A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (32 page)

What I do know is that on May 15, 1956, you’re called up to the Royal Svea Logistic Regiment in Linköping, and between August 3 and November 12 you’re taught how to maintain and repair military vehicles. Not exactly a new horizon, but you shoot well. With the army-issue Mauser M-38 you shoot your way to the army’s Silver Medal for shooting, scoring 86 out of a possible 100. The only picture of you in uniform is in a weapons store with straight rows of Mausers lined up in racks behind you, and you’re holding an army-issue submachine gun, the M-45. It’s November and you’re in the army’s white winter camouflage coat with the fur collar, and on your head you have the army’s lined leather cap. You look small in the winter uniform. The summer uniform suits you better. You do most of your military service in the summer and autumn of 1956. Having completed 180 days, you’re excused from the remaining 180 days and the compulsory refresher course.

You’re thirty-three years old, and you have a family with two children to provide for.

And a horizon that doesn’t quite want to open up.

There’s something indistinct about the horizon, not just the small one, beyond the rowanberry avenue, the railroad bridge, and Havsbadet, but also the big one, beyond the radio set that stares at me with its blue-green Cyclops eye and over which you bend your head in the evenings. Sometimes you press your ear closer to the loudspeaker fabric and gently turn the right-hand dial and move the indicator through the radio stations, and the blue-green eye pulsates with the wavelengths of the world and the sounds of the world burst in from the big horizon. Much later, I realize that what comes bursting in are the sounds of war, the sounds of Israeli tanks charging toward the Suez Canal, and Soviet tanks charging toward Budapest, and in the small two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue you hang your uniform in the hall and bend your concerned head toward the world.

Are you concerned about Caryl Chessman, too? A Caryl Chessman fragment glints brightly in the darkness around the uniform and the radio set. Caryl Chessman is waiting for his death sentence to be carried out. Year after year, he waits for his death sentence to be carried out. Chessman is also a brand of cigarettes, sold in a yellow packet with black and white checks. Auntie Elisabeth on the other side of the railroad bridge chain-smokes Chessmans, and Chessman is reprieved, time and time again, until he’s taken into the gas chamber to die. There’s
always a last-minute reprieve for Chessman. A film about Caryl Chessman, based on a book by Caryl Chessman, is showing at the Castro cinema, and I can’t stop thinking about death in the gas chamber when Auntie Elisabeth lights a new Chessman with the glowing end of the previous one.

No, I don’t think you’re bowing your head for Caryl Chessman, not even when the last minute comes, and not for Tumba-Tarzan either, I assume. Tumba-Tarzan is the Caryl Chessman of the rowanberry avenue. Tumba-Tarzan is hiding out in the woods around Tumba and Rönninge but has also been sighted in the forest around Havsbadet and in the woods near the riding school on the other side of the railroad bridge, and some people say they’ve seen his abandoned lair in the woods around the Ewos skull factory. Tumba-Tarzan’s lairs are always abandoned when the police find them. The hunt for Tumba-Tarzan never ends, and in the school playground we replace the hunt for Robin Hood with the hunt for Tumba-Tarzan. In the local paper he’s referred to alternatively as a desperado and a pathfinder, reflecting pretty well the atmosphere of combined terror and admiration that the hunt for Tumba-Tarzan arouses in the rowanberry avenue and surrounding area. When no one has sighted Tumba-Tarzan for a while, the local paper wonders anxiously if he’s left the vicinity, and when someone immediately thereafter spots a tent or a couple of bikes hidden under some spruce branches in the woods on the other side of the truck factory, the local paper hopes that they’re Tumba-Tarzan’s and he’s come back. When he’s finally caught, we’re all convinced he’ll soon find a way to escape. Tumba-Tarzan has broken out of a penal colony to go and find his Jane, whose name is Alice, and take her away, over the water on a raft, to live as an outlaw in the vast forests around the rowanberry avenue. They live on pheasants’ eggs
they find on the ground and canned food they steal from empty villas and summer cottages, and they let the police find the stillwarm campfires they’ve just abandoned on their freedom flight through the Swedish summer. Tumba-Tarzan is the first rebel of the rowanberry avenue, and we keep on seeing him in the forest on the way to Havsbadet and in the woods around the skull factory long after he’s been caught.

Much later, I read the report of the proceedings at Södertörn District Court against Rolf Johansson and understand once again why he was a rebel and not just a common thief:

The mapped-out future generates its rebels. After Tumba-Tarzan there are Tommy and Elvis, who split the school playground into two camps and fill the local paper with ominous warnings about young people going astray. Then Tumba-Tarzan again, in the form of two young brothers who quickly bring the brand into disrepute by behaving more like thieves than rebels.

The local paper is also full of debates about whether people were happier in the old agrarian society than in the new industrial one. Much space is given to a survey of Swedish factory workers, who answer the question with “an unqualified yes.” Much space, also, is given to a front-page article about a public meeting to protest against “the widespread vandalizing of parks in Södertälje.” Park vandals are held to include people creating their own paths across the grassy areas. Young children are said
to vandalize out of ignorance (“training is needed here”), older children out of a desire for opposition (“they need to be guided toward other activities in which they can vent their feelings”).

