by Peter Weiss
His parents separated in the year of hunger, nineteen seventeen. The seven-year-old ended up with his father, a carpenter in the prison workshop in Karlstad, by Lake Vänern; his two siblings were assigned to their ailing mother. The father resided in a room with a stove in one of the wooden houses on the edge of the city. Because his father’s working hours stretched from seven in the morning to seven in the evening, the boy was left to his own devices, except for the hours he spent at elementary school. His father had left a few slices of dry bread for him to gnaw on. The pantry was empty but for a jar of pickled beets. Father won’t notice, thought the boy, if I grab a beet. He pushed the table over to the open cupboard, lifted the chair onto it, reached the top shelf, then put everything back in its place. His father discovered the theft that same evening. A few drops of the red vinegary brine had trickled out. The father laid into the boy’s head, his behind. His screaming could be heard throughout the neighborhood. Back then, committees were being sent out to investigate the nutritional condition of the children. When they asked him where the bruised spots on his body came from, he said he had fallen from the table. But the real reason came out, the child was taken away from the father and given into the care of a pastor. But here, with his well-off host, he was subjected to attacks that hit him harder than his father’s blows. He was used to beatings; they were part of everyday life. It was only with the punishments of the priest that this took on the dimensions of injustice and violence. Once, after a scuffle on the street, the boy had picked up a scarf that had been lying on the ground and shoved it into his schoolbag, to give it back to its owner the following day. The clergyman, who had caught sight of the piece of cloth, didn’t believe the boy’s explanation. He took him between his knees, clenched him tight. The father was of low status, he was no match for the government agencies. The cleric was authority incarnate. If he said he had stolen the scarf, then the boy had to agree with him. To begin with he wanted to resist, wanted to refuse to make a confession, but the fat knees that enveloped him disgusted him; to get out of this humiliating situation he admitted to the theft that he hadn’t committed. Even lower than his father, a foster child who lived from the mercy of others, he atoned once more for the crime of his mere existence. Thrown out of the church home as a liar and a thief, he was handed over to another family to be disciplined. He was beyond help, downtrodden. He was sent up toward Charlottenberg, to Sunne, to peasants who needed cheap help. The river valleys of Värmland, the forests of Finnmark on the Norwegian border, these might have been landscapes full of wide-open spaces, but for him they were realms of bondage. During his years with the cottagers, the question of what it might be like to have his own life grew inside of him. His final foster father, in Karlstorp, on a farm with four cows, a horse, and some poultry, suffered from shingles, yet didn’t want to be taken to the hospital, because in the hospital they stab you to death with knives, he said; so he only called quacks, at whose hands he wasted away, stinking, his body disfigured by blisters and boils. He didn’t grieve for the farmer, had never been fond of him, but he kept the foster mother in his thoughts. She came from the family of a provost, was an Anabaptist, and at times had shown him kindness. He was also allowed to read the books that she kept in a basket in the attic. The Count of Monte Cristo, Tristan and Isolde, titles behind which an alien world opened up, but when he thought about what had driven him out into the workplace as a fourteen-year-old, it had not been dreaming but raw necessity. He went from being a serf to a day-laborer with the raftsmen on the river. He had to measure out the lumber, two tape lads worked each shift, one would hold the measuring tape against the lower end of the stump, the other had to walk up to where it had been cut and yell out the measurement, which was added to the list by the scribe, then the piece was rolled into the water to be chained on. He could still hear the cries: Thirteen foot, thirteen foot heave-ho. Two kronor twenty-five is what he earned a day; that was a lot for someone who had always been penniless. He grew broad, strong, bought himself tobacco, Tiger brand; lodging with the trader cost seventy-five öre. This job lasted an entire summer, then he had to look around for work again. I need work, work, that was the pulse that pursued him incessantly. In the forest, felling trees, he hewed into his leg, and thanks to the insurance he received more on sick leave than he had while working. He received three kronor fifty a day and was able to set aside sixty kronor, with which he bought a suit and a pair of shoes, to look for a job in the city. But there was no work for him there, and he didn’t want to go back to the country, to the forest. He was too young to get hired on a freighter, but he heard it was possible to apply to the cabin boy corps as a sixteen-year-old—and because for that he needed the permission of his guardian, he had to track down his father once again. His father refused to place his name at the bottom of the letter; the lad threatened to forge his signature; he, the foreman of the carpenter’s workshop, would then be responsible for the shame of his son being sent to prison. Actually he had wanted to talk to the old man, tell him about his experiences, after their separation of almost a decade he had wanted to meet him as a free and independent being. There was nothing left of their family