The Other Woman Read online

  I had recently read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and I had just started The Magic Mountain, I said that the first day when we went around the table introducing ourselves and the course tutor asked what I was reading at the moment. Everyone else was reading stuff that I found utterly banal — one girl said that her favorite writer was Astrid Lindgren — and during the break they chatted about a debate in one of the morning papers, about the limited role of women in both life and literature, and the way they talked about it made me realize that they really did regard themselves as limited. I found it hard to grasp what they meant, but I didn’t dare say so, because I thought that would prove that I was unworthy to join in with these conversations. I couldn’t understand what they thought was limiting them, and it seemed to me that they were discussing a nonexistent issue. Just write what you want to write, otherwise there is no point in writing, that was what I wanted to say, but I got the impression that they felt they were writing on behalf of someone else: the female sex, the female experience, that it was their job to address certain issues in their writing and that they were proud to accept this task, out of some strange sense of duty, and that they then felt affronted when their efforts were not sufficiently appreciated. I thought about Dostoevsky and the man from underground; I wished he had been part of my group. He would have been more fun to hang out with. Hard work, of course, but definitely more interesting than the rest of them.

  At the same time, the fact that I was not interested in their debates made me feel like a traitor. I couldn’t get away from the notion that all forms of sisterhood would mean lowering myself to an inferior level, that I would be forced to diminish myself to some extent, to dissemble, and I cannot dissemble. I couldn’t say this to anyone, including the boys, because they might have seen it as a way of making myself stand out from the other girls, of selling out my sisters in order to appear more interesting. But that was not the case; I genuinely felt I had nothing in common with them or the things that interested them. As the man from underground said, “On the whole I was always alone.”

  I sometimes thought about the prerequisites for female solidarity, about why I always found it suffocating and claustrophobic, why I never felt comfortable with other women. In a way I envied those who did, it seemed so pleasant, so reassuring: to be able to relax in a sense of community, to know that there was always someone there to provide support, someone to talk things through with, even though at the same time there appeared to be a template for the topics you could bring up. I still feel the same way with Emelie: she is irritated when I say something she perceives as unfavorable toward other women, she cannot deal with anything that deviates from the way she believes I should want to behave — for example the idea that I might want to go to bed with an older, married man. If I had been let down by an older married man, there would have been a template for the situation, for the constructs to which I had fallen victim, the mantra of oppression and the balance of power, patterns of destructive behavior. The sisterhood demanded that I renounce myself. I wondered whether other women felt the same, if they accepted it, like entering into a relationship with a calculation in the back of your mind that you are going to have to make certain compromises, but that the result — security, whichever form it may take — will make it worthwhile.

  It often occurred to me that it seemed simpler to be a man. Not that I have ever wanted to be a man, quite the reverse; ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by everything to do with women, with the stereotypes of femininity, makeup and perfume, high-heeled shoes. I could spend hours planning what the wardrobe I hoped I would one day be able to afford would look like, which items of clothing it would contain, what fabrics — silk, cashmere, totally out of reach for me on an income that came from a student loan or casual work paid by the hour in the hospital cafeteria, but in a well-to-do future I would be the most elegant woman of all, and the most feminine.

  Femininity was another topic I found difficult to discuss with other women; I somehow felt it wasn’t entirely acceptable to embrace it as I wished to do, that it required a kind of metacognition, an ability to recognize the highly charged aspect of stereotypical femininity and its destructive potential, which to me was the idea that everything men routinely regarded as sexy was in fact objectionable and should not be given to them, for example the shaved pubes and thongs that the men’s mags had taught them to want. Once that realization had been taken on board it was possible to move on, to look at stereotypical femininity with a theoretical distance, since the whole thing was a construct and a drama, in which after detailed study and careful consideration I had decided to play the female lead. “There’s an idea behind it,” I often heard people say when they were trying to define something good, whether it was a piece of art or an item of lingerie, but that was a lie; it had to have the right idea behind it. Being attractive to men is never the right idea.

