Barbro quickly shows her the note her mother has sent in. It begins: Engwall!!! Three exclamation marks. It is immediately obvious that the note is full of spelling mistakes, and is badly written with clumsy, unfinished sentences and unnecessary exclamation marks.
But what has happened is conveyed very clearly.
An alarm clock didn’t ring, chaos, everyone overslept.
Barbro wonders in a whisper whether the note will do? Absolutely. There is no possibility of misinterpreting the contents. The Swedish teacher—everyone is afraid of her and her pointer—reads the note and frowns. She picks up a piece of chalk and writes Dear Miss Engwall on the blackboard, then underlines the words three times. In front of the whole class she picks out the spelling mistakes Barbro’s mother has made, corrects them, then gives Barbro a good telling off. Lack of knowledge and education, says Engwall, plus lack of respect.
She is to be addressed correctly: Dear Miss Engwall is the appropriate form in a written communication. Barbro is held responsible for every error in her mother’s note. She sits there with her head down, cheeks bright red. It is so embarrassing. And unfair on Barbro.
Afterward they walk up the slope behind the school and sit down, leaning against the trunk of a pine tree. Barbro wants to hear more of the dirty bits from The Emigrants.
The spring sunshine is warm. There are patches of wood anemones growing among the trees. They are not best friends; Barbro has lots of other friends. But she likes Barbro, who listens and seems to know what it’s all about.
I know the subway stations off by heart. I also remember the images that went with them as I traveled beside a silent Annemarie.
Johanneshov (now Gullmarsplan): silence, not a sound, the world is sleeping.
Blåsut: reveille, a trumpet, a knight on a horse.
Sandsborg: a sand castle, the sand trickling down, the roar of the sea.
Skogskyrkogården: music, trees, a stone wall, graves, sometimes it hurts so much, will I die too? Not for a long time. Life is long.
Tallkrogen: lots of pretty little houses with pretty little lights.
Gubbängen—Old Man’s Meadow (this one lasts all the way to the next station): old men fumbling and stumbling, boozing and snoozing, belching and squelching, stuttering and muttering, creeping and sleeping, snoring and boring, huffing and puffing, wheezing and freezing, drinking and stinking, pissing and missing…
Hökarängen: the last stop, and the rhyme comes to an abrupt end. Everyone is in a hurry, the clatter of heavy boots, pushing and shoving, lots of kids get off here and they shout and scream in the concrete stairwell, the racket is deafening.
Laila (who lives in one of the new apartment blocks for families with three or more children in Årsta, and who is achingly cool and cheeky): Have you heard? Tumba-Tarzan is at it again!
Birgitta (whose parents give her twenty-five öre for every book she reads, imagine that!): Tumba-Tarzan doesn’t exist, he’s just something the newspapers have made up.
Laila: He so does exist—you be careful, he could turn up at any minute!
The girl (slightly vague): Who’s Tumba-Tarzan?
Laila (forcefully): Jeez, you know nothing—sometimes I wonder if you’ve even been born yet, he hangs out in the forest, he robs empty summer cottages, the cops can’t catch him, my dad says…
But the girl is no longer listening. He is walking just a little way ahead of her, along with two guys in windcheaters carrying hockey sticks. He’s wearing a red woolen hat. She takes in the slim neck. The narrow ass. Boys have slimmer bodies than girls; she is always trying to clench her buttocks. He has chapped skin and red hair, he is German, he lives in Årsta, and she is in love with him.
One day she will leave a note in his desk, telling him. An anonymous note, of course. Laila links arms with her, Birgitta does the same on the other side. They walk to school pressed close together.
Everything is better. No one teases her anymore, at least not so much that it bothers her.
I don’t recall my parents ever visiting the school in Hökarängen. Dad probably came with me on my very first day. But I do remember other things.
She sold May flowers in the spring and Christmas magazines in the winter.
