January came to an end. People and things advanced through the winter. One weekend in February she was going to another party. She felt little enthusiasm for the event and therefore set off late. In the hall in her shoes, hat and coat she observed with some surprise that her hand was reaching out for a DVD and putting it in her bag. It was a film that had been lying about at home, one that she had borrowed from Hugo exactly a year ago after one of their long sessions at the restaurant near his studio.

Instead of walking to the stop for the part of town where the party was, her legs walked her to the stop for the number 1 bus at the corner of Fleminggatan and Sankt Eriksgatan. She would just return the DVD. She could walk on to the party from there. The film was Gaslight. He had said how marvelous it was and wanted her to see it so they could discuss it afterward. She watched it twice, straight through, so she would be really well prepared with interesting reflections, but the opportunity never arose because very soon after that they went to bed and stopped talking.

She recalled the moment when their warm fingertips met as the film exchanged hands, and the spark that it generated.

She’d have to give it back sooner or later, she thought. She needed to clean him thoroughly out of her system and her apartment. She would just hand over the film and then go. You can send it by post, the girlfriend chorus would have said, so she did not consult any of its members.

Ester got off the bus at Karlavägen, walked the short distance to Kommendörsgatan, rang the bell and was admitted by the same assistant with paint-stained trousers who had opened the door that first time she came to borrow a video artwork and he had not wanted to let her in. That was exactly fifteen months ago. Ambitious, she thought, working alone on a Saturday night. This time he recognized Ester but looked at her with a slightly uncomfortable expression that she could not read. It looked like sympathy. She did not understand why and did not think it could have anything to do with her.

“You know the way.”

He fluttered an arm in the direction of the stairs.

Hugo Rask was leaning on the bar counter in the kitchen with Eva-Stina and a glass of red at his side. Even on the stairs Ester could hear their laughter. It was Saturday and almost seven o’clock. Two colleagues staying behind at the end of the day’s work, nothing peculiar about that, but Hugo remembered her name now. They did not look surprised when Ester came in, but rather blasé. They were both smoking cigarettes, which he had never done with Ester, except that time at her apartment when he had smoked five. The smoking contributed to the impression of nonchalance. Eva-Stina was not looking sideways this time, but tended more toward the condescendingly forbearing.

“Here’s that film I borrowed,” said Ester, noting that her movements and speech were too hurried, giving a self-effacing, servile impression.

He took the film, seemingly not recalling that he had lent it to her or that they had talked about it, put it on a shelf and said:

“Do you want a glass of wine?”

“Well I’m on my way to a party, actually.”

Actually, thought Ester. That word again. Am I on my way to a party or not?

A glass was produced and wine was poured. The TV was on and the two of them, Eva-Stina and Hugo, talked with indolent contempt about the program on the screen. The wine was sour and hard to drink. She didn’t like wine without food, but drank some anyway. Ester, too, made some indolently contemptuous remark about the show and the current offerings on TV, feeling instantly false and disloyal to something indefinite.

“It’s a good thing that there are bad programs on television,” she corrected herself.

In unison they gave Ester a dull, quizzical look.

“Why do you mean?”

“Bad programs with no ambitions are crucial. We need the torrent of crap to sift the nuggets of gold out of. Unfortunately it’s comparison that’s the key.”

“Do you think it’s because there was so much bad music that Bach wrote his?” said Eva-Stina.

“Yes, that was the only way he could see there had to be a better way to put the notes together.”

“That’s not how I see it,” said Eva-Stina.

The two colleagues were about to go out for dinner. It did not seem to be an isolated occurrence or something they had decided to do on this particular evening, but part of a natural rhythm.

They all put on their outdoor clothes. Ester hastily drank up her unpalatable wine and noted the distinctive little sound of an empty glass being set down on the counter, the one she had heard so far away in Paris a thousand years ago.

They stood down in the street. It was snowing. It had snowed all winter and all day. Even here in the city it was banked up high.

“Do you want to come and eat with us?” asked Hugo.

The fact that he and Eva-Stina belonged together in some way seemed more and more evident, but Ester could not get it into her head that they could belong together in the way she had belonged with him. They were surely just particularly close colleagues; they quite often went out for driving practice, she had just learned, and laughed a lot while they were out driving, laughed at all the “hilarious situations” they got into in the process. Eva-Stina would be taking her driving test before the summer.

