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:
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”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 1st 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 2nd 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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