  Emelie felt that way, even though she had never put it into words, but I could tell from the way she dressed: smartly and expensively for a student, because her parents gave her an allowance each month. She bought good-quality clothes and always looked well groomed, unlike a lot of the other girls in her class who never wore makeup, and whose wardrobe consisted of ill-fitting clothes, shapeless jeans, hoodies, and backpacks. But there was something wonderful about Emelie’s whole appearance, something well scrubbed and nonthreatening which, I had realized, made her incredibly appealing to the boys in the student bar. I knew that she would never try to look sexy for them. Sexy was forbidden. The student town of Norrköping was a chaste environment, in spite of the fact that people seemed to sleep with one another at the drop of a hat, in spite of the fact that we were a generation who had always been encouraged to go for whatever we wanted, but still hardly anyone ever talked about what was sexy. Perhaps the whole Zeitgeist was chaste, at least that was the impression I got from Emelie and her friends, who were the only people I met apart from my work colleagues. Self-aware students who did everything they could to distance themselves from working-class girls, even though they were doomed to buy their clothes in the same stores as these girls for financial and geographical reasons. At a party earlier in the fall I had got into a conversation about underwear. Two of Emelie’s friends had practically tied themselves in knots trying to express their loathing for G-strings, such a vulgar item of clothing, while at the same time making every effort not to condemn those who wore them. In the end they agreed that anyone wearing a G-string just looked amusing, not sexy. “Amusing!” they shouted, triumphant in the knowledge that they had found the key to expressing their enlightened point of view without criticizing anyone else.

  Femininity was an intricate network of rules with a minimal amount of leeway, where everything was unspoken into the bargain. I often caught myself wondering whether everyone else had been given instructions that I had missed, or if the confidence with which they seemed to proceed was the result of a lifetime of close female friendship, if this had a salutary effect on all those involved, if it had made them into perfect examples of modern women who had an awareness of everything, from their essential view of the world to their preferences in contemporary literature and insights into women’s fashion.

  Anyway, that’s how I often felt: that everyone else was the same, while I was dramatically different. It was a self-obsessed view. It’s hardly surprising that I like Dostoevsky’s man from underground, I would sometimes think with a smile, and then I would feel a sense of relief: I am conscious of my own frailty, I am not crazy, perhaps I have a slight narcissistic tendency, but then so do all writers, perhaps that’s not a bad thing.

  He is wearing a wedding ring, I note when he finally visits the cafeteria. The name badge on his white coat says CARL MALMBERG, SENIOR CONSULTANT. He has short dark hair with a hint of gray at the temples. He looks athletic, with broad shoulders and a lightly tanned face. Presumably he’s into sports in his free time, perhaps he plays tennis, isn’t that what men lik
e him do? Or perhaps he has gotten his tan somewhere abroad, I expect he and his wife have a house in Spain, Italy, France, they go there as soon as they have some time off.

  “I don’t suppose you have any arak to go with this?” Carl Malmberg’s colleague says, smiling at me as he helps himself to a large bowl of pea soup. Pancakes are included, but there is no room on his tray, he will have to come back for them.

  Carl Malmberg laughs and looks at me, I smile at him. His colleague is not the first to joke about arak to accompany the pea soup.

  “I don’t think pea soup will ever taste as good as it did when we were in the military,” his colleague goes on. He is slightly overweight and is not wearing a name badge, his cheeks are red, as if he has been running. He suddenly realizes that he may have been tactless.

  “Your soup is very good too, of course,” he adds quickly.

  “I didn’t make it,” I say, to indicate that I realize that the pea soup we serve here isn’t particularly good, and that I can distinguish good pea soup from bad, just as they can, even though I don’t actually like pea soup. “I just serve it up.”

  Both of them smile at me as they hand over their bright yellow lunch coupons, then they go over to a table by the window where two other doctors have already moved on to their pancakes.

