“Does this look like Söder to you?”
“I wouldn’t know. I just got here yesterday.”
The boy put his hand behind his ear. “You said you were born yesterday?”
Alvar felt his spirits sink. He’d had no idea that people in Stockholm would be this unfriendly; he’d just assumed people said that about the city. He rubbed his fist across his forehead and wondered just how long his walk would be.
“Oh, just hop on,” the boy said. “I’ll take you part of the way. Then you won’t keep looking like a lost sheep.” He winked. Alvar felt his heart warm from the offer. Not everybody in Stockholm was mean. As he got up on the platform, the bike almost fell over from his weight. They both laughed at his further attempts.
“You better pedal and let me sit,” the boy decided. “I’m smaller. But make sure nothing happens to the bike, or you’ll owe me a hundred fifty in cash.”
Alvar was pretty sure the boy was talking about money. “You mean dough?”
The boy laughed out loud. He tried to imitate Alvar’s Värmland pronunciation. “You’re a good one, aren’t you? Start pedaling and I’ll tell you when to turn.”
Riding a bike in the middle of Stockholm was really different from riding a bike in Björke. Alvar had thought all the straight streets and smooth pavements would make it easier, but he found he had to zigzag around huge carts of wood, other errand boys on bikes zooming along at full speed, not to mention being alert for the sound of vehicles coming out of side streets.
“There were more cars before the war,” the boy yelled back to him from his seat on the platform. “Now they can’t even buy wood gas. To the left! Now to the right!” Then he yelled, “STOP!”
Alvar had to brake to avoid crashing into a streetcar. They started over a bridge.
“We’re in the Old Town now,” the boy informed him. Then suddenly he leaped off the package holder so quickly that Alvar almost fell over.
“Here’s my stop. Just keep walking along that way for a bit.”
The boy took the handlebars and Alvar held out his hand.
“Thank you so much.”
The boy grinned as he shook hands, as if there was something funny about Alvar’s formality. Alvar realized that all he needed to say next time was thanks.
As he was crossing the bridge from the Old Town to Södermalm, Alvar felt it. The sun shone brightly on him and on the bridges all around, the streetlights, the melting snow, and he was now a part of it, part of the capital city. Nobody could tell, just by looking, that he’d arrived from the countryside yesterday. He stopped and waited casually for the streetcar to pass by, as if he’d been doing it all his life, even though the streetcar still scared him a bit. Then he entered Södermalm.
To his left was the water. Right in front of him was a huge contraption, an elevator? To his right, streetcars ran in both directions. He never imagined there could be so many. All the pedestrians walked among the tracks without a trace of fear. Alvar could not see what Aunt Hilda had been so afraid of, but then she was an old lady.
An unbelievably beautiful girl in a cape and hat walked past. Alvar stared at her, but could not say a word. Instead, in what had almost become routine, he stopped another errand boy, who pointed him in the right direction. Barely twenty minutes later, he was standing on Åsö Street.
— CHAPTER 8 —
The buildings on Åsö Street were wonders of stone. People sure liked stone in Stockholm. But the street lacked both the detailed lion heads and extravagant entrances Alvar had seen on Tor Street and in the Old Town. As if to compensate for the lack of decoration in the architecture, the walls gave off the smell of beer, which, for many of the district’s inhabitants, was very pleasant.
After hearing Aunt Hilda’s condemnation of the people of Söder, Alvar was expecting to see ragged people and dirty beggar children, but the people he saw were surprisingly well dressed. Most people in Stockholm were well dressed, he realized. He was the only person wearing a knitted cap. Everyone else had hats that could hardly warm their ears. In the Old Town, he’d seen ladies with muffs.
Alvar thought about all this as he made his way to 140 Åsö Street, not an easy task, since not all of the buildings were numbered. When he found the right building, he realized that Erling the clarinet player had given him only an address. Not a time. Not his last name. In Björke that would have been good enough, but in Stockholm the buildings were fortresses. Alvar searched from window to window in the impenetrable stone wall above his head. When a loud voice called from the doorway, he jumped.
