The Turk reminded me of my maternal grandmother. He sat exactly as she did, straight backed with his hands clasped, his gaze bright and steady. You had the feeling that nothing could disrupt their absolute composure, which I like to call “the strength of the weak,” a realization that it is possible to endure anything, that you are ready for whatever may happen at any moment. These people know that they can’t rule the world, but they can rule their own fear.
Then we had the Jew. No one knew if he was actually a Jew, but that’s what we’d called him because he was a well-educated man, unlike the rest of us. It was rumored that he’d been a judge, and he was brought in occasionally to solve minor practical or ideological conflicts. He too lived alone, but he had “his dead companions,” as he put it.
There were also the Single Ladies—elderly women who brought their defective cars to Giorgos’s workshop, partly because his prices were low, partly because he sometimes refused to take any money at all if he suspected that the customer in question was in a bit of a fix financially. One of these ladies once took a photograph of Giorgos and me because we looked “so beautiful together” with our graying heads. How the hell could he let her pay after that?
None of us wanted Giorgos to retire, but he found a Yugoslav, sold the workshop, put the money in the bank, and went home.
“I’m going to wash my hands,” he said.
A week later the first symptoms appeared. The odd pain here and there, some worse than others, dizziness, tiredness, his tongue felt thick, and he found it difficult to talk. We had lunch together one day. I had never seen him in a shirt and jacket, and hardly recognized him without his overalls. He came toward me smiling, but his footsteps were cautious, almost anxious.
He insisted that lunch was on him.
“Eat up, you need to put on some weight, you poor old scribbler,” he said.
“What do the doctors say, Boss?”
“They say nothing. They talk about the weather. Tell me I’ve inhaled too many exhaust fumes, that I’ll soon get better.”
He didn’t get better.
The conclusion was that we grow old, and the best we can do is to grow old while we’re working. I should have learned my lesson, but I didn’t. Instead of continuing to write at all costs, I had given up.
When I was twenty-five years old, I asked myself how I should live my life, and the answer was: Leave. That was exactly what I did. Now, at over seventy-five years old, I was faced with the same question: How should I live the years that remained of my life? More and more frequently, the answer was: Go back.
The days passed, and it was June. The city slowly emptied. It was time for us to go to our summer place on Gotland. We had been there every summer since 1971. In other words, I had plenty of material if I wished to draw comparisons.
Comparisons with what? The dizzying speed of the consumer society. For the first few years we owned a used Ford Taunus, if anyone remembers that model. We loaded it up with everything we needed—and we needed virtually everything, from sheets to kitchen equipment. We transported an entire home, and it worked well. Then we had our son, followed three years later by our daughter, and Gunilla just had to take her favorite potted plants with her. Which was fine. As the years passed, we bought things for our summer cottage, we almost had a complete home there, and we also acquired a bigger car. That too was crammed full, and the children sat with potted plants on their laps. A few years later we bought another car, and now both cars were packed to bursting. The children grew up and no longer accompanied us to Gotland. Gunilla and I traveled there in separate cars, still shifting just as much stuff back and forth.
We had two fully equipped homes, but the anxiety-laden trips continued. At the beginning we didn’t even have a can of beer with us, but as time went on we took wines we couldn’t find on Gotland, whiskey and schnapps for those dinners on summer nights, even more potted plants, various treats we would miss, suits and dresses for a range of social events that seemed to keep increasing in number. We scampered around to christenings, weddings, and funerals, we invited people to dinner, we hurried off to dinner elsewhere. The somewhat desolate headland where we lived was no longer so desolate.
We didn’t have a vacation, we simply swapped the places where we lived and our winter life for our summer life. We always had guests. My wife likes to have people around her. I prefer to be alone. I also get tired very quickly, glancing at the clock even in the company of good friends.
For that reason we built a small house intended as a studio for me. On the shore one day I found a piece of wood, polished by the sea until it resembled marble. Gunilla wrote THEO’S HOUSE on it, and I hung it above the pretty pale blue door, then went inside and settled down at the computer.
I sat there for three hours; not one word was written. It felt as if my true “self” was hanging over the door, and I was no more than a pale imitation.
I took down the sign and went back inside with my true “self” under my arm. After fifteen minutes I had filled a page.
That’s how a simple truth was revealed to me on that occasion. When you start to safeguard your writing, when you start to be the author, when you hang yourself up on the wall, it’s already over. Writing works in the same way as a spring. You can create fantastic adornments all around it, you can construct a beautiful fountain, plant lovely trees. None of this will make the water flow. It is the pressure from deep within the darkness of the earth’s interior which makes that happen.
This doesn’t mean that as an author you should fold your arms and wait until the egg is boiled. You have to work all the time, learn to appreciate other writers, which most of us are disinclined to do. You have to learn to hold back, not to step into every shop window that presents itself.
In this way our visits to the island provided an ideal training camp for me. I would take my notepad and stroll down to my deserted beach. Everything around me carried on as usual. I might scare away a little lizard now and again, but that was all.
