Wilful Disregard Read online

  The implication hitherto had been that Per and Ester liked each other’s company and were always together, whereas the implication now was that Ester did not come home in the evenings until she had to. Their whole relationship had been implied, so its disintegration also took place without comment.

  Hugo’s text messages generally arrived at night, when his assistants and Dragan had gone home and he was still working away on his own. Every evening around midnight he would send a friendly line that she read the instant it arrived. In the bed beside her lay a human being who did not exist.

  His studio was on Kommendörsgatan, in one of the few unassuming buildings on the street. In the evenings she would patrol the surrounding area. She hoped to catch a glimpse, hoped that someone in his circle, or even he himself, might emerge from the front door. And one evening, it happened. On her way home from the cinema, she took a detour past his place to do some more circuits of his block. All at once she spotted him on the other side of the street, walking along the pavement. He was heading briskly in the opposite direction. She turned and followed at a distance. He rounded a couple of corners and went into the ICA Esplanad supermarket on Karlavägen. Ester waited outside.

  He emerged three and a half minutes later holding a small bag and went back the way he had come. She made sure to stay twenty metres behind. As they approached the entrance to his building, she caught up with him, put her hand on his shoulder and said:

  ‘What a coincidence.’

  He expressed no surprise but touched her arm and said:

  ‘Come on up. We’re having a chat after work, just me and a few of my associates.’

  ‘Are you sure the others would want me to?’

  ‘I want you to. Do come.’

  There were five people standing in the studio’s kitchen, their glasses charged with red wine and their elbows propped on the bar counter. He produced what he had bought: crackers, grapes and some blue cheese, which he unwrapped from its plastic packaging.

  One of his collaborators, a youngish woman with frizzy hair and startling spectacles, gave Ester a sideways look, but that was presumably a misreading, because Ester saw no reason why she should.

  They ate and drank and said how delicious the cheese was. Hugo explained that the taste combination of bread, cheese and grape had taken centuries to develop. Only this extended timescale had allowed them to evolve to appeal perfectly to the taste buds. She loved the fact that he reflected on such big and important topics.

  The only thing that dissatisfied her was the fact that he always had people around him. It said something about him that made her feel vaguely sceptical. She would have preferred him to be a solitary being with a fissure of longing in him that she could fill.

  Before you understand where the emotion is going to lead, you talk to anyone and everyone about the object of your love. All of a sudden, this stops. By then the ice is already thin and slippery. You realize that every word could expose your infatuation. Feigning indifference is as hard as acting normally, and fundamentally the same thing.

  Ester had still not reached that point, which became evident at an event where she ran into the editor of the philosophy periodical The Cave, for which she had occasionally written, and immediately turned the conversation to Hugo Rask, although they were talking about something else. The editor agreed that he was extremely interesting, and had a sudden idea. She said they were just putting the finishing touches to an issue on the theme of self-sacrifice and duty but still felt something was missing, something to tie everything together and attract readers at the same time. The editor had not decided what it should be until this moment. As Hugo Rask’s work always revolved round ethical issues, the editor proposed an interview with him about the tension between I and You, in his work and for him personally.

  Ester Nilsson felt her hair follicles tingle with heat as she asked the editor why she felt Ester was particularly suited to the commission because, after all, she had not addressed those tensions either in her own work or in her study of his.

  ‘Because you’re in love with Hugo Rask and will dare to ask questions it would never occur to other people to ask.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Think what?’

  ‘That one would ask penetrating questions in that case. I thought it was generally considered to be the other way round, namely that being in love makes one uncritical, undiscriminating.’

  ‘Undiscriminating, certainly. But not uncritical; severe, rather. If the object of one’s affections proves to be pitiful, contradictory and weak, it simply makes one love them more.’

  ‘It sounds as though you’re speaking from experience.’

  ‘You bet I am.’

  The editor smiled more broadly than was advisable for someone with a set of teeth ruined by wine and cigarettes.

  ‘But there’s another, much more immediate reason for asking you to do it.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Only someone in love would be able to produce an article like that within the week. I’m afraid that’s all the time I can give you.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m in love?’

  ‘I can tell from the way you look.’

  ‘I rate his art highly,’ said Ester. ‘I genuinely do.’

  The editor gave an indulgent and slightly unkind laugh.

  ‘2,500 words maximum, 2,250 minimum. Submission date a week from now.’

  An interview of this sort called for hours of conversation and a good deal of contact thereafter, to discuss the framing of the text. This was her chance.

  The next morning, she called Hugo. He was flattered but wanted to consider the matter, for this was a weighty subject that demanded a lot of time and thought; it had to be right and it had to be good. But in principle he was interested, and he respected The Cave.

  In the course of that day she discovered the impossibility of telling her partner about the commission and realized their relationship was over. The question that remained was how she was going to say it. She hoped he would help her. And that was indeed what happened. He could not cope with living with the ambivalence and the following evening he gripped her firmly by the top of her arm and said:

  ‘Is there any point in this any longer? In us?’

