“Nice horn,” he said. He used the same tone his father used to judge a piece of lumber.
“You think?”
“Well, nice is as nice does … a good instrument.”
“The slide is broken. That’s why it’s just sitting there. You play anything?”
She was helping him save face by changing the subject. His own mother did that to save face for his father sometimes. This girl was understanding, and he was grateful.
“I play guitar.”
“I didn’t know they were going to take on a guitar player.”
Alvar was saved from answering as Erling and a strange man clattered down the stairs and into the room.
Erling laughed in surprise when he saw Alvar. He clapped Alvar on the shoulder like a brother.
“Hey, Big Boy, we were just talking about you. And I see you’ve met Anita.”
Anita? Could there be a more beautiful name? Alvar formed her name in his mouth without moving his lips. He was torn between wanting to be alone with Anita and relief that he was not.
The man sat down at the piano and played a chord. The instrument was not in tune, but with jazz that wasn’t important. Exact pitch was out. The wild and untamed was in, and right now it was making itself at home in a basement with three musicians and a goddess. In five seconds Erling had his clarinet together and then he slid into the music with one of his wild glides. Nothing came from a page. It was just in the air.
The dim light made the corners of the basement dark and blurry like a photograph. Anita was watching the man’s hands on the piano, so Alvar could devote himself wholeheartedly to watching her while the jazz music seeped into every part of his body. He observed Anita’s hands, narrow except for the joint where the thumb was attached, with slightly pointed fingertips, and they were playing … yes, playing on her knee, as if she had an invisible piano. Alvar glanced down at his own hands and saw they were also playing. His left hand was pressing invisible guitar chords nobody could hear. Erling and his friend were the audible orchestra, Alvar thought, while he and Anita were the secret one.
The only indication of the passing time was the dimming light coming through the gap in the window. Alvar glanced up and realized it was dark. Erling had already played “Summertime,” “I Got Rhythm,” and a number of other bits and pieces. Time had gotten lost in some other place. Alvar realized he’d have to walk-run to make it back to Tor Street with a suitable lie to remain in Aunt Hilda’s good graces. He couldn’t keep anxiety from bubbling up as he reluctantly muttered that he had to head home right away.
Happily, Anita leaped up, too.
“Oh, my goodness!” she exclaimed, hurriedly gathering up her things. As if she were a normal person and not a goddess.
* * *
They ran through the streets of Stockholm—they flew. He wobbling like a reckless daddy longlegs, she with her scarf and coat fluttering behind her like butterfly wings. They ran side by side, panting and laughing, her eyes playful. But an anxious look came over her as she caught sight of a clock on the facade of a building. A moment later, she swung up onto one of those dangerous streetcars and she looked down at him commandingly.
“You can take this one as far as Central Station.” She smiled.
She might have said the streetcar would take them all the way to Germany and he would not have hesitated. Without any money for a ticket, he found himself beside her among all the other Stockholmers who had places to go and they rolled through a blacked-out Stockholm.
“Hasse Kahn is playing at Nalen on Saturday,” she whispered into his ear. “You going?”
He could only nod. To be on the safe side, he nodded a second time more energetically. She laughed.
“Great! Here’s where you get off. Vasa Street is that way.”
Alvar obediently stepped off with only a vague idea of where Anita had pointed, still feeling the breath from her words slowly evaporating from his skin. It was as he’d always believed: Stockholm was filled with miracles. First, no conductor had come to check for tickets. Second, he still had the package of 250 grams of coffee to placate his widowed Aunt Hilda so she wouldn’t want to write home to his mother. And now all he had to do was find out what that Nalen could be and where it was.
* * *
“It was a nightclub, right?”
Steffi risks a guess, since she’s read thousands of times that Povel Ramel had played at Nalen.
“You could call it that. It was much bigger than the jazz nightclubs you find around today.”
“You don’t find them in Björke.”
“I tend to prefer … well, I can’t really say I prefer the bigger or the smaller venues. It’s hard to compare the two. It’s…” Alvar makes a face and then shakes his head as he smiles. “But it’s probably been at least fifteen years since I’ve been to one.”
“Are there any jazz places in Värmland?”
Alvar stares right into her eyes and then he winks.
“One thing’s for sure. Jazz is everywhere and it will never die. Now, I no longer know exactly where they are, because the nurses around here don’t really care about jazz and wouldn’t know but … I’m sure you could find some syncopated rhythm as close as Karlstad.”
Steffi laughs and she’s just about to tell Alvar about the walking bass line she’d been working on today when there’s a knock on the door and a nurse peeks in.
“Time for supper,” she says.
* * *
Alvar disappears toward what must be the cafeteria. He walks steadily, almost quickly, compared to many of the shuffling old ladies and the people in wheelchairs all around him. Steffi feels a little proud; her old guy is the best old guy in this place.
As she passes the door before the entrance, it opens and a gray-haired tiny woman peers out and stares at her with a hate-filled expression. “What are you doing here?”
Steffi gulps, startled, and she takes in a breath so quickly she has to cough it back out.
“Well, what do you have to say for yourself?”
