Twelve Thousand Days

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  Uppsala, I liked to think, was one of my cities. (I liked that phrase, ‘my city’, which I had read in someone’s memoir, in the sentence, ‘Dublin is my city.’) Uppsala is my city too, because I was married in it, on a snowy winter’s day, and I had visited it maybe twenty times since then. Also, I loved it, because it was beautiful and old and very Swedish. I knew all the streets from Torsgatan, where Hugo’s flat was, to the English Park, at the far side of town. Every day, during my visits, I walked all the way along the river, past the Uppland Museum and the cathedral, past the shops and old hotels, past the English Park and the hospital, to the yard where people kept their boats and yachts. In summer they would sail along the river into the great lake Mälaren, and then on into Stockholm and the sea. Or so I imagined. I knew, in particular, the shops: the nice little boutique on St Olof’s Gata where you could get expensive clothes, linen and undyed wool; Hemtex, for tablecloths and textiles; the big department store, Åhléns. It was as familiar to me as Dublin or Dingle, and I enjoyed it more because it was always exotic.

  On the Last of April, though, it felt strange, and I felt like a foreigner. There were always lots of students in the city, of course, cycling and walking. It actually was their city; it’s like Oxford, a city that belongs to students. But now it was crammed. The shops were closed and the cafes were packed so getting a bite to eat would be a challenge. The hotel we were staying in was fine, but its restaurant was called MacFie’s; the seats were covered with red tartan and the TVs screened football matches from the UK.

  Before trying to get lunch, we walked down to the river, where the raft race was on.

  The river in Uppsala is its great treasure, at least as precious as the medieval cathedral or the six-hundred-year-old university. The river is older – of course – and even more beautiful. The many bridges are picturesque, some ancient and some new. The water passes slowly under some of them. At other places, it dashes along in rapids over rocks and bumps.

  It was on the rapids that the raft race took place.

  We stood on the street opposite the museum and a Greek restaurant with an outdoor area looking down over the river, where we had eaten many times over the past thirty years. At this point the river ran downhill for about half a kilometre, over rocks, in a series of rapids, and this was where the rafts were sailing. It was different from what I had imagined. (Everything is.) I had envisioned the rafts sailing peacefully along the calm stretches of the river, down through the streets and the park. But no, they were being set off, in twos and threes, from a point above a little waterfall, to shoot the rapids. Two ambulances were positioned just above the Greek restaurant, waiting for eventual casualties. Lifeguards, in wetsuits with underwater regalia, stood in the water at either side.

  A raft with an igloo on top came hopping and skipping down the rapids. The crowd cheered. The goal was, I understood, to make it over the rapids without capsizing or falling into the water.

  ‘Did you do this?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled.

  ‘I wonder when they started doing it?’

  He didn’t answer. He hadn’t been in the city on the Last of April in over forty years. Time and space have different dimensions but sometimes one can relate them. Forty years is further away in time than Ireland is from Sweden in distance. Very much further. Even in the Viking days, in the early Middle Ages, they would get from Norway to Dublin in a week or so, spend the summer raiding and robbing, and return home. Two weeks on the North Sea. These days two and a half hours in the air takes you from Dublin to Stockholm. And vice versa. In history there is no vice versa; it is a one-way flight, no return possible.

  It started to spit rain, and sleet. People, well wrapped up in thick, dark, waterproof coats, were moving away from the river.

  The igloo was manned by two students. It came shooting down the river and they stayed on board. Then it floated fairly serenely along the calmer water towards the finishing line, or whatever it was.

  ‘Would you like to go and get some lunch?’

  ‘Whatever you want, darling.’

  It was all for me, this day, this Last of April. Being back in his beloved old city to revisit the highlight of the student year meant nothing to Bo. Or it meant something that was not enjoyable, maybe painful. I didn’t really know what, though.

  I wanted to see one more.

