His head is bent forward. He has his summer cane across his knees, over his blue work trousers. When the Eko ends, the finger presses the button. There is silence. The ocean beats against the island. Then Oskar gives his brief comments about the bombs. He never raises his head. His index finger is still.
“They’re crazy. You’d think the devil really exists, at least when you hear what they’re doing down there. What do they think they can achieve? They can kill a load of people. But there are quite a few of us.”
I get up and we shake hands as we do when I arrive and when I leave. We nod, say that we’ll see each other next year, and I walk into the night. The wind is lashing and tearing. It is dark and hard to see. There is salt in the air.
The story of Oskar is like an iceberg. What you see is only a small part. Most of it is hidden under the surface. That is where the bulk of the ice is, keeping its balance in the water and making its speed and course steady.
The story consists of two strands which run in parallel. A few summers’ worth of events and memories shared with a retired rock blaster. Then we have the course of history, the developments that changed the society in which Oskar lived. He talks about his affinity with the first strand, and ignores the other. It is a fault line where two plates grind against each other, two cogwheels mesh with each other. The two of them reflect the same evolution. They are mirror images of each other. They share a single identity. They describe the features of the society that is Oskar Johansson’s.
Oskar Johansson’s face.
The narrator’s face.
Together they become the story.
There is salt in the air. The wind tears at my eyes and I walk through the forest instead of following the shoreline. It is like walking through a black wall. Bushes and branches beat against my face. The juniper pricks, the birches whip.
It is the early autumn of 1968. The narrator has visited Oskar Johansson for the last time.
The Pensioner
Once he tells me about his last day at work. He left his job at six o’clock on September 14, 1954. He stood in the yellow changing hut with a bunch of flowers in his hand. It consisted of two tulips and three green twigs. He held the flowers pinched between thumb and index finger and heard one of the assistant directors of the construction company speak. The air was muggy and hot because of the bad ventilation and the stench from the damp raincoats and boots. There were nine of them in the cramped little hut. From his description, I get the impression that it was even smaller than the cabin which to all intents and purposes later became Oskar’s home.
Oskar had intended to go on working until Christmas that year, but then he changed his mind.
“I just don’t know why. But the closer it got, the more pointless it seemed to keep on working, since I didn’t have to. So one Friday I told them. Next week will be my last. They didn’t really say anything. Even in those days there was no room at work for older men. So don’t think there’s anything new about this idea that you’re old before you’re even forty. But there weren’t so many people then.”
When the cleaner came to clear up the hut at four in the morning on September 15, the flowers were still on the table. Oskar never says whether he left them there on purpose or forgot them.
“The flowers never made it home. I suppose they got left behind.”
On September 15, Oskar stayed in bed. He lay there and listened to the trams clanking past in the street and was glad not to have to go outside in the slush. He clearly remembers how it rained that morning. He remembers that it was a sustained, heavy downpour, and he remembers the awning on the balcony of the apartment above flapping in the wind.
He lay in his bed and heard the mail thump down into the letterbox. He felt no regret that his work was over. He lay there thinking that next year, next summer, he would move out early to the archipelago.
In the afternoon he leaves the apartment and buys a calendar. He has never done that before. But now he buys one which he hangs up in the kitchen. It is a tear-off calendar where one page has to be removed every day. With a large disc that he rotates once every month. The theme on the disc changes according to the seasons. For September that year, 1954, there is a black-and-white picture of people in rain gear waiting for a yellow number 34 bus.
When the assistant director has finished his speech, he pats Oskar on the shoulder and calls for three cheers. A roar goes up in the hut and then the assistant director leaves. After that, Oskar and his workmates start to change to go home. Oskar throws his blue work trousers into a box which serves as a rubbish bin. They lie there among sausage skins and greaseproof paper.
Then they all go off, one after the other.
“Have a nice time, then. In this weather.”
“Thanks.”
“Only two more years to go.”
“They’ll pass quickly.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Thanks for all our time together.”
“You too.”
Then they all leave the hut and pick their way across the muddy ground. Some take their bicycles, others practically run away. Oskar walks towards the tram stop.
“Can’t for the life of me remember what he said. It wasn’t much. But there was something about the accident.”
Oskar and the accident always go together. Everyone mentions it as Oskar’s distinguishing feature.
“An old boy who was blown up but somehow managed to survive.”
“A thumb that looks bloody awful. But he’s a decent sort.”
“He certainly gets by in spite of it.”
Oskar hardly ever talks about the accident. On the rare occasions that he does, he sounds hesitant and not at all forthcoming and gives the impression of being disconnected from what once happened.
Oskar is lying in bed. It is the evening of September 15,1954. He has switched off the bedside light and lies there in the half-dark, looking out into the room. Then he gets to his feet and goes into the kitchen. He takes a pencil from the kitchen table and draws a little cross over September 13. He puts down the pencil and goes back to bed.
The following day, when he is having his coffee, he notices that he marked the wrong date, but he does not bother to change it.
“All of that autumn and winter, I sat and waited for spring. I don’t think I did anything else. But I had a yearning in me and you can live on that for a long time. Not only when you are young.
“The days passed. I mostly just waited. And luckily the winter was short that year. So it wasn’t too long.”
When Oskar leaves the Social Democratic Party, it is no sudden and dramatic decision, rather the result of a long series of developments. But when he talks about it, it is mainly because of his feeling that too little happened over too long a period of time. He never explains exactly what he means. All he says is that something came to a standstill. And since Oskar only very rarely discusses the reasons for the changes he himself has brought about, all he really mentions are the words “standstill” and “too slow”. He makes no comparisons between the party he leaves and the one he joins. All he does is change his party membership.
But once, one evening in August during one of the last summers, he says that his pension has increased and adds in passing that he has often found that one never has anything to lose by changing one’s opinions, if necessary. He says that one can easily change party once a year if one really thinks it worthwhile.