A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (3 page)

Foreign kings are also said to have made a brief stop here, to be greeted by flag-waving people on the platform or to have their royal railroad cars routed into a siding for a royal breakfast and then coupled to the Swedish royal train in order to arrive in full state at Stockholm Central and the Royal Palace, but I have no memory of such a world outside our kitchen window. Presumably it was before the war, before our block was built, and before I existed, when the only things to be seen if one happened to look out of the railroad car window in our direction were sandy heath and sparse pine forest.

What’s certain is that a few months after the end of the war, General Patton, who first won fame as an armored division commander, made a brief stop on Platform 1 before boarding the 21:53 train to Malmö. Earlier that day he’d visited the Södermanland tank regiment at Strängnäs and studied the twenty-two-ton Swedish tank model 42 and the Swedish armored troop carrier SKP, built by Scania-Vabis, and he’d declared the Swedish carrier to be superior to the corresponding American model. Though perhaps he was just being polite. And perhaps not at the
moment seeing entirely eye to eye with the American military leadership, which had just relieved him of his command of the Third Army. It was the evening of December 3, 1945, and a large crowd had gathered at the station to pay tribute to “the popular general.” As Patton’s train pulled away from the platform on the southbound track, loud cheers were heard. That too was before I existed, but by then our apartment block was already in its ringside seat, newly built and filled with tenants, and perhaps some of those who had just moved in had been tempted on that late December evening into opening one of their windows facing the platform to see if they could catch a glimpse of the man who only a year before had crushed German resistance in northern France with a sensational combination of genius and brutality. George S. Patton was his full name. I remember him only as George C. Scott in
Patton
and might therefore have been inclined to cheer less lustily, but those who with no reservations whatsoever shouted hurrahs for the real Patton on the platform outside our future kitchen window and saw him in the flesh as he climbed aboard the train to Malmö, and who maybe still felt the anxiety of wartime in their bodies, would surely never forget what they had seen, since they turned out to be among the last people to see General George S. Patton alive. Just a few days later, he was fatally injured in a car crash outside Mannheim in defeated, occupied Germany.

My first proper memory of the station outside the kitchen window is of trains that never stop as they clatter endlessly through the nights—caravans of freight cars, open or covered, screeching and whining like an overburdened chain gang on a punishment march. I remember them because they’re the first things to wake me as the windowpanes rattle and the rail joints hammer against the wheels and the crackling flashes from the
double locomotives cut through the curtains and a putrid smell of chemicals and decay rolls down from the platforms and into our beds and our dreams.

On the narrow strip of ground between the apartment blocks and the steep slope up to the fence and the platforms, the architects of the Place have left some of the original pines standing and encouraged grass and white clover to spread beneath them. It’s my first playground. I hunt for four-leafed clover in the grass, play hide-and-seek among the trees, and float bits of bark in the puddles on the footpath below the embankment. A four-leafed clover is an early sign of luck, a double four-leafed clover an early mystery. Gradually the games grow bolder and more absorbing and go on later and later into the afternoon and can’t be immediately interrupted just because somebody opens the kitchen window and shouts that it’s time to come home:
Chodź do domu
, calls the voice from my kitchen window. The person calling is the young woman who’s now my mother, and she’s calling in the first language I learn and the first language I forget. In winter the largest stretch of grass between the pines is hosed with water, and the bigger boys come down with their ice hockey sticks and the games grow rougher and it gets dark earlier and the voice at the window takes on a more anxious tone. And soon, another language.

They want to leave nothing to chance. Nothing is to come between the Child and the Place. No foreign words. No foreign names. Nothing that might make the Child lose the foothold for all of them. So when they hear that the Child’s first words are in a foreign language, they force themselves to speak to him in a language still alien to them, and they’re quick to put books in the
new language into his hands and to spell out the words of the new language for him in alphabet blocks on the living room floor.

