Wonderful Feels Like This

by Sara Lövestam

  Steffi looks at him, confused. “Why would I be afraid?”

  “You know we love you, just as you are.”

  Steffi’s mind leaps into overtime. What is he talking about? She reads the sheet of paper again and sees the rescuer of frightened birds in her father’s eyes.

  “What…,” she says slowly. “What do you think I am?”

  Pappa puts his arm around her. It’s like a bear’s, always warm and easy to cry against when you need to.

  “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I just wanted you … yes … well … it doesn’t matter to me or to your mother who you like. You will always be our Steffita.”

  Steffi nods. “I know, Papito.”

  “Your papers are your business, of course.”

  He leaves the printout on her bed. She can’t figure it out.

  She picks up her bass, her eyes still on the answers to the question posed on the Web site. They’re all badly written. She’s pretty sure she’s never read them before. Could she have printed out something without realizing it? Like when she thinks she’s put her plate in the dishwasher, but really didn’t? Is this her subconscious? Or did someone just hit print while they were reading the newspaper online?

  She hums as she reads:

  Why not relax and let it all work out?

  She finds herself rhyming to a ragtime bass:

  You know it’s your life to live.

  Whoever you love, it’s your love to give.

  She thinks she could start a radio talk show, giving advice on relationships based on jazz music. She shifts to a walking line and keeps thinking. There are so many things she could do. Errand boys probably no longer exist in Stockholm, but she could probably get some other kind of job until she got a spot in a band. If the Monk and the Number One were still around, maybe she’d be able to play there. If not, there must be other places. She thinks about this sleeping-with-a-girl business, like one of the answers to Little Me. Probably not. Right now she has no interest in any of the guys she knows, either.

  She hits a wrong note. She shivers, tries the note again. She’s already figured this out. If it sounds wrong, just keep playing until it sounds right. Or play it wrong with confidence, so you could feel it all the way in your stomach. Alvar tells her she has what it takes.

  * * *

  Steffi never prays. There’s not much God in the lives of the Herrera family, except when Pappa says “Good Lord!” in Swedish or Spanish. This evening, however, she felt she had to figure out how to open a line to the One Upstairs.

  “Dear God,” she whispers from beneath her blanket. “You know, if You are up there, that I’m really having a tough time down here. If You can, do what it takes so I can get into music school and move to Stockholm. Otherwise, my parents aren’t going to let me go, even though there aren’t any Germans in Norway like there were in Alvar’s days. You know Alvar, the old man at the Sunshine Home.”

  It seems strange to be talking out loud to Someone who could already read your thoughts, so she doesn’t bother with Amen. If He exists, He knows that she’s finished.

  She thinks about God for one more minute and then turns her thoughts to her mother’s strange behavior on the train. Her parents must have found that sheet of paper before they got on the train that morning, she thinks. That explains all those strange questions. God doesn’t say anything in response to her prayer, but she imagines He agrees with her request. If her request was the right thing to ask for, that is. God probably wouldn’t agree if it were the wrong thing, just to remain friends. She realizes she knows next to nothing about God. Then she falls asleep.

  — CHAPTER 19 —

  It’s a much different thing to go to school when you know your future depends on it. Steffi manages to be early to social studies.

  Karro’s early, too. “Dyke slut,” she says.

  Steffi swallows the impulse to say “Good morning to you, too.” Instead she just looks at the floor.

  But Karro’s eyes are bright as she tries to catch Steffi’s attention. “I’ve heard it’s official!”

  Steffi doesn’t say a word and doesn’t give a damn about what Karro is making up. She doesn’t give a damn because she’ll be out of here in three months.

  “You’re a dyke slut. The whole Web is full of your sluttiness,” Karro continues.

  “What, what?” Sanja walks in, her eyes shining in excitement.

  They were two dying queen bees in a hive that would soon be torn down. They just don’t realize it yet.

  “She’s been surfing all kinds of lesbian sites. Her dad found out. I’m not making this up,” Karro tells Sanja.