“I … I’m visiting Alvar.”
“You are not supposed to be here! Nobody wants you here!”
From the other end of the hallway, a nurse comes trotting up. “Svea!” she calls, forcing friendliness into her voice. “Svea, it’s time for supper. This girl doesn’t live here. She’s only visiting. She’s nice.”
Svea stares at Steffi. “She is NOT nice.”
“Yes, yes I am,” Steffi whispers.
“She’s a witch-spawn!” Svea hisses.
Steffi feels a lump in her throat. “I am nice,” she whispers again.
“She’s lying,” Svea says slowly, sucking on each word.
The nurse takes Svea by the shoulders, but Svea angrily shakes her off.
Steffi backs toward the exit as the nurse gives her an apologetic look. Steffi tries to smile back, although her heart is racing. Once outside, she leans back against the outer door and stares up at the apple tree’s net of snow-covered branches.
“I am nice,” she says, half aloud.
Nobody answers. The snow doesn’t move from the branches, the clouds are motionless in the sky, and nothing contradicts her as she stands on the wooden stairway of the retirement home. Perhaps this means she’s right.
Her walking bass line comes back, and she thinks about it the whole way home. A—D—E—D with syncopation. You can’t live without syncopation.
— CHAPTER 10 —
She has a brilliant idea, but her Pappa doesn’t get it. He’s even pretty upset. Steffi hears it as his v’s turn to b’s and then sees his expression change. “What are you saying?” he exclaims, and his usual calm eyes have become fiery. “How did this man contact you?”
“He’s my friend, even though he’s really old.”
“You may not talk to this man ever again! Do you hear me? Next time he tries to talk to you, just say no! Tell him your pappa refuses to let you meet him! Do you understand?”
Steffi is filled with rage and can feel
irritating tears form. “Do YOU understand?” she asks, and is amazed at her loud voice.
“Going to Karlstad with a man is OUT OF THE QUESTION!”
It’s impossible to have a discussion with Eduardo Herrera. Hard to believe he and she are even related, when she understands so much and he understands so little. Steffi wants to scream “OH, YOU!” like Julia does, but decides not to sink so low. Instead, she stamps into her room and slams the door behind her as hard as she can. She lies on her bed with her bass. A—D—E—D. Syncopates every other downbeat. A walking line with half notes at times, skips at other times. She needs to go to a jazz club. Anyone with ears could understand that. She needs to go with Alvar.
The door opens without a knock. Steffi shows her irritation over this invasion of her privacy by hitting the D string especially hard. She discovers, to her surprise, a slap bass.
“Pappa’s really angry with you,” Julia says, leaning on Steffi’s wall. “Because you want to go to Karlstad with that guy.”
Steffi sighs and hits the D string again to get that slap bass effect. It echoes through her room. “He’s not a guy.”
“I know. It’s some disgusting old creep. That’s what Pappa means by ‘that man.’”
Julia imitates their father so perfectly it’s a bit funny. Steffi can’t help but smile.
“He’s not a disgusting creep. He’s just an old man.”
“Of course it’s disgusting. You shouldn’t meet up with some strange old man. Do you know, my friend Fanny was almost raped by some old guy.”
Steffi hadn’t known that.
“Alvar is not like that.”
“How do you know? Steffi, really, you don’t know anything, even if you think you do.”
“By old, I mean really old, even older than Grandma and Grandpa. He lives at Sunshine Retirement Home and he sits around listening to music on his gramophone. That’s how I know he’s all right.”
Julia lifts an eyebrow in her typical skeptical manner that so few people can imitate. “You say he’s at Sunshine Home?”
Steffi nods, closes her eyes, and ignores the fact she’s revealed so much about Alvar to her crazy sister. Her crazy sister in turn laughs out loud and thinks it’s hilarious that Steffi is hanging out at a retirement home visiting a really old man. When Julia goes away, Steffi keeps practicing slap bass. It sounds best on her E string, but she decides to practice on all four strings.
Two minutes later, there’s a knock on the door. People never leave you alone in the Herrera family. Pappa comes in with a thoughtful look on his face.
“So that man,” he begins. “Julia tells me he’s retired?”
“Yep.”
“Living at Sunshine Home? A really old, old man?”
Steffi silently moves her fingers over the fingerboard.
“He was seventeen in 1942.”
Pappa nods and Steffi can tell he’s counting in his head. He sits down beside her, and she claps the bass to her stomach.
“I misunderstood,” he apologizes, and his normal, warm, fatherly voice is back. “But I don’t understand how you came to visit Sunshine Home. Aren’t you kind of young?” He winks.
He always makes these kinds of bad jokes. Only Edvin thinks they’re funny.
“I was mature for my age, so they let me in,” Steffi replies.
Pappa laughs and runs his hand across her hair.
“Stephanita, let me talk to him myself, and then we’ll see about a trip to Karlstad.”
She smiles as he gets up. She’s already playing A—D—E—D. Before Pappa closes the door, he turns and says, “You can thank your sister.”
