Wait blink, p.4
Wait, Blink, page 4
* * *
He went up to her during the break, even though he wouldn’t normally dare, and said, with dry mouth and sweating brow, that she should perhaps wipe off the mustache. What mustache? she asked, and looked at him, confused, and she noticed how beautiful he was, this fumbling student, and what incredible eyes he had. That one, he said, and pointed at the whiteboard pen smudges left on her upper lip by her two fingers. He hadn’t meant to touch her lip. But he did, with his fingertip. And in that fingertip-touching moment, a curious bond was created between them. Or, he believed a curious bond was created. He believed it for the six months that the student and lecturer met for sex and conversations in tutorial rooms and other out-of-the-way places, and in fact continued to believe it, even after the female lecturer said to him, “For me, it’s over,” then picked up her bag and left. As far as she was concerned, the fascination had waned, she’d moved on. And in any case, she was forty, and didn’t have time to get involved in a deep relationship; her great love was literature, a conclusion she’d reached over time, with some degree of suffering, but of which she was absolutely convinced. But it was his conviction as well! Love, literature. She neglected to say that his nervousness was starting to annoy her, the fact that he sometimes thought things would explode even though he knew they wouldn’t, the constant soul-searching and fumbling, that he never made any suggestions about what they should do, that he obviously worshipped her—all of which she found problematic: in short, she’d simply had enough. He’d called a brilliant quote from Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus after her when she picked up her bag, put it over her shoulder, and walked down the corridor, having said what she had to say about their relationship: There are no frontiers between the disciplines that man sets himself for understanding and loving. They interlock, and the same anxiety merges them! but: no response. Viggo stood in the corridor and felt his insides being torn to shreds, she was his first and only love, he’d finally found solidarity, an internal solidarity. But he understood well enough, without her having to say it. She’d had enough of him. His trembling wool. He had to hide his face in his beautiful, but oh so useless, hands.
* * *
Viggo is now standing by his grandmother’s grave, and he looks at his hands as the coffin is lowered into the ground. Through me [you pass] into eternal pain! pops into his mind. Those brackets, by the way, have been added to show that he’s remembering the quote incorrectly, but that we have remembered it correctly, and we wanted to point out the discrepancy: the brackets don’t appear in his mind, no, he just thinks it all, bracket-free, accidentally replacing “you pass,” as the line should read, with it passes. But: no, no, he mustn’t think that, Grandma’s not going to hell, why did that quote have to pop up right now? The quote, which is engraved on the gates of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, his favorite work other than Kafka’s The Castle, has been on Viggo’s mind all day. He read it very early this morning, when he was sitting on the plane waiting for it to take off and take him home, to the funeral, he sat there and read the inscription written in capital letters as the throbbing of the engine intensified: THROUGH ME [YOU PASS] INTO ETERNAL PAIN! He snapped the book shut. He thought: Is it symbolic? Is it the plane? Is he going to pass into eternal pain? Is the plane going to crash? Or is it he himself that’s the problem, the self of himself, is that the gate to hell?
* * *
Because what had he done, following the unhappy ending of his relationship with the female lecturer with a razor mind? He had partied, he who never drank. One day three weeks ago, the day after the female lecturer had said that it was over, he had bumped into St åle, the friendly thug from his childhood, down by the law school in the center of town, and St åle had shouted fuck, man, is that you! And Viggo had replied in his usual awkward way yes it (and then mumbled “is” as quietly as he could, since he’d realized that he should have stopped at “yes” and that instead of “yes,” he should really have said “yeah”). And then they had hugged each other, or rather, St åle had embraced Viggo, and Viggo had given St åle a couple of careful pats on the back. Fuck, man, St åle said again, after all these years, what are you up to? What are you doing in Oslo? I thought you’d end up as a librarian and part-time shepherd. I’m studying literature, Viggo said. Fuck, man, St åle said, and laughed out loud, of course you’re studying literature. St åle was studying economics at the business school, and thanks to this chance meeting of these two childhood conspirators at Universitetsplassen, Viggo had ended up in the random circle that always surrounded St åle. Only this time he didn’t sit in the bike shed. We should catch up, St åle said, let’s go out this evening, we have to! Fuck, man! And Viggo simply thought, with a kind of universally resigned sigh: why not. Why not, given the state of things?
