Another Life Read online

  Copyright © 2017 Theodor Kallifatides

  Originally published in Swedish as Ännu ett liv in 2017 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm

  Translation copyright © 2018 Other Press

  Verse on this page from The Persians by Aeschylus, translated by Robert Potter.

  Reprinted by permission.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.

  by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield NH.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Kallifatides, Theodor, 1938- author. | Delargy, Marlaine, translator.

  Title: Another life : on memory, language, love, and the passage of time / Theodor Kallifatides; translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy.

  Other titles: Ännu ett liv. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2018] | “Originally published in Swedish as Ännu ett liv in 2017 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm”—ECIP galley Identifiers: LCCN 2017058667 (print) | LCCN 2018006806 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519462 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519455

  Subjects: LCSH: Kallifatides, Theodor, 1938– | Authors, Swedish—20th century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PT9876.21.A45 (ebook) | LCC PT9876.21.A45 A5613 2018

  (print) | DDC 839.73/74 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017058667

  Ebook ISBN 9781590519462

  v5.3.2

  a

  Nothing is more precious than a friend.

  —Aristotle

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  About the Authors

  I

  It was a difficult time. My latest novel had taken up all my strength. I was exhausted, and thinking of abandoning my writing: giving up on it, before it gave up on me.

  I was already on overtime, having completed my seventy-seventh year. One evening in the Folkoperan bar, the subject came up when I was chatting with Björn Wiman, the culture editor of Dagens Nyheter. He put forward the view that nobody should write after the age of seventy-five.

  “It’s okay until seventy-five, but then something happens to them,” he said. He meant writers.

  Had this “something” happened to me now?

  I made a couple of halfhearted attempts to work on a few ideas, but got nowhere. Partway through a sentence I would be overcome by a feeling of weariness, the words didn’t taste right in my mouth. How to move on?

  On one of those days I went and stood under the shower in my studio with all my clothes on and let myself get absolutely soaking wet. The idea was to try out Chekhov’s advice on how to recover from a failure. That was what it felt like: not being able to write was a major failure, a huge failure, and the unassuming Anton had suggested that one should do what a wet dog does. Shake off the water.

  It didn’t work. Quite the reverse. I ended up trembling with cold, and the sorrow burrowed even deeper into my soul. I was not only a wet dog but also a frozen ex-writer.

  I had lived for seventy-seven years. The time weighed heavier than the water. It wasn’t possible to lift that weight from my shoulders. How was I going to be able to write again?

  I had read an interview with Karin Johannisson, one of the finest essayists we have ever had. She was only seventy, but she said she wasn’t going to write anymore, because she had neither the strength nor the desire to be eaten up by a new literary project to that extent.

  It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Was it still possible for me to organize my days around a text? The narrative filled every waking and sleeping moment when I was working. My heroines were close to me, and my heroes, who lay beside them, had to put up with my scorn or loathing if they were cowardly or cruel.

  My heroines aroused boundless curiosity and desire. They walked before me or arm in arm with me, they came toward me scowling or smiling, they sat opposite me with their legs crossed, or giggled behind my back.

  I knew how they dressed, what they read, what they liked in a man or in a woman, when they fell in love, and when they opened their arms for the first time.

  Sometimes I would fall in love with one of them, and jealousy took over. Intense interrogation, over and over again. What did you say to him and what did he say to you? Where have you been? You call that dancing? It looked more like foreplay to me! What are you thinking about? I called and you didn’t answer. And so on and so on.

  In the evenings, my wife would occasionally ask, “What did you do today?”

  “I’ve been with another woman.”

  She would laugh, but it was true. I was with Elena from With the Coolness of Her Lips in Australia or with Timandra in Athens two thousand five hundred years ago or with someone else somewhere else.

  That was how my days had passed ever since 1969, when my first novel was published. No writer’s block, no interruptions to the flow. Every book was a bridge to the next. Almost like love affairs. But now it was 2015, and my strength was dwindling. Did I have the energy to summon up the dedication and commitment that had carried me all these years?

  My greatest fear has always been that I might leave myself open to ridicule. Write something so dire that even the gulls flying over Strömmen would snigger. I was more afraid of writing badly than not writing at all. But would I know if it was bad? Or would I terrorize my wise publisher?

  One can always rely on the critics, of course. I couldn’t. I had been part of the literary game of Ludo for far too long to take it entirely seriously. The decision to write or not to write was too important to allow someone else to make it for me.

  This was about my life.

  Aksel Sandemose—who spelled his name with ks because he didn’t want a cross in the middle of it—is a writer who has won my heart and my mind. He used to say that if an author can stop writing, then he should.

  Sandemose had another piece of advice. One of his close friends was a painter who had lost his beloved wife and was bemoaning the fact that he could no longer paint.

