In order to seem like a living human being she made an effort to do things, tried to engage in some activity.
She went to Paris.
A good friend of hers had been there for six months for work, and persuaded her to make the trip to revive her spirits and give her something more pleasant to think about. (Interestingly, in general linguistic perception a “good friend” counts as more distant than a basic “friend,” just as an “older person” is younger than an old one. This was one of those good friends. More than an acquaintance yet not close.)
She checked into the New Hotel by the Gare du Nord, a claustrophobic little establishment which in case of fire would barely have managed to evacuate its cockroaches. She was allotted a tiny room on the second floor with dust in the corners and a plastic cover on the mattress. The thought of the bodily encounters that had necessitated this arrangement was painful, but no worse than all the other things hacking and stabbing at her internal organs with tools both blunt and sharp. She chewed endlessly over what had happened, with herself and with anyone who would listen, going through what she could have done differently at such and such a time or on such and such an occasion, if only she had known things would turn out as they had. Not one single step from the moment she and Hugo went to bed together would she have taken in the same way, had she known.
One mistake perplexed her. She could not have avoided it because it arose from a judgment and an evaluation that she could not consider wrong. The fact that anger was forbidden in love was something unknown to her. She could not conceive that a single outburst of anger, the one she had sent as a text message on the Saturday evening after the film, on finding his premises in darkness, was sufficient to ruin everything. On the contrary, she thought anger was permitted precisely when you were close to each other.
And perhaps she was right that this was a universally accepted notion, she thought. And therefore wrong in her perception of their closeness.
The closeness that makes anger permissible was the closeness he did not want to have with her.
But why did he want to be physically intimate with her if he did not want to be close? And why those long, intense conversations over the preceding months?
She did not understand.
She thought that if she were ever to write a work of poetry about this she would call it: Don’t Understand.
She had had friendships that had not withstood anger. They had not been durable, close or loving enough, not of the type in which fully expressed disappointment was an option; they had lacked the emotional structure to support confrontation. She suspected that this was how their relationship had been for him. He was not attached enough to her to put up with the least amount of bother.
Every morning in her dreary hotel in Paris she made a point of rising at seven and went down to eat breakfast before writing in her room for two hours. She set her alarm and when it rang she stopped work abruptly. Then she went out and walked, moving aimlessly through the city, taking in the atmosphere and the smells. When her legs got tired she went to sit in a cafe and read. For a few minutes here and there it felt as if she was enjoying life and was an individual being who could live without symbiosis. For the rest of the time she was vividly aware that she barely had a life. In those minutes of independence, euphoric in comparison with her general mental state of constant pain, the euphoria made her want to send him a text message to show how independent she was, and happy, how their relationship was based on equality of friendship and how she had accepted things and moved on to new, intrepid goals. She wanted to inform him that she was sitting in a Parisian cafe savoring life and did not need anyone else for mental stimulation because she was strong, thirsty for knowledge, and entirely autonomous.
One day she gave in to the temptation and sent a text. She imagined that the spiritual fellowship she felt inside her was real, and thus mutual. There was no answer, so even those tiny fragments of independence were ruined and the rest of the week was spoilt. Why could she not grasp that the abysmal anguish of an unanswered text was the same every time and the only way to avoid it was not to send any? It was hope that got her into such a mess, deadening the memory of the shame and anguish and making her take a chance on it all being different this time.
In the evenings she met up with her good friend. They went out for dinner but the good friend did not understand the grief of unrequited love. She thought an unhappy person must be all right if said person produced a laugh or two in the course of an evening. No one seriously burdened down by life could laugh, thought the good friend, who had seen documentaries about chronically depressed people who let their kitchens fester and were given electric shocks. They never laughed. After a disappointment you had to try to move on and remember how well off you were compared to those who were really suffering, people with cancer, the paralyzed, the starving and those forced into prostitution. The good friend was not up to carrying others’ burdens and wanted everything to be normal so she could take up some space in the conversation for her own troubles and questions without feeling guilty.
After a few evenings they no longer felt like meeting so they saved each other’s faces by deciding, wordlessly, discreetly and in total unanimity, to dine alone.
Paris was full of smells and fragrances: dirt and buttery pastries, exhaust fumes and perfumes. Day followed day, walk followed walk, impression followed impression and all the while Ester knew it to be a pointless trip. She took in the slender, dark-green metal railings between the sidewalks and the traffic, the pale-green men who kept the streets clean, all the distinctively Parisian things that she had always loved, and the street corners with their brasseries. Coming to Paris didn’t help. Nothing helped if you still had yourself with you.
On her penultimate evening she went out to buy a bottle of wine to go with the takeaway food she planned to eat in her hotel room in front of the television. On the way to the shop, her mobile rang. It was half past seven. She fished the phone out of her pocket and saw Hugo’s name on the display. There it was, plain and clear, Hugo Rask. She stopped in midstep, stood still and answered with her first name and surname, in a stifled voice. A person with only a first name is sitting there in a flutter, waiting for the world, she thought. First name and surname on the other hand had gravitas, signaled supremacy and self-respect. First name and surname was not waiting pathetically by the phone but was engrossed in something of their own, fully occupied. Surname only would have been even better but, in this context, distancing in such a studied fashion that it would almost sound like a joke. He would be able to see through it.
