Wonderful Feels Like This

by Sara Lövestam

  The second thing that comes to mind is Erling. He tells her so after they’ve been playing for at least a half an hour and the strain on his fingers and back has become too great. She wrinkles her brow.

  “I remind you of Erling? Because of the clarinet?”

  “Believe it or not,” he said. “There’s something about you that reminds me of him.”

  She’s not at all pleased to hear this.

  What has he told her about Erling? “He was not a bad clarinetist,” he tries.

  “He was nowhere near as good as Arne Domnérus. And he was so nasty to you.”

  Alvar leans the bass against his bed and sits down in his armchair.

  “It depends on how you look at it. Erling was the first real jazz musician I’d ever met. Have you forgotten the train to Stockholm? He could swing, you see, even though his technique never was the best. And a disposition to annoy the other guys…”

  “But he didn’t like it when you started to play at Nalen. A real friend would be happy for you. He wouldn’t keep on nagging you about his trio.”

  Alvar thinks about this. He can still see Erling’s face in front of him: his good-humored look, the almost movie star appearance of his face, and his hair always styled just so. Not to mention his worn-out suit.

  “Erling,” he said thoughtfully. “Erling was a working-class guy with big dreams.”

  * * *

  Erling was a working-class guy with big dreams. He’d grown up in a one-room apartment with four siblings, a constantly exhausted mother, and a father he saw only the day before payday. When the first state apartments for large families had been instituted, he was fourteen. He had moved into one with his family, just one kid among many in patched clothes who stole into the movie house through the back fence. But all that time, he knew he’d make something of himself.

  “You see?” he said as he peered over his pilsner at Alvar. “I always knew that I would make it playing jazz music. I started long before you got here, Alvar. Erling’s Trio started in the thirties! I’m not like Ingmar or some damned Thore Ehrling. Or that Tersmeden guy; he’s someone who shouldn’t have bothered to come to Stockholm.”

  He snorted. Tersmeden was a composer whose musical pieces had been given professional arrangements and were often played at the Winter Palace, chiefly due to Tersmeden’s willingness to pay for Ellboj’s Orchestra’s studio recordings. Alvar had to admit that Erling was right. If he had Tersmeden’s resources, he would already be a soloist. But if you didn’t have money, you needed to have technique.

  “If you take more care when you practice, you’ll be someone,” Alvar said and regretted his vague encouragement immediately. “You’ll be one of the very best.”

  Erling took a few deep gulps and wiped the foam from his lip. “I don’t know. I’m starting to get tired. I’m getting tired working every night. It’s just … I can’t leave the band. Erling’s Trio. Doesn’t that sound grand?”

  Alvar noticed the dark rings under Erling’s eyes, but he saw those eyes light up when Erling talked about his trio.

  “With you on the bass,” Erling said, “we could really get somewhere.” His enthusiasm returned. “I just … I have to admit that you’re the one who is the real talent here.”

  Alvar had nothing to say to this. At least, not a direct reply. He took a gulp of his own pilsner. “I don’t know,” he said. Alvar had still not gotten used to the sour taste. There must be something wrong with him. “I mean, it’s you and me and Ingmar,” he said evasively. “I don’t know if Ingmar and I are … such a good combination.”

  Erling tapped his bottle with his forefinger. “I shouldn’t get into the middle of this,” he said. “No, actually, I should. Two things. Number One. Watch out if Ingmar finds out about you and Anita canoodling behind his back. And Number Two.”

  Erling paused and looked at Alvar with a gaze that was difficult to interpret. “I would never have believed that Big Boy from Björke could have ever captured the heart of a girl like that. I must have taught you a thing or two after all.”

  Alvar laughed, perhaps extra long and extra loud. Erling gulped down the last of his pilsner. When he turned back to Alvar, the darkness in the corner of the bar crept closer. Erling breathed out beer and the desperation of broken dreams. “If you would just ask Topsy, we could get a gig at Nalen, am I right?”

