“I’m really going to Stockholm to play swing music.”
Someone snorted, but the man with the case grinned.
“So you like swing, do you? Some people go to Stockholm for a girl, for others it’s a way to make a living, but you are one of the chosen few going there for music.”
As the man said this, people around them snickered. Alvar laughed with them. What else could he do?
“I’m sure your latest tune is well known in…,” the man teased with a wink.
Alvar began to sing “How Do You Do, Mr. Swing?” in a wavering voice and heard a few other voices joining in.
The song petered out; nobody really knew the lyrics, but the fact that so many had enjoyed the song made Alvar feel good. He even managed to take another peek at the girl. The woman beside her had laid her arm over the girl’s shoulders. Neither of them had been singing along.
The man with the odd case was still interested in Alvar. After a few kilometers of listening only to the train chugging along, he leaned forward to put his elbows on his knees. “You don’t look like a jazz cat to me.”
“Thank the good Lord for that,” a woman sitting on Alvar’s bench harrumphed.
Jazz cat, Alvar repeated to himself. He didn’t know what cats had to do with it, but he was sure he’d find out when he got to Stockholm. He wasn’t going to reveal such a gap in his knowledge in front of this beautiful blond girl.
“I’m just me,” he replied. He hoped that would be good enough.
“And who are you, then?”
“Alvar Svensson from Björke.” He held out his hand. Decided he would keep the name of his hometown to himself from now on.
“If you want to keep your good name, stay away from that swing music!” the woman to his right exclaimed.
“And what do you mean by that?” the man said, egging her on.
“I can tell by your case what you think,” the woman replied with a snort. “But respectable people are forced to stand by while that horrible jazz music destroys an entire generation. No, my boy, you just make sure you find yourself a good job and take good care of your relative when you get to Stockholm. Make your parents proud of you!” The way her eyes drilled into him made it hard for Alvar to disagree.
Still, his curiosity about the man’s case increased after her comment. It wasn’t a suitcase, even though it resembled one. It was long and had a clasp. Alvar stared at it, his curiosity increasing moment to moment as the train chugged on. The man grinned slightly and then, without looking at Alvar, he opened his case. Alvar felt his pulse increase and knew everyone was watching as he craned his neck, but he couldn’t help himself. The man began to lift out parts of a clarinet, taking his time, putting the reed to his mouth, checking to make sure each part fit properly. Then he slowly took the instrument apart again and set each section back in its place. He closed the lid and snapped the clasp shut. It was as if the doors to paradise were being slammed shut before Alvar’s eyes. He tried to catch the man’s eye, but he was now staring at the ceiling.
“Was that … was that a real clarinet?” Alvar finally had to ask, even though he already knew it had to be.
The man brought his gaze down. “Oh, that? Yes, that’s the one I take when I’m on the road.”
Alvar stared. A man who takes a clarinet on the road implied that he had another clarinet at home, and that meant that this man was a real musician. The other passengers had come to the same conclusion.
“Oh, please play something for us!” the blond girl asked, ignoring the stern look from her traveling companion.
The man laughed. “Oh, no, no, no.” He seemed pleased, in spite of his protests, and finally gave in.
“So, just for the sake of the beautiful girl who requested it…,” he said, and managed to wink at everyone in the compartment.
Two of the women covered their mouths as they giggled.
The man quickly reassembled his clarinet as he said, “Give me a beat.” He looked straight at Alvar. “Like this.”
He clapped a simple beat, and it was entirely different from how all the folk musicians clapped in Björke. Something in the elbows, something much more exciting. Alvar tried to do that, too, until he could. Then the man put the clarinet to his lips.
Alvar didn’t recognize the music. Perhaps it wasn’t even a real tune, but an improvisation of melodies and rhythms like those that Alvar had heard only on the radio. This was jazz! Alvar found himself keeping time with the clarinet, his elbows moving in the same swing beat the man played, while the landscape of Sweden passed by outside the window. The blond girl across from him swayed her upper body to the music, her eyes fixed on the clarinet player, ignoring even the hard grip on her shoulder as the music took her away.
* * *
“So was that Anita?”
“Who?”
“The girl on the train.”
“No, that was just a girl on a train.”
“So why are you telling me about her then?”
“Well, it was terrible, what she was going through. She’d had to leave her newborn baby with relatives in Värmland to spare her family from gossip.”
“You didn’t mention that.”
“We hadn’t gotten to that point of the story. By the way, have you seen a real clarinet?”
Steffi nods. “Sure, we have one at school.”
“Then you probably can’t imagine how things were back then. I was seventeen and I never had. And to have one in school in those days … that would have been…”
Alvar begins to laugh instead of finishing his sentence. “Thank God times change! Your school can’t be … you do go to school, don’t you?”
Steffi nods. It’s almost lunchtime. By now sex health class is over and any survivors had probably all gotten a condom to take home and study.
“We don’t start until twelve thirty today,” she lies.
* * *
At school, nobody had gotten any condoms. They seemed to have been divided into a boys’ group and a girls’ group. Next week they were supposed to discuss what is important in a good boyfriend or girlfriend. Steffi decides she’ll skip that day, too.
