There was no way he could even describe the girls. Alvar was right behind one of them, and the scent of her perfume drew him into her aura. Her skirt twitched and her high heels clicked against the sidewalk as she prettily stamped her feet in place to keep warm. The line to get in was long, and he was able to remain, admiringly, behind her for a long time. Of course, they weren’t going to let him in. Looking back, he saw that the line was getting longer. The boy behind him wore a wide-brimmed hat, and he sounded just like Erling.
“He wasn’t ready, but I didn’t hesitate. I said I took care of your girl when you were away. It’ll cost next to nothing, two bits.”
The company around the boy laughed heartily. He caught sight of Alvar. “Well, hello, you look like something the cat dragged in. No offense.”
“I’m Alvar Svensson.” Alvar held out his hand.
The boy—or perhaps the man, they both shared that indeterminate age—shook it.
“Don’t be mad, but you really stick out in this crowd.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“But you’re here for Nalen? Or did you just get lost?”
His friends laughed, but he shushed them and then asked the question again.
“Yes, if they let me in,” Alvar replied. “Because, you know, I do look a little different.”
“But you’re a musician, aren’t you?” the boy said with a wink.
“How did you know?”
“So, hello, you are a musician! I mean, you could always tell them you’re one. They do look pretty much like anybody. I can barely understand what you’re saying, no offense. Where’re you from?”
When the group got close to the door, they told the doorman that this was “the famous jazz guitarist from Värmland, Alvar Svensson.” He paid his crown and was in.
He’d thought Nalen would be as big as a coffee shop, but it turned out to be twenty times bigger. Heat, sweat, music, and cigarette smoke embraced him as he walked into the hallway while young men and women swirled around him in all directions. He took off his woolen cap and leaned against the wall to ponder his chances of finding Anita in this crowd. They seemed minute. From the back, all of the girls looked like Anita, but from the front none did. Alvar decided to just follow the music, as he’d always done.
A twelve-piece band was playing the wonderful sounds Alvar had, up to that moment, heard only on the radio or the gramophone. Eight horns, one pianist, one drummer, one guitar player, one bass player—all live and focused on their work. The drummer’s head nodded in time to the beat, the pianist sometimes frowned and sometimes smiled from ear to ear, and the horns stood up each time they had solos, so the band never seemed to be still for a moment. Alvar’s body leaped. If jazz was in a war over human souls, he was already lost. He wanted to be up there, part of the band; no, he’d rather be out on the dance floor with a girl, a girl whose nearness didn’t make his hands sweat. Some of the men were dancing so hard, their pomade was battling it out with their sweat and others did steps so intricate that Alvar despaired that he could never imitate them.
“Hey, you!” a familiar voice said in his ear. “Weren’t you just thinking about asking me to dance?”
Anita’s eyes were laughing as she took his huge hand in her own smaller one. All he could think was: Please, hands, don’t start sweating now! Stop it! Right now! He could picture so much sweat dripping from his pores that it dropped through Anita’s small-cupped palm, drowning the parquet wooden floor and turning it into a swimming pool.
* * *
“Thanks, that was an interesting story,” Steffi’s father says. “It must have been an exciting time.”
Steffi wants to hