A Darker Shade of Sweden

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A Darker Shade of Sweden Page 28

by John-Henri Holmberg (Editor)


  DIARY BRAUN

  SARA STRIDSBERG

  When her first novel was published in 2004, Sara Stridsberg was recognized as a major literary talent; her second, in 2006, confirmed her position as perhaps the foremost new voice in Swedish literature. Since then, she has gone on to publish a third novel, again hailed by critics, as well as writing several stage plays performed at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, the stage closest to a Swedish national theater. The lead in her second play, Medealand (Medea’s Land, performed 2009), was played by Noomi Rapace, who became an international star when she player Lisbeth Salander in the Millennium trilogy.

  Stridsberg’s novels and plays explore the personality, inner and outer conflicts, and treatment of extraordinary women. Her first novel, Happy Sally, was inspired by the life of Sally Bauer, who, in 1939, became the first Scandinavian woman to swim across the English channel, and draws parallels to a present-day admirer wanting to repeat Bauer’s feat. Her second, Drömfakulteten (The Dream Faculty), was inspired by the life of Valerie Solanas, author of The SCUM Manifesto (which Stridsberg has translated into Swedish); her third, Darling River, was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s iconic novel Lolita, and in parallel stories both completes and gives alternative readings of the Dolores Haze character, in Nabokov’s novel viewed only through the eyes of Humbert Humbert. Stridsberg’s first play again revolved around Valerie Solanas; her second takes the theme of Euripides’ Medea, but is set in the present and the protagonist is an immigrant woman, abandoned by her husband and denied the right to stay on in her new country; her third, Dissekeringar av ett snöfall (Dissections of Snowfall, 2012), is loosely based on the life of the Swedish Queen Christina, expected by her court to let the men around her rule while she married and bred future kings, but raised by her father as a prince and with no wish to renounce her humanity in order to be what men consider a woman.

  In the following story, Stridsberg is inspired by one of the mythologized women of the twentieth century, a woman both known and unknown to us all, who was not only a witness to, but in a sense also an accomplice in, and certainly a victim of, one of the worst crimes ever committed.

  THE CURTAINS LET IN LIGHT BUT NO IMAGES. THE LANDSCAPE OUTSIDE is a desert. The rhythm of the train is convincingly and seductively lulling. He has written you that you must pull down the curtains in your compartment when the train passes the places you have talked about. So you pull down the curtains or you lean your head against the window glass and watch the other passengers in the compartment and their luggage when the train pulls close. A woman alone with cheap luggage and her face turned to the corridor. A man with an armful of sunflowers in a paper bag. The compartment is sun-faded with burnt-through leather seats that must once have been elegant, but which are now splitting along their seams and letting out spongy upholstery. Politics bores you, always has bored you to death. The sun-bleached curtain separates you from the world and the earth. You are going back to the house on Berghof. Insubordinate sunbeams sneak in through tears in the fabric. A patch of blue, bulging sky. The beauty of this country. Wheat and roses.

  How should I describe you? Sweet as a box of chocolates. A kind of dreamy beauty, an expensive small piece of jewelry. The Munich girl falling for a pair of famous blue eyes. For a long while you were retouched out of all public photographs since your love has the notion that he shouldn’t be seen in public with any women. So. Your rabbit fur disappears from the image. Your ash-blonde hair, your mother-of-pearl nails, all your devotion will afterwards be retouched out. As if you had never been there or as if you are a ghost who on her own has invented your decade-long love. Occasionally a single woman’s hand is visible on his forearm, but the body belonging to it is gone. As late as June of 1944, the British intelligence service believes you to be his secretary.

  Further descriptions of you from literature: mild, naïve, dreamy, romantic. I add your longing for death to the catalogue. Since it must be there. Your inclination for the underworld. Absolutely.

  “About twenty-four years of age, brunette, attractive and unconventional in her dress. Occasionally wears Bavarian leather shorts. In her spare time, walks two black dogs. Protected by operatives of the RSD during her walks. Always without makeup, on the whole gives an impression of inapproachability.”

  —From a Special Operations Executive document

  The spring smells of ashes and greenery just come into leaf. Long, lonely walks, rambling conversations about the weather and the dogs, sleepless nights. Obersalzberg, the small set piece, a utopia of purity and beauty. Still no public displays of affection. Hamburg transformed into a sea of fire, its people ashes. It’s your birthday. Money in an envelope. No greetings, not a kind word, nothing, but your entire office looks like a florist’s shop and smells like a funeral chapel. You ought to make use of the shelter, but instead you stay in the house, dancing with your mirror image, get up on the roof after each raid to see if any fire bombs have fallen. The crowns of the trees bend down towards the water as if in prayer. You write: They say that my country is burning. All will be well. It will be all right. Dragonflies dive down at our picnic. My bathing suit is gold and silver.

  You have never been as happy as now. After all the years of waiting he is finally yours. He has grown strangely old and stern, but at least today he is cheerful. Blondie sings like Zarah Leander. She sounds like a mad wolf. It’s snowing even though it is April and throughout the night you drink wonderful champagne, full of promise, toasting his last birthday. The next day all of the presents from the ranks of the people are sent away due to the risks of poison. You wear the dress he loves, the navy-blue sequined silk one. When you are dead, a German journalist writes of it: “Her taste now was more mature and she could carry off clothes that were chic, not just lovely and youthful.” Then Munich falls and he is off again to the underworld.

  You and your silly little cousin wait every day in your bathing suits for the mailman in Obersalzberg who drives you down to the lake and the beaches, the happy waterfall, the fairy-tale beach by the ice-cold blue lake. Sometimes you take off your bathing suits to swim nude between alps. You imagine the officers doing nasty things to themselves while they watch your naked body. That thought appeals to you. The assassination attempt in Berlin fails, but all the sunlight disappears. Days pass. All the tender letters and carrier pigeons. Pull the curtains down my dear when the train passes the places we talked about. Pull the curtains down my dear . . .

  You order a new dress for Christmas. It’s to be something special and more, something to amaze everyone. Miss Heise nags you about her perennial bills. It would be best if they could be obliterated once they are paid. It would be best if they just disappeared. You don’t want anyone afterwards to study your correspondence with you seamstress. Your dresses are your secrets. You hold a slip and a diamond brooch up against death. Snow falls like sugar cubes on the city. There is no longer any hope for a future.

  A cherished meeting with a sister in Wassenburgerstrasse. A few pieces of jewelry handed to Gertraud when you are both temporarily in the shelter beneath the house, a necklace and a bracelet. You say, “I don’t need them any longer.” The decision has been made; we leave all of this together, where you go I will go, where you are buried I too want to be buried.

  His birthday gifts for your last birthday: a Mercedes, a diamond bracelet, a pendant set with topazes. You have a birthday celebration in the marbled room. I don’t know which dress you chose to wear for this last night in the house, but I imagine it to be extravagant, I imagine you in cream and embroideries and throughout with a brandy snifter in your hand. You pick clothes and jewelry to bring along from your enormous closet, the rest you will have to give away now. You make sure that the dogs will have somewhere to live. One last time, trying out everything, once more enjoying your image in the huge, mirrored bathroom. The flocks of jackdaws take wing from your heart, leaving it empty.

  The sheets in the night train sleeper are white and fragrantly clean. Outside are th
e wastelands. When you arrive at Berghof there is still snow. The train to the underworld will leave at 8:14 p.m. He can no longer stop you since you are not afraid of death, since you long for it. The only thing frightening you is that your body will be disfigured, violated by strangers once you can no longer defend it, dress it, adorn it. Now you leave the window of your compartment naked despite his warnings. Anyway it’s dark outside. Earlier in the day a weak sun was shining. Ominously weak.

  The lack of natural light underground amazes you. That disgusting neon light, artificial and sinister. From now on it is always claustrophobic night. You dream of huge scenic windows. In your dreams strange tropical animals roam in slow motion through the garden above. Your miniature suite next to the chart room comprises a bedroom, a closet, a bathroom and toilet. Even Blondie has a small room to herself and her pups. It isn’t far to the climbing roses in the garden and yet you can’t go there because of the grenades. The cities are gray and wasted now, dead and crushed, occasional shreds and climbing roses, people resembling clouds.

  The apartment underground smells of marmalade and metal. You watch movies, drink sparkling wine, eat fruits and sweet cookies, you prepare for death, write wills. A black sunlight radiates through the windows. The night is a tomb. Not all birds sing. In a letter to your sister, you write, “Destroy all my private correspondence, particularly the bills from my seamstress, Heise. Bury the blue leather notebook. Wait until the last to destroy the films and the albums. The telephone lines are all dead now. I hope Morrell landed safely to bring you my jewelry.”

  You order Moët et Chandon. You order cakes. Cocaine drops for his bad eye. New promotions. The pretend war goes on. Paper swallows across the office floor illustrate devastation. You call into the wind. Mrs. G. is given a brooch. Afterwards it is still pinned to her dress. It looks like a fallen butterfly. Now death is keeping you busy, it is your only conversational subject. To do: Change dress. Fix nails. Paint mother-of-pearl. Life is a beauty pageant and you are the foremost exhibit underground where you have free access to his luxurious bathroom. A. still washes and irons your clothes. You change your dress several times a day, always wearing elegant, gossamer underwear. You dance alongside the dead. A brimstone butterfly gone astray into the tunnels.

  The silver-fox stole gleams like a cloud in darkness. How you have loved that stole. A garment made for a movie star. A boa for the future. For all your silly dreams. You give it away, too. It has lost all value for you. You put it in the arms of a secretary, Miss T., convincingly say, “Take it. Use it. Enjoy.”

  The best way to die is to shoot yourself through the mouth. Memorandum: My husband dislikes being seen in the nude. For that to happen would be a defeat to him. Please bear this in mind

  The underground wedding resembles none of your dreams. But yet. An elegant, navy-blue sequined dress and black suede Ferragamo shoes. No flowers, no songs, no incurable diseases, but champagne—the cellar is still full of fabulous, immortal drops. For the very last night your are dressed in carbon dioxide and night. Thirty-six hours of marriage under the earth. A political testament in four blueprints. The bride of night in poisoned veils. Your closet is like your love, a black circle without end. The king’s first and last wife.

  And I want my death to be painless. Nothing of all I wished will turn out as I wished, but that I do want. A painless death. I thought about dying in my silver-fox stole. I think about this and that. Everything passes, everything ends.

  Thirty-six hours after the wedding all that remains is a last, dizzying farewell. The patterned fabric of the couch under your nails, your favorite couch. In the distance the sound of a diesel-powered fan, and the scent of his sweat. You sit like children, legs up in the couch. You listen to his continuously more disjointed talking, his chest close to your ear and in it you can still hear the beating of his heart. How you loved him, dizzyingly much. The garden, fire, love, the underworld.

  The dress with black roses will be your last dress, the one leading to eternity. There are thirty-seven roses, you have let him count them one last time. One rose for every hour you were a wife, and one extra. For nothing. For all you will now never be. The pink curlers are thrown on the floor of your bedroom. Hair newly set. Just a whiff of powder and a little lipstick, since he still hates makeup. You have showered in perfume to drown the odor of sweat.