  The next raft was already coming down. This one had a fairy-tale castle with icicles dripping from it and there was only one skipper. It shot over the rapids, tumbling and turning, and when it flew into the deeper water the student was tossed overboard. Everyone screamed ‘Ah!’ I felt excited. I knew they all did. This was what we all wanted to see, really – people falling off their rafts, into the icy water. Without a second’s hesitation the lifeguard threw the buoy out, and one of the divers swam rapidly to where the student had disappeared into the black water. I watched eagerly. He – or she – would be rescued. There was no doubt. There was only a fraction of a doubt. If it was really dangerous they wouldn’t be allowed do it.

  Yes. He … or she … was rescued, and we went off looking for a place to eat.

  After lunch we went up to the library, Carolina Rediviva. A huge crowd was gathered, old people as well as young. Champagne on trays, picnics. A choir singing ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’ and many other songs.

  There were hailstones, but spirits were high.

  At three o’clock the Rektor Magnificus, who was a Rektor Magnifica this time, made her little speech and donned her cap. And all the caps went on, on young and old, although not on Bo. In Dublin he would put on his student cap on the Last of April, but not here.

  That was that.

  ‘Don’t they run down the hill?’

  Not any more. It’s not permitted for safety reasons. It would be lethal nowadays, with so many students. That custom too had bitten the dust. Everything changes, and if you are an emigrant, you find these changes abrupt and disturbing. You are a stranger in your own country and your own city. You return to it from another place and from another time.

  Lingon was Bo’s favourite restaurant in Uppsala. He belonged to a generation of Swedish men who always ate in restaurants if they were unmarried. As a student, his allowance had permitted him to do this – there were cheap places to eat, then, the ‘Nations’, which are a kind of student club associated with the various Swedish counties, and endowed to some extent by alumni (Bo’s nation was Värmlands Nation). In Dublin, when Bo lived alone in Booterstown, he always ate a three-course lunch in the staff restaurant in Belfield, and a three-course dinner in the Tara Towers Hotel on the Rock Road. Of course, in Shankill we always had dinner at home. I like cooking, and, in the years after the boys left home, when it was just the two of us in the house, dinner was a pleasant ritual. I cooked, we ate by candlelight with a glass of wine, chatted and lingered. Bo always took care of the washing-up and filling and emptying the dishwasher. In the early days of our marriage I had grumbled that he never cooked. My feminist principles demanded that he should. It was not entirely true that he never cooked. When left alone with the boys he could rustle up a meal of potatoes, salad, and either pork chops or meatballs. They, in fact, preferred his meatballs – nothing but meat, fried to a crisp – to anything I cooked. As we had more time, and mellowed, I accepted that I enjoyed cooking and stopped complaining. I got the best of the bargain anyway – washing-up is not half as much fun as cooking.

  Tonight, Lingon was operating a special deal. They had installed an outdoor barbecue, and there were only two things on the menu, lamb or salmon. There was a long queue waiting to be served. We stood in the cold wondering if it was worth it. But we were not standing for long when a man, perhaps attached to the restaurant, said to the maître d’, ‘Haven’t you got a table for the professor?’

  ‘Do you know us?’ I asked.

  ‘No, but I know what a professor looks like.’

  We were both pleased. Bo still looked like a professor, an Uppsala professor, in his eighty-first year. A handsom
e Uppsala professor – he looked like a character in a Bergman film.

  And we got a table.

  We visited an old friend in Uppsala on 1 May, Ingrid, and had lunch in her lovely apartment before going back to Stockholm. Although we were seeing various friends and relatives, and doing a bit of sightseeing, the main reason for this trip to Sweden, the main reason, was that Bo was getting his passport renewed. The Swedish Embassy in Ireland had closed some years earlier, and now Swedish citizens living in Ireland have to go to London or Stockholm. Due to new security regulations it is quite a complex procedure and was not comfortable – long queues, confusion because Bo had an Irish address, a general inefficiency that was not characteristic of Sweden but confirmed our suspicion that life would be easier if there was an embassy in Dublin. But finally we got the passport, valid for ten more years.

  There were a few more stages to our holiday. We went south on the train from Stockholm to Ystad, home of Kurt Wallander, the fictional detective created by Henning Mankell, whose writing I love. From Ystad, we were going to the island of Bornholm, which neither of us had ever visited, and then on to Copenhagen before returning home.