I certainly know who vents their feelings by twisting the swings several times over the top of the frame in the playground behind the Co-op. I certainly know who eventually ends up in the young offenders’ prison at Hall. I certainly know there are things we do because they’re forbidden.

I’m no rebel, far from it, but I’m tempted by forbidden things, too.

In the light of later understanding, I think it has something to do with that mapped-out future, the one staring at us all and not blinking, not flinching, not paying any heed to the shadows behind us and the confusion around us and the fear inside us, the one we therefore want to see through and give the finger to, which is what the rebels are doing for us. Against the mapped-out future, the rebels hold out the forbidden dangers and freedoms of untrodden forest.

You’re no rebel either, far from it, but when the horizon of the truck factory refuses to open and the mapped-out future threatens to suffocate you, untrodden forest starts to attract you, too. “I’ve made a huge mistake in staying at the factory for so many years, I would have been better off doing a variety of jobs,” you write to Natek on October 11, 1957, my ninth birthday. The factory has started to measure the time each stage of your job takes, using a method called MTM, demanding that you do the same amount of work in a shorter time, and you’re beginning to suffer from persistent headaches that you suspect have something to do with your “unhappiness” at the factory.

You write the word in Swedish,
vantrivsel
, in a letter otherwise in Polish. Natek has made the leap from Borås to Tel
Aviv, and you’re ready to make the leap from the truck factory to almost anywhere else. The more the horizon closes in, the more important the leap becomes, and the longer the leap is postponed, the more the horizon closes in. You tell Natek that you recently replied to an advertisement “for a job as a service engineer for the Toledo automatic car,” and the company called you back and everything looked very promising—until you told them you were thirty-five.

I know nothing about the Toledo automatic car (
automat-vagnen
). You’re writing in Polish, so the problem could have something to do with the translation, or with your Polish, which quite often has some Swedish mixed in, making it hard to understand what you mean, particularly when the Swedish and Polish words are similar. You may possibly mean a service engineer for the Toledo automatic scales (
våg
rather than
vagn
), but I’m not familiar with those either. What I do know is that you speak the language of Strindberg with the accent of Mickiewicz, and what I suspect, much later, is that the obstacle to your becoming a service technician for Toledo wagons or scales is not your age but the confusion of languages.

In a letter to Natek on February 17, 1959:

Time and again you raise your head to see if the horizon is opening, but instead you see time running out and the Project stalling.

Let me say something about the big horizon as I see it, much later. There’s something about the light. It’s too bright. It eats away the shadows and burns off the gray shades. The world becomes too light and too dark. The brightest of horizons shines over the darkest of experiences and the most menacing of times.

“The residents of Södertälje can protect themselves against a dreaded nuclear death by throwing themselves to the ground and ensuring that no part of the body is left uncovered,” pronounces Captain Curt Holmfrid at a public meeting of the Södertälje Civil Defense Association on April 29, 1957.

“The atom bomb can shorten wars and reduce casualties,” asserts Colonel Erik Graab at the meeting of the Rotary Club on August 20, 1957.

“More than half of New York’s eight million inhabitants are estimated to have died in a mock attack in which five hydrogen bombs were dropped,” reports the local paper on July 21, 1956.

“The USA has hydrogen bombs that can displace the earth’s axis by sixteen degrees,” says the local paper on October 27, 1956.

“The mystery of life will soon be solved and religion abolished,” pronounces the director of studies at the Workers’ Education Association, Torvald Karlbom, in the assembly hall of my local school on August 18, 1956.

“Ours is an age characterized by lack of moral and spiritual direction,” warns study ombudsman Thorsten Eliasson of the Workers’ Education Association in the music room of my local school on August 21, 1957.

Light in the assembly hall, darkness in the music room.

Light on the big horizon, darkness on the small.

Darkness descends only gradually, almost imperceptibly, over Havsbadet. On July 11, 1956, the local paper reports a water temperature of 19 degrees C (66 degrees F) and two thousand bathers. On July 18, 1956, the Chemical Analysis Agency reports 7,000 E. coli bacteria per liter of seawater. On August 6, 1956, the local paper reports sunshine and a party spirit at a packed bathing beach for the 38th swimming gala, “the loveliest element unquestionably the formation floating, which a bouquet of pretty girls had mastered to perfection.”

The darkness is falling and nobody notices.

Nobody wants to notice.

Havsbadet is too indispensable to be unfit for use.

The unfitness follows from the toilets. Year after year, human waste is flushed from toilets straight out into the bays of Igelstaviken and Hallfjärden and can sometimes be seen washing up on rocks and beaches in semisolid form. Over the course of twenty years, the number of toilets in Södertälje increases twentyfold. Toilets—called water closets or WCs—are to be found in all the apartments in the blocks along the rowanberry avenue. It’s only the tenements in Baltic that still have dry privies in the yard, or dry closets as the local paper calls them. The dry privies are rows of dark stalls, separated by thin walls of rough planking. I can hang on for days to avoid going to the dry privies. I’m scared to death of something crawling up out of the dark holes or of falling into them. The WC is a blessing for humankind in general, and for me in particular.