  A last, flaring memory. You are riding your bike through the woods to meet him by a lake. You are young and his eyes are blue like gemstones. A box of cookies on your baggage carrier. A dead pheasant smeared across the road. The feeling that a cloud is following you. A light in those blue stones you will never afterwards be able to forget. Afterwards your bodies will be burned outside in the garden. The small brass tube that held the cyanide looks like a discarded lipstick. A glass phial full of dark-brown fluid. The searing smell of bitter almonds. Breaking the glass phial between your teeth and swallowing the dark-brown fluid. Soviet grenades fall around your burning bodies. And Blondie. Doctor Stumpfegger takes care of her. Your loved one was unable to do it himself. He put the glass phial into your mouth, in bewildered trembling tenderness, but he was unable to do it to her.

  Sara Stridsberg, born in 1972 in the Solna area of Stockholm, is a writer and translator. After a number of highly regarded essays, for which she in 2004 received the annual award of the Swedish Essay Fund, she also in 2004 published her first novel, Happy Sally. Her second novel, Drömfakulteten (The Dream Faculty, 2006), was a fictional, impressionistic work based on the life of Valerie Solanas. It was a finalist for the Swedish August Award for best novel of the year and received the Nordic Council Literature Prize for best novel in any Nordic country. Her third novel, Darling River, 2010, was again a finalist for the August Award. In 2006, Stridsberg’s first play, Valerie Jean Solanas ska bli president i Amerika (Valerie Jean Solanas Will Be the President of America), premiered at the Swedish national stage, the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, which also staged two of her later plays. Her book of collected stage plays, Medealand (Medea Country, 2012), made her a three-time finalist for the August Award. In 2013, she received the Dobloug Prize awarded by the Swedish Academy for outstanding work in the field of literary fiction. Sara Stridsberg is one of Sweden’s foremost contemporary authors.

  REVENGE OF THE VIRGIN

  JOHAN THEORIN

  Johan Theorin is a journalist and author. He was born in Gothenburg, but grew up in the sparsely populated mining country of Bergslagen. Since his childhood, he has spent every summer in a cottage close to a barrow grave in the northern part of Öland, a long, narrow island of 518 square miles in the Baltic, between two and three miles off the eastern coast of the Swedish mainland. The island provides the setting for most of Johan Theorin’s fiction, including this story.

  Öland in Swedish simply means “island land.” The island is separated from the mainland by the Kalmar Strait; its landscape is dominated by the Stora Alvaret [the Great Alvar], a barren limestone plain covering some 138 square miles and overgrown by sparse, stunted trees and an immense diversity of other flora. Öland was settled around 8000 BC, and the island offers a vast number of burial grounds, barrows, and Iron Age ring forts and artifacts, as well as the ruins of more modern keeps and other buildings: it is a lonely, windswept, and often mysterious place, full of history, legends, and stories. Even today, Öland has a population of only around 25,000 people; the largest town, Borgholm, probably named for a castle built there around 1270, has only some 3,000 inhabitants.

  In the middle of Kalmar Strait is the small island of Blå Jungfrun [the Blue Virgin], only about a quarter of a square mile but rising to a height of almost 290 feet above sea level. Blå Jungfrun is partly naked rock, partly dense hardwood forest. It holds numerous caves and an ancient stone labyrinth, as well as other remains; it is surrounded by the remains of numerous wrecked ships, some of which are visible from the surface of the sea. According to Swedish folklore, already documented in the 1550s, Blå Jungfrun was the place where witches went on
Maundy Thursday to meet with Satan and celebrate the witches’ sabbath. Another, still living legend says that anyone removing a stone from the island will suffer bad luck until the stone is returned.

  In this barren and magical setting, Theorin sets his novels of mystery, violence, humor, and wisdom. His first novel was published in 2007, and received the Best First Novel Award from the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy; his second won both the Crime Fiction Academy Best Novel Award and the Glass Key Award given by the Scandinavian Crime Writers’ Association to the best novel published during a given year in any of the five Scandinavian countries. Theorin is one of only seven Swedes who have won this award during its twenty-two-year existence. He has also twice won awards from the British Crime Writers’ Association.

 

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