A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (4 page)

On the other hand, it’s a place that can easily be explored and taken possession of. Not only because it’s so small and so circumscribed, but also because it’s so new. In fact, it’s practically without a history. Not long ago, there were no people here at all, just pine forest and sandy heath. Not long ago, there was no railroad passing through here and there were no plans for one to do so. Not long ago, the intention was to put something else here, something grander and more visionary. Not long ago, the idea was for these unchartered backwoods to be the site of an ideal society, meticulously planned in every detail. “The forested area of Näset to the south of the city” was to become a workers’ paradise of self-owned homes, adjoining one-family houses, each with its own patch of garden, an esplanade punctuated with parks and hills, a square with a covered market, public baths, a church on a slight rise, a public park and sports area down by the factories, and a bathing beach, Havsbadet, by the sea.

Only much later did I learn that the place where I applied my first words to the world is a wrecked planners’ dream.

The name of the architect behind the dream was Per Olof Hallman, and the dream was inspired by a social movement that sought to replace the rectilinear, antinature urban ideal of the industrial age with something more organic, more in tune with the natural world. The town plan was to be adapted to the
landscape, and not the other way around. Streets were to be built around or over rises and hills, not blasted through them. Existing natural conditions were to be exploited, not obliterated. “A town planner unfamiliar with the terrain can all but ruin a place with a few strokes of the pen,” Hallman wrote in 1901. Two years later, he put forward his plan “for the disused land to the south of, and belonging to, the town of Södertelge.”

Hallman’s ambitions, and indeed those of the whole movement, were far-reaching. The people involved wanted to plan away the disadvantages of industrialization, the dirt, the overcrowding, the ravaging of the countryside, the social injustices, and to plan forth its hidden potential: a freer and more equal society, closer to nature. One of the movement’s leading proponents was Camillo Sitte, an Austrian who wanted to re-create the human community of the medieval town, with its winding alleys and irregular squares. Another was the Englishman Ebenezer Howard, who wanted to forge a new connection between country and town, between agriculture and industry, gardens and backyards. Bulging metropolises would be decentralized and green, and airy garden cities would be built in surrounding rural areas. A bit of forward-thinking town planning would enable the tenement blocks of industrialization to be peacefully torn down and a new and better society to be peacefully built. Ebenezer Howard was the author of
Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
, a book which Per Olof Hallman had undoubtedly read before he brought his draftsman’s pen to bear on the southern lands and forests. Here there were no tenements to be torn down, no streets to be reconfigured, no memories to be dug up, no traditions to be broken.

Nor were there yet any plans for the railroad embankment that would cut the place in two, nor for the deep furrow of the
canal that would cut it off to the north, nor—obviously—for the railroad bridge or the viaduct or the factory fences or the oil terminals that would very soon turn Per Olof Hallman’s dream into wastepaper.

Much later I’d understand that this in a way was a speciality of the Place: nothing there ever turned out as planned. Not the development of the disused land to the south. Not the route of the railroad. Not the course of the canal. Not Havsbadet. Not the population. Not the town.

It was as if chance had developed a special affection for this particular place. And as if that same chance, like a magnet, had attracted the most fortuitous of human destinies, making the fact that he got off the train at this very Place to start his life anew perhaps the least arbitrary element in the story. A place perfectly chosen for doing exactly that, in fact, or so it sometimes, much later, seemed to me: no strong ties to the past, no fixed plans for the future, no readymade scenario to step into—or be ejected from.

Oh, that “much later”! How insidiously it creeps in, that all-narrowing perspective of hindsight wisdom and rationalization. How easy it is, with only a few strokes of the pen, to inscribe people into a narrative which to them must still be unwritten, burdening them with a knowledge they can’t possibly have yet, closing horizons which to them must still remain open.

So let me be honest about the hindsight, since it’s pervasive, inescapable, and treacherous. When I diverge from the story of myself as General Patton in a tank disguised as a garbage truck,
busily inspecting my newly won territory, and slip into a digression on Per Olof Hallman and his abandoned plan for the southern fringes, I’m five years old and will in a few months’ time be caught hopping on ice floes in the canal. I will be seduced into doing this by Tommy Hedman, who’s two years older and lives in the right-hand apartment on the ground floor and comes from Falun and has parents who eat fermented herring once a year, though my parents think it’s a bag of rotting garbage caught in the unfortunate kink near the bottom of the garbage chute. I’m not allowed to visit the Hedmans, and I’m not allowed to play with Tommy.

Actually, to be perfectly honest, what I can remember of these events is fragmentary at best. The early mornings with the garbagemen are fragments of the sleeping apartment, the sun-warmed pavement, the pungent yet sweet smell of the garbage, the clatter of the dumpsters, the dirty, oily overalls, and the vinyl seat sticking to my bare legs. I’m not even sure if the fragments are real, still less whether I’ve put them together correctly. I’m not sure I remember the fragments either, if remembering means actively recalling something. How can you recall something you haven’t yet named and therefore don’t yet have a word for?

Reflections then, rather than fragments: diffuse reflections of physical perceptions, of sensory experiences without words or order. Jumping on the ice floes: the rasp of frozen trousers on skin blue with cold, the glare of chalk-white faces in a black door opening, the pressure of hard hands, the sound of sharp voices, the feel of a thrashing. In my world, thrashing is a word linked to the sensation of ice floes.

Other words come only much later, words like dread and desperation, and, later still, words for the nightmares wallpapering the small apartment facing the railroad tracks, and even finally
the words for what the man who is my father and the woman who is my mother might think and feel when their united nightmares suddenly stand before them in the winter darkness of the hall, dripping deep-black water on their threshold, the thin ice crunching beneath their feet, the lethal cold burning against their skin.

Only much later can sensations turn into stories. Only much later can mute expanses of wordlessness be strewn with scattered fragments of language. Only much later do I slither behind Tommy down the steep slope to the canal bank by the railroad bridge and slide out onto the creaking ice and see dark cracks of water open beneath our feet and feel my feet slipping and the water getting into my boots and the cold and stiff trousers chafing against my body on the heavy way home and the sensations of dread and thrashing.

Only much later can I become the child who tells a tale. Only much later can I dig in the mute expanses for fragments, sieve them out of the layered deposits of time, and put them together into a story. It’s not the child who’s remembering. It’s me, trying much later to recall the child’s sensations.

“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater,” writes Walter Benjamin in an essay about the Berlin of his childhood.

The image: a shiny yellow disk of metal, sharp and uneven around the edges, a bit like thinly rolled-out gingerbread dough, and the size of a five-öre coin. It’s burning hot in my hand.

The later understanding: we’re romping noisily along the sleepers of the railroad track that runs along the path to my first school and leads to the factory where they make milk separators. It also leads to the factory where they prefabricate building blocks of aerated concrete and to the black mountains of coal and coke beneath the tall cranes on the docks and to the gigantic grain silo whose purpose we don’t yet understand. But the separator factory is what we’re running toward, because our school is just beside it, and because the separator factory’s renowned canteen (“Every housewife’s dream: appliances, appliances, and more appliances of every conceivable kind”) is where we walk to in a column every day and consume the free school meal to which we have just become entitled but about which we’ve already taken the liberty of developing cautious opinions.

But no, it must have been on our way home from school. On our way to school in the mornings, when we were always late and racing against the clock, the idea wouldn’t have occurred to anybody. So it’s in the afternoon, and we’re running along the sleepers leading away from the factory, and it must be from behind, from the factory, that the train is coming. Well, no, not a train really, just a shunting locomotive, and it’s making quite a racket because it’s a diesel. No danger, we can all see and hear it coming, and it’s coming only very slowly. But some danger still, because now somebody’s got the idea that we’re in a competition
to see who’s last off the track. It’s not Tommy this time, he’s too old to be in my class. So who is it? The picture won’t come into focus.

The engine’s getting closer, nobody budges, I get an idea.

Am I the one who puts the two-öre coin on the rail? Is it really my idea?

We hide in the waste-filled and weed-covered ditch and watch the engine grow against the sky. The ground trembles. The rails screech. The coin vibrates.

I imagine myself in the place of the two-öre piece.

A shiny disk of yellow metal larger than a five-öre piece is lying thinly flattened against the rail. It’s burning hot in my hand.

The image: Anders and I on the pavement outside our house. I test out a word I’ve heard someone say, maybe Tommy. “If you say that word again, you can’t come to God’s party in Heaven,” says Anders.

I ask who God is. And where Heaven is. And who’s allowed to come to God’s party.

The later understanding: that’s how God and Heaven are added to my world. I’ve passed my fourth birthday and learned to read the words that Dad puts together on the floor with the letter blocks, but God and Heaven are not among them. Nor is Hell. These are words that Anders has learned before me, and he’s the one who teaches me them for the first time, and it’s on the pavement at the front entrance to our house on the rowan avenue that God and Heaven and Hell forever assume a sense of someone else’s party.

These are the sensations I dig for much later, when I want to tell the story of how my world came into being: the sensation of the images and the sounds and the smells of those moments
when I put names to the world for the first time. And at best, the sensation of a small dark-haired boy who for some reason bears my name and somehow is me and who on a small plot of earth between the railroad bridge and Havsbadet, the port and the embankment, is busy making the world into his own.

There are times when I feel a bit ashamed for him. Not because his mother dresses him in home-knitted jerseys and plus-fours, and on special occasions, if I’m not mistaken, in a mottled brown woolen cap, all of which are quite possibly a source of shame for the little boy since no one else in his world wears such things, but not for me. Not for the person who much later is me. What that person much later is a bit ashamed of is his behavior. Of the fact that he so often rings the doorbell at Rickard and Bosse’s in the house next door and silently buries himself in their piles of comic books even when Rickard and Bosse aren’t home. I’ll wait for them, the boy tells their mother, and he vanishes into the adventures of Captain Miki in the twenty-five-öre
Wild West
comic that comes out weekly in a kind of checkbook format and always ends with the baddies in hot pursuit of Captain Miki, forcing the boy to read on through comic after comic, pile after pile.

It shames me to think of him reading so many comics when I know how hard his dad is trying to stop him from reading comics at all and to steer him toward the books carefully selected and brought home for him from the town library every two weeks in a brown leather briefcase.