Subscribe now

It is the ending I am writing, that much is clear. Everything moves more slowly, both the march of vegetation across the landscape and the play of my fingers over the keyboard. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Once I raced through the days and the story, with a fever known only to those who have lifetimes ahead of them. Like the seed that pours all its stored energy into violently thrusting itself up through the soil and quickly stretching towards the sun. Now I need to weigh my words, negotiate and reflect, because these are the last ones, the final ones.

We are well into August. The evenings are dark, with no pale undertones. I assume other people have started planning their crayfish parties. Soon it will be exactly nineteen years since I stepped into the culture desk at Norrköpings Tidningar as a hungry intern. Back then my senses were insatiable, not a single detail escaped them, and whatever subject I was assigned to cover, I gave it my full attention. My daughter has only a few years to go before it is her turn to conquer working life and bestow upon it her open, unclouded gaze, though she has probably not given that much thought.

There is a documentary by the filmmaker Tom Alandh on SVT Play. Hej och tack för mig, it is called, and it serves as his farewell to the audience. He is eighty two years old now. When I met him in 2007, the angle of the interview was the same: retirement. Time is the best dramaturge, he says in the film. Meanwhile, on other channels, Marcus Birro advertises a betting company during the commercial break. Other people I once interviewed drift past in the media from time to time as well. Jenny Andreasson wrote a novel about her time on Dramaten. Roberto Saviano lives and writes under bodyguard protection. Stig Larsson has a podcast. Jensa Sernelius writes columns for DN Kultur. Many of my former classmates are highly regarded names in the industry. They barely remember me any more. Life goes on.

Olli said a great many things at our final meeting. The word situationist was only one of the many he tossed out during his monologue. It stirred in me only later, when I was looking at trips. The weekend before the start of upper secondary school, I thought Zelda and I could take the boat to Gotland and visit the southern, leafier part of the island. When I searched for rental cars, I found information on the local heritage association’s website saying that Atler Jorn’s grave was at Grötlingbo Church. The name may not mean much to the reader, but this Danish artist was one of the founders of the Situationist movement. Among other things, these wild minds coined the concept of psychogeography: how the shape of cities affects our inner lives. According to these revolutionaries, the only proper way to move through the four dimensional streets was to dérive, to drift, to switch off one’s will and let playfulness take over. Art, they believed, had been swallowed by capitalism, which meant that the only true art was anti art, that is, an art without the slightest intention of being art. A kind of act of terror, détournement. Atler Jorn drew his brother Jørgen Nash into these ideas. His brother bought the Drakabygget farm in Örkelljunga and ran from there what he called The Second Situationist International. The participants there went by the name Bauhaus Situationists and consisted mainly of people who had been expelled from or defected from the original Situationists.

Not so unlike the first infrarealist, before Bolaño and the other poets took over the baton, I found myself thinking as I read, or the way I, high on most things, took part in Reclaim the City’s illegal street party on Götgatspuckeln in 1999, and when the police charged received baton blows all over my forearm, or even the creation of my own group, (oi), in 2003, the letters stood for Och Internationella1. We, three other young artists and I, devoted ourselves to more harmless vandalism, such as plastering Slussen with our poems, attaching texts to park benches or slipping a few extra sheets into evening papers that had yet to be sold. We reached our climax when a writer in a major magazine wrote, puzzled, about one of the works, a box of slides deliberately left behind, and mentioned the group by name in the article. We disbanded the moment I met Emma. With her as my shield, I tried, and for a few years succeeded, in moving closer to normality.

“Were the other participants girls?” Natasja asked after reading the previous paragraph over my shoulder. “Yes, actually, one became a gardener and the other is now quite a famous novelist. I had a fling with her, but very briefly and incredibly innocently. The fourth member, a man, works in UI design for a pension company.” I mentioned the romance with malicious calculation, so that I could once again experience her surging possessiveness. “Do you have a picture?” Natasja asked, and presumably did not mean the UI designer, so without further ado I gave her the author’s name. She googled her, and afterwards her expression grew darker still. “Yes, she was pretty,” was all she said, trembling with suppressed anger.

In a few days she will go home to Västerås and everyday life, to spend another year receiving newborn human beings, bleeding mothers and weak kneed fathers. Everything will change. Admittedly, it is not far by train, but nor is it close, and I cannot be away for more than one night at a time either, because I have a responsibility for the mute witness to this story: The Last Siamese.

If only Olli Alice could speak, she could vouch for me and answer all the questions still hanging in the air.

Lately, Natasja and I have played basketball almost every day, in an attempt to hold on to summer for as long as possible. One of those days, after many hours of moderately intense play, we sauntered back towards Södermannagatan and I felt time and freedom seeping away from me, while somewhere in the back of my mind I considered applying for a few leftover university places to fill some of autumn’s empty hours. Then a notification appeared on my phone. An email from one of those anonymising services that offers temporary addresses. Nothing ever happens when you expect it to. If you want to avoid something, all you have to do is wait for it stubbornly enough and something else will happen instead. So this happened.

The email: Got this through a contact. My condolences. Regards, Olli.

There was a file, a PDF, which I did not dare open until I was sitting down. A concrete statue in the middle of the avenue along Katarina Bangata would have to do. Natasja asked what was wrong, noticing how I was losing my balance both physically and mentally. I asked her to walk ahead, just go away, so that I could read in peace. “It’s important.” She was torn between the impulse to stay by my side and the impulse to grant my wish. After a moment’s hesitation, she chose the latter, snatched my canvas bag from me and tucked the ball under her arm, then said: “Okay, but call if you need me.”

When she was out of sight, I began to read. The document contained a scanned obituary from Turkey, commendably enough translated into Swedish in handwriting right beside it. The text, which was very brief, read as follows:

Eda Eriş, born 13 March 1984 in Ankara, died 20 December 2007 in Istanbul, has been suddenly taken from us. She left this earthly life mid stride, full of life and energy. Eda was passionately interested in art, photography and music. She was always seeking the unknown, travelling and immersing herself in the knowledge of the world. Always warm, always smiling. We miss her endlessly.

Then followed a series of factual details, such as that the text had been written by her sister Sena. There was a brother called Ali. Her mother and father were named Gülnur and Mustafa. The memorial service was held at Kocatepe Mosque and her lifeless body was to be laid in the earth at Karşıyaka Cemetery. The notice also gave an address in Ankara to which letters of condolence could be sent. In addition, readers were asked to donate money to a fund for people affected by sepsis. Blood poisoning.

Several times I had to read the text, then compare the translation with the corresponding Turkish sentences, to make sure there had been no mix up, some blasphemous joke or work of art in which she was taking issue with the whole nature of the obituary concept, the very definition of the word concentrate, which would have been entirely in keeping with the Eda I got to know in the autumn of 2007 and had come to understand even more this summer, as I revisited us. But it looked right, seemed right, must not be right, but was. There was no meaning in any of it, nothing to learn from it. She had probably only been home for a while to visit her relatives. A scrape in the skin that went too deep, perhaps from a kerb, invasive bacteria, and then just dead.

She had been gone a long time already. For almost my entire adult life I had lived with a vague, lingering sense that we would run into one another, that our paths were meant to cross again, because that was how we had once found our way to each other, and if it can happen once it can happen twice. In reality, I had been walking alone. No one was wandering along the parallel street. There was no meeting left. Everything had already happened. The tears fell and mingled with my sweat. No one could have been more alive than she was, I thought. She, with her energy, impulsiveness and drive, her warm soft hands, fragrant neck and electric lips. She who could look my way and, with nothing but a glance, perform an intricate joke without so much as opening her mouth, because she understood what I understood, something only certain people see in others and understand in themselves.

Never was she allowed to grow old. Always was she to remain young.

She would surely have got in touch if she could, I thought deliriously. She was not someone who disappeared. She would have sent a letter asking how things had turned out, perhaps even tucked a homemade dreamcatcher into the envelope for my little baby. At some point she would have got in touch if she happened to be passing through Stockholm. At least sent a connection request on LinkedIn. She would have done something, one of all those things I never did, when I was trapped in myself and the present and the future, but never the past.

Sitting on the sculpture, I felt amputated, or rather pruned. Life contains far more possibilities than actual events. Many branches are cut off halfway or never get the chance to grow at all. Some grow stronger and therefore receive more nourishment, and so we focus on them. With this story I have had to give them all the same gaze. What if Eda had become pregnant and not Emma? What if I had never introduced Jensa to Mats? What if I had been man enough to tell Emma the truth, whereupon she would have left me? Then Eda would have lived. The fact is that if I had only done some small thing differently, she would have gone on existing, missed a train, worked late, stopped at Hemköp to buy extra basil: then other branches would have become the story of my life, the one still unfolding, not merely what had been or might have been. Or could anything have turned out differently? Did I not simply perform the action I believed was right at that moment, with the limited knowledge I had of myself and of life at large? Not even the meteorite impact that was Eda knocked the course of my life completely off track, although it should have, was meant to. I was stupid enough not to realise that I had met my fate. Over the years, after meeting more women, it became obvious whom I should have chosen. She was the one.

