Another Life Read online

  “After we’ve eaten, we switch on the TV to watch the news. I haven’t seen the end of Aktuellt for years. I fall asleep in my armchair. Fortunately Christina wakes me up, makes me brush my teeth as if I were a three-year-old, then I collapse into bed, half-dead. Who can play the energetic Greek lover under those circumstances?”

  Every day, the same routine. First the flowers must be bought, then the stall must be erected and his wares displayed. Then it’s a question of trying to sell as much as possible. It is important to recognize the customers, chat with them, in certain cases even flirt a little with them. At the end of the day everything must be packed away, the takings counted and deposited in the bank’s night box, and the following morning it starts all over again.

  “You’ve become like Sisyphus,” I said.

  He’d never heard of Sisyphus, so I told him the myth. Zeus had punished Sisyphus by making him push a boulder up a hill, but when he reached the top, the boulder rolled back down again, and Sisyphus had to start over from the beginning.

  My tale had consequences.

  One morning the Greek looked different. He hadn’t shaved, and he didn’t smile when he saw me.

  “What’s wrong? Has Christina closed the pearly gates to paradise?”

  He shook his head.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  We went to the café on Medborgarplatsen and he told me the whole story. He had decided he wasn’t going to fall victim to the same fate as Sisyphus. He didn’t remain at his post, but instead left his stall in the hands of his employees and went for a walk. It was one of those glorious sunny winter days. First he went to Fatbur Park to enjoy the sight of the young moms playing with their children. However, most of them had brought a dog along, and there was a cacophony of barking dogs, screaming kids, and the moms’ cell phones ringing nonstop.

  He didn’t last long. Fifteen minutes, maybe. Then he went for an espresso in an Italian café, where the owner had only one thing on his mind: Juventus. There was no point in trying to talk to him about anything else, but his coffee was good. My poor friend moved on to the Pakistani restaurant, but he couldn’t stand the smell of curry. He finally opted for a Danish hot dog from the other Greek on Medborgarplatsen, who looked worried as he asked, “Do you trust your employees? They’ll steal the shirt off your back!” But our hero was determined not to suffer the same fate as Sisyphus, so he set off for Katarina churchyard.

  He sat on a bench and counted all the passersby, who would be dead one day. It wasn’t easy to grasp the fact that all these people were going to die. He sank deeper and deeper into his thoughts, until he started talking to himself. “Won’t any of them survive?” he asked, getting angry.

  He realized he was approaching a critical point. Sitting on a bench in the middle of the day talking to himself just wasn’t acceptable. He hurried back to his flower stall and immediately began to banter with his staff. It was an absolute joy.

  “Listen to me, my friend. You may be an author and a philosopher, but you haven’t understood the myth of Sisyphus. Zeus wasn’t punishing him. Quite the reverse. He was taking pity on him. Man is nothing without his work.”

  I had never heard this interpretation. You learn a lot in a foreign country. He was right. Now that I had left my studio, it was obvious.

  “Man without his work is haram,” he had stated firmly, using the Turkish word that had been adopted by the Greek language. Life without work is a waste. That was the terrible conclusion he had reached.

  It sounded like an exaggeration, and yet the same applied to me. It was in my studio that I functioned best, and the days were filled to the brim with significance.

  That was where everything had a role to play, even if I didn’t always realize it. The wood-burning stove, for example, which I didn’t use but liked to look at. How carefully, how meticulously it was constructed. And then there was the maker’s name, Bolinder, etched in beautiful ornate lettering. The industry was gone, but the old premises were being converted into luxury offices and apartments.

  Through my window I could see the golden bell tower of Katarina Church, shining like a little sun on bright afternoons. And the bells that rang and sent me into a dreamlike state could have been the church bells in my Greek village, or my local church in Athens. There were heavenly pathways stretching between my two countries. The rambling rose outside my window kept on flowering late into the fall, as if it were embracing the summer that had gone.

  In the end it didn’t matter why I was so contented in that room, only the fact that I felt that way. I made my coffee, lit my pipe, switched on the computer, and the world came pouring in. That was how my life had been for forty years, sometimes in other rooms too, in other areas, in other cities, on trains and in hotels, overseas and here at home. I worked all the time. That was my life. That was my soul. I brought it out in my writing every day.

  How could I deny it?

  One afternoon I happened to walk past a school, Södra Latin. The children had just finished and were on their way home, but a small group was blocking my path. A girl, presumably the most daring of them all, boldly asked me, “What’s your name?”

  I hesitated for a second, but only a second.

  “Theodor.”

  I thought she would snigger. I thought wrong. The young, challenging gaze softened.

  “That’s a lovely name,” she said, inclining her head elegantly.

  It was on that very afternoon that my decision was made. I ought to change my life in the same matter-of-fact way as I had given my name to those children. Rediscover what I had lost.

  I left my studio, sold everything that could be sold, gave away everything that could be given away, threw out everything that ought to be thrown out, and closed the door behind me.

  “Goodbye, my friend,” I said.

  I had no idea what the consequences would be.