  “What’s that?” a third voice chimes in until the whole classroom is buzzing with Steffi’s supposed lesbianism.

  The rumor will fly through all the other classrooms like the smell of cooking food. It will get into all the lockers through all the gaps and be breathed from mouth to mouth in bathroom lines and jokes across the Ping-Pong table. The nasty kids will say “dyke slut” to her face and the nicer ones will just say “lezzie” because rumors are like drugs in Björke School. But that’s not what ties Steffi’s stomach in a knot. It’s the fact that Karro knows what Steffi’s father has talked about with Steffi behind a closed door at their house on 21 Herrvägen Road. She wants to tell Bengt that she can’t stay in class today, because she feels like she’s going to vomit. But if she leaves, she won’t get a good grade.

  * * *

  Bengt bores his gaze into her, but she can’t breathe. Steffi’s still thinking about how Karro knew what was going on in her family. Was she spying? Did she use a webcam? Did Julia tell Fanny, who then spread the story around? Steffi feels like she’s going to throw up any second.

  Bengt is asking her how her project is going.

  Steffi focuses. “Yes, right,” she says. “It’s that … it’s on…” She can’t even remember the topic she’s chosen. It makes it so hard to lie about her progress.

  “In my notes, I see you’ve chosen Sweden during the Second World War.”

  Steffi nods. Bengt raises an eyebrow.

  “It looks to me as if you have no idea what your topic is. If you haven’t even started, you have a great deal of work to do in the next two weeks.”

  Steffi nods again, convinced. “I have started. I’m sorry, I was just thinking about something else.”

  Second World War, Steffi thinks desperately. Second World War, Second World War. Time stops. She sees Alvar, his wild hair as he bikes through the strange new world of Stockholm.

  “My topic … I’m writing about the Second World War and music.”

  “And?” Bengt’s eyebrow heads up again.

  “How things were for jazz musicians in Stockholm.”

  “In Stockholm?”

  “Yes, not in Björke, because people didn’t want to listen to jazz here when the Gramophone Hour came on the radio. They just wanted to listen to Beethoven, schottische, and hambo.”

  “It sounds to me as if you’ve started your research.”

  “I’ve been talking to an old guy … an elderly man who knows all about it. That’s why I haven’t been here the past few days.”

  She takes a peek up at Bengt. As she’s saying this, she finds her voice is serious and even ambitious. Perhaps he’s also thinking along those lines.

  “It is completely unacceptable to be absent, even to do research, without informing me first. You ought to know that.”

  “I know.”

  He nods strictly and measures her with his gaze, and she breathes out a sigh of relief because he’s calling her visits with Alvar research.

  “I still think your main focus should still be on Sweden during the Second World War. If you want to write about jazz musicians, you should make a clear connection to the war. Make sure that you use quotation marks, and you need to clearly identify which source you are citing for which passage. You will also have to find written material to verify and complement your oral source.”

&n
bsp; “OK.”

  He smiles. He rarely smiles. “I’m looking forward to reading it.”

  * * *

  It seems as if it’s been a whole year since she has seen Alvar. He’s playing “Jazz Me Blues” on his gramophone and he’s directing the music with one hand, and as she walks into his room, he asks her if she’s had the chance to get the pictures developed yet.

  “I’m fifteen,” she says. “I don’t know what ‘develop the pictures’ even means.”

  She feels extremely young as she says this. As if she’s no different from Karro, Kevin, and all the other idiot kids who are busy calling her lezzie these days. She pulls out her phone.

  “Here’s the music school,” she says, and holds the phone to Alvar.

  He peers at the tiny screen.

  “I’ll print it out in a bigger size,” she reassures him.

  “It’s so small, but I recognize the old München Brewery,” he says.

  “That’s where the music school is these days,” Steffi says, smiling as she realizes his pronunciation shifts as soon as he looks at a picture from Stockholm.

  She swipes through a few photos. “Do you recognize this place?”

  He bends closer to the screen. His clown smile appears.

