Such Good Work

by Johannes Lichtman

  The first quiz asked whether the government should impose an extra tax on jet fuel for flights within the EU. Twenty-nine questions later, the quiz told me I was a center-right Moderate. Unsatisfied, I found a second quiz, which asked if the state should require passing Swedish exams as a prerequisite for refugees to receive government benefits. My answers suggested I should vote for the Feminist Party. I took a third quiz, which had a lot of questions about the restrictions on hunting wolves, an animal I didn’t even know lived in Sweden, and my answers indicated that I should be a member of the fascist Sweden Democrats. After eight quizzes—one of which asked if I would ever consider taking the last cookie from the plate at fika—I still couldn’t find a party that fit my beliefs. I realized that this was partly because, once I was out of the either/or-ness of Democrat/Republican, I found that I didn’t know, specifically, what I believed.

  On the day of the election, I had walked down to the polling place in the university building near my dormitory still undecided. It was crowded; Sweden had an 85 percent voter participation rate. In line, I began to sweat. It was as if I were about to take a drug test knowing I was just on the edge of what the internet said was the life span of oxy in the bloodstream. When I got to the front of the line, I was informed that my address was still listed with the government as my cousin’s apartment in Stockholm. I was told that I had to vote at my Stockholm polling place, three hundred miles north of Lund. Which was such a relief.

  * * *

  Bengt’s party rolled into the morning. The nonserious drinkers left. It would be a week before I went to Hamburg for New Year’s, and I was eager to find something to fill that time with. I wanted to write and publish something, anything, and I’d gotten it into my head that I should find a Swedish writer to study. I would read all their books over the next week, then write an essay about the Swedish writer, which I could sell to an American arts magazine or literary journal. The problem was that I didn’t have any Swedish writers I liked. Swedes didn’t study their national literature at the university level the way Americans did theirs. In class we were just as likely to be versed in American, British, French, or German literature as the Swedish canon.

  “There aren’t any Swedish writers worth reading,” Karin said.

  But the boys from class offered: August Strindberg, Selma Lagerlöf, Vilhelm Moberg, Tomas Tranströmer, Pär Lagerkvist, Moa Martinson, Harry Martinson, Lars Gustafsson, and Hjalmar Söderberg. I liked Söderberg’s clipped delivery, Strindberg’s cynicism, and Tranströmer’s heart-stopping images. But the writer who piqued my interest was one that Jakob mentioned: Stig Dagerman.

  Dagerman was the tragic wunderkind of postwar Swedish letters, Jakob told me. After World War II, from the ages of twenty-two to twenty-six, Dagerman published several books to great acclaim.

  “But then he killed himself,” Jakob said.

  I was, despite my knowledge of how immature it was, still fascinated by prodigies, geniuses, and tragic figures who died by their own hand. The next day, before my hangover set in and the library closed, I checked out all the books by and about Dagerman that I could find. Over the coming days, I read Dagerman for as long as my hangovers would allow. I read about his suicide. Plagued by writer’s block, guilt, and anxiety, he shut the garage door and started the engine. I tried to dig into the novels—which alternated between swirling stream of consciousness and nightmarish Freudian lyricism—with little success. What grabbed me was his essay collection, German Autumn. Dagerman wrote the essays at the age of twenty-three, on assignment from a Swedish newspaper to cover the conditions of German civilians after World War II. And much of the book took place in Hamburg—where I was going!

  Dagerman had been a Swedish leftist and anti-Nazi activist, married to a refugee who’d fled the Nazis. But when Dagerman traveled through Germany in 1946, he saw a defeated population that the world had agreed deserved to suffer. He saw 7 million German civilians left homeless by Allied bombing. He saw families living in flooded cellars and subsisting on what dirty potatoes they could find. He saw mothers forced to prostitute themselves to foreign soldiers to feed their children. He wondered if it wasn’t important to maintain the ability to feel for those suffering, even if they deserved to suffer.

