At that moment Oskar feels he has been tricked and he becomes furious. He looks around and unfastens one of the drawings and turns it upside down. Then he takes a pen out of his pocket and adds a nought and a number here and there to the various calculations. He takes great pains to make the figures look as credible as possible and does not stop until he is satisfied.
Then he leaves.
A few days later he reads in the local newspaper that a somewhat unfortunate incident has occurred in connection with a study group visiting from Finland. The Finnish guests were being escorted through the town hall by one of the town architects, and when they were taken to see the drawings of the new Hamnborgen neighbourhood in the entrance hall, the architect guiding the party discovered that one of the sketches had been turned upside down. This was swiftly put right. It is thought that this was evidence of some visitor’s peculiar sense of humour. The town’s property department does not deem it necessary to take any measures other than to have a caretaker come to check the drawings at regular intervals.
For several days afterwards, Oskar searches the morning newspaper for confirmation that they have also discovered his sabotage of the calculations. But there is nothing there and one day Oskar goes to the town hall and finds that the drawings have gone and have been replaced by an exhibition of photographs of the newly inaugurated town library.
The matter of Oskar’s rearranged figures, which nobody had discovered, becomes one of decisive importance to him. It brings home to him the tremendous extent of arbitrary power that technical people and civil servants have managed to acquire. He is disgusted by the self-importance of these people. He knows that most of them owe their careers to their Social Democratic Party membership. And he no longer wants any part of that.
During these years in the late fifties, when he has become a widower, Oskar rarely talks to anybody. He keeps in touch with his children, but he has no social life and feels no need for one either. He experiences silence as a spacious and cosy place in which to think, dream and conjure up images of nature. He establishes a simple and effective routine for himself and that suits him.
On New Year’s Eve 1959, he is standing by a window that he has opened. It is cold outside and he stands there, looking out at the town from his apartment on the fourth floor of the building he has been forced to move into. In the distance he hears the clocks in the town’s three churches strike midnight. Then people start firing off rockets from the balcony below his, so he closes the window and sits down in the kitchen. He has taped the poster onto the wall above the sofa. He sits still and listens to the noises that resonate through the water pipes and from the floor and the ceiling and two of the walls. Where he used to live, you could also hear every sound. But now the noises that come through the concrete seem colder and more invasive and above all more negative. Sometimes he feels like an eavesdropper, somebody who hears but who should not really be doing so. He never had that feeling in his old apartment. There it was simply accepted that the walls were not soundproof and you would act accordingly. In this new building, which is supposed to keep out all noise, the sounds become menacing and alien.
He lives on the fourth floor and does not know his neighbours and is unhappy there. He spends all his time trying to swap his apartment for one in town.
He has been living in the building at Tornvägen 9d for one and a half years, when one day his son comes out and tells him that he knows of a place in town which his father could have. Oskar makes up his mind without even seeing the apartment and one month later he has moved in and it becomes his last-ever home. He will live there until he dies and from early spring till late autumn he moves out to his cabin in the archipelago.
Thus was Oskar ushered into the sixties, carrying with him from the fifties his new solitude and his new party allegiance. But what mattered most to him was that his longing for nature and the sea had now been satisfied.
And all along he held on to this conviction, this faith in his own role, that he had never been nor ever would be anything extraordinary but, rather, was someone who at some point at the end of the last century had played the same games as other children. He had run and yelled and shouted, clambered over boards between backyards, and all the time, throughout his life, he keeps coming back to this perception of himself. He sees it as both the starting point and the sum-total of his life. Neither does he feel that he is missing anything. Once his longing for the sea was satisfied, he was content.
But he went on following all the social changes and maintained that he had been present for them but had not played any role in their coming about. He never denied responsibility or claimed to be free from blame, but neither did he place any value on the role he had played, not even in specific instances in which he had taken a part. He had lived and worked and held his opinions, switched his party allegiance, and deep down inside had his hopes and dreams.
As the years go by, the poster becomes ever more tattered and one day there are so many holes in the corners from all of the drawing pins that it falls to the floor. Oskar then rolls it up and ties a piece of string around it. He puts it on a shelf in a wardrobe and never takes it out again.
Oskar lives on with his thoughts and dreams, which he likens to the process for developing photographs.
In One Single Blast,
And Give Them My Regards
Harstena, 3. Clear to moderate visibility.
“That’s spot on, that is...”
Oskar presses down the button on the transistor radio.
“I need new batteries. Can you get some?”
“Of course.”
It is the middle of May. Spring 1966.
“Elvira was a waitress all the time we were together. And always at the same place. You’ve probably seen it. It’s a café down by the railway. For ten years it was called The Barrel. Then there was a change of owner. He bought three new tables and decided to call it Café Paradise. We had a good laugh at that. I think that was the time Elvira liked the least. The proprietor wanted to turn the place into something fancier. He hoped to get rid of the old boys drinking beer and have different customers. But then nobody came at all. He sold up and another owner came along. That was after only three years, just before the war. He bought new chairs and called the place the Barrel again. Elvira liked it there. She knew the old men and what they liked to drink. Mostly beer. Coffee and sandwiches. They opened early, you see. At six o’clock, to serve breakfast. So Elvira got up at five all her life. She went on working when we had the kids. She never took time off. She brought the children along when they were small and they spent the day in the office behind the kitchen. Nobody objected.
“But Elvira went to bed early so as not to tire herself out. As she got older, she would turn in at nine. I stayed up a little while longer. She liked her job very much. The pay was always bad in a job like that, but she got along well with the old boys. She worked from 1919 until she died. One day she burst into tears while we were having supper. I asked her what was wrong and she told me. That her eyesight had gotten a lot worse in just a few weeks. We went to see the doctor and he said that she had cataracts in both eyes. He would treat her, but it was hard to know. It didn’t get any better, but it didn’t get worse either. The days before she died, she could see nothing at all, but then there were other reasons for that. The stroke. Up until then she had never been sick in all her life. She laughed a lot and the old blokes liked her. Many of my mates from work went to that café and they always said how good she was. She didn’t care if someone got a bit drunk sometimes and if anybody got out of hand she would just drag him out. She wasn’t afraid.