Читать книгу Integrity - Anna Borgeryd - Страница 22

15

1 PIECE OF DRYER LINT

For the lint opener: Walk up to a woman, stop, wordlessly remove lint (hidden in the palm of your hand) from her clothing, ask, ‘How long has that been there?’, then hand her the piece of lint.

Neil Strauss, ‘The Game’

One evening, as Peter sat eating a sandwich studiously, Vera came in holding a piece of paper full of handwritten notes. She looked deep in thought. She put her notes down and opened the pantry. Peter took the piece of paper and began to read. In the middle were the words ‘Redeeming reproduction’ with a circle around them. Around that were lines to other words, which were also surrounded by lines to still more words and sentences.

‘What is this?’

She started when she saw him. Peter took that as a good sign.

‘It’s my mind map,’ she answered and opened a cupboard. Peter looked at the swarm of notes and found something interesting at the bottom left of the page.

‘Okay. What have you discovered that can destroy all of Sweden, or wait, the whole planet?’ A peculiar nervousness made him sound more teasing than he had meant.

Vera had taken out a bowl and a spoon, crisp flat-bread, milk and homemade lingonberry jelly. She crumbled the flat-bread into small pieces in the bowl. ‘I don’t claim to have discovered the undervaluing of reproduction.’ She dropped dollops of lingonberry jelly on the pieces of flat-bread. When she had poured milk into the bowl, she looked up at Peter.

‘But what do you have to say about a career as an unpaid stay-at-home dad? And as long as you’re home, you may as well take care of your old, sick father-in-law as well?’

Are you suggesting that I should stay home with our kids? He was only 24 years old and, sure, he had always thought that he wanted a couple of kids, some time in the infinitely distant future, after 30. But now Peter was taken by surprise by an unexpected feeling – he found himself strangely attracted to the idea. He felt an impulse to ask the question aloud, but realized that the possibility of having children together was not the right place to begin.

She put the milk in the refrigerator again and closed the door. She walked right towards him, and he felt his pulse quickening. For no sensible reason, he stood up, holding the piece of paper, taking advantage of the fact that he was bigger and stronger. Vera tried to reach her notes a couple of times, and he noticed that she smelled of something mild, good – some soap or other. Peter wanted to make it last longer, but Vera seemed irritated.

‘But I guess you have never taken care of anybody in your whole life?’

Of course I have! Peter thought, but, strangely enough, he could not come up with a single good example. She collected herself and stepped away from him:

‘This is ridiculous. I’m not going climb all over you.’

It sounded like a statement of intent. As she took her snack and left, she nodded towards her carefully written notes, ‘But those are really important. Give them back when you are finished playing.’

Peter stared after her at a loss as she walked away, then at the flat-bread and lingonberry jelly that she had left behind. He took a bit of the bread, dipped it into the jelly and put it in his mouth.

The taste sensation was new and unexpectedly complex; the lingon was tartly sweet, but the crispy bread was rich and a little salty. Remarkable.

He still hadn’t managed to communicate sensibly with Vera, and he didn’t know what he should be doing differently.

She didn’t seem at all interested in acknowledging what had happened last week. It was true that she had nicer clothes now, but she had gone back to wearing her glasses and putting her hair in a braid. It irritated him; in the same way that it annoyed him if he was served cold food at a restaurant – here was someone who wouldn’t pull themselves together and do their job. Looking as good as you possibly could was something he considered almost a duty. And he expected it, particularly from girls. All women in his vicinity, except his mother when she was depressed, went to considerable trouble when it came to their appearance. He suspected some of the results were real triumphs of effort. Like Sandra, for example. He knew that she had hair extensions, a spray-on tan and probably a new nose. And there were other things that he experienced as look but don’t touch – he remembered well the day that she didn’t move her mouth at all, because she had just had her lips done. And she also had the best-looking silicon breasts that he had ever been up close with; they managed to be unbelievable in a sufficiently believable way. He had noticed that few men, and not many women either, failed to notice Sandra, a magnificent five feet 10 in height. It was a triumph of effort, but she looked like glamor model Victoria Silvstedt, at least at a distance.