  Part of me admired Dagerman’s empathy. But a part of me also wondered if it was real or if it was just a literary device. I figured the answer would come to me in Hamburg.

  * * *

  I did a solo Christmas in Lund, which I hadn’t thought would matter, since I didn’t even like Christmas. But the holiday was lonelier when it was dark and snowy outside than when it was seventy degrees and sunny. If you ignored the golden tinsel hanging down over the strip-mall storefronts, Christmas in California could be just like any other day. In Sweden, Christmas was definitively Christmas.

  On Christmas Eve, sitting in my room alone, I felt a little down. I tried to call Anja, but she didn’t pick up, as she was likely eating eighteen kinds of sausage with her big German family, listening while her grandfather read a book to the children about Santa Claus marauding through the forest and slaying the naughty. I tried to call Stella, who didn’t pick up either. But soon after, Stella texted me a picture of her family and Zach, sitting around the tree in ugly Christmas sweaters.

  We miss you! the caption said.

  The picture made me feel better, for a second, but then more alone. Things were happening without me—people were growing. Stella would probably soon marry Zach, and then my two college buddies would be adults. I didn’t feel homesick or want to return to the US, nor did I want Stella and Zach to come visit me in Sweden—the thought of visitors was exhausting. I just wanted time to stop for a while.

  I decided that I should try to do something nice for someone else. I went to the Save the Children website and bought a goat for a family in Mali, which the promotional materials suggested would help the family eat and survive for a year. I was a little disappointed when I realized that I wouldn’t get to see the family receive the goat.

  After the goat purchase, I still had three hundred kronor, about $40, left in what I calculated to be my charity budget, so I biked up to the ATM by the student union, withdrew the money in hundreds, and biked down to the ICA grocery in the strip mall. A Rom woman always sat out front on the hard concrete, saying, “Hej hej,” to everyone who walked by, and clasping her hands in a thank-you prayer whenever someone dropped a few kronor in her cup. Today she wore a red scarf around her head. A long dress stuck out under a winter jacket.

  She smiled at me when I approached. “Hej hej.”

  “Hej hej,” I said, rolling my bike alongside me. I pulled a hundred-kronor note from my wallet and placed it in her cup.

  “Tack, tack, tack.”

  “God jul.” I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for out of the interaction, but I felt kind of good afterward.

  Then I biked—slowly and slippingly in the snow—down to Lund Central, where the other ICA was located. Usually a large Rom woman sat by the entrance in what looked like an uncomfortable position—one leg tucked under her, one stretched out in front. But today it was a younger girl, maybe in her late teens. I took a hundred-kronor note and placed it in her cup. Her eyes got big and she said something in a language I didn’t understand.

  “De nada,” I said, for reasons that escaped me. But she smiled and bowed her head and I smiled and bowed my head and got on my bike. Now I was feeling really good.

  In front of the nearly deserted entrance to the train station across the street stood a Middle Eastern man in a long ratty peacoat. He was holding up a copy of the magazine a nonprofit organization published for the homeless to sell.

  “God jul.”

  “God jul,” the man said back to me.

  I handed the man my last hundred-kronor note.

  “Det kostar bara fyrtio,” he said—it only cost forty.

  “It’s all for you.” I waved off the magazine. “God jul.”

  “I’m not a beggar. Here.” He handed
me the magazine. “It’s only forty.”

  “I don’t want one.” I had bought an issue a few months earlier and found that it was maybe the worst magazine ever written. I handed the man the money. “It’s a present.”

  “I’m not a fucking beggar!” The man waved his hands. “Give it to the Gypsy across the street!”

  I walked back across the street and dropped another hundred in the cup of the young Rom woman in front of the ICA. Then I jumped on my bike without making eye contact and pedaled off, wondering why I hadn’t just bought the magazine. When I got home, I drank until the memory of the failure faded away. Midway through my fourth beer, I began to think of all the acceptance letters from editors that would soon appear in my inbox. I could see the names of the editors and the congratulatory subject lines so clearly that it was strange waking up in the morning and remembering that I hadn’t written anything at all.