I got up from the sculpture and began to walk, crying, just walked, drifted, down towards the water but then abruptly up in some direction, through a tunnel, past the ferry terminal, then up to Fåfängan, down again, towards the outskirts of Folkungagatan, the ice cream kiosks by Fjällgatan, down across Tjärhovsplan, past Carmen, and I paced in so many directions that anyone trying to map my wanderings from above would have had the impression that I was trying to unlock the city with a secret combination. Unfortunately, I could not walk myself free of the thoughts and the grief, which went on whirling and pulsing, and in the end I simply lay down on the grass by Bofills båge, while the commuter train passengers went back and forth between Södra station and Medborgarplatsen in their imagined importance. What had I actually spent the summer doing? Was any of this about me? Or had I, without knowing it, been appointed Eda’s biographer? Was this the purpose of everything? Was there a purpose to everything? Lightning could strike at any moment, anyone, without distinguishing between right and wrong. Now I was crying again, wounded and remorseful. Several sidelong glances came from passers by who were right when they saw me as a broken man, lying sweaty and tearful right beside the busiest pedestrian route, when my phone vibrated.

Zelda: What are we having for dinner tonight?

Just like that, all the thoughts, feelings and impulses that possessed me were thrown into confusion. Many things seemed true at once. The message reached me from another angle, another dimension, with a presence that only the present can give a situation. From a daughter with dreads and no tattoo yet. This story has been about Olli Alice, Eda, Emma, Olli, Mats, René, Jensa, Natasja, Sergej, Norrköping and me, but in the background, and now so clearly in the foreground, also about the human being who became human, not in spite of all the tumult, but because of it. She, the only person who needed me. I knew nothing about the future, but what the present required of me was, just like that, crystal clear. There was a direction. Something I could do here and now. I typed on my phone as I walked home, tears running with grief and hope and the utmost seriousness:

Maybe we can cook something together? I’ll be home soon, sweetheart. Love you.

The End

Do you want to read from the beginning? Here you find all chapters.

Subscribe now

Zelda had been to Sicily with a friend, got dreadlocks and a carcinogenic tan. Unfortunately, there had been no tattoo because ID was required, and besides, it had been an impulse thing and the next day she had changed her mind about the design, from a seahorse to a lizard. Better to wait, actually. “Mature, right, daddy?” she said, sinking into the armchair. I had managed to clear away the cans and bottles and bags, but not to vacuum, and realised I did not even own a mop for washing the floor. Now I could also see clearly the film of exhaust fumes covering the windows facing the street. “I thought you could have the alcove,” I said. “I’ll take the sofa.” “Sure,” she said, without beginning to negotiate, as I had hoped. She was shorter than me and could easily lie full length on the sofa, whereas I would have to fold myself into the shape of an s.

For the first years of her life, the ones she no longer remembered, we lived as a nuclear family. I had an unobstructed view of death, changed diapers and rocked her in my arms, worried about croup and read picture books aloud. After the separation, we saw each other more sporadically. It was mostly the odd weekend out of a sense of duty, apart from holidays, of course. On the occasions when Zelda and I did meet, she came to treat me like a strange man she was obliged to ask polite questions of the kind: How are things at work? Those were my pill years, when I felt nothing and therefore experienced neither longing nor duty, but that changed when the self medication stopped and I realised what I had lost (strictly speaking I was the father of two more children, but to the twins in Oslo I never became anything more than a sperm donor).

My daughter travelled light, bringing only a Fjällräven rucksack that hardly looked full. It contained everything she thought she would need for the coming week, or perhaps it was weeks, or perhaps it would turn out to be days. My mobile vibrated on the table. Zelda tilted the screen towards herself and saw the notification on the home screen. “Who’s Natasja?” “She’s my friend.” “I see, your friend.” “She’s a midwife,” I said, because it sounded reassuring. “She’s only here for the summer to look after the plants in her sister’s apartment.” “How do you know her, then?” “We met on the basketball court down in the park.” “You play basketball?” “We could all have a game one day.” “Forget it.” I coaxed the mobile out of her hand and said aloud, buoyed by having managed to surprise my offspring: “Let’s see what she wrote, then.” It really was nothing in particular: Did I leave my cap at yours? I replied: Don’t think so. Maybe.

It felt as though something was beginning to happen, especially when Olli-Alice came ambling in and stretched herself across Zelda’s lap, a something, like a new context in which I had a place. I asked her what the row with her mother Emma had been about and got the answer: “She interferes in my life all the time.” “You’re eighteen, of course she interferes.” “That’s what I refuse to accept. I reject the whole system. I didn’t even get that tattoo.” “Was it nice?” “Yes. Do you want to see?” She had photographed the designs from different angles, and the seahorse, in its 2D rendering, was probably more appealing in the moment, as a possibility, but I did not want to ruin anything here, so I merely said: “I can see why you had the impulse, definitely.” “Are you saying I was wrong to wait?” “No, not at all. I hate tattoos. I’m an old man.” Then we giggled about that together for a while, because the last assertion was something we could agree on. Good. A promising beginning.

Something life giving seeped through me in that moment, something actually rather like motivation. It had been a long time. I looked around again. I really did need to get this place in order, take out the recycling, fill the fridge and freezer with something other than microwave meals, and simply behave a little more like a father, because I now had a responsibility beyond myself.

We spent the whole of the following morning watching the television series Familjen Wahlgren together. There was a knock at the door just as Bianca was about to taste Benjamin’s homemade pizza. Light, dancing taps, as though the visitor were using her fingernails. It was Natasja, of course. The cap. She saw the discarded Converse trainers on the hall mat, changed expression and walked straight in without saying anything. Apparently she had been expecting something else, or rather someone else, because she laughed in amusement as soon as she saw Zelda on the sofa. “Yes, you did say you had a daughter.” “Here she is,” said the daughter without looking up. “What a twist,” Natasja exclaimed, sitting down at the end of the sofa nearest the screen, where I had just been, and then the two of them watched together instead, without me. They were dangerously close in age, I realised the moment I saw them together, and culturally they had many frames of reference in common. Everything from music to mobile habits to various terms and how they were used. The way I was behaving that summer was almost a cliché. Men never understood their own age and consequently matured out of step, while the biological clock forced women to come to terms with theirs in good time. Or so I had heard.

When the episode ended, I asked if anyone wanted to go for a walk. My guests shook their heads without taking their eyes off the screen, so I went alone. They hardly seemed to notice me leaving, simply carried on with what they were doing, well schooled in the more slothful way of life that came with the holiday season.

My wandering was unplanned and aimless, yet something nevertheless steered me towards Årstaviken, because one has to end up somewhere. The greenery hung thick over the path between the boat club and the footbridge. It was one of the last days without the slightest hint of autumn, when the branches could still bear their heavy burden without effort. Over by the Banana Houses in Tanto, I spotted a Persian cat roaming about alone and apparently homeless. It pressed tamely against my leg and was wearing a collar with a number, so I called it. “Right,” said the old woman on the phone once I had explained why I was calling. She said: “I found the cat and gave it a collar so the owner could get in touch and say that everything had turned out well.” Having filled in the numbers in ink, I wandered on, towards Hornstull and the bridge to Långholmen, where I met a down and out in a misbuttoned shirt. He had one sleeve rolled up but not the other, seemed fond of asymmetry and probably of intoxicating beverages too. Suddenly he rasped: “You look good.” I almost wanted to glance over my shoulder to make sure he really meant me, then thought that the exercise and the sun might have had some effect. “So do you,” I replied, probably not quite as convincingly. “Like hell I do,” he all but roared, then said more gently: “But you do.” I thanked him, had momentum now and flowed onwards, through Lundagatan’s torpor, towards Mariatorget and past the fountain, bought a cup of Ethiopian coffee at Johan & Nyström and rested for a while at a folding table on the pedestrian street, eavesdropping on the tourists’ languages, mostly Spanish and English, with a little Korean, before continuing my walk and realising that the circular route had brought me to the basketball courts at Åsö. Fate, I thought.

A teenage boy in a headband recognised me from an earlier session and shouted: “Oi, monk. We’re one short, hurry up.” Although I was really not dressed for physical exertion, I slipped naturally into the game and moved as smoothly as I could. Passed the ball on the moment it reached my hands to keep the team play flowing. Made myself big beneath the basket when necessary. Never lost my man in defence. It was easier to do my job properly if I did it before the ball reached him. My legs were a little looser and springier now, my joints could extend differently in the jumps, my shots landed with greater certainty, my shooting percentage was reasonably high, my brain quicker and prepared for different scenarios. I do not know whether the drunk in the shirt was right about what he had said, but I felt different, I really did. Stronger, freer, better.

A stylish elderly gentleman in a hat sat down on the bench to watch while we sweated beneath the summer sun. It happened relatively often that we attracted an audience, either families with children passing by or old people who could no longer take part except in their imaginations. The figure was familiar somehow, but I did not think about it during the game. There was no possibility of devoting attention to anything but the matter at hand.

It was only during the water break that I saw it was Pauli Olavi Kuivanen, the fugitive. He nodded at me as I approached. No, no hug. This was no reunion. Nor had he probably come to discuss the IFK men’s team winning eleven of their twelve matches. “How did you know I was here?” I asked. “Perhaps you shouldn’t publish your address on your blog if you don’t want visitors,” he replied, in the same gruff tone he had used on the phone. By now I could barely remember what he had looked like before, because my memory of him had clouded over and become mixed up with press photographs, especially the one Andersson had taken of him leaning against his Bianchi outside the newspaper offices. The publishers had used it in black and white, but in its original format the photograph had been intended as an illustration for the family page’s popular series “My Bike and Me”. The man sitting before me was well groomed to the point of pedantry. He plainly went to the hairdresser regularly, shaved every morning and probably with a razor, wore a close fitting jacket and Gucci spectacle frames. He said, very simply: “I want to get in touch with Eda.” Disappointment shifted inside me. I had, after all, been hoping for something, something else, although I had not believed or expected anything, but apparently there had been a little hope nonetheless. I replied flatly: “I’ve no idea where she is.” “You said she worked at Södertörn University.” “That was a lie.” “Right, it’s difficult to know when you’re telling the truth and when you aren’t, considering how you recounted our conversation.” “Why do you want to reach her?”

