Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Read online

  GENTLEMEN

  A NOVEL

  KLAS

  ÖSTERGREN

  TRANSLATED BY TIINA NUNNALLY

  CONTENTS

  Part I

  Gentlemen (Stockholm, Autumn 1978)

  Part II

  Brothers

  Part III

  Gentlemen (Stockholm, Winter 1979)

  Part I

  Gentelmen (Stockholm, Autumn 1978)

  Presumably it’s a quiet spring rain that can be heard drizzling over Stockholm at the moment, in the Year of the Child, the election year of 1979. I see none of it, nor do I have any intention of taking a look. The curtains are closed tight in front of the windows facing Hornsgatan, and this flat seems lugubrious, to say the least. It’s been days since I’ve seen any daylight, while outside all of Stockholm is probably walking around in the very last springtime delirium of the seventies, but I don’t give a damn.

  This grand flat is like a museum to some kind of glory, an ancient ideal, or maybe some vanished chivalry. The library is silent and permeated with smoke, the service corridors with their gloomy sideboards and tall cabinets are terrifying, the kitchen is filthy, the bedrooms haven’t been made up, the living room is cold. On either side of the fireplace – where we spent so many hours sitting on the Chippendale furniture, drinking toddies and entertaining each other with peculiar anecdotes – stand two Parian figurines made by the Gustafsberg Company towards the end of the nineteenth century. The pieces are about one and a half feet tall, and the porcelain looks exactly like the real marble they’re meant to imitate. One of them represents ‘Truth’ and is depicted as a muscular man without a stitch of clothing on his body, with exquisitely sculpted features that nevertheless fail to conceal something indeterminate and evasive in his eyes. The other Parian figure represents, appropriately enough, ‘Falsehood’ – a jester leaning casually on a wine barrel, holding a stringed instrument and bubbling with esprit, no doubt in the midst of telling some risqué story about a shepherd.

  It’s not in the least difficult to make certain associations with the two men who until quite recently resided here in this flat. They abandoned it as hastily as if an air-raid siren had sounded. Everything stands untouched; indeed, this whole museum-like home is filled with such extraordinary objects, things from bygone eras. My thoughts are inevitably drawn back to the past.

  Repulsive is what I am. Under this ridiculous English tweed cap my shaved and battered head is slowly trying to regain its former dimensions – as far as that’s even possible. I’ve already aged with astonishing speed during this Year of the Child and the Swedish elections of 1979. I’ve acquired new wrinkles and some sort of tic or twitch under my eyes. It gives my face a certain haggard, though not entirely unattractive, look. Although only twenty-five, I’m already ageing like a Dorian Gray. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to burn out or to wither so cruelly in the preservative, antiquated darkness that has always been a terrifying possibility in this flat. At any moment, summoning the last of my strength, I could clear away the barricaded door in the hall – I dragged over an enormous, solid mahogany cabinet to make myself feel secure – and get out of here. But I don’t. There’s no going back. I suspect that this whole thing has driven me crazy.

  I’ve got a wound on my skull and enemies at my throat. Everyone has some petty enemy, but I share mine with my friends, and my friends have disappeared. They never pointed out my enemy, and I don’t know what he or she or it looks like. I can only hazard a guess. This is probably not going to be so much a portrait of an enemy, a description of Evil, as it is a portrait of my friends, a description of what is good and all its possibilities. It’s going to be a dark story, because I’m inclined to believe that what is good in fact lacks possibilities. We must allow ourselves to despair, at least once in a while. If you’ve been the victim of an assault and serious abuse and almost lost your life as a result, at the very least it’s excusable.

  With regard to my own condition – my head is not to be subjected to any major stress, according to the recommendations of the doctors after they treated me – and considering the times, which seem increasingly unbearable, I’d better get started at once. I’m thinking of erecting a temple, a monument to the Morgan brothers. That’s the least I can do for them, wherever they happen to be now.