There, with no witnesses apart from the sea and the sky, I tried to write as best I could. Occasionally it went really well.
But not anymore. My spring had dried up. I could have erected a mausoleum around it. That would have been no help at all. And close to my beach small luxury houses for the young and wealthy were being built, there were plans for restaurants and concerts, exhibitions and goodness knows what else. Large yachts with laughing passengers on board fought for space with noisy motor launches, from which no laughter could be heard.
The place had changed direction. It was now facing consumerism and entertainment. This change was even more noticeable in Fårösund, the nearest built-up area, which was already a functioning community when we first went there in 1971.
There was a school, a library, a clinic, a doctor, three banks, three grocery stores, a regular bus service plus a school bus, three restaurants, and a fine old hotel where the local Rotary Club held its meetings. There was even a bookshop.
The linchpin of the economy was the Coastal Artillery Regiment, which was stationed there, along with the Bungenäs artillery training facility on the land adjoining our property. I wasn’t overimpressed with military discipline. There was all kinds of activity going on around the entrance to the base, and they drove their military vehicles at full speed along the dirt track into the village. All in all there were almost six hundred professional soldiers plus fifty civilian administrators, tradesmen, and mechanics living in Fårösund.
In those days Gotland and Fårö were key military zones. There were signs everywhere forbidding unauthorized access, the taking of photographs, and so on. Foreigners were also completely banned from certain areas, and from buying land.
We bought the house in Gunilla’s name, but I had to have permission to be there. I could obtain a permit from the commander of the regiment, who lived in the most beautiful house in the village. Gunilla and I went to see him,
and everything was sorted out after a few minutes’ pleasant conversation. I think he decided to trust me when he heard that I’d done my military service in Greece, so I hadn’t deserted my country but had in fact served it for twenty-eight months.
Fårösund’s social life had acquired a khaki hue. There was a hierarchy that everyone respected. The only threat came from the “08s,” as the locals referred to the tourists because of Stockholm’s area code.
Gotland had become fashionable, even though Fårö was the real magnet. More and more outsiders were buying or building summer homes. The ferry from Nynäshamn to Visby was crawling with famous people and celebrities. I once saw Olof Palme sitting cross-legged with his sons, eating sandwiches made by his wife, Lisbet. He was already prime minister back then, but there were no bodyguards, there was no car waiting on the quayside. He was simply a Swedish father on holiday with his family. Sweden was still innocent. It wouldn’t stay that way.
The Vietnam War woke my generation. Demonstrations in the cities spread to rural areas. A peace movement was founded on the island, and one of its demands was demilitarization—all military units must be moved elsewhere. We organized marches with our kids on our backs, we produced posters and banners, the take-up was moderate and the atmosphere pleasant, it was a kind of revolutionary vacation, so to speak.
One evening, after yet another short march, we gathered at a newly opened restaurant and Olof Palme came along to say a few words. This remarkable politician had already read my debut poetry collection and quoted a verse from it, not to praise it but to express his opposition. When I look at that verse today I blush with embarrassment, but at the time I absolutely believed in what I had written. Sometimes I think the point of old age is to be embarrassed about one’s youth.
Palme made me happy that evening anyway. My new country was prepared to listen to what I had to say.
The war in Vietnam ended. The left suddenly turned into a bullfighter without a bull. The route from street demonstrations to the living room proved surprisingly easy. We locked ourselves in, looked after our home and family, learned how to cook complicated dishes and how to choose wine, got divorced in order to make a fresh start. In the past we didn’t get divorced even if there was a good reason; now we got divorced for any reason at all. We had been fellow citizens—now we were individuals.
The international détente and the steady increase in social projects made it necessary to implement cuts, including within the defense budget. The regiment at Fårösund was to be disbanded, and a new act in our comedy began. We went back out onto the streets, but this time we were demanding that the regiment remain. The whole of northern Gotland would go under without it. A large number of shops would close, as would the banks and the school, we would lose our doctor, rents would fall, and the value of our properties would be significantly reduced.
The minister for defense didn’t mince his words: “We didn’t listen to you last time. We’re not going to listen to you this time either.” That’s what he said, and that’s what happened.
The regiment was disbanded and all of our fears were realized; unemployment rose. But people didn’t sit around lamenting their fate. Fårösund survived: new small businesses started up; the barracks became hotels, restaurants, youth hostels; a folk high school opened; tourism increased. Unemployment went down, and after a while it was impossible to get hold of a tradesman; people were brought in from our neighboring countries or even farther afield. The military air base was also taken over, and a newly established aviation company offered direct flights to Stockholm for the young and wealthy. Men and women at the younger end of middle age learned to fly small planes or hunt. The residents of this formerly ascetic Protestant community complained that they carried Luther on their backs, which was why they couldn’t live life in any other way except when they visited Spain or Greece as tourists. “You know how to live,” they would say to me; I was still the only Greek in the village.