If Ester had not found it absurd she would have thought they sounded like a couple in love. Instead she thought that the word hilarious was one of the worst words in the language. It was a word for people who observed that a thing was funny but didn’t find it funny, yet despite this did not become ironic about it.

Her throat constricted at the thought of his having time for driving practice and hilarious situations when he had been telling her for a year that lack of time was what prevented him seeing her.

They stood on the sidewalk outside the entrance to his building. It was snowing. She thought: How can anyone be so stupid as to believe it’s to do with time when people give time as their excuse? How can anyone be so fundamentally stupid as not to see what’s obviously happening? Nothing is just sheer chance when things change. No. I’m not stupid, it’s not that. I never believed time had anything to do with it. I was just trying to cope with my disappointment, weather it, get through.

Should she go for the meal? She thought it must mean, after all, that he liked her company and that the two colleagues did not have intimate dealings. You couldn’t take your last woman with you when you went out for a meal with the next one. Nobody could be that tasteless.

Wasn’t the question he had just posed in actual fact his way of telling Ester there wasn’t anything between him and Eva-Stina, that she was just an art student who idolized him and whom he was helping with her driving test and giving career advice to?

Otherwise he would surely never have wanted all three of them to go to the restaurant together? It would be too illogical.

“But perhaps the two of you would rather be on your own?” said Ester.

“By all means come along,” said Eva-Stina.

“You’ve got to have dinner anyway, haven’t you?” said Hugo.

“Yes. I don’t feel like going to that party.”

“What party?” he said. “Let’s go. I’m quite hungry.”

Then he remembered something, turned and went up to his study. Within a minute he emerged with a slim volume.

“I got you that book I was talking about. The one I said I thought would suit you.”

He held it out to her.

“Here. A belated Christmas present.”

She looked at him, looked at the book.

The Unfortunate Consequences of Utilitarianism, it was called.

“Was this the one you saw in a shop window?”

“Yes. Or rather no. I never found that one. Bought this instead. You’re interested in this sort of area, aren’t you?”

“You too, I rather think.”

“Er, I suppose so. Yes, of course.”

“We did an interview on it. It caused a slight stir, as they say. Review in a national daily and all that.”

She read the back of the book.

“So did you think I ought to do some more thinking about the issues involved?”

She laughed to take the edge off her pointed question.

“Doesn’t one always need to do that?”

“Yes. One always does.”

She leafed through the book and saw that it was attractively typeset.

“Thanks. How thoughtful of you.”

Ester took a surreptitious glance at the second woman, or was she the first? She looked young and unspoilt. No she didn’t, in point of fact. She looked self-assured and crafty, quite calculating even. She stood calmly at his side with her hands in her jacket pockets, fur-edged hood, with an air of someone with self-evident domiciliary rights and a sense of belonging.

The snowflakes landed on their shoulders and didn’t melt. On Eva-Stina’s shoulders they melted instantly. Ester sensed that she ought to go home. But if she went home now she would have yet another dreadful, lonely evening. She did not intend to go to the party and in a strange way, which was actually her normal modus, she was sitting alongside what was happening and watching it, at the same time as being part of it. Thus she was far too curious about how things would develop not to accompany them.

Hugo was stamping his feet and wanted to get going. Ester kept the book open and brushed away the sprinkling of dry snowflakes on the pages.

“Why have you given me this?” she said.

“I saw the book and thought of you.”

“In what sense did you think of me?”

“I don’t know. How does one think of people? Let’s go and eat.”

It was apparent from his whole body and the little muscles round his eyes that he sensed something tiresome in the offing, sensed that the easy mood would not last, sensed there were critical opinions of his judgment, sensed general unpleasantness, the dreaded unpleasantness which virtually all his actions were designed to avoid.

“Perhaps you don’t want it?” he said, holding out a tentative hand to take the book back.

She pressed it to her chest.

“I do want it. But I don’t understand what sort of present it is.”

“No particular sort. I bought one for myself, too.”

She looked at Eva-Stina. Evidently not for her, at any rate.

“No particular sort of present. What a pity.”

“People can give each other books. Things aren’t always as complicated as you think.”

“Yes they are. Everything has added levels of abstraction. Everything that happens can be reduced to energy and matter and everything that is done has its origins in a thought, a feeling, good or bad, but everything comes from something, and everything is of some sort.”

Hugo appeared to wish he were somewhere else as he fixed his gaze on the end of the street, seeming to have grave regrets about the whole initiative, the book, the restaurant, everything. Ester knew she ought to go home, right now.

