XXIII. THE LOVE OF DESTRUCTION

‘Perhaps it really will be better once you’re gone,’ Hedda had said the day before I left for Rome. I’d retreated to the bedroom in order to pack my suitcase which I’d been hoping to be able to do in peace, but, almost as soon as I heard her enter the flat, there she was, leaning in the doorway and staring at my fingers. She was in a fancy dress and her lips were done as if she were about to go out, but she’d just got home, which explained the dress but not her lips.

‘It is not all that particularly pleasant to watch a relationship in the process of its demise,’ she said.

‘Then don’t watch,’ I answered. ‘It’s got something to do with discipline, Hedda.’

‘Yes, of course, discipline,’ she replied sharply. She didn’t listen to me, she simply did not want to understand what I meant. She just acted like she had no will of her own, no power of decision in her life, she preferred to constantly be a victim. A victim of circumstances, a victim of other people (above all, me), a victim of a past relationship, the past in general, which really was just like it was because it was like she was and nothing could be changed. In any event, one could attempt to allow the present to be more enjoyable, Hedda however dived straight into unhappiness, and when it was almost over, she’d wave and cry out: Wait for me, I want to come with you!

‘What relationship are you talking about, Hedda?’ I asked and pulled a stack of shirts out of the wardrobe. ‘We decided not to have any relationship any longer. You aren’t sticking to the terms of our agreement and reproaching me at the same time.’

The shirts exploded in a burst of colour. Hedda knocked them over with the palm of her hand, and what had just been in order now lay in a heap on the floor.

‘We decided?’ she screamed. ‘You decided! You decided everything. What I was to wear, how I was to have my hair cut, what city we were going to live in, the name of our son. You decided my whole life for me and never allowed me to say a single word. What I wanted, what I wanted for my life and perhaps for yours too and for Lasse’s never interested you in the slightest. You took the decisions and then in the end spoke of a “we”. That is no joint decision, Anton, that’s just talking in pluralis majestatis.’

I bent down and picked up the shirts. They were fine, they could still be folded without having to be ironed again.

‘Of course I was never interested in what you wanted.’ I lay the shirts down on the bed and smoothed the arms flat. ‘Weren’t you the one who wanted to be with me?’ I asked but did not look at her, for it would’ve been taken as a provocation. How much her daily blackmail bored me. ‘Weren’t you the one who wanted to move in together?’ I asked. ‘Weren’t you the one who wanted to get married? Weren’t you the one who wanted to have a kid? Up to the end everything I did was for you.’

‘At most, you did whatever it was that you wanted for me,’ Hedda said. ‘In truth, of course, you were only ever interested in yourself.’

‘I did whatever it was you wanted while you were busy thinking about your job at the gallery and your boss and the next spot of paint you could sell and, at most, Lasse. All that time I was simply unimportant.’

‘Maybe you were too important for me, maybe that was my problem,’ Hedda answered softly. I could tell by her voice that she was about to cry, which she always did whenever there was nowhere else to go with an argument.

‘I did not get the professorship and you never asked, I lost my job at the university and you didn’t care.’

‘Because it was unimaginable. Because I simply didn’t believe that something like that could even happen to you. Because you were never weak. Because you never made any mistakes. That was something other people did.’

‘But it did happen to me, Hedda. It happened. You’re not a kid any more.’

‘You told me you were letting Kalkreuther take the lead. I didn’t want to interfere. I didn’t think I had the right.’

‘How old are you, Hedda? Do you have to act like a fifteen-year-old?’

‘You turned me into a fifteen-year-old.’

‘Your accusations are becoming increasingly more bizarre.’

‘I had respect for you, Anton. I did a few things wrong out of respect, or maybe even a lot of things . . . who knows? Maybe everything. But it wasn’t because of indifference. I could never be indifferent towards you, even if I wanted to.’

‘Are you even listening to yourself?’

‘For far too long I’ve only listened to you,’ she said, and now her voice skipped with stifled sobs. Fifteen? What was I thinking? More like five. ‘That’s what you wanted, Anton. You didn’t want me to listen to anyone else.’

‘You are slowly going insane, Hedda, do you know that?’

‘You alienated me from my friends. You wanted to sleep with all the women. It was so bad I didn’t risk running into them any more. Sofie, Carolin . . . and Magda least of all. And all of my guy friends were beneath you. You talked so badly about them for so long that I began to find them intolerable myself. And now I’m alone. I look at the walls of our flat which was never classy enough for you, I run my hand over the armoire you inherited from your mother, or was it your grandmother? Sorry, Anton, I can’t remember all the details of your history any more. At some point it will become unimportant, but I believed in you, Anton . . . did you ever notice, coming home, did you ever notice that I was more distraught than usual, that maybe I had red eyes, I don’t know, I don’t look in the mirror, but you never said a word.’

She sat down on the bed next to the shirts I’d just smoothed out and, with her head on her hands, stared into the open wardrobe.

‘You never allowed me to get close to you,’ I countered. ‘Did you think I’d be able to stand being alone for ever?’

‘I simply didn’t know what to do any more. No matter what I did, it wasn’t right.’

‘I’m so sorry to have offended your vanity. It’s nothing else. A narcissistic disorder. And you’re sitting on my suit trousers.’

She raised her eyebrows, but too much, everything was always just a bit too much with her. She’d never understood how to use her charms at all, and so I’d given her instructions, it’d gone OK for a little while but then, after a few months, she’d let everything slide.

‘It’s not a disorder, it’s quite simply sadness,’ she said, ‘but you wouldn’t know a thing about something like that. You’re the one who broke up, but you have no idea what breaking up means. You have no idea about your entire life any more.’

‘I have always found your overconfidence ridiculous.’

‘I always thought your character was so complex that I’d never figure it out,’ she said meditatively. ‘But maybe you just have a poor one.’

‘Good, Hedda, now we’ve said it all. Now you have what you want. In the future, I won’t decide anything for you.’ I pulled down another two pairs of trousers, folded them once more then placed them on top of the shirts. ‘You will no doubt find a man who will stay out of your life much better than I could.’

‘He already does.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’ve been fucking your boss for months and you haven’t noticed.’

‘Well, that’s lovely, Hedda.’ I shut the drawer and tossed my socks and underwear into the suitcase. ‘Why do you always think you can make me jealous?’

‘I can put you at ease, I don’t give a shit about your jealousy.’ She was standing in front of the bed, let her hand run over my suitcase, picked up a pair of socks, a pair of underwear, then a tie, which she unrolled and pulled between her fingers like a cord. ‘The worst thing for you,’ she said slowly, holding the tie against my jacket, ‘is that, when I think about it, none of us ever loved you. I didn’t and certainly none of your affairs did. We just wanted your infatuated eyes on us. That gleam you saw in us for a time. And we didn’t want to admit that that gleam didn’t exist.’

She turned away and clumsily wrapped the tie around her neck. ‘And when you begin to deprive us of that gleam, we run after you even more. We beg, and you scold us. We try to do somersaults, it’s never good enough for you.’

‘You are awfully vain, Hedda, do you see that?’ I asked and reorganized my socks and underwear.

‘Anyhow, I’ve noticed something else. The longer one’s with you, the emptier one feels. One becomes dependent on you because nothing else is left. Just you. Your demands. Your desires. But in truth it’s your emptiness, your endless interior emptiness, Anton. That’s why no one can love you. And you cannot love yourself either.’

‘Are you done, Hedda? I’d like to take the tie with me. And the way you continue to circle around my love life is really manic.’

‘Your love life means as little to me as your jealousy.’ She threw the tie onto the bed and went to the door. ‘But don’t you dare criticize me for having played a role for me in the past!’ she said and slammed the door behind her.

‘You could have at least hooked up with someone of my calibre!’ I yelled after her. ‘Nordhoff is dumpy all the way down to his belt buckle.’

Her steps in the hallway grew quieter. I stood in front of my jackets trying to decide which ones I wanted to leave behind. I liked to change clothes twice a day, especially in a Roman summer when even a passer-by’s sweat could make your shirt wet. Nordhoff, of course, would get by with just three jackets because, as far as style was concerned, he understood just about . . . ach, he didn’t understand a thing about style, full stop.