Luther was forgotten now. The younger generation might just about have heard of him. They certainly didn’t carry him on their backs. The community changed from the collective responsibility of its residents to the equally collective flight from that responsibility.
It was very rare for someone in a position of authority to admit that a mistake had been made, or that anyone was responsible for such an error. The Greek expression for indifference is “It’s raining somewhere else.” That wasn’t really appropriate because it rains everywhere in Sweden, but the sentiment was the same. The responsibility always lay elsewhere. Past blunders and miscalculations also had a legendary ability to survive. It just wasn’t possible to put them right. The municipalization or decentralization of the education system destroyed our elementary schools, everyone knows that. But it hasn’t been changed, and it probably never will be. A number of private schools of varying degrees of competence and diligence have been set up, but the result of all this is that the children of less-well-off families will attend worse and worse schools. Decentralization was a crime against the democratic contract, and so far no one has apologized. And they never will.
These changes also made their mark, albeit on a smaller scale, in Fårösund. Some things didn’t survive. The three banks became one, the school bus disappeared, the three grocery stores also went down to one, and the bookshop was gone for good.
* * *
Other changes were also noticeable, for example, the relationship between the local population and the tourists. In the 1970s there was a certain warmth, a friendliness, which was gradually replaced by mutual distrust. The tourists were perceived as parasites, but the locals wanted their money. Meanwhile, the tourists didn’t really want anything to do with the locals, but they needed their services.
It was a paradoxical process. Words such as “conscience,” “duty,” “responsibility” were distorted or mocked, or simply disappeared. Sweden had discovered the carefree life. In my homeland, Greece, people strove to be like my second country, Sweden, where people wanted to live as they did in Greece. In Greece they dreamed of the Swedish model, while in Sweden they dreamed of the Greek lack of any kind of model.
We had the same problem at home. Gunilla tried to teach me her theory about organization, which I gradually realized lay at the heart of the Swedish model.
“Before you can do something, you must do something else first.”
That was how she ran our everyday lives. Let me give you some examples. Before you can open a window, you must remove all the potted plants from the windowsill. Before you can load up the car, you must wash it. Before you make the bed, you must air the sheets. And so on. But she never forgot anything.
I, on the other hand, always forgot something, even if it was nothing major. My boots, maybe, or the novel I was reading. Gunilla advised me to make lists. So I made lists, but I forgot where I’d put them.
However, my forgetfulness reached a whole new level when I made the decision to step aside. My brain was like a clock that had stopped at the wrong time.
It turned out that in addition to several items of clothing and medication, I had forgotten all my notes and material relating to a past project, plus my Swedish and Greek dictionaries, which had been my companions throughout the years. Without them I was helpless.
My reaction was not what you would call normal. I didn’t try to work out a way of getting the things I lacked. On the contrary. I accepted it, as yet further proof that I ought not to write. My forgetfulness was not a coincidence but evidence that I was distancing myself from myself. If I didn’t remember something, it was because it wasn’t worth remembering. If I didn’t write something, it was because it wasn’t worth writing.
“That’s a fine start to the summer,” I said to Gunilla. She hadn’t forgotten anything, but her left knee was causing her problems.
“It’s all going downhill,” I added. She didn’t reply but went out to inspect the devastation. The rabbits had taken ev
erything, but my beautiful Ispahan roses had survived.
We need to grow thorns if we’re going to survive, I said to myself. I didn’t grow thorns, but a few days later I discovered a patch on the left side of my head, on the temple. I touched it; I could feel it, but there was nothing to see.
Gunilla was summoned and immediately delivered her diagnosis.
“It’s the patch of forgetfulness,” she said, and went on to explain that this was common in men of my age. Women, on the other hand, were spared.
That wasn’t all. I suddenly developed a growth on the palm of my right hand. It didn’t hurt, but I was bothered by the fact that I could feel it all the time. I spoke to a doctor I knew, a younger woman. She reassured me. It was nothing to worry about. It was very common in men of my age. There was no need for surgery, it wouldn’t get any worse.
That made me feel better. I sat down at the computer to see if anything would happen, but there was nothing. Not one single word popped up. I kept scratching the patch of forgetfulness and thought it was getting bigger and bigger.
Fortunately, I picked up Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. It was his last book. He took his own life in Brazil in February 1942, together with his much younger wife. Why? one might ask. His world of yesterday was gone and would never return. Hitler had destroyed it, once and for all.
The World of Yesterday is an outstanding book, written in a musical, gently lilting prose that is simply irresistible.
It gave me great consolation. The aging Zweig lived a lonely, isolated life in Petrópolis, Brazil. He couldn’t return to his Europe, and yet he found the strength to write his best book.
What did I have to complain about? My situation wasn’t remotely dramatic. I could visit my homeland at any time. I also had children and grandchildren. How can you kill yourself and leave such a legacy behind?
Another Life Page 5