“I’ll tell you my whole story someday, if you want to hear it.”
Steffi thinks there must be a pleasant polite phrase she should say, but she can’t remember what it could be. “OK.”
* * *
When she walks through the door at home, she wishes she could have stayed longer at Alvar’s place.
“ADMIRAL!” Edvin is shouting, holding up his stick with a yellow flag, his imitation of a military gesture. When she doesn’t respond, he marches into the kitchen, flag held high, turns, and then marches back to her.
She takes off her shoes. She should have thought to tell her father she was in the music room at school. Then she could have stayed longer.
“Hi, Steffita,” her father greets her. He claps her on the shoulder.
Mamma asks her to help in the kitchen.
“Julia can,” Steffi answers, but then she sees the extra pair of shoes in the hallway and knows she can’t get out of it.
“Fanny’s come over,” Mamma says.
Fanny coming over is like having two Julias in the house. It’s also like having a song on repeat, because they say the same things over and over even if someone eavesdrops on them. What idiots some other girls are; how to get rid of unwanted hair; how cute the senior boys are. Fanny would complain, “I can’t stand the boys in our class. I want a real man!” And Julia would agree. “We girls just mature faster.” And wonders if she should get Botox for the wrinkle beneath one of her eyes. “It’s because you smoke!” Fanny would exclaim, and then the two of them would giggle so stupidly that Steffi couldn’t stand it. She had to be really bored to even bother eavesdropping on them. Most of it was scribbled in Julia’s diary anyway.
“How was school today?” Pappa asks.
An image of Karro and Sonja—Watch out for Steffi!—the bathroom, the song that came from nowhere, the bald old man in the window, the original gramophone records behind a plaid armchair.
“We were told how to go about choosing our projects,” she replied.
Edvin leaps into the kitchen. He’s exchanged his yellow flag for a golden sword. “En garde! A duel! What’s for supper?”
— CHAPTER 3 —
“Kevin, Leo, Hannes…”
Sanja is ranking the boys, and Steffi is not there. She’s not there because she’s sitting on the farthest bench away, with her back to them, and she’s concentrating on putting on her sweater. She’s not there and that gives her a bit of breathing room.
“No, Kevin, Hannes, Leo,” Karro objects. “Hannes is really hot, now that he’s cut his hair, and Leo stinks.”
“That’s because he’s always exercising.”
“He still stinks.”
“But he’s so cute.”
“That’s why he’s third. Or do you want him?”
Sanja pretends to hit Karro with her towel.
Steffi can see them reflected in the mirror on the wall. She has the song “Letter to Frej” running through her head.
Povel’s bossa nova from the seventies gets entwined with Sanja’s attraction to Leo and his aroma. Steffi smiles at the thought. They could start a song, she thinks. Sanja would begin:
Your nose to me is so enchanting
And Karro would reply:
But your mouth spews only bantering.
They’d giggle like the singer Wenche Myhre and trill the lyrics that Steffi hasn’t yet figured out. Something about the gods.
“Excuse me,” a voice says too close to her ear and Steffi transforms back from air into flesh and blood. “Excuse me, but I think this slut has been laughing at us.”
Steffi immediately checks her clothes and finds herself still half-dressed. At least she had gotten her pants on and her cell phone is safely in her pocket. But her tights and woolen socks are on the bench next to her.
* * *
Her shoes squish all through the last class, even though she’d wrung her socks out as well as she could and held them under the hand dryer for at least two minutes. When she’s about halfway home, her feet have gotten so cold they hurt. She unties her shoelaces and pulls off her wet socks to walk the rest of the way home in just her shoes.
As she walks by the long, flat building that is the local retirement home, she sees that Alvar’s room is dark. Even though she hits pause on her mp3 player, she doesn’t hear any music from his window. Just as well, since her feet feel like tender blocks of ice. She walks a few more steps and looks back to see if he’s turned on a light, but she couldn’t turn back anyway.
Of course, according to Sanja and Karro, Kevin is the hottest of all the boys in their class. There’s no room for discussion there. Everyone agrees. It’s a fact, not an opinion. That Steffi disagrees with everyone else makes her a little worried. She knows she’s old enough to understand why cute boys are cute, but she thinks that Kevin’s eyes are too narrow and she doesn’t like the way the ends of his mouth turn down. She can’t see what makes him the cutest guy in class. This must mean that the others are right: there’s something wrong with her.
Just before she reaches her block, her shoes really start rubbing on her bare ankles and she forces herself not to tear up by holding her breath. She’s been through worse—and she is definitely going to learn how Wenche Myhre sings that trill.
At home, when she pulls off her shoes, her feet are bright red in the middle and white around her toes. They tingle as she pulls on some woolen socks from the dresser in the hall while she yells, “Hello? Anybody home?”
She gets no answer. But there’s a sound from Julia’s room.
A wheezing, a sigh, a human sound. Julia’s door is slightly open. Steffi tiptoes up to it. She sees Julia on her stomach on her bed, completely still. Then a snivel followed by a long, halting exhalation. Steffi stands there, mouth wide open. Julia is crying. Steffi feels frozen in place as she watches Julia’s shaking back and catches the sound Julia is trying to muffle. She feels tears welling up in her own eyes. She wants to ask what’s going on, but this is Julia.
She leaps back when, without warning, Julia flips over and stares at her.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Steffi backs away. “I’m just … I’m just…”
“You’re so damn nosy! Go away and shut the door behind you!”
“What … what’s wrong?”
Julia sits up in bed. Her eyes are red from crying and her anger makes them ugly. “GO AWAY!”
* * *
By dinnertime, Julia seems back to normal. She rolls her eyes at Pappa. He’s been trying to understand the Swedish word påbrå.
“I thought it meant something else! I mixed up brå with bra and it wasn’t until I realized that å and a were totally different letters in Swedish that I figured out why Swedes didn’t understand me! But it was a logical mistake!”
“What does påbra mean?” Edvin asks.
Pappa starts a long explanation involving Pippi Longstocking, a Siw Malmkvist song from ages ago, as well as his own Caribbean Indian grandmother.
Steffi is chewing her fish balls, trying not to look at Julia. Julia is not a person who cries. She’s the one who flips back her hair and tries on lip gloss. Julia rolls her eyes at last year’s shoes and gossips with Fanny about twenty-year-old guys. There are never tears in Julia’s eyes, only mascara on their lashes.
Edvin is eating for a change and Mamma asks Steffi, “How was school?”
Steffi stuffs two fish balls into her mouth and nods instead of answering. Outside, the winter night is black as coal.
* * *
After dinner, Steffi decides to get right to work. She tries to laugh like Wenche Myhre and attempts the hoarse sound of a laugh making its way all the way up through her throat. Wenche Myhre is Norwegian, and her Swedish has a Norwegian accent.
Your mere nearness devastates
A fire flames in me that incapacitates
Steffi sings along as well as she can. “Oh, oh, oh!” She trills together with Wenche Myhre, and Povel Ramel’s lyrics become a drama
tic duet between them. The trill is not so hard; it just doesn’t rhyme. Once she’s figured out the entire song, she pulls out her bass guitar.
“Dum de dum, the song’s in fifths. Dum de dum, she just can’t quit, I’m dancing with the dame who got a letter from Frej.”
Her socks on the radiator are slowly steaming off the water from the changing room toilet. Her CD keeps spinning; Povel’s voice takes over from Wenche. It is a good voice, a voice that sings only funny words with happy music.
— CHAPTER 4 —
On her way to school she hears the music again. Perhaps she hears it just because her first class is biology. Perhaps it’s just her imagination; music sometimes takes over her mind so that she’s not always sure if she’s remembering it or hearing it. But she sees that Alvar’s window is slightly ajar and there’s a fuzzy white shape that could be his head moving around inside the room. She pushes at the door to the retirement home and it opens.
Biology is hard enough as it is, but when Gunnel retired, they got a newly graduated substitute teacher who immediately figured out who were the most popular kids and did her best to keep them happy. Soon enough she was hired full-time. This new teacher was so adept at brownnosing that only Steffi seemed to notice. Steffi could see it in the way the teacher smiled whenever Karro called Steffi names and in the way she gestured whenever she talked about Darwin and the survival of the fittest. Survival of the cunt, Steffi thinks and stares at her textbook so that the new teacher, Camilla, can’t look into her eyes and see that she’s calling her a cunt. School is hard enough as it is. This month, they’ll even have to endure Sexual Health.
Steffi tiptoes through the empty hallway of the retirement home like a burglar. Before she’s reached Alvar’s door, a nurse turns into the hallway from another corridor. Steffi stops abruptly and so does the woman.
“Well?” the nurse asks when Steffi doesn’t say a word.
“Ah…,” Steffi says.
She can’t think of anything more intelligible. But she does know all of Povel Ramel’s lyrics on his first and second CDs; she could quote them at will.
“Who are you looking for?” the nurse asks. Her voice is harsh. Her hair is strictly combed back, slick and shining, and she does not smile.
“Alvar.” Steffi exhales in relief.
* * *
Alvar breaks out into a wide clown smile when Steffi opens his door.
“Of course I know Steffi,” he replies to the nurse’s questioning if this girl really was coming to see him. “I’ve been waiting for Miss Steffi Herrera.”
“So where were we?” he asks as the nurse closes the door behind her.
Steffi blurts out the entire riff by Wenche that she now knows by heart: “Oh, my darling, there is only one like you, you, you, oh, every small detail of you is a miracle created by the gods, I worship your thin lean neck and the small wonder-filled dimples in your knees, every single golden hair on your amazing forearms, oh, I only dream of the next time I will embrace you, kiss you, hold you, oh!”
It doesn’t sound the way it does when she sings along with Wenche, just more like a gush of words, but she knows them all. Alvar watches her recite and then wryly replies, “My thin lean neck has not been admired in a very long time.”
Steffi blushes. “Oh, but…,” she says, and then sighs like Julia.
Julia’s sighs, however, always seem to come from a deep, highly irritated place in her soul, while Steffi’s sound more like embarrassed coughs.
“It’s from ‘Letter from Frej,’” she says.
Alvar is laughing so hard his mouth is wide open.
