A Darker Shade of Sweden (30 page)

“One day a man at the table next to mine spoke to me. He was a shabby creature whom I of course hardly could start talking to. What he said was:

“
‘This is a great trick. Too bad you can only pull it a couple of times a year. The checks you sign are collected in some office somewhere, and they keep track of the names. If you sign too often they put you on their blacklist, and they just won't serve you any longer.' “I stared at him. Most probably he was an imbecile. After watching me sign the check with a dignified and dismissive expression, he sadly wiped his mouth and said:

“
‘I know another good trick, but you can only do it once a year. At Parsley's. They give you a free cake on your birthday. And then you can sell it. But you have to be able to document that it's really your birthday.'

“Without dignifying him with a glance I rose to leave, increasing my capital with a further five quarters on the way out.”

“I was now faced with a problem, but solved it immediately. I could hardly get in touch with my father, but instead I could write the authorities in McGrant and tell them to send me a hundred identity cards with my birth date left blank. In McGrant, that kind of thing was handled by the sheriff, and since he was up for reelection only half a year later, I had the cards in three days. He had mailed them special delivery.

“After that, everything became much easier. I picked my cakes up at Parsley's, which was also a major trade chain, and sold them to those Friendly restaurants I had already used up.

“Perhaps I haven't told you that I genuinely dislike walking, while at the same time disdain on principle so-called public transportation, possibly, and I really mean just possibly, with the exception of this kind.”

McGrant fell silent and made a sweeping gesture encompassing the
Queen Elizabeth
's lounge, where the fifth Earl of Something, strongly marked by age, senile decay and general stupidity, was just giving a lecture on Lord Nelson and the Battle of Aboukir to a sparse audience of commandeered ship's officers twisting uneasily in their seats. The old man seemed totally oblivious of the swell.

“Well,” McGrant continued, in passing letting his coffee spoon fall to the floor, “in brief, this is what I did. I phoned all the major car retailers in town and told them that my aunt had asked me to buy her a car. A luxury car, but that she wanted it thoroughly tested. Then I set up meetings with the salesmen in the lobby of one of the largest hotels. After that I let myself be chauffeured around for a week or so, taking in the nearby sights. When the salesman began to seem nervous and started hinting that I ought to make my mind up, I would of course have come to realize that his particular car just wouldn't do for my discriminating aunt. After that, I turned to the next outlet. At one point, I believe when I was riding a Daimler, I had already been driven around for ten days and had to let my poor aunt pass away from a heart attack on the eleventh.”

“Yes, my friends, that's how I lived during my year in San Francisco, most brutal of all great cities. And if you should ever happen to find yourselves there, at least you know how to cope. When the year ended I took a train home, and you can trust me when I tell you that this time I had plenty of dollars in my pocket. Unfortunately my father never got to see my proud return, since he had died a week before.”

McGrant was a careful man. At an intimate moment he showed us his medicines—around a hundred—and his cash. In spite of his checkbooks and bank accounts and credit cards and the fact of his trip being prepaid, he always carried a wallet full of bills in large denominations and from every Western European country.

“You never know what may happen,” he said.

And of course that's true.

He disembarked at Cherbourg and on the quay a black, chauffeured limousine waited for him.

The last piece of advice he gave us was:

“Don't tip the bootblack when you get to Southampton.”

We last glimpsed him as he minced out from the dining room, on his way palming a few dollar bills left under a plate by some gullible American.

Otherwise, the trip was as such trips usually are. Schools of flying fish and porpoises and a whale blowing. By the way, the captain was named Law.

And we won a prize in designing the funniest hat in a competition. Everyone who entered did. McGrant didn't enter. He was up on deck, telling off the cabin steward for allowing his suitcases to be wrongly packed. Incidentally, it wasn't his cabin steward.

Per Wahlöö was born in 1926, began working as a journalist in 1947, and continued writing—though gradually emphasizing theater and movie reviews and features—for newspapers and magazines until 1964. He published his first novel in 1959 and a further seven until 1968; they express
his strong political convictions as well as his concerns about social justice and abuse of power. These themes are also central to the ten crime novels he wrote in collaboration with Maj Sjöwall, born in 1935 and a journalist, editor, writer, and translator. Wahlöö and Sjöwall met and began living together in 1963; in 1965, they published their first cowritten novel,
Roseanna,
which began their ten-novel series The Story of a Crime, starring the detectives working under Chief Inspector Martin Beck at the homicide
commission of the Swedish national police. The fourth novel in the series,
Den strattande polisen
(
The Laughing Policeman
,
1968
),
in translation won the 1971 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best crime novel published in the United States. Sjöwall and Wahlöö also wrote movie scripts, short stories, and essays. The last novel in their series,
Terroristerna (The Terrorists),
was not yet published when Wahlöö died in 1975, at the age of forty-eight. The Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels were published around the world and have never been out of print. All of them have been made into feature films or adapted for TV, and more than twenty-five additional movies have been based on characters from the novels; in Great Britain, the BBC has produced a radio dramatization of the ten books. As Maj Sjöwall has noted, she and Per Wahlöö failed in changing the face of Swedish society, which was the task they set out to accomplish. But they did, most emphatically, change the themes and directions of Swedish crime fiction.

DIARY BRAUN

S
ARA
S
TRIDSBERG

When her first novel was published in 2004, Sara Stridsberg was recognized as a major literary talent; her second, in 2006, confirmed her position as perhaps the foremost new voice in Swedish literature. Since then, she has gone on to publish a third novel, again hailed by critics, as well as writing several stage plays performed at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, the stage closest to a Swedish national theater. The lead in her second play,
Medealand (Medea's Land,
performed 2009
)
, was played by Noomi Rapace, who became an international star when she player Lisbeth Salander in the Millennium trilogy.

Stridsberg's novels and plays explore the personality, inner and outer conflicts, and treatment of extraordinary women. Her first novel,
Happy Sally
, was inspired by the life of Sally Bauer, who, in 1939, became the first Scandinavian woman to swim across the English channel, and draws parallels to a present-day admirer wanting to repeat Bauer's feat. Her second,
Drömfakulteten
(The Dream Faculty)
, was inspired by the life of Valerie Solanas, author of
The SCUM Manifesto
(
which Stridsberg has translated into Swedish
)
; her third,
Darling River
, was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's iconic novel
Lolita
, and in parallel stories both completes and gives alternative readings of the Dolores Haze character, in Nabokov's novel viewed only through the eyes of Humbert Humbert. Stridsberg's first play again revolved around Valerie Solanas; her second takes the theme of Euripides'
Medea
, but is set in the present and the protagonist is an immigrant woman, abandoned by her husband and denied the right to stay on in her new country; her third,
Dissekeringar av ett snöfall
(Dissections of Snowfall
, 2012
)
, is loosely based on the life of the Swedish Queen Christina, expected by her court to let the men around her rule while she married and bred future kings, but raised by her father as a prince and with no wish to renounce her humanity in order to be what men consider a woman.

In the following story, Stridsberg is inspired by one of the mythologized women of the twentieth century, a woman both known and unknown to us all, who was not only a witness to, but in a sense also an accomplice in, and certainly a victim of, one of the worst crimes ever committed.

THE CURTAINS LET IN LIGHT BUT NO IMAGES. THE LANDSCAPE OUTSIDE
is a desert. The rhythm of the train is convincingly and seductively lulling. He has written you that you must pull down the curtains in your compartment when the train passes the places you have talked about. So you pull down the curtains or you lean your head against the window glass and watch the other passengers in the compartment and their luggage when the train pulls close. A woman alone with cheap luggage and her face turned to the corridor. A man with an armful of sunflowers in a paper bag. The compartment is sun-faded with burnt-through leather seats that must once have been elegant, but which are now splitting along their seams and letting out spongy upholstery. Politics bores you, always has bored you to death. The sun-bleached curtain separates you from the world and the earth. You are going back to the house on Berghof. Insubordinate sunbeams sneak in through tears in the fabric. A patch of blue, bulging sky. The beauty of this country. Wheat and roses.

How should I describe you? Sweet as a box of chocolates. A kind of dreamy beauty, an expensive small piece of jewelry. The Munich girl falling for a pair of famous blue eyes. For a long while you were retouched out of all public photographs since your love has the notion that he shouldn't be seen in public with any women. So. Your rabbit fur disappears from the image. Your ash-blonde hair, your mother-of-pearl nails, all your devotion will afterwards be retouched out. As if you had never been there or as if you are a ghost who on her own has invented your decade-long love. Occasionally a single woman's hand is visible on his forearm, but the body belonging to it is gone. As late as June of 1944, the British intelligence service believes you to be his secretary.

