My Struggle: Book 6

PART ONE

In mid-September of 2009 I went up to Thomas and Marie’s little retreat between Höganäs and Mölle, he was going to take some photos of me for the forthcoming books. I had rented a car, a black Audi, and headed north along the four-lane motorway in late morning with an intense feeling of happiness in my chest. The sky was clear blue, the sun shone like it was still summer. To my left the Öresund lay glittering, to my right yellow fields of stubble and meadows stretched inland, separated by stone walls, streams lined by leafy trees, sudden woodland. I was struck by a feeling that such a day wasn’t supposed to happen, and yet there it was, an oasis of summer in the midst of autumn’s paling landscape, and the fact that it wasn’t meant to be like that, that the sun wasn’t meant to shine so brightly, the sky wasn’t supposed to be so saturated with light, tinged my joy with a sense of unease, so I tried not to think about it in the hope that it would pass of its own accord, sang along to the chorus of Cat People as it came through the speakers at the same moment, and took pleasure at the sight of the town appearing on my left, the harbor cranes, factory chimneys, warehouses. These were the outskirts of Landskrona, gliding by as Barsebäck had glided by only a few minutes earlier, the nuclear power station’s characteristic and ever-ominous silhouette rising in the distance. Next up was Helsingborg, and from there it was another twenty kilometers or so to Thomas and Marie’s place.

I was running late. First I had sat for a long time in the parking garage, in the roomy Audi’s temperate interior, wondering how to start the ignition, unable to bring myself to go back to the rental office and ask in case they took the vehicle away from me once I had revealed such towering ignorance, and so I sat and pored through the handbook, flipping backward and forward through the pages, finding nothing at all about how to start the engine. I studied the dashboard, then the key, which wasn’t a key at all but a card made of black plastic. I had unlocked the doors by pressing on it and wondered now if the ignition worked by some similar system. I searched the steering column in vain for a diagram. But there, wasn’t that a slot of some sort? Maybe that was it?

I inserted the card and the engine purred. The next half hour I spent driving around the center of Malmö looking for the right road out of the city. By the time I eventually drove down the entrance ramp and onto the motorway I was nearly an hour behind schedule.

As Landskrona disappeared behind the low fold of the glacial ridge, I fumbled for my mobile on the seat next to me, found it, and pressed Geir’s number. It was Geir who had originally introduced me to Thomas, they had met in a boxing club where Thomas had been working on a photo book about the sport, while Geir had been writing a dissertation on the same subject. They made an odd couple, to put it cautiously, but held each other in the highest regard.

Hi there, said Geir.

Hi, I said. Can you do me a favor?

Sure.

Could you give Thomas a call and tell him I’ll be an hour late.

Will do. Are you on the road?

Yes.

Sounds good.

It’s fantastic, for a change. But listen, I’ve got to pass a truck now.

And?

I can’t talk on the phone at the same time.

Someone ought to investigate your multitasking skills sometime. Catch you later, then.

I hung up, changed gears, and passed the long white semitrailer truck, which swayed gently in the turbulent air. Earlier in the summer I had driven the whole family up to Koster and nearly had two accidents on the way, one due to hydroplaning at high speed, which could have ended very badly indeed, the other not quite as drastic, but frightening nonetheless; I had changed lanes in a traffic jam outside Gothenburg without seeing a car coming from behind, and we only avoided a crash because the other guy was so quick on the brakes. The angry blast of his horn cut straight into my soul. After that I took a break from driving, and felt a little fear every time I thought about it, which was probably a good thing, but still, even passing a truck had become an ordeal, I had to force myself to do it, and any long drive filled me with anxiety for days afterward, like a hangover. The fact that I had passed my test and was actually allowed to drive a car was something my soul cared little about, it lagged behind and was still living in the days when it had been a great recurring nightmare of mine that I got behind the wheel of a car and drove off without knowing how. Ridden with angst, negotiating the bends of Norway’s roads with the overhanging threat of the police catching up with me any minute, I would be sound asleep in bed somewhere with the pillow and the upper half of the duvet soaked in sweat.

I left the motorway and joined the narrower main road to Höganäs. The warmth outside was visible in the air, something about the substance of light and sky, they seemed veiled in a way, and the glitter the sunshine sprinkled over everything. The world was wide open, that was the feeling of it, and everything shimmered.

Ten minutes later I swung into the parking lot outside a supermarket and got out. Oh, such a rush of well-being in the air, it seemed pervaded by the blue of the sea, though without being hot in the way the air is hot in summer, there was a hint of coolness and sedateness about it. As I crossed the asphalt toward the supermarket, whose flags hung flaccidly from their poles, the feeling the air gave me reminded me of smoothing one’s hand over marble on a sweltering hot day in some Italian town, that coolness, as subtle as it was surprising.

I bought a box of raspberries to give them, and a packet of cigarettes and some chewing gum for myself, put the raspberries on the passenger seat, and started the ignition again. The narrow road, lined by the hedges of small whitewashed cottages, led down toward the sea only a few hundred meters from the supermarket. Thomas and Marie’s place was right at the bottom, with the sea to the west and a vast green field to the east.

Thomas came across the lawn in shorts to greet me as I got out and shut the car door. He gave me a hug, one of the few people who could do so without it feeling too intimate. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was down to the simple fact that he was fifteen years older and, although we didn’t actually know each other that well, had always been sympathetic toward me.

Hi, Karl Ove, he said.

Long time, no see, I said. What a gorgeous day!

We crossed the lawn. The air was completely still, the trees stood completely still, the sun hung suspended above the sea, sending its scorching rays out over the landscape. And yet all the time the same coolness in the air. It had been ages since I had felt such calm.

How about some coffee? said Thomas as we paused at the rear of the house where the previous summer he had made a timber deck that stretched like the deck of a ship from its outer wall to the thick, impenetrable hedge that cast its motionless shadow a couple of meters back toward the house.

Yes, please, I said.

Great, have a seat and I’ll get you some.

I sat down, put my sunglasses on again, and leaned my head back to soak up as much sun as possible while I lit a cigarette and Thomas filled a receptacle with water from the tap in the little kitchen.

Marie came out. Her sunglasses were pushed up onto her forehead, and she squinted at the sun. I told her I had read about her in Dagens Nyheter that morning, there was a piece about an art controversy she was involved in. I had forgotten what it was exactly they had written about her, despite racking my brains, but fortunately she didn’t ask, saying only that she would check it out at the library, she was on her way there anyway.

Has your book come out yet? she asked.

No, not yet. It’ll be out on Saturday, though.

How exciting! she said.

Yes, I replied.

See you later, then, she said. I take it you’re staying for lunch?

Yes, that’d be nice! I said back, and smiled. By the way, I brought Linda’s manuscript with me. I’ll give it to you later.

Marie had been a supervisor at the writers’ school in Biskops-Arnö and had agreed to read the manuscript of a novel Linda had just completed.

Fine, she said, and went inside again. Shortly after, a car started at the front of the house. Thomas came out with two cups of coffee and a plate of muffins. He sat down and we chatted for a bit before he went and got his camera and took a few photos as we continued talking. The last time I had been to see him he had been reading Proust; he still was, he said, just before I came he had been sitting there reading the part about the grandmother’s death. That’s one of the finest passages, I said. Yes, he said, getting up to photograph me from a different angle. I thought about what little I remembered about the grandmother’s death. The way it came out of nothing. One minute she had been getting into a carriage to take her through the Jardin du Luxembourg and the next she was struck by a brain hemorrhage from which she died only hours later. Or was it days? The house milling with physicians, the all-consuming anguish that bears down during the first phase of grief, apathy continually interrupted by the unrest that comes with hope. All out of the blue, the shock of that.

Great, said Thomas. How about if you move your chair over to the hedge there?

I did as he suggested. When he was done he went inside to study the images away from the light. I went and got more coffee in the kitchen, glancing at the photos he was clicking through on the camera screen as I stepped past.

These are quite good, he said. As long as you don’t mind having a long nose.

I smiled and went outside again. Thomas wasn’t out to make me look good, nor to capture some particular expression, rather the opposite, so I understood, he wanted me the way I looked when I was relaxed, without posing.

He came back out with the camera and sat down in the sun.

Are we done? I asked.

Yes, he replied. They’ve come out nicely, I think. I might take a couple of full-lengths, though, a bit later on.

Great, I said.

A low murmur of voices came from the other side of the hedge. I crossed my legs and looked up at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight.

I was at the hospital visiting one of my best friends before we came down here, he said. He’s broken his neck.

How terrible, I said.

Yes. They found him in Gullmarsplan. No one knows what happened, he was just lying there on the square.

Is he conscious?

Yes. He can talk and is quite lucid. But he can’t remember a thing about what happened. He doesn’t even know what he was doing in Gullmarsplan.

Was there alcohol involved?

Not at all. No, it’s an illness he has. Similar things have happened to him before, he can pass out in his apartment and wake up again without knowing where he is. But this time the consequences were more serious. I’m worried he might not pull through.

I didn’t know what to say and nodded. We sat there in silence for a while. Thomas looked at me.

Like to go for a walk?

Yeah, why not, I said.

A couple of minutes later he closed the gate behind us and we tramped off across the grazed pastures that sloped gently down toward the stony beach, where waves rolled lazily in from the sea. Some longhorn cattle stood and stared at us from the top of a small hill. We were only about fifty meters away from some houses and the busy road that ran behind them, but it felt as if we were walking on a deserted heath. Maybe it was the sea, and the way the pasture ran all the way down to the beach. Normally in these parts land like this was the most valuable of all and rarely given over to grazing.

There are some old bunkers from the war up there, said Thomas, pointing toward some low concrete structures a bit farther ahead. We’re very close to Denmark here, of course.

We had some where I grew up, I said. But they were German.

Really? he said, lifting his camera to take a photo of me in profile against the sea.

We used to play there when I was a boy, I said. The bunkers in the woods were especially fascinating. Just the fact that they were there! This was the late seventies. The war had only been over for thirty years or so.

It was windier here in the open, but the waves that lapped the shore were low and lethargic. The cattle had begun to graze again. There were cowpats deposited everywhere they had been, some soft and mushy, others dry and shriveled.

We’ve got something of a rarity over there, said Thomas. He gestured toward a small pond in a boggy area of reeds and moss, sheltered from the sea behind a rise in the landscape.

And what’s that? I asked.

You see the pond there?

I nodded.

There’s a species of toad in it not found anywhere else in Sweden. It lives right here. In that little pond.

Really?

