Замок Грипсхольм

When you move, your worries follow you. If you’re only staying somewhere for four weeks, you can laugh at everything – even the little unpleasantnesses. They don’t concern you. If you stay there forever, though, you have to be involved. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ Charles V said once to a prior whose monastery he was visiting. ‘Transeuntibus!’ replied the prior. ‘Beautiful? Yes, if you’re passing through.’

But that was not all. The atavistic drive of mankind was rampant in her: for power, power, power. Nothing hurts such a creature more than an unexpected rebellion. A world collapses. Spartacus . . . So many children were suffering here. I could have hit her. She shrank away.

And now I was a strange man going to a wicked, strange woman. I quickly played through the different scenarios of Hansel and the witch; ‘but I’m so shy’ . . . and then I recovered. It took much less time to happen than to write. It was over. A wise Indian said, ‘You have to kill the tiger in your mind, before the hunt–the rest is a formality.’

‘I mean they’re always so terribly chic. Even when they write about being broke, they tell a stylish version of it. They seem to have both feet off the ground. Will a newspaper ever talk about what it’s really like: how you start scrimping on the twentieth of each month, how things get miserable and petty sometimes, how you can rarely afford to take a taxi, not to mention buying a car. Instead, they feed us their ridiculous cult of fashionable living . . . do any of us live in proper flats?’

We were in the middle of our holidays.
Swimming in the lake; lying naked on the shore, in a sheltered spot; soaking up the sun, so that you rolled home at noon, wonderfully dozy, and drunk on the light, the air and the water; quiet; eating; drinking; sleeping; resting – holiday.

She was so alone here. Quite alone among the other thirty-nine girls, and she was afraid. Her life consisted of nothing but fear. Fear of the Limb of Satan and of the older girls, who would tell on her whenever they could, fear of the next day and of the day before, from which things might come to light. Fear of everything, everything. The child didn’t sleep – her eyes made holes in the dark.

It’s funny, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘When people think about Sweden, they think: Swedish punch, awfully cold, Ivar Kreuger, match-boxes, awfully cold, blonde women and awfully cold. It’s not that cold at all.’

Wenn einer nichts zu tun hat, dann holt er die andern, und dann machen sie eine Konferenz.

We had thought we could escape time. But you can’t, it follows you. I looked at the Princess and pointed at the newspaper, and she nodded. We had talked about it the night before; about newspapers, about time in general, and about this time. One often thinks love is stronger than time; but time is always stronger than love.

‘First of all,’ I said, ‘I saw how it was. And then I understood why it was like that – and then I appreciated why it couldn’t be any other way. But I still want it to be different. It’s a trial of strength. If you can remain true to yourself . . .’

We let the wind blow over us some more, and said nothing. It’s nice to have someone you can share a silence with.

The Princess didn’t drink red wine much. Instead – and she was the only woman I’ve ever met who did – she liked whisky. Most women say it tastes just like a dentist’s mouthwash, but if it’s good whisky, it tastes of smoke.

Missingsch is what comes out when a Platt German from the North wants to speak proper High German. It slithers about on the carefully wax-polished stairs of German grammar, before falling flat on its face in its beloved Platt.

Neither of us suffered from that peculiar disease of finding yourself at a station and suddenly buying a couple of pounds of newsprint, when you can be pretty sure in advance it will be tripe.
And so we got the papers.

The bait of 14% of copies without royalties isn’t tasty enough: 12% would be more tempting. Just think about that for a bit, and give your hard publisher’s heart a little nudge. I can’t guarantee inspiration at 14% – the Muse starts at 12%.

Und dann hielt das Auto da, wo alle bessern Geschichten anfangen: am Bahnhof.