It has started to rain. Ninne wants to sit in the front with Dad, her hand resting on the steering wheel so she can pretend she’s driving. In the backseat Ia falls asleep with her head on the girl’s shoulder. Now that they are going to move, she feels as if Ia is the only thing she has left.
And finally: goodbye to her maternal grandparents.
They are very different from her paternal grandparents. They have a market garden close to Lake Mälaren, south of Enköping. The grandchildren spend a lot of time there. Granny is small and dark-skinned, her embrace is soft and generous. However, she can be very strict.
And Granddad is prone to violent outbursts of rage. Everyone must help to pick the crops—the adults are responsible for the apples and plums, the children for the gooseberries and strawberries. They also visit in the school holidays in the winter; it’s a bit lonely then, particularly when they are there without their parents. She reads the serials in Allers magazine, even though Granny doesn’t like it.
And the books on Granny’s shelf, especially those by the author who has almost the same first name: Netta Muskett. She writes about daring flying officers, doctors dressed in white, nurses, kisses, and champagne which makes the head spin.
In the summer the steamboat comes, Ena One or Ena Two, to collect the boxes of fruit for the market in Hötorget. The boat leaves a trail of smoke behind as it plows across the bay. The whistle resonates deep down in the girl’s chest.
Everyone runs down to the pier; she is moving so fast that she is flying. Herr Krantz the gardener drives the cart laden with boxes, and dark-skinned Granny runs alongside so that she can add a layer of top-quality strawberries to the punnets at the last minute. The pins fall out of her black bun, strands of hair drift down over her back.
The Dutch are already on the jetty. They are Granny’s relatives, and like her they come from Java, where Mom and her brothers were also born. These days the family live in Holland. It’s hard to find labor here, and they have no money, so every summer Granddad invites them over to Sweden to pick fruit.
Herr Krantz, with his pipe in his mouth, gets ready to catch the rope. If the boy responsible manages to throw it over the capstan, the Dutch shout Bravo and clap their hands. In the summer the long dining table is crowded. Uncles, their wives, cousins. And then the Dutch, chattering away in Dutch and Malaysian.
Long summer evenings, full of talk.
A feast of spicy dishes and homemade ice cream, produced in a special machine on the kitchen steps. That’s the way it has always been. But not this time. No Dutch. No one else, apart from them.
It is a harsh, awkward, and sorrowful farewell.
Childhood is a no-man’s-land, although of course I didn’t think about it at the time. I didn’t know I was in it. The impressions overwhelmed my senses.
The dragonfly on my finger in Granny’s rock garden.
The tiny water boatmen, that’s what they were called, the insects with spindly legs who could walk on the surface of Lake Mälaren, lifting the water a fraction so that it looked as if they were wearing boots. The cows in the barn, and how I learned to milk them in there, the air thick with dung and hay. The scents of the trees as I ran to the barn, so palpable that I could touch them.
The odor of decay in the potato cellar.
The smell of soap as fru Krantz did the laundry, kneeling on Granny’s specially built jetty as she rinsed the clothes in the ice-cold water. And Granny’s dresses on the line, all exactly the same, all pinned up by the seams, as if Granny were on display in five different versions of herself.
Now I’m going to talk about something for which I didn’t have words back then.
About the fear. About the feeling of being overwhelmed, attacked in fact, by my body. About the loneliness all children share. And about the shadow cast by my parents’ dysfunctional marriage. But if they hadn’t met, I wouldn’t exist. Some other child, perhaps, but not me. That thought crossed my mind from time to time when I was growing up, and it was terrifying.
Something happened last night. Soviet bombers tore the sky apart, and German planes were approaching in strict formation. I was dreaming. What actually woke me were claps of thunder out across the Sound, sharp as cannon fire and salvos from a machine gun.
I woke up, and the room was crisscrossed with lightning flashes.