Yes. They’ve got a few in Finland too, apparently. The European fire-bellied toad, it’s called. If we’re lucky we might be able to hear them. Their call sounds like little bells. I heard a program on the radio once where they recorded the ones here and compared them to the Finnish ones. Let’s go see if we can hear them.

We trudged over to the edge of the pond. There wasn’t a sound to be heard apart from the wind buffeting our ears and the gentle rush of the sea.

No, he said. Sometimes they’re just quiet. They’re in decline, too. In the old days, not so long ago actually, this whole area was underwater. Then the houses got built, and the water has retreated since then.

How come they only live here?

No idea. It seems they used to be found in a number of other spots as well, then they started to die out, apart from here. I suppose the conditions here must have suited them particularly well.

How strange.

Yes. A shame you didn’t get to hear them! The sound they make really is rather special.

We walked on to what had once been a little fishing village, now a summer retreat. All the old cottages had been done up, the gardens meticulously kept, shiny new cars in the driveways. We followed the road that ran between them, and after a short while we were sitting once more in the little back garden we had left an hour before. Thomas got some more coffee going, Marie was preparing lunch.

Shortly after, as we enjoyed our omelettes with fried potatoes, bread, and beer, we talked about Jon Fosse. Marie translated his plays into Swedish and had just finished one that was to run at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre that autumn. Fosse is a writer who has gone from describing the world the way it appears, the social-realist nightmares of small, unapproachable states-of-affairs in his early novels, brimming with neuroses and panic, to describing the world the way it is in essence, dark and open. From the world the way it can be inside the individual, to the world as it is between us, this is the line of development in Fosse’s work. The turning toward God and the divine follows on from that. Anyone investigating the conditions of our existence must sooner or later investigate that too. The human domain has both outer and inner boundaries, in the space between them lies our culture, which is what makes us visible to ourselves. In Fosse’s work it is subdued and almost indefinite, open to outside forces, the wind and darkness, which seem to rise and fall in the people he writes about. In that respect there is something premodern about them, in that all the things with which we fill our time, newspapers and TV programs, the vortex of politics, news, gossip, and celebrities that make up the world we live in, or mine at least, are something Fosse’s characters stand outside. The simplicity of his later work prompts some to speak of minimalism, its darkness eliciting comparisons with Beckett, but there is nothing minimalistic about Fosse’s work, rather it is essentialistic, and not in any way Beckett-like, Beckett being hard, ironic, without hope, his darkness is cold and filled out by laughter, whereas Fosse’s darkness is warm, comforting, without laughter. Perhaps because he has come to that point from within, rather than going the other way like Beckett?

I could express nothing of this to Thomas and Marie because, as with most of the books I read and the art I look at, I relate to such things through something other than thoughts. Fosse is like this, Beckett like that, I know that, but then it stops there.

How’s it going with your uncle? Thomas asked. Is he still angry? Last time we talked you said he was taking you to court.

Nothing’s happened yet, I answered. The book’s at the printers, so if there’s going to be a court case it’ll be after it comes out. He’s threatened to go to the papers as well. That’s what I’m most afraid of, in a way. That they get hold of a story.

But if he doesn’t want anyone to read what you’ve written, then that wouldn’t be the best way of going about it. It wouldn’t be rational, said Marie, lifting her fork to her mouth.

True, but rational doesn’t come into it.

I pushed my plate away and leaned back.

Thanks, I said. That was delicious!

I needed a cigarette but held off until they had finished eating.

Thomas looked up at me.

Smoke, if you want, he said.

Thanks, I said. I lit up and gazed out at the dark blue ribbon of sea above the green hedge, the way it glittered on the horizon, where the sunlight erased everything like a bomb, and the sky, lighter in color because of the haze, rose up.

It was such a fine day.

They started to clear the table, I left my cigarette in the ashtray and gave them a hand, putting the plates on the counter next to Marie, who began to rinse them in the sink. She was pushing sixty but came across a lot younger, the way so many writers do; only now and then, in the briefest of glimpses, did her true age become visible in her face. The impression of the face and the face itself are two different things, interwoven, a bit like those drawings that look like one thing if you look at the shading and another if you look at the other parts, perhaps, apart from the fact that a face is so much more complex. Not only does it change from hour to hour depending on the moods that ebb and flow behind and all around it, but also from year to year depending on the kind of relationship you have to it. My mother’s face, for instance, appears mostly unchanged to me, what I see is Mom, the way she has always been, but then she can turn her head slightly in a certain way and all of a sudden, like a shock, I see that she has become elderly now, a woman approaching seventy with perhaps no more than ten years left to live. Then she can turn again and say something, and once more all I see is Mom.

I sat down again outside. The cigarette was still burning, I put it between my lips and sucked so hard it made the filter hot. I looked up at the sky, then at Thomas as he came out with the box of raspberries in his hand.

We used to hear nightingales here, he said, sitting down at the other side of the table. Not that many years ago either.

What happened? I asked.

He shrugged.

They just vanished.