She let the phone ring several times before answering and said her first name and surname in a calm, measured tone, then waited to hear his voice. In her ear canals she could hear her heartbeat, but on the line, no one. She could hear the murmur of voices and identified his among them, but none of the voices was talking to her. They were chatting during a break in their work. Someone laughed and someone put down a wine glass on a smooth surface, to judge by the sound an emptied glass and the bar counter in his studio. Was it Eva-Stina’s, the one whose name he found hard to remember?
Ester said hello, loudly. After five hellos she stopped. It was at about that point, she sensed, that it could start to seem desperate. Her desperation being real, she was extra-sensitive to the ways desperation could be expressed.
The murmur continued. Receiving calls from Sweden was not free of charge and she would soon have to hang up.
“Hello,” she called, one last time. “Hello.”
When his name had come up on the display, all hope rushed back, and now she could not rid herself of it. It could not be the case, she argued, that feelings for another person evaporated from one day to the next, and he must have had feelings, otherwise he would not have invested all that time in spending those hours with her. The clear logic of this made it very easy to mobilize hope. All night long she hoped with her whole body, sleeping very little.
The next day was her last one in Paris. She wrote and went out for a walk, sticking to her usual schedule, but breathed in no scents and saw no city. She was consumed by the worry of not knowing whether he had tried to make contact the evening before and had then lost his nerve, or what else it could be. Was he making fun of her? Did he want to make her suffer? For what possible reason?
By the evening she could stand it no longer and called him. The weight that had been constricting her lungs for weeks vanished the moment he answered. He chose to answer, even though he could see it was her. His voice was guarded but when she said she was calling from France it became as soft, warm and enveloping as it had been in their first three months. France was a long way away, as distant as the strangers to whom he was always so warm, and there was no need for him to defend himself.
“You rang me yesterday,” she said, rapt and anxious.
“Did I?” he said amiably.
“Yesterday evening.”
“That’s odd.”
“I was on my way to the shop to buy a bottle of wine for my evening meal. I was walking along the sidewalk in the middle of Paris when you rang. I’m staying near the Gare du Nord. It must have been about half past seven. But maybe it was by accident?”
“It must have dialed the number itself, in my pocket.”
“There was nobody on the line when I answered.”
They both laughed awkwardly.
You’ve known this for several days now, she thought, I sent you a text from here on Wednesday, which you didn’t answer.
“So it dialed by itself in your pocket?” she said.
“It’s always in my pocket. A key must have activated itself when I leant against something.”
“Against the counter in the kitchen.”
“Possibly. Yes, could well have been.”
“You get that sort of thing with these modern devices,” she said.
“Yes, you certainly do,” he said.
“But wasn’t it strange that it rang me, of all people? Almost like a sign.”
His laugh was embarrassed now. It generally was, in fact. Ester thought he must find his own laughter uncomfortable because laughter was intimate.
“Maybe your phone’s missing me and all those wonderful conversations it listened in on,” she said.
Scornful laughter wasn’t intimate, her train of thought continued, but then it wasn’t really proper laughter. It merely mimicked the sound and muscle movements of laughter to parasitize the genuine article.
The great expanses of silence in the conversation made her thoughts go bouncing off in various directions.
“Do you remember how lovely it was together? When we talked and talked.”
“Is it all right in France?” he said.
“Yes, fine. Great. Really interesting.”
“France is good,” he said. “The native land of cheese and wine. And true intellectualism.”
“Paris is always Paris, of course,” she said, feeling the ghastly platitude to be emblematic of their shipwrecked liaison.
“Yes indeed.”
“I’ve been walking all round the city, soaking up the atmosphere. There’s nowhere like it.”
“Sounds splendid.”
“It’s spring here. In the capital of love.”
“I can imagine. I mean to say, it’s March already. How time flies.”
“Yes. Or creeps by. Anyway, that was all. I just wanted to check whether you rang me yesterday for any particular reason.”
“No. As I said. It must have been an accident.”
“That’s a pity.”
She considered the conversation closed and had removed the telephone from her ear when she heard his voice again:
“Maybe speak when you’re back, then.”
She put the phone back again.
“What did you say?”
“Maybe speak when you’re back, then.”
“Yes? Yes! Shall we? Do let’s!”
“OK, we’ll do that,” he said. “Have a nice time until then.”
After those small, nonchalant words from his lips she went weightlessly out into the Paris evening, loved every scent and felt in sympathy with every person she saw. She got down to Shakespeare and Company just before they closed and bought a couple of books, one by Hannah Arendt and the other by Derek Parfit, and took an internal decision to work harder, resume her self-discipline, her reading and her efforts to understand how the world fitted together.
She chatted away in bad French to the bookshop assistant while she was paying, and nothing would have the power to annoy her ever again.