They organized a class party, even though Engwall said they weren’t allowed. She and Marianne managed to get into the Forum cinema in Årsta to see One Summer of Happiness, even though it had an adults-only certificate and she was twelve and Marianne thirteen. She went out on her skis and the snow on Årsta Field was sparkling white with blue shadows.
And love. The red-haired boy is lying with her on the kitchen sofa. Well, not really, but he’s very close. She can hear him breathing. They don’t do anything in particular, they’re just very close. The only thing that happens is that he sometimes cries like a girl—why?—and she comforts him.
To be honest, in reality that is, she doesn’t exchange a single word with him, except on one occasion when they are caught up in the crush at the main door leaving school. He raises his arm and she pushes it down. He gives her a long look.
What the fuck!
That was probably the only time he noticed her.
She hides her feelings because they are so strong. To declare one’s love is to be exposed, irredeemably lost. In spite of this, one day she sneaks a note bearing those three words into his desk. No signature. It is in the spring of second grade, and she has just found out that she will be leaving school, because they are moving again.
She slips the note into his desk before anyone else arrives in the classroom. From her place at the back she sees him open the lid, pick up the note, read those three words, glance suspiciously over his shoulder, then crumple up the scrap of paper. Well, at least I told him, she thinks.
She has never lived anywhere as long as in the apartment in Årsta. Three and a half years. And now they are moving again. She thinks she has made an enormous effort. Taken all kinds of crap. Put up with being teased. She hasn’t complained—whom would she complain to?—and finally she has succeeded. She has made some friends. Have all her efforts been in vain?
There is a lump of sorrow sitting inside her. She herself is that disgusting lump. She rests her cheek on the window, all alone on the way home in the coach with the dirty yellow walls and the green plastic-coated seats. She always has to wait for the bus at Johanneshov.
There is a long line.
It is cold, a biting wind with snow in the air.
When the bus finally shows up it is already overfull. People swear and complain because they can’t get on. The conductor yells at them from his ticket office, telling them to stop trying to push through. She has to wait for the next bus.
She is frozen and hungry. She cries inside. Far too often. The following morning she has to catch the bus again, traveling in the opposite direction this time. There is no point to anything, no point to her. She doesn’t understand where this sorrow comes from, but it overwhelms her.
Yes, of course, they’re going to move, and she doesn’t want to.
But the sorrow is bigger than that. And it’s vicious. Just as when some nasty kid squeezes together a hard ball of ice, takes aim, and hits you on the back of the neck so that you fall flat on your face. Out of the darkness comes a horrible laugh. Somewhere in a strange room that she can’t see, unknown beings have weighed and considered and found her wanting.
During all those years in Årsta she has longed for a dog. A real dog, a Schnauzer. No chance. On the beach in Santa Monica in California they knew a married couple with two Schnauzers, one brown and one black.
The dogs leap out from the backseat of the car, barking joyously as they race toward the ocean. She runs alongside them. She swims with them. She hunts in the sand for the empty shells of giant turtles, the colors shimmering on the inside. She clambers up a great big sand dune, and deep inside a thicket of scratchy undergrowth she finds an old, rotting wooden sign. She moves her index finger over the semi-obliterated letters. With some difficulty she mana
ges to work out what it says:
NO BLACKS. NO DOGS. NO JEWS.
There are plenty of dogs around, and some black people too. Who isn’t allowed on the beach? She wants to know what Jews means. Mom has bought an elegant white swimsuit with a palm tree over one hip, and she is wearing black sunglasses.
Forget it, Mom says. It’s just an old sign.
When she persists, Mom points to the pretty girl with long blond hair, sitting alone on a blanket letting the sand trickle through her fingers. She is Paco’s girlfriend. Paco is a Swedish-American, and he is Dad’s colleague. The two men are standing at the water’s edge in swimming trunks conducting a discussion, as mathematicians always do. The young girl on the blanket has a number tattooed on her arm.
She has noticed it before. Mom says she is a Jewess, and has been in a concentration camp. She asks more questions, and learns what happened to the Jews during the war. She doesn’t understand it, and wants to stop thinking about it.