Here my former colleague embarked on a long monologue without once deigning to make eye contact with me. It was as though he had spent almost two decades waiting to find a person he could open up to, without having any real interest in the actual individual, only in the fact that this person, me, could release the catch that allowed him to relieve the pressure. He talked about apophenia, called her various names, alternating “bibliomaniacal” with “quasi intellectual” and “overread”. She had evidently sought Olli out shortly before my first meeting with her, sauntered into the Åby café with her bag of books, asked questions and shown photographs, even in front of the other regulars, which meant the gossip would spread through the whole town. She had not even done it to conduct any research, but to satisfy her “morbid and dangerous curiosity”. Olli said, his face still turned towards the basketball hoop: “It was bound to happen sooner or later. I understood that. And really, I was only looking for an excuse to leave, I was so tired of everything. The monotony, the threat of redundancies at the paper and the constantly shrinking budget. Eating plaice at Snusket. All the faces from the past that merely aged but never changed. The dead life. Have you never felt like that, that you’re just waiting for an excuse to leave and start again? There’s no excitement in what I’m telling you, no dark truth, only a weariness with life.”

I nodded as I processed all the information. He grinned and said: “And that was the end of the story. You can do something else now. You seem to have more of a gift for basketball. Or are you merely carrying on with your Situationist drifting?” I pretended not to notice that he had once again mocked me for my stylistic shortcomings. “May I ask you a question?” He nodded. “You may, but I won’t answer it.” The lads were taking their positions for a new game and I stood up. Then he muttered: “You stole my cat.” I looked at him and shook my head, so that he would understand that the impudence was not even worth answering in words. He said: “And you’re going to give her back.” They waved to me from the court and I needed to choose a side. “I really have to play now,” I said. “For fuck’s sake,” he said, stood up and left. I did not even see which direction he went.

The game was no good this time. My mind was elsewhere, I was constantly arriving late and committing fouls. I had to apologise and felt like an old uncle the others needed to make allowances for. They still passed me the ball from time to time, as though performing their good deed for the day. The moment a few drops of rain fell on the court, I blamed the slippery surface and my sensitive knees, and came off. There was a new text message on my mobile. It was from Emma: Is she with you now? I replied: Yes, everything is under control. She wrote: Good, then she can stay until she has apologised. I wrote: It’s going very well. A few minutes later she wrote: Are you sure? To which I replied with a thumbs up emoji.

It was only when I was home again that I thought through what had happened. Basketball always swallowed me up. I thought only in quick, instinctive thoughts, and the normality of my raised pulse possessed me for a good stretch of the walk home, during which I impulsively bought a bottle of rosé and some farmhouse crisps, and when I stepped into the hall the girls were still sitting in the same positions on the sofa, staring at the screen. “Did you have a nice walk?” Natasja asked, looking up for a moment. “I met Olli,” I said. “That Olli? Are you joking?” “No, and I got almost no answers to anything. Because I needed to play basketball.” She put a hand to her forehead and said nothing more. It was almost as though she were considering whether to try her hand at the art of fan fiction and alter the dramatic structure of this story according to her own wishes, and in it encounter the fugitive herself and ask him to sign the basketball. For the time being, however, the course of events was mine and mine alone, and in it I had missed the chance to demand answers. He had behaved too sullenly and without interest. That would have to be enough. Throughout the entire novel writing process he had been a shadow, but as soon as he became a flesh and blood human being again, my fascination and longing diminished. My reaction went from shock to “oh, right” in just a few seconds. A little like the way horror film producers avoid showing the creature for as long as they can, because nothing frightens modern people more than uncertainty, whether it involves monsters, unemployment or merely four empty days alone with oneself.

It would undeniably have been nice to know where he had been, whether his partner had accompanied him in his flight, what the publishers did and did not know, whether he had continued writing in exile, whether he renewed his passport and what strategies he had for living in isolation without being recognised. All of this could, of course, have been cleared up by a meddlesome reporter with plenty of time and interest, but just as with Elena Ferrante, whose identity was once exposed and then collectively forgotten again, readers would probably prefer to preserve the illusion of the disappearance rather than establish the truth of the matter.

“Who’s Olli?” Zelda asked with delayed curiosity, as though everything we had said had been processing in the background for half a minute before the penny dropped that she might gain something by joining the conversation. “A character in a novel your father has created,” Natasja replied, and began talking about The Last Siamese in a way that seemed to hold my daughter’s attention for at least more than a few seconds. And I could not contradict her. Olli both existed and did not exist. “I’m going to have a shower,” I said.

In the bathroom, I studied my naked body in the mirror and saw what the inebriated man had seen. He, my reflection, looked healthier than before, the blotchy rashes on his skin had faded considerably, his torso was leaner and in my eyes there was something I had not seen for a long time, something alive. I showered away the sweat from the game, stood there a little longer than usual and let the jets massage my skin, then wrapped myself in a dressing gown. When I sat down beside the girls again, they had switched over to a skateboarding competition. A Brazilian teenager was excelling in both technique and attitude (she had gone viral at the age of eight after performing a heelflip dressed as a fairy).

Meanwhile I thought about what he had said, about that feeling of simply leaving everything behind, of becoming free and light, and I knew exactly which feeling he had meant. For many thousands of days in a row I had inhabited that state of mind, would easily have given up everything in exchange for almost anything, if only someone had made me an offer, but at that moment I could not summon the feeling. I did not, in fact, want to be anywhere other than where I was. Nowhere else.

Subscribe now

Do you want to read from the beginning? Here you find all chapters.

Subscribe now

“Was that it? She just left?” Natasja burst out from the armchair by the window when she had finished reading the eleventh chapter. “Yes, but I was a pig. I deserved a much more bitter goodbye.” “Oh, sweetheart. You were manipulated, surely you understand that?”

Read more

Subscribe now

The midterm gathering took place at JMK in Garnisonen, the concrete colossus at the far end of Karlavägen. The ceilings inside were so low that if I stretched out my arms I could brace myself against them, though I preferred not to, since tiny asbestos like fragments would then drift down through the air.

Read more

Subscribe now

Charlie Chaplin’s son was in town. I was assigned to interview him and went to Kulturkammaren on Tunnbindaregatan with the photographer Glimstedt. The former red brick industrial building was now a meeting place for poetry slams, art salons and, on this occasion, children’s theatre. It was the first day of rehearsals. Four people were waiting for us: the producer, the director and two actors. The folders containing the scripts lay open on the round table, the ballpoint pens at the ready.

Read more

Subscribe now

This writing can no longer be seen as a chronological narrative, but as a spatial one, a form of architecture extending in every direction, in which I add room after room and allow both writer and reader to find their own way around. It is as if I have discovered a shortcut through time, where I can effortlessly spend time with other versions of myself and others across the decades.

Read more

Subscribe now

High summer. The air lies utterly still in the apartment as I write this, as though the particles have become fixed in their positions. The only things disturbing the arrangement are my breathing in the heat and the cat’s understimulated sprints across the floor. For a little over a month I have been working on this story. Faces from the past have become my company, even though I have not seen Olli, René or even Eda for many years (nor Jensa Sernelius, but he has been easy to follow through the media, having later become culture editor and then, when the department was closed down, a popular pundit on breakfast television).

Read more

Subscribe now

Read more

Subscribe now

One afternoon, when I was alone on Plankgatan, I was rummaging around the kitchen for the colander, which someone seemed to have misplaced. I opened every kitchen drawer, and right at the back of the very lowest one I found something unexpected: a bundle of Polaroid photographs. They showed me, and other men too.

Read more

Subscribe now

After the conversation in 2026 I returned in memory to October 2007, where I was still sitting on the sofa with Eda and the cat that might have been Olli (of course not), pleased with my double girlfriends, and troubled for the same reason. How spacious was my conscience, really? Not very, at that time, since I had made no attempt to widen it, but it was evidently elastic enough to be gradually occupied by the foreign power. Because that was what she was, my femme fatale. She resembled no one I had ever met before. I therefore behaved a little like the dodo that ran up to human beings without fear. That, at least, was how I explained it to myself: that I was still immature and entirely open, because life had not yet dealt me any blows, because I trusted everyone blindly. Swept along by other people’s currents.

Read more

Subscribe now

Immediately after saying goodbye to Mats Granberg in the early summer of 2024, I set off home to write, slightly drunk and fiercely motivated. It was as though I had built up an internal pressure over a long period of time. My usual strategy for dealing with troubling situations, running faster, only worked as long as I had something to keep myself active with. Work was a drug, writing could become another.

I put together what became this story. The first three chapters poured out of me that evening and into the night, not because I believed they had any literary value or would take me anywhere, but because I needed an outlet for all the unprocessed memories. I suppose this is the sort of thing people call trauma, I thought, when your closest colleague disappears, when you slip into a double life, when you are thrown in and out of other people’s actions. And yet I had barely thought about it, largely because of the speed at which my life had been lived, with the managerial role, the SSRIs and, not least, all the women and children clamouring for attention.

