The next day Oskar is sitting in a café in the harbour, listening in on a conversation. Two brothers are sitting at a table by the window. There is no-one else there. That is because an important football match is being played in the town that same day.
The younger brother is a syndicalist. The other is a follower of Kilbom. There is a striking similarity between them. They use the same gestures and have the same halting way of expressing themselves. Oskar is alone at the far end of the room and he hears their increasingly heated conversation. The waitress leans against the counter, scratching her chin.
It is not known what the two brothers said to each other, but when Oskar leaves it is with one thought in mind. He walks fast and the momentum helps to push ahead this idea that has possessed him. When he gets home, he stops abruptly in front of the door and then continues on at the same pace.
He strides four times around the block before entering the house and climbing the two flights of stairs. His thought has now become a clear image inside his head and he is almost elated.
That night, after Elvira has fallen asleep, he goes into the kitchen and sits at the table. He turns to a page in his union passbook and tears it out as delicately as he can. And, after reflecting for a while, he writes in clear block letters:
TOMORROW THERE WILL BE A POLITICAL DEBATE ON THE RADIO.
WE UNEMPLOYED WORKERS AND SOCIAL DEMOCRATS MUST LISTEN TO THE THOUGHTS AND WORDS OF OUR ELECTED LEADERS.
Then he signs it “Oskar.” He leaves the piece of paper on the table and steals into the bedroom so as not to wake her up. There he gets dressed and then returns to the kitchen. He picks up the paper and tiptoes out of the front door.
He is alone in the deserted streets and keeps close to the walls of the houses. He walks all the way to the main square and stops for a moment in a doorway. He listens to the deep silence and then hurries over to the glass door of the savings bank. There he fastens the piece of paper that he has torn out of his union passbook. He spits on the back and presses it against the glass.
Then he hurries home. As he comes in through the door he listens for a while to her breathing to be sure that she is asleep. Then he undresses, puts his clothes on a kitchen chair and pulls on his nightshirt. He sits on one of the chairs and smiles to himself. He leafs through his union passbook, from which the page is missing, and it is very late when he gets into his side of the bed to sleep.
But she had not been sleeping. When he went out a few hours earlier she had quickly got dressed and followed him. While he had been standing in the doorway close to the largest square, waiting and listening, she had been in another doorway a little further down the street. When he was by the window she had stopped in the same place as he had a minute or two earlier and was terrified, thinking he was about to commit a crime.
As he leaves the savings bank window, she remains where she is in the doorway. Then she runs up, sees the sheet of paper, reads the text, and hurries home across backyards and over boarded fences to get back before him.
She gets into bed fully dressed, with coat and shoes on under the blanket, and hears him come in, hears him pause to make sure she is asleep, sees him undress, sees him sit at the kitchen table and turn the pages of his union passbook, and only once he has gotten into his side of the bed and she is certain that he is asleep does she slip out from under the bedclothes; avoid the creaking floorboard, which is the third one along from the kitchen door; take off her clothes; and crawl back under the blanket again.
Only then is she filled with joy, and she lies awake until morning, when they get up together and Oskar asks how she has slept.
Then they have their coffee and porridge. They hear the neighbours upstairs begin to argue and eventually Oskar goes upstairs to them to borrow a little sugar, and he knows he has made both of them happy because the arguing stops.
Oskar starts work again in 1933. He is among the first to get a job after unemployment peaks early in the year. In May he begins working in Stockholm and it is there one Sunday that he sees the Nazis parading through the streets. He feels a knot in his stomach as he stands on the pavement and sees them passing and recognises Sergeant Lindholm right at the front. He can imagine himself charging in and jabbing his finger and thumb into the sergeant’s face.
Then, after the procession has gone by, Oskar goes back to where he is living, a rented room on Katarina Bangata, and the next day he reads in the newspapers how the Nazis were set upon in Humlegården by some young communists and others.
At a Nazi election rally in early summer he is standing to one side by a tree in a park and listening to the hoarse and strident language in which the speaker clearly states that there are many who will have to go, and Oskar realises that he is one of them.
Later he returns to his hometown and once again joins the ranks of the unemployed. He continues to take Lindgren out for walks, but he avoids the woodland where they had their picnic when autumn had already set in. He is the only one in church at Lindgren’s funeral apart from his mother.
When she is about to go home, for the second time the mother holds out her weathered arm, which looks like a stick, and Oskar takes hold of it with his finger and thumb and he is very moved when he sees how confused she is.
The first time Oskar sees Hitler’s face is one day in 1936. He and Elvira are standing in front of the window of the newspaper office, looking at pictures from Hinke Bergegren’s funeral. She is just saying that she thinks she recognises one of the women in grey coats pulling the funerary carriage, to which he mutters an indistinct “Is that so?” when he sees Hitler, his hand raised, inspecting serried ranks of young women in a large stadium.
He has come across pictures of Hitler before, but now it is as if he were seeing the face for the first time. The clenched jaw muscles. The low forehead with the deep folds. And as he looks at those young women lined up in rows, he has the impression that he is seeing the face clearly for the first time.
Then they move on and as they pass the savings bank window they are sharing an experience without Oskar being aware of it.
They take their time walking home and speak in low voices, with many steps between their words.
“It’s cold.”
“Yes.”
“Did you remember to pay the rent?”
“I did.”
“Are your shoes alright?”
“What do you mean, alright?”
“Are your feet getting wet?”
“They’re not too bad.”
“The shoes will wear out again, I’m sure.”
“Not yet though.”
“Let’s hope they last.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the left shoe.”
“Funny that only one keeps giving out.”
“Yes, it is a bit strange.”
And like all the other unemployed they struggle on and in time leave the thirties behind for a war which will last nearly six years. That evening in 1936, Oskar is forty-eight and he walks by her side and looks at the stones on the pavement.
His thoughts rarely went beyond anything to do with his family. It was his joy that they never had to do without any of the necessities of life.
At night he dreamed about the pictures he saw through the steamed-up window of the newspaper office. He dreamed about the day just past. Sometimes he dreamed that he was running with other children and shouting and climbing through holes in the boards between backyards.
He wished for what was in his thoughts and believed in the things that filled his dreams.