Later they stood around the little hole in the graveyard and his father tried to comfort his mother by saying that they did not need any more children. Three were enough.
“I don’t really remember that much of my childhood. What we used to do. There was nothing special about me. I played the same games as all other children. Had the same clothes. Sometimes they were whole, sometimes torn. We played in the backyards. Running around and shouting at each other. We chased cats when we found them. We pushed one into a hole under the privy in the yard one day and blocked it up with pieces of wood. It was white. I think it was called Putte. And I ran to school like everybody else. There was nothing unusual. Sometimes I ask myself what I thought of back in those days. It might be fun to remember. But I don’t. I suppose most of the time I just ran around and screamed along with the rest of them. We clambered out over the planks, climbed back in again, went home quickly to get some food, and then charged around the backyards. There were four or so of us boys who stuck together. One was called Oskar, like me. We pretended to be brothers. His father ended up hanging himself, and I think his mother went and did the same thing a few years later. But there was never anything special about me. I played like all the others. The same games.”
One day, in the third summer, there is someone sitting next to Oskar outside the sauna. When I arrive, he nods.
“I’m Karl.”
Oskar gives a little smile.
“He’s my brother.”
“We haven’t seen each other for a long time.”
Then they sit on the wooden bench and look out over the water and talk. Karl is only there for the day. A boat comes to fetch him. He has to go back to an old people’s home somewhere. The brothers shake hands, Karl walks carefully out along the planks, climbs into the boat, which reverses out, turns around and disappears behind the headland.
The Accident
Once the rumble had died down and the first shock subsided, Norström half-ran up to the rock wall ahead of the others.
“You stay right where you are. I don’t want you to see this.”
Norström yelled at the young helper not to move. He was standing among the scattered metal spikes. He was shaking all over and tears welled up in his eyes.
“Christ, that’s horrible.”
The blasting crew stood in a semicircle a few metres back from Oskar, who was lying twisted on the ground with blood pouring, pumping out from various parts of his body. His fair hair has been scorched off and there is a smell of burnt skin. The monotone buzzing of the blow-flies cuts into their ears.
Then, suddenly, Oskar’s right leg twitches.
“What the fuck. He’s alive.”
“What?”
“He’s alive.”
“How the hell...”
“Off with your shirts. Bandage him every bloody where. Quick.”
The blasters tear off their shirts. They stop up the bleeding holes as best they can, the mutilated body parts. Norström bellows.
“Run like fuck and get a cart. Oskar’s alive.”
And the young helper runs.
And there is no time to wait for anything else. Oskar’s body is lying there on a cart and the blasters rush towards town, through the streets in the direction of the hospital. They hurtle along with their cart rattling and bouncing over the cobblestones. People stop on the pavements, turn, shout out “What’s happened?”, but get no answer. Up the gravel path to the hospital, Norström charges in through the doors, on the verge of exhaustion, his heart pumping wildly.
“Quick, quick!”
Once the white coats have realised what has occurred and that there is still life in the body on the wooden cart, everything happens very rapidly. Caring hands lift the body, charred and covered in red blotches, lay it on a stretcher and vanish through doors, down corridors.
What about the rock blasters, drained as they were, what did they do? Sit down in the sun on the steps, shaken and scared? Or did they go back? Or go off in different directions?
One day I did get an answer, without asking.
“Even though I worked with pretty much the same blokes for a number of years, I don’t remember a single name. Norström, of course, but none of the others. That’s how it was. We were so anonymous to everyone else. We had no value other than as blasters. A bunch of blasters, a bunch of carpenters, a bunch of textile workers. We even saw ourselves as a bunch of blasters. A sort of self-contempt, I suppose. Sometimes they would come up to the hospital. Norström visited me and said he was proud that I had made it. Nobody in any other team of blasters he knew of had survived a bang like that. The other men just sat there in silence, maybe asked how I was. If they told me anything at all, then it was that they’d actually kept working for another hour that day after running to the hospital.”
“They had cleaned up after the blast. But they didn’t find my right hand until the Monday. But basically we were just a bunch of blasters. If anyone had a name it was a nickname.”
But this is where Oskar is wrong. Here, he himselfwill change his story. His memory is split. Oskar was a different person then. Now his account is elusive. Not because there is anything he wants to hide, but because he thinks it does not matter.
Oskar Johansson has been a worker all his life. His thoughts and actions have changed, yet all along he has been a worker. What changed his thinking? What changed the things he has done? Why does he talk of bunches of blasters, bunches of carpenters?
Oskar is sixty-eight when we first meet. He has been living in his apartment in town together with his wife, Elly’s sister. Then she dies and he stays there on his own and comes out here in the summer. Usually it is his eldest, his son, who drives him down to the boat harbour and fetches him home in the autumn. The son has his own company. He owns a laundry business. Oskar and Elly’s sister have two more children. Both girls. They are married and live elsewhere in the country. Oskar also has grandchildren, through his son as well as his daughters.
Oskar’s place in town is a two-roomed apartment in a rental block built in the late forties. It is on the ground floor, in a neighbourhood that is just being redeveloped. I don’t recall if it is entrance A, B or C, but the building is still there. Inside one of the ground floor windows there are heavy, flourishing pot plants. Maybe that was where he lived. I could ask, but it is unimportant.
Oskar is a special and rare case. A worker who has survived an explosion at close range. That is why he has a room of his own. It has a high ceiling. Since Oskar is going to be there for a long time, they hang a portrait of the royal family on the wall opposite the bed. The king and queen are seated, the princes and princesses, the brothers-in-law and cousins stand. Wishy-washy pale colours. Oskar’s room is on the top floor. He can see the sky and the outline of tin roofs right at the bottom of the window. Sometimes a pigeon flutters into view. Sometimes two or ten of them.
“Most of the time I would just be lying there on my back, looking out of the window. There was nothing to see. But I probably just lay there waiting for something to turn up outside. They couldn’t do much about the pain, of course. After about half a year something did in fact show up. It was a yellow hot air balloon with a basket under it. It drifted by the window. It was far away, so I was able to watch it for a long time. There were a few people in the basket. Looking in different directions. There may have been some sort of race going on and they had got lost, were off course.
“You can’t ever really bear the pain, but you can get used to it. I remember my eye being the worst. It didn’t actually hurt, but I had this strange feeling in the empty socket where the eye had been. I kept wanting to blink, but there was nothing there. I remember quite well what I was thinking at the time. Probably because I had nothing to do.”