On the advice of new friends, they’ve already fixed on a name for the Child. It’s the most common boy’s name in the new language. The name is important, their friends have told them. A foreign name stands out and becomes a handicap. The name they initially chose, Gershon, after the Child’s paternal grandfather, is therefore superseded by Göran, a name that seems devised to distinguish between foreigners and natives. The complicated intonation of the long ö is what does it. They could also call him Jakob, after his maternal grandfather, which would be easier to pronounce and wouldn’t really stand out because it’s a name that belongs here too, but I imagine they want to play it safe in the name game. They give him the name Jakob as well, but a middle name isn’t something you shout out of a kitchen window.

In the matter of the Language, they’ve calculated correctly. Perhaps in the matter of the Name too, but that’s harder to know for sure. It’s safe to say that the Language is what first binds the Child to the Place, since it’s here that the Child sees everything for the first time, absolutely
everything
, without the weary discernment that comes with knowledge of what everything in the world is supposed to be called and experience of how everything in the world is supposed to look.

The first bird is a house sparrow in the barberry hedge outside the dairy shop. The first squirrel climbs up the first bark of the first pine outside the kitchen window. The edge of the first forest extends along the first route to school. The first woodland path is carpeted with the first warm pine needles and bordered by the first bilberries. The first pungent reek of
surströmming
, fermented herring, comes from the Hedmans’ apartment on the ground floor. The first street is called Hertig Carls väg and is
bordered by the first pavement (play only on the pavement!), the first cycle path (watch out for the cyclists!), and the first rowanberries. It’s also paved with stones that resound with the rubbery bumping and thudding of the first automobile tires. The first automobile belongs to Anders’s dad in the next-door apartment and sometimes needs a starting crank to get it going and has a windshield I can’t reach when we’re allowed to play in the driver’s seat and turn the steering wheel. The first garbagemen in my first garbage truck hook the first garbage dumpsters onto a lift mechanism at the back of the truck and press a button to raise the dumpster into the air, fit it to a circular opening, and tip it forward so that the trash catapults down into the belly of the truck, the last bits shaken out with a few sharp tugs of a lever before the dumpster is lowered, unhooked, and carried on strong backs into the secret room behind the locked door in the concrete chill of the basement in the newly built apartment blocks where we live. My first garbage truck is a Norba, and three of them have been purchased at great expense by the Södertälje public sanitation department; they are described as a step forward in providing cleaner and more convenient refuse collection, having “a hood for spill-free emptying, a hydraulic dumpster-emptying device, and a scraper to distribute material in the refuse unit, plus a tipping mechanism.” My first garbage chute is presumably a backward step, since the shaft that carries the garbage down to the refuse storage room hasn’t been built correctly and there’s a kink at the bottom that sometimes makes the garbage get stuck, so the chute blocks up. This is in spite of the fact that the local housing committee directive for garbage chute construction, dated November 5, 1940, clearly states that “the shaft must run straight and vertically for its entire length, and the whole of its lower end must be entirely aligned with a
refuse container, such that a vertical line drawn along the inside wall of the shaft will run 5 cm inside the edge of the container.” The regulations also say that “the refuse storage room shall be provided with sufficient electric lighting so that the entire room is well lit.” My first refuse storage room is not well lit. It’s dark and cold and gives off the sweet-sour odor of kitchen waste and a raw breath of damp concrete.

Early one morning I get a ride from my first garbageman in my first garbage truck while the two new arrivals who have become my father and mother are still asleep on the sofa bed in the living room with the blinds drawn and the street outside lies silent, apart from the chatter of the sparrows in the barberry hedge and the screech of brakes from the first morning train on its way south. My first mornings are always early and always bright, and on one of those mornings I slip out of the front door and down the stairs to the entrance hall and out onto the sunlit pavement, because I don’t have the patience to go on lying there on the pull-out settle in the kitchen and don’t want to wake the two sleepers until the alarm clock rings and the street is filled with the cries and sounds of the growing caravan of bicycles making their way down the rowanberry avenue with rattling chains and creaking saddles and a daily load of filled lunchboxes and drowsy riders.

So I take early possession of the Place without their really noticing; sometimes, in fact, while they’re still asleep. I’ve been told not to go off with strangers or accept anything from strangers, but the garbagemen aren’t strangers. They’re part of the Place, in the same way as the dockers and sailors at the port where I go fishing for my first roach, and the bakers and assistants all dressed in white at the bakery on the other side of the road where I buy my first crusty bread roll and my first milk is
ladled out with a long-handled liter measure from a hole in the counter. The speciality there is a bread loaf known as the SS loaf, named after the shop, which is called the SS Bakery, named after the Place itself, Södertälje Södra; but that’s a loaf we never buy. Just to the right as you enter the dairy, my first bottles of fizzy pop are ranged in dark green crates stacked on end against the wall. The very first is called Pomril and tastes of apples.

Seated in the driver’s cab, I’m allowed to ride in the garbage truck from one end of the rowanberry avenue to the other, from the end where we live, in the last building before you reach the edge of the forest and the road to the Beach, all the way to the other end, where the row of buildings comes to an end and the street makes a sharp left turn and disappears under a railroad viaduct. The forest and the road to the Beach are part of my territory, but not the road beyond the viaduct. Beyond the viaduct is the big factory that swallows the caravans of bikes and spits out trucks, sheltering behind its front gates a world I can neither reach nor name. Dad’s a pipe fitter, but what a pipe fitter is I have no idea. He could just as well be a founder, borer, tracer, clerk, plater, punch-card operator, balancer, manager, smith, foreman, filer, capstan lathe operator, or designer. The words of the world beyond the factory gates can’t be seen or touched or smelled, so it’s impossible for them to lend their names to anything in my world. Thus an early distinction is drawn between the world I can make into my own and the world Dad must try to make into his, because at seven every morning he and his bike disappear through something called the Chassis Gate and I don’t see him again until Mom calls out of the kitchen window to say that dinner’s ready.

The boundaries of my world are sharp and forbidding, and the two garbagemen who have given me a seat with a view in
their cab know very well where those limits are: the busy mainline railroad tracks, the railroad viaduct that spans the street, the railroad bridge over the canal, the canal itself, the steep-sided quays of the port area, the sharp fences around the factories and coal depots along the bay at Hallfjärden.

Steel and water. Fences and cul-de-sacs. Barriers and precipices.

The only road that doesn’t end at something hard and impenetrable is the road that continues where the paved street ends and the forest begins, the road that in spring is edged with cowslips and lilies of the valley and in summer is crowded with bikes and eventually with cars, and which on my long Sunday walks with Dad seems never-ending. This is the road to the Beach, Havsbadet, and it ends in a sandy shoreline. Havsbadet is the most open and inviting of the boundaries in my world, but a boundary it is nonetheless; the road comes only this far, and this is how large my world is allowed to be.

The area of predominantly new housing where the garbage truck stops at every block, empties every refuse storage room, and carefully shakes the last scraps out of every dumpster is no larger than can be explored by a young child on foot and is in fact a strictly encircled enclave comprising, roughly speaking, a railroad station with auxiliary red-brick accommodations for its employees; sixteen new, three-story housing blocks in yellow or gray plaster lining both sides of a stone-paved avenue; some smaller side streets with two-story detached houses; an open square; two playgrounds; a day nursery and a post office; two grocery shops, Kling’s with cooling water running in the window, and the Co-op with the first frozen-food counter; a tobacconist’s; a haberdasher’s; a bakery and a cafe. In front of the train station, there’s a newspaper kiosk and a telephone booth
with a removable floor of wooden laths through which escaped ten-öre coins lie glinting. It’s a perfectly enclosed, idyllic world, which you can enter or exit only by passing under dark railroad viaducts, balancing across vertiginous railroad bridges, climbing over prohibited embankments, jumping on treacherous ice floes, or making holes in skull-marked factory fences.