  Alvar couldn’t meet Erling’s eyes. He couldn’t tell Erling the truth. He couldn’t insult a friend to his face. His chest tightened. Perhaps he should just ignore his own reputation as a musician and give Erling the chance his talent did not deserve. On the other hand, he’d come to Stockholm to be a jazz musician, and a real friend should see that he, too, had dreams he had to chase, ones that were just as important to him.

  A sharp bang made him jump. Erling had slammed the pilsner bottle on the table. His film star eyes were filled with disgust. “I never thought you’d be such a coward!”

  Two days later, Alvar found retribution come creeping up on him. Erling’s words had started to seep under his strings and made his playing wishy-washy and out of tune. Hadn’t Erling taught Alvar everything he knew about jazz? Didn’t Erling deserve a band, even if it was just a trio? The director at the Winter Palace noticed the change and asked Alvar if he’d lost his drive. His jazz was sick. No, his concentration was back at 140 Åsö Street.

  He heard the music all the way from the street. He threw down his bike so quickly it almost crashed against a drainpipe. He stumbled down the stairs. Perhaps he’d go to Topsy after all. It never hurt to ask. His jazz fingers began to feel better as he used them to open the basement door. He was about to yell “I’m going to ask Topsy…” but he never got any further than “I” as Ingmar shot up from the piano stool. Alvar had never thought about how big Ingmar was, and the way Ingmar now jumped up made it look as if he loomed as high as the ceiling. Ingmar’s usually blank eyes were thunderously black, and the darkness spread across his face.

  “You little rat!”

  Alvar didn’t fly across Stockholm. He stumbled, panted, leaped between streetcars that seemed ready to block him or even kill him. He lost his breath and couldn’t get it back. The men in his band used to joke that they were musicians, not built for athletics, but Ingmar was motivated by rage and self-righteousness.

  He’s so big, I’m so stupid, a small voice peeped inside his head. He’s so big! He’s going to kill me! Mamma! Help! But his mother was in Värmland and Alvar had to catch his breath. He stopped in front of a streetcar, feeling dizzy. Ingmar was catching up now, with a roar. Alvar deserved it; he knew he deserved it. “Ourfatherwhoartinheaven,” he began but gave up asking for God’s forgiveness at the last minute in preference to the streetcar. Perhaps it was his prayer, perhaps God gave him the strength to leap up on the streetcar that almost ran him down. Ingmar’s roar behind him reminded him of a bassoon.

  “You damned rat! You’re DEAD, do you hear me? Go ahead, run away! I’ll find you and you’ll be DEAD! YOU RAT!”

  * * *

  “It’s just like I said.”

  Alvar opens his eyes, which he’d closed for a moment. “What?”

  The sixteen-year-old in his room bends over and plucks one of the strings on his upright bass. It gives a dull thud when she releases it. “I told you Erling was nasty. You said he wasn’t and then you told me even more about how nasty he was to you.”

  Alvar is lost in his own thoughts for a moment. Had he been intending to defend Erling when he started? He didn’t remember. Well, if he had, he certainly chose the wrong anecdote.

  “We’ll get there,” he says and he hopes he will.

  There was a place in his heart where he remembered the betrayal of a working-class guy who’d had dreams. For some reason, he really wants her to understand this. But not today.

  “Steffi,” he says. He’d taken a good look at the calendar that morning. “When will you get your letter?”

  “In May! In May and today is the first of May!”

  * *
*

  Today is the first of May and she’d forgotten all about it. She’d forgotten to check the mail ever since she’d gotten her new Fender bass. She runs the whole way home and calls into the kitchen: “Is there a letter for me?”

  There was no letter for Steffi. But it was May now. The letter might even come tomorrow.

  — CHAPTER 28 —

  In reality, he hadn’t caught the streetcar that day. What really happened was that Ingmar had caught him and beaten him to a pulp. Steffi doesn’t need to know that, Alvar thinks, and as he looks back, he remembers what had really happened.