But all it takes is the sign for Sandsborg outside the window of the subway train, and it all comes flooding back: the beach, the sand, the turtle shells, the Schnauzers, the wooden sign, and the girl sitting on a blanket all alone.
And the lack of love. She doesn’t have room for all this.
Lack of love? A big concept. Far too big, perhaps.
But she tries to find a sausage skin so that she can stuff life inside it and tie up the end, so that it all fits together. She can’t get life into the sausage skin.
She knows that she has a better life than most people. But there is a shortage of love—no more than the odd glimpse from time to time. It’s not just because they are moving and she will never see the red-haired boy again. There’s other stuff too. The old guy she and Annemarie tripped over on the way to the bus. He was dead.
A homeless old man, poor and covered in snow. A hobo, people said.
And Tanja’s dad, who jumped out of a fifth-floor window. They took him away in an ambulance, but they couldn’t save his life. Why did he have to jump out of the window and die? He was unhappy, of course. But why?
And then there’s Mom and Dad, who have almost stopped speaking to each other. Dad tells stories, does the dishes, and tries to cheer everyone up, but it doesn’t help. When he notices that none of this makes Mom feel any better, he becomes distant, as if a veil is drawn over his face. It’s impossible to get a word out of him.
And then she gets scared. What’s going on?
She keeps a careful eye on herself, like King of the Royal Mounted. She needs to blend in. Be good enough. Be accepted. Avoid irritating Mom. Stop being nasty to Ninne (she doesn’t quite manage that one). She is kind to Ia; Ia is her baby.
But the shapeless fear—the thing that language cannot frame, however many new words she has learned—continues to threaten her. She goes out onto the balcony. She can see the roof of the block where the red-haired boy lives. She can see all the way to the sign on the NK department store, constantly rotating. On one side there are the green letters, NK, on the other the clock. She doesn’t know anyone in Lund.
Outside their front door is a short staircase leading up to the balcony where the residents can go to beat their rugs. Opposite the balcony is a gray steel door, which is locked. And behind that door lives a strange creature: alone, confined, orphaned. Dirty and scruffy.
Barely even human. Resembling a starving animal.
She collects food for her over the course of many nights. Leftovers from the refrigerator. A solitary boiled potato. A few dried-up slices of sausage. Crusts of bread. Anything at all. She takes the plate upstairs and bangs on the door.
The creature inside is very frightened. It takes a while, but eventually the door opens a fraction. And this female creature, crazed with hunger, trembles and gobbles everything so savagely and unselfconsciously that it is a strangely enjoyable spectacle. The creature would die if she didn’t bring her the leftover food. She is kept alive only with the help of the worst, the most disgusting scraps. She needs so little, and is grateful for the smallest contribution.
She is company. She is there during the course of many long nights.
She is there for ages, all the time they are living in Årsta. When the girl feels unhappy, she gathers together the leftovers for the creature, which survives purely on what she can spare from her own excess, her incomparably richer bank of resources. The creature enables her to feel a little better than she actually is.
But one boring Sunday when she doesn’t have anything to do, she calls Ricki and asks if she can come over and see her. She catches the bus to Ricki’s new place on Banérgatan, and Ricki meets her at the stop with a bag of pastries in her hand.
She is stylish in a white suit and high-heeled shoes.
The apartment is small and dark, one room with a tiny kitchenette.
It is sparse and bare. One bookshelf. A round coffee table, two chairs, and a bed. That’s all. At home there is always stuff everywhere, magazines and papers, clothes lying around that make Mom curse, Ia’s toys, potted plants crowding the windowsills. Ricki’s apartment is pared to the bone; it looks like a storage depot.
Not a single picture on the walls. Nothing apart from a guitar, hanging up. It seems to be screaming Touch me, and it has several small droopy silk ribbons knotted around its neck. It’s the only personal thing she can see, apart from two straw-covered empty bottles on the bookshelf.
Has Ricki tidied up for her, a child? Or does it always look this way?
