A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (5 page)

He reads the books too, of course, sometimes with a flashlight under the covers when the reading light has been switched off for the night. Or if it’s summer and still light outside, with the book held up to the slightly wider chink of light at the edge of the blind. After a late night with Sherlock Holmes and the
Mystery of the Speckled Band, he dares not sleep with his back to the wall, for fear that a deadly poisonous snake will come crawling down it. After a late night with Poe and the Case of M. Valdemar, he dares not sleep at all, for fear of dissolving into a rotting mass.

So the boy is to be preserved from comics. As from so much else that the two new arrivals fear could bring down the world the boy is busy making into his own, and which for them is the only world they can pin their hopes on.

Actually, they’re not the only people having fears. Per Olof’s mom in number 43 gives the little boy who somehow is me a book entitled
Young People Astray
or
Big City Dangers
or
Godless Inferno
or something in that vein, which she thinks the boy ought to take home to his mom and dad. I must be about seven or eight and there’s a little sister now and we’ve moved across the road from our one-room apartment at number 42 to a two-room apartment at number 45, and like a one-man plague of locusts, I consume any reading matter that crosses my path, be it the shop signs along the main city street or the cereal box on the kitchen table. The book has a pulp-fiction-style cover, a black hand grabbing the naked arm of a woman against a background of flickering flames or something to that effect, and it’s easy to mistake it for that kind of a book. But that isn’t why Dad takes it away from me and insists that I return it right away with thanks for the loan, which is something I can’t do because the book is a gift and not a loan. No, it has something to do with Per Olof’s parents, and with something Dad calls propaganda. The book with the seductive cover is propaganda for Per Olof’s parents’ religion, which is not the same as my parents’ religion. Per Olof’s parents are Pentecostalists or Baptists or something like that. Part of their religion seems to be
that children drink coffee with their parents. Per Olof always drinks coffee with his parents. My parents’ religion seems to stipulate that children under no circumstances shall drink coffee. At any rate, I’m never allowed to taste even a drop when they have it. I’m given my first coffee by Auntie Ilonka in her tobacco shop at Strängnäsvägen when I’m ten. I’m also entrusted by her with taking payments and counting change and putting money in the till, but not in the till for lottery tickets, which we must be very careful about. The coffee has been simmering all day and tastes bitter, and I feel no urge whatsoever to join the Pentecostalists.

But it’s true that Per Olof’s parents are anxious, too. They’re anxious about what will become of the world when young people are going astray and families are breaking up and the film matinees and the comics and the swearwords and the rock music and the immorality and the general godlessness are spreading. And about what will become of Per Olof’s dark-haired classmate in the house next door if there’s no one to show him the way and the truth.

On the other hand, it could be that the little boy doesn’t have the book with the inviting cover foisted on him at all, but in fact asks politely if he can borrow it, and that Per Olof’s mother kindly gives it to him as a present and says that maybe his mom and dad might enjoy it too, and that the whole episode is not a sign that Per Olof’s parents are anxious but that they’re kind.

Much later, I have only the fragment to work on. Dad takes a book away from me with surprising severity, not a comic (God forbid), and it has something to do with the smell of coffee in Per Olof’s mom’s kitchen. And with a sense of anxiety.

Much later, I fill out the mute areas with sensation and memory, and add some belated finds from the local paper.

At the Roxy cinema, Easter Day 1952 is celebrated with a film about the sexual morass of the big city, with an introductory talk by Pastor K.-E. Kejne.

At a housewives’ meeting, the editor Sture Olsson issues a warning about the serious problems arising from children going to the cinema: “The maladjusted young idolize shady characters, and bad detective films spark criminal acts. The hooliganism of the children, who are generally the sole occupants of the auditorium at cinema matinees, can have a disastrous impact on the youngsters’ development.”

“No more Laurel and Hardy,” declares a Mother Against Matinees.