  The streetcar had pulled away and Ingmar’s fists had pounded him so that the whole world seemed to turn bloodred and throbbing. A blow to his eye. Blows to his chest. Blows to his shoulders as Alvar had managed to get back up on his feet and run for the next streetcar. When at last he’d finally tried to sneak into Aunt Hilda’s apartment, his shoulders ached and his left eye was swollen and black and blue. He’d hoped she was asleep.

  “Alvar Svensson!”

  Her voice struck him like another blow. Aunt Hilda’s consonants were getting sharper as each year passed. She was holding a newspaper, and it looked as if something must be upsetting her, but when Alvar came in and she saw his condition, the newspaper rustled to the floor. “Oh, dear heavens! Sit, dear child, sit down!”

  She sighed and went to the kitchen to wet a handkerchief that she held to his throbbing eye. His mother would have done it differently. While she pressed the handkerchief to his forehead, Aunt Hilda rocked back and forth and muttered incomprehensibly.

  “That it has come to this! That THIS is what it has come to! No, I said right from the beginning, I said it, didn’t I tell you?”

  The handkerchief pressed hard against his forehead stung more than it helped, but he didn’t dare say anything about it.

  “What, Aunt Hilda?”

  She dropped the handkerchief and tilted his head so he could see her. She was obviously no longer concerned about his injury. She stared stubbornly into his uninjured eye.

  “I said from the very beginning that you were not to have anything to do with that jazz music as long as you were living under my roof. Did I or did I not make myself clear?”

  Her eyes were those of an old, angry hawk. This scared him more than Ingmar’s fists.

  “But I … but I haven’t—”

  Aunt Hilda interrupted him as she picked up the newspaper.

  “Don’t lie to me, young man. Lies also do not belong in this house. And see, this is how far things have gone!”

  His eye was throbbing so hard he could almost hear it. He couldn’t say he hadn’t lied, because that would be another lie. But he couldn’t say anything else, either.

  “What’s wrong, Aunt Hilda?”

  He would never forget what came next. Her wrinkled fingernail tracing the headline, his aching body, and the words he was reading.

  * * *

  Karin comes in. She has to change his sheets. He likes it when they change them when he’s still in the room.

  “Do you want to hear what they wrote about me once upon a time in the Stockholm newspaper?” he asks.

  “Only if you tell me the short version,” she replies with a quick glance in his direction.

  She has a sense of humor. Karin keeps it secret, but inwardly, she’s a good woman with a real sense of humor.

  “You really know how to encourage a guy,” he says and smiles the way Erling taught him. “Well, this is what they wrote: ‘Among the really great Swedish jazz musicians we also must mention Alvar Big Boy Svensson, who has come from the forests of Värmland to supply the Winter Palace and The National, better known by the nickname Nalen, with real swing. He’s a rock in the studio and a fresh breath of wind in any orchestra.’”

  Karin rearranges his pillows after she’s changed the pillowcases. She is unbelievably quick.

  “Those were nice words,” she says. “To think you still remember them after all these years.”

  Even though she’s already heading out of the room, Alvar replies: “Yes, to think I do.”

  If she’d stayed a moment longer, he would have told her that those nice words had gotten him thrown out of his aunt’s apartment in Vasa Stan.

  — CHAPTER 29 —

  Steffi is doing an experiment. She is Hepcat, though nobody knows it.

  When Karro calls her “the daughter of a whore,” Hepcat makes a mental note: “Gal calls her classmate the daughter of a whore.”

  She looks over the whole class and notes: “One guy is jealous of another guy’s iPad.”

  She calls them “guys and gals,” as if she were living in the forties. Her idea of a curious hepcat fills her mind: she could write a song! A Hepcat Visits the Twenty-first Century. She opens Word and can already hear the walking bass line in her head. After a moment’s thought, she changes hepcat to swing player.

  The swing player’s in town

  What do these kids have on the table? What kind of class is this?

  Where are all the telephones? Why don’t they swing to jazz?

  Why do they always need more?

  Why do they call this girl whore?

  Though Steffi is not sure people actually used the word whore in the forties, she suspects that Alvar has cleaned up his stories a bit. She’d have to ask him.

  “That doesn’t look like research to me.”