After math class, she hurries into the music room.
Jake, her music teacher, often stays behind after school so that anyone who wants to can come in and try out an instrument. He’s just putting away some percussion instruments.
“Can you hand me the maracas?” he asks Steffi.
She hands him both the maracas and the guiro.
Then she asks about the clarinet. Jake looks confused at first, but then takes it from the cupboard and says he can give her five minutes to look it over. You take it up so well, your little clari-narinet. Povel Ramel’s voice in her head.
The clarinet is well worn and certainly had been used by kids to hit other kids on the head. How else could it have gotten so wrecked, with gaps where there should be connections? Still, she can imagine how it must have looked to a young boy traveling on a train in the forties.
She tries to blow it, but no sound comes out. Jake tells her to wet the mouthpiece first, then tense her lips and blow harder. She gets a sound. Yes! Not exactly Arne Domnérus, but it is a sound. A wail between melodies, she thinks. She tries pressing some of the pads on the keys. It sounds like a sick animal.
Jake is standing there, keys in hand. “Would you like to take it home?”
“May I?”
“Sure. Give me a security deposit but don’t spread it around that I let you. OK?”
He winks at her. He lets her take instruments home now and again.
* * *
All the way home, she keeps her fingers crossed that nobody from school will see her with the clarinet. It would be hard to explain to Jake if it got broken, and she’d never be able to borrow an instrument again.
As she passes by the retirement home, she wonders if she should stop in and show it to Alvar. Then she reconsiders. It would be better if she learned to play something on it first.
�
�� CHAPTER 5 —
Steffi knows two things about the way she looks. She knows she’s ugly and she knows she’s pretty. The first is the truth agreed upon by everyone in school, and therefore everyone in the rest of the world. The second is the truth at Herrvägen Road, number 21, with the exception of a separate zone consisting of Julia’s room. Julia thinks that Steffi is hopeless. Mamma thinks her “pretty just as you are” and Pappa calls her linda, which is Spanish for beautiful, not a Swedish girl’s name. Edvin thinks she looks like a Muppet. Steffi has no idea at all. She finds her face a painting she’s looked at for far too long. It’s like a word repeated so often it’s lost its meaning. Sometimes she’s not even sure her face is really hers. “I’m just myself and me alone,” she tells the face in the mirror and watches as the lips move. Since she’s considered ugly in school, these words don’t sound the way they did on a train to Stockholm in the forties. With one minute left of lunch break, she sneaks out of the bathroom to her class Civics and Society.
Bengt assumes they’ve all chosen the topic for their special project. He stares straight at each student in the room as he says this, and immediately, heads are put together to agree on some excuse for why their group doesn’t have one yet. Excuses, excuses, Steffi jots on her piece of paper, and tries to find something that rhymes. Induces, recluses, effuses.
“Well,” Bengt continues in his most tired tones, “you can’t choose one on today’s fashions. That’s not a field of study.”
“How do you know?” Sanja asks.
“Morgan and Linus, why don’t you have a subject?”
“The thing is, we couldn’t agree on math or physics. And Morgan’s brother was going to be on TV,” Linus explains.
All these excuses, Steffi writes. She hears music in her head. The same bass walking line as in the song “Klarinarrinetten,” but with a different melody:
Everything they taught you about duty
You forget the moment you see beauty.
“What about you, Steffi?”
Steffi gasps and hides the piece of paper under her palm.
“I don’t know,” she says. She doesn’t want anyone to think the lyrics she’s just written are about her. “I can’t think of anything.”
Bengt turns and walks to his lectern.
“Anyone without a topic in either the field of social studies or science will choose from a list I have here. On Thursday, you will hand me your project thesis and your outlines. Do you remember what a thesis is?”
Steffi is given a choice between global warming, Sweden during the Second World War, and primates. Her choice is easy. Since they already call her slut, dyke, disgusting, there’s no way she’s going to add monkey to that list. She puts her name next to Sweden in the Second World War. She thinks about the last line of lyrics rounding out the verse:
All these excuses you give
You’re forgetting how to live.
Drums sound a whirl in her head. She knows the refrain will come to her easily now.
* * *
She decides to show her lyrics to her bass teacher. Torkel is not really a bass teacher. He has a double bass that cost nine thousand Swedish crowns and a wife who keeps him in Björke against his will. After a lesson with him, Steffi knows more than anyone needs to know about his brown garden furniture, his unusual vision problems, and his aversion to green grapes, but not much more about playing the bass.
Torkel purses his lips as he reads her lyrics and he nods. “Excuses drive me crazy, too. Let’s see … last week you were supposed to practice page thirty-four.”
“As well as practice walking bass lines.”
“Yes, sure, but right now we need to concentrate on your lesson. I don’t imagine you of all people want to start making excuses, right?”
He winks at her, as if they shared an understanding of her lyrics. Steffi folds up the sheet of paper and opens her exercise book to page thirty-four.
By the time they’ve finished the lesson, there’s only five more minutes to practice a walking bass line. She shows Torkel the transition from B to E that she’s discovered, but he glances up at the clock and just says, “That’s good.”
