The Best Book in the World

CHAPTER 20

The Calm of Stockholm


When Titus leaves Doctor Rolf’s building, the air is still. He realises that there is no longer a promising early summer feeling that meets him. It is the middle of July and the very height of the summer. He feels a bit out of sorts and needs to clear his head after the strange visit to Doctor Rolf. He decides to walk all the way from this northern edge of the city down to S?der.

He walks via the Observatory Park up behind the City Library so that he can follow Drottninggatan from its beginning right down to the Old Town. The trees in the lower reaches of Observatory Park groan under the merciless rays of the sun and fight with the grassy banks for the last drops of water in ground. You can almost hear the sucking and slurping. The green of the grass is sometimes broken by brownish patches. The leaves in the park droop humbly in a prayer for a little rain.

He loves the Strindberg quotes that have been inserted into the centre line of Drottninggatan after the bottom of the hill. The street is still picturesque with cosy cafés and middling restaurants. The buildings are low enough to allow the sun to reach the pavement tables. This part of the street crawls with hip teenagers trying to break a record in drinking lattes as slowly as possible. Then, closer to the Old Town, the street is transformed into a bustling shopping Mecca for all the usual high street brands: H&M, Intersport, Stadium, Zara, Clas Ohlson, McDonalds and so on. Families with children dominate here. They rush between the escalators and swing doors with dripping ice creams at the ready and enormous plastic carrier bags under their arms. Woe betide you if you don’t look happy. Damn you if you don’t look rich. After Sergels Torg and the House of Culture, Drottninggatan dissolves into an icy cold corridor in the shadow of government departments in tall and ugly buildings. The only people to be seen are the odd middle-aged civil servant and occasional flocks of tourists that have probably gone astray. Weird shops sell elk motifs on T-shirts and Dala horses of every possible size. Who buys Dala horses? wonders Titus. What can you do with them? Perhaps there are bus trips directly to the souvenir shops, because they seem to be crammed with short and happy Japanese tourists. They compete to grab at the Dala horses. They obviously know something that others don’t know. Dala horses are good for potency. You crush them and mix the result with saké. A clunk of that and you get a magnificent swaying mid-summer pole from the Swedish Dalecarlia.

Stockholm in summer is like nowhere else, Titus thinks. If you ignore the completely re-built area around Klara and the southern part of Drottninggatan, Stockholm is objectively the most beautiful summer city in the world, of any kind. No doubt about that; it must be considered as proven.

The sound of the city is different in the summer, too. Birdsong that is almost painful in May and early June sounds like normal and pleasant interval music now. The cars are not in such a hurry between end-of-term celebrations, overtime work and suburban shopping. Instead, they roll slowly along the streets in a sort of proud parade to manifest what every genuine Stockholmer feels: Stockholm is best in the summer. That’s when the hundreds of thousands of ‘newer’ Stockholmers travel home to their provincial roots and are seen as rich and successful ‘homecomers’ for a few weeks. While there, they can subject their old cottages to an extreme makeover, they can push up the prices at local knick-knack auctions, grill Flintstone pork steaks and piss in the water at public bathing beaches to their hearts’ content. And the permanent local residents can moan and grumble about the people from the capital. Indeed, country folk need their images of the ‘Stockholmers’. That they are in actual fact mirror images of each other is of lesser importance.

When Titus reaches the Old Town, he decides that he deserves a cup of coffee. He needs to think. He walks up to Stortorget and goes into the café in the Grillska building. With a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun on his tray, Titus sits at a window table and looks out onto the square and the old Stock Exchange.

The last few weeks have been eventful. For starters, he has written a copious amount. Most of it has been top-notch stuff. He knows that when he reads through the material in a week or two, it will be easy to decide what is up to standard. He has absolute pitch. When it comes to text, he can trust himself 100 per cent.

The Best Book in the World is beginning to acquire a structure that he really likes. The variation of a thriller with elements of fact works better than he could have imagined. The bits with H?kan Rink’s hunt for Serial Salvador are snappy and hard-boiled. They always end with an exciting cliffhanger. The sections with facts occupy at most one or two pages each time, and serve as comfortable resting places in the midst of the action. He has already managed to incorporate the most common subjects that the bestselling non-fiction and reference works usually deal with: from crash slimming to self-help. The language is almost impertinent in its accessibility. Sometimes he wonders if it really can be so lucid and easy to read when the theme is so intellectual. You can’t help but go on reading and reading, to keep finding out what happens next. Titus is pleased with himself: this is exactly what he wants to achieve. Language is communication, not an art form in itself. The work of art is that which remains inside the reader’s head. A unique picture that only exists in a single copy.

But best of all is nevertheless that Astra forced him to sober up. He feels bright and energetic. The poison has left his body. In a purely chemical sense, I have conquered the abuse, he thinks. His body no longer screams for poisons. What remains are figments of his imagination: he can still find himself looking in the fridge for a beer or feeling in his pocket for a fag. The force of habit is powerful, but these remnants are no worse than he can brush aside with the help of another figment of his imagination: the reward image where he is lying there enjoying life on a warm young female body. Better to be obsessed than dependent.

He feels the calm returning to his body. It has been quite a while since he has been away from his computer for such a long time. It doesn’t feel totally wrong to be out on the city streets again. Cafés. People-watching. Relaxing.

That unpleasant Doctor-Rolf feeling is losing its grip. What an idiot. What a pathetic life. What a repulsive attitude towards people. At the same time, it was quite interesting to hear what he had said about Tourette’s syndrome being just an imaginary illness.

What if he was right? What would that mean in Lenny’s case?