Then the Stockholmer goes around and climbs in behind the wheel again. He doesn’t look at us — he just turns the engine over and lets it hum for a bit. But before the car starts to pull away, the really white girl rolls down her window. We think maybe she wants to get a better look at us, but we’re wrong about that. Her eyes aren’t focusing on us anymore. She sticks her arm out and empties an ashtray on the road, and then the car pulls away. It’s only then that we notice how badly the sharp ends of the stake fence are biting into our backs. We pull ourselves off them and in the back our shirts are dotted with little pricks of red. In the road a cigar lies smoldering in the gravel. It smells like town and dress clothes, like the parsonage or one of those big houses that’s got its own name. We stand for a while in the road circling around the cigar, as if it was a campfire, letting the smoke tickle our rough, thick noses. And still we’re not really there — only the cigar is there. In the distance we can see another car appear on the road. Before it reaches us, we kill the cigar in turn with our bare feet, me first because I’m the oldest, and Siri last of all because she’s a girl. Then we walk back into the yard. It’s not a Stockholm car, this one. It has an “X” on the plate, so it’s just another car from Gävle.
Rosa is back in the yard now, over next to the hay wagon, rubbing her muzzle against its wooden slats. We get our hands on an old link chain and start to beat her and beat her with it until she bolts off, clomping down toward the row of lilacs. We don’t run after her. We drop the chain, and it slinks into the burnt grass with an empty rattle. We’ve discovered one thing anyway: that we don’t get anything out of beating Rosa like that. And actually we’ve discovered another thing: that there’s no remedy for what we know, that we can only ever be what we are — three, grubby, poor kids in other people’s hand-me-down, cut-off overalls, three dirt-farmer’s kids, the lowest of the low.
Still together, sure enough, we walk back to the barn. Up in the loft we squirrel away in the hay, each of us digging out our own separate caves. And we lie there in the dark, sucking on salty braids of hay as the noon hour passes, as the day passes, as the cows bellow from thirst in the pasture, as one after another the grown-ups fling open every door, scythes at the shoulder, shouting our three miserable names over and over. But to these things we’re insensible. All we can see, all we can hear, is a Stockholm car hurtling down a long straight road, bearing on its roof a great silver trunk that holds all our longing and our shame.
The Midsummer Night’s Chill Is Hard
A boy and a room. The room is hot and small, with a single narrow window facing out on life. Through it the boy sees the sky as a thin margin wedged between the tops of tall buildings and his eyelids. He is young, and in his impatience, he thinks his eyelids keep him from seeing all that he might otherwise. The window opens onto five adjacent courtyards of masonry and asphalt. In one stands a lone poplar. In the other four perennial laundry hangs yellowed and drooping like wilting leaves. At night he cannot sleep. He keeps the lamp lit on his table, even though this is forbidden, so that he can read the books he has borrowed. But they are never the right books. In the mornings, once he has fallen asleep at long last, his father pounds on the door until he answers.
Mornings in the cramped kitchen smell of bedclothes, coffee, and gas. His father drinks from the faucet, making slurping sounds, as his mother stands in front of the mirror combing her long black hair. The boy, Håkan, sits half-dressed, with his back against the firewood rack, sipping scalding-hot coffee. When his father is ready, he lifts the little sack with his Thermos off the firewood rack and leaves with a short, mute nod. When his mother has finished combing her hair she opens the window and cleans out the comb over the courtyard. Håkan goes into his little room and makes the bed, then smokes a cigarette as he pages through a book with clammy fingers. It is a hot, stupid summer, the summer of his failure. Right above his chair hangs his new uniform jacket, with its armband bearing the postal insignia. He thinks it looks like a mourning band.
Sometimes he takes his schoolbooks out of the little sugar crate under the window and sits down on the floor in the middle of the room to look through them. It’s a stupid and pointless exercise, a way of punishing himself. Yet he does it all the same with a kind of merciless gloating, as if he were his own worst enemy. Poor kids often have old schoolbooks their parents have picked up at used bookstores, scarred with the marks and stains of others before them. On the front page just inside the cover the name of the book’s original owner can usually be found sketched out in bold block letters impossible to rub away. Poor kids write their names under this first one in weak lead letters that are easy to erase, so their mothers can get a better price when they sell the books back at the end of the school year. His books are filled with marks and notes from a string of previous owners, and he sometimes thinks that this is why he failed. It’s not alright for poor kids to fail, partly because of the shame and partly because of the cost. On some of these hot stupid June mornings, just before he packs off to the post office, he stands there in the middle of the room flipping painfully through his old schoolbooks. Then he carefully sets them back in their little crate, as if he’d broken some taboo. And maybe he has. They are no longer his. They are forfeit. Each and every book will be sold back again in August, just before the start of the new school year.
The morning of Midsummer’s Eve begins like any other day: it is hot and he is sluggish, his bag heavy with bulk mail. The streets smell faintly of birch bloom and gasoline. His skin prickles in the sun. The bells begin to chime at the Stockholm Community Center. On the corner of Götgatan and Folkungagatan, his English teacher comes bounding up to the street from the subway, whistling, a leather briefcase swinging from his hand. This is a teacher who inspires fear, always whistling right before he pounces. He sees Håkan and greets him with the kind of forced cheer with which teachers always meet their students during vacations. Håkan is lugging too much bulk mail to shake the teacher’s hand.
“Well, Mr. Bergström,” the teacher says. “Highly commendable — your taking a job during the summer break!”
“It’s not a break,” Håkan answers. “I’m done with school.”
The teacher gets embarrassed then, as if he’d mistaken Håkan for someone else, and hustles along on his way, still whistling. To be a schoolboy and a mail carrier is commendable. But to be just a mail carrier, and nothing more, that’s another story. No one will sing his praises for that. If he gets stuck between floors in an elevator, he’ll likely be chided for not having taken the stairs in the first place. If he delivers a bent-up letter, the disgruntled recipient will probably open the door and yell down the stairwell that it’s the goddamned carrier’s fault. If he rings a doorbell because an envelope can’t fit through the mail slot, he’ll get an earful for making someone get up out of her sick bed, as if he should have known she was sick to begin with. If he forces an oversized envelope in through the slot the next time round, the very same person, now well again, may be outraged over possible damage to the parcel’s valuable contents.
For seasoned mail carriers, buildings become familiar as they do for no one else. Every building has its own distinct smell, whether pleasing or repugnant. There are proud buildings, like those on Folkungagatan, redolent of dining rooms and dusty carpets, and there are those like the ones on Södermannagatan that are honest and clean, if poor, exuding the sour aroma of mop and scouring brush. And then there are friendless, poorly-lit buildings that reek of squalor and poverty, like the ones on Kocksgatan. There are also buildings where invisible shadows linger in the stairwells and vestibules, where throats seem to close in on themselves as soon as those spaces are entered. On Folkungagatan, for instance, there is a building where a man was trapped inside during a fire and burned to death, and on Södermannagatan there is a particular doorway Håkan always hurries past apprehensively because a double murder occurred there. On the top floor of a building on Kocksgatan a young couple were asphyxiated by the gas stove. It happened so
recently that he still has to deliver mail for them that arrives now and then from Norway. A picture postcard of Oslo Harbor came in the beginning of June, and even though it was in Norwegian he could make out the message: “We’re waiting to hear from you!” Then in the middle of June another card came: “Congratulations on your thirtieth birthday! We do so hope to get a letter from you soon!”
And now on Midsummer’s Eve day, during his second round of deliveries, another thick letter has arrived for them. He stands outside their door holding the letter in his hand, warming it for a long moment, before he lets it fall through the mail slot. He imagines writing a response to the return address in uncertain Norwegian: “Dear Unknown Friends: A letter carrier in the third district of Stockholm regrets to inform you that …”
But nothing comes of it. Nothing ever comes of anything. During his second round he is tired. The soles of his feet burn as though he’s been walking on hot stones and he keeps getting a cramp in his side in those buildings without elevators. A mushroom distributor on his route takes a whole armful of magazines off his hands. There’s only one building on Kocksgatan that smells nice, the one with the specialty store that deals in tropical lumber. Must be all that good foreign wood, he imagines. Today the store receives small oblong envelopes with hard contents. He once delivered a heavy packet there all the way from India. Wouldn’t it be great, he muses, if someday he had to deliver a palm tree there? He pictures a really big palm tree with coconuts hanging from the top and imagines all the letter carriers from Stockholm 4 coming along to help him carry it there. He would be the one to go in and knock on the office door, since it’s his route. Excuse me, he would say, a big package has come for you. A really big package. We’ve left it out on the sidewalk.
During the break between the second and third rounds of the day Håkan stops back home, where his father is sitting in the hot kitchen, shirt unbuttoned, drinking vodka with a couple of his co-workers. Håkan has removed the postal armband and stuffed it into his pocket because he doesn’t want to draw attention to his failure. But somehow it seems to show on him anyway, because all of a sudden his father says: “After five years of the best schooling Stockholm’s got to offer, you can bet your sweet ass Håkan’s more than qualified to lug people’s letters around town.” Håkan’s mother gets up then from the stool near the sink where she has been sitting by herself, listening, just listening. She leaves the kitchen, biting down on her lip as if to stifle an outburst.
Håkan himself goes into his little room and stands at the window. The sky is mostly clear and blue. Three white clouds drift in over the back lots of Södermalm, riding high in the sky like fugitive summer balloons. A woman is pulling laundry from a clothesline. Another is setting out potted plants in hopeful anticipation of rain. A man just across the way, in rare Midsummer form, whacks his wife on the fingers as they beat a rug together. Someone opens a window, and a gramophone starts to sing to the accompaniment of the drunken carpet-beater. Håkan’s mother enters the room behind him, but he doesn’t turn around. She sets a tray of food on his little table and goes out again. From somewhere in one of the other buildings, a baby begins to wail in a loud red tone that infiltrates every quarter in the chain of apartment houses. Down in one of the courtyards a street musician is playing the accordion, looking up at the apartments’ back windows with hopeful eyes, but the buildings are vacant as they can be only at Midsummer, and just a single penny clatters down on the cobblestones at his feet.
By the time he begins his third round of the day, every building he comes to is empty and silent. The stairwells smell of dust and desolation. The shops are all closed, and his clacking footsteps echo over every cobblestone courtyard. The Church of Catherine’s tolling bell chases him every fifteen minutes, hastening him on from doorway to doorway. On each and every mail carrier’s route the tolling bells of some church lash out like a long, harsh whip. The air is now stifling, and there are no shadows on the streets. The weak blue smoke of afternoon hangs over every courtyard. All those who have gone away for the holiday have drawn their blinds, and so all the buildings seem to be in mourning.
When he comes home again, his father is gone. In the big room with the full-length mirror on the doors, his mother sits in front of the clothespress, teasing out her hair. Under her stool is a wadded-up handkerchief. She has been crying. Håkan goes into his room.
He lies on his bed and leafs through his English grammar textbook as far as Should/Would. Then his mother comes in and sits at the foot of the bed, letting the silence between them grow warm before she says anything. The sounds of the city meanwhile needle their way into the room: a steamboat in the harbor sounding a loud whistle, thick with anxiety; a window slamming shut with a bang, panes a-rattle; an ambulance with its morbid music approaching and then disappearing again slowly, leaving behind a trail of disquiet. His mother grabs hold of his ankles with a sudden force that is still somehow feeble.
“You really should go outside,” she whispers. “Go out and have some fun. It’s Midsummer’s Eve. You can’t stay inside on Midsummer’s Eve. I won’t let you.”
The Church of Catherine’s bell sounds a single tone, soft like a piano note. Håkan closes his eyes but says nothing. She leaves him alone. After a little while he hears his father come home, hears his steps faltering as he bumps into things in the kitchen, first opening and then closing cupboard doors, then knocking chairs into one another. Full of regrets he has probably brought home flowers, tulips most likely. As he lumbers back and forth in the large room, Håkan’s mother is silent. After a good while, it seems they have become friends. Words are exchanged in muted tones. His father’s steps now creak in the corridor, approaching Håkan’s door. When he knocks Håkan scrambles out of bed and moves to the window. His father enters the room and approaches Håkan from behind, excruciatingly slow. Then comes the arm hooked round the neck, the murderously suffocating embrace.
“You can’t sit here at home, boy,” he says. “Not on Midsummer’s Eve.”
The father lifts up Håkan’s face, holding it in his hands like a stone.
“OK,” the boy says. “I’ll leave.”
“Take my bike,” the father says to the stone. “It’s out on the street.”
And so he takes the bike and rides down Katarinavägen. It’s an old bike, with fenders that rattle. The city is quiet. The only noise seems to come from his own clattering fenders. Through the thin blue haze of ferry smoke and dusk he can make out the light-spangled serpent of the amusement park across the water, writhing about in powerless despair. He rides around the wide and meandering harbor shore and then casts himself in among the lights and sounds of the bustling crowds with his fenders clattering. Like a leper, he thinks, since he has read somewhere how lepers fasten warning bells to their clothes. On the winding, shadow-soaked roads of Djurgården he startles a hare and more than one amorous couple. No one else is riding a bike. In all of creation’s vast expanse, he is the only one journeying forth on a bicycle. If I wasn’t on this bike, he thinks, I wouldn’t be so alone.
At a clearing along the shore, he lays the bike down on the ground. It is late now but still very light out. Empty white boats glide past with gulls trailing in their smoky plumes. He sits and follows their course with his eyes until they disappear in the dusk with their stern flags drooping. One of them blows its horn as a warning to the Tegelvik ferry, as if crossly scolding a dog. Everywhere he turns the evening is alive with music. Small campfires flicker on nearby islands and distant bluffs, with fires that leap out suddenly and stretch their flaming tongues over the water. From the dark gap where the mouth of Hammarby Canal meets the harbor, a white sail glides out toward him like a letter through a mail slot. In long silhouettes the cranes at the Stockholm shipyards stand out in rows against the skyline like lizards, their heads bent sharply forward as if preparing to drink from the water. Higher in the sky, more or less directly over his territory, hover clouds blackened as if gutted by fire yet radiant around their edges. He has
read a book recently in which clouds of this sort were called “sleeping wrecks.” In an apartment deep below these clouds his father has just fallen asleep with his mouth open, hands folded against his chest. And at an open window stands his mother, combing her black hair before bed.
One day a palm tree will arrive from Africa for the specialty lumber dealer on Kocksgatan. It will be hard to get it around that tight corner there at the intersection of Östgötagatan, but in the end he knows that they’ll manage it nevertheless.
In time he begins to feel the evening chill, and so he takes up his father’s bike and rides again, clattering through the twilit night, off toward the sleeping wrecks.
Bon Soir
He knows precious little about life, the boy who mans the ferry newsstand, this fifteen-year-old who becomes so tongue-tied and ashamed one Sunday when he is startled by the cook’s husband up above the dock. The boy is loitering on the exposed rock between some bushes, poking and jabbing in through the branches with a sharp piece of board he found down near the shoreline. Who knows what rogues might be lurking behind them? And what better way to rout them out? But when the cook’s husband appears out of nowhere, the boy stammers something about there being wasps’ nests in those bushes, maybe even rats, then he gathers up his dignity and heads off to the other side of the cove, beyond the sunken barge, to lay in the sun on a shelf of high exposed rock. Nearby a dirty little canal wide enough for a rowboat flows out under an overhanging thicket, extending a small gray finger into the clear water. This is the very spot where he asked Barbro, the kitchen helper, if she’d like to play Adam and Eve one evening when they went for a swim. When she replied, “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” he lost his nerve and wished he’d never said it.
Sleet: Selected Stories Page 11