Further descriptions of you from literature: mild, naïve, dreamy, romantic. I add your longing for death to the catalogue. Since it must be there. Your inclination for the underworld. Absolutely.

“About twenty-four years of age, brunette, attractive and un­conven
tional in her dress. Occasionally wears Bavarian leather shorts. In her spare time, walks two black dogs. Protected by operatives of the RSD during her walks. Always without makeup, on the whole gives an impression of inapproachability.”

—From a Special Operations Executive document

The spring smells of ashes and greenery just come into leaf. Long, lonely walks, rambling conversations about the weather and the dogs, sleepless nights. Obersalzberg, the small set piece, a utopia of purity and beauty. Still no public displays of affection. Hamburg transformed into a sea of fire, its people ashes. It's your birthday. Money in an envelope. No greetings, not a kind word, nothing, but your entire office looks like a florist's shop and smells like a funeral chapel. You ought to make use of the shelter, but instead you stay in the house, dancing with your mirror image, get up on the roof after each raid to see if any fire bombs have fallen. The crowns of the trees bend down towards the water as if in prayer. You write:
They say that my country is burning. All will be well. It will be all right. Dragonflies dive down at our picnic. My bathing suit is gold and silver
.

You have never been as happy as now. After all the years of waiting he is finally yours. He has grown strangely old and stern, but at least today he is cheerful. Blondie sings like Zarah Leander. She sounds like a mad wolf. It's snowing even though it is April and throughout the night you drink wonderful champagne, full of promise, toasting his last birthday. The next day all of the presents from the ranks of the people are sent away due to the risks of poison. You wear the dress he loves, the navy-blue sequined silk one. When you are dead, a German journalist writes of it: “Her taste now was more mature and she could carry off clothes that were chic, not just lovely and youthful.” Then Munich falls and he is off again to the underworld.

You and your silly little cousin wait every day in your bathing suits for the mailman in Obersalzberg who drives you down to the lake and the beaches, the happy waterfall, the fairy-tale beach by the ice-cold blue lake. Sometimes you take off your bathing suits to swim nude between alps. You imagine the officers doing nasty things to themselves while they watch your naked body. That thought appeals to you. The assassination attempt in Berlin fails, but all the sunlight disappears. Days pass. All the tender letters and carrier pigeons.
Pull the curtains down my dear when the train passes the places we talked about. Pull the curtains down my dear
. . .

You order a new dress for Christmas. It's to be something special and more, something to amaze everyone. Miss Heise nags you about her perennial bills. It would be best if they could be obliterated once they are paid. It would be best if they just disappeared. You don't want anyone afterwards to study your correspondence with you seamstress. Your dresses are your secrets. You hold a slip and a diamond brooch up against death. Snow falls like sugar cubes on the city. There is no longer any hope for a future.

A cherished meeting with a sister in Wassenburgerstrasse. A few pieces of jewelry handed to Gertraud when you are both temporarily in the shelter beneath the house, a necklace and a bracelet. You say, “I don't need them any longer.” The decision has been made; we leave all of this together, where you go I will go, where you are buried I too want to be buried.

His birthday gifts for your last birthday: a Mercedes, a diamond bracelet, a pendant set with topazes. You have a birthday cele­bration in the marbled room. I don't know which dress you chose to wear for this last night in the house, but I imagine it to be extravagant, I imagine you in cream and embroideries and throughout with a brandy snifter in your hand. You pick clothes and jewelry to bring along from your enormous closet, the rest you will have to give away now. You make sure that the dogs will have somewhere to live. One last time, trying out everything, once more enjoying your image in the huge, mirrored bathroom. The flocks of jackdaws take wing from your heart, leaving it empty.

The sheets in the night train sleeper are white and fragrantly clean. Outside are the wastelands. When you arrive at Berghof there is still snow. The train to the underworld will leave at 8:14 p.m. He can no longer stop you since you are not afraid of death, since you long for it. The only thing frightening you is that your body will be disfigured, violated by strangers once you can no longer defend it, dress it, adorn it. Now you leave the window of your compartment naked despite his warnings. Anyway it's dark outside. Earlier in the day a weak sun was shining. Ominously weak.