“The small dimples in…”
“The small wonder-filled dimples in your knees.”
Alvar is sitting on his bed, still laughing heartily, but he’s gazing at the ceiling, and then he says, “When it comes to the miracle of love, I’m afraid we really can’t search for its explanation in our friend Povel.”
Steffi ponders the idea of the miracle of love for a moment, but Alvar’s gaze has moved from the ceiling to the carpet. Steffi really can’t say she knows more about this subject than all the things Povel Ramel has sung.
“You can interpret this in many ways, of course,” Alvar says. “One boring theory is that he did not know enough about love, himself, to sing about it very well, and another is that he knew it all too well and just decided to leave it be.”
Alvar looks at her as if she understands what he is talking about. Grown-ups usually don’t do that. Usually you have to listen to them, pretending you care about what they’re saying, until finally they say something interesting. Usually they never do.
“Doing it his way, he could keep love for himself while the rest of us sit and debate about what he knew. I’m sure he’d appreciate our second way of looking at him.”
Steffi throws herself into the armchair. She’s supposed to be in biology class, but that was now the furthest thing from her mind. Alvar’s room smells like soap and the musty gramophone. The scent of real thoughts.
“I know nothing at all about the miracle of love,” she says.
Alvar draws in a deep breath before he replies. “Perhaps you have a mother or father who loves you.”
“Yeah.”
“Then you know the first half. The rest will come in its own time.”
“Maybe.”
“Absolutely. How old are you, Miss Steffi Herrera?”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen years old. Yes, well, this age is as good as any to be surprised by love and its wonders. Have I told you about Anita?”
“Not really.”
“I must have mentioned it. Surely I told you I went to Stockholm?”
“You just said that you went there and there was a woman named Anita.”
“So I didn’t give you the story in the right order.”
“No.”
“Well, then. Let me start from the beginning. I was just a boy when I took the train to Stockholm for the very first time. It was 1942.…”
* * *
Alvar was just a boy when he took the train to Stockholm. It was 1942; it was a death-defying gamble to take a train. His mother told him that trains transported war matériel and could explode at any time. Also the Germans could come pouring out of the freight cars and take over every unlucky traveler onboard: the wrong train at the wrong time. The more she talked about trains, the more they seemed to be erratic machines of murder. Alvar was more eager than ever to ride one. Stockholm drew him like a peg pulls its string into tune.
Alvar was already taller than his teacher and he’d played his father’s guitar until it had fallen apart. He thought it was time to go.
“You don’t have to go searching for trouble,” his mother declared. “I forbid it.”
So he went to his father. His father had good sense and could understand a solid argument.
“I’ve never even heard a real clarinet!” Alvar said.
His father grunted and scratched his chin.
“And what will happen to me if I stay here?” Alvar said, his voice shaking with passion. “Am I supposed to work in the forest hauling timber all my life, when I know, I really know that I could do more, be something big?”
Alvar’s voice had cracked a bit as he said this, but that could be seen as a mark of his intensity and not his youthful immaturity. His father still scratched his chin. A good sign.
Alvar finally was able to leave Värmland because, first, Värmland was much too close to occupied Norway, from where the Germans could swarm just as easily as from the very next train. Second, his mother had an aunt who lived in Stockholm and who was having difficulty with her old legs. Third, Alvar was beginning to drum on every object in the house until even his normally even-tempered father could take it no more. Alvar had to promise that he would be quiet in his aunt’s house and not beat up the furniture. He promised he would wear a muzzle and tie his hands together if that was what was needed. In the end, his mother gave in.
* * *
A blond girl his own age with a middle-aged woman who held tightly to the girl’s hand. It looked like the older woman could barely contain her anger, and also that she hadn’t had a great deal of practice doing just that. “Cry if you want to,” she hissed from the side of her mouth. “But don’t forget whose fault it is that we’re here right now!” The girl bit her lip and didn’t lift her gaze from the floor. Her tense shoulders and white knuckles gave witness to her unhappiness.
Alvar swallowed, tried to look away, but kept glancing back at that closed, delicate face. Was there anything he could do? But he had no talent for comforting unhappy girls. Unexpectedly she looked up at him and he caught his breath so abruptly he broke out into a coughing fit. He tried to draw attention away from this by drumming his fingers on his knees. He drummed with concentration, faster and faster, in time with the train’s accelerating engine. He kept on until, from his left, a strong hand took hold of his and held it in the air until he calmed down. The passengers on the benches around them expressed their approval.
“You’re not fully grown yet, are you?” the man across from him asked.
“I’m seventeen!”
He said this with emphasis so that the girl across from him could hear. Seventeen might not be so impressive, but it was still closer to being a man than a boy, right? The girl glanced at him quickly, but he couldn’t tell what was going through her mind. Alvar made the great mistake of imagining what her legs might look like under her skirt and then couldn’t keep up the facade of strutting masculinity. The man with the unusual case asked him where he was going, and Alvar’s voice cracked when he stammered out, “Stockholm. I’m going to find a job and take care of my mother’s older relative, but what I really want is…”
A few heads turned in his direction, and he avoided looking at the young girl to keep his voice steady.
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