Driving home an hour later, the sun hanging low over Denmark on the other side of the strait, I thought about those vanished nightingales. It was the perfect beginning for the novel I was going to write when My Struggle was finished. An elderly man, full of years, potters about in his garden on the Swedish island of Gotland, reads in the shade, goes for long walks in the woods or along the endless beaches, retires early to bed in the evenings. It’s summer, the sun beats down in the day, the vegetation is dry and scorched, and he is all alone with not a living soul for company. He thinks about a conversation he had more than thirty years before, sitting in the sun at a cottage on the Öresund coast, during which his friend Thomas, long since dead like so many of his friends are, told him the nightingales had vanished. It was the first he’d heard of it. Not long after, he saw a TV documentary about bees vanishing in the United States. From one day to the next they were gone, no one knew where, whether they had found some new place to go or simply died out. One Sunday, out with his family in the great beech woods outside the town where he lived at the time, they had seen hundreds of dead bats scattered everywhere on the ground. The newspapers carried reports of similar occurrences, flocks of birds falling from the skies, huge shoals of fish floating dead in the sea. Something was happening in the world and no one knew what. The fish, could it have been a volcanic eruption under the sea, gases rising and killing them off? Or was it caused by man? The birds, was some sickness running rampant among them? But then why would they fall down at the same time? Was it some kind of stress? The wild salmon disappeared, some suggested farmed salmon were to blame. Certain species of butterfly vanished – had there been a change in the environment so rapid that they had been unable to adapt? And then, in the space of a couple of summers, the great bird colonies stopped coming to their nesting grounds along the coast to the north. This time no one could even hazard a guess as to the reason why.

Every night before he goes to bed he writes a few pages in a notebook, mostly for his own sake, his days out there on the island being so alike that without his notes everything would merge seamlessly into one. He notes down the things he does, the way he feels, what he sees, and now and then events from his past life, which in that way emerges unsystematically.

That was the idea I had, and I elaborated on it in my mind as I headed south. In order to have the afternoon to myself I had taken the morning shift with the children, fed and dressed them and got them off to the nursery, and it was with that thought in mind that I had driven up to Thomas and Marie’s when I did, it would give me some time left over to spend sitting at a café in Helsingborg. I took a left, passing at first through a semi-industrial area that gradually transformed into detached residences followed by long rows of linked houses on both sides of the road, eventually going down a steep hill, at the bottom of which was the town center, the harbor glittering in the light of the low-hanging sun.

I had been there once before with Linda and the children, it had been our first trip after I passed my driving test. Being a registered bad debtor, I was unable to borrow money or even rent a car in Sweden, so Linda had made the reservation in her name, it was a bulky, unmanageable vehicle which looked like a minibus. We came crawling into the town, my heart thumping in my chest, it was all I could do to steer properly, but at the same time I felt buoyant, driving gave me an immense feeling of freedom, as though being motorized solved all my many problems. Now I knew there were parking spaces at the far end of the expansive quayside area and I drove slowly in that direction.

An enormous cruise liner lay at anchor off the pier. It looked like it could carry several thousand passengers. I locked the car and ambled off. On the other side of the strait, surprisingly close, was what I realized must be the castle at Elsinore. The thought that I was looking at Hamlet’s home made my spine tingle. I tried to eliminate everything that had since appeared in the world in the way of cars, boats, and buildings, to see only the castle in the landscape, to think of how enormous the distances were at that time, how little space people occupied within the world, how vast the gaps between them, and gazed across at the place where the young prince, broken with despair at the death of his father, seemingly at the hands of his uncle, had perhaps lain on his back in bed, staring up at the ceiling, tortured by the colossal meaninglessness that had come between himself and all things, his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, seated on a bench in the courtyard, casting their long shadows across the cobbles, drunk on light and boredom.

I stood there staring toward the castle for a moment before turning and walking along the quayside toward the town. Here and there, tourists were leaning over the railing, peering down at the cool blue of the water. Maybe there were fish swimming around, or maybe it was the deep itself that fascinated them.

The town center was situated at the foot of a steep ridge; this was the only town in Skåne I had seen with hills and rises like this. It gave a completely different sense of space. I entered the pedestrian street, at the bottom of which was a park; there, beneath tall, shady deciduous trees, I spotted a pavilion, and a few minutes later I was able to sit down and order a coffee. The other people at the tables were speaking English with American accents, they must have come from the cruise liner.

I looked up at the treetops. The leaves were not yellow, but their green was not quite as fat and pastose as it had been in summer, it was drier now, and paler. All around me the sounds of the town swirled in the air. Tires rolling against asphalt, a rumble of car engines, footsteps, voices, laughter.

Hamlet was written at the close of the sixteenth century. The earliest edition still in existence is from 1603. A few years ago I would have thought of that as being a long time ago. I didn’t any longer. The seventeenth century was only a few generations away. Goethe, for instance, must have run into people who had been born in the seventeenth century. To Hamsun, Goethe would have been someone who died a generation before he was born. And to me, Hamsun was someone who died a generation before I was born.

No, the seventeenth century wasn’t long ago at all.

A waitress in a black apron crossed the road carrying a tray. The café itself was housed in a building on the other side. She skipped up the two steps to the pavilion, halted, and placed a cup of coffee, a small jug of milk, and a thin paper sachet of sugar on the table in front of me. I handed her thirty kronor and told her to keep the change, det var greit. She didn’t understand and began to rummage in her apron for coins. I held up my hand and said it didn’t matter. Tack, she said, and wheeled away.

The coffee tasted bitter, it must have been standing for ages. It wasn’t what people were drinking in the hot weather.

I lit a smoke and looked out at the rooftops across the way, a zinc-clad chimney reflecting the glare of the sun, though without its movement, making the light seem like it was emitted by the zinc itself, an inexhaustible source. The gray-black slating that surrounded it, the fire escapes disappearing down into the backyards on the other side.