The boy loves going to matinees. He devours the films as indiscriminately as he does books. It’s true that there’s always a rumpus at the matinees. Maybe even hooliganism. When the film starts, everybody folds their tickets down the middle and blows into them. It takes a particular technique to generate the right sound. You hold the folded ticket between your thumbs, cup your hands behind, and blow carefully so that the two sides of the ticket start to vibrate. If you’re lucky, it makes a terrible racket. The boy’s very good at making a noise with his ticket. He learns a lot at the matinees, like siding with the Red Indians against the Palefaces. He learns this from the western
White Feather
, which he sees three times. When the children play cowboys and Indians, which they often do in the forest that takes over where the rowanberry avenue ends, the boy with the dark hair is always an Indian.

So yes, there may well be good reason to be anxious.

Don’t I see that little darkhead among the minithugs making a terrible screech with rosined wires against the S. family’s windowsill on the ground floor of number 38? What on earth is
he doing there, he who’ll soon be toting around a violin case to jeers of “catgut scraper”?

And isn’t that him with that gang of older boys, shouting “Old hag” at Miss Bergerman one early spring morning as she cycles past them on the way to the school by the factories in Baltic? I can’t see who’s making him do it, and I don’t understand it, because I know that he loves Miss Bergerman and would give his life for her, and that he’ll forever remember the way her flowery dress flutters in the factory-tainted breeze from the port, and the way her red hair caresses her fair, freckled face as she turns her head in surprise to look at them, and the way she will forever stand there in front of him in the creaking classroom in the yellow wooden schoolhouse, explaining with an otherworldly smile that the word hurled at her, in Swedish
kärring
, is derived from the word
kär
, meaning “beloved.”

And the way the shame burns in his stomach.

The thing that much later fills me with shame, or perhaps not shame, that’s too strong, the boy is only a child, but what makes me feel very uncomfortable all the same, is how hard he’s trying to please, to fit in, to do as the others do even though he isn’t like them. How easily, in fact, the Place takes hold of him and draws him in and makes him its own. How unresistingly he lets the Place come between him and his parents. How unthinkingly he puts their world behind him and his world beyond them.

How badly he performs his part of the Project.

The boy is certainly no Patton, taking possession of the Place for them. He’s a deserter, all too ready to let himself be captured by it and all too often turning it against them. All too often he feigns deafness when they address him in the language that’s still theirs, and all too often he pretends to be someone else when their accents distort the language that’s already his. He nags
them into letting him attend Scripture classes, even though he’s excused from them. And into having a Christmas tree like everybody else, even though he knows he isn’t like everybody else.

He’s different and he knows it, and he doesn’t want to be.

I can explain him to some extent, and to some extent this is what the Project’s all about: the Child shall make the Place his, so that a new world will be possible for them.

What the Project is not about is the Place turning the Child away from them. And what I much later find hard to explain is why he so readily lets it do so.

Summer 1956. The boy has just finished his first year at school and can reasonably be expected to have learned a thing or two. But when the pitiful remnant of his almost extinguished family comes from the other side of the globe on a visit to the paradise on the rowanberry avenue and fits itself surprisingly well into the small apartment on the ground floor of number 45, he hastily pulls up the drawbridge and barricades himself behind comics and excuses.

Aunt Bluma is plump and loud and makes breakfasts the way they do in Israel, with salads of finely chopped vegetables. Cousins Isaac and Jacob are his age and ginger-haired and wild and immediately do their best to lure him into doing all kinds of things.

It could have been a great summer. Havsbadet. The forest. The playground. The port. The Sunday outings in the brand-new car with room for two children folded up in the little space between the back seat and the engine.

And everything’s there. Not least the forest. His cousins can’t get enough of it. They’ve never seen a forest like this before. The paths so thick with layers of pine needles, the huts, the warm trunks of the pines in the clearing. They pick lots of bilberries
this summer. One day Isaac, or maybe it’s Jacob, suggests they commandeer all the transparent plastic storage containers fixed to the underside of the kitchen cupboards, and a few hours later, their freshly picked bilberries are lovingly sprinkled with salt.