* * *
And as he stands at his grandmother’s grave, looking at his hands, the past three weeks of blurred St åle chaos slowly dissipate, the way that mud in water sinks and settles. The mud: he’d partied with St åle for three weeks. He had drunk drinks that he hadn’t even known existed. He had pulled small umbrellas out of olives. He had talked to people he’d never have believed he would talk to. He had danced on the dance floor, even though he realized that he didn’t dance very well and people were looking at him and laughing, and he had thought, why not, why not! Why not live fast and loose and unwind out of oneself? He had tried as best he could, to unwind out of himself. And then his grandma died. As though the universe was telling him: everything that is you is now dying. Through me, he thinks, you pass into eternal pain. That was what he’d done! With his relationship with the female lecturer and all the partying afterward, he’d gone through the gates of hell. He’d not been true to himself. In fact, Dante’s words didn’t allude to the gates of hell at all, Viggo thinks to himself as he stands there in front of the grave. They allude to one’s own actions. The me in this. What is the me in him? The me in him was the trembling. The trembling that made him fall for the lecturer, the trembling that made him agree to party with St åle, the pathetic attempt to unwind himself out of his shell. But is a person’s trembling enough to cast them into hell? Viggo wonders as he watches the coffin disappear into the ground. Can a person not tremble without being eternally damned?
7
And now we hear a flapping sound: it’s Sigrid, she sits there pulling her lower lip down, then releasing it so it slaps against the upper lip, just as Sofia Coppola says “We’re going to the production office” to the man who’s filming her for the film about making Lost in Translation. We see Sofia Coppola walk toward a building and go up some steps at the same time that we hear the sound of Sigrid’s bottom lip slapping against her top lip. Sigrid is watching the behind-the-scenes documentary about Lost in Translation, she’s looking for the scene where Charlotte wanders around the hotel room in an oversized man’s shirt. Despite the oversized man’s shirt, she loves this film. Magnus also loves the film. She sometimes wonders if it’s Scarlett Johansson, the actress who plays Charlotte, that Magnus loves and not the film itself and then she feels utterly demoralized, because she’s nothing like Scarlett Johansson. Her breasts, for example, aren’t half as big. Not even a fifth. When they first started to grow, she would stand in the shower and gaze at her tiny breasts and look forward to them getting bigger, but they never did. It was one of the biggest disappointments in Sigrid’s life. She stood in the shower as a thirteen-year-old, as a fourteen-year-old, as a fifteen-year-old, as a sixteen-year-old, as a seventeen-year-old, and thought: when I’m eighteen, they’ll be bigger than they are now. But when she stood in the shower as an eighteen-year-old, her breasts were just as small as they had been when she was thirteen. There was nothing she could do but accept it! She’s told Magnus about it. And now she’s sitting there flapping her bottom lip against her top lip as she watches the film about making Lost in Translation because she thinks that Sofia Coppola might say something about the choice of costumes for the film in general, and more specifically: about the oversized man’s shirt, but instead is astonished to discover that Sofia Coppola is very like the main character in her own film, except that Sofia Coppola is even more vague and whimsical, and she doesn’t have such big breasts as Scarlett, they might even be smaller than Sigrid’s (which pleases Sigrid intensely). But Sigrid thinks that having such tiny vanishing tits actually suits her really well, as there’s something ethereal about Sofia Coppola. When she talks, the sound barely manages to carry through her lips and past her big teeth, and when she walks, it’s like she glides rather than walks. The most recent thing that Sigrid has heard about Sofia Coppola is that she’s pregnant, and she wonders how it’s possible for a pregnant woman to glide sublimely across the floor! Here on the computer screen in front of her, however, Sofia Coppola is sitting up thin as a straight line and smiling an ever-so-faint and disarming smile, telling us this is her dream, she almost can’t believe that Bill Murray really is coming today, and she can’t wait to see him, she says, sitting on the bed in a kimono, looking sad. It’s quite incredible how similar Sofia Coppola is to her lead character, they’ve even got almost the same hair, and the clothes she’s wearing are the same muted, almost fading colors. She has to ring Magnus about it, she thinks. No, she has to resist. No, she’s got to call him! No, she must resist.