Everyone’s life contained a horizon, the horizon of death, and it lay somewhere between the second and third generations before us, and the second and third generations after us. We, and those we lived with and loved, existed between those two lines. Outside were the others, the dead and the unborn. There, life was a chasm without us. That was why a figure like Hamlet could be so important. He was a work of fiction, someone had made him up, given him thoughts and actions and a space in which to act, but the point was that fiction was no longer a valid dividing line, a valid distinction, the moment one stepped beyond the horizon of death. Hamlet was neither more nor less living than the historical figures who had once occupied the earth; in a certain sense anyone from then was fictional. Or, since Hamlet was made of words and ideas, the others of flesh and bone, was it only he and his life form that could overcome time and mortality?

Does he rise now in his chilly chamber? Does he climb the narrow steps out onto the roof, to the parapets? What then does he see? The blue waters of the Öresund, the green land on the other side, the low-lying expanses stretching away and beyond. What thoughts does he have? Shakespeare told us. The earth appears to Hamlet as a sterile promontory. The air, this most excellent canopy, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, as he describes it to his two friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is to him but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors, man but a quintessence of dust. This was what he saw over there at the castle. The English word vapor is the same one as was used of the darkened mind, and the space that opens out there, between the mind’s and the world’s darkening, appears like an abyss.

I took my mobile out of my jacket and pressed Linda’s number. She answered right away.

Everything all right? I asked.

Fine, she said. We’re in the park. The weather’s gorgeous! Heidi refused to walk, but we worked it out. When will you be home?

Soon. I’m in Helsingborg. It’ll take less than an hour from here, I suppose. There’s the car to take back, though, and then I’ll have to walk. Do you want me to get some things on the way?

No, I think we’ve got everything.

Okay, I said. See you. Take care.

Bye, she said, and we hung up.

I sat for a while with the phone in my hand and gazed up the road. Two women wearing skirts and sandals and carrying bags made of some lightweight material came walking along the sidewalk. Behind them a man on a bike, a child squeezed into the kid’s seat against his back. Both had helmets on, the man wore glasses and a suit. I thought about Heidi and smiled. She invariably wanted to be carried. If it was up to her she would never walk a single step. She had always been like that, right from the start. I was so close to her then, after she was born. Vanja was jealous and claimed Linda’s attention as much as she could, while I carried Heidi around until she was eighteen months and John came along. It stopped then, our closeness to each other. Every now and again I felt a twinge of sadness about it. But that was how kids were, everything came in phases, and phases came to an end. Before long they would be grown up, and the children they used to be, whom I had loved, would be gone. Even seeing photos of them from as recently as a year before could make me feel sadness at the fact that the children they were then no longer existed. But mostly they took up so much of our lives now and whirled up our days with such intensity there was no room left for such feelings. It was all here and now with them.

Not without relief, I dropped the car key through the mailbox of Europcar an hour later; that both I and the car were still in one piece after a long day on the roads was by no means to be taken for granted. The sun shone against the tall black spire of Saint Peter’s church above me, while the street beneath my feet was shadowy and cold as I walked along. I went as fast as I could, feeling guilty as always about being away from the family, or rather about leaving Linda to deal with the children on her own. I couldn’t help it. I strode on, past the Hansa arcade, past Hi-Fi Klubben and Orvars Korvar, the hot-dog joint, before crossing over to the canal that ran through the little park, past Granit and Designtorget, across the bridge and onto the pedestrian street at the end of which towered the yellow-white Hilton hotel. The streets were busy, the tables outside both cafés were full, young girls chatting in pairs or small groups, some teenagers being boisterous, and a couple of men my own age, rather more subdued in body language and dress. All sat soaking up this unexpected summer’s day. I felt calm and excitement at the same time; it felt good, but underneath was anxiety.

Our apartment was on the little square across the road from the Hilton. A steady flow of people from early morning to late evening passed our entrance door, which was tucked in between a Søstrene Grene store and a Chinese takeaway. On the square itself there was a fountain, the trickling sounds of which went on through the night, and a big octagonal fast-food stand that blared out soulful pop and eighties hits to its customers, mostly people from outside town, who sat at the tables stuffing themselves with grilled sausages and hamburgers, with bulging carrier bags at their feet. The benches a bit farther away were occupied by homeless people. Ours was the top apartment, on the sixth floor, with a balcony running its whole width at the front. Once, Vanja threw a lighter over the railing, and it had hit the ground and exploded, just missing a couple of passersby who leaped into the air and glared up at us while I waved my hands in apology, trying to tell them it was an accident and hoping they weren’t going to get angry.

I glanced up at the railing, so high above the sidewalk, and got my keys out of my pocket. This involved another memory, for tucked in behind the plastic window tag attached to the key ring was a photo of Vanja and me, the two of us together on a boat, we were on our way to look at dolphins on the Canary Islands, she no more than three years old, holding my hand and wearing a white hat and a look of anticipation. I tapped the orange key card against the panel next to the door, there was a click, I pushed the door open and went inside, pressed the button for the elevator, and checked my phone while I waited. No calls, but I knew that already. The only people who would call my cell were Yngve, Mom, Tore, Espen, and Geir Angell. Each followed their own pattern, and none of them was due to call just yet. I spoke to Yngve and Mom about once a week, Mom on a Sunday evening usually. Espen I spoke to about once every couple of weeks, Tore maybe once a month. With Geir it was about twice a day. That was pretty much my social life outside the family. But it was enough, and it was how I wanted it.

