The Beauty

Chapter One

It looked like it was going to be another perfect day in this perplexingly hot Swedish summer. On one early morning in June, exactly half a year since he was released from a county prison after serving time for committing a theft of a dire painting, a Rembrandt alas!, at an art museum, Edward woke up in his bed with a strange thought in his head:

”Content is something very small.” The old man looked at the clock that was standing on the bookcase, which was placed right across the room, approximately ten feet from his bed. It was 07.00 AM. At the same time he got a glimpse from the book which he had placed on the bedside table the night before. Actually he had only managed to read one single page in it and this was, he thought, due to the extraordinary tricky language in it, he thought. The book was an early novel by Joseph Conrad. JC was one of the greatest writers of all time. And what Edward was thinking right now was precisely that content in novels usually is something very small

Form is, by contrast, something more important. This idea wasn´t really his, but came from a boo by Sartre, the title of which he had long forgotten. He was very good at forgetting things nowadays. The notion presented by Jean-Paul Sartre wasn´t very strange or remarkable per se, but it was a strange notion to wake up with.

   Edward Tegelkrona had expected to wake at sunrise. The alarm was set just as a precaution. Now he woke at 07.00 AM and to top it all right out of a dream. He noticed that was all sweaty on his chest. Then he remembered:

   The dream hadn´t at all been about Sartre, but it had had to do with a re-meeting with old buddies from his time in the Army. But in the dream all of them had been assembled in a small flea market in a suburb, like the ones organized by the Missionary Churches. Edward had been buying an old infantry cap from a poor collection of hats managed by a very old spinster in black, and it was an infantry cap, from which it was clear that it was a cap of a Private Second Class. But Edward himself, in the dream, knew he himself actually was a Corporal. And this, while many old-age comrades from the old good times irradiated around him, snapping, stuttering and arguing about all their peculiar hobbies, which they had acquired as retirees, not to succumb to sin, drinking and sadness. Thus, an older white-haired companion, with great tattoos, - Edward hadn´t the slightest idea who he was - , had begun to cultivate small mice as a pastime. The former comrade explained decently and with an intense, ridiculous and intrusive seriousness how crucial it was for the half-rats to have walls in their housing, perforated with small holes for the sake of ventilation. Suddenly the whole antiquarian-like room was completely flooded by these little animals, irrigating here and there, plaguing the retirees, who occasionally mentioned their memories of canteens, kettles, hand grenades, and pea soup. But Edward could not in any way get rid of the silly cap. Without wasting more time on trying to remember more of the dream, even though it certainly had a significant message, Edward pulled off the white t-shirt and stretched out for a new one that he had already placed on the big radio close by on the previous night. The radio was a big, black, more than 20 years old, JVC radio device, standing next to his bed. He now swung his legs to the floor while listening to the brittle summer noises from the birds and the bikes from outside softly intruding into his flat by the left-open balcony door. He had placed his large, pale feet on the naked floor but could not perceive weather it was cold or not due to the damages caused to his nerve ends in legs and feet caused by excessive smoking and use of alcohol as well as misuse of medical drugs.

   He heard the engine of a motorcycle down on the street. “I guess it is Spontlav.” Edward said to himself. Spontlav was one of his neighbours, living at the 1^st floor, that drove an old Harley Davidson.

  It was a very peaceful summer´s morning. It was all very nice and tender. Little did Edward know what had been going on in the house during the early hours.

  Perhaps as a sign of hesitation before the activities of the day Edward´s dull gaze again fell on the book by Conrad. “Imagine no longer being able to read a book!” he contorted while he wept his nose with the back side of his left hand, but he soon evaded this thought, since he thought he would not disgrace himself by starting this beautiful day negatively. He harked, snarled and panted, as was his habit, and then looked theatrically at the window and the balcony door, where light softly entered. Sometimes, when his mind was ambivalent, which often was the case, he almost felt sighted. Somewhere inside, he thought he no longer was able to concentrate as much as needed to be able to properly read books.

- “Ah, he cried out. The weather is super!”

   Aside from sleeping Edward´s favorite occupation nowadays was the taking of long walks. Reading books was, according to Tegelkrona, something that belonged to the youth.  Leon Battista Alberti, the inventor of perspective and an erudite humanist  in Renaissance Italy, did not read a single book after the age of thirty.

   The weather on this Monday was very favorable to Edward’s plan for this day, a plan which consisted in the rather pleasant activity of delivering two small plastic pots containing small Monstera Deliciosa plants to his younger sister, living in Billdal at the other site of the town. His sister, Janina Blingstav-Tungspetz, married to Jan-Albin Tungspetz, wasn´t at home today but resided with her daughter in a bungalow in the southern parts of Halland, by the sea. But Edward had the key to Janina´s place. It would of course had been much nicer to meet with Janina, but it was under all circumstances a pleasant task to have, this delivering flowers to her for a retiree like Edward, especially when the weather was such a marvel. The paper bag with the two pots in it waited apt in the hall. The Monstera Deliciosas had long been under permanent ban of the EU, because they were considered to be poisonous. During many years you could get hold of a single Monstera anywhere in Sweden in any store at all. If you eat leaves of Monsteras, you will end up dead, especially if you are a child. But now the ban was lifted, and Janina had no children of small age any longer. The house where Edward resided was an old functionalist one, built during the 2^nd World War. Many houses around looked just like Edward´s and all of them were situated on a hill, quite in the centre of Gothenburg. In the areas between the houses there were lawns with trees and lots of greenery, playing grounds for children, small parking lots, and … nothing more. The area of houses, although it was all inhabited, seemed all deserted. The parking places were very few, but the whole area was designed and prospected long ago, when not everyone drove around in the city in a car.

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