  Siv sends me to the utility room. She has fully recovered and is back at work. She likes to order the casual staff around, but it doesn’t bother me at all. I have always liked clear instructions, and I prefer to have plenty to do so that I keep busy, I have never seen the point in standing around at work if there’s no opportunity to do something meaningful instead — if I could go somewhere quiet to read a book I might do that, but I think hanging around chatting with other members of staff is just exhausting, I’d rather do the cleaning.

  The piles of trays and plates look distinctly unsteady, I change over to empty racks and start to run the plates through the dishwasher. If you leave them out for too long, the pea soup dries to a hard crust and they have to be washed several times. It is warm and damp in the utility room, a particular smell from floors that never dry properly, of drains where leftover food is never properly rinsed away, steam from the dishwasher that makes my hair go frizzy. I am wiping up the sticky residue of pea soup from the floor next to the garbage when Carl Malmberg and his colleagues return their trays to the hatch, I think I must look disgusting, or at least totally unremarkable, a girl wiping up pea soup in a utility room. Then I remember the cream-colored bra that shimmers through my blouse if I push my breasts forward, so I straighten up, give the doctors a little smile.

  “That was very tasty,” Carl Malmberg’s colleague says politely.

  “Great — I’ll tell the kitchen,” I say. I try to adopt a perfectly balanced tone of voice which is meant to make clear that I don’t really care, because I don’t really care about this job, but that since I am here, I take pride in doing my job as well as possible, in behaving correctly toward the customers, being polite and a lot pleasanter than the sour-faced old miseries who have been wiping up pea soup in here for twenty years, maybe thirty. And I am wearing a sexy bra that just shows through my blouse.

  Carl Malmberg looks at me, but he doesn’t say a word.

  At first this town was allowed to decline, and then, when the factories in the center had fallen silent and the workers had been relocated to the electronics company in its suburban bunkers, they decided to revive the heart of the town for others, not the workers: for the children of the middle class from all over the country who come here to study at the university, taking courses in media and communications in fresh, newly renovated former industrial premises where my maternal grandmother spent her entire working life sitting at a loom. The water that drove turbines and machinery flowed around the red brick and yellow plaster, the river was thick with salmon right in the middle of the town. No smoke rises from the chimneys these days, people come here to study instead. Just a few years ago the trend was to move away.

  Emelie stayed, she has lived in the same two-room apartment on Södra promenaden ever since we were in high school. She is having a party before going out tonight, just as she did when we were at school. I have washed my clothes in the sink. My dress smells of peach detergent and it isn’t quite dry yet, I’ve blasted it with my hair dryer but the seams are still a little damp. It’s black so you can’t tell, and the temperature is still above freezing outside.

  She seems to have invited everyone in her class. She greets me with a kiss on the cheek, then goes off to talk to someone else, leaving me to open my bottle of wine in the empty kitchen, find myself a glass. Loud music that I don’t recognize is playing in the living room, and people I don’t recognize are dancing in the way that students dance when they are not quite drunk enough, slightly stiff and clumsy, with gestures to indicate that they are in fact dancing with an ironic take on dancing. When they’ve had a bit more to drink maybe they will have the courage to dance properly. I don’t like dancing. A boy sitting on the sofa nods to me as I sit down beside him, then continues talking to a girl with bangs. I take my cell out of my purse, the time is 10:28, no messages. The girl gets up and goes into the hallway, the boy stands up and follows her. On the whole I am always alone. I sip my wine. I am tired, I should have stayed at home. My calves are aching.

  “How’s it going?” Emelie asks, draping herself over the armrest of the sofa with a cigarette in her hand, even though I know she doesn’t usually like people smoking indoors.

  “Okay, I suppose.”

  “Did you speak to Niklas?”

  “Not really.”

  “He’s nice, isn’t he?”

  “I didn’t speak to him.”