The elevator arrived, I stepped inside and pushed the top button, studying myself in the mirror as I slid slowly upward through the dark and narrow shaft that ran through the middle of the building. My hair had grown long over the summer and I now had a beard of sorts. My beard growth had never been impressive, the cheeks always seemed to remain bare, so every time I looked at myself in the mirror I kept wondering if it looked stupid or not. It was hard, if not impossible, to decide, there being no obvious criteria to apply. If I asked Linda she would just say it looked fine. Did she mean it? Impossible to tell. And obviously I couldn’t ask anyone else about so intimate and vain a matter. So a couple of weeks earlier I’d shaved it off. When I showed up at the nursery the next day, Ola, the only other person there of my age, father of Benjamin, Vanja’s current best friend, and a head of faculty at Malmö’s university, had stared at me and asked if there was something different. Hadn’t I had some facial hair or something? He was being funny, not referring to it as a beard, and it made me think shaving it off had been the right decision. But then, on the Friday, I picked up some of the photos we’d taken that summer. I sat with Vanja, Heidi, and John at the café at Triangeln where we went every Friday after nursery, they had ice cream while I sat with a coffee, and we looked through the photos together. One was of me standing on a beach over in Österlen with John on my arm. I looked unusually good, I thought to myself, there was something about the beard and the sunglasses that made me seem … well, so masculine. And with John on my arm to complete the picture, I looked like … well, dammit, yes, like a dad.

There and then I had decided to grow the beard back. Only now, on my way up between floors, I wasn’t so sure. I was going to Oslo the next day to do interviews for the launch of the first book. This forced me into considerations about shirts, jackets, trousers, shoes, hair, and now beard. For the past few years I hadn’t been bothered about that sort of thing, hardly giving a thought to the clothes I wore, simply grabbing something to put on if I happened to be going out, which was basically only when I was taking the children to nursery or picking them up again, or if we went out somewhere with them on the weekend. I was living in a city where I knew only a handful of people and didn’t care much about what they might think. This gave me a sense of freedom and allowed me to run around in baggy old pants and big grubby coats, awful woolly hats, and sneakers, but now, from the end of summer on, with publication approaching and my first interviews in five years having all been arranged, it was a different situation altogether.

I turned automatically as the elevator approached the sixth floor, after three years I knew exactly how long it took to ascend, stepped out onto the landing with its clutter of kids’ stuff – two strollers, toddler roller, Vanja’s scooter, and Heidi’s bike with training wheels – and opened the door of the apartment.

Coats and shoes dumped on the floor, toys strewn all over, TV sounds from the living room.

I took my jacket and shoes off and went inside. Heidi and Vanja were snuggled up close in one chair, staring at the TV. John, standing in the middle of the floor in his diaper with a toy car in his hands, looked up at me. Linda was sitting on the sofa reading the newspaper.

The rug was bunched up, cuddly toys lay thrown about the entire room, as well as a number of books and plastic toys, felt pens and sheets of paper they had been drawing on.

How did it go, all right? Linda asked.

Yes, fine, I said. Nearly bashed the car when I was getting gas. You know, that cramped underground place. Apart from that, fine. Thomas and Marie say hello.

Did you give her my mansucript?

I nodded.

How are we doing, girls? I asked.

No reaction. Their little blond heads were motionless as they stared at the TV. In the same chair: apparently they were getting along today.

I smiled, they were even holding hands.

Daddy basement? said John.

No, I replied. Daddy’s been driving a car today.

Daddy go to basement! he said.

Are you hungry? Linda asked. There’s some leftovers out there.

Okay, I said, and went out into the kitchen. The dishes were still on the table, the girls’ plates almost untouched, they hardly ever ate at dinner, never had. To begin with, Linda and I had argued about it, I wanted discipline when it came to meals and felt they should sit at the table until they had eaten up, whereas Linda held the opposite opinion, that when it came to food everything should be as free as possible, with no compulsion. What she said had seemed right to me, it sounded awful to talk about forcing them to eat, so ever since then we had let them do as they wanted. Whenever we came home from the nursery and they started going on about being hungry they had a slice of bread, an apple, some meatballs, or whatever was left over, and when dinner was ready and on the table they could sit there for as long as they felt like. Usually, that was no more than a few minutes during which they prodded a bit and took a few small mouthfuls before sliding off their chairs and toddling off into the living room or their own rooms, leaving Linda and me to eat at opposite sides of the table.

I piled up a plate with macaroni and meatballs, Sweden’s national dish, cut a tomato into bite-sized wedges, squirted some ketchup over it all, and sat down. The first year we lived in Malmö I talked about it with one of the other dads from the nursery. How did they cope at mealtimes? They never had any trouble at all, he said. She always sat nicely at the table and cleaned her plate. How on earth did they manage that, I wanted to know, biking up alongside him on our way out to Limhamnsfältet to play football as we did every Sunday morning. She knows she has no choice, he said. How does she know that? I asked. We broke her will, he said. She sits there until she’s finished, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. One time she sat there until late. Sobbing, and shouting all sorts of things at us. Wouldn’t touch a thing. But after a long while it sank in, she ate up and could leave the table. Three hours, I think it took! Since then there’s hardly been an issue. He looked at me and beamed. Did he realize what he was telling me about himself, I wondered, but said nothing. It’s the same whenever she throws a tantrum, he went on. I’ve noticed Vanja gives you a bit of trouble every now and again. Yes, she does, I said. How do you tackle that? I hold her still in a firm grip, he said. No drama, just hold her still until it passes. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. You should try it, it works like a dream. Yes, I said, I certainly need to think of something.