The lack of natural light underground amazes you. That disgusting neon light, artificial and sinister. From now on it is always claustrophobic night. You dream of huge scenic windows. In your dreams strange tropical animals roam in slow motion through the garden above. Your miniature suite next to the chart room comprises a bedroom, a closet, a bathroom and toilet. Even Blondie has a small room to herself and her pups. It isn't far to the climbing roses in the garden and yet you can't go there because of the grenades. The cities are gray and wasted now, dead and crushed, occasional shreds and climbing roses, people resembling clouds.

The apartment underground smells of marmalade and metal. You watch movies, drink sparkling wine, eat fruits and sweet cookies, you prepare for death, write wills. A black sunlight radiates through the windows. The night is a tomb. Not all birds sing. In a letter to your sister, you write, “Destroy all my private correspondence, particularly the bills from my seamstress, Heise. Bury the blue leather notebook. Wait until the last to destroy the films and the albums. The telephone lines are all dead now. I hope Morrell landed safely to bring you my jewelry.”

You order Moët et Chandon. You order cakes. Cocaine drops for his bad eye. New promotions. The pretend war goes on. Paper swallows across the office floor illustrate devastation. You call into the wind. Mrs. G. is given a brooch. Afterwards it is still pinned to her dress. It looks like a fallen butterfly. Now death is keeping you busy, it is your only conversational subject. To do: Change dress. Fix nails. Paint mother-of-pearl. Life is a beauty pageant and you are the foremost exhibit underground where you have free access to his luxurious bathroom. A. still washes and irons your clothes. You change your dress several times a day, always wearing elegant, gossamer under­wear. You dance alongside the dead. A brimstone butterfly gone astray into the tunnels.

The silver-fox stole gleams like a cloud in darkness. How you have loved that stole. A garment made for a movie star. A boa for the future. For all your silly dreams. You give it away, too. It has lost all value for you. You put it in the arms of a secretary, Miss T., convincingly say, “Take it. Use it. Enjoy.”

The best way to die is to shoot yourself through the mouth. Memorandum:
My husband dislikes being seen in the nude. For that to happen would be a defeat to him. Please bear this in mind

The underground wedding resembles none of your dreams. But yet. An elegant, navy-blue sequined dress and black suede Ferragamo shoes. No flowers, no songs, no incurable diseases, but champagne—the cellar is still full of fabulous, immortal drops. For the very last night your are dressed in carbon dioxide and night. Thirty-six hours of marriage under the earth. A political testament in four blueprints. The bride of night in poisoned veils. Your closet is like your love, a black circle without end. The king's first and last wife.

And I want my death to be painless. Nothing of all I wished will turn out as I wished, but that I do want. A painless death. I thought about dying in my silver-fox stole. I think about this and that. Everything passes, everything ends
.

Thirty-six hours after the wedding all that remains is a last, dizzying farewell. The patterned fabric of the couch under your nails, your favorite couch. In the distance the sound of a diesel-powered fan, and the scent of his sweat. You sit like children, legs up in the couch. You listen to his continuously more disjointed talking, his chest close to your ear and in it you can still hear the beating of his heart. How you loved him, dizzyingly much. The garden, fire, love, the underworld.

The dress with black roses will be your last dress, the one leading to eternity. There are thirty-seven roses, you have let him count them one last time. One rose for every hour you were a wife, and one extra. For nothing. For all you will now never be. The pink curlers are thrown on the floor of your bedroom. Hair newly set. Just a whiff of powder and a little lipstick, since he still hates makeup. You have showered in perfume to drown the odor of sweat.

A last, flaring memory. You are riding your bike through the woods to meet him by a lake. You are young and his eyes are blue like gemstones. A box of cookies on your baggage carrier. A dead pheasant smeared across the road. The feeling that a cloud is following you. A light in those blue stones you will never afterwards be able to forget. Afterwards your bodies will be burned outside in the garden. The small brass tube that held the cyanide looks like a discarded lipstick. A glass phial full of dark-brown fluid. The searing smell of bitter almonds. Breaking the glass phial between your teeth and swallowing the dark-brown fluid. Soviet grenades fall around your burning bodies. And Blondie. Doctor Stumpfegger takes care of her. Your loved one was unable to do it himself. He put the glass phial into your mouth, in bewildered trembling tenderness, but he was unable to do it to her.