  “Every time I stand in front of my easel, I see her face,” his friend said.

  “Well, paint her face,” Sandemose replied.

  I didn’t have a face to paint, just a dull feeling of anxiety in my heart, an inarticulacy in my brain as if it were wrapped in cotton wool, a kind of permanent hangover. I might be able to write about why I couldn’t write, but it wasn’t exactly a pressing need. It would be better to stop.

  Could I stop? I wasn’t sure. Not being able to write is one thing. Deciding to stop trying is something quite different. When I mentioned it to my family, they just laughed and reminded me that I said the same at the end of every book. A couple of friends reacted in the same way. “Typical addictive behavior,” one of them said. “Every time you get clean you decide to stop, then you go straight back to your drug of choice.”

  Although sometimes it’s just not possible to
write. Even an author as gifted as Göran Tunström had to abandon a manuscript in the middle of his work, because he simply couldn’t write another line. Or a major author like Vilhelm Moberg, who chose death rather than artistic impotence.

  Georges Simenon used to write at top speed. A two-hundred-page novel took him a couple of weeks. His routine was very straightforward. He shut himself in a room, his secretary provided him with food, and Simenon didn’t come out until the new book was finished.

  One day he followed the usual pattern. He locked himself in, and his secretary stationed himself outside the door, waiting for the familiar sound of the typewriter. Several hours passed, and he heard nothing. Suddenly Simenon emerged, pale and haggard after the fruitless search for the first sentence.

  “Ça y est,” he said.

  Which means, “That’s it.”

  He had written more than four hundred books, but he couldn’t produce one more word. From that day on, he didn’t write anything else as long as he lived.

  In other words, my own fear was not irrational; the more I wrote, the greater the risk that it would all come to an end. The probability of something happening increases as time goes on and it hasn’t yet happened.

  It wasn’t coquettishness either. I wasn’t expecting the whole of Sweden to fall to its knees and beg me to continue. I wouldn’t be summoned to Babel to explain myself. Most people wouldn’t even notice. Very few people are fortunate enough to attract attention because they have stopped writing. I was under no illusions. But I was terrified of the emptiness that would take over my life. A series of days and nights as indistinguishable from one another as the long walkways in the apartment blocks built as part of the Million Program.

  And yet I couldn’t write. Why? It wasn’t illness, it wasn’t personal problems or the social climate or anything else. The spring from which my writing came lay within me. If this spring dried up, there was something wrong with me. I couldn’t blame anything else, even if I wasn’t completely in tune with contemporary society. I could write an essay or a discussion book about that kind of thing, but I didn’t want to.

  Sailors talk about a following wind. That’s what writing is like. You are carried along, the narrative chooses its own pathways, anything can happen from one sentence to the next.

  I yearned for that feeling. It wouldn’t come.

  Two months passed. I traveled to my studio every day. Once I got there, I did nothing but listen to music and talk on the phone. Mostly I played chess with my computer, which I had named Karl Otto after the man who has been my publisher for more than forty years, my constant opponent. Occasionally I beat the computer and my happiness knew no bounds, at which point I would go and stand in front of the mirror to check if you could actually see that I was losing my mind.

  I loved spending time in my studio in the Söder district of Stockholm. The thought of walking up Mamsell Josabeth’s steps filled me with joy every morning. That was where the first white, yellow, and blue flowers of the spring appeared, on the slope behind the Norwegian Church. Leaving my room each evening gave me just as much pleasure. The beautiful streetlamps spread a soft honey-colored glow all the way along Stigbergsgatan. It always took me a while to tear myself away from that particular sight.

  You could say that was where I got a taste of a past that wasn’t mine. It was the Stockholm of the old days. The building that housed my workspace used to be a spice emporium. I sat and wrote surrounded by the aroma of another century.

  I really loved that room. “Good morning,” I said each day when I walked in. “Have you had a restful night? Do you have anything for me today?” It had always obliged, throughout the years.

  The material we use is not only in our heads, but all around us; it is part of the walls and the furniture, in the aroma of the coffee, in the glow of the lamp. On a perfect day you can write about absolutely anything.

  “Give me an ashtray and I’ll give you a story!” boasted the modest Chekhov. There are other days when you can’t write about anything at all. I often arrived feeling peevish and miserable, only to find the writer within me ten minutes later. “My slave,” as a colleague put it.

  Why was that the case? I have no idea. Perhaps it was the previous tenant’s aura that lived on. I had never met him, I had no idea what kind of person he was, apart from the fact that he presumably lived a lonely life, because he left behind a very narrow—narrower than normal—iron bed, more reminiscent of the torture chamber than of rest and pleasure.

