s done is done, I can’t change it.” She went to him and embraced him. She put her head to his chest. “You know that you’re the one for me, I never felt so deeply for anyone. You are intelligent, handsome, and good in bed.” She looked up at him anticipating some response but there was none. She was silent for a short time; he could see that she was thinking. Then she continued: “Werle thinks that he’s something, but I know that he’s nothing compared to you.”
He felt an astoundingly bitter satisfaction. He had always been certain that he was better than the Werles, simply some strange fate predestined him to a life of misery. How good it was to hear that he was better than chief Werle from his wife, who had been with both of them. He sure had to feel greatly honoured. Like hell he had to, he thought.
There was an obscure suggestion from the abyss that only started forming inside him. How many years had they been together, and how old was Hedvig? Her eyes! He could trace back his family tree to the time of the Vikings, and all of his ancestors had had perfect sight. That was true of Gina’s family as well. Why did she have such a bad sight? Because of reading too much? He didn’t think so.
He slightly pushed her away. He knew she would retaliate. Her amiable style changed immediately to anger. “Fine if this is what you want,” she fumed with the hate of one who had humbled herself, and achieved nothing. “I’ll be in the living room if you have something to tell me.”
She demonstratively walked away, but he didn’t care. The memories got the best of him; they were stronger than ever, his intuition led him downstairs to his workshop. His body moved automatically, his senses primed on the computer screen, his conscious mind far away, doped so it wouldn’t complain. He typed commands vigorously, his search engine promptly found the available information about the myopia disorder he was looking for. In all articles about the subject it read: hereditary disease. Non-acquirable from overuse, abuse or illness. It was due to a dominant genetic disorder. He calculated the probability of mutation, that is the likelihood for two healthy sighted individuals like Gina and him to have a bad-sighted Hedvig. The chances were 1 to more than all the known atomic particles of the Universe. He had to continue calculating. When was Hedvig’s birthday? Yes, now subtract 9 months. It couldn’t be... Either Hedvig was born a month early or a month late for the computer had all the dates. When she was supposed to have been in the making he was on a study trip. Of course, he knew that one month here or there wouldn’t make much difference to doctors, but he was a man of precision. He thought that only humans of all creatures on the planet seemed to have immensely varied incubation times and menstruation cycles and the sort. A duck for example lay an egg at regular intervals; this he knew because he had examined these birds thoroughly when making the artificial duck. Nor had he any knowledge of primates that were so individualistic in their reproduction. He sarcastically laughed at himself. Then he sat still. Complete silence surrounded him.
Hedvig wasn’t his daughter. The statement cut through his brain like a knife, he could feel the pain as it sliced its way. What was he supposed to do? He was crushed, his life lay in ruins. Everything he valued turned to dust, what remained was just a big basket of lies and unfulfilled desires. Everything he had believed to have been his, were in reality someone else’s. And that someone else was the most disgusting, loathsome of all.
He contemplated suicide. All his life he had denied even having such thoughts, and always claimed within that if he was pressed to some insanity, then it would have been homicide rather than suicide. He couldn’t tell how many times he had imagined crushing chief Werle’s head to pudding, but in life he was too cowardly to do so. Now he was too down-stricken to move as much as an inch. Again his social mind vehemently opposed violence, and questioned the benefits of such an action. The results portrayed were imprisonment, solitude and despair. He would never see his family... His family?! He never had a family! He bounced to his feet, then froze once more. The abyss was strangely reserved: “even if you killed chief Werle, your life would not be any better, go and start a new life instead”. But how could he start a new life? Should he simply forget his previous life? How could he face his father? What should he say to Gina and Hedvig? Should he say anything at all?
No, he couldn’t leave. There was only one option left for him. His father still had his arsenal of shotgun upstairs. He had to go. The eternal hunting grounds were waiting for him. The memories were now the ones protesting, society was silent. His body moved impalpably; he was the driver of a big machine and he stirred it towards the edge of a cliff. But first he had to ascend, all the way up to his father’s room.
He entered the room; there was an army-like tidiness inside; almost surreal he thought. He commanded the machine to open a drawer. He looked at the weapons. There were revolvers, rifles of all sorts, knives and ammunition. Everything was shining clean. He contemplated for a moment. Which one should he choose? He laid his hand on one of them, then changed his mind and picked another. He started the loading. For a while he amused himself with the possibility of playing Russian roulette, but then declined as it would have been pointless if the outcome was the same. He held the revolver to his temple. He took a deep breath. It was time to go. The Vikings were waiting for him on the other side. Pull the trigger, he told the machine. For a moment nothing happened, then he perceived his finger slowly advancing on the trigger. He felt the trigger counter the pressure, as it was harder to pull until it would fire off. Just one nanosecond more and it would be all over.