She stayed and the three of them trudged off through the snow that had fallen in the past hours, which the plow had not yet had time to deal with.

For Hugo Rask there was a table even when the restaurant was full. They bypassed the queue, there was some rearrangement and a table for three materialized.

Ester ordered chèvre salad, Hugo entrecôte with pommes frites, and Eva-Stina had raw minced steak. The food came and they ate. The chèvre was thick and creamy, the steak juicy and tender, the raw mince completely silent.

“The food’s good here,” said Hugo.

“Yes, it is,” said Ester.

“How’s yours?” Hugo said to Eva-Stina.

“Sure, pretty decent,” said the second woman, or perhaps the first, who had become rather standoffish and, it appeared, ill at ease.

“I generally ask them to go easy on the garlic,” said Hugo.

“Ah no, you don’t like garlic, I remember that,” said Ester.

“Not too much of it.”

“We talked about it the first time we came here for a meal together.”

“Did we?”

They might just as well have been filmed for The Natural World. Biology had taken over. Territory and rivals and plumage and sexual selection were in full swing. Hugo gave a quick smile, a socially acquired twitch of a muscle, yet still part of nature’s game. The expressions of the second woman who might have been the first grew steadily more remote.

Ester remembered what the girlfriend chorus had once said: To be dropped for someone else is always incomprehensible, impossible to take on board. The replacement always seems preposterous. Always.

When Eva-Stina went to the toilet, Ester asked:

“So how are you?”

Hugo replied that the USA’s actions were upsetting him more and more, that one had to do something, make some protest. That was what he was considering, what he as an artist could do, what his responsibility was when nobody was doing anything and the world was collapsing in front of our eyes.

He often talked like that, she noted, about nobody doing anything, saying anything, having the guts for anything. They were all morally corrupt, bankrupt and cowardly.

“Why does no one see the injustice of society and protest against it?”

It was a wholly rhetorical question.

“Oh, surely there are a lot of people expressing opinions on that all the time?” said Ester. “All over the media, as they say.”

“Where do you see it? To me they all seem too tied up in themselves and their own consumption.”

The plates were whisked silently away by an efficient waiter. Ester looked at Hugo. This body and this consciousness were what she had been yearning for, all day every day for almost a year and four months. She said:

“If I hadn’t dropped round this evening. When were you planning to give me that book?”

“Which book?”

“The book you just gave me. The one you chose for me.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think about that sort of thing as much as you do. I expect I would have posted it.”

The second/first woman returned. Ester saw him smile a warm, glittering smile at her and pull out her chair, and heard him say:

“We’re talking about US imperialism.”

She felt the defiance swelling like a mushroom cloud inside her.

“The Taliban are worse than all the US imperialism in the world,” she said.

“It’s the West that brought the Taliban into being,” said Hugo.

“They brought themselves into being. Nobody forced them to have their ideas. But they’ve got them, they believe in them and they put them into practice, to the horror of the women who get in their way.”

“Is that how you think?”

“And is that how you do?” said Ester.

“They join the Taliban as a protest against some form of oppression,” said Hugo pedagogically. “Terrorism is the only weapon of the poor.”

Ester felt suddenly weighed down and dulled by the fact that the man she loved sounded like an echo and lacked the stamina or ability to progress any further than such simplistic sloppiness.

A thought went through her head, timid as an agoraphobic it slunk along the walls of the cell, but both the thought and the anxious agoraphobic risked the walk nonetheless: this was not a person she wanted to live with. She would not be able to bear the self-sufficiency of his political morality.

“How is it,” she asked, “that only Westerners have to answer for their actions and ideas, not other people? You and many like you divide the world into predetermined and immutable categories of the responsible and the innocent, the active and the helpless. How can you stand yourselves and your own brutal condescension to everybody, except those you count among your own sort?”

“One simply has to have an analysis of power,” said the second woman sanctimoniously, or perhaps she was the first.

“One also has to see when the powerless wield power, and that powerlessness doesn’t automatically imply that one has good sets of values,” said Ester. “Power depends on situation. The structures recur in all situations but the people shift around in them, and behave equilaterally to each other. The same person finds him- or herself at different points in the structure in different contexts, it’s not something in their skin color, their religion or their geography.”

“Nobody’s saying it’s in their skin color, religion or geography,” he said.