  ANJA MET ME IN THE arrivals area of the Hamburg Airport wearing a thick scarf and a puffy jacket. Her hair was tightly braided, and I felt a surge of happiness when I saw her big smile.

  “Meine Katze.” I kissed her.

  “Mein Jonas.” She kissed me back. “I am sorry, but I have a flu.”

  “Poor you,” I said, trying not to recoil. I was sad for her that she had to be sick over the little time we had together. But I was also sad for myself that I would now be sick.

  She drove us into the city in her mother’s little black Renault. Once we’d settled into the apartment I’d rented for the weekend with my student-loan money, she looked so tired that I assured her it was fine if she just wanted to go to sleep. After lying with her until her breathing loudened and slowed, I rifled through my bag for the whiskey bottle I’d bought at the duty-free and drank half of it sitting in the chair in front of the window.

  * * *

  Anja felt a little better in the morning, so we went out in the city, where nearly every surface was covered in advertisements for The Lion King Lion King buses on the outskirts of downtown, Lion King boats on the Elbe, and finally, across the river, a large yellow dome with a lion’s head proclaiming DER KÖNIG DER LÖWEN.

  As we walked along the water, Anja blew her nose and asked me what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” I said, realizing that I’d been quiet for a while.

  “You’re not having a good time.”

  “I am having a good time. I’m happy to be here with you.” I squeezed her arm, trying to make it true.

  During my time alone, longing for Anja, I had forgotten that relationships often involved taking care of another person at times when you didn’t feel like taking care of another person. I was either feeling guilty about my failure to take care of Anja, annoyed at the need for me to take care of her, or both. Since my classmates had gone home for the holidays, I had only talked with cashiers and Christmas-charity targets, and I’d wanted to spend the weekend laughing with Anja, curling up next to her, and feeling at home while I gathered material for the great essay I would write about Dagerman and Hamburg. But I wasn’t feeling what I wanted to feel for Anja or for Hamburg. Hamburg was not the dystopian ruinscape that Dagerman had described. It was just a boring city that inspired no literary insights. I thought about drugs and how they must be easier to find here than in Sweden. In Berlin, Bengt had told me, all you had to do was walk into a bar and someone offered you coke. It wouldn’t be the same in Hamburg—but it wouldn’t be too hard either.

  * * *

  As we rode the train back to the Nord part of the city where we were staying, I thought of a scene from German Autumn. Dagerman comes upon a train of German civilians who fled Essen for the Bavarian countryside during the Allied bombing. After the war ended, they were deported by the Bavarian government and told to return to their homes. But now they’re not allowed back into Essen. The city is too ravaged to support even those who had stayed. They’ve been waiting outside Essen for a week in train cars deemed too leaky to transport “perishable” goods—refugees in their own country, suffering and dying while they wait for a green light.

  The sick passengers beg Dagerman’s German guide for help. The guide tells them that he’s just here to give a tour to the nice Swedish journalist. Later, Dagerman wrote that he tried to impart kindness while gathering material to share the refugees’ plight with the world. But he wondered what good it is visiting the suffering when one has no medicine to offer, only empathy.

  “Journalism is the art of coming too late as early as possible,” he wrote to a friend while touring Germany. “I’ll never learn that.”

  * * *

  Back at the apartment, I saw that the apartment owners kept a scale on the shelf above the toilet, so I took it down to weigh myself. The scale read 86 kilograms, which was too much. I took out my phone and converted the number to pounds: 190. When I’d left the US, I’d weighed 175. I stepped on the scale again and found that it read 86 again.

  I came out of the bathroom and said to Anja that the scale must be broken. “It says I weigh eighty-six kilos.”

  “That sounds right.” Wearing pajamas and a scarf, she was boiling water in the kitchen for tea.

