He is out early that morning. He puts the blackened glass, which he has wrapped in a handkerchief, in his pocket and follows the gravel path out into the forest. Walking along, he thinks back to the times he has gone there with Elvira. The thought makes him a little melancholy, but at the same time he is happy that he is still alive and can experience the remarkable eclipse. He stops in the clear-cut and sees that there are only very few clouds gliding across the sky. He has put an alarm clock in his other pocket and has set it by the radio. He puts it on a tree stump and finds himself a low pile of logs to sit on. The air is warm and he squints at the sun.
Then he stays sitting on the woodpile, alone, as he waits for the momentous occasion.
He keeps an eye on the hands of the clock and stands up as the time approaches. He has set the clock to go off a quarter of an hour before the eclipse is due. He hears it and sees a squirrel stop in surprise halfway up the trunk of a pine tree. He unwraps the blackened glass from the handkerchief and with his head tilted upward he holds the glass before his eye.
There he stands, following the whole eclipse with a slight shudder as the bright day turns to dark. He does not move a muscle and can hear the clock ticking beside him.
* * *
—
When it is all over and he packs up his handkerchief, the blackened glass, and the alarm clock, he feels happy to have been able to experience this extraordinary event. He walks the gravel path back to town, thinking that at that very instant of total eclipse, time no longer ran on and away; instead it increased and expanded sideways. And he thinks that he would like time to be like that always. But he also thinks that it is not possible, and when he gets home, he drops the blackened glass and the dirty handkerchief into the rubbish bin in the yard.
* * *
—
One day, a year later, the local newspaper carries a detailed description of how photographs are developed. Oskar reads the article several times before he puts the newspaper to one side on the table.
Then he reflects that his thoughts and dreams are just like the process he has just read about for developing photographs. The way the negative, which is sharp but has no detail, slowly transforms into an ample and faithful representation of a moment and a situation and perhaps also a mood. That is exactly how he believes his brain functions, and he tears out the article and puts it in the drawer of the kitchen table.
* * *
—
During the fifties, four main events influence Oskar’s political stance. And three of them are also important and decisive developments during that decade, which people so wrongly see as somewhat static, a political vacuum compared to the sixties or the forties. Those three events are the atom bomb and the discussion as to whether Sweden should have such weapons, the uprising in Hungary in 1956, and the Suez crisis. The fourth event is Oskar’s experience of how a high-rise development takes shape in the neighborhood from which he is forced to move in December 1959.
* * *
—
The atom bomb frightened Oskar. When he read about the vast numbers of victims claimed by each of the bombs and about the stockpiling the great powers were already engaged in, he felt a fear that was almost panic. Oskar only read the local press, but the other newspapers were often quoted there and he followed the debate with a growing sense of despondency combined with an increasingly strong disapproval of what the political parties were doing. Oskar read Tingsten’s words, which were cited in the newspapers. He was briefly cheered by Östen Undén’s relatively strong pronouncement against nuclear weapons, but he still thought that it was insufficient.
* * *
—
Then there was a minor event that instilled a lasting fear in Oskar. It was when he saw an article about the two bombs that were dropped on Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946. Nearly fifteen years had passed when he read the article and learned that they had been given girls’ names.
He never forgot this and it fostered in him a strong distrust of America, which would be further magnified by the Vietnam War.
In the end, the question of the atom bomb also alienated Oskar once and for all from the Social Democratic Party. When he left, he was sad that it had to happen, but there was no turning back and he signed up as a member of the new party.
* * *
—
The Hungarian uprising came as a shock to Oskar. When he read about the tanks on the streets of Budapest, and about the fierce battle, and when he listened to the agitated voices giving terrifying reports of the brutal assault, he became completely desperate. He would turn the radio off, only to switch it on again seconds later. He would get to his feet, open a window, go back to the radio, and then jump to his feet again to close the window.
* * *
—
The Suez crisis was another major factor in changing his political views. He never altogether understood the causes of this war, but he was deeply affected by the accounts of the suffering endured by the civilian population.
* * *
—
At the end of the fifties, the neighborhood in which Oskar lives is to be torn down to make way for large high-rise buildings. This is the fourth and perhaps most important event for Oskar during the decade.
One afternoon, when he has gone down to the backyard with trash wrapped in a newspaper, the bin has been moved out into the middle of the yard. There are two men taking readings and measurements where it would normally stand. Oskar pauses for a while, hesitating, before dropping his packet of rubbish into the bin, even though it is not where it should be. Then he goes up to the two men and asks what they are doing.
“It’s just some calculations for the new housing that’s going up.”