  The computer teacher, Elin, always sneaks up on kids, and you never know when she’ll catch you when you’re in her class. But she always winks, and that makes it easier to handle.

  “It’s lyrics from a song,” Steffi says quickly, and changes the window to Internet Explorer. “I’m doing research on the forties.”

  “May I see?”

  “It’s not important. I just wanted to check it. It was about some musicians.” She shows the picture of Lulle Ellboj that has appeared on the screen. He’s smiling, dressed in his suit and tie. “He wasn’t the best musician in the world, but he could keep a band together. And his father was an engineer, so he wasn’t exactly a working-class guy.”

  “It sounds very interesting,” Elin says. “But I thought Bengt said your project was on the Second World War?”

  “And jazz music. They belong together.”

  Elin nods. “I can imagine. Jazz came from America, so, absolutely, there was a political dimension.”

  “Jazz music was forbidden in certain countries during the war. Though people still played jazz—they just called it by another name. The politicians didn’t figure out it was the same music.”

  Elin almost looks impressed. She pats Steffi on the shoulder and moves away to sneak up on the next unsuspecting student.

  Steffi concentrates on Lulle Ellboj’s black-and-white photograph. He looks young in this picture. He was young when Alvar played in his orchestra. That very face, except alive and in color, was the one Alvar watched when he played the Winter Palace.

  She searches for Alvar Svensson although she already knows there’s no picture of him. Wikipedia mentions him, in a few articles on various bands, but there’s nothing about Alvar himself, except that he was a jazz musician. She clicks edit and she feels somehow invasive, but that’s how Wikipedia is supposed to work.

  Alvar Svensson is from Björke in Värmland, she writes and hits save. Then she searches for Erling, but none of the Erlings she finds on Wikipedia are described as jazz musicians. She just finds skiers and Norwegian princes. Did Alvar ever mention Erling’s last name? What did Erling say to Alvar when he introduced himself?

  “Erling…,” she mutters. “Erling hum hum. Erling…”

  Karlsson! She types in Erling Karlsson into the search engine because Wikipedia seems not to know him. It appears there are many Erling Karlssons in the world. Most of them are not the right Erling. Then she finds a blog.

  It’s called “In My Own Words,” and the author describes herself as a retiree interested in genealogy, crime novels, and Swedish handicrafts. The chapter that Steff
i finds is entitled “What Happened to My Sisters and Brothers.” The chapter starts with a man named Rune Karlsson, born in 1917, who, unfortunately, fell victim to the bottle just as his father had. He was some kind of foreman at the printer shop for a short time and this was the high point of his career. He had been fired and had to support himself by small jobs (not all of them within the limits of the law, I believe, God rest his soul, as these were not easy times). The blog continues with the story of a sister named Britt, who was adopted by a childless couple in Nyköping out of the family and she did very well for herself. She became a teacher and eventually married the principal of the school. Erling is the next sibling in line.

  Steffi waves her hand to catch Elin’s attention. “May I print something out?”

  * * *

  Alvar is visibly touched when she tells him what the printout is. Either that, or he is tired today, too. He takes a deep breath and lies back on his pillow as he looks up at the ceiling. “Could you read it for me?”

  Steffi reads: “Erling Karlsson was my second brother. He was born in 1920 at our home on Skåne Street. Both Liselott and I idolized him. He was bitten by the jazz bug, as the saying goes, and although it was not yet popular elsewhere, jazz was something we liked in our part of town. Rune, who was still a foreman in those days, helped Erling get a job at the printer’s. Erling held on to his job much longer than Rune did, but every free moment was dedicated to jazz music. He played clarinet at many of the city’s dance halls. During the fifties, he met every jazz musician who came to town (and there were a number). He envied ‘the Negroes’ as he called them, but the word was used differently then. He only had admiration for them. To his sorrow, his musical career never took off. For some time, he didn’t even want to continue playing anymore. He left the printer’s for a better job at Bergners, where he remained until cancer took him in 1984. He spread happiness wherever he went and I miss him to this very day.”