ties; if they had ever existed, they were long forgotten now. And yet his father clung to the role that he had once played, barking and hurling his fists about; but he found himself driven back by his son, had the paper shoved in front of him, the pen pressed into his hand; it wasn’t rage that the lad felt, it was more like pity. The prison carpenter had not lost only him: both of the other children had been taken from him; he hadn’t found a second wife; and the mother of his children had been living in an asylum for years, delirious. The boy stood waiting; his desire to make it out of this narrow, dull world was so strong that his father was forced to give in. As he left, the boy was unable to turn and face him. That’s how the sixteen-year-old made it to Marstrand, on the training ship named after the harbor. In summer, the three-master cruised around in the Kattegat and Skagerrak; in the winter they maintained the battery. Trained as an artillery mechanic and armorer, after two years he ended up at the Stockholm naval base. Alongside his regimented lifestyle, for ten kronor a month he tried to prepare himself for his high school diploma via correspondence, but at nineteen, having been promoted to corporal, he was discharged because Communist flyers had been found in his locker. This was at a time when unemployment was rising in the country, when Sweden was joining the economic crisis, and the deep rift in society that the Social Democratic Party and the bourgeoisie had previously attempted to conceal was becoming evident, a rift that both parties soon sought to paint back over. He didn’t have to ask himself in nineteen thirty how he had become a Communist; a singular logic had led him to the Party, a continual experience of the contradiction between the strong and the weak, the powerful and the exploited, an unarticulated drive at first, then a conscious will to resist injustice. The restructurings of finance capital caused that condition referred to as a depression to manifest on the global markets, and it was primarily those who were already disempowered who felt its crushing weight. The creation of armies of idle workers was carried out in order to spread demoralization and despondency among the proletariat. With the losses in production, anybody who still dared to strike now and invoke their rights had to expect instant, violent retaliatory action. The clashes of the workers with the strikebreakers, the police, and the military culminated in Ådalen, and there was a direct line connecting the shots fired at the protestors to the intensified persecution of Communists and the closer alignment of the union leadership with the business community that was set down in writing in Saltsjöbaden in December of thirty-eight. Expelled from the Royal Navy with unemployment at thirty percent, he could no longer find work on land. Until the outbreak of the civil war in Spain, he worked at sea as an ordinary seaman and machinist, hired illegally, saw harbors that were identical to one another, read books, from which he always learned something new, began himself to write stories, letters, addressed to people whose names he didn’t know, an
d who lived all over the place, and the writing was just as natural as the manual labor on board, not corresponding to some desire, but to a necessity. When I asked this calm, contemplative fellow traveler, in one of our conversations in Cueva la Potita, what had made him, a country boy from drab villages out in Värmland, set out to sea and become an internationalist, he answered, with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile, that it had probably been the force of historical materialism. When he, having picked up a little German and English on his long sea voyages, told me—back then, in the autumn before the Battle of Teruel—about his childhood, he brought to life not just to me, but also to himself, something of a world which seemed to be marked by shades of medieval damnation. The twenty years that have passed since then, he said, may seem long to me because I have transformed myself fundamentally, but living conditions are still in many respects almost identical, you can still find people there who live as if in primeval times, ruled by ignorance and superstition. I remembered now, sitting across from Rogeby in the café next to the Piper summerhouse, how he had witnessed the death of the farmer who was too scared to go to the doctor, preferring instead to be treated with salves concocted by a witch. I saw the small room before me in which the mother lay in bed with the three children, and the father on the floor beside it, in his work clothes with a jacket rolled up under his head, and then the room he lived in with his father, the one with the open fireplace, the stout, brick chimney, the pile of brushwood, here too they slept in their clothes, which had a sourish smell, the father lay on the kitchen bank, the boy in the compartment underneath, in the narrow coffin. Just as he described to me the table, stained a yellowish brown, the roughly hewn floorboards, the yard outside with the outhouse with the pump that often froze in winter, he was also able to depict the little room in which his foster father would lay into him. The pastor would sit in a tall, carved chair, the pendulum of the grandfather clock moving back and forth, a white, embroidered cloth on the table, the sunlight filtering through the slit in the billowing tulle curtains, and on the wall, Jesus suffering the little children to come unto him. His sympathy and compassion for his father, who had been embittered by constriction and hardship, and for his mother, who had been broken by poverty, were just as strong as the outrage he showed toward the powerful.