  In Ystad we stayed in a hostel that was based in the old Custom House, which had been used in the first TV series based on the Wallander novels. Our room was the one that had been Svartman’s office in the first few series of the drama. Like all the Swedish hostels, this one was more like a hotel, simple but comfortable. It did not serve food, however, and we had dinner in one of Wallander’s favourite restaurants, Opp och När.

  Our day in Ystad was a bright sunny one. The town is old and very picturesque, with narrow streets of pretty wooden houses, a medieval monastery, flowerbeds full of dazzling flowers – thousands of purple and yellow pansies, Bo’s favourites because they are so cheerful, always smiling. A river, a duck pond, ducks. The television drama, intent on revealing the dark side of Sweden, conveys little or no impression of the charm and beauty of the town and the surrounding landscape.

  Bo and I walked around, but his back ached and he spent most of the day sitting outside a cafe, reading, while I explored the shops. I went to my favourite department store, Åhléns, where I set off the alarm as I walked in the door.

  This had happened a few times on the holiday, this sudden setting-off of alarms. Nobody could figure out what was causing it. But now, in the town of Wallander, a young male assistant solved the problem. Was I possibly carrying something in my handbag that had not been desensitised. Make-up? I opened my bag, fished out a lipstick, and he desensitised it.

  How had it got there?

  A lipstick bought in Dunne’s Stores. Or perhaps not bought? Left by mistake at the bottom of the trolley, never paid for or checked out? It could have happened, I couldn’t swear that it had not.

  The alarms could have been omens. But there was a rational explanation.

  There were other possible omens. I dreamt that my teeth were falling out. Some people believe that this dream, which many have, heralds a death. But I was having problems with my teeth. There was a boil in my mouth, a gumboil, which would not heal, in spite of applications of Bonjela and other medications. I interpreted my dream about teeth falling out as a dream about teeth. And when I got back to Dublin and had it checked it was discovered that I had an infected root. Root canal work was tried and failed. Sometime in September – much later – the tooth was extracted.

  Bo, long ago when we were young and having our very first holiday together in Denmark, told a story about Bornholm. As a young man he was going to a nightclub in Nyhavn in Copenhagen with his Icelandic friend, Eggert. They both spoke Danish and claimed to be Danish. A Dane they were drinking with looked suspiciously at Bo and said ‘Enten er du svensk, eller er du frå Bornholm.’

  Bo had expressed a wish to go to Bornholm then, and often afterwards. In recent years, a Danish friend, Lis Pihl, whose father came from Bornholm, and who visited it from time to time, encouraged us to visit the island with her for a few days. Yes, we would, we would. But Lis died in 2011, from ovarian cancer, and we never made that trip – a matter that I had always regretted.

  But now we were on our way.

  We were on the big ferry, sailing over the Baltic to the little island that lies between Sweden and Germany but belongs to Denmark. And, just as was the case on the Last of April in Uppsala, Bo was not all that interested in the experience. He appeared to have forgotten that once he had longed to see Bornholm. But now, although he did not express any indifference, I could see that he didn’t care about it much one way or the other. All the enthusiasm for the voyage was mine. Perhaps Bo would have preferred to go to Gothenburg, and visit his sister Vera? She is eleven years his senior. There was always the risk that we would not see her again, that she would die before our next visit. Or perhaps his travelling days were over. All his life he had been a traveller, an explorer. But that impulse was fading. He no longer cared about seeing new places. I’ve read in a memoir by one of my favourite writers, Penelope Lively, that, in her eighties, she no longer had any desire to travel abroad, although all her life she had loved going to new places. The desire had disappeared, and travel abroad seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. In Bo I had seen over the past few years that the old excitement was no longer there. It was as if he was already moving out of the world, and that the places on planet Earth that we love, for their beauty or history (always more of a draw, for him), were losing their lustre and significance.

  We arrived in Rønne, the capital, and took a bus to Svaneke. Lis Pihl always stayed in this village, at a hotel called Siemsens Gaard. I had booked a few nights there, partly to honour Lis’s memory and partly because I knew it was a good hotel.