The odd thing about that conversation, I thought to myself as I spooned the barely warm food into my mouth, was that I had gauged him – or rather both parents – to be alternative, meaning soft. He carried the youngest around in a sling, the way dads like him were supposed to, and on a trip we were on with the nursery I had overheard him talking about the advantages of it as opposed to a BabyBjörn baby carrier. They were more than ordinarily concerned that food should be healthy and additive-free, their kids’ clothes were as far as possible made of natural fiber, and they were among the most active at parent meetings. So the fact that such uncompromisingly Victorian parenting methods should suddenly be revealed in their case came as a surprise to me. Or maybe it completed my understanding. I had always wondered how come their eldest daughter, who often played with Vanja, was always so reasonable and cooperative. She never spent a second in her stroller and walked everywhere they went, as opposed to Vanja, who could start pestering me to get in behind Heidi as soon as we were more than a few meters away from the nursery gate.

There had been occasions every now and then when I’d seen no alternative but to break her will, and of course eventually I had succeeded, but never without feeling awful afterward. It couldn’t be right, surely. On the other hand it was good for her to sit and eat with us, good for her to walk, good for her to get dressed herself, good for her to brush her teeth and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

Once, Vanja had been at their place, it was her first ever sleepover. I went to pick her up the next day, they said everything had gone fine, but I could tell from Vanja, who kept wanting to be as close to me as possible, that it hadn’t been quite without problems. There had been a minor episode, he said, but we sorted it out no trouble, didn’t we, Vanja? What happened, I asked. Well, she asked for more dinner, but then after we’d given her some she wouldn’t eat it. So she had to sit there until she did.

I stared at him.

Was he mad?

No, he was already rummaging around to find her socks for me and I said nothing, even though I was furious. Who did he think he was, assuming he had the right to force my child to adhere to his ideas? I took the socks he handed me, helping Vanja put them on as she stretched out first one foot then the other, before giving her her coat, hoping and praying she was going to put it on herself so I wouldn’t have to do it for her under his critical gaze.

Linda was enraged when I told her what had happened. By then I had changed my mind about it, it wasn’t that bad, besides it was probably good for her to see that different people had different rules.

That’s not the point, Linda said. They’re criticizing us, aren’t they? How dare they. Who do they think they are? You should hear how smug she is. You wouldn’t believe it.

They invited Vanja to do a fun run with them in the woods, I forgot to mention it, I said. It’s next weekend, in the Pildammsparken.

It was the sort of activity we never would have got involved in on our own. Vanja was excited at the prospect. She’d get to stand behind a starting line with a number pinned to her chest, and to run with a lot of other kids along a path through the woods, and when she crossed the finish line she would get a medal and an ice cream.

It fell to me to take her to the start, along with her friend from the nursery and her friend’s mother, while Linda looked after Heidi around the finish line. Vanja was proud of her number, and as soon as the starter shouted Go! she took off as fast as her little legs could carry her. I trotted along beside her under the trees, with all the other moms and dads. But after a hundred meters or so she slowed down, then came to a complete standstill. I can’t, she said. Her friend and her friend’s mother were of course well ahead of us by then. They stopped, turned around, and waited. Come on, Vanja, I said. They’re waiting for us! Let’s run! And so we ran, Vanja in that wobbling way of hers, me loping along like an elk; we caught up with them and we all ran side by side, until her friend and her friend’s mother once more began to edge ahead of us and we again fell behind. She ran like the wind, that girl. Vanja panted heavily at my side and came to a halt. Can’t we walk a bit, Daddy, she asked. Yes, of course we can, I said. Just for a little bit though. They waited patiently for us until we caught up with them again, and we forged on together for another hundred meters perhaps, before the gap between us opened up again. Come on, Vanja, I said. Not far to go now. You can do it! And Vanja gritted her teeth and ran on, maybe it was the finish line that lay ahead and the ice cream she knew would be waiting for her that gave her renewed energy. Her friend was about twenty meters in front of us, she was a good runner with a light and effortless step, and if it hadn’t been for us she would have been over the finish line well before. She turned and waved to Vanja, but then as she turned again she stumbled and fell headlong onto the path, where she sat clutching her knee and sobbing. Her mother stopped and bent over her. We were approaching now, and as we came up to them, Vanja was about to stop too. Come on, Vanja! I said. You’re almost at the finish! Run as fast as you can! And Vanja heard me and ran as fast as she could, past her friend, whose knee was grazed and bleeding, with me alongside her, past child after child she ran, as fast as the wind and over the finish line!

Behind us her friend got to her feet and limped on. An official hung a medal around Vanja’s neck, another handed her an ice cream. I won, Mommy! she shouted out to Linda, who came smiling toward us pushing the pram, with Heidi at her side. Only then did I realize what I had done, and blushed like I’d never blushed before. We ran past her! So we could be first! While she, the little girl who had stopped and waited for us along the way, sat bleeding on the ground!

