The disquiet that had been spreading could no longer be denied, the security of the nobles was undermined, no prayers or parades could wring devotion from the populace. The torturers were still raging, and the dungeons still filling up with any people arbitrarily suspected of dissatisfaction. But the whereabouts of the real prisoners were shown one morning, before sunrise, when Heracles arrived in Thebes, accompanied by a gigantic hound, at whose howling all those who had a solid house crept under their beds, while those in shacks and those who slept outdoors pricked up their ears and dashed toward Heracles as if called by a cheery trumpet. The guardian of infernal order, who had been depicted as unassailable since time immemorial, had been pulled out of the earthly depths by Heracles, easily, with a song, it was said, during his last raid into the interior of the world structure, and in the marketplace, which had been abandoned by the warriors of the upper ranks, he showed the maids and farmhands, the craftsmen and the day laborers, and the loitering rank and file: Cerberus, the shabby cur, who, upon viewing the vast assembly pulled in his tail and started whimpering. Heracles had also brought a caged eagle, a further celebrity in the system of coercion and menace; the eagle had served to torment the defiant, the valiant, the self-confident, to devour the livers of the rebellious, over and over, and now all this, as the inhabitants of Thebes could see, was about to end. They saw what scabby scraggy legs had propped up the reign of fraud and lies and how wretchedly the feathers dangled on the bird that had only just been throning proudly over Prometheus, how dull the membranes were that had drawn over the bird’s eyes, which had otherwise glittered so dangerously. An end thus to fettering anyone to anguish for thinking new thoughts, everything was open in Thebes, in Mycenae, for the age of justice. But, we wanted to know, did the inhabitants manage to spread so much conviction that the aristocrats in the palaces, in the patrician buildings, came crawling on their knees, begging for mercy, were they not, after a little doubting and waffling and not even necessarily a betrayal, but rather that routine tolerance, given a chance to defend themselves, to strike back. For it was not peace that now followed, we would, after all, have heard about it; instead new campaigns were launched, wars, vaster than ever. From now on, however, Heracles could not be imagined anywhere but on the side of the enslaved, said Heilmann amid the screeching of the wheels of a packed trolley, which, coming from Alexanderplatz, turned into Rosenthaler Strasse; Heracles, Heilmann went on, had made it clear that all magic spells had been broken, all legendary creatures subdued, and it was a mortal who could perform such feats. His apprenticeship was over, everything he now did would be marked by tremendous changes, he already had powerful allies, including the carrier of the firmament. And yet, said Heilmann after a while, as we entered the worn building entrance, which was shored up by buckling titans, and yet Heracles perished in dreadful agony, no one managed to grab the shirt soaked in Nessus’s poisoned blood, tear it from his skin, stop his pain-induced madness, and prevent him from throwing himself into the ever-burning pyre on Mount Oite. (The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 1)

We drove down into the underground garage and parked. Wandered round town, Geir wanted to go to some record shops and look for blues CDs, his new obsession, and then we went to the two big bookshops before looking for somewhere to eat. The choice fell on Peppes Pizza, beside the library. Geir seemed unmoved by what had happened in his life during the last week, and while we sat eating and chatting I wondered whether it was because he was in fact unmoved, and if so, why, or whether it was because he needed to hide his feelings. During my early days in Stockholm he had written some short stories, I read them, they were characterised above all else by a great distance to the events they described, and I remembered I told him it was as though a huge sunken ship had to be raised. Lying deep in his consciousness. He didn’t care about this any more, it wasn’t important for him, which of course did not mean it was without significance. He didn’t acknowledge it, and lived accordingly. But what status did it have? Was it repressed? Rationalised out of existence? Or was it, as he said, yesterday’s news? The distance he kept from his family was related: he held everything in the past at arm’s length. Their lives, which from what he said consisted of a regular series of everyday events, whose high points were trips to out-of-town shopping centres and Sunday lunch at some roadside inn, and topics of which conversation rarely rose beyond food and the weather, drove him crazy with restlessness, also because, I assumed, what he did had no place in them. They weren’t in the slightest bit interested in what he did. If the relationship was going to work he had to meet them on their terms, but he didn’t want to. At the same time he would often praise their warmth, their concern for their immediate world, hugs, embraces, but he invariably did that after having talked about what he couldn’t stand about them, like a kind of penance, and not without jibes at my expense, for while I had everything he didn’t have in the family, intellectual curiosity and constant conversation, which he called middle-class values, we didn’t have the warmth and closeness that he saw as typical of the working class from which he came, nor the desire to create cosy atmospheres so disdained in academic circles, inasmuch as the taste with which it was expressed was regarded as basic, simple even. Geir loathed the middle classes and middle-class values, but was quite aware they were the ones he himself had embraced in his university career with all that that entailed, and somewhere there he was caught like a fly in a spider’s web.

He was glad to see me, I noticed, and perhaps he also felt some relief that his mother was dead, not so much for his own sake as hers. One of the first things he mentioned was what importance her fear had now. None . . . but that was the point, we were as trapped in each other as in ourselves, we couldn’t escape, it was impossible to free yourself, you had the life you had. (My Struggle, Book 2)