“No? Well then, how can you people always know in advance which party is the underdog, regardless of the question at issue?”

With suppressed irritation, Hugo signaled for the dessert menu to be brought over and said:

“My father used to say that Stalin was the only one who understood the workers’ conditions.”

“He defended Stalin?”

“He understood him. Understood what he wanted to do.”

He sounded smug and looked pleased with himself.

“Do you, as well?”

“What?”

“Understand Stalin?”

He took his spectacles out of his shirt pocket and studied the choice of desserts with interest.

“But opinion is free,” said Eva-Stina. “One has a right to think whatever one wants, surely?”

“Not if Stalin has his way. Do you defend Stalin on even a single point?” insisted Ester, turning to Hugo.

“I’m not in the same position as my father.”

“But regardless of position, your father can’t defend one of the worst murderers and criminals in world history, can he?”

“That could be propaganda, at least in part.”

“This is unworthy of you, Hugo.”

“Stalin would have been good for my father and others in his position, as workers. Stalin would have furthered their interests. We haven’t the right to pass judgment on this; it’s a question of class interests and it was another age, things were different.”

“So workers can’t rise above their own short-term interests, assuming that really was in their interests, which I dispute because reigns of terror and totalitarianism are in no one’s interest, but let’s assume it just for the sake of this argument. Your interests are furthered by the ideas and practices of liberalism. You make video artworks critical of society, which you’d never be allowed to do in any of the countries or political systems you applaud and defend. And yet you don’t feel obliged to back up the ideas that are in your own short-term interests as a professional practitioner. In your view you have a duty, for the sake of the whole, of society and the exploited, to rise above vulgar class interests of that sort. Why don’t you expect the same of your father and other workers, the ability to rise above their own self-interest? Why do you demand greater stature of yourself than of others?”

“My father was a simple laboring man. A little person who got into a tight corner.”

“It’s a completely different matter, depending on whether you have power or not,” said Eva-Stina, which sounded a bit repetitive this time.

“So workers can’t make ethical assessments for any other reason than their own profit?” said Ester. “Can’t think of anything but themselves and their interests? Can’t pay regard to the whole, or to the lives of others?”

Hugo inserted a toothpick between two of his teeth and turned toward Eva-Stina to ask what she wanted for dessert. Sorbet, came the answer. Hugo wanted chocolate fondant. So did Ester but with such tension between them she could not have the same as him and had to settle for panna cotta.

“Mayakovsky was in favor of the Soviet state,” said Hugo once they had ordered. “Read ‘My Soviet Passport.’ ‘Envy me — I happen to be a citizen of the Soviet Union.’ ”

“Let’s hope he wouldn’t have written that if he’d known what we know.”

Hugo Rask cast a longing look out into the winter night, where the falling snow could be clearly seen under the street lights. Big, round flakes. For a few seconds, Ester was seized by the feeling of having had the chance to resume a relationship with him but having thrown it away by coming across as overbearing, sharp-tongued and polemical.

Now he’ll choose her instead of me, she thought. This was the moment I lost him and crushed the fragile shoot that had started to regrow. Taking us both out to dinner was a test, and here and now he realized definitively that he didn’t want me. His final doubts, which he wanted to examine one last time tonight, evaporated right here.

Her face flushing, she said:

“Well naturally, it all depends on one’s perspective.”

How hideously unnecessary to get into a discussion of Stalin and the Taliban.

She regretted doing it. She didn’t regret doing it.

She still couldn’t live with someone who thought in catchphrases and kept to the sleek outer layer of activism so as never to have to descend to the labyrinth of investigation.

The waitress was approaching with more food, and his smile broke through like fire from green timber. They quickly ate their desserts and then he produced his wallet like some rich businessman in a cartoon and paid for all three of them.

“You needn’t,” said Ester.

“Don’t mention it.”

He closed his wallet with a bang so the weight of responsibility was clearly audible and got to his feet to tower over his two followers. They went up Nybrogatan, three abreast, crossed the square to Sibyllegatan and continued toward Kommendörsgatan. The snow fell.

The two colleagues were returning to their workplace while Ester would walk on to her bus stop. They stopped outside to say good-bye.

“Thank you for the book and the dinner,” said Ester.

“Hope you find it useful.”

“I’m sure I will.”

He raised his arm in a wave.

“Best of luck, then,” he said.

She saw the two of them enter his door. Then she walked along the sidewalk as she had done so many times before. How many sidewalks must a person walk down, before she gives up?