Back at the finish, it was now her turn to receive her medal and ice cream. Fortunately, it seemed there were no hard feelings on her part. Her father came toward us.

Looked like you really wanted the win there! he said with a laugh.

I blushed again, understanding that he didn’t realize it was true. That he would never in his wildest fantasy think that a full-grown adult could behave in such a way. He was making a joke out of it precisely because it was unthinkable that I should have urged my daughter on so she could win over his daughter, and to have done so in such an unsportsmanlike way. They weren’t even four years old yet.

The girl’s mother came over and said the same thing. Both of them took it for granted that it was Vanja who had pressed on and that I hadn’t been able to stop her. They could understand a four-year-old not being able to show empathy with a friend her own age. But the idea of a nearly forty-year-old man being equally incapable was naturally beyond their imagination.

I burned with shame as I laughed politely.

On the way home I told Linda what had happened. She laughed like she hadn’t laughed for months.

We won, that’s the main thing! I said.

Two years had passed since then. John had been only a month old, Heidi nearly two, Vanja three and a half. I remembered it so well because we had taken so many photos that day. John with his big baby head and narrow, wrinkly baby eyes, kicking his slender bare legs, waving his slender bare arms in the stroller. Heidi with her wide eyes, short little body, and fair hair. Vanja with her delicate features and her character’s singular blend of sensitivity and fervor. Then as now I was unable to fully grasp the connection between us, mostly I looked upon them as three little people with whom I shared my home and life.

What they had, and what I had lost, was a great and shiningly obvious place in their own lives. I often thought about it, the way they woke up every morning to themselves and their world, which they would inhabit all through the day, taking everything as it came with no questions asked. When we were expecting Vanja, I had been worried my gloominess might rub off on her, I had even mentioned it to Yngve once, who had said that children are basically happy, it was their point of departure, and so it had turned out, always they strove toward gladness, and as long as no complications arose, they were forever happy and buoyant. Even when that wasn’t the case and for some reason they were feeling sad, despairing, or upset, they never removed themselves from who they were, but accepted everything completely. One day they would look back and ask the same questions as me, why had things been the way they were then, why are they like this now, what exactly is the meaning of my life?

Oh, my children, my beloved children, may you never think such thoughts! May you always understand that you are sufficient to yourselves!

But most likely that won’t happen. All generations live their lives as if they were the first, gathering experiences, progressing onward through the years, and as insights accumulate, meaning diminishes, or if it doesn’t diminish, it at least becomes less self-evident. That’s the way it is. The question is whether it has always been that way. In the Old Testament, where everything is expressed through action and the narratives are closely bound up with physical reality, and in the ancient Greek epics, where lives unfold in similarly concrete fashion, doubt never comes from within, as a condition of the individual’s existence, but always from without, by some external occurrence, for instance a sudden death, and is thus bound up with the conditions of external, earthly life. The New Testament, however, is different. How might we otherwise explain the darkness in Jesus’s soul that eventually drove him to Jerusalem, there to close door upon door until only the last and simplest remained? His final days can be interpreted as a way of eliminating all choices, so that responsibility for what was to happen, his slow death on the cross, would not be his, since he would be directed there, so to speak, by the will of others. The same thing occurs in Hamlet, his soul too is darkened, he too approaches his demise with open eyes, in such a way that it appears governed by fate and thereby inevitable. In the case of King Oedipus it is fate, he is genuinely oblivious, but for both Hamlet and Jesus it is a choice they make and a direction in which they choose to go. Oedipus is blind, Hamlet and Jesus see with open eyes into the darkness.

I got up, rinsed the plate, and put it in the dishwasher. We had been given the plate by the same couple when they were moving house and didn’t need it anymore. They had actually helped us a lot. What had we done for them in return?

Not much. I always listened patiently to whatever they talked about, asking questions and making an effort to seem interested. I had introduced him to our Sunday football. And I had given him a signed copy of my previous novel inscribed with a dedication. Two days later he told me he had given it to an uncle who was interested in books. But it was for you personally, for goodness’ sake! I thought to myself, though I said nothing; if he hadn’t grasped the fact on his own I wouldn’t be able to explain it to him.

This was how it was having children, you found yourself thrown together with complete strangers, people who were sometimes impossible to understand. Once he told me he and his wife liked to talk in the evenings in such a way that I understood that their talking to each other was something out of the ordinary, impressive even. After that I would often make a point of suggesting to Linda that we should talk. It became a joke of ours. Most likely they had similar ones about us. Nevertheless we kept on seeing each other right up to the time they moved, me especially in fact; I spent countless afternoons with him at different playgrounds, listening to all his ideas about how the world and everything in it hung together while our kids were playing.

On one such occasion he had a book with him by someone called Wolfram, which he would leaf through. It seemed to be about certain recurring patterns, in everything from leaves to river deltas, and contained a lot of line graphs. My first association was to Thomas Browne and his seventeenth-century treatise on the quincunx figure, the pattern on the five side of a die and its occurrence in nature, then to something I had only just read, in the book Geir Angell was writing, about how all complicated systems – society, share markets, weather phenomena, traffic – sooner or later break down because of instabilities brought about by the systems themselves. I found this idea striking, since the patterns these breakdowns form are the same in artificial systems as they are in nature. The sky was blue, and as wide as it is only at the sea, and although the sun hung low the air was still