  _______

  To stand in front of a mirror in the Europa Athletic Club near Hornstull in Stockholm on an autumn evening in 1978 and nonchalantly whistle the solo of an old tune blaring from a plastic record player while at the same time meticulously tying a Windsor knot in his tie was bad enough. But then, in the doorway on his way out, to shout in his booming voice: ‘So long, girls!’ – that was really going too far.

  No one said a thing. Only Juan laughed, and Willis, of course. Juan wasn’t his real name, but he had a basketball jersey with a big yellow 7 on it, and since he was Yugoslav and looked like a Spaniard, he was called Juan. He laughed at almost everything, not because he was trying to ingratiate himself but because, in his dark eyes, there was plenty to laugh about in this country. Willis also had a real sense of humour. He stood there sniggering in his office. He’d been the head of the Europa Athletic Club since it was founded, and he personally knew the man who had gone too far.

  But everyone else at the Europa took it quite hard. A stranger had come and called them girls, and that was hitting below the belt, that was just not done. It was especially too much for Gringo. He’d been the uncrowned king of the Europa the past few years, and he’d largely been left in peace to rule undisturbed. No one dared challenge him. Except on this particular evening, when he’d been run through the wringer by the stranger. They’d started sparring, mostly just for fun, thinking they’d go three rounds. Gringo had calmly started popping in his famous right hooks – which at one time had won him a Swedish Championship – but then the stranger answered with a totally unorthodox style of boxing: inventive and varied, as if in a fourth dimension that no one had ever thought of before, until Gringo felt compelled to break off, justifying it by saying that his opponent had such damn bad breath. There was an odour of garlic surrounding the stranger, so Gringo couldn’t move in close with his famously lethal right hooks. Gringo had capitulated to a little garlic! Everyone just about died laughing.

  That was merely an excuse, anyone could see that, because even in the second round, Gringo had been in trouble. The rankings were chalked up and now Gringo sat on the bench under the clothes hooks, and in spite of a shower and plenty of cold water, he looked like he’d taken a beating. Both his cheekbones were red and swollen, and he had unwrapped the gauze from his hands with ill-concealed pain. For once he wasn’t saying a thing. He was silent, but he’d get back at the man, everyone knew that. Gringo was brooding over his revenge.

  ‘Who the hell was that?’ asked one of the little guys, one of the feather-weights who had stood glued to the ropes when Gringo was beaten by a totally untrained stranger who seemed born to box.

  ‘That,’ said Willis as he came out of the office with its glass doors and all the boxing portraits, ‘that was Henry. One of my old lads. Henry Morgan. One of my best boys some twenty years ago. He’s been gone a long time. He’s a piano player. But he’s been away.’

  The little guys listened in amazement and then started pummelling the heavy sandbags, trying to punch exactly the way Morgan had, but it just wasn’t the same. Now they had something else to talk about; otherwise Ali vs Spinks was all that mattered. Everyone was talking about the Match down at the Europa Athletic Club. The rematch between Ali and Spinks.

  _______

  Of course I couldn’t help committing the name ‘Henry Morgan’ to memory. It was one of those specia
l names to which your mind has a certain predisposition, and I wonder whether I didn’t take the man to heart as well, even on that first evening. I don’t think I was the only one.

  Several evenings later I was down at the Europa again – I was awfully bored in the evenings and couldn’t stand the thought of sitting in my ransacked flat. I needed to kill time and pound my depression into a punch bag.

  The man named Henry Morgan came down at about the same time to say hello to Willis and ‘the girls’. And in the glance that he exchanged with the boss, there was so much of that father–son relationship that Willis shared with only the few chosen lads he really believed in, the ones on whom he pinned all his hopes. He would do anything for them.

  So this Henry Morgan had been gone for God knows how many years – he’d quite simply ‘been away’, as Willis had phrased it – because boxers come and go, and Willis had probably realised long ago that this guy would come and go exactly as he pleased.