“Best of luck, then,” she thought, a phrase with all the qualities of a murder weapon. People are created to torment one another. She had underlined that sentence when she read The Idiot not long before.

She halted in midstep and stood still. She saw all at once with absolute clarity what she must do. And she must do it now. Far too much remained unresolved. This evening was the chance to talk it through. Something had to happen this evening. She went back to the building. He owed her a proper conversation.

The lights were still on in the studio. Ester could wait. She was a little elated by the thought that they could finally talk to each other about everything there’d been and why it had turned out the way it did, and by the prospect of what could happen then, where a frank conversation might lead in the middle of the night and with alcohol in their bodies.

She walked round the block. When she got back they would undoubtedly have finished in there. When she got back the lights would be off and the place in darkness.

When she got back a window had been opened wide and she could hear a game of table tennis in progress.

They were laughing to each other in that polite way you do when you want to like somebody but there’s a vacuum in between, when you feel goodwill but no sense of affinity, when you want to show that you’re having fun together but are not on your own ground and aren’t finding the chosen activity particularly edifying. You take part and show pleasure for the other person’s sake. When everything’s a bit artificial. That was the way they were laughing.

She had laughed like that herself sometimes. But never with him. With him she had never played or pretended or felt uncomfortable. Once he told her he had never shared conversations with anyone as he had with her. Talking was her aphrodisiac, the only one she knew and had mastered. Through conversation she could knock down anyone who shared her appetite for verbal sparring and the exchange of ideas. The conversations between her and Hugo had been erotically charged, never-ending and infinitely rewarding — but apparently not indispensable. People could clearly live without interesting conversations. Their primary need was not verbal-erotic intercourse but absence of inconvenience. That always took priority over the desire for substance and meaning. They bought this freedom from bother at the price of mild ennui.

Ester Nilsson stood on the sidewalk in Kommendörsgatan with frozen feet and thought that unusually lively activities seemed to be laid on for those who worked there. She waited another hour in her coat of hopelessly inadequate thickness. Then the lights finally went out and the premises were dark except for a faint gleam from a back room. She waited another five minutes. Then she went through the entrance, across the courtyard and up the stairs to his flat.

The smell of the stairwell was as she remembered it, old dust and cold stone. The smell would have been painful, as recollections are, but her sense of expectation was stronger. The door to his flat stood ajar. She knocked.

“Yes?” came his voice, friendly and expectant.

She took a step into the hall. How she had longed for this, to talk everything over with him properly, undisturbed, in his home, when neither of them was on their way somewhere else.

She heard him coming to meet her, walking from the kitchen, rounding the corner. Now she saw him, his shining, full-moon face that generally also bore a look of slight doubt and introspection.

Ester started to say something. She had practiced it while she was stamping her feet out in the street. It ran: I thought we could have a little talk now, seeing how nice it was this evening. We’ve never had the chance to talk properly about what happened and where we actually stand and what we’re going to do with the beautiful thing we built between us.

That was what she had worked out that she would say.

This perpetual talk that the jilted party feels obliged to engage in. This perpetual talk. The jilter never feels the need to talk.

She, if anyone, should have known that the one walking away feels no pain; the one walking away does not need to talk because they have nothing to talk about. The one leaving is through with it. It’s the one left behind who needs to talk for an eternity. And all that this talk boils down to is repeated attempts to tell the other person he’s made a mistake. That if only he realized the true nature of things he would not make the choice he has, but would love her. The talk is nothing to do with gaining clarity, as the talker claims, and everything to do with convincing and inducing.

There’s no point talking. Honest answers are never forthcoming, to show consideration. One betrays and is betrayed and there’s nothing to talk about because there are no obligations when the will is not to hand. What is done out of compassion is worth little if the other party hopes it is done out of love.

Ester did not have time to say what she had planned, but she made a start:

“I thought we could …”

Then she registered the expression on his face. It was the expression of someone who has just swallowed a snake.

Hugo was expecting someone. But not her. The words that came out of his mouth were tactless with panic and dismay, or whatever it was he was now feeling.

“Someone else … is coming … Eva-Stina’s … coming.”

Ester slammed the door and ran down the stairs, all but sliding down the banisters to avoid a meeting in the stairwell with the second woman, who was the first. She must still be in the studio, seeing to something. Perhaps she was putting the final touch of paint to a set piece.