  At first it was a relief. No need to rush around in the mornings, no need to wonder what clothes to wear—for example, would I need my long johns?—no need to hurry to the station in order to avoid missing the train, which was usually late anyway, and the greatest relief of all, escaping my pounding heart—would I be able to write something today? It was my pounding heart that prevented me from falling asleep even when I was bone-weary.

  I was worried about missing something. It felt like dropping off to sleep when you were on watch in the military, the only time when an ordinary soldier had real responsibility and a little power. Not even the commander could get by without the correct password. I liked being on guard duty, watching over my sleeping comrades.

  It was the same with my writing. I was keeping watch. If I woke at three in the morning, I would get up, make some coffee, light my pipe, and write at the kitchen table until it was time to catch the train to my “wolf’s lair.”

  Why did writing carry such weight in my life? What did it give to me? What did it replace? I think it was like being on guard duty in the military. I wrote without asking for permission and without anyone being able to forbid me from doing it. Perhaps that was exactly what it was: I was taking responsibility for my world.

  Now it was time to leave all this behind. It was time to emigrate from myself, just as I had emigrated from my country.

  During those first few days of not working, I hardly wanted to get out of bed. Fortunately we—my wife and I—have separate rooms. Her name is Gunilla, but my dear father couldn’t pronounce u and always called her Giounilla. Presumably because he had learned Turkish when he was a child, where the diphthong iou is very common.

  I thought about him a great deal. He hadn’t retired until the age of eighty-two, when no one was prepared to offer him a job any longer.

  Why was I considering a withdrawal? Clearly I had hit some kind of crisis. I wasn’t the only one. Most writers end up there at some point. Why didn’t I keep trying? My publisher tempted me wit
h very generous advances in an attempt to get me to carry on. My books were selling well, if not quite so well as in the past.

  What was it that drove me to give up?

  I was tired, no doubt about it. And yet I functioned as a writer in my daily life, regarding it as material for future projects. Significant details were noted, things that might be of use were saved on the hard drive of my brain, whether it was a face I had seen for ten seconds or the memory of a garden with almond trees in blossom outside my village seventy years ago.

  Life was still arousing, albeit not as erotic as in the past, when I would see the sea and want to make love to it. Now I no longer saw it, but rather remembered it.

  Was it time to go back to my roots? Could it be that what remained was not the future but the past?

  This was the kind of thing that occupied my mind.

  I have to admit it: I was also ashamed. Poverty in Stockholm was becoming more and more evident. Beggars on the streets, in the squares, on the commuter trains. The homeless. At the same time, hatred toward foreigners was growing, asylum seekers’ centers were being set on fire, support for the most virulently anti-immigration party was increasing with every new poll.

  I wasn’t just an immigrant, I was also a Greek. This wasn’t Greece’s finest hour. Its national debt had reached astronomical levels. The whole of Europe was burning with indignation at these idle Greeks who were born pensioners. A political cartoon in a Dutch newspaper showed a fat Greek in pajamas with a bold expression on his face, holding out both hands to the EU. With one hand he was begging for the European taxpayers’ money, and with the other he was giving them the finger.

  It reminded me of Dr. Goebbels’s posters during the German Occupation, which depicted the Greeks as brazen apes chasing German virgins. It also made me think of the foreword to my novel Masters and Peasants, in which I declared that I wanted to talk about my country without shame and without pride. The year was 1973.

  In 2015 I needed all the pride I could summon up in order to cope with the shame that overwhelmed me. Greece was being humiliated every single day, by everyone.

  The EU worked out what Greece owed, while at the same time, on a daily basis thousands of refugees risked and sometimes lost their lives in the Aegean archipelago. I had seen them for myself in the spring on the island of Symi, where I had gone to see the two very beautiful monasteries. Most of the refugees were young men, but there were also women and children. It was the middle of the day, and the heat was tiring. The newly arrived refugees lay exhausted in the square outside the dock office. They didn’t speak to one another, they didn’t attempt to speak to anyone else either. There was complete silence. They had given themselves up to their fate, which at that moment consisted of the two young dock guards.

  I sat down in a modest café on the narrow shoreline. Thirty seconds later a beautiful woman appeared in front of me. She was tall, fair-haired, slender. She must be a tourist wanting to ask me something, I thought. In fact, she was the owner of the café. I ordered a double espresso, because I know that a single espresso in the tourist spots in Greece is regarded as a half espresso.

  “What will become of these people?” I wondered.

  “Things will work out for them just as they did for us,” she replied.

  There weren’t many people in the café, so she told me her story. She had come to Greece from Albania in her mother’s arms. It was hard at first. Then her parents found work, she went to school, learned the language with lightning speed, and at the age of seventeen she met her husband, who was from Symi. And now…

  “Now I have two grandchildren.”

  Her voice was full of defiant confidence.

  I couldn’t help myself: “Why didn’t I have a grandmother like you!”

  Thanks to this compliment, I wasn’t allowed to pay for my coffee.

  I shared her view. Things work out. My father was a refugee and I was an emigrant. We had both made it.

  Times were different now.

  I could see it when I traveled to Athens two months later. In my part of town, the cafés were full of the unemployed. The number of street hawkers was growing by the day. I bought ten lighters from one of them. Not a single one worked.