  I started skipping rope, and sadly enough the rope is the thing I’ve mastered the best in my whole routine. Henry Morgan was also skipping, and gradually we started dancing around in a sort of rope duel with crossed arms and double bounces at quite a furious pace.

  It was already late and after an hour we were practically the only two left, besides Willis of course. He was sitting in the office behind the glass doors, hustling to get a few of his lads into the next competition.

  ‘You’re looking a little down in the dumps, kid,’ said the guy named Morgan.

  ‘I am a little down in the dumps,’ I said.

  ‘Apparently it’s not just governments that get the blues this time of year,’ he said.

  ‘I have nothing against the time of year, per se,’ I said.

  The man named Henry Morgan stepped onto the scales and read off his weight, muttering something about ‘light heavyweight’. After he’d put on a pair of brown slacks, a pinstriped shirt, burgundy pullover, and a houndstooth tweed jacket, he went over to the mirror to fix his tie in that complicated Windsor knot. He carefully combed his hair and peered into the mirror for a long time. His reflection showed the image of the perfect gentleman, a mysterious anachronism: hair cut short and parted, a powerful jaw, straight shoulders and a body that seemed both solid and supple at the same time. I tried to estimate his age, but it was difficult. He was a grown man with the look of a boy. He reminded me a bit of Gentleman Jim Corbett, whose picture was taped on the glass door of Willis’s office. Or Gene Tunney.

  After he stopped admiring his own appearance he began to study me as I sat there on the bench, gasping. It was clear that he saw something unusual, because he raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Damn, to think I didn’t notice it before!’ And then he fell silent and continued to scrutinise me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re a hell of a lot like my brother, Leo. I could use you.’

  ‘Is Leo Morgan your brother?’ I said. ‘The one who’s the poet?’

  Henry Morgan nodded silently.

  ‘I thought that was a pseudonym.’

  ‘How’d you like a part in a film?’ he asked all of a sudden.

  ‘As long as it pays,’ I said.

  ‘I’m serious. Would you like a part in a film?’

  ‘What’s it about?’ I asked.

  ‘Get dressed and we’ll go out and talk about it over a beer,’ he said. ‘Damn, to think I didn’t notice it at once!’

  I threw on my clothes as Henry Morgan went back to admiring himself in the mirror.

  ‘You’re going to have to stand me a round,’ he said.

  ‘I had a feeling.’

  The man named Henry Morgan let loose a roar of laughter and extended his hand.

  ‘Henry Morgan’s the name.’

  ‘Klas Östergren,’ I said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure about that,’ he said, and roared again.

  The Europa Athletic Club was located on Långholmsgatan near Hornstull, diagonally opposite Café Tjoget, but that’s not where we went because it’s easy to get too drunk in that place, and we were both determined to take it easy. It was a completely ordinary, rainy Thursday in September 1978, and there was no special occasion, according to the calendar, to go on a binge. We ended up in Gamla Stan, the old town area, and went into the Zum Franziskaner pub. We each ordered a Guinness, and then, with aching legs, sat down on a bench.

  Henry offered me a Pall Mall from a very elegant silver cigarette case and lit it with a fat, scratched old Ronson lighter. Then he began cleaning his nails with a little penknife that he kept in a burgundy leather case in his jacket pocket. I hadn’t seen such a battery of paraphernalia in a very long time and was quite amazed.

  But the cigarette was strong, and I glanced out at Skeppsbron where the rain was falling gently, making the streets slippery, shiny, gloomy and melancholy. I said as much to Henry Morgan, that I was feeling down in the dumps and glum and I had every reason to feel that way. I had been robbed of nearly everything I owned.

  _______

  To be robbed of practically everything you own is a very special existential situation, and a great moralist such as William Faulkner certainly might have said that the person who is robbed wins what the robber loses – the victim proceeds to drown blissfully in the perfect righteousness and complacency of innocence, the victim is suddenly forgiven all his own previous sins, and grace descends like an unwritten clause in an insurance policy with immediate divine effect.

