“So that’s why I had to work on a Sunday,” she said. “He never lets me leave until all the work is finished. But if I take the tiniest little break, he writes it up in his book. Yes, he keeps track of every single minute I work. Though, to be fair, he writes up all the extra hours as well, so I guess it works out in the end.”
Alvar hummed something as the snowflakes landed on his eyelashes. He blinked them away as his brain worked furiously. Was he really going to start wailing “All of Me” in the middle of the street? It had seemed perfect in his imagination, but he hummed a note and it sounded like the howl of a dog. Anita turned to him and raised an eyebrow.
“What did you say?”
“No, I … it…”
She stopped. “Are you feeling all right?”
What had he intended to say? Plan A, what was his Plan A? All he could pull from his imagination was the image of Anita’s eyes shining when he went down on one knee and asked her to marry him.
She was looking at him with worry. “Alvar?”
He’d have to improvise. If Carl-Henrik Norin could improvise, so could he.
“No, I … there’s no problem … I mean … nothing wrong with me … I just want … to ask you something.”
Then it hit him—he should have bought a ring! How could he have forgotten such an important thing? He was about to propose without a ring! It was like asking someone to dinner and not having any food in the house.
Anita cocked her head. Were her eyes shining? “What is it, Alvar?”
“No, well … if … I…”
He couldn’t breathe even though they were standing stock-still in the falling snow. He found he was also sweating. Anita deserved a better proposal, perhaps even a better man to make a proposal.
She looked up at the sky. “Look,” she said. “What a wonderful feeling.”
He obeyed because any other alternative was gone. From far, far away, from the dark, endless realm of space, snow was falling down on them. Anita’s arms came around his thin body and she was still looking up at the sky, her chin nestling on his chest. “What did you want to ask me?”
“Just if you … not just, I mean, but … if you wanted to marry me.”
She wasn’t surprised, unlike the scene in his imagination. She didn’t take a deep breath and burst out Yes, yes, Alvar! Oh, yes!
The snow was melting on her forehead and she smiled warmly at him. “I guess this means you’ll have to find us a real apartment.”
* * *
He laughs as he relays her reply.
Steffi thinks it’s terrible. “That’s not romantic at all! How could she say such a thing!”
He chuckles. “Romantic! Do you know what’s romantic? When someone decides in all seriousness to spend the rest of her life with you! Look for Billie Holiday and you’ll have a record … no, not that one. The one next to it.”
Steffi pulls out the record, takes it from its sleeve, and winds up the gramophone.
“Listen!” Alvar says. “Anita bought this record for me! Listen!”
Steffi sits down on the floor near the horn. Alvar leans back in his armchair.
Billie Holiday starts to sing:
It’s very clear. Our love is here to stay.
Not for a year, but ever and a day.
“What’s she singing about?” Steffi can’t catch all the words.
“Well, she’s singing that the radio and the telephone and the movies we like so much are going to disappear one day, but our love will be here forever.”
He nods, closes his eyes, and smiles. “Anita was romantic in just the way she was with everything else. Thorough. Thoughtful. You have to remember she had her worries, too, just as I had mine. She was twenty-five and she was not yet married. How would it work out with a younger man, a bass player, who didn’t even have a place to sleep but Gunnar Liljebäck’s kitchen floor? She was probably…” He coughs. “She was probably the braver one of the two of us.”
Billie Holiday has finished singing. The needle scratches on the last groove. Steffi gets up and flips the record over.
She hears Alvar chuckling behind her. “So now you know.”
“What do I know?”
“What happened in 1947 when I played with Hjukström on the clarinet. The story you wanted to hear on your birthday.”
She turns toward Alvar. He seems content, even though he’s told the story all wrong. “You played with Povel Ramel.”
“No, no, Alice Babs.”
“You told me you played with Hjukström on a Povel Ramel record in 1946.”
“Oh no, it was really Alice Babs.”
Steffi is looking at him. Was he just making up a story? Is he just as forgetful as the old ladies in the hallway? She can’t really ask him directly.
“I see,” she says.
Billie Holiday starts singing again. After a moment, Alvar gets up and looks for a record from his shelf. His old fingers trail along the records filed under A. He pulls one out. “Take a look.”
The record label says: Alice Babs, Charles Norman & Co. On the dirty gray sleeve, written in blue ink: Charles Norman, Casper Hjukström, Gunnar Ohlsson, Alvar Svensson. February 1947.
Steffi reads it over and over.
* * *
After Steffi leaves, Alvar wonders what she’s going to think of him years from now. He puts on the record he’d made with Alice Babs and can still see Steffi standing in front of him. In time she’ll be nineteen, then forty-two, then … and she’s going to stop in the middle of what she’s doing and think: just a minute! That old man got me to listen to him by pretending he’d played with Povel Ramel! Then he told me this long story about Anita and finally he’d admitted he never played with Povel Ramel at all! What a cunning old man he was.
He giggles at the thought and looks out the window. Everything is turning green. The plants are growing as fast as they possibly can.
And another day, he thinks, another day she’s going to stop and think to herself: That Fender electric bass! Maybe he only gave it to me because he had a bad conscience.