  “Isn’t that Åsö Street?”

  “Number one forty!”

  His bushy eyebrows knit. He inhales the pixels, his eyes narrowing.

  “No, no. That doesn’t look like Åsö Street. No, it can’t be. Not at all.”

  Steffi’s heart sinks. She wants Alvar’s memory to be crystal clear. She wants everything he tells her to be true. She wants her oral history source to be verifiable with written material.

  “Sure it is. The number’s on the building.”

  She zooms in on the number with two fingers.

  “I see it,” Alvar says. “But there’s something wrong here. Look at those hatches … they’d lead to the furnace, and that would make it too hot to play swing music down there.”

  Steffi searchingly looks into the old man’s face. “Maybe you got the number wrong.”

  Alvar shakes his head, as if to get his memories back into place.

  “No, no,” he says. “No … perhaps … it was so long ago. But no.”

  He sinks into his own thoughts concerning the street number. It seems to distress him. Steffi observes him. She sees the brown flecks on his cheeks. Bushy white hair grows from his ears. It looks like a tuft of cotton.

  “Everyone in school thinks I’m a lesbian,” she says.

  Alvar looks up from the screen at Steffi. “They do?”

  “But I’m not.”

  “I see.”

  He says this in a way as if he’s not sure about how to talk with a teenager about sexual orientation. But he’s a hepcat, so Steffi’s not worried.

  “But I don’t like any of the boys in my school. Kevin and the other boys all the girls like. So, maybe I am?”

  “There were two girls at Nalen,” Alvar says. His eyes get that gleam. “They only would dance with each other. La … no … Lena. Lena and … Well, I forget the name of the other one. One girl would call herself the gentleman, I recall. People had a certain kind of respect for them.”

  Steffi stretches out on his bed with the Sunshine Home covers that smell of laundry soap.

  “Then you were more civilized seventy years ago than the kids at Björke School in the twenty-first century. If you had respect.”

  Alvar knocks at the cell phone, which has gone out. It doesn’t come back on. Steffi tells him to press the green button.

  “Well, I was in the entertainment business,” Alvar said. “You learn all kinds of things about people. I realized that some people were like that fairly early on. You can’t force people to feel things they don’t feel. Otherwise you’re just stomping on them.”

  She understands. Björke School was nothing but stomping on people.

  “And that’s what was going on between me and Inga-Lill,” Alvar says. He sets the phone on his nightstand.

  * * *

  The thing with Inga-Lill, she had narrow fingertips and warm, soft lips. The first three weeks, he sang their praises from his kitchen bench bed. Quietly, of course, but Aunt Hilda’s hearing had been declining lately, so Alvar could go around humming to himself while in her doily-covered apartment. The first three weeks, his tunes had swing. After a month, swing turned to blues.

  He noticed the change because he’d started to compare them.

  Erling’s Trio had been busy rigging the stage before an important dance at the Zanzibar. Inga-Lill burst out that Alvar looked so elegant as he bent down to play lower on the strings.

  Anita looked at Inga-Lill in amusement. “So you think he should always play in that position, no matter what pitch the notes are? Just because he looks good? By the way, the strings aren’t going lower the farther down you play, they’re going up. You don’t even know how string instruments are played.”

  Inga-Lill looked back in defiance. “We girls don’t notice things like that and we don’t care what you boys call them!”

  This was the second time that evening that Inga-Lill had included Anita with the boys. Alvar wasn’t sure what was going on, but it seemed Anita’s knowledge about musical instruments was part of the problem.

  Anita raised an eyebrow, but Ingmar was the one who spoke up. He laughed as he wrapped an arm around Anita’s shoulder. “I can guarantee that Anita is a real woman, through and through!”

  Those words rang in Alvar’s ears right through the entire concert. He took out his irritation on his string bass. He banged the strings as if they were spreading rumors. Ingmar had basically said that he’d embraced Anita all … well … been … well … seen her naked. Totally naked, with all buttons undone, and her panties … people aren’t supposed to talk like that about respectable girls. Not surprising that a certain bass player got upset.