“Are they building new houses here?”
“Yes, both blocks are going, Nypan and this one, Smeden.”
“First I’ve heard of it.”
“The plans haven’t been finalized yet. So far, it’s only a decision.”
“What do you mean, ‘a decision’?”
“That there’s housing going up here.”
“What about us?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those of us who live here.”
“I expect they’ll make other housing available for you. But we don’t know anything about that. The town owns these blocks, so it’s up to them to tell the tenants what will be happening to them.”
As Oskar goes back up the stairs he is dumbfounded and walks slowly.
* * *
—
Two months later he gets his notice to move, together with the information that there will be accommodation for him in a rental block in a suburb three kilometers outside town. The letter tells him that he is to move out by September 30 that same year. He is also asked to contact Herr Evertsson in the town’s property department for further details.
At the property office, Oskar has to wait forty minutes for Evertsson to arrive. He looks at Oskar for a long time before asking him into his office. He leaves the door to the corridor open and sits down behind the desk.
“It hasn’t been all that hard to arrange new accommodation for you, Herr Johansson. We’ve assumed that you would like to have an apartment approximately the same size as the one you have now.”
“I don’t want to move.”
“I don’t think anyone does. But surely we must welcome the fact that housing construction has now finally gotten going. And of course quality enhancement is also important. Especially for families with small children, for example.”
“Do they have to be built just where I live?”
“The town has decided that it is a suitable area. Not least because of the very central location.”
“Quite so. That’s exactly why I want to stay.”
Then Oskar is on the point of saying that he is disabled, but he keeps
quiet.
“You’ll be given a moving allowance.”
“But what about the rent?”
“It hasn’t been set for next year yet, but it will obviously have to be a little bit higher, bearing in mind the standard of the new housing.”
“How does one get there?”
“Bus routes are being planned.”
“I see.”
“Right. Do you have any other questions, Herr Johansson?”
“What will the houses look like?”
“Plans and sketches will be on display in the entrance area of the town hall a few weeks from now. Those will give an overview of the whole area, including the individual apartments.”
“I see.”
“So you’re welcome to go and take a look.”
“I see.”
* * *
—
When Oskar arrives in the entrance hall, it is deserted. He crosses the stone floor, sees a number of sketches pinned to some wooden boards in the darkest corner of the large hall. He goes up to the boards and notices right away that there are no proper pictures showing what the housing area is going to look like. Only architectural drawings and various cost calculations. Behind him he hears steps echoing in distant corridors, tapping against the stone floors. He pauses and looks at the abstract and incomprehensible drawings. He sees the black lines running into and out of each other like labyrinths. He sees numbers with strange symbols between them.
At that moment Oskar feels he has been tricked and he becomes furious. He looks around and unfastens one of the drawings and turns it upside down. Then he takes a pen out of his pocket and adds a zero and a number here and there to the various calculations. He takes great pains to make the figures look as credible as possible and does not stop until he is satisfied.
Then he leaves.
* * *
—
A few days later he reads in the local newspaper that a somewhat unfortunate incident has occurred in connection with a study group visiting from Finland. The Finnish guests were being escorted through the town hall by one of the town architects, and when they were taken to see the drawings of the new Hamnborgen neighborhood in the entrance hall, the architect guiding the party discovered that one of the sketches had been turned upside down. This was swiftly put right. It is thought that this was evidence of some visitor’s peculiar sense of humor. The town’s property department does not deem it necessary to take any measures other than to have a caretaker come to check the drawings at regular intervals.
* * *
—
For several days afterward, Oskar searches the morning newspaper for confirmation that they have also discovered his sabotage of the calculations. But there is nothing there, and one day Oskar goes to the town hall and finds that the drawings have gone and have been replaced by an exhibition of photographs of the newly inaugurated town library.
* * *
—
The matter of Oskar’s rearranged figures, which nobody had discovered, becomes one of decisive importance to him. It brings home to him the tremendous extent of arbitrary power that technical people and civil servants have managed to acquire. He is disgusted by the self-importance of these people. He knows that most of them owe their careers to their Social Democratic Party membership. And he no longer wants any part of that.
* * *
—
During these years in the late fifties, when he has become a widower, Oskar rarely talks to anybody. He keeps in touch with his children, but he has no social life and feels no need for one either. He experiences silence as a spacious and cozy place in which to think, dream, and conjure up images of nature. He establishes a simple and effective routine for himself and that suits him.