  So I was feeling very bitter but absolutely righteous that rainy Thursday in early September. But perhaps I should go further back in time. I’m not saying back to the beginning, because I don’t believe that a story has any beginning or end; only fairytales begin and end at certain points, and this one is definitely no saga, even though it may sound like one.

  Even back in that most beautiful, seductive May – at the beginning of ‘the most coquettish of times’ as the poet Leo Morgan said – I was broke. The bank had given me the cold shoulder, and I had nothing to sell. I was anticipating with dread an entire summer without money, which meant working. Even though it might appear otherwise, work didn’t scare me. What felt ominous was a whole summer of being broke.

  Feeling slightly desperate, I tried to pound out a few short stories for a couple of journals and weekly magazines, but the editors were up to their ears in submissions. They politely rejected my wares, and deep inside I wasn’t surprised. They were shoddy goods.

  After that I tried, rather more desperately, to offer my wares to the daily papers. I ferreted out a little controversy here and a little controversy there and threw myself full-force into debates about subjects and concerns to which, up until then, I had never given a thought or known anything about. This was in the spring of ’78, exactly a decade after the legendary Revolutionary Spring. So it was high time for ennobled rebels (who were already starting to go grey) to raise their voices in an anniversary chorus that sounded awfully out of tune. Some of them wanted to re-evaluate the Revolution, which had completely lost its direction, by turning it into a playground for academic punks. Others saw it as a golden age rife with political festivitas. The long and the short of it was that our own era took the form of a time that was both waking up and falling asleep, depending on what condition a person had been in during the previous decade.

  I knew quite well that an entire mafia existed that made its living by sniffing out controversies and throwing itself into the public debate. And often with great success. Occasionally the controversy would go on for months, spreading like some sort of intellectual rabies among the cultural journalists. Everybody was suddenly infected and on top form.

  But that was obviously not my style. I never managed to get a handle on the controversy. Hitting below the belt was completely acceptable, but to take back anything, to say the opposition had been right, that was the same thing as committing hara-kiri in front of millions of readers. I needed a new profession.

  My solution was to swear off w
riting for a couple of months, and just then Errol Hansen, my friend from the Danish embassy, rang and very conveniently happened to mention that they needed some help at the popular country club where he went for diversion.

  ‘Wijkman, he’s the one in charge of the whole place,’ said Errol. ‘He’d like to see someone show up with a recommendation. They’ve had problems with the groundskeepers before, guys who just lay about sleeping when they had the whole fairway to mow. They don’t look on that very favourably, you see. But I could recommend you if you like.’

  ‘What would I have to do?’ I asked.

  ‘All you have to do is sit on the tractor and mow the grass. It’s a real easy gig, a life of leisure, you know. Plenty of sunshine, fresh air and cute girls at the clubhouse.’

  I was in a vulnerable state at the time, and I needed money and a job, so it wasn’t hard to persuade me. The very next day I was standing in Mr Wijkman’s office on Banérgatan to check in.

  As soon as I set foot in that luxurious office – it was an accounting firm – I was accosted by a chic woman in her forties who was the secretary.

  ‘Finally!’ she cried, and I couldn’t understand how I could be in such demand. ‘Where have you been?’

  I glanced at my watch to see if it was possible that I was horribly late, but that wasn’t the case at all. I was actually five minutes early, but I didn’t have a chance to think much about it before the chic secretary started loading me up with stacks of papers. Being the helpful gentleman that I am, I accepted one stack after another as she piled them on, twittering all the while.

  ‘This time there’s more than ever,’ said the secretary. ‘We’ve been on holiday and all, you know, so people have built up quite a backlog, but I hope you can handle this as quickly as always, I’m sure you can, ten copies of each, as usual, be a dear …’