So yes, they definitely do things together.

And still not. It’s as if the boy refuses to let them get close to him. As if he’s afraid they’ll take something from him, disturb his position in the Place, make him alien, make him as different, as, deep down, he suspects he is.

It’s true that the cousins speak a language he doesn’t understand and do things he doesn’t want to be associated with, like borrowing the unlocked bikes in the courtyard and leaving them here and there. It’s also true that the rowan avenue is a small, enclosed world into which no one is admitted just like that, be they from Viksängen on the other side of the railroad bridge or from Tel Aviv on the other side of the globe.

But it’s also true that they try to fit in as best they can, and that they pick up the language with surprising speed, and that by the end of the summer they move freely about the Place as though they feel entirely at home, and that they continue to the last generously offering to share everything with their inhospitable cousin, who lurks among the comics at Bertil’s on the first floor of number 47 and pretends not to hear when they shout his name from the courtyard.
Berrrra
they call, the rolled
r
’s rasping in their throats, and they almost choke with laughter because they know that’s what everyone calls Bertil and that’s where their cousin’s hiding.

They stay until the rowanberries turn red and school starts and nothing can get between the boy and his world any longer.

The boy’s world and nobody else’s. Not even his parents’.

Least of all his parents’.

Occasionally something happens to thrust him back toward theirs, and their shadows momentarily penetrate him, and a sensation of darkness and cold lingers on.

One winter’s day, some children throw snowballs at their kitchen windows and shout “Jews.” It’s at number 45, where the apartment is on the ground floor, and the kitchen window faces the courtyard. The boy hears the snow thump on the window and sees his mother’s face go white. Utterly white and utterly silent. She says nothing. Not to the children outside, nor to the boy in the kitchen. Nor to his father when he gets home from the factory. At least, not in the boy’s hearing.

When the snow melts at the end of winter, the marbles come out. In the Place, marbles playing is the sign of spring. The monochrome stone marbles cost one öre apiece and you can buy them at the tobacconist’s and they make your trouser pockets droop and bulge. Some kids keep their marbles in a special cloth bag dangling from their belts, weighing against their thighs. There are shiny metal marbles and multicolored glass marbles too. They’re better for shooting than the stone marbles because they’re bigger and heavier, but they cost more and are therefore not so often put at risk. Some people always seem to lose their marbles and have to make do with watching or trying to beg money for more. There’s a lot at stake in a game of marbles, particularly the game where the object is to hit the pyramid. The pyramid consists of three marbles pressed into the ground and another one balanced on top. Whoever breaks up the pyramid gets to build it again and wins all the marbles that have rolled past it.

There are several ways of cheating at pyramid. The most insidious is to press the base of three marbles into the ground a bit too hard and a bit too deep, making the target area
smaller, the pyramid more stable, and the top marble harder to dislodge.

Such a pyramid, the boy learns, is called a Jew pyramid.

He also discovers that there are marble Jews.

A marble Jew is someone who makes a Jew pyramid, or picks up more marbles than he has won, or collects his marbles in a pile rather than playing with them, or someone who just happens to get in the way of a player’s frustration or disappointment. “Marble Jew” is a general insult for the duration of the marble season. “You goddamned marble Jew,” usually.

The boy’s rarely called a marble Jew because he’s a useless marbles player, always losing his marbles, and rarely threatening or annoying anyone, but he goes ice-cold every time he hears the word “Jew” in one combination or another. He knows that Mom and Dad are Jews, and that he and his little sister are too, and the Klein family on the other side of the railroad bridge, and Auntie Ilonka at the other end of the rowanberry avenue. And even if he doesn’t know what it means, he knows it has something to do with the shadows.

I wish I could make contact with him and explain a few things. That the Place cannot become his if it doesn’t also become theirs. That he cannot make the Place his own if he doesn’t know where he comes from. That he has a certain responsibility, small though he is, for the success of the Project.