* * *
—
On New Year’s Eve 1959, he is standing by a window that he has opened. It is cold outside and he stands there, looking out at the town from his apartment on the fourth floor of the building he has been forced to move into. In the distance he hears the clocks in the town’s three churches strike midnight. Then people start firing off rockets from the balcony below his, so he closes the window and sits down in the kitchen. He has taped the poster onto the wall above the sofa. He sits still and listens to the noises that resonate through the water pipes and from the floor and the ceiling and two of the walls. Where he used to live, you could also hear every sound. But now the noises that come through the concrete seem colder and more invasive and above all more negative. Sometimes he feels like an eavesdropper, somebody who hears but who should not really be doing so. He never had that feeling in his old apartment. There it was simply accepted that the walls were not soundproof and one would adapt accordingly. In this new building, which is supposed to keep out all noise, the sounds become menacing and alien.
He lives on the fourth floor and does not know his neighbors and is unhappy there. He spends all of his time trying to swap his apartment for one in town.
He has been living in the building at Tornvägen 9d for one and a half years when one day his son comes out and tells him that he knows of a place in town that his father could have. Oskar makes up his mind without even seeing the apartment and one month later he has moved in and it becomes his last-ever home. He will live there until he dies, and from early spring till late autumn he moves out to his cabin in the archipelago.
* * *
—
Thus was Oskar ushered into the sixties, carrying with him from the fifties his new solitude and his new party allegiance. But what mattered most to him was that his longing for nature and the sea had now been satisfied.
* * *
—
And all along he held on to this conviction, this faith in his own role, that he had never been nor ever would be anything extraordinary but, rather, was someone who at some point at the end of the last century had played the same games as other children. He had run and yelled and shouted, clambered over boards between backyards, and all the time, throughout his life, he kept coming back to this perception of himself. He saw it as both the starting point and the sum total of his life. Neither did he feel that he is missing anything. Once his longing for the sea was satisfied, he was content.
But he went on following all the social changes and maintained that he had been present for them but had not played any role in their coming about. He never denied responsibility or claimed to be free from blame, but neither did he place any value on the role he had played, not even in specific instances in which he had taken a part. He had lived and worked and held his opinions, switched his party allegiance, and deep down inside had his hopes and dreams.
* * *
—
As the years go by, the poster becomes ever more tattered and one day there are so many holes in the corners from all of the drawing pins that it falls to the floor. Oskar then rolls it up and ties a piece of string around it. He puts it on a shelf in a wardrobe and never takes it out again.
* * *
—
Oskar lives on with his thoughts and dreams, which he likens to the process for developing photographs.
IN ONE SINGLE BLAST, AND GIVE THEM MY REGARDS
Harstena, 37. Clear to moderate visibility.
“That’s spot-on, that is…”
Oskar presses down the button on the transistor radio.
“I need new batteries. Can you get some?”
“Of course.”
* * *
—
It is the middle of May. Spring 1966.
* * *
—
“Elvira was a waitress all the time we were together. And always at the same place. You’ve probably seen it. It’s a café down by the railway. For ten years it was called The Barrel. Then there was a change of owner. He bought three new tables and decided to call it Café Paradise. We had a good laugh at that. I think that w
as the time Elvira liked the least. The proprietor wanted to turn the place into something fancier. He hoped to get rid of the old boys drinking beer and have different customers. But then nobody came at all. He sold up and another owner came along. That was after only three years, just before the war. He bought new chairs and called the place the Barrel again. Elvira liked it there. She knew the old men and what they liked to drink. Mostly beer. Coffee and sandwiches. They opened early, you see. At six o’clock, to serve breakfast. So Elvira got up at five all her life. She went on working when we had the kids. She never took time off. She brought the children along when they were small and they spent the day in the office behind the kitchen. Nobody objected.
“But Elvira went to bed early so as not to tire herself out. As she got older, she would turn in at nine. I stayed up a little while longer. She liked her job very much. The pay was always bad in a job like that, but she got along well with the old boys. She worked from 1919 until she died. One day she burst into tears while we were having supper. I asked her what was wrong and she told me. That her eyesight had gotten a lot worse in just a few weeks. We went to see the doctor and he said that she had cataracts in both eyes. He would treat her, but it was hard to know. It didn’t get any better, but it didn’t get worse either. The days before she died, she could see nothing at all, but then there were other reasons for that. The stroke. Up until then she had never been sick in all her life. She laughed a lot and the old blokes liked her. Many of my mates from work went to that café and they always said how good she was. She didn’t care if someone got a bit drunk sometimes and if anybody got out of hand she would just drag him out. She wasn’t afraid.
The Rock Blaster Page 11