  “It’s not right. I weighed seventy-nine when I came here.”

  “Well. You have gotten a little bigger.”

  “I’ve gotten a little bigger?”

  “You still look good. I don’t care.”

  “I’m going to get you some ibuprofen for your flu.” I returned to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror. I lifted up my shirt. My belly protruded a little. When I turned, there was a crease in the skin down my side, between hip and rib. I had put on weight. How had I not noticed?

  I found my big bottle of ibuprofen, bought from the Rite Aid back home, took it out of my toiletries bag, and brought it to Anja. “Take two.”

  “Thank you.” But then she looked at the bottle in disbelief. “Five hundred pills? Why do Americans sell it in such a large bottle?”

  “Convenience?”

  “If you take forty, you will die.”

  “Don’t take forty. Take two.”

  “Here you cannot buy more than twenty at a time. This is irresponsible.”

  “Can you buy a knife here? Because you only need one of those to die.”

  “It’s different swallowing pills and cutting yourself with a knife. One is much more difficult. And what if you don’t really want to die? If you have five hundred pills just lying there, and you feel bad, you can just take them. But if you have to go to two stores to buy them, maybe you have another thought on the way and you don’t want to die anymore.”

  “I think people who want to kill themselves have stronger feelings than that.”

  “Maybe there are different levels to wanting to kill yourself.”

  I thought of Dagerman, whose suicide was not his first attempt. His biographer wrote that when Dagerman asphyxiated from the car fumes, he had been trying to get out of the garage, but had changed his mind too late and died while trying to escape his own decision. Then I remembered that this thought had nothing to do with my conversation with Anja, and that I had, for a moment, confused the things I’d read with the things I’d experienced.

  “Do they have cars in Germany? Because you can easily kill yourself with one of those. Or household cleaning products. Or an oven. Or—”

  “Okay, okay.” She kissed me on the cheek. “I want to take a catnap now.”

  As she slept, I began to google neighborhoods in Hamburg to find the one with the highest crime rate, as that was the one most likely to have a drug trade. But I closed the window before I got too far. I would not leave my girlfriend sleeping in a rented apartment so that I could take a train to a dangerous neighborhood to try to buy heroin in German. I could barely order a kebab in German. Instead I finished off the whiskey I’d bought at the duty-free. During our ibuprofen argument, Anja had not once used her being sick to guilt me into not being such an asshole. I appreciated that and wanted to tell her, but she was sleeping, so I nestled next to her, stroked her bac
k, and said, “Meine Katze.”

  When she woke up, I kissed her on the head.

  “I’m sorry that I am sick and you aren’t having fun.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m sorry. I’m happy just being here with you.” And in moments like this, I was.

  We kissed, then kissed some more, then she started to go down on me. I didn’t want her to do it when she was sick. But I didn’t stop her, at first because I could only imagine how bad it felt to be told to stop when you were trying to fix something, and then because of how good it felt for her not to stop. Afterward I went down on her and she came with a long sigh. We cuddled and she seemed happier and I was happier.

  After she fell asleep, I tried to write about Dagerman. Outside Essen, Dagerman sees a man console a hysterical girl from the train by rolling her wheelchair around in the rain and mud. Dagerman ends the vignette with this image of admirable consolation offered in the face of hopelessness. But by the end of his life, as he sank deeper into depression, he began to categorize the temporary consolations—the distractions from suffering that were the lifeblood of German Autumn—as false consolations.

  I wondered how much Dagerman had believed in temporary consolations even in German Autumn—how much he’d believed that his writing could change anything besides his reputation.

  * * *

  On the morning of December 31, I woke in my Hamburg bed with a start. A bang outside the window. Then another.

  I shot up. “What’s happening?”

  “Fireworks,” Anja mumbled.

  “What?”

  She put her hand on my face and pressed my head into the pillow. “There are fireworks. Go back to sleep now.”