Oskar is brown from the sun. It has been a warm summer. The eyelids that have grown shut over the left eye socket shine a pale brown.
Oskar Johannes Johansson. Oskar after the king. Johannes after his grandfather. Oskar never met him. He died in 1886, at the age of ninety-three.
“If I’d been born a little earlier, I would have known someone who was born in the eighteenth century. He came from a small place up by Lake Boren. He worked on the construction of the Göta Canal. Once that was done, he got a job on one of the locks. He stayed and worked at that for the rest of his life. I believe they had six children, but only my father survived. I went there at some point in the thirties. The lock is still there and I expect it looks much the same as it always has. We cycled to it one summer, my boy and I. We spent an entire day watching all the traffic passing through the lock. We saw four timber boats, a ship from Lidköping carrying bricks and the passenger steamer coming by. If we’d had any money, we would probably have taken that boat back to Söderköping and then cycled home from there. But it was too expensive. I didn’t have any work at the time. It was interesting to look at it all, though.
“We also went to the churchyard and managed to find the gravestone. The inscription reads ‘Johannes Johansson’. Underneath, it says ‘Brita Johansson’. She seems to have died almost ten years before him. There were no pictures of them so I have no idea what they looked like. But then Far went to Norrkoping. Like so many others, he wanted to move into town when the factories came. But Far became one of those who emptied out privies. He had no other work as long as he lived. There was nothing unusual about him, I suppose. He did what he had to. And didn’t think it would be possible to get a better job. How he must have resented it. He slaved away his entire life without any respite. He would have had plenty of time to think. He died in 1936. He too grew to a ripe old age.”
Oskar Johannes Johansson has been a worker all his life. Like his father. Like his grandfather. Lock worker, canal construction worker. Privy worker. Rock blaster, rock blaster. Johannes, Oskar’s father, Oskar.
Oskar’s son has a laundry business in town. It belongs to him. The telephone directory lists him as a company director.
It was a ramshackle wooden house, grey and drafty like the others that were crowded together side by side. At the back they all had the same kind of yard with a wooden shack that was part privy, part woodshed. The shacks were connected by a high plank fence which teetered on the very edge of a thirty-metre drop. Down below, the railway line ran into and out of town.
Axel Johansson lived with his family on the second floor of one of the wooden houses. A kitchen, one other room. The apartment had two windows and both gave out onto the yard. The parents had their bed in the room. The children slept in the kitchen. Oskar in a small wooden bed which was put out on the landing during the day. Karl in the kitchen sofa under the window, and Anna slept in the other wooden sofa on the far side of the dining table. There was so little room in the kitchen that it was barely possible for more than two people to move around in it at the same time. In the evenings, when everyone was at home, some of them sat in the kitchen and some on the bed in the room. That way you could sit and talk from one room to the other. It was a cold and draughty flat. However much you fired up the stove, it was never possible to raise the temperature to more than 12 degrees in winter.
Oskar provides precious little information. The narrator has to piece together fragments to form a dull whole. Any snippets are delivered incidentally, when Oskar is talking about other things.
“It was the same as all the other worker housing. No better, no worse. Since we were an unusually small number of children, I imagine we were less cramped than many others. But in any case, we didn’t know anything else. And there was nothing else to look forward to. You had the hovels that we workers crowded into and froze in. You had those big, light apartments in the stone buildings in the centre of town. You had the detached houses with their gardens. But to me those all seemed so remote that I hardly even thought about it until after the accident, which is when I first began to think at all.
“I remember that one night eleven more people slept in our apartment. There’d been a fire somewhere in town and everyone had to help out. I just don’t know how it was possible to fit in another two adults and nine children. Even if it was only for one night. I suppose they must have lain there crying. After all, they had lost everything. And you could never easily find another place. The wooden houses were always overflowing. And there was nothing else. I have only a faint memory of it. I wasn’t old when it happened.”
That is how Oskar lived.
That is how Elly lived.
Her sister.
The rock blasters.
All the others.
But the workers’ parties were growing. The right to vote, to housing, to decent working hours, pay. Society was awakening, its nerves beginning to twitch.
But there is one detail in the narrative to do with the flat, with Oskar’s childhood, which features more prominently than anything else.
It is a stone, which Johannes Johansson found during one of the years he was working on the construction of the canal. It is a piece of granite, perfectly round. But on one side there is a red crack which runs through the rock like a cross. The stone fits into a hand. And the cross is red against the greyish white of the stone. Axel Johansson took it with him when he moved to town. When he died, Oskar got it. Now it lies beside the transistor radio on the green wax tablecloth.
“Don’t think that I want to have it on my grave. But I do think it is beautiful.”
I hold it in my hand and try to gauge its significance. It is a memento. Oskar’s father carried it in his pocket or in a bundle when he walked the gravel roads into town. It has spent a lifetime on a chest of drawers indoors. Now it is in Oskar’s cabin. A chip has broken off the back.
“It’s always been missing. When we were children, I suppose we must have asked how it had happened. But it always had a chip missing.”
The stone is like a crystal ball. Hold it in your hand, lower your gaze to look into the pale grey granite and the red cross.
The summer after Oskar died, one June day, we roll the sauna away on logs. There are five of us. We heave the house onto a cattle barge and then tow it to the other side of the island, where it is to stand from now on. After one day of hard work it’s in its place, under some tall oaks, right on top of a rocky knoll. The weather is hot and we don’t finish until late in the evening.
At five in the morning I walk along the shore, skirt the steep cliffs and reach Oskar’s headland. The mist is swirling and my boots sink deep into the soft soil.
The four cornerstones. The ground between them is a mat of dead, yellow grass. There is a rusty oven door lying there, a black stove-pipe with large holes in it. Shards of glass, a couple of akvavit bottle tops. A rusty tin, used for worms. When I turn it upside down, spongy grey strips of moss fall out. A stiff worm lies at the bottom of the tin, which makes it look as if it is cracked. In the cellar, a pit dug into the earth, is an empty beer bottle.
I walk up behind the cornerstones and take down the grey line with clothes pegs on it.
It is a fine summer. Soon the grass will be tall. And shrubs will be growing over the oven door and the stove-pipe.
I sit in the green flat-bottomed hardboard rowing boat. Row away from the headland.