  Emelie doesn’t look pleased, she takes a swig from her can of beer and gets up.

  “We’ll probably be leaving in an hour or so.”

  The student bar is crowded and some band I’ve never heard of has just finished playing, the wine has made me feel a bit drunk. I am in a strange mood, sometimes I think the situation is unbearable and repugnant, then I think that perhaps this evening is a metaphor for my life: in my drunken state I think this is a perfectly reasonable comparison, that in fact it is my life that is either unbearable or repugnant, depending on how you look at it, but what kind of life is it if it is at best unbearable? The thought makes me sad. Emelie tries to drag me onto the dance floor even though she knows I don’t want to dance, I get annoyed with her, I am tired, I suddenly feel like I can’t stand any longer, I look for an empty seat but I don’t see one. I lean against the bar and when the bartender asks what I want I order another glass of wine and immediately realize that I don’t want to drink it, it tastes rough in my mouth, my feet are killing me. I don’t know anyone here, I don’t want to know anyone here, I fetch my coat and go home.

  It rains and rains, the town is sinking. It is built on waterlogged ground. If you study photographs of the central station, you can see that there was a flight of steps leading up to the entrance a hundred years ago, now it is at ground level. The entire building has sunk, and the whole town will do the same. This is the old seabed, a barely concealed bog, mud and sediment, slime and clay beneath the streets and squares. When the trams go rattling by you can feel the ground shake. Soon there will be an accident, something will collapse, floating down the river on a layer of slime, a tram will plunge into the marshy ground beneath the cobbles, a disaster, a tangled inferno of metal and mud.

  It is the weekend in Norrköping and I ought to do something but I don’t know what, I might as well have offered to work. The rate for working unsociable hours in the main kitchen on weekends is good, I could have done seven till four on both Saturday and Sunday, washed the containers that had been used for the weekend’s puddings, fruit-flavored soups, and fruit purees and creamy desserts that all have a cloying, synthetic taste, thick with starch, the containers are so difficult to get clean if they have been allowed to dry out. I could have gone to the antiquarian bookshop with the extra money and bought th
e edition of The Magic Mountain that I have looked at several times already, two volumes from the late 1950s in different shades of green, they would look lovely in my bookcase.

  Carl Malmberg would stand in front of it, take out the first volume, and say that this is a really good book, a major achievement by one of the greatest authors of our time. “I know,” I would say. “It’s brilliant.” He would be impressed by the fact that I have read it, he would never have guessed. He would sit down in my red armchair with the book in his hand, distractedly leafing through it as he takes a sip of his wine. He has brought a bottle with him, something I have never tried before because it is expensive, over a hundred kronor. He is wearing a shirt and jacket, he is very stylish. I am sitting on the sofa in a new black dress which is both classic and flattering, my body looks voluptuous in a tasteful way, like an expensive gift wrapped in beautiful paper. My apartment is clean and tidy. Carl Malmberg glances around the room, his eyes settle on me.

  “You’re not the way I had imagined at all,” he says.

  “What had you imagined?” I say.

  Carl Malmberg gives a little smile.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but … you do work in the cafeteria.”

  “Oh no,” I say. “That’s just something I happen to be doing at the moment.”

  “So what are you really going to do?” Carl Malmberg says, taking another sip of wine. He is holding the glass in a firm grip, he is looking right into my eyes, genuinely interested in what I intend to do with my life. His expression is both considerate and challenging.

  “I’m going to write a novel,” I say. No, I am embarrassed by my own fantasy, it sounds painful. But that’s what I want to do, so that’s what I have to say. I am going to write a novel. Not just one, but several, I am going to be a writer. If I say it the right way, with conviction, not like someone who is just dreaming, but like someone who has really made up her mind, it will sound positive and ambitious. I am sure that Carl Malmberg likes people who are positive and ambitious, energetic, you can just tell. He likes it when things happen, he likes women who make sure things happen.