“How much will you pay her?”
“Ten kronor, but then it’s the whole hog.”
“Have you done it before?”
“Of course. Twice.”
“With her?”
“With prettier ones.”
“Who’s she with?”
“Don’t know.”
“Shall we push them around a bit?”
“Yes, let’s.”
Patent-leather shoes, pointed ones. Silk socks. Grey woollen trousers. Jackets. The white student’s cap. Spots on their chins, their backs, their buttocks. Elbows that have not yet been sharpened jab Oskar and Elly in the side. A greeting, cigar out of the mouth, cap in slim hand.
“Good evening, Elly.”
Oskar says nothing. They walk on and he holds on to her hand. But then, trying to make it sound unimportant, he quickly asks:
“Did you know them?”
And Elly. Elly, you cannot leave this unanswered.
“He’s a son in the house where I work. From another marriage.”
“I see.”
Oskar’s face darkens. He slams his heels into the cobblestones. With jealousy welling up, he can feel an evil thought gnawing all the way down to the pit of his stomach.
“Fucking bastard. Did he shove you too?”
“A bit.”
Oskar looks like thunder. Fucking rock blaster, working-class pig, nothing but riffraff. Twelve children in a kitchen, another ten in the living room. Stack them up on top of each other. Rat-catchers. Mouldy food. Let them freeze. Block out the sun with tall white houses. Build our houses, and walls to shut out the sun. Pull their teeth, remove their vocal chords. Bang nails through their feet.
“What is it, Oskar?”
Elly pulls her hand away. She looks at him. He shakes his head.
“Nothing. I was just thinking.”
One more block to go. The sun’s setting.
“What were you thinking about?”
One more block.
“Nothing in particular. Shall we turn back?”
“Might as well.”
And already they have turned around. Piano music can be heard from an open window. Elly and Oskar. Elly and Oskar.
The town they have to cross: Wooden hovels clinging desperately to one another, propping each other up, warming each other. High white brick walls framing a square, screening off the slums. The short walk from the middle-class homes. The long way back.
Elly goes into her room beyond the nursery. The other girl is already asleep. Her blanket has slipped off. She is snoring, open-mouthed. The noise cuts into Elly’s ears. She takes off her white dress. Without knowing why, she pushes it under her end of the long, narrow pillow. Clambers over her bedfellow and lies down against the wall. Slowly, she runs her little fingernail along the wallpaper. She thinks she can see a tram in the white-brown pattern. She falls asleep with that image in her mind.
As to Elly: in the spring of 1911 she is twenty-three years old. Her employer is the manager of a textile company in the town.
As to Oskar: He is wandering through the streets. In seven hours, he will be standing in front of Norström holding his metal spike in his hand.
The Island
The fog has lifted. I get up to go. Oskar is shuffling his cards. He uses his thumb to lay them out in a row along the table. He stirs them around with his index finger. With his thumb he pushes them together again into a stack.
“Shall we put them out tonight?”
“Yes. We should get more tomorrow.”
“I’ll be along at about seven. ’Bye till then.”
“’Bye.”
Oskar is sitting on the chair. It is a quarter past seven. Soon he will lie down on his bed. Soon he will sleep for a few hours.
The island is in the outer archipelago. It is shaped like a truncated boomerang. There are oaks, birches, cliffs and sand. From three sides you can look straight out to the open sea. The fourth side slopes down into a narrow strait which leads to an island with a fishing village.
On a national survey map, the island is shown as a nameless rocky islet.
The customs boat ties up at the island once in the spring, once in the autumn. There is a radio antenna on the highest point. The customs officers usually come down to Johansson’s old sauna to say hello. You can hear Radio Nord blaring out across the water. The customs men laugh, and so does Oskar. One of them goes around to the back of the cabin. There is a food store there, dug into the ground. A square one metre deep, with a wooden cover. They fetch out the cans of beer, go back into the cabin, and every now and then you hear the sound of Oskar’s rough voice shouting out.
The Sisters
“It’s a bit strange, I suppose, that I ended up marrying her sister. But it took over a year for me to recover and Elly moved away. At first, she used to come and visit me, but I could tell that seeing my injuries was painful for her. I think the eye bothered her less than my hand. Then she told me that she was leaving town. I noticed she had been putting on some extra weight and trying to hide it. I don’t remember feeling all that much. I’d had all my pain. I knew her sister for nearly three months before I realised that she was Elly’s younger sister. It wasn’t as if they were alike. The colour of their hair perhaps, but nothing else. I saw Elly several times after we got married. There were never any problems. She had a good man. And we had never really gotten that close. I read in the paper a few years ago that Elly had died.”
The Oar Strokes
Oskar moves his oars in time with his breathing.
His many voices form a whole which does not actually exist.
Oskar is distorting his own history. He claims a poor memory, that none of it is important, that he does not feel like talking about it. He picks fragments out of his story and gives a terse account of them, while drumming his index finger on the wax tablecloth. Rarely answers questions. Doesn’t avoid them, but his replies are always ambiguous and open-ended.
His way of being evasive.
“Others have already described it so well.”
“I don’t really remember that bit.”
Surely you can’t have forgotten.
We are sitting on the bench outside the sauna. Hitting out at flies, mending nets, drinking coffee, and occasionally Oskar mentions something in passing. I hear the words, close up the gaps between them, fill in the margins.
Oskar Johansson, the rock blaster with the damaged body. He is there, and he mentions something in passing. His sentences weave in and out.
The alarm clock keeps ringing, harsh and unrelenting, and the sauna is always the same distance away.
We sit in the rowing boat.
Oskar’s flat tone as he counts the fish we catch.
The playing cards, Radio Nord, frequencies and blue-speckled cups.
And the narrator?
Oskar thinks he is too slow at pulling up the nets.
Oskar Johansson
Oskar was born in Norrköping in 1888. He was the third of five children. Three sisters and two brothers. Elsa, Karl, Oskar, Anna, Viktoria. Elsa and Viktoria died young. He never saw Elsa. By the time Oskar was born, she was no longer even a sad memory. When Oskar was seven, his father came out into the backyard one day looking serious, took Oskar gently by the arm and told him to come indoors. His mother was sitting in the kitchen crying, and his father told Oskar that Viktoria had fallen down the steep drop behind the houses and that she was dead. So Oskar had to stay indoors for a while and be sad.