Read more

Subscribe now

The fact that I have found myself both thinking and writing about the autumn of 2007 has to do with running into Mats Granberg during a city walk in the spring of 2026. That circumstance was made possible by the scratch-card win, which brought with it a spell of idleness after I resigned from the then weekly free newspaper Nacka Värmdö Posten, where I had worked since the redundancy notice at IDG in the spring of 2009.

Staying so long in the editorial offices in Villa Pauli, formerly the home of the artist couple Hanna and Georg, had never been my intention. After only a couple of years, comfort had caused a growing anguish and a need to move up somewhere else, but then the editor-in-chief told me over lunch at the Asian buffet that he and his partner were planning to move back home to Arvika. He wondered if I wanted to take over, which could be arranged if I showed interest. By then I was still anxious about titles and career, chasing anything that might give me the lustre of being significant, a name, somebody.

But being legally responsible for a newspaper suited me badly. I worried constantly about decisions, day and night. Sleep suffered. Once an inexperienced reporter had completely misunderstood a pipe replacement, another time I had accidentally illustrated an article about traffic problems near a school with a car whose registration number was fully visible. At other times I received approaches from organised crime, who did not appreciate our reporting, or was called by lunatics with opinions about the number of park benches in Storängen.

It ended with a visit to the health centre and a prescription for antidepressants, which I picked up at the pharmacy. The pills brought relief, but also a change in personality. The empathy drained out of me. Work became easy, but relationships difficult. Emma and I therefore had only one child together before the sudden break-up after the one of my missteps that could not be kept secret.

She had been a tourist from Oslo, of Argentinian origin, and worked as a healthcare assistant. We met at the beer and whisky fair in Nacka Strand, where I was representing the newspaper, and soon she was pregnant with twins. Since she was a devout Catholic, abortion was out of the question. Nine months later I had three children, two exes and a growing need for a steady high income.

I increased the dose of antidepressants without consulting a doctor. It became easier then, to row through the years, and everything really stopped one solitary summer when I visited a friend in Falkenberg and heard a strange story about an elderly relative of his who had died leaving behind five hundred unscratched scratch cards. They had all expired. A dilemma arose among the heirs: scratch or not? I suggested they should be framed, like a work of art, whereupon the friend, six months later, gave me a framed, unscratched scratch card as a dinner-party gift. Not one from the relative’s collection, however, but one that had not yet expired. He simply transferred the decision to me.

I saw it as a funny gimmick and hung the picture on the wall above the television, beside the kimono. “Why don’t you just scratch it?” all the guests asked, deeply provoked, as though I had poured away Dom Pérignon in front of their eyes. Their reactions gave me even more reason not to reveal the card’s contents, promising interesting conversations, worth more than anything else, I reasoned. Was there really any difference between refraining from this and refraining from buying a scratch card at Ica? That possibility was always there. No one agreed with me.

Everything changed the morning my daughter Zelda, named after Fitzgerald, though no one understood that, suddenly came running in while I was asleep and shouted: “I think we’re rich, Dad!” The money did not make me financially independent, but it was a large enough sum to make me dare both to resign and to stop taking the pills, and then everything came back, like a tsunami: all the remorse, all the feelings, all the insight into what had happened, how wretchedly I had behaved and how impossible it was to continue.

So it was in that state, from my rental flat on Södermannagatan, that I saw the notice about a Slas walk starting from Stig Claesson’s Park, and decided to go there. Mats laughed when he saw me, but instead of the usual “long time no see”, he asked:

“Do you still have the cat?”

Before I give you the answer, some other things first need clearing up. Nowadays most literarily informed people know Pauli Olavi Kuivanen’s books, five in number, written over many decades but published within a single year by the Finnish one-man publisher Posse Unlimited. In truth, it was about as close to self-publishing as one can get. The publisher, a distant relative, financed only the printing. The rest came from Olli’s own account. That the production nevertheless reached an audience had instead to do with the content, which had made a reviewer at Vasabladet compare Kuivanen with the somewhat more famous W.G. Sebald, that is, the German writer who, in his hybrid essays, freely mixed historical events with fantasy, without even hinting at which was which. Photographs and stories might just as easily be wholly true as half-true or invented. Sebald, who had his definitive breakthrough in 1995 with The Rings of Saturn, had among other things uttered the now famous or notorious words at a lecture to his students: “I can only encourage you to steal as much as possible. No one will ever notice.”

It later became a general truth that Pauli Olavi Kuivanen had followed the same path, or possibly preceded him. There was also a parallel in the themes: Sebald’s German post-war period and Kuivanen’s detailed descriptions from the Winter War. I was not the only one who had found myself turned into a character in the works. The same applied to his childhood friends Pentti and Lasse, to the corrugated-cardboard entrepreneur Curry, and even to people completely unknown to the author, such as the shop assistant Åse Ekberg in Katrineholm or the Jaguar salesman Jukka Heikkinen in Töölö. For a time there were several Reddit threads for close readers trying to find their way among the distortions, and several discoveries were made, in which Olli’s holiday trips could be matched with various characters. Really quite irrelevant information, but the kind of thing people become invested in.

In connection with the publication of the dreamlike Everything Flows in Sweden by Ellerströms, Olli’s books also began to receive attention in the Swedish press, perhaps because he was riding the wave of autofiction that had come to characterise publishing in the 2000s, where Knausgård, Erpenbeck, Cole and Cusk were already familiar names. Reviewers found Kuivanen’s version of fraud somewhat more elegant, but also more inaccessible, which meant that no larger domestic audience ever found its way to the books. The story of the writer’s disappearance, however, most people learned, especially in Norrköping, where he became a mythical figure, like most people from the town who have made a literary attempt.

He never returned from his reading holiday. A great deal was of course written about this, but over the years a consensus was reached here too: he had died in an accident at sea in the kayak. He paddled in all weathers. That had to be how it happened. Whether it had been by accident or by his own hand, we would never know.

Then came other trends, other writers, other things to talk about. Not least, public debate in recent years has been much shaped by the regular flight stoppages after the attacks by climate-terror groups. In the debate, writers and commentators began calculating dizzily with human lives: present or future ones. Incidentally, city walks in Pauli Olavi Kuivanen’s footsteps are still arranged in Norrköping, by special booking through the City Museum, but these days they take place rather sporadically, in the event that some travelling literary scholar shows an interest. The starting point for these tours is Åby konditori on Drottninggatan, where my former colleague spent many free days reading and socialising, then on across Söder, Nelinsgatan, to the editorial office, and after that a handful of other cafés where he also spent time. Really an entirely meaningless walk. I have done it myself, since the interesting thing about his life was hardly the outer aspect but the inner.

Mats Granberg’s Slas walk was conducted together with the writer’s son Nils and the circle around the man of letters that had arisen after his death. We stood in a ring: the grey-haired admirers, a few relatives, a couple of Hammarby supporters on their way to the derby, a child in a stroller and me. From the park we trudged to the Kristallen block, where Stig Claesson grew up in poverty, then on towards the studio by Nytorget, the Pelikan tavern and finally the place where he died: Allhelgonagatan. When the emergency staff arrived, he was already in another world, Mats said, signalling with that that the story was over. Applause, the group dispersed.

“Shall we have a glass, perhaps?” I asked, and when he hesitated I said: “My treat.” We sat down at Blecktornskällaren. He was just as before, hyperfocused and cunning, switching back and forth between talking about discoveries concerning the forgotten metamorphosis poet Gertrud Knepler and IFK’s men’s spring season under Eldar Abdulic’s leadership, and somewhere around the third bottle he returned to the cat, and I said: “It became impossible to part with her after what happened.” “Alice, wasn’t it?” “You remember correctly.” “Strange story, that. Who could have believed it? He was so secretive. Was there ever any explanation?” “No, none at all. I can’t even come up with a reasonable theory for how it happened. Besides, wasn’t he allergic?” “Can’t remember.”

Olli never showed up that Monday in October 2007, or any other Monday, had left no messages and could not be reached either. In the photo calendar at work there was nothing to suggest other plans. He had entered himself for three assignments that week, distributed among Andersson, Glimstedt and Johansson. Since I was nevertheless going to do a report out in Åby, the opening of a new gallery full of tourist-shop art that I would go on to write far too positively about, I was instructed to swing by the cottage, where we expected to find him lost in some brick of a book about Stalingrad, in a state beyond time and space.

Andersson parked the car on the drive by the lavender, was actually in a hurry to get on to a press conference at the town hall, but had still approved a short detour, perhaps he too was a little worried. I half-ran up the hill towards the house, calling Olli’s name as I went. A sound came from inside, a whining response, slightly howling, growing louder the closer I came. My pulse ticked against my temple. The moment I pushed open the porous door to the patio, a flock of cats rushed out. I do not know how many, at least seven, small in size, perhaps six months old, and they had such speed and eager will to flee that I could not hold them back. They scampered down the hill, into the copse and vanished.

Everything became quiet again. I lost my thread completely, resumed my calling, without receiving a human answer. The front door was unlocked. Soon I was wandering around the cottage. The binoculars stood in their usual place on the windowsill. The bucket placed beneath the hole in the kitchen ceiling. Nothing suggested that he had been here recently. Andersson was leaning on the horn down below, probably wanting me to return from whatever I was now doing, but I could not understand how I was supposed to do that.