“Whaddaya want?”
A man, about fifty, with a fleshy lower lip so big Alvar couldn’t help staring, even though he knew it was not polite.
“I…,” he stammered. He forced his eyes up from the man’s lip to his eyes. “I … am looking for Mr.… Erling, who plays clarinet.”
The man sucked in half his lower lip as he considered Alvar’s statement.
“Mr. Erling,” he said with irony. “So you’re one of them.”
One of the musicians in Stockholm. Yes, he could say wholeheartedly that he was one of the jazz musicians in Stockholm.
“That’s right.”
The man took a step toward Alvar, who instinctively backed up.
“I don’t know what devilish amusement you’re looking for, or what small town you’ve crawled out of, but if you think I don’t recognize those noisemakers from far off, you’re dumber than you look. Now get lost!”
Alvar lost heart. He feared he might lose jazz music forever here in the big city. His eyes slid back to the man’s monstrous lip in spite of himself. Then, in the middle of this tense situation, an angelic voice broke in.
“Now, Andersson!”
Right before Alvar’s eyes a fascinating transformation took place. The man’s lip changed from a piece of hanging flesh to a heartfelt smile.
“Oh, hello, miss!” His voice had a warmth that excluded the single young man from Värmland.
Alvar felt himself blushing even before he turned around.
The girl looked older than the sound of her voice. Twenty-one, maybe even twenty-five. Hard to tell, the voice sounded youthful, but her clothes were those of a young woman, a lady. Her eyes were gray. Alvar hadn’t ever realized it before, but his favorite eye color in a young lady was definitely gray. He found that his favorite color in a young lady’s hair was auburn, and his favorite nose was a button with a touch of red from the cold air. Alvar couldn’t get a word out, but luckily he didn’t need to.
“This snip of a boy says he’s with the band.”
The young lady looked Alvar up and down while his heart thumped ever faster. Single girls had never looked at him like that, and certainly no city girl with gray eyes and a real hat.
She smiled. “Yes, he is,” she said, and she took his arm.
She took his arm! His own arm! It felt warm beneath hers, and she’d just saved him from Flabby Lip of Söder. He was just seventeen, perhaps even naïve, but he knew that his violently beating heart would belong to her for all time. Whatever her name was.
She led him down the basement stairs and through an iron door. Once his eyes had adjusted, he found paradise within.
* * *
“What was it?”
“What was what?”
“Paradise. What made that room paradise? You said paradise was behind the iron door and then you stopped talking.”
“I found myself there, once again, just for a moment.”
“So tell me!”
“It was the band. I mean, no players yet, because we were the first ones to show up, Anita and I.”
“I knew it was going to be Anita!”
Alvar gives her a broad smile, his eyes turning as dreamy as a cherub’s on a bookmark.
“Who else was it going to be?”
“So, what did it look like? Describe paradise!”
“There was a trombone. An upright bass. A piano and a few chairs. All in a rather cramped and chilly basemen
t space.”
Steffi could see it in her imagination. A room resembling the school’s music room, but without the chill, of course. Yes, she could understand the music room as a warmer kind of paradise, at least when no other kids are there. The music had ended, so Steffi decides to play “What Wonderful Feels Like” again.
“So was that where Povel Ramel rehearsed?”
Alvar takes his thoughts away from paradise and focuses on Steffi.
“On Åsö Street? No, no, no, not there. He was already quite famous by then. This band was not Povel Ramel’s band.”
“But you told me Anita was there when Povel recorded?”
“Yes, but that was later.”
“Did you meet him then?”
Alvar gets up from the plaid armchair. “Nothing against Povel Ramel, but he comes into the story later. Let me play something for you.…”
The song cuts off as Alvar gently lifts the needle from the disc. He holds the record by its edges, sliding it into its cardboard sleeve. He takes out another record from a different cardboard sleeve and puts it on the gramophone.