Then suddenly it was pitch dark. The electricity had gone, and I wrapped the blanket around me and groped my way out onto the veranda. A strong wind blew up. The violent storm struck again; the lightning was like something on a stage. The trees shuddered, their tops bowing down, and the waters of the Sound turned white, as if they were covered with ice.
Nature was running amok, directing its full force at me. The enormous pine tree by the veranda fence was doing all it could to attract the attention of the flashes of lightning. One strike and I would be annihilated. Nature wanted to whip me out of my mind. Don’t imagine you’re anything at all, that was the message.
Rapid changes of light that fooled the eye.
Blidö on the other side of the Sound was obliterated. The storm was majestic, but everything in my life was ridiculous. I myself was null and void. I protested, but some people sometimes fall into a great well of insecurity, due to circumstances. You have to offer resistance, search for whatever is greater than the self. Writing is a way of offering resistance.
You simply have to persist.
I took a deep, deep breath. And the storm moved away, the wind increased, and suddenly rain was hammering down on the veranda. That’s when it happened. I was both outside and inside. Right next to something, and far beyond everyday life. In a nothingness that filled me. I recognized it.
It has happened to me before. The first time was in Hökarängen, some time before the move to Lund. Soon she would never see her classmates again. She took off the cardigan Granny had knitted for her and hung it on the hook outside the classroom. That’s when it happened.
She was gliding, slipping, and sliding.
Just the way it was for Alice when she stepped through the looking glass. Time was chopped up, places were sliced in half and came together. She knew she was standing in the school corridor. She could see her classmates’ hats on the metal hooks. But she wasn’t there. Or she was there and somewhere else at the same time. The place where she had been. Or hadn’t. It was like a duplication, a kind of reflection. Like a memory of a memory. She no longer existed. Or she existed in everything.
Last night on the veranda I experienced it again. Perhaps life is a round aquarium, where the fish swimming along keep meeting themselves? But these moments are also a blessing. You exist within something greater, you belong to everything.
The phenomenon is known as déjà vu. Nothing can fully explain it.
2
the knife and a fortune foretold
In life there comes a moment, I think it’s unavoidable, you can’t escape it, when you doubt everything: marriage, friends, particularly the married couple’s friends. Not the child. You never doubt the child.
The knife was a compulsion in my head. The first time it turned up was on the school bus in Princeton. It flicked out from my seat. It was enormous and razor-sharp and it sliced through everything the blade touched, trees, houses, cars.
Pedestrians were chopped in half, their upper and lower bodies tossed in different directions. Strollers were slit open and babies’ heads went bouncing across the street like little balls adorned with woolen hats. It was appalling. Get your kicks on Route 66. A jazz song I remember from America.
The knife was with us on the drive to California.
I buried myself in my book to avoid seeing it. The knife was part of my life for a long time. It was only recently that I managed to change it into a fawn, gracefully leaping over the roofs of cars and from tree to tree. Less violent.
A toned-down variation without spilling any blood. In cars. And on train journeys. Even during my Freudian psychoanalysis I never talked about the knife, or even any childhood
memories. At the time, in my thirties, I recalled next to nothing from my childhood. On the sofa I spoke only about how little my then husband loved me, and about the fact that I felt weighed down by guilt, although I didn’t understand why.
It is through writing that one can begin to remember.
She avoids looking up at the gray door as they leave the apartment on Siljansvägen for the last time. Mom is nervous and stressed. It is a sunny day in August. The main road is narrow, with lots of traffic.
They might be somewhere south of Södertälje when the knife flicks out from her side of the Hanomag. It cleaves through firs and pines, that’s bearable. But it also slices off the tops of oncoming cars as if they were soft-boiled eggs.
The car roof is slit open, heads are ripped away from bodies. She closes her eyes, but she can still see what is going on when she hears the swish of the oncoming vehicles. Everything is played out on the inside of her eyelids, as if on a cinema screen. She opens her eyes, the landscape is painted sloppily outside the windshield, the colors smeared across the sky.
She closes her eyes. It is hot and sweaty in the backseat. Ninne and Ia are quarreling, insistently and infuriatingly. Mom turns her head and asks them to shut up for God’s sake, tells her to keep them in order. She reads a comic to Ia. Outside the Hanomag a massacre is taking place.
Swish, swish from the oncoming cars.
She knows that the knife is only inside her head, but that doesn’t help. In the country when they were saying goodbye, Granny took her to one side and asked her to be nice to Mom. Not stubborn. Promise. Anger punched her in the stomach when she heard Granny repeat Mom’s words. Everyone has the right to self-defense, doesn’t Granny understand that?
But Granny is Mom’s permanent defense attorney. She promises to be nice. That is what she intends to be from now on. She will be as nice as three Pollyannas. But the car journey She will be as nice as three Pollyannas. But the car journey is going to take two days. She doesn’t know how she is going to survive.
They stay overnight in a bed-and-breakfast in Ödeshög.
Her parents are allocated a room up in the house. The children are to sleep in a kind of hobby room with a sofa bed and two camp beds, in the company of a surly-looking moose head on the wall.
Ninne is scared of the moose, and wants to go to Mom. That’s definitely not happening. Ninne pulls the blanket over her head and sobs, furious and abandoned. Ia wants stories, and she reads aloud until she is hoarse and Ia falls asleep.
You’re the eldest, Granny said. You have to set a good example.
The fact that she is the eldest sister, the eldest cousin, sticks in her throat. As usual it is impossible to get to sleep. She pushes open the squeaky basement door and goes up a concrete staircase. Outside it is night. She sits on a garden bench in her pajamas, shivering and listening to the soughing of the leaves and the sound of crickets.
Perhaps she cries a few tears? Absolutely.
She sobs uncontrollably over Granny’s unfairness. And formulates her plan for the future in Lund; it is not unlike a pact or a declaration of intent. No one will ever have the opportunity to reproach her again. Not for one single thing.
She won’t give them the chance. Never ever. She will polish her niceness until it shines like a silver crown. She swears that’s how it will be. That is her revenge for Granny’s great unfairness.
Deathly pale roses are listening, along with cow parsley swaying gently in the breeze, and mosquitoes. When she crawls back into the camp bed, the king of the forest is staring gloomily at her. She would like to rip the horrible thing off the wall and throw it outside, to the mosquitoes and ants.
It’s a long time since Dad looked at her affectionately and said, To think I brought you over the bridge. He was talking about the day he picked up her and Mom from the maternity home in Stockholm where she was born, and it was wartime.
All of that is long gone. Gone, gone.
The second day is worse than the first. It’s not because of the knife. Every time Mom sees a car coming toward them, she covers her face with her hands and whimpers, faintly but audibly.
They drive through suburbs and Dad slows down. A church steeple is cloven in two, the roof of a barn is sliced off, and a row of houses is decapitated. He speeds up and Mom carries on in the same way, covering her face and whimpering.
Every time she sees a car coming toward them!
Does she really think Dad would deliberately crash into another vehicle?
She forgets the knife in order to observe Mom. It is a relief to escape the massacre, but it’s only because the drama in the front of the car is taking up all her attention. It is like a silent storm.
Mom is making a point. Or being obstructive.
And Dad doesn’t say a word. From her place diagonally behind him in the backseat she can see the vein at his temple beginning to swell. That means he’s angry. When he’s angry, he keeps quiet.
Mom does the opposite, she uses words. But now she is quiet too, apart from the whimpering. Have they quarreled overnight? It looks that way. Mom is trying to make Dad feel guilty. She knows how that feels, and is furious with her mother. She remembers the promise she made to her grandmother, and places her hand on Mom’s shoulder.
What are you scared of, Mom?
Fear, Mom says abruptly. Nothing for you to worry about.
Are you scared we’re going to crash?
Don’t worry about it. It’s just my nerves.
She doesn’t believe that. She is convinced that Mom wants to make Dad feel guilty about something. They’ve definitely had a row. When they argue it always starts off with things that seem to make sense—money, moving to a new apartment, having the opportunity to play the piano in peace, tidying things away. Beneath the surface are heavy seas of antagonism. She can’t put it into words, but she knows it’s true.
In the car on this August day she is sometimes hurled into her father’s silent bitterness, and shares his feeling. And sometimes into her mother’s terror of the oncoming cars, experiencing with her the collision in which they all die.
Why don’t you stop, Dad?
He is normally so attentive, but this time he doesn’t answer.
Can’t you see Mom’s scared?
He isn’t listening. He ought to drive Mom to a doctor (or a lunatic asylum, she thinks nastily). But Dad ignores her and remains silent. Ninne and Ia don’t notice a thing. During the journey the trial takes place inside her: which of them is in the right? First Dad is in the dock, then Mom.
After all, one of them must be in the right.
They brought a pressure cooker home from America, which was much admired by friends and acquaintances. A pressure cooker has to have an air vent so that the whole thing doesn’t explode. For the mechanics of the pressure cooker—sociology and psychology—a safety vent is required, a valve in case the pressure becomes too great.
I remember that car journey to Lund as a pressure cooker drama.
The Hanomag is filled up with gas. She is allowed to borrow the key to the evil-smelling toilet provided for the convenience of drivers. She feels sick. When she tries to throw up, nothing comes—only retching. It is just her imagination.
All the time. It’s hopeless. She can’t judge between them, and so the fault becomes hers. There is no one else to blame. She is imagining the whole thing. She alone carries that particular memory of the journey to Lund.
Her recollection does not match the shared family memory as it is later recounted. Lovely summer weather. Candy canes in Gränna. Picnics on sunlit hillsides along the way. Stopping to swim in a lake. Peace and joy.
They reach Helsingborg, where the road runs alongside the water. It is blue, with an indolent swell. Derricks. A strip of land which is Denmark. Soon they will be able to see Lund cathedral, according to Mom, who seems to have woken up. Who will be the first to spot it?
They are drawn into her silly competition, chanting Cathedral, cathedral, until its towers appear above the pl
ain like two connected gray index fingers, pointing up at the sky. They drive into Lund in a good mood.
Their new home is far out to the east. In the newly built housing development where they will be living, all the streets have been named after planets—Tellus, Sirius, Neptunus. Their house is part of the universe too; it is on Vintergatan, which is the Swedish name for the Milky Way.
Outside the red-brick rented house with its white balconies, Lund comes to an end. Looking down from the balcony she sees a farm and a threshing machine. Whirling dust from the seed. Sun haze and gulls. In the distance she can just make out the road to Malmö.
Inside there is a slightly spooky echo.
But Dad is filled with fresh energy. He cracks jokes, tries to dispel the gloom. He knocks up a dividing wall so that Ninne and Ia can each have a separate room. He hammers, whistles, and sings. She is the eldest, so she gets a room of her own.
For the first time in their marriage, her parents are sharing a bedroom; it is one floor up, and is reached via a spiral staircase. The apartment is bigger than the one they left. Five rooms. From now on the kitchen sofa will be a place to sit, nothing more.
A new school. It is called Lund Community Girls’ School, but it also has more academic classes for girls. Dad shows her how to get there by bicycle. This is her sixth school year and her sixth encounter with an unknown class.
A hundred steep steps up to the classroom.
Only girls in the whole school. The teachers are all female too. In the doorway she is blinded by the light; the classroom is bathed in sunshine. The other pupils have just been reunited after the summer vacation; the chatter is deafening, and no one notices her. She comes from the capital, but these girls seem advanced in a way that is quite alarming.
She keeps her distance.
A Fortune Foretold Page 5