Then a small life rubbed itself against my calf, warm and intense. Down there she was, the cat who would become my Alice, as if risen from Wonderland. I picked her up in my arms, returned to the car, where Andersson laughed at the absurd turn of events and said: “That’s a Siamese, my mum had those.” He began reversing back to turn out past the barrier. “Bloody social little things, chatter all the time. Good if you like that kind of thing. Otherwise you go mad.” “More cats ran out, should we report it to the police or something?” He shook his head: “No, you. They’ve got plenty as it is, haven’t they. Not least the double murder.” “Maybe they’ll find their way back in,” I said, as if to persuade myself that I really believed it.

While he drove us back towards town, the cat lay silent in my arms, warm and calm. For a moment I got it into my head that she was Olli, transformed into an animal. Just a whim, I do not know where it came from. As if I had actually found him and was now bringing him back with me. A shiver ran through me when I thought that, and at the same moment I thought I heard a cautious purring, a small whirlwind arising inside the animal. As though my thoughts went straight into her. “So what do you want now?” I thought, and looked towards the head, which was turned away, but nothing happened. This, I reflected, was probably what was called magical realism, in literature, that is, where reality is gradually interwoven with the supernatural, but I had not yet begun reading the South American writers, so for me it was still only a concept. Like the names García Márquez, Allende, Borges. I had the books at home on the shelf, but had not yet opened them, which they had in common with many other writers whose names I had learned to locate as prominent and therefore picked out from the second-hand bookshop’s fifteen-kronor shelf of worn paperbacks, but then never read. Still a little too difficult, still I was in a little too much of a hurry.

“I think she’s asleep,” I said to Andersson when he parked outside the newspaper building. “Yes, but I’m already very, very late. They’re going to keelhaul me.” “Yes, but what am I supposed to do?” “Start by getting out of the car, and the rest will happen automatically.” He was right about that. The receptionist smiled at me for the first time when she caught sight of my companion, and arranged a bowl of water. Once I stepped onto the editorial floor I became the focus of everyone’s gaze, almost as much noticed as when, as a summer temp, I had made my debut with my left arm in a bandage after sliding beside a Norwegian waterfall, and even Ulrik came forward to speak. Unmoved by the weekend’s bizarre encounter, he said: “Oh, you’re going to have to explain this.” “Now it suits you,” I said. “What do you mean?” I recounted the visit to Hötorget, as if that should have been necessary. “Oh, you met Pär,” he said. “He can be a bit grumpy sometimes.” Without further ado it dawned on me: “You have a twin?” “I must have mentioned that. He’s an editor at Aftonbladet, lives with his Greta in Hammarbyhöjden. No, I’ve said that.” “I don’t think so.” “In any case, we need to sort out a litter tray. And I think there’s some mackerel in tomato sauce in the pantry.”

The sliding door to the corridor now had to be kept shut. Alice sashayed around the entertainment desk while I hammered away at the review. She was intensely communicative, but luckily the others were out on assignments. I became so distracted by all the strange noises that I no longer remembered what I felt about the art I had seen in Åby, which I could not understand anyway, had no grasp of either proportions or colour theory, though possibly some understanding of motives. Since I was a creative person myself.

My rejection CV consisted of the debut work Rhythm Disturbances, written over two feverish days, about a lawyer who was swallowed up by a young poets’ society, the amnesia comedy Days as Paul, strongly influenced by Leif Panduro’s A Man from Denmark. After that, having discovered Steppenwolf, I wrote what was meant to be my breakthrough as a serious man of letters: The Magic Theatre, a dark, heavy, solemn thing about time, space and choice, to be followed by the lighter To Paris, a rewriting of the author Gustaf Ericsson’s feigned suicide and flight to that city, and finally Limbo, a short novel about a doctoral student’s ordeals in Sundbyberg.

After the working days in Norrköping, I tried to put together a collection of short stories, where the first text dealt with the girl in the shop window, who towards the end of the story turned out to be a mannequin, that is, the one on Vattengatan. It was, however, difficult to muster any sensible creative energy, the energy I had channelled into the articles, so it usually ended with my idly surfing various football sites until bedtime, writing on Gnällbänken about how I wanted to sketch next year’s squad and potential signings I had found on Transfermarkt, preferably with aesthetically pleasing names such as Yeltsin Tejeda, a Costa Rican defensive midfielder.

In any case: I finished the review of the exhibition. I disguised it as competent and those concerned would be pleased, or at worst confused. In addition, Mats had written diligently during the holiday and the freelancers had begun filling up the magazines again. The danger was over. I could leave a little early, with the cat in a basket on the handlebars.

During the bike ride home I began thinking about the text messages I had received over the weekend, about narcotics and more guests. On the uphill stretches I felt anxious about coming home, but on the downhill stretches the thought was more tantalising. It was as if I secretly hoped for chaos.

To put the thought in context: where other young people dreamed of more specific outcomes, perhaps a professorship, getting into horticultural college, an annual pass with SAS, or just peace and quiet, I had dreamed of a no. Of not living the life I thought had been destined for me. All the adults I knew got up early every morning, went to the car or the Saltsjöbanan, drifted into town and the offices there, carried out someone else’s tasks and then commuted out again, drained of energy, ate dinner with the family and conked out in front of the television. Many mornings I had seen the dead looks of friends’ parents at Slussen. Further conditions were also self-evident: to study at university, then go on to meet a girl, perhaps at some formal dinner, be together for a few years before the engagement, the marriage, first live in a flat, but then buy an expensive villa with loans they would never pay off, probably in Nacka, and after that reproduce, once the villa was furnished and the garden lush, and then life was over, I imagined. A clear view towards death. The standard upper-middle-class path. The goal therefore became: not that.

When I stepped into the flat on Plankgatan I saw Eda sitting at the kitchen table, painting something in oils. I almost felt disappointed. Everything in there was in its place. No signs of a rave. The kitchen clean as on the first day. She smiled when she saw Alice in the basket and said: “How nice, then I’ll have some company here during the days while her human is at work.” Dissatisfied with the reaction, I said: “This may be Pauli Olavi Kuivanen.” She shook the cat’s paw and said: “A pleasure finally to meet you.” I glanced at the sheet in front of her. Vague soft lines. A butterfly? “What are you painting?” “You need new paintings,” she said. “Yes, you’re right about that.” I looked up at the wall and the sweeping strokes the flat owner had daubed with a broad brush during a painting course. He had been proud when he showed them to me. Abstract works, if one were being generous. Otherwise scribbles. She said: “He really likes grey.” Then I saw the geraniums on the windowsill. The curtains. Had I acquired a bathroom mat? And the scent? Sweet, sharp, like jasmine. “There’s food in the fridge you can microwave,” she said. “A Turkish dish. I’m a little nervous to hear what you think.”

I was starving and did as she said, with a naturalness that surprised me. She simply glided into my life and stayed, and I neither could nor wanted to resist. That evening the three of us sat together on the sofa and watched television. Eda was knitting a baby hat meanwhile, and I do not know what the programmes were about, nor did I care. The cat lay asleep in my lap. All of it harmonious.

As if I truly had a second life, and if both were this good: why choose?

Subscribe now

All chapters:

Subscribe now

Cyndi Lauper’s voice echoed through the corridor when I returned to the flat in Nacka late on Friday evening. Emma was already home, and I realised at once that I had not showered since sharing a bed with Eda.

No wonder I had forgotten, since the day had carried on with the same frenzy as the others. I had needed to produce masses of text, finish the column, and now, on top of everything, dash off a long-winded essay about how well invested the charming sociopath Tony Soprano’s hours in therapy with Dr Melfi really were, now that the final season of the series was about to be shown on SVT and the mafia boss had not exactly softened over the years. In the end I managed to fill the pages, but without a lunch break and fortified by my new vice, coffee, or at least the version of the drink produced by the machine whenever someone dropped a one-krona coin into the slot.

Once the final piece had been entered into the editing system, I had to throw myself on the bike and tear towards the travel centre, lock it among all the others in the overcrowded racks and wriggle past the barriers. A margin of less than thirty seconds. Found the train, the seat. And then it was quiet. I let myself be transported all the way north, barely moving a muscle, let alone a thought. All the obligations kept racing round my head as if they were still needed, and it did not stop until I heard the music at home and was reminded of the young woman now staying in my room in Östergötland, the perfume that had caused sudden visions to rise before my inner eye: the Bosphorus, cafés, water pipes. My clothes smelled like her. Perhaps my skin too.

I could not shower straight away, that would be too suspicious, and besides, I had done nothing wrong, but nor could I hug Emma, because then she would start asking questions, and even though nothing had happened, the situation was difficult to explain. If I even began, she would question its credibility, and then I would have to extend the explanation with the story of the kayak trips in Karelia, which I had not taken part in either, and I truly did not have the strength for that now. I just wanted to slump in front of the television with a few glasses of red wine and then fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.

After coming into the hall I called towards the bedroom, where she was changing the sheets: “Hello, darling, I just need to use the bathroom.” In there I could quickly change my shirt for one from the laundry basket, more comfortable anyway, and give my skin a light wipe, because of the sweat, and besides, if she asked about the scent, perhaps I had interviewed a perfumer, how could she know otherwise. But she noticed nothing and asked nothing, was sad because her closest colleague in Västerås was leaving for a job at a law firm. “Who am I going to have lunch with now?” she asked, putting the remains of the pasta salad on the table. “Oh no, that’s sad, but someone else will come along.” “It’ll take them months to sort that out, knowing them.” “Yes, you know that better than I do.”

