What did we know about it? It was on the very edge of Europe, small, pressed up against the wall of the ocean. A country not really known for anything. Perhaps she chose it due to its mysterious name, which sounded like portokal, the Bulgarian word for “orange”? I was convinced that oranges lived mainly there, in Portugal. And since it was so far away, they rarely made it here. Someone ate them up during the long journey, most likely the truck drivers themselves, because who could resist the temptation? I didn’t blame them, I wouldn’t have been able to resist, either.
Portokalia Portugalova, that’s what I called her. That name is all I can remember of her.
5.
Unlike Spain and Portugal, Sweden, for example, found it much more difficult to choose a happy time to return to due to very few unhappy decades, which left far too many choices available.
Okay, so the first fifteen years of the century could easily be excluded due to the unemployment caused by a sharp increase in population, which some historians attribute to vaccines and potatoes. Then, after two major wars and a cleverly cashed-in neutrality, everything fell into place. That which had decimated the Continent had been good for the country. There would always be a need for strong Swedish steel and machine parts, especially during wartime. This explained the fact that there, on the eve of the referendum, for the first time among all the other countries, a movement in favor of the 1940s arose and even gained popularity. Someone had obligingly excerpted passages from Astrid Lindgren’s diary, which gave a short and sweet account of what could be found on a Swedish holiday table in those wartime years: a leg of pork weighing 3.5 kilograms, homemade liver pate, roast beef, smoked eel, reindeer meat, or a list of family gifts exchanged on Christmas 1944: an anorak, ski boots, a sweater vest, a white woolen scarf, two sets of long underwear (I give him those every year), cuff links, slacks for everyday wear, a chain for his watch, books, a gray pleated skirt, a dark blue cardigan, socks, books, a puzzle, a very nice alarm clock, a bath brush, a little marzipan pig . . .
I don’t know why that little marzipan pig stuck in my head, but clearly it had the same effect on Swedish journalists. Sweden was not a marzipan pig during the war—protesters shouted this slogan against the movement. Such prosperity was a fact, but of course the problem of guilt remained. Could a person be happy and well fed amid the hell unleashed all around? In the end the polls showed the ’40s with a rather modest percentage, which put them in fifth or sixth place in the rankings, without any practical chance of success. But the very fact that the specter of the war years had reared its head as a possibility was jarring enough.
According to analysts, the high percentage of supporters for returning to the 1950s, which all surveys showed to be leading in the campaign, was due precisely to the upswing in the previous decade along with the awkwardness of choosing war, after all. But the ’50s were a strong decade in their own right. The media recalled how, amid a ruined Europe coming out of the war, Sweden stood strong, with unviolated resources and manufacturing. Life was growing ever cozier. We had a nice semi-automatic washing machine, a television for the first time, and a refrigerator yea big . . . a woman on TV was saying, spreading her arms as wide as she could. She was around seventy, well preserved for her years. And . . . here the camera panned to the man next to her, a tall, wiry old man with a red face, who added to the fridge his Volvo Amazon, the first model from 1957, black with a light gray top, quite a piece of work . . . And he thrust at the camera a black-and-white photo of the couple standing in front of the car, grinning from ear to ear. The Volvo resembled my father’s Warszawa, which in turn was an exact copy of the Soviet Pobeda. Those sturdy, slightly hulking cars of the ’50s, solid as tanks and almost as fuel-inefficient.
Another strong and undeniable ace up the sleeve of the movement for the ’50s was, of course, IKEA. Yes, that was when IKEA published its first catalog, opened its first store, and, perhaps most importantly, introduced the idea of dismantling the legs from a coffee table so it would fit in your trunk and so you could put it together at home. That’s how the ’50s were—practical, sturdy, cheap, a bit raw, and simple.
Their big rival was the ’70s, however. The 1950s, on the one hand, or the 1970s, on the other, despite the economic crises, those were the stakes in the Swedish referendum. There was something inherently scandalous in the ’70s. During the 1970s and ’80s, besides the Iron Curtain, the world was also split in two in an equally categorical manner by the question every man faced—the Blonde or the Brunette (sometimes also the Redhead) from ABBA. Posed just like that, not Agnetha vs. Anni-Frid (Frida). I, with all the wisdom of my ten years, was not among the target group, but secretly, like most men, I liked the Blonde. I also already knew, however, that that was banal and that it was cooler to prefer the Brunette. Or at least to say that you did. In any case, ABBA was everything northern, light, Swedish, dancing, glittering, white—in the ’70s.
ABBA or the Poäng chair, for example, an IKEA creation from that same decade, such things turn eras upside down, not the gross domestic product and the export of wood and steel. In the end, despite the crises of the 1970s and the changes of government, despite the jump in gas prices and the subsequent new crisis, despite all of that, the dancing queen of the late ’70s overtook the Volvo of 1957 with its huge refrigerator and semi-automatic washing machine. Romance no longer lay with the fridge, people felt like dancing, and a new sentimentality was hovering over the northern waters. So, after the referendum, Sweden woke up to a new 1977.
It was no surprise that Denmark, too, chose the 1970s in the end, although the ’90s remained in the race until the very last. Yes, there was something Scandinavian about the ’70s. They resembled those New Year’s cards sprinkled with white sugar instead of snow, which we secretly licked.
Because in the 1970s we started taking pleasure in life, that’s what a Danish friend of mine explained to me. But what about the sixties? I asked her, didn’t the pleasure start there? She fell silent for a moment, then said: You’re right, only we still didn’t know what to do with it then. I got pregnant without meaning to, I had a child, the father disappeared, I left the child with my mother and father, went to Moscow, to a new life, I lasted a year, Yevtushenkos were screaming in the stadiums, Ahmadulinas, children of the sixties’ thaw . . . While their real poets were underground, drunk, unpublished, exiled, and I had just discovered them and then they arrested me, I got sent back to Denmark via official channels. In short, that’s how the sixties ended, like a college party where you’ve just gotten drunk, just gotten your buzz on, and suddenly the cops bust in. Only the hangover remains. In the 1970s I already knew how to handle pleasure, we all already knew, and we lived well. Rest assured that everyone will vote for them.