He sat down and pondered the complicated notes. One thing was clear; Vera was damned serious about her studies. It was like a code, and he realized after a while that the smallest, most code-like notes were references to pages in books. He didn’t recognize any of them from when he took the introductory course: Green Economics, Global Women, State of the World.

The riddle that was Vera Lundberg seemed more complicated the closer he looked.

It was Friday night and Peter was with Matt at the big partying place downtown. It looked like it was going to be packed, because it was teeming with people even though it wasn’t yet 11 o’clock. Matt had been so highly motivated to make contact with someone of the opposite sex that he had even brought some dryer lint, so he could pull a ‘lint opener’ from the pick-up manual. With Peter’s encouragement and not a little nervousness, he had chosen a girl he thought looked nice – a cute girl with short hair.

A little shakily, he approached the chosen one and pretended to remove the lint from her back. He showed it to her: ‘Here, trash from your back… ehhh.’ He peered at her shyly from under his protruding eyebrows.

She turned matter-of-factly towards Matt and took it:

‘Oh, um. Thanks.’

Then she turned to the guy on her other side, held out the ball of lint accusingly and chewed him out for ‘never cleaning the lint’ out of their dryer.

Bollocks! There was nothing about that in the pick-up manual.

Matt returned to the bar and Peter kindly passed him a beer.

‘Listen… no big deal. We all get rejected sometimes.’

‘Seriously. I don’t believe you.’ The Brit shook his head and looked almost sorrowfully at him. ‘You’re the kind of guy who can get any girl he wants.’

Peter smiled at the flattery and took a swallow of beer. That isn’t entirely unlikely, in fact. Then Peter darkened a little. There were actually drawbacks to that too. Like with Linda yesterday, after she had seen him with Sandra. She had called and bombarded him: she had cried and screamed; she had apparently not understood that Peter hadn’t promised anything. She had thought that she was his girlfriend. He didn’t tell Matt that Linda had ‘ended it’ because he’d been ‘unfaithful with that plastic bimbo’.

‘Hey, Peter!’ Matt blurted out, already in a better mood. ‘I know – let’s make a bet! The next girl who comes through the door! Check it out, check it…’ He made a dramatic noise like the filmmakers used in Jaws. ‘HER!’

It was Vera who came in. Completely unexpectedly. Peter had been out at least once a week all fall, and he had never seen her out before. She was in the company of Cissi and moved carefully through the throng of people. Her hair was loose and she was wearing jeans and an ivory blouse with brown embroidery that showed off her collarbones. Peter’s pulse quickened. Matt had also discovered that Exhibit A, the chosen guinea pig, was their dormitory mate, and he smiled.

‘Oh, no, that doesn’t count. That’s Vera. I stand corrected. Not all of them prefer you, you know. You can get any girl you want, except Vera. She thinks you’re a… Oh, what was it? Spaller?’ He looked questioningly at Peter as he used the strange word.

Peter had to exercise enormous concentration to hear Matt, but the last part of what he said was drowned out by the increasingly loud music.

‘What? What did you say?’ shouted Peter.

Matt turned toward his friend and repeated himself slowly and clearly directly into Peter’s ear: ‘Any girl you want, except Vera!’

Matt’s yelling hurt his ear, and Peter shuddered.

‘Did Vera tell you what she thinks of me?’

Matt nodded.

‘But what did you say she said? ‘Sprawler’?’

‘No. Spaller,’ said Matt in his broad Sheffield accent.

‘Spaller? What does that mean?’

‘You tell me – you’re the one who’s Swedish!’

Now Matt’s attention shifted to the right. An interesting blonde was approaching. Peter saw Matt summon up the courage to try again.

‘Hi! Fancy meeting you here!’ said Matt, using the Swedish verb stöta på.

The girl stared at Matt before she quickly fled to another part of the bar.

‘Whoops!’ an involuntary grin broke out on Peter’s face. ‘You need to put the accent on the little word – stöta på – because then it means, like, “bump into”, otherwise it means… uh, “hit on”.’ He touched Matt on the arm in a gesture of brotherly affection, and then went off to see where Vera was.