That night I slept better than the previous one, but had a persistent dream in which I was not allowed to touch my bedmate, which meant it was of the utmost importance that I kept as close to the edge as possible, which in turn caused another kind of nervousness. Theme: great heights. By breakfast Emma said that she, for her part, had dreamt about sleeping bags, and only then did she ask whether anything had happened. So far I had not lied, merely refrained from telling, and I intended to continue that way.

“Have you sorted out a present? I’m sure you have,” I said, but in fact she had not. As usual, the weekend had been planned well in advance. Saturday was to be devoted to a children’s party for Emma’s brother’s son at the villa out in the bay, so first we needed to buy a jigsaw puzzle at Nacka Forum and then get ourselves to the bus and schlep out there. I had attended so many birthday celebrations by this point that they had become routine. Gather on the sofas first, talk about this and that and then the weather again, in this case “how are things in Peking1, then?” and “how’s the new pellet mixer going?”, some biscuits and crisps, sour cream flavour, plenty of wine for anyone not driving, food, cake and singing, a few games.

This time it was a kubb tournament on the lawn. There were so many of us that you could not get into your throw, just two sticks per round, and that was when my pocket began to vibrate. I missed, and missed again. The first message read: You know you’ve got narcotic-classed medication at home, right? The cupboard above the fridge. The second: Thanks. I’m so focused now, it’s incredible. Have been reading all night. We’ll have to try it together later.

Emma was admittedly playing on the other team, but she saw my troubled expression. She stepped over to my side and asked, “From work?” “Sort of, or not exactly.” “How do you mean?” “Someone from a photography exhibition I wrote about.” Still no lies. “It must be able to wait.” “Absolutely, it’s just hard not to check.” Now she had crossed the line there on Plankgatan. It was one thing that I had agreed to let her stay over the weekend, while I was away anyway, in exchange for an unspoken promise of cleaning, but I had not given her permission to rummage around among my, and the soldier’s, belongings. I ought to reply with something angry and decisive. Until now I had managed to keep my two worlds apart, forgetting everything about the paper at weekends, and everything about the children’s parties during the weeks, but now I was being called back. It affected my rest negatively. My thoughts negatively. My relationship negatively. I should never have let the Turkish woman in to begin with.

Emma’s parents offered us a lift home, it was on their way anyway, just a short detour from Värmdöleden. Our two-room apartment on Fyrgränd was on the ground floor of a newly built area. The woman next door, who had left a collapsed marriage, had moved in with her two teenage children and greeted us when we moved in with the words: “Don’t buy them alcohol.” After that she occupied the patio every morning and smouldered with dark energy. But there were other things here. Here were my second-hand bookshop finds, the CD collection, the damp damage across the whole parquet floor, the computer chair that gave me a rash. Here was the proximity to everything I knew. Here, too, was the pressure, to succeed and become, to have eyes on you, there was career and CV, expectations and industry celebrities. The same did not quite apply in Norrköping, which certainly had its celebrities, but they were generally the kind who had once visited the town on their way to bigger assignments. The spectres had names like Natalia, Kenan or Zoran, and people often talked about them during the sometimes hour-long editorial coffee breaks as if they had merely stepped away from their keyboards and might saunter in and join us at any moment. They also hinted that perhaps, after all, it was up to me what the future would look like, and that was a frightening thought.

I wanted to be discovered, lifted up, because I had only just been a child, and in films that was how it happened. The only thing was that in reality no one looked in our direction. However well we listened, observed and rendered, the texts disappeared with the paper recycling. The world lay open: Ian Buruma one week and Karin Rehnqvist the next. Olli had interviewed Richard Ford and afterwards received a call from Ford’s publisher, who said that the conversation had been one of the more rewarding the author had experienced, but it stopped at being an amusing anecdote. No reader reactions came in about the article, not even any from colleagues. From the editorial offices on Stohagsgatan we therefore had a clear view and, apparently, no insight whatsoever. I, of course, kept track of all the metropolitan press interns, just as a published novelist forever remembers those who stepped onto the stage at the same time as her. Through byline and language I could tell which names were permanent and which I could compare myself with. They did not look at me. As soon as the train took me south on Mondays, I shrank, but something else happened at the same time: since nothing mattered, nothing was dangerous any more. And I came fully to live out my invisibility.

Sunday. As soon as I woke, I hurled the jumper, the shirt and the trousers into the machine. The margin before my return home had been sufficient, and if I had waited any longer she would do it herself and perhaps pick up the scent of perfume, but she was to ask anyway: “Are you doing laundry?” “Yes, is there anything strange about that?” “Do you even know how? Have you already put a load of my clothes in there? You know some things need delicates? There’s a special programme.” “Of course I know how, it’s not especially advanced.” “That’s what I’m afraid of.” “Isn’t it good that I’m doing laundry?” “Sure, sure, I won’t say anything.” “About what?” “It was just a bit unexpected.” “I need everything clean for the week.” “I thought you were waiting for me to do it for you.” I sat crouched in the bathroom for a while and watched my light-grey cardigan tumble around inside. How did men who lived double lives do it? Did they have different sets of clothes? Several mobile phones? We had an informal division where I emptied the dishwasher and she dealt with the laundry, but it was not set in stone, which would guarantee wilder discussions many years later, when the chores were placed in columns, but we were still young here. It was not a big thing.

Still sitting in the bathroom, I heard my mobile vibrate over on the kitchen table. The tremor spread into my joints. Emma took a few steps across the parquet and called: “Who is Eda?” I tried to stand up and walk towards her as calmly as possible. “She’s the one I told you about, the photographer. What has she sent now?” Slowly I reached for the phone. Just one text this time. Is it okay if a few people from the art gallery sleep here? Just one night? At the same moment another arrived: Sorry. The tenses. Did you mean it was okay if they slept here? They had nowhere to go. Emma looked at me and smiled. I needed to put an end to this quickly. OK, I wrote, and put the mobile in my pocket. She looked at me with renewed interest. “Is this girl perhaps a little interested in you?” “No, it’s nothing like that.” “Really?” “It’s about Olli. It’s complicated.” “All right, all right, you can talk more about it later, if you feel like it.” She gave a little laugh, unable for a moment to imagine that I would betray her, and of course I had not. Nothing had happened. I had helped a young immigrant without a home, that was what I had done. This one happened to be fragrant and beautiful, but that was not necessarily part of the matter.

This day would become memorable for several reasons. Radiohead released the album In Rainbows, the Russian president Vladimir Putin died in a hunting accident, but above all I ran into Ulrik at Hötorget. The latter should not really have caused any great surprise, my table-tennis partner visited Stockholm regularly, but it was the way it happened that shook me. I caught sight of him at one of the flea-market tables, his slender body, dull hair with a hint of orange, thought I would make a little joke, pointed at a book about plastic surgery and said loudly: “Maybe you should consider this.” He stared at me in horror. “Excuuse me?” he burst out, with that Bjurholm weight in his voice. I tried to meet his gaze, but it just darted around my face. “It was only a joke, I mean,” I said. “You thought so. Jesus.” His eyes widened further before he began shaking his head, turned to a woman I had never seen before, seemed to retell the sequence of events and walked briskly away from me. I had imagined a crooked smile, a joke in return, and did not know how to react, muttered “I mean” without him hearing, but was soon rescued by Emma, who called out that she had found a nice pot for the hydrangea, but that it was a little expensive. She needed help haggling, and that at least I could assist with, by playing the hard-to-impress budget manager. She insisted on a purchase, whereupon the seller could find a compromise between us both, and it went reasonably well in the end, a discount of 75 kronor.

For the rest of the day I managed to block out the parallel world fairly well, through my usual escape behaviour: activity. We bought new shorts for the winter charter trip, not yet booked, we were going to do that last minute, ate the crispier falafel in Kungshallen, walked to Slussen with the tourists, came home, vacuumed, emptied the dishwasher, packed the rucksack, watched television, whatever was on, some English programme about hoarders. Our bedtime routine consisted of me scratching Emma’s back until she fell asleep. Sometimes only strokes were needed, at other times such forceful sweeps that she was left with deep marks. This time she wanted something in between, but especially hard over the sore point to the left of her spine, where I was welcome to press a little extra. A shock wave passed through her when I did, and somehow it made it easier for her to fall asleep, as though she had been rebooted. I drifted along with my fingers brushing so long that I began to doze off myself, and then I woke into paralysis.

I saw my hands massaging a woman’s back, but did not immediately know which woman, in which bed, or even which me. Had I already crossed the line? Must not cross the line. Must not listen to the impulses. Must hold back. I was breathing hard and pulled my arm away, as if I had encountered something electric. “Why did you stop?” Emma asked. “Oh, I started dreaming.” “About what?” “I don’t remember.” “How unpleasant. Can you carry on?” “All right, but I might fall asleep again.”