  But behind his words, Ester discerned above all a wish for reassurance and relief. He was saying it to find out that he was wrong. There is a resistance in the party who wants to leave, a fear of the unknown, of the hassle and of changing one’s mind. A party not wanting to be left must exploit that resistance. But then they must restrain their need for clarity and honesty. The matter must remain unformulated. A party not wanting to be left must leave it to the one wanting to go to express the change. That is the only way to keep a person who does not want to be with you. Hence the widespread silence in the relationships of the world.

  Ester thought: I mustn’t. I mustn’t soften his pain and my own inconvenience. I mustn’t.

  ‘No, there’s no point,’ she said.

  ‘So it’s over?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that case you can move out tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ve nowhere to live.’

  ‘When I get home from work tomorrow, I want you to be gone.’

  The next morning, she moved back in with her mother in Tulegatan. Her mother asked neither too many questions nor too few. She said Ester could stay as long as she needed to. When she awoke the first morning there was no sorrow, no sense of loss, just a sensation of freedom. Nobody can pretend away their rapture. It is said that breaking up is always hard. But if you are in love with someone else you are not going to be simultaneously sad, not really. You may feel weighed down by guilt and the complications in prospect, you can suffer with the other party. But your love is total, even totalitarian. It envelops everything you do and think, hence its power to inflict damage.

  Ester arranged to meet Hugo for the interview the following Sunday at one o’clock.

  Sunday was a gre
y, damp, raw day with half-closed eyes. It was almost 1 p.m. and she was standing in one of the streets that intersected his own, waiting for the moment when she could ring at his door. She was calm at the prospect of the encounter. Concentrated discussion of real things for several hours was something at which she could not fail. Her only vague worry was the thought of missing out on the future in which her desire was already nesting.

  She realized she was starving and bought a vegetarian hot dog at the kiosk outside Hotel Mornington in Nybrogatan. She finished eating it on the stroke of one. She waited for a further two minutes. Crossed into his street and walked along to his studio. Rang the doorbell. He opened the door. Gave her a clumsy hug, his gaze shifting uneasily. A new, thin-skinned and slightly shamefaced introspection had penetrated his usual good-natured joviality. The easy-going demeanour of old had deserted him. It was the first time they met each other alone and in his hung-over eyes there was a hazy awareness that anything they were about to undertake would have consequences.

  She registered that his underpants appeared to be of the tighter-fitting type. They each took a chair at the big, solid desk covered in papers and books, switched on the tape recorder and started.

  There were many who considered him obsessed with morality in his work, she ventured cautiously, to test the ground and get things going. Or perhaps by human beings and human nature, archetypal human behaviour?

  That was the way he would prefer to describe it, he said, apparently appreciating the observation. Obsessed with humanity per se, yes. But obsessed was too negative a word, it was more a case of a detailed interest. The individual differences between people were only of interest to him for the light they shed on the humanity of human beings, which was what he was seeking. He sought the sign for the thing, as in Plato’s world of ideas. The human being as a human being. The chair as a chair, the body of all bodies.

  This made him hopelessly passé in the eyes of those parts of the intelligentsia that had long since abandoned all forms of universality and human nature, Ester pointed out. The human of all humans could not be designated, they said, without turning out to be a white, European, middle-class man. The chair of all chairs did not exist because it was Western and from a particular era. And the body he spoke of was proto-fascist.

  He passed no comment on this but said that the best way of seeking truth, in both art and science, was to force yourself to see things anew, as they were, pared to the bone, and by never assuming them or their forms to be self-evident. If you wanted to observe the movements of a human being, you should look at the skeleton. If you wanted to observe oppression, you should seek out the formula for oppression; any variations were only there to confuse your eyes and everything emanated from a single original phenomenon, both people and things.

  Ester said that she entirely shared this view of the unifying principles of existence, the basic structure for everything to exist. The question was precisely how much notice to take of the critique of it.

  Ester knew that Hugo was more concerned with how he wanted to come across to the readers than with worrying about whether she shared his view, and it was right that he should be. The fact that she had a secondary agenda for the conversation did not mean he had to. She would be patient and play a long game.

  Ester changed tack and asked what he based his morality in, whether he judged actions in terms of consequences or principles. He did not seem to understand the question, upon which she explained that she sometimes reflected on whether we are in fact not all to some extent utilitarians, that is consequentialists, that is, judged things in terms of outcome, even when we claimed to be applying principles.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked sharply, with an air of irritation. ‘There’s no contradiction there, is there?’

  Ester felt nervous but decided it would be more embarrassing to relinquish her argument than to see it through.

  ‘A consequentialist,’ she said, ‘is obliged to be against democracy if it turns out to have worse consequences than dictatorship. For her, there can be no intrinsic value in anything other than maximum well-being, whereas for the rights-based ethicist, intrinsic value is the only orientation point. The intrinsic value of freedom and autonomy.’

  After every sentence she paused for a moment, but no response came.