The sorrowful Englishman remained alone at the bar, mumbling down into his glass. ‘Stöta på not stöta på? God, they’re picky.’

For some reason it felt like Vera kept slipping away from him. She wasn’t like other women, who seemed to be drawn to him. That made the challenge even greater and something like a competitive streak had awoken inside him. But he knew a place where she would be forced to stay for hours, where they would ‘meet the network in a suitably formal context’, as Sturesson had expressed it when he informed him that Tomas Lern preferred not to join the project, and that it was splendid that Peter could help out on such short notice. Peter had looked for her during the graduation ceremony, had hoped to sit near her, but he had realized too late that she had skipped that part. To absolutely no purpose, Peter had suffered through four hours of ‘Take the ring… Take the hat… Farewell,’ painfully struggling against drowsiness as a soporific number of strangers proudly wed themselves to Knowledge.

But then the evening came. He saw her at once in the sea of buzzing people in party clothes. Vera had hatched like a butterfly when she took off her dark coat and revealed her slim arms and a shimmering, dark green, full-length dress. Boredom and drowsiness disappeared. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad evening after all?

He followed her at a distance. The messy bohemian hairstyle exposed her small, protruding, slightly pointed ears. At the sides, her dark hair was pinned up with white flowers, while other curls fell untamed between her girlish shoulder blades. Vera found Cissi in the crowd, took a small flat-bread canapé and a glass of champagne spiked with cloudberry liquor. Cissi looked good this evening, Peter noted as he helped himself to food further down the buffet. She had done something unusual with her red hair, and she was wearing a gold dress befitting a film star.

Like most of the other young men in the room, Peter was in a black suit and tie. It was that or white tie and tails for the men. When Peter saw Sturesson and Sparre on the other side of the hors d’oeuvre buffet, chatting with other men, he thought of a gaggle of penguins whose only defining features were their different sizes and forms. Sparre was the tall, slightly stooped, darkly sharp-eyed one. Åke Sturesson was the greying, irascible terrier. He didn’t know the others. Peter’s gaze fastened on the small, round, reclining man with spiky strands of hair behind his ears – there was something vaguely familiar about him.

Åke caught sight of Peter and waved him over; he was in the middle of an enthusiastic toast, ‘…and the making of history. Cheers to a ground-breaking research project on Future Welfare and Prosperity!’ Sturesson carefully looked all the penguins, and finally Peter as well, in the eye before taking a swallow of the cloudberry champagne. This was followed by a similar round of small nods in the direction of each individual in turn.

Peter felt like a zoologist observing the strange behavior of an exotic bird, and a small smile crossed his face as he thought of Kalle. Then Sturesson spoke again, in English.

‘And this, gentlemen, is young Peter Stavenius, the only son of Lennart Stavenius, the famous entrepreneur in the travel… yes, yes.’ He broke off when the men nodded. The round one with the plumes of hair offered him a meaty hand.

‘Morley, Anthony Morley.’

Sturesson started listing all of Morley’s accomplishments. Peter nodded, but realized with embarrassment that the obviously world-renowned academic probably seemed familiar to him only because he had seen that kind of Antarctic seabird in some animated film. Sturesson continued in English for Morley’s benefit.

‘I’m actually an old friend of the family. Lennart and I were at Stockholm’s School of Economics, class of ’76!’

Peter suddenly realized that Åke Sturesson had actually visited them at home in Stockholm about 10 years ago. When we were still a family, popped into Peter’s head.

Sturesson continued absentmindedly: ‘Yes, I almost forgot, we have the girls too. Come, come.’ He took his gaggle of penguins with him, over to Cissi and Vera, who had now been joined by Lilian, the department secretary. Peter’s eyes were drawn like a magnet to Vera. She was not good-looking in a way he could handle, like Cissi and so many others this evening. She was beautiful in an important and disquieting way. Different, like a mythical being. When he moved towards her, he suddenly felt that she reminded him of someone or something that he had been attracted to since he was a teenager.

The mythical being looked serious when they formally shook hands. Her handshake was pleasurable and the memory of the cool, strong softness remained in his hand. Perhaps she’s cold? He smothered a sudden impulse to keep hold of her and warm her up.