In the morning it was a change of shift for both of us. She got up as early as four and I at half past five, so when I fried the eggs I was alone. Everything was packed by the front door. I needed no thought, only to put on my clothes and step into the working week, and that is what I did: brushed my teeth, went out, the bus, the metro, the central station and half asleep reached the platform, found my seat on the train and zoned out. Then, after an hour or so, find the bike at the travel centre, always just as happy that it was still there, in light rain roll through town towards Stohagsgatan, greet the receptionist, be let in, walk through a still deserted newsroom, towards the upper floor. Ulrik had taken his place at UngNT but I did not say hello. He felt unpleasant. Mats’s chair stood empty. I went to my computer at the entertainment desk, opened my email and among press releases and a few letters from readers objecting to grammar I found a message from Peter Tidman.

It read as follows:

“Gaby Stenberg-Koch was clearly visible in Abraham Zapruder’s Colour Film she has red coat glasses white gloves. And shouts = Bravissimo,mein Kaiser Söze...When I was 15 years old I saw a great Ufo in very Close range it was 400 meters Across and was Golden glowing time was november 1971 Saturday 20.04 until 20.13 At Vindön Orust Bohuslän Västra Götaland light Phenomen was Red Ruby Glittering Lighted Enourmous Visible Cloud and 5 to 6 White Flashes,then in East over Uddevalla a Dark Blue NATO Cross.”

Too early for this. I needed to put a coffee token in the machine, drink a few bitter gulps and try to decipher the text anew. It felt like a glitch in the Matrix, like so much else that autumn. Mein Kaiser Söze? It was surely just spam, a mishmash of information from the internet, nothing to attach any importance to. Besides, I had a lot to do. There was no time to get caught in anything.

Missed the first chapter? You can find it here:

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

In the autumn of 2007, naturally, none of what would later happen had yet happened. I was an intern on the culture desk at Norrköpings Tidningar, commuting weekly to the second-hand flat on Plankgatan, furnished by a career soldier who, after his time in Bosnia, had come to hate impressions. Grey wallpaper. Dead furniture. Pill bottles above the fridge.

From there I fled into various whims. After borrowing a paperback edition of the novel New Year from the city library, I asked whether it would be all right to interview the writer, Stig Larsson. We met at Rosa drömmar and his breath wafted pear cognac. Afterwards he wanted to change all the more reasonable quotes, but keep the megalomaniac ones (he was the greatest since Thomas Mann). A few weeks later I met Roberto Saviano, together with his interpreter. I tried to make a joke about Berlusconi, but it did not go down well, since he was, after all, the one guaranteeing the bodyguard protection. And so the autumn went on like that. In between, I went to IFK’s matches in Superettan, where, led by the Icelander Stefan Thórdarson, they finally climbed the league system. But I had not yet started going to training sessions. That only came when I was on parental leave, as an endpoint to my walks with the stroller, which indirectly led to my seat on the board.

It was amid all this youthfulness that I came into contact with the Turkish woman. She was an exchange student at Linköping University, specialising in Nordic folklore, and for no reason valid to me had begun asking questions at Kafé Kuriosa on Hörngatan.

“You there, have you perhaps read Pauli Olavi Kuivanen’s books?”

I put down my review copy of Björn Ranelid’s Open Letter to George W Bush (which I would later come to own in duplicate, one of them signed, through a gift from my former parents-in-law) and quickly tried to shift realities. Had she really asked that? As far as I knew, my colleague on the desk had never published anything. True, he had slipped me a few sheets of poems from the eighties, and hinted that there was a novel project about growing up in Åby somewhere sloshing about at the back of his mind, but for the life of me I could not believe that he, the least ambitious person in my circle, could be persuaded to let himself be judged by strangers. She, who I came to understand slept on a mattress in the art gallery (after being invited as a guest artist by Johnny and the gang who later started Den svenska björnstammen), stared at me as if she expected an essay read aloud on my colleague’s art of living. “How do you know him?” I asked, now slightly irritated. By this point I had concluded that she had realised we wrote for the same newspaper, perhaps she recognised me from the byline photo, which the photographer had needed several sessions to get right, since that year I had not yet had my eyes operated on for strabismus. The picture of Pauli Olavi Kuivanen had been difficult for another reason, the fact that he preferred not to have one. He had failed to appear at so many photo sessions that the personnel manager had been forced to issue a written warning, and then he finally turned up, stern and surly, a photograph that generated that rumour about him being severe and unreasonable.

The Turkish woman drummed her finger over the books on the café table beside her. A hefty pile. The titles seemed to be written in Finnish and yes, of course, there was his name along the spine of every one of them. It was, after all, irrefutable evidence. But when the hell had he had time to write them? I began going through what I knew. Perhaps when he worked at that home for people with intellectual disabilities? He had told me how it was during those decades that he became well read, by sitting on watch through the nights, surrounded by world literature and sleeping young people. I had had no reason to question anything he had told me, but now, with the authorship as evidence, there must have been something else, a track he had chosen not to tell me about, for reasons still completely obscure to me. The Turkish woman giggled inwardly, as if she could read my thought process. She said, in broken but grammatically perfect Swedish: “I really did not expect this. I thought you would be much younger. That is how you were described to me.”

To further explain the mysteriousness of the situation, this took place during the years when I did not look at women. I was blind to everyone except my partner in Nacka, who in turn commuted weekly to the district court in Västerås, blind not only because of love but also because I was inexperienced. I was twenty when we met and still lived at home. Since that first meeting we had continued to see each other every day, with an inevitability that had something of fate about it. There was simply no logical possibility of breaking the chain of days, no more than one can change siblings or parents, and therefore there was also no reason to lay eyes on attractive women, not even as a pastime, I decided. One or two had, of course, punctured the bubble, without my understanding how it had happened, or even that it had happened. Forgetting stepped in and I later had to place these events on my straw of memories in order to understand myself, who I was without her and quite simply: what the women had had in common. Yet there was nothing that connected either the curvy emo girl at Eriksdalsbadet, the fashionista on the outdoor terrace in Västra hamnen, or Kelly Kapowski in Saved by the Bell with the inquisitive Turkish woman I now had before my eyes.

At the risk of exoticising her: she was not a type, did not fit the templates of my subconscious, came from a culture I was not familiar with, smelled unfamiliar, radiated an intellect I still had quite a few decades to go before I could measure myself against it. In addition, she was beautiful. I could of course determine that, but without being actively drawn to it, since I had not yet learned to understand my impulses. They simply arose like viruses in a computer and then I tried to fend them off without ever grasping what they were about. So I answered her: “Have you read what I’ve written in the paper, is that what you mean?” I recalled that the suite of articles from the film festival ought to have been published that same day, it was probably those. Perhaps the subeditor had used one of the pictures of me at the very back of the row (placed there because of the knee problems I would come to hold forth about in the texts). Was I famous for a day?

“Is it all right if I sit beside you?” she asked, pinched one of her books with her and sat down after I had nodded slightly. Now I noticed that she had fitted hundreds of the pages with small taped bookmarks in yellow plastic, which in turn had been supplied with notes in what must have been Turkish. She could therefore quickly turn to page 244 in the work Kaikki virtaa, which dealt with a kayak journey across Lake Ladoga. Suddenly, among the lines, I found at least two familiar combinations of letters: Jörgen Löwenfeldt. She translated the rest for me. According to the story, I had apparently travelled with the author to Sordavala, in present-day Russia, to visit my colleague’s remaining and now rather distant relatives. There we were to put together a documentary film, with me as technical assistant. That she had thought I was younger had everything to do with how I was described: sluggish in the mornings, mad about sport and the extensive problems with acne (which would be solved the very moment I came into contact with the almost magical face lotion from Ullared). Nothing written in the book corresponded to how I perceived reality. “What you have read there is an entirely fictional account,” I said, adding: “Do not ask me why he wrote it like that, but in any case it did not happen.” She gave me a sceptical look, leafed to the middle section of the book and said: “But how do you explain the photographs?”

On the glossy paper there were pictures from the Winter War, my colleague’s grandfather as a soldier, wearing a bushy moustache and a white fur cap, pictures of his parents during the first shift at the textile factory in Industrilandskapet, and then a panorama from the family party at the terminal in Mariehamn, where I saw the child Pauli Olavi, or Olli as everyone called him, wearing sunglasses and lying in front of the others. When she turned the page I then found the sequence of pictures from what was claimed to be our joint trip to Karelia. It certainly was someone with my appearance visiting the old church school, now rental flats. And yes, it did look as if I was standing there with the digital camera photographing Willy Kyrklund’s childhood home, a typical thing for me to do, I could admit that. Only it had not happened, must have been manipulated and retouched with first-class sharpness, however he had learned that technique. Nor did it answer the more burning question: why?

I could not ask him either, since he had taken two weeks’ leave of absence to read up on current historical non-fiction ahead of the next term’s publications (something the employer really ought to have paid for, we thought). No one knew where he went during these periods, even if we suspected that he had merely cycled up to the cottage by the lake and left his mobile phone turned off, but I had no desire to take a taxi there only to find the house empty. “Thank you for showing me this,” I said at last. “I can understand why you asked. It would be easy to mistake this for the truth. The way it is written and rendered, I mean.” She pointed towards the pile and said: “There is more, but it has probably become a little too much for you today, hasn’t it? Perhaps we can meet a little later, once you have slept on it.” She went back to her place over by the thirsty monstera and began packing books, notebooks and pens into a tote bag. “What is your name, by the way?” I asked stupidly. She answered: “Eda Eriş, but surely you already knew that? You wrote about my photography exhibition. We even shook hands at the opening.” I did not remember that, for fuck’s sake I was writing four or five articles a day to make up a spread now that Olli had scarpered and Mats had gone on holiday to arrange the funeral, but for some reason I nodded and smiled while she left the café. As if this sort of thing happened to me all the time.