* * *
But when Steffi and her father visit the retirement home, nobody opens Alvar’s door. Steffi knocks again, a little louder. Perhaps Alvar is taking a nap. But the door stays closed and no jazz music is slipping out of the keyhole. Pappa looks at her.
“Should we ask a nurse?”
“That’s a good idea,” Steffi replies.
“There’s one who’s nice.”
“Just one?”
“And watch out if we run into Svea. She’s a little, you know, not right in the head.”
She grimaces and Pappa nods.
“You know this place pretty well.”
“A little bit.”
They run into the strict nurse, but this time she smiles and reaches to shake hands with Pappa. When they ask about Alvar, she points to the cafeteria.
“He didn’t tell us he was expecting visitors.”
“Maybe he forgot,” Pappa says.
“Forgetfulness is big around here,” the nurse says and laughs. Pappa laughs with her.
They find Alvar in the corner of the cafeteria. He’s at a table with a number of old ladies, but when he spots Steffi, he stands up courteously, as if she were a foreign dignitary. As someone takes them to a table for visitors, a gray huddle with their backs toward them turn around to look and one of them points a bony finger at Steffi.
“YOU!” she hisses, but Steffi doesn’t get the shivers this time.
“That’s Svea,” she whispers to her father.
“You shouldn’t be here!” Svea screams and two nurses try to distract her attention and calm her down.
That doesn’t work until Alvar walks over and bends down to look her in the eyes.
“We don’t scream here,” he says gently.
Svea stares back a moment in defiance and confusion. Then she falls silent. “You’re not my father,” she says, but that’s all.
They are escorted quickly to another room. In one corner there’s a closed piano with a vase of flowers on top. The piano looks untouched, as if it had become a sculpture instead of an instrument. The three sit down together. Steffi thinks that Alvar looks like Dopey in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His ears are so big. She wonders if Pappa might think Alvar has dementia, even though he doesn’t.
“Is this where you usually visit?” Pappa asks.
Steffi shakes her head. “No, we’re usually in Alvar’s room.”
“I see. And what…” Pappa’s question stops in the middle, but Alvar replies anyway.
“We listen to one record after another, just like candy, so to speak,” Alvar says. He has a sly smile. “Bebop, swing, cool jazz … good times.”
“Ragtime, even though it’s not really jazz,” Steffi says.
“It’s a good base for further education,” Alvar says, looking straight at Pappa. “Ragtime was the beginning of it all. So we can’t ignore ragtime.”
“No, of course not,” Pappa says. He spreads his hands wide, as if he’d never even think of making fun of ragtime.
“And we talk about things that happened in 1942,” Steffi says.
“Like what?”
“Like there were piles of wood in the streets of Stockholm back in those days,” Steffi says.
“During the war,” Alvar says. “We didn’t have enough coal then.”
“Even if Sweden wasn’t in the war,” Pappa remarks. “Same thing in Cuba. No matter who’s fighting, the people are the ones who take the blows.”
Alvar says it was probably worse for the Cubans during the Cuban missile crisis than for Swedes going without coffee during the Second World War.
Pappa nods but says it was probably the same. The lords start the wars; the people starve. They discuss war for a while. Alvar mentions the German soldiers in Värmland, and Pappa talks about his parents fleeing Cuba, and how he had to live with cousins until he was reunited with his parents in Sweden.
Steffi’s heard it all before, but it’s more interesting when he’s telling it to someone outside the family. She herself has no war stories to tell, but she realizes she knows more about Pappa’s than Alvar does and more about Alvar’s than Pappa.
“The good thing back then was jazz,” she says at last. “People got to play jazz even though it was wartime.”
“That’s right,” Alvar says. “Although even back then, not everybody liked jazz.”
&nb
sp; * * *
Not everybody liked jazz, even back then. Aunt Hilda hated jazz music more than she hated the war.
“Jazz music is another kind of war,” she said whenever the subject came up. “It’s a war for the soul.”
Alvar tried to tell her that jazz wasn’t dangerous, but then she looked at him with such disbelief he was forced to change the subject and tell her that he had the opportunity to run an errand for Åkesson. Maybe he’d be good enough to become an errand boy. He’d soon be able to help out with the rent, if he got the job. “On Saturday,” he said, and he turned his face away so she wouldn’t catch him in the lie and see him blush. He told her he was supposed to inventory a load of potatoes arriving that evening. With this lie behind him, Alvar headed out to find Nalen for the first time.
Aunt Hilda had declared that the ultimate rat’s nest of vice in Söder was found in Nalen. Thanks to her angry finger pointing to the ad in the newspaper, Alvar made out that the address was Regering Street 74, but once he got near and asked people, he realized that Nalen as a concept was better understood than the actual address. As he got closer, he found himself in the middle of a stream of perfumed people heading in the same direction like a school of fish. They were all dressed to the nines. The boys had tailored suits and ties, and if they had no hats, they’d slicked their hair back with some kind of grease, so they seemed like they’d just stepped out of the bath. Alvar touched his own hair, the same hair his mother had cut, and now it felt like hay sticking out in all directions. Perhaps they wouldn’t even let him in.
Wonderful Feels Like This Page 6