* * *
Hello, Magnus says, she can hear that he’s walking somewhere outside, with cars whizzing by. Hello, Sigrid says. How’s things? she asks. You know, Magnus says. Did you have a good time in Prague? she asks. Yeah, Magnus says. I’m watching a film about the making of Lost in Translation, Sigrid tells him, and do you know what, Sofia Coppola is just like Scarlett! Or perhaps not physically, because her breasts aren’t as big. She’s actually got quite small—but very nice—breasts. There’s no answer. Hello? Sigrid says. Hello, yes, I’m here, Magnus says. Oh, I thought you’d left me here to talk about Sofia Coppola’s tits on my own. Magnus laughs. But it’s actually quite strange, Sigrid continues, it’s as if she’s directed herself in a way, which is pretty amazing, if for example you think about the opening shot where Charlotte is lying with her back to the camera, and we only see part of her back and her butt down to her knees, and she’s wearing see-through panties, and the title appears in three separate words, first “ Lost,” and then “ in,” over her bum, and then “ Translation,” farther down, and the way they seem to glide onto the screen and then fade and disappear; it’s just like Sofia Coppola! I’m blown away, Sigrid says, to think that even the way the opening credits are used can give a perfect picture of inner life. Mmm, Magnus says. Great, he says. Sigrid collapses back in her chair. He’s not interested! Where are you off to? she asks. I’ve got an audition for the radio orchestra, I’ll call you back later, he says. I’m glad you had a good time in Prague, Sigrid says. Mmm, Magnus replies.
* * *
But it is amazing, Sigrid tries to reason with herself as she sits there feeling cut off and rejected, stupid and geeky and incapable of understanding that other people are interested in different things, and that she should have stopped and tried to work out what that was before she just steamrollered on. But the way the title of the film has been designed is fantastic, and the director’s way of being is fantastic. And the fact that they’re the same. But there’s no point. The only thing she feels now is a paralyzing sense of self. Why does she have to be like that?
* * *
The Belgian literary theorist Paul de Man stretches out his arm from the wall, puts his finger under her chin, and lifts her head. Pah! Sigrid says.
8
Thank you very much, says the host, a man in his fifties in a navy suit and a white shirt. He gives K åre a handshake that’s as heartfelt and firm as he’s learned they should be. And then there’s that slightly awkward pause, as always, when the applause has stopped and you’ve shaken hands, and you have to gather up everything you had with you, your jacket and bag, then leave the stage and the room as you notice that a couple of women in the front row are following you with their eyes. K åre smiles to himself as he emerges into the corridor outside the conference suite. It’s incredible, he thinks, just how unabashed some of these women are. He remembers the time when he was at a similar seminar a few years ago and a woman in the front row sat there licking her lips in a very deliberate manner. That is to say, she kept touching a particular point on her upper lip with her tongue as she stared up at him, and he got hotter and hotter under the collar as he stood there reading. K åre doesn’t even think that, given the situation, she might perhaps have had something wrong with her lip that was irritating her, maybe a crack that she wanted to moisten with her tongue so it didn’t get any deeper, or maybe she was remembering that she’d left her lip balm on the bedside table at home and was feeling a bit desperate because she just couldn’t survive a whole day without lip balm, and so was sitting there wondering where she might get some, whether they’d sell it at a news kiosk or if she’d have to go to the nearest supermarket, if she’d have to use her entire coffee break to go and buy lip balm instead of mingling, and wasn’t listening to what K åre was saying at all, but only keeping her eyes on him out of politeness—K åre simply didn’t consider this possibility, he thought it was outright flirting, good God, she’s flirting with me, he thought, and now he’s standing in the corridor outside the conference suite, thinking how glad he is that he’s changed. If it had been pre-Wanda, there’s no doubt what he would have done with the woman who’d sat there licking her lip.