At this time in my life, there were men everywhere: living and dead. Men with hubris, a few without. I read men, listened to men, compared myself with men. Because the developmental phase was based on similarity, rather than difference, on becoming who one is by searching where others had searched. A lad among lads. For some reason I avoided telling Emma about the café incident when I spoke to her on the phone that evening. Instead I said something brief about Ranelid and Marcus Birro having the same agent, just to say something. She, in turn, had met a former Säter patient, known from court, at McDonald’s. He had stared at her for half an hour. When we hung up, I realised that I had avoided bringing up Olli’s authorship, not because of the incomprehensibility of what had happened, but because of who had revealed it to me. It seemed impossible to me to be unfaithful, and yet to some extent that was what I had been simply through this avoidance. Because, I could not explain it, but there was a because.

The next day at the office I chose not to sit in my usual place in the cupboard beside the entertainment desk, since the culture desk was empty. The letters editor Anna-Karin was also early and observed: “Well then, it’s the intern running the pages now. Swiftly marched.” But I did not really have time even for joking, since I needed to have three finished articles, not yet begun, before late afternoon. I had almost emptied the stock of reviews written by freelancers in order to save Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s papers, before the film special took care of Thursday, so now I could only insert a short, vague notice from the choir leader Michel Bruce about a premiere performance at the opera in Stockholm. Then it was empty. If I wanted a future on the desk, I could not put in material from the news agency, as other departments gladly did, apparently that was some form of sacred rule here. I therefore devoted the morning to speed reading Ranelid’s book, secretly reading what the Stockholm papers had written and formulating something punchy, after which I phoned, at random, the talkative artistic director of Vadstena Akademien, so that with a generous five thousand characters I could summarise the summer (a little too late for that really), whereupon I skipped going to the lunch restaurant, since I was out of vouchers anyway, and could then start a column in which I pointed out how this internet community Facebook might mean the beginning of a new surveillance society. Technology was my way in as a young person, I thought, and thought again when the telephone on the desk rang.

Since I constituted the editorial desk, I answered. A bleak, aged male voice asked: “Is that Mats Granberg?” “No, it’s Jörgen. I also work here,” I said, and cut myself off, because I did not want to say that I was an intern, since the word immediately made people lose interest, as if I could watch myself being devalued in real time. “This is Peter Tidman, I just want to make sure that what I sent arrived. There have been some problems with my connection. The modem has been making strange noises. As if it is whistling at someone.” The editorial email was empty, and I did not have time to give him a basic course in machine lore, so I asked him to read the text aloud, about a new Romanian poetry collection in which he saw merits. Afterwards he wanted to check whether my transcription contained the correct number of commas and semicolons. He was satisfied, and then I dared to give him a little praise. During other café visits I had, namely, read the caller’s poems about children tearing twigs from young apple trees (a line that dissolved something in me), so I took the opportunity to tell him how impressed I was by his handling of language. Every sentence so precisely measured. “Oh, well, yes, that’s good,” he said, without changing tone, as if I had asked whether he wanted to take part in a survey about ice cream. Outside the window, in the car park, some intermezzo was taking place between the photographers Larsson and Rundstedt over who had the right to the space by the entrance instead of taking the route round by the loading bay. It struck me that I could ask him about what had happened. “By the way, do you know anything about Kuivanen’s authorship in Finland?” Now I heard violent breathing on the other end of the line. “I know nothing about that,” he said, and continued with a self-contradiction: “And you should stay away from it.” He hung up abruptly. At least I had got the review, did not need to hurry with the column, and could soon, at the afternoon meeting, calmly instruct the subeditor on how we imagined the pages. A saved day in a flow of days.

Towards the end I could even afford to play a few rounds of table tennis in the basement with Ulrik Paulsson (the surname pronounced with a long Bjurholm a, Pa-ul-sson) from UngNT. As usual he won by just a few points, only the match plan was repeated so often that it could no longer be seen as an even game, but only as a sadistic game with my competitive instinct. After we shook hands I told him briefly about the Turkish woman and he did not even ask what she looked like, he was never interested in things like birds or even beer, but merely observed laconically that “Olli is a man of integrity” and that “one could have imagined as much”, as if nothing I had told him surprised him in the least.

Norrköping did not yet know at this point that the city was in the middle of a golden age. Industrial premises stood empty in the centre, students were beginning to spill over from Linköping, while the politicians had read too much of Richard Florida’s theories about the creative class. Every youthful initiative received municipal compensation, if not financially then in space. There was a museum of forgetting in the smithy on Västgötabacken, which became SVT’s premises, from where I often reported on new events, debates and photography exhibitions. Once I took part in a panel and claimed that the only thing preventing a journalist from writing what they wanted was their own morality, while disregarding the ethical rules, since I was writing a short novel during that course, but also because I had learned the importance of angle. How easy it was for me to manipulate the reader into this or that opinion by introducing a few disagreeable adjectives, or simply by writing out exactly how people spoke. The art gallery lads, for their part, had gained access to the flat on Trädgårdsgatan after a short conversation with the head of the culture administration. No one else wanted the Art Nouveau rooms anyway, so they might as well fill them with bizarre artworks, graffiti, flown-in artists such as the Turkish woman, or just drunkenness and parties. I, the intern, simply had quite a lot to write about during those months. There was always someone who wanted to show something new. And otherwise one could always write about the still new concept of gentrification or the city’s curious attempt to become European Capital of Culture, in which they had sent Ydre municipality an invoice for fifty million kronor, since it was considered to benefit from any possible future designation.

Back home in the capital, I scarcely dared pedal to Ica Maxi on a bicycle, but here I was immortal. Through an acquaintance I had got hold of a used seventies Monark (so that it would survive the weekends at the train station), refrained from wearing a helmet (because of the wind in my hair), and skidded whenever I could across car parks and tram tracks, piles of leaves and later slush, and in darkness through heavy, deep snow, without using lights. The way home stretched from St Persgatan, the intersection by Spiralen where my father’s shop still stood, down past the Freemasons (who when I interviewed them denied that they drank one another’s blood) and the Bosnian association and then quickly past the brow with no visibility, where I nearly came to grief a few times, towards the bridge over the stream, Kungsgatan and the drunks, left up towards Vattengatan where a mannequin stood in an otherwise solitary shop window and then the cemetery, depressing Plankgatan, where I placed the bicycle in the stand in the courtyard.

When I looked up towards the entrance door, Eda was standing there. Beautiful and fresh. Here, in the squalor, as misplaced as the mannequin ought to have felt. “Can we talk upstairs?” she asked. “Yes, that’s probably better than standing here,” I said. While we climbed the stairwell I asked: “How did you know where I live? It’s not written anywhere, is it?” She said, with a built-in shrug in her pronunciation: “I followed you.” As I fumbled with the key in the lock, I was reminded of what it looked like inside. The whole week’s dried out dishes were still there. In addition I had used the rucksack as a wardrobe. Of course I had not made the bed, but did the sheet cover the mattress?

Eda grimaced when she saw my teenage room installation, went immediately towards the balcony and opened the door to air the place. “Better,” she said loudly into the air. She then reached for her bag and slowly brought out all the books by this author Pauli Olavi Kuivanen who shared a name with my colleague and wrote about me without my knowledge, a rather fascinating story if I had not been so stressed and overworked. She laid the works on the veneer dining table with their covers facing upwards. “I thought you could begin helping me now, because there is quite a lot that does not add up,” she said. “Why don’t you ask him directly?” “That is exactly what I did and then he ran off,” she said. “Then I got to the sections where you appeared and thought you could help me, but honestly you seem a little, what does one say, confused?” “No, I see no logical explanation for any of this. True, we have known each other since the short placement last autumn, but we have never gone on any journey together.” “Förvirrad, that is what it’s called,” she said and smiled. I thought she would leave me alone after this, since her searches yielded so little, but instead she turned to the kitchen area, inspected the meagre contents of the fridge and pantry and began throwing together a rice-based dish. We ate from deep bowls on the sofa while watching the television broadcast of the away defeat against Bunkeflo, in which Imad Khalili scored both of the opponents’ goals. She never left, so in the end I had to ask.

She answered: “There’s an inspection from the municipality over the next few days. We have all had to move out. But it is only temporary.” “Oh?” I replied, feeling my heart thump. There was no question of sleeping on the sofa, which was barely possible even to sit on comfortably. “We’ll have to sleep head to toe,” she then said. “Your girlfriend will surely understand. She doesn’t want you to force a young woman to sleep in the street, does she? Think what could happen?” “But there are loads of Turks in Norrköping. It ought to be easy for you to find a countryman who can help you?” “They are just peasants. You do not understand my country. It would never work.”

That evening I did not have my call with Emma. I only wrote in a text message that I was too tired, which was true, and it was not improved by the fact that I had received a visitor in bed. I hardly think I slept more than a couple of hours, was conscious the whole time of my body, her body and scent and her scent on me and mine on her, without us ever touching each other. She breathed heavily in her sleep and I felt the draught against my feet. There was, of course, something deeply erotic in the situation, and that was probably why I only perceived panic. The slightest movement towards intimacy and my life back home would come to an end. The thing that was my life, my real one, not the parenthesis that was this. Only it did not feel that way from this side. It never did. No more than a dream cares what takes place during the waking hours of the day.

Subscribe now