“But your pension? How do you mean?”
“It’s gone up.”
“Yes?”
“Well, it should have gone up even more. You know what food costs.”
“Yes, of course. I know.”
“Well. Precisely.”
For a couple of summers, Oskar regularly listens to radio drama. One evening, he tunes in for the first time, and after that he repeats the experience a couple of times a week. This continues over two summers. But the third summer, he no longer listens. Not that he switches over to some other programme. The radio stands there silent. Instead, he has started to solve crossword puzzles. He has picked out a dozen or so of them from old newspapers under his bed. He has torn them out and put them on the table in front of the radio. He starts in May and by one of the last days in August he has solved them all, and as we burn rubbish one evening, I see them catch fire among the leftover food and cardboard.
But one of the puzzles is left behind, has slipped down and got stuck behind the table. When the time comes to move the sauna after Oskar’s death and the table is carried out, the yellowing piece of paper drops onto the floor.
He has solved the crossword. But I see that he has made a spelling mistake in one place and as a result has got the wrong words to fit in. He has written “ogonblick” without a “c”. And after that, a whole section of the crossword is skewed, but he has still managed to fit in words so that the letters match even though the clues in fact referred to quite different words. He has solved his crossword puzzle and with his spelling mistake created a new one.
The picture of Oskar is obscure. Contradictions and empty answers, silence and ambiguous pronouncements are just a part of the unfinished picture. Sometimes too, minor events break into the picture, opening up cracks, ensuring that all the way through the picture remains incomplete.
Sometimes I think Oskar is doing it deliberately.
At other times, I’m sure I’m wrong.
Once I forget my wallet on the table. When I fetch it the next day and later want to take out a postage stamp, I find that it is gone.
Another time, as we are sitting in the gloom of the cabin with the radio turned off and his index finger drumming on the wax tablecloth, Oskar suddenly bangs his fist on the table and in a loud and tuneless voice starts to sing a few verses from the chapbook song “Elfsborg Fortress”. He sits with his head bowed over the table and sings at the top of his voice. Then all of a sudden he stops, mid-verse, and the index finger begins to drum on the table again.
A third time Oskar asks me to buy him a pornographic magazine when I go to the mainland to do the shopping. First, he lists the usual things he wants. Milk, coffee, bread. But then he adds that he wants me to buy him a girlie magazine. He does not know of any particular title and asks me to choose. When I return, I have bought Kriminaljournalen and Cocktail. His only comment is that one would have been enough.
Then he sits down and flicks through the magazines. He is not interested in the text. He just turns the pages, pausing for a brief moment at each picture. Then he continues, and when he has finished he simply puts them away with the other newspapers he has in the house.
A fourth time he is asleep when I arrive to take up the nets with him. He is breathing evenly and when he opens his eye and sees me in the doorway he just turns over and goes back to sleep.
“I sometimes think it would be nice if it was all over.”
Only once do his words suggest that he is fed up and tired. It happens one beautiful day as we are sitting outside the cabin and the flies buzz around us. We are watching a fishing boat, packed with tourists, sail past and they wave at us. This time Oskar does not wave back with his stump of an arm. Instead, he raises his voice to be heard over the sound of the thumping engine.
“I sometimes think it would be nice if it was all over.”
He says nothing more. Soon afterwards another boat comes past, equally full. This time he waves back.
“I think I’ll keep on waving.”
“Yes.”
“Because they look like a happy lot.”
“They’re on holiday now.”
“That will soon be over.”
“They’re lucky with the weather.”
“You can never be sure.”
“But you can always hope.”
“Yes.”
The picture of Oskar that never becomes complete is inextricably linked to the society in which he has lived. Oskar as a presence, but almost never a participant, runs like a red thread through the description he gives of himself. The incomplete fragments, the half words, half sentences, the short and disconnected episodes which he produces from his memory are his way of confirming what he means. The image he gives of himself is that of one who was present. But the person he is every day, during the years when we meet, is a participant. Oskar tries to create a false picture of himself, and his story has to be seen and developed in the context of whatever motivated this choice. One of our last summers together, I try to be more methodical in the way I put my questions, but it leads to the only episode of mistrust that ever arises between us. For a little more than a month he is reticent, taciturn even, sometimes a little gruff. But then one day he is back to normal again, stuttering out his own account of himself at irregular intervals. His words almost never seem to follow any thoughts he bears within himself; instead they give the impression of taking him by surprise, emerging from a room he would rather see closed and locked, slipping out almost unintentionally. Every memory, every word that has to do with his life is followed by a silence that is scarcely noticeable. Then he sometimes goes on to talk about things we are busy with, but there is still a small silence behind the words. And in his telling, there is rarely any enthusiasm. What he says can sometimes be incredibly insistent, but he almost never raises or lowers his voice. Here the unexpected song, the sudden outburst with “Elfsborg Fortress,” is a mysterious exception.
Once Oskar said that he had not been to the cinema since the mid-thirties. I remember him saying that it had simply not appealed to him. Then I asked him something and he once more replied that he simply did not like it, and that he himself found that a bit odd.
One summer, Oskar develops a strange itch where his eyelids have grown together. It gets so bad that he begins to scratch the scar at night and one morning he sees pus on his pillow. He travels to the hospital and is admitted for a week. The scar is opened up and the infection healed. Then the socket is sewn together again and he can return to the island. A week later he goes back for the day and has the stitches removed. When he returns, he says that the doctors told him that they found a tiny piece of grit embedded in the socket and that it had presumably been there ever since the accident. Oskar gives a knowing smile and unfolds a handkerchief. I see a greyish-white piece of grit on the white fabric. Then he blows it onto the floor and it vanishes.
“I took it with me so you could see.” Then, just when I’m about to leave:
“In the olden days someone might have written a song about this grit in my eye.”
And the speck, which had been wrapped in the handkerchief, and bounced across the floor and disappeared down some crack, is the last episode I can remember. After that, there are no more memories clear enough for me to describe.