First there’s just crackling and then the woodwinds kick in. Alvar’s fingers begin to tap on the table and his thin body sways in time as the clarinet rises and falls in ever-wilder leaps. Steffi closes her eyes. Sitting next to seventeen-year-old Alvar and listening to an untamed clarinet on the radio while war rumbled through Europe and the cars in Stockholm had to use wood gas, whatever that was.
“Gösta Törner’s Orchestra,” Alvar says. Steffi opens her eyes. “Listen carefully!”
From the clarinet solo, the music merges into a jazz arrangement that in turn is broken, almost attacked, by a different, deeper solo instrument.
“It’s like society,” Steffi says.
“Like society?”
“Think about it. We do stuff together, like class or work, but it’ll never amount to much unless we get to do our own solos, too. Or maybe I should say, it won’t be anything special.”
Alvar smiles and seems about to laugh. “Anita would have liked you.”
“It’s not going to amount to much unless we get to do our own solos,” Steffi repeats, just to taste the sound of her sentence once more.
“You know, that’s not a bad comparison. That’s how it was. And that’s why people liked jazz so much.”
“Yeah,” Steffi says as she keeps time to the music with her bass-player fingers.
The saxophone glides along in the middle of its solo. It’s sighing. She wonders if she could do the same thing with a clarinet. If she ever learns how to play clarinet.
* * *
Once Steffi is back in her room, she realizes she can make all kinds of sounds with a clarinet. She just never thought about it before. Now she keeps time with her foot and listens to the rest of the band in her head as she whines, peeps, gasps with the clarinet and smiles each time she discovers something new so that air puffs from the sides of her mouth. She’s still having trouble figuring out the notes, but she’s starting to find them more easily.
The door is ripped open and Julia is staring at her. “What the hell, Steffi?”
“What’s wrong?”
Julia rolls her eyes, tosses her hair back, and sighs as loud as she can as some kind of protest. Steffi watches her.
“What do you think you’re doing! You sound like you’re murdering animals in here!”
“I have to practice!”
“Practice? For what?” Julia furrows her brows and glares at her. She always has a great store of expressions to draw from.
“To get better!”
“OK, you’re not getting better. Pappa is covering his ears back in the kitchen.”
“No, he’s not!”
Although Steffi is pretty sure nobody’s holding their ears in pain back in the kitchen, she’d lost the thread of enthusiasm once Julia had left her room. It wasn’t just Julia’s declaration that Steffi would never be better. Julia doesn’t know anything about music. She thinks Rihanna is the height of musical talent and she wouldn’t even get it if Lucky Millinder stood in front of her in person with his entire band. Julia wouldn’t hesitate to storm into Lucky Millinder’s rehearsal hall and demand to know if he’s murdering animals.
But Lucky would never feel any doubt and sadness inside while Julia glowered at him like that, saying he’d never be better. He wouldn’t give a damn about what she thought.
After taking a few deep breaths, Steffi begins to feel like Lucky. If this was what was going to happen each time she tried out a new sound, she’d just have to find her own space to rehearse. She feels it all the way to her stomach—it feels like a basement stairway at 140 Åsö Street. She moves her fingers along all the silver pads of the clarinet, looking at her electric bass leaning against her blue desk, and then she stretches her neck so she can meet her own gaze in the mirror. She is Steffi and she needs a paradise.
— CHAPTER 9 —
As if someone had heard Steffi’s prayer for a paradise, Karro is absent the next day. Sanja says, in a loud voice so everyone can hear, that Karro has the stomach flu, and she adds that Karro probably caught it from Steffi’s dandruff. Some of the kids giggle and Sanja smiles, pleased, but it seems more routine than anything else, just to keep the system in place, lacking the malevolence of what Karro would say.
It’ll be an easy day. Steffi does her math problems. She eats potatoes and a beef patty just like everyone else. She almost feels like one of them.
During music class, two boys mumble their way through their reports on Johann Sebastian Bach and Claude Debussy. When Linus falls asleep, the rest of class 9B is roused to a pitch of cheerfulness that they manage, with some effort, to keep up for the rest of the period. Then school is out. The music room turns quiet as all the pushing, shoving, teasing, and giggling ebbs off into the hallway.