She knows what he really means by that. She’s not stupid. Read music or die.
* * *
These days, Alvar watches the pedestrian path outside his window more often than he used to. He finds he’s somehow turned into one of the other pitiful old folks in this building whose happiest moments of the day come when they see a cat walking by or a child on a scooter. The main difference is that he knows exactly who he’s looking for. The other day Steffi had come walking by with a clarinet case sticking out of the top of her backpack. For some reason, this made him extremely happy. Today Steffi had the case for her bass guitar strapped to her back.
Alvar opens his window slightly and turns up the music. Today he’s not playing Povel Ramel, but he still thinks he can catch the girl’s attention. He’s pleased when Steffi stops abruptly in the middle of the path and turns her face toward him. He waves enthusiastically.
She stomps into his room like a near sighted buffalo, a bundle of teenager with bangs, but he can tell she feels more at home in his place than many other visitors. Herrera is a Spanish name, and she’s probably South American, which would explain her black hair and eyes. She wriggles off the instrument straps and looks at him.
“Hi.”
“I see you’ve brought some accompaniment.”
She smiles slightly and gestures toward it. “My bass guitar.”
He doesn’t say anything and eventually she explains.
“I want to practice walking bass lines, but my teacher doesn’t like them.”
Alvar thinks that over and finds himself indignant.
“Nothing has changed in seventy years! So what does he want you to do instead of walking bass lines?”
“Practice. Learn how to read music.”
An echo of her sullen voice hangs in the room. Alvar lifts an eyebrow.
“So?”
“So what?”
He nods toward the bass guitar in its case. “Well, then?”
It turns out that playing walking bass lines for Alvar is totally different than playing them for Torkel. Alvar grins with his clownish mouth and beats a rhythm with his forefinger against the arm of his chair.
“Then I wanted to go from E to A, and it just sounded stupid,” she tells him, finding encouragement in the old man’s rhythmically nodding head.
She shows him what she’s tried and he pulls in his lower lip while he thinks. Then he suggests she go up the scale instead of down.
“You don’t have to be afraid of going back and forth,” he says, moving his hands as if he were the one fingering the guitar.
Steffi tries his suggestion. Much better. She is hit with an idea and tries it out, with the next-to-last note on B, and waits for Alvar’s reaction.
“Oh yeah, you’re swinging now. Try it again from the top.”
“From the top?”
“From the beginning. When you play in a band, you say ‘from the top.’”
Steffi listens to the beat he gives for a second and then starts from the beginning, from the top, and Alvar increases the tempo the second time around. It’s a quick walking bass line that could fit into any jazz piece, though not an amplified one, since it could be heard only if the rest of the band were silent.
“You’ve got a bit,” Alvar says.
“You mean a song?”
“The guys in the studio called it a ‘bit.’” Alvar grins. There’s a break in his warm Värmland dialect. “At first, it used to be they said a lot of things I didn’t catch. It started with the man on the train calling me a jazz cat.”
* * *
It started when the man on the train, smiling with practiced nonchalance, wearing a hat that shadowed his face just like a film star, called him a jazz cat.
During the rest of the trip to Stockholm, Alvar’s vocabulary about swing music was so stuffed with new w
ords he started having trouble remembering them all. The man with the clarinet seemed to be amused by his intensity, and he began to look at Alvar with deepening interest.
“So, hey, where’re you going to crash? I’m sure you don’t have enough cash to stay at a hotel.”
Alvar pretended to think about that while he tried to figure out what crash meant here. It seemed logical enough, though the man started to smile at him and the blond girl had fastened admiring eyes on the clarinetist.
“Cash. That means money, you see. Better pick that word up before you roll into the big city. Somebody might ask you to loan him some cash, and you’ll know enough to say ‘not a chance.’”
“Not a chance,” Alvar repeated.
The girl giggled. She’d spent a lot of time giggling on this train trip.
“Of course he will be staying with his aunt,” the same old woman exclaimed. “And you should be ashamed of trying to get a decent young man involved in your … business.”
The man lifted his eyebrows at her angry face. “What? There’s nothing immoral with a bit of va-va-va-voom.”
He sang the last bit like Alice Babs, with a wink to the girl. “And as far as my … ahem … business goes? I don’t stick my nose into your business, so why do you care about mine? At least I’m not shooting at an innocent Norwegian when I play my music.”
Alvar took in a quick breath. His mother had always said you never know, you never know, who was listening when you talked about the war. Father never even called it the war, just the unhappy events. And here was this man with his clarinet who’d just suggested a fellow passenger sided with the Germans. In Sweden, now, both being a friend of the Germans or an enemy of the Germans could get you into trouble, depending on who was listening. Alvar was not the only one in the compartment who shifted uneasily in his seat.
The clarinetist continued without missing a beat. “In addition, I have not invited young Alvar here to join my band, or even to help out as a roadie. Just to get some insight into swing. If he wants more of that, he has to ask me himself.”
Alvar’s heart skipped. All he had to do now was ask! He braced himself against the unkind stares of the probably German-friendly passengers as well as the angry woman whose iron grip still held the young woman’s shoulder. But how could he do it without looking ridiculous?
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