He doesn’t even know himself why he gave it to her. Things are always more complicated than they seem.
He thinks about it for an hour or more and manages to listen to Wingy Manone and Blue Lu Barker and ten other songs on his gramophone. He finally decides it doesn’t really matter. He gave her the bass just because. And now it’s bedtime—he should go and say good night.
— CHAPTER 33 —
Jake Berntsson never should have become a teacher. He has ten more days to figure out the grades for all his students. He has to make sure they are impartial and based on the curriculum and its objectives. He should already have comments for each and every student in his logbook, but there aren’t any yet. There are three girls in his eighth grade class he has never learned to tell apart; they all have identical blond ponytails and none of them play any instruments. He certainly can’t write that. He’s definitely going to have to buckle down.
He doesn’t notice when Steffi enters the music room. She’s just there in the doorway. Her dark eyes are studying him calmly and, as usual, make him nervous. He knows why the other kids tease her. It’s the same reason people want to break into a locked cupboard. Sometimes he wished he could talk to her about it, but he can’t figure out how to bring these thoughts into a conversation.
Steffi lifts up the old clarinet. He gives his friendly teacher’s laugh that’s supposed to remind him that he is the grown-up.
“Oh, yes, you had the clarinet,” he says.
“You said you wanted it back in May for the eighth graders.”
Her eyes are looking at him searchingly. Her demeanor is not that of the average teenager returning something; perhaps she wants to talk to a grown-up.
He clears his throat. “So, did you find it useful?”
She nods. “My bass got broken, so I’ve been playing on it instead.”
“That must not have been easy.”
She barely moves a muscle.
Another student would have shrugged or laughed or at least smiled. The only thing Steffi moves is her fingers, which play on the clarinet’s keypads. “It was actually kind of fun.”
Jake Berntsson is not good with people and probably never should have become a teacher. Still, he keeps trying. And he can tell when someone wants to play an instrument.
“Let me hear it.”
* * *
Already from the first notes Steffi plays, he knows that she is more of a musician than he will ever be. Five years ago, he would have found this unjust. That’s when he thought he was just teaching until he made his big breakthrough. Steffi’s talent would have brought out feelings that he would not want to recognize. Now he just laughs.
“Wow, Steffi, who taught you all of this?”
She smiles now. “Do you know Alvar Big Boy Svensson?”
He likes her smile. There’s nothing like seeing an otherwise sullen teenager break into a smile. Perhaps he was meant to be a teacher after all.
“I recognize the name,” he lies.
“He lives here,” Steffi says. “In Björke.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” Jake says, which is not a lie.
She’s weighing the clarinet in her hand like a question. He makes a gesture that is supposed to look generous but it comes out merely vague. He smiles to compensate. “You can keep it until the end of the year.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m just happy that there’s finally someone who can actually play the thing.”
He shouldn’t have said that. As a teacher, he shouldn’t accuse the other students of not being able to play the instruments. On the other hand, Steffi laughs for the first time ever in his music room. A really bad teacher would never have gotten her to laugh.
* * *
Steffi is singing. Not out loud, of course, as that would be dangerous at school, but inside her head. She waits in the building until she sees Karro and Sanja disappear down the slope from the schoolyard. Through a gap between the social studies and home ec buildings, she can see the road all the way to the crosswalk. Once they’ve turned to the left and they’ve disappeared behind some birch trees that are in the midst of leafing out, Steffi runs with the clarinet in her backpack and her song in her head. It’s been May for a while now and the acceptance letters may already be in a postal truck on the way to the ninth graders. Jake had told her she had talent. This means she might really have a chance to get in. On the way home, she swings past the Sunshine Home.
As soon as she walks in the entrance, she stops. Svea, with her cane, is standing right there. She whirls around when she hears the door shut. Her eyes turn to evil slits.
“Bastard child!” she hisses and lifts her cane like a weapon.
Luckily, Svea can’t hold her cane up for long without losing her balance, so it’s nothing more than a gesture. Steffi looks at Svea and tries to see the four-year-old inside Svea’s eyes and all the other people who were mean to her. She’s trying to wipe off the dirt, Alvar had said. This means that Svea is really talking about herself.
“You are not a whore child,” Steffi says as calmly as she can manage.
Svea pounds the floor with her cane, so Steffi jumps.
“Whoooooore child!” Svea says more slowly, with a raspy and witchlike voice.
“You’re a good girl,” Steffi says. “You are a nice girl, Svea.”
Svea looks at her, perhaps surprised, perhaps in suspicion. “Whore child,” she says, but at a whisper.
“No, you’re not,” Steffi says, and shakes her head. “You’re nice, right?”
Svea doesn’t say anything else. She glares at Steffi and follows her with her gaze as Steffi walks away down the hallway. When Steffi reaches Alvar’s door, she turns around.
Svea is still looking at her in complete silence.
* * *
Alvar is humming and nodding as Steffi tells him of her latest Svea encounter.
“Haven’t I always told you that you’re a smart girl?”
“You did?”
“Sure, I did! Well, at least, I’ve always thought so.”
“Svea was completely surprised.”