  It was painful to look at that bed. It exuded such loneliness that my eyes filled with tears, and I was afraid I would end up the same way. Alone in a very narrow iron bed. I sent it to a secondhand store, then I went to IKEA and bought a simple but comfortable bed that was neither single nor double but somewhere in between. It was called the Sultan. Marvelous.

  That was where I had my siesta. My Swedish friends took a walk after lunch, except for Ernst. He ran instead. I couldn’t do it. I felt sleepy as soon as I’d eaten. It was impossible to remain upright. I just had to lie down on my Sultan, and that was what I did.

  The fact that I was secure in the knowledge of the sight that awaited me when I opened my eyes filled me with calm. Through one window I could see the dome of Katarina Church, and through the other Stockholm’s harbor area, where large and small ships docked, carrying retirees and couples from all over the world.

  My room was in a wooden building dating from the 1870s. It hadn’t been restored since those days, apart from the décor. On one occasion an electrician had to dig out a channel for a cable. He fought like a demon.

  “Jeez, it’s harder than stone!” he said. He grabbed the piece of wood he had cut out and held it up to my big Greek nose.

  “It still smells of pine,” he said.

  I had had so many wonderful years in my studio, and now I was going to live without it. The last few months had a nightmarish quality. I did everything the same as always: I arrived on time, made coffee, switched on the computer, but that was the end of it. I tried out various ideas: translating the Iliad, penning an essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, writing a love story. They all died due to a lack of oxygen.

  I had a problem. Not only with myself but also with society. It was agonizing to see Sweden changing, step by step. Social justice and solidarity were giving way to the visible and invisible power of the market. Education was becoming increasingly privatized, as was care. Teachers and doctors were turning into entrepreneurs, students and patients were becoming clients. It was all happening so fast that it didn’t even have time to register as history. The pay gap was growing year by year. Greed was in the driver’s seat, the boundless freedom of the individual was now the guiding star.

  I couldn’t adjust, and I was getting older in a world that felt more and more alien to me. In the end I didn’t even dare to open my mouth. My objection was a given. I had gotten old and grumpy. A gnällspik, no less, to use a word that I love. A bellyacher.

  Gnällspik! A fantastic invention.

  And they say Swedish is a poor language.

  My wooden house represented all the values that were slipping away. It was built with these values. The wood still smelled of wood after almost two hundred years, while even candles smelled bad these days. I usually lit one or two on gloomy winter afternoons. Thirty years ago when I started this habit, they spread a soft scent all around. Now I couldn’t bear the acrid odor they gave off.

  Am I exaggerating? A little, perhaps, but only a little.

  The whole area was being transformed with bewildering speed. Stigberget was being excavated in order to provide underground parking beneath our feet. We protested, we wrote letters and signed petitions, but we were ignored, not only by the building contractors but also by the city of Stockholm and its functionaries. The city was experiencing the worst housing crisis in modern times, and they were building parking lots.

  An unex
pected consequence of the subterranean construction was that the rats went crazy and rushed out onto the streets waving red flags. They followed me when I was on my way to have lunch at Jimmy’s, yet another Greek in the diaspora. The streets stank, people pissed all over the place, the cost of finding somewhere to live was going through the roof, and they were building parking lots.

  That’s what had happened in Stockholm, where spitting in the street was once regarded as a minor offense.

  Fortunately there were also changes for the better—outdoor florists, for example. They put up their stalls every morning in a square or at an intersection and set out their flowers and plants, both in summer and in winter. The scent that rose up transformed their surroundings.

  Down below my studio on Tjärhovsplan was Samira from Chile. She was energetic, knowledgeable, and cheerful. We always exchanged a few words in the morning, and in the evening if she was still there. Sometimes she would give me a flower to put on my desk. She had read one of my stories, but otherwise it was her daughter who read my books.

  Occasionally I would linger for a while. I actually have a secret. I like to watch women buying flowers. They have a kind of glow about them. As far as men are concerned, it’s all doom and gloom. They look as if they’re about to purchase hand grenades.

  Samira had set up her business all by herself, and she now employed three assistants. Somehow just seeing her put me in a good mood and made me want to get down to work. How hard can it be to write a book, when a single woman, a refugee from Chile, can start up and run a business with three employees?

  The Greek, on the other hand, had erected his stall on Medborgarplatsen when he lost his job with Saab, which was going downhill fast. His progress too was astonishing. After a year or so he had five employees and he became a warmhearted philanthropist, taking care of the homeless, giving them food, and inviting them inside out of the cold. He also gave money to all the Roma begging in his area.

  He worked inhumanly hard. He got up at four in the morning to go to the market in Västberga even though his wife tried to pull him back into bed. That was their time; if they didn’t make love then, it wouldn’t happen. He didn’t get home until nine o’clock in the evening.