Jake looks at Steffi. “Do you want something?”
“Can I stay here for a while?”
“Stay here?”
“Just until you’re ready to leave. I want to practice the bass.”
Jake thinks that over and then says, “I’ll lock you in. I’ll be back in an hour. But you’re responsible for everything in here.”
As he walks past, he winks and whispers he’s really not supposed to do this. She doesn’t know what to reply, so she just plugs in her bass guitar and tries to look as grateful as possible.
* * *
A piano, a box of tambourines, and three guitars on the walls. The strong lights make the room look like a classroom, but it is not. On a whim, she turns off the lights. The instruments become shadows and a streetlamp outside turns into a soft spotlight. The bass makes the floor vibrate—Jake’s amplifier is seven times more powerful than hers. She decides to play a walking bass line. She doesn’t have Povel Ramel’s music with her, so she follows it in her head. Then she tries a new line. From A to D. To E. Back to D. She hums along, even though it doesn’t sound in tune. She keeps time with her foot and suddenly knows she’s playing the blues. Steffi, a blues musician standing in the dark. She plays A—D—E—D and finds new ways to scale between them. She stops for syncopation, slides up to the highest A and then back down. A melody starts to emerge from all the darkness, and she puts down the bass and pulls the clarinet from her backpack. She almost gets the melody, even though it doesn’t sound all that good.
She’s about to return to bass playing when she hears Jake’s key in the door. He laughs when he turns on the light and sees her standing there in the bright light.
“Still here, I see.”
“I just wanted it dark.”
“All right.”
Her awkward words hang in the air. Steffi gestures vaguely toward the clarinet.
“Can I borrow it again?”
“You’re teaching yourself to play it?”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“You can keep it until May. Then I need it back for the eighth graders.”
Until May! That’s forever!
�
��Thanks!”
* * *
There’s no good way to describe her feelings to Alvar. He’s sitting in his armchair and is waving his fingers as he always does when he listens to Totty Wallén. His head has tremors like old people’s bodies sometimes do, but if you look closely, you can see he’s nodding in time to the music. Steffi is holding on to the feeling of playing her bass in the dark, but there really is no way to explain it. Unless Alvar had already felt it himself.
“Have you ever played in the dark?”
Alvar leans forward, as if this question is of the utmost importance. He rubs his chin.
“You know, now that you’re asking, I don’t know if I’ve ever played in the light.”
He smiles, as if surprised at his own answer, and she has to smile back.
“It’s better in the dark,” she says.
“Your senses become sharper,” Alvar says. “And things that seem clear in the daylight become…”
His voice disappears down into the carpet, but she knows exactly what he means.
“… invisible,” she says. “They might as well not even be there.”
“Miss Steffi Herrera,” Alvar says. He slowly gets out of his armchair to change the record. “Sometimes you hit the nail right on the head.”
This new record crackles just like they all do, but then a guitar starts up, someone on drums, someone on bass, and someone is trilling up and down in a comfortable descant. Steffi closes her eyes and tries to follow the guitar’s melody in her mind.
“It can be like that moment I followed Anita into the basement,” Alvar says after a moment. “All I could see was her figure and the shine in her eyes.”
* * *
The darkness of the basement space allowed Alvar to see only the contours of the girl’s figure. He still didn’t know her name. Her figure, the silhouette of an upright bass, and a piano—all of this—everything he’d hoped to find in Stockholm made visible. His clumsy movements, her high heels clicking on the stone floor—they resonated in the sound boxes of the various instruments—and only a misty ray of light from a gap in the blackout curtain reminded him vaguely of the world outside. The girl’s smooth walk as she moved to the back of the room and turned on the light. A bare bulb revealed a trombone and a pair of chairs next to the piano. Alvar felt sure that it must also reveal his palpable fascination with the girl. He turned aside to pick up the trombone to minutely study all its parts and attachments. All he knew about brass and wind instruments was that they could be taken apart and some were called horns. But girls, for their part, knew nothing of instruments.
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