  Playing the Zanzibar was a definite step up for Erling’s Trio. Not just the bigger audience but also the walls themselves, covered with the signatures of visiting jazz players from the days when the papers still condemned jazz as “jungle music” and called Louis Armstrong “a primitive ape.” Alvar could feel how Armstrong roared, forcing jazz from his solar plexus and spreading it all over Sweden, all the way to Värmland via the radio. Now, ten years later, he himself was experiencing, no, living this world, hanging on the syncopations and half notes vibrating through Zanzibar’s floor and making Anita move her shoulders and hips as if she couldn’t help herself. Not to mention Inga-Lill, of course. Alvar Svensson, by day an errand boy, by night a jazz musician, thumping on his bass and breathing in sweat and cigarette smoke as if it were a part of him. At the start of the evening, there’d been three couples on the dance floor, but now it was full.

  Ingmar didn’t like it that Anita could play the piano. Nothing had provoked it, but Ingmar said it, right after finishing his solo after the third riff. “Girls shouldn’t play instruments, and certainly not in public,” he said. “They’ll never play as well as men.”

  “What about Alice Babs?” asked Alvar.

  Both Ingmar and Erling laughed. “It must have been some trick they used when they filmed her.”

  After that, Alvar could never admit that he’d heard Anita play and he thought she was good. But he also couldn’t get angry with Ingmar on her behalf. He couldn’t say right out that Ingmar didn’t really love Anita if he didn’t let her do what she loved the most. It was none of his business.

  * * *

  The smoky dance hall was filled with laughter and talk as soon as Erling had played the last note on his clarinet. Excited voices, flirting, angry, sad. At the Zanzibar, as opposed to Nalen, you could drink as much as you wanted. Alvar lugged his bass along the wall toward the door, where cold air met overheated bodies. He needed some lungfuls of fresh air. His bass was somewhat secure in its case, but a shove from a jitterbugging knee or a flailing elbow could jostle it and knock the bridge loose, so Alvar had to protect it at
the same time he was moving it. With his back to the dance floor, he couldn’t identify a man’s voice behind him.

  “That was an unusual waltz. What do you call it?”

  In the short second it took for Alvar to turn around he was able to make out three things. Ingmar had his arm around Anita’s waist, with his hand on her hip. Erling was staring at Alvar from the other side of the hall and was opening his mouth to say words that Alvar couldn’t hear. And the man making the comment had a uniform and a mustache.

  “Your trio played well today,” he added.

  He spoke with an exaggerated roll to his r’s and finished with a short, controlled laugh. He was at least twenty years older than most of the Zanzibar audience and really didn’t fit in at all. His mother had always warned him to beware of military men. “Especially if they have a German accent!” The man held out his hand.

  Alvar knew the man hadn’t spoken with a German accent, but he saw the seriousness in the man’s face, perhaps even war experience. Terror-struck, he shook hands.

  “Sten Persson’s the name.”

  “Al … Alvar Svensson.”

  “What do your friends call you?”

  Alvar looked right into the man’s eyes. He heard his mother’s warning: “They want to know everything!” Suddenly his mother felt very far away. Sten Persson had truth serum in his gaze. “Erling calls me Big Boy.”

  The man smiled. It did not make the seriousness in his face disappear.

  “So, Alvar Big Boy Svensson, how close are you to your band?”

  They wanted to take him, stuff him in a uniform, and make him shoot at innocent Norwegians fleeing the Germans. He’d have to salute and hold a rifle instead of play a nice walking bass line in a dance hall. That black mustache … His heart pounded in a way that made his brain think of thudding march rhythms.

  “I … I…”

  “Here’s what I think,” the man said, and Alvar’s heart started to calm down.

  “You’re starting to get a reputation. Arthur Österwall can’t make it in to Stockholm this weekend and he told me to go listen to Erling’s Trio.”

  Alvar couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Arthur Österwall? The Arthur Österwall?