  The entrance to a major clothing store in the city center was guarded by two large German shepherds, which had been trained to distinguish between different types of people. They wagged their tails when a genuine customer appeared but growled threateningly at poor immigrants and Greeks, men and women alike.

  “For God’s sake,” exclaimed an elderly woman, “we didn’t have dogs outside the shops even during the Occupation!”

  (That’s what the time between 1940 and 1944 is called. Four years of the Nazi terror regime and shortages of everything.)

  Poverty isn’t only visible; you can smell it. An acrid odor mingled with expensive perfumes had settled over the city center. “The stench of humanity,” my friend Kostakis would say, if he were still alive.

  Beggars everywhere. Some were crippled, showing their wounds. Women lying on the street with small children in their arms. Stylish young men, pleading on their knees. And we walked past, some of us ashamed and embarrassed, some with studied indifference.

  THE DRACHMA IS THE OLDEST COIN IN THE WORLD, a sign outside the Greek National Bank informed us. But the drachma no longer existed. However, it was possible to see the remains of ancient Athens beneath the foundations of the bank.

  It can’t be helped. I am struck by a low-intensity dizziness when faced with such contemporary experiences. Fantasy images of the daily lives of the ancient Athenians are mixed up in my head with the reality around me. Everything is overlaid by poverty, utter destitution, the homeless, all those who don’t have a roof over their head.

  My brain is split in two like a ripe watermelon, while my heart shrivels like a snail. That’s what makes me dizzy.

  Exarcheia Square is a place I always go to whenever I am in Athens. That’s where my old high school was during the 1950s, and where I would sometimes sit with my girlfriend, in spite of draconian restrictions. We would eat honey mixed with butter. When I couldn’t afford to pay, we simply sat on a bench beneath the acacia tree.

  Now the square was occupied by drug dealers and their clients. Young girls who were prepared to sell themselves for the next hit. The dealers strolled around with their wares in a body belt, sometimes a fight broke out. Not a police officer in sight.

  A dealer suddenly started furiously beating a skinny little girl. She didn’t even dare to scream with pain. Nobody intervened apart from her boyfriend, who summoned up the remnants of his human dignity and stepped in.

  “You’d hit a woman, would you, you bastard?” he yelled. The dealer punched him in the chest and he went down.

  I didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. It was impossible to forget the boyfriend’s voice. It was hoarse, under the influence, without hope, yet still human. He hadn’t given up.

  “You’d hit a woman, would you, you bastard?”

  At three o’clock in the morning, I went out onto the balcony of my hotel room. In the distance, the dark mass of the mountains, the sparsely lit communities on the hills surrounding the city. The Acropolis glowed in the night like an incomparably large butterfly.

  I wanted to shout as loudly as I could so that everyone would hear me.

  “You’d hit Greece, would you, you bastards?”

  I didn’t do it.

  Never before had I seen my city in that way. Poverty was an old friend, but not this misery. Boarded-up shops, unlit streets, the homeless sleeping everywhere, the stench of excrement, and on top of all this, an air of violence that made my heart beat faster. For the first time I could remember, I was afraid to go out alone in Athens.

  That was the most humiliating aspect. The ultimate alienation. People gave me good advice. Don’t go there, don’t carry too much money,
don’t carry too little money, because then they might get mad and beat you up.

  Who were “they”? Some of the perpetrators were certainly Greeks, but my would-be advisers were referring not to them but to the immigrants, the refugees. The collective gaze saw only the collective guilt. I had felt it too, in Sweden, when the crisis surrounding the Greek national debt began. After fifty-one years of life in Sweden, I became a Greek again, shuttling from one radio station to the next, from one TV channel to another. I had my part in the national guilt of the Greeks.

  One evening in the square in my part of Athens, I sat down at one of the simple cafés offering “whores’ food,” as my mother used to call it—grilled chicken or pork or something else that is quick and easy. The waiter was from Albania, but his Greek was very good.

  “Feta, chorta [cooked dandelion greens], and retsina as usual?” he asked with a smile.

  I had eaten there just once before, yet he remembered not only me but also my ascetic order. It made me want to give him a hug.

  He was no more intelligent than the other waiters, his memory was no better. But he possessed the alertness of the foreigner.

  He saw, heard, learned, and remembered with all of his senses. There was no rest, and at night he slept as lightly as a hare. I had been there, and I knew. People don’t sit down and wait for death.

  If Europe showed a little more goodwill, things would work out for all the refugees. But Europe wanted its money.

  II

  On the first day without my studio and without my work, I rejoiced in the thought that I would be able to sleep as late as I wanted. However, I woke at half past three, and the morning star was shining so brightly, as if it were calling me in for questioning, and I had nothing to say in my defense.

  I went back to bed. Strangely enough, I fell asleep once more. Two hours later it was time to get up. It was wonderful to think that I would be able to read my newspaper without constantly glancing at the clock, but I hadn’t realized that I would be sharing it with my wife. As long as I was working, there was no problem. She was still in bed when I bent down and gave her a kiss before I set off. “Mm,” she would say, without waking up.