Ricki pours them each a glass of juice in the kitchenette while she waits on one of the chairs. They drink their juice and eat Danish pastries and talk about Tarzan, Cheetah, and the language of the apes. Ricki has seen the film, and says that Johnny Weissmuller is handsome.
After a while they don’t really have much to talk about.
Ricki doesn’t ask her any questions. And what would she ask Ricki? There is nothing to suggest that Ricki has friends, a social circle, interests, or anything that might involve having fun—a life outside the sphere of HSB and its toilets, to put it briefly. She knows that Ricki doesn’t have a boyfriend.
But she really likes Ricki. When she has finished her juice, she realizes she ought to make a move. She says she should be going; it all feels a little awkward. However, when they are on the way out, Ricki says with genuine warmth in her voice that she has appreciated the visit, and hopes she will come again.
Ricki walks her back to the bus stop and waits with her until the bus arrives. Mysterious is a good word for Ricki.
Dad buys a used Hanomag, it’s a German car, and he gets it cheap. They will be traveling to Lund in the car; Dad has become a professor there. They have to say goodbye to everyone. Goodbye to her paternal grandparents, who have moved to a three-room apartment in Västertorp.
They have often cycled over there on Sundays. Mom wants to play the piano, so Dad goes down to the cellar to pump up the tires with a grim expression on his face. He slips on his cycle clips and settles Ia on the parcel shelf. Ninni cycles in the middle, wobbling along.
The girl brings up the rear. Sockenvägen is long and depressing, and the sun is beating down. An afternoon spent with her grandparents is indescribably boring; she just wants to die. But this time they have arrived by car. Mom isn’t with them.
Ricki is in the kitchen, making sandwiches! Her soft hair is caught up in a clip at the back of her neck, and she looks a bit like the model and film star Haide Göransson. The girl really wants to stay in the kitchen and help with the sandwiches, but Ricki says she should go and join the others.
Her grandparents don’t go in for hugging. Shaking hands and giving a little bow is the norm. Grandma has broken her hip and suffered a concussion; she can’t walk, and sits in a wheelchair by the window. The girl bows and shakes hands; afterward she wonders whether her grandmother recognized her.
Everything is so slow here that it seems to creak a little. Words are like ice floes—not because they are cold, but because no one takes any notice of the wa
ter between the floes. Therefore, what is not said is very obvious. She sits straight-backed at a table covered in a sheet of glass, which protects her grandfather’s antique coins.
Grandpa is grumpy as usual. And when they are here, Dad is almost as grumpy as Grandpa. Who used to be a professor of electrophysics. When the two of them discuss science, no one else understands a word, and time drags itself along on crutches.
Ricki sits beside Grandma and cuts her sandwich into tiny pieces. She spears them on a fork and holds them up to the wrinkled mouth as if she were feeding a baby bird. Who are Ricki’s paternal grandparents? Will the girl ever find out? They come from Småland. They are thrifty. Grandpa is responsible for some important inventions; according to Dad, it’s thanks to Grandpa that you can send several telegrams at once. They are distinguished people, she understands that, but their apartment is very small. Even smaller than their place on Siljansvägen.
Grandpa is smoking a cigar in the leather armchair she remembers from Eriksbergsgatan. There was no room for the leather sofa when they moved in here, nor for other pieces of furniture she recalls. Why did they move to such a tiny apartment? Because they didn’t want to spend any more money. Because Grandpa is a pensioner now.
They brought their books, of course. Books about mechanics, electromagnetism, physics, telephony, resistance, cable laying, and the theory of relativity, nothing she can read. She occasionally glances over at Ricki, who appears to be encased in plastic when she is here. Ninne is drawing angels on a sheet of paper. Ia is getting fretful; she wants to go home. She sits Ia on her lap even though she is seven years old.
At last it is time to leave.
They bow and shake hands. Ricki comes to the door and waves them off. She really does look like Haide Göransson, although unfortunately she is entirely encased in plastic at the moment.
A Fortune Foretold Page 4