  ‘What the rights-based ethicist then has to endure is the thought that her stance could have worse consequences than other stances, whilst still standing by and being able to justify the principle of the individual’s freedom and autonomy.’

  Hugo’s face was expressionless except for a vague questioning look. Even absence of expression is an expression, noted Ester.

  ‘So how does the rights-based ethicist deal with that?’ she ploughed on, regretting the whole digression. ‘Isn’t it still the case that in the long run, the rights-based ethicist believes that the autonomy of the individual is the only thing that can produce acceptable consequences? And thus inevitably lands up in consequentialism, a form of rule utilitarianism?’

  Hugo, his hands on the arms of his chair, rocked thoughtfully back and forth.

  ‘In the long run we’re all dead, as Keynes put it,’ he said.

  ‘And how do intrinsic values and principles arise in any case?’ said Ester. ‘That is, those things which the utilitarian shuns but on which the rights ethicist bases her whole approach? Isn’t it of necessity, by comparison with alternatives, presumed to be worse? But worse compared to what? Surely it has to be the outcome, entirely discounted by the rights-based ethicist, that is the point of comparison?’

  Hugo’s eyes had started to wander. He said:

  ‘When they asked Zhou Enlai about the effects of the French Revolution almost two hundred years after it happened, do you know what his answer was? “Too early to say.” Isn’t that wonderful? “Too early to say.” ’

  Hugo gave a sudden laugh. It was not of the inclusive variety.

  ‘But with perspectives that long we’re all dead, as you say,’ said Ester.

  ‘I’m an artist,’ said Hugo. ‘There’s a morality in aesthetics too.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  He said: ‘Aesthetics is a moral act.’

  She said: ‘What does that mean?’

  He said: ‘It means that aesthetics, art per se, has revolutionary power.’

  She said: ‘Regardless of content?’

  He said: ‘If it hasn’t, then it’s not art.’

  She said: ‘So is that a definition?’

  He nodded. She asked what the rest of it was, then, the stuff which was called art but wasn’t, because it lacked revolutionary power.

  He said: ‘Crafts. Or rubbish.’

  They moved on to talk about details of his work. She toned down the subject of the interview, I and You, as his answers turned out to consist mainly of impenetrable quotations or accounts of Buber. When they ranged more widely Hugo expounded on his text each time as though no question had been asked, and each time he appropriated the wording of the question as his own. Ester got the feeling she was providing the words for what he was engaged in and who he was, but that he simultaneously believed he was the one thinking them.

  After three hours she thought she had what she needed to put together an article and turned off the tape recorder. Her head felt really tired and she looked at her watch. It was too early for dinner.

  They sat and rested for a while and chatted of other things, small talk about a lovely violin that hung on his wall and about what was going on in the street below, which they observed as they got to their feet and stood beside each other at the window. She craved his body. She happened to mention that her own relationship had come to an end and that she was living with her mother while waiting for a flat. He fiddled with his paper clips and looked as though he wanted to suggest something. Ester said she planned not to start writing the article until first thing the following morning when her brain felt refreshed. Now it was jaded and tired.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ asked Hugo.
r />   ‘Yes.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I only had a hot dog for lunch, just before I came here. A vegetarian one from the hot-dog kiosk down by the hotel.’

  ‘They have good hot dogs there.’

  ‘I’ve read about it in the newspaper,’ said Ester. ‘It’s quite famous, isn’t it?’

  ‘But I don’t eat much in the way of hot dogs. Do you?’

  ‘No. I hardly ever eat hot dogs.’

  ‘So there’s such a thing as a vegetarian hot dog? I had no idea. What are they made of?’

  ‘Vegetable matter, processed and compressed into a skin. It’s not exactly healthy but perhaps better than meat.’

  ‘Nutritionally?’

  ‘Yes. And morally.’

  ‘Better in utilitarian terms?’ he said and gave a warm, gentle laugh. ‘Or from a rights-based ethical standpoint?’

  So he had been paying attention to what she said, after all.

  ‘I’ve taken up jogging again,’ he said. ‘This past week. But I immediately started to feel a strain in the inside of my knee.’

  Ester thought he must have started jogging because he had noticed her looking at his body and loving him.

  ‘It could be your meniscus. Can I feel it?’

  He extended his knee and she prodded it for a long time.

  ‘A few years ago I could jog pretty well. I’d like to start again. Perhaps we could jog together?’

  ‘As long as this isn’t some kind of injury.’

  ‘But you’re sure to run faster than I do.’

  ‘We’ll decide together how fast we’re going to run,’ said Ester.

  He bent and stretched his leg a few times and said:

  ‘Mmm, aha, yes. So you don’t eat many frankfurters. What do you eat, then?’

  ‘Plants, mostly.’

  ‘Plants?’

  ‘And a prawn every now and then.’

  ‘Why plants?’

  ‘Because I can’t find any way to defend the eating of conscious life forms. And it may also prolong our lives.’

  ‘How long do you want to live?’