* * *
But then there was Wanda. He’d seen her at John Dee’s. She was the bass player in an up-and-coming underground band. She looked like she was more than six feet tall as she stood there on the stage, and she had thin black hair with straight bangs cut just above her eyebrows. Sometimes, when she looked up, it was as though she was looking straight up at her bangs, and was observing the audience through her own personal black curtain, her eyes narrow slits. She was wearing a black vest and tight black trousers and had long, muscular arms. She played the bass guitar in the sexiest and most aggressive manner that he’d ever seen anyone play it. He was there with one of the women whose head he’d touched, but then, at the sight of this being with her bass, who played as though she had the same sort of sex drive and aggression and devil-may-care musicality in her as he had in him—albeit a tender devil-may-care attitude—he was unable to concentrate on anything else, and the woman he was with noticed that he wasn’t listening to anything she said, and that his mouth missed the glass when he tried to take a drink of beer, because he was staring at the bassist so intently. The woman he was there with went home. And he just stood unmoving, and thought, as he stared at the bassist: she is the ultimate woman.
* * *
And now it was over. After three years with the ultimate woman. What had gone wrong? K åre walks out of Hotel Norge onto Torgallmenningen, the main square. Bergenites hurry past the statue of Ole Bull, who stands playing his violin on top of a small boulder, with no water around it. It’s an ordinary January morning, and mothers with buggies and strollers, hip-hoppers with pimples and breaking voices, businessmen with open jackets and yellow ties are all making their way to different destinations, at their normal speed. Bergenites, K åre thinks, are not half as well-dressed as Oslo folk. He feels he stands out. He walks over to the record shop to see if they’re open yet, and feels very conspicuous in the cityscape with his down jacket, Adidas shoes, and Skullcandy earphones. He feels that people are staring at him. K åre wonders if perhaps they recognize him from the newspaper; maybe there aren’t that many authors living in Bergen?
9
Linnea is still standing with her sweater in her hands by the window in Copenhagen. She should really get a move on: Robert is sitting in his room waiting. It’s today that she and Robert are going to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek to find the place where her main character is wandering around the Egyptian collection and suddenly meets a man. The film version of G öran, obviously. Who she, the real Linnea, hopes will be standing there, the real version, waiting for her when she comes in. At ten o’clock. On January 10, exactly two years after they first met. Because she, inspired by the films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which thankfully he had never seen, suggested that they shouldn’t have any contact with each other, but that they should come back here in two years’ time and meet again. Admittedly, in the films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy actually meet ten years after their first, breathtaking encounter (they were originally only going to wait a year, but there were complications with a dead grandmother, and suddenly ten years had passed). Linnea thought that waiting ten years was perhaps a bit too long, she couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t meet someone else in that time, and it also struck her that in ten years’ time, G öran would actually be fifty-seven. Which was perhaps a little too old. So she said: maybe in two years’ time we can come back to Copenhagen and see what happens? On January 10 at ten o’clock, two years from now. G öran had smiled and said: maybe. Who knows.
* * *
They had met at the Glyptotek, quite by accident. G öran, a professor in comparative literature at the University of Uppsala (who at this moment is waking up from his dream about the rattling keys), was in Copenhagen to give a lecture on epic poetry, his speciality, but right then was standing in the Glyptotek staring thoughtfully down at two Egyptian mummies lying side by side in a glass display case. She herself had come to Copenhagen in an attempt to throw herself into life, into the world, to feel that she was alive, having broken up with a boyfriend who had had sex with a barmaid two weeks before they were due to get married—but it had to be Europe, because the rest of the world seemed to be alarmingly un-Western, and preferably Scandinavia, as the rest of Europe seemed to be alarmingly un-Scandinavian—and then, suddenly, there she was, wandering around the fantastic displays of ancient art in the Glyptotek, which her mother had said on the phone she simply must visit.