  It’s an old merchant’s house close to the harbour in Svaneke, which is a picturesque old village, with timbered houses, rose-filled gardens. We arrived at about 9 p.m. The restaurant in the hotel had stopped serving food; none of the other Svaneke restaurants were open. Tomorrow would be Ascension Thursday, a bank holiday in Sweden and Denmark, but the holiday season had not started yet. In the only pub that was open – a convivial place where we were made to feel very welcome by the few customers – we had a beer and a packet of peanuts, the only food on sale. Laughing, we went home, rather hungry, to bed in our simple, comfortable room.

  Next day we took the bus that goes around the coastline of Bornholm. Windmills, green fields, pretty old houses. It didn’t take very long to reach Rønne, which is a big enough town, and not enchanting. Ordinary. In the bookshop, Bo bought a book about Bornholm and over lunch he told me the story of the end of the Second World War on the island. On 7 May 1945, when the people of Copenhagen were celebrating the end of the war and of occupation by Germany, Bornholm, still under the command of a diehard German officer, was bombed by the Russians. For a year, the island was held by Russia, while its fate was decided: would it become part of the Eastern Bloc, or stay Danish? In the event, it remained with Denmark, of course. But Bornholm felt betrayed by the Danes and has never forgotten this episode – from which its tourist industry makes plenty of mileage these days.

  We didn’t go to a museum. This was one of the great aspects of travelling with Bo. He knew the history of almost every place we ever visited, and enthralled me with stories of those places, but we did not always feel it was essential to see all the tourist spots. Being with him as a travelling companion was almost like being alone – except a million times better. I always felt that we were at our best, as a couple, travelling together. We rhymed with one another, as we walked and flew and sailed. And we had many perfect journeys together.

  It is not that our interests always coincided precisely. Sometimes I liked to be more active than Bo, especially in these later years, when his backache prevented him from walking as much as had been his custom for most of his life. I had dreamed of cycling on Bornholm – a flat island, filled with small country roads. A Swedish friend of mine from my Copenhagen days, Ulla, had spent a holiday once with her mother on the i
sland cycling around, and based on her descriptions I had imagined an idyllic experience. And the island is certainly ideal for cycling: flat. There are cycle paths everywhere and anyway not much traffic. The hotel had bicycles that one could borrow. I set off. In practice it was not as wonderful as I imagined. The skies were overcast, the island was quiet, empty, a bit gloomy. I cycled in one direction, then in another. Photographed a windmill. Followed a sign saying Paradise Bakken. Who would not? But Paradise Bakken turned out to be a camping site on the top of perhaps the only hill on Bornholm, a forested slope. As often when hiking or cycling alone I began to feel the place was a bit creepy. After a few hours cycling, I was back in Siemsens Gaard.

  Bo was at home in the hotel room, sitting at the desk, translating an Icelandic saga, a short one, Bornholms Saga, to Swedish. He became engrossed in this work of translation, which he always loved. Over the two days he completed the translation and handed me the printout. It was dedicated to me. For Éilís. Till minna om vår semester på Bornholm. For Éilís, in memory of our holiday on Bornholm. Back home, he placed it on my desk by my printer. It is there still.

  Was it another sign? A sign that Bo was thinking of death? Almost certainly. He had had close brushes with it: his prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment two years earlier, a bowel cancer tumour that had been removed less than a year ago. On this holiday, the ghost of Hugo was with us in Uppsala, and now we remembered Lis Pihl on Bornholm. Bo did not talk about death and we were optimistic about his health. He was strong, and his siblings Hugo and Vera had lived for decades following cancer treatment. Bo had just renewed his passport for another ten years. I am sure he did not know that this was our last holiday abroad together. But I am also sure that he was reflecting on his own mortality. It upset him that he was slowing down – finally at the age of eighty-two. We had celebrated his birthday in Stockholm on 5 May, with Ragnar and Ailbhe and our great friend from Stockholm, Helena Wulff.