He grins. “I can imagine. But the next time you see her, she’ll have forgotten all about it.”
“Then I’ll have to say nice things again.”
Alvar starts humming again.
“Alvar?”
“This building is full of forgetfulness,” Alvar says. He looks right into her eyes. Then he gets up and pulls out a new record.
“You’re the only one who remembers,” Steffi agrees.
He points at his head. “You and I are the only ones with everything in order up here!”
He lets the air out in a long sigh as he winds the gramophone.
Steffi thinks maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned Svea. “Alvar,” she says quickly. “When Anita wanted to marry you, what did her parents say?”
“I don’t want to talk about this today.”
Steffi doesn’t know what to say to that. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, that’s just what they said. It was the same week coffee rationing returned.”
* * *
Director Bergner said, “I don’t want to talk about this today.”
He looked as sulky as a child, but his voice was as authoritative as ever. Alvar looked at Anita, who looked at her mother, who sighed.
“Alvar,” she said. “You are a sweet boy, but…”
She almost laughed, as if it were just a joke. It was like a spike right through Alvar’s heart. Mrs. Bergner looked back at Anita.
“You can’t be serious.”
Alvar swallowed and swallowed but couldn’t clear the thickness from his throat. Was he really such an unthinkable son-in-law?
Anita tensed her jaw and her voice was controlled. “Read his letter at the very least. He deserves that much consideration.”
* * *
They waited and it was horrible. At first it was bearable, because he was waiting with Anita. She held his sweating hand in hers, and for the first time, hers was just as sweaty as his. Then Mr. and Mrs. Bergner called her into the room and he was all alone at the dinner table. His heart was pounding so hard it should have echoed through the large room. He could see two portraits of gentlemen in cravats hanging on the wall and they seemed to be looking down on him with censure. He changed his seat so as to avoid looking at them. He could hear a few words from the salon, mostly from Anita’s insistent voice. Once or twice, he thought he heard her parents say Ingmar’s name.
He looked at his hands. Anita’s parents were right. Hands like his did not fit on this beautiful, polished table. Was he crazy, thinking he could make her happy? He felt the angry glare of the portraits hitting the back of his neck. The chair itself seemed to be rejecting his bony backside and the rug on the floor seemed to say, “Be worthy and do not ever dance.”
Finally they returned to the dining room. They all sat down silently. The slight sound of chairs against the dining room rug moving toward the table was the only sound. Alvar tried to calm his nervous breathing, but in vain. Mr. Bergner drilled his eyes into Alvar.
“Our stubborn daughter Anita,” he began. “She never listens to her parents.” He leaned back in his chair but did not release Alvar from his glare. “We have no reason to believe she will change her mind this time, either. Therefore, we will not attempt to convince her to change her mind, but we will turn to you instead.”
“We have a request,” Mrs. Bergner added.
Alvar’s gasping was getting worse and worse. He had tried to prepare himself for any eventual outcome of this meeting, except the one where Anita’s parents would turn to plead with him directly. What was he supposed to say? “I am sorry, honorable director and honorable Mrs. Bergner, but I cannot resist your daughter.” He kept silent and waited.
Mrs. Bergner put her elbows on the table, in a manner contrary to her normal behavior. She looked right into Alvar’s frightened eyes. There was a place i
nside Mrs. Bergner that appeared sympathetic. “A boy who only plays jazz music could never support our Anita,” she said. “Anita understands this as well, if she thinks about it.”
Alvar wanted to exclaim that he earned as much as an average worker with his music these days and he did two shifts at Åkesson’s Grocery as well, and they’d never had as hard a worker as Alvar Svensson. Not a single word left his lips.
“In short,” Mr. Bergner said, “there’s an open position at my good friend Malkolm Brink’s firm, and I would recommend you. If you are willing to take this position, we will give our consent.”
Was it a test? Or a joke? Or a psychological experiment? The truth sank in slowly, very slowly, as if he’d inexplicably won the lottery. He had to swallow three times before he replied. “Of course.”
The Bergners had always been tough businessmen and they were society, so they do not reveal their thoughts, but Alvar could still see the relief in their expressions.
He still could feel the fear running down his back, but it was departing from his body as he contemplated his new life.
Mrs. Bergner looked him right in the eyes. “You wrote a beautiful letter.”
* * *
Steffi realizes she’s been holding her breath. Time has passed and the Emil Iwring record had fallen silent some time ago. Just as Alvar had been forced to do, Steffi thought. She looks at him, disturbed. “How could you stop playing after all you went through?”
His sly old-man look went right to her.
“Whatever makes you think I stopped playing? Put on Lill-Arne’s swing. We need something upbeat.”
Steffi finds the record while Alvar explains that Lill-Arne brought jazz to the accordion.
“You see, Steffi,” Alvar says, “the most important thing for a man who wants to play jazz music is not to refuse any chance of obtaining lucrative work. It is to make sure he marries a real jazz crazy girl.”
“Like Anita.” Steffi smiles and sits down in the chair.
“I did have to say no every once in a while when a gig conflicted with my position at Brink’s. On the other hand, I was able to afford a telephone. And a real bed. And, eventually, a piano.”
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