The doorbell rang. It was clear and loud. He put back the pistol in its place immediately. The tension in him decreased, but he was not relieved. Why on earth couldn’t he be left to himself when he finally found a solution to his life? Why did fate want to take this very last option from him? Why couldn’t he just simply die?
His body quickly descended downstairs and opened the front door.
“Hello, old chap,” Gregers said with a slight smile. There was some awkwardness in his voice. Because of last night, of course, he thought. His friend must have come here to explain. Not that he would care. If Gregers liked kissing a guy like Molvik, then Gregers liked kissing a guy like Molvik. If Hedvig wanted to have group sex, then let her have it. He wouldn’t mind. He just wanted to die.
His arms made welcoming gestures, as if saying: “well, come in, don’t stand there in the rain”. They went into the workshop. Gregers looked at him intensely, after they had seated themselves. It was obvious that his friend had a lot to tell him, but didn’t know where to begin. He gathered it wouldn’t make any difference if he helped him get started. “I’m sure you want to tell me about last night. If you think that I deplore you because of what happened, then you’re wrong. I’m not going to judge you or deem you good or bad.”
“It??
?s not only that,” Gregers said painfully. “You don’t understand. You never did.”
“Tell me then,” for a moment his thoughts of suicide dispersed.
Gregers gazed into his eyes, hesitated for a second. Then Gregers said the most perverse sentence he could think of: “I love you.” He was perplexed, stunned, exhilarated and disgusted all at the same time. Gregers took his hand to his heart. “I have always loved you. I just couldn’t tell you before. I was too chicken to let you know. I was afraid that you wouldn’t understand. That’s why I had to run away from you. All these years I was on the run, because I couldn’t face you, I couldn’t face that I loved you. I know that you think I’m simply an insane gay asshole who has the nerve to treat you like this, pop up and mess up your life after all the woes my family incurred upon yours. But that’s not true. I want to remedy everything. I want to...” Gregers moistured his mouth with his tongue. “I want to treat you the way you deserve to be treated. I want to offer a business partnership to you. I want to make up for what you lost because of my father.” He watched Gregers listlessly. He would have been thrilled and excited before if someone offered him a tenth of what Gregers was now proposing. But now was too late. No partnership meant anything to him. Not any more. And with that, his intentions of suicide faded away. Anger took its place.
“We could make your duck into a phenomenal success,” Gregers continued.
“The duck?!” he asked his hate focusing on the things he had believed to have loved.
“Yes,” Gregers seemed unaware of the imminent eruption.
He went to the box containing the robot, and unwrapped it. “We are talking about this?” he asked with a theatrical tone and sounded quite menacing. Gregers nodded and sensed trouble. In the next moment, he threw the duck onto the ground with vehement force, the force of a creature for which nothing mattered any more, which was ready to combat anything or anyone in its way. A creature that wouldn’t care if it died in the process. The duck made a crash landing, and was shattered but stayed in one piece until he hopped on it, kicked it, and tore it to extremely small pieces. Gregers watched in complete silence and fear.
When he finished the destruction, he glimpsed at his friend and said: “I’m fed up with the lies, with the virtual worlds, with the substitutes for love. I don’t want anything from you, especially your pity.”
Before Gregers could respond in any way, the door opened and Gina entered. Her countenance was somber. She turned even more somber when she looked at them, and the remnants of a once almost real virtual bird. She turned towards Gregers demandingly. “Thanks a lot,” she said between her teeth, “thanks for messing up our lives. We had everything fine before you came back.”
Gregers sighed. “I’m so sorry.” There were teardrops emerging in his eyes. “I wished... I wanted to make things better for you. I’m so sorry for messing it all up.”
“Sorry is just not good enough,” she said close to crying.
He was almost amused. Here were two strong people, who had enjoyed manifesting their power over his life now in complete disarray. Like two parents who didn’t know what to do when their infant turned to drugs to substitute for the missing love. But he definitely wouldn’t be the one to exhilarate them. They deserved punishment for all the things they had done to him, all the despair they had caused.
“I wanted to remedy the things...,” Gregers repeated as if trying to convince himself. “I asked Hjalmar to be my business partner.”
“Really?” Gina asked, her countenance eased all of a sudden. “And what did he say?”
Gregers pointed to the plastic and metal parts strewn all over the place. Gina looked at him inquisitively. “Have you gone mad?” she asked. “What has got into you? This is the chance you have been waiting for in your whole life.”
“No,” he said plainly. “This is the chance you wanted me to wait for in my whole life. I never wanted it.”
