In the late fifties a postcard photographer travelled through the archipelago. He went around the islands in October, and the cards are cold and off-putting. They are all black-and-white and sold poorly. A few years later colour postcards arrived and the black-and-white ones were piled up in the shops, unsold.
There is one postcard of the island. You can just see the sauna, appearing like a black piece of stage scenery among the bare branches of the trees. The photographer must have been about thirty metres from the shore when he took the picture.
As I look at the postcard, I imagine that I see the door ajar.
“I remember the first time I met Norström. He wasn’t quite as fat then as later on. They were busy blasting to clear the way for a main road. I got there in the middle of the day.”
“If you want to be a rock blaster, you’re going to have to put your back into it, matey.”
“I think I can do that.”
“Good. Norström’s my name.”
Oskar Johannes Johansson. Helper, rock blaster, rock blaster again. Married to Elly’s sister. One son, two daughters.
Oskar buys lottery tickets. He has a standing order at the news-stand on the mainland. The mail boat brings him a ticket once a month. He wins nearly every time. Fifty or twenty-five kronor, never more. The following day his order goes in with the mail boat. It comes by at half past six. Oskar stands in the doorway and waves. That means he wants a bottle of akvavit.
In the evening, when the day’s work is done, the mail boat ties up at the island. The mailman goes up to the cabin.
That evening we do not put out any nets.
“We were warned off alcohol at home. Far never drank. And the people who taught us to become socialists were also against drinking. I don’t think I tasted any spirits until I turned forty.”
They are sitting in the sauna, Oskar and the postman. Two glasses and some fizzy lemonade. The mailman, who lives on a nearby island, sweeps off his uniform cap. Sometimes, when Oskar has waved from the doorway in the morning, he spends the evening with Oskar in the sauna.
What do they talk about?
Mail. Letters. The strange things some people send.
Fishing.
They sit in silence.
When the bottle is empty, the mailman makes for home.
“It’s a bloody nuisance that I have to do a morning roun^l as well. Sometimes that’s three hours’ work for just one postcard.”
“I see.”
“The rubbish people write. I usually read the cards.”
“Blimey!”
Oskar’s expressions. Again and again, with a touch of dialect.
Blimey.
I wonder.
I see.
God willing.
Blimey.
“A number of times this summer I’ve come across boxes with hedgehogs in them. People don’t seem to have the slightest idea. Summer visitors don’t understand that hedgehogs rarely survive the winter out here. When they come back the year after, they think the place will be swarming with hedgehogs. But of course it isn’t.”
Then they talk about all the hornets this summer. The ones in the old boathouse. The size of your thumb. Vicious now in the autumn.
At their most poisonous in spring?
Like everything else, it no doubt varies.
The mailman is talking. Oskar answers.
“Blimey.”
“I see.”
Pike pest.
“It’s spread to cod now as well. You can’t even throw them back. They have to be buried. That means bloody standing and digging holes for the fish every day. Must be all the crap in the water. One morning I nearly ran into a chest of drawers floating there. It’s crazy.”
Akvavit makes Oskar tired. After he’s had a few, he sleeps for a long time. The mailman helps him to bed. Then he goes down to his boat, which has been lying there with the motor running all that time, the regular thump of the fuel-oil engine.
When Oskar wakes up in the morning, he goes out and lies down on the ground under an oak tree. His snoring can be heard across the bay. The red wood-ants crawl all over him. Sometimes he sleeps until midday.
Oskar suddenly stops his rowing and breathing. Then he points with the left oar and says:
“What’s that?”
I turn and look. The flounders are flapping weakly on the floor of the boat.
I see something white floating in the water, ten metres away.
“Shall we take a look?”
Oskar rows over and I lean out from the boat and take hold of the white object.
As we row home, we have a few sodden logbooks lying in the boat. Later, when we take a closer look, we see that they come from a German vessel. M.S. Matilda, Bremen.
“The captain was probably drunk and fed up.”
I sit there and try to decipher the washed-out sentences and numbers in the books. The pages stick together and it is hard to separate them. Figures, positions, cargoes, ports. I read them aloud for Oskar. We have the door open and mosquitoes are dancing in the room. Oskar raises his head and looks at them.
“They don’t bother me. Let them have a little blood.”
On a calm night every two weeks or so we burn rubbish. So the logbooks go up in flames along with the plastic bags, leftover food, and newspapers. The plastic spreads its acrid smell and Oskar hits out at the smoke with his walking stick.
“I had to start using it ten years ago. The injuries to my stomach began to hurt again and the best way of easing the pain was to lean forward when I walked. The stick helped.”
It is light brown with a rubber ferrule on the end.
“This is my summer cane. I have another one at home in town. It’s black.”
Now Oskar is dead. At the time I saw the cane as a yellow stick, with a black rubber cover over the end and a worn handle.
Now I remember the words “summer cane”.
Summer cane. Lying across the blue-covered knees.
Summer cane.
Winter cane?
Oskar does not want a metal hook in place of his blown-off hand. Neither does he want to have an enamel eye inserted into the empty eye socket. He wants to have a stump for an arm and his eyelids to be sewn together.
He is skinny and pale when he leaves hospital. He walks gingerly. He looks at the ground in front of him, tests each step, sets one foot in front of the other and does not notice the looks from the passers-by. The reactions at the sight of his eye socket. The grimaces at the stump of his arm sticking out of his coat sleeve.
Oskar is discharged from hospital in January. It is very cold and the hard snow crunches under his feet. Breath steams from his mouth and his earlobes are burning. Oskar leaves hospital on foot.
The game of Patience does not work out. Oskar rakes the cards together to begin again.
What about the time in between?
There were years, events. From 1910 to 1965, to 1969. There is an ever-shifting reality, an ever-changing Oskar. He has been a disabled worker all along. Has had the same life as everyone else. Brutal swings between having work and being laid off. He has more money. Better accommodation. Society changes and Oskar changes. Oskar never talks about development. He talks about change and the narrator thinks that it is exactly the right word for what he means. Oskar is a worker. He belongs to a group that he sees as clearly defined and also clearly segregated. There are those keywords again. They keep surfacing. Keywords, cropping up time and again, marking the stages in Oskar’s life by something other than years. And it is some of the changes, never the violent ones but those that take their time, which divide up Oskar’s life. Once again. Certain key words. The games that were the same. I’ve been a worker all my life. Everything has changed, but not for us. Oskar simply sees himself for what he is. He keeps emphasising that there was never anything out of the ordinary about him, but he never says what he means by out of the ordinary. He says he is one of the others. Nothing more. A rock blaster with a family. Who matters to his family but not to anybody or anything else. He does not feel that he has had anything to do with any of the changes. They happened and they have had an effect. But he himself had no part in shaping them. The worker is a member of his community, but the forces driving and changing society are wielded by others. That is what Oskar really means when he says that there is nothing out of the ordinary about him.