Life started returning to Gina and Gregers. They sensed that it was time for a counteroffensive. “Of course,” Gina said, “as you had no ambition for anything. Was it up to you, you would have liked to live in some shabby hut on some remote island, and let life run past you without noticing....”
She continued nagging; he had to smile. She was naturally right. He let the words slip by him. He thought about his life up to this point, and had to declare it an absolute bore. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed it now and then, but presently the things he amused himself with before seemed dull and irrelevant. He had to consider a strange notion. Earlier he had been convinced that intelligence was the greatest gift of evolution, the best thing in life. He watched ancient native tribesmen from some far away land on TV and despised them. But not any more. He realised that happiness was more important than intelligence. The tribesmen had been happy. What was even more stunning to him now was that happiness and intelligence were paradoxically contradictory to each other. The more intelligent a creature would get, the less it would be satisfied with its life. Then what was the point? Perhaps intelligence was simply a by-product of evolution, a side-track that would ultimately eliminate itself, either by homicidal or by suicidal fashion. It seemed that his society chose the latter with an aging population and diminishing birth numbers. Everyone seemed to have so high standards that made it impossible for them to stand each other. Everyone seemed to have one sole interest: to make money. But it was just stupid, he mused, as they spent their money on making more and more of it. It was a self fulfilling process.
“Think about grandpa.” He plunged back to the real world. “He could finally retire,” Gina said. “Later we could buy him a place up in the woods, where he could live like in the old days.”
“Do you know about honour?” he asked. Then he added: “Of course, you don’t. My father will never go back to the mountains, because they are sacred to him. The woods remind him of the days when he was someone.”
“You Ekdals are all so indulgent in honour,” Gina said sarcastically. “It’s time you came back to Earth. You have this elevated vision of the simplest matters that ought not be considered at all.” He began to feel a crumb in his throat; his neck started to ache as always when he was really pissed off. He tried to respond, but couldn’t for his lips were dry. He was gaping instead as if not receiving enough air. “And the only good thing you have done, you have now destroyed,” Gina pointed at the scattered electronic parts. It was extraordinary that she deemed the late artificial duck a good thing. Never before had she done so. The robot had been rather a stupid toy, the product of a childish mind.
“I’m sure we have the documentation of the duck in the company’s database,” Gregers said soothingly. “We don’t need the prototype to start mass production.”
He stared at Gregers. He didn’t want to hate him, but he hated him so much that couldn’t be described. He didn’t hate him because his friend was gay or bisexual or whatever, but because Gregers was a Werle. And so was Hedvig. And even Gina was a Werle in some sense. And he was an Ekdal, a man of the past. This was definitely not his terrain. He felt as an intruder, an alien in his own home. He was once a warrior, he pondered, like in a movie he had seen titled: “Once Were Warriors”. He had, of course, only one thing in common with the main character in the motion picture: he had no future. He was well-educated, perhaps even talented, yet he had no future. It was understandable that a brutal, lazy, wife-beater, unemployed character wouldn’t have a future. But that he didn’t...?!
There was a faint smile emerging on his face. Whether he laughed at himself or at the situation, he couldn’t determine. “Welcome to the family,” he unexpectedly said and embraced both of them, placing one hand on Gina’s shoulder, the other on Gregers’. “Let’s go upstairs and have some fun, the three of us.”
“You are mad,” Gina said and tried to unleash herself from his grasp in vain.
“Why not?” he asked. “You like the Werle type, Gregers likes me, and it’s all the same for me. We can be a real proper family, you know.” He la
ughed with bitter sarcasm. He stared at Gregers. “You know that we are one big happy family, don’t you?” Gregers looked at him with wide-open eyes, and shook his head. “Hedvig is your sister, brother. So restrain yourself.”
Gina was furious, she broke herself loose. “What are you saying, Hjalmar? Haven’t you hurt me enough this morning?”
“How can you say something like that?” Gregers asked. “You couldn’t deny Hedvig is your daughter, she is so much you.”
“Her eyes,” he moaned and realised with dubious sentiment that he must have looked like a madman indeed. “But we can easily ascertain, it takes only a few days,” he told Gina, who was shaking with anger and pain. “We send some samples...”
“Stop it right now,” Gina said and started crying.
“You are just pulling our leg?! It can’t be true.” Gregers glimpsed at Gina and then gazed at him. “Or could it?” He simply nodded, Gina was sobbing. “I’m so sorry, man,” Gregers uttered.
“It’s too late to be sorry,” he said, took his coat and left them there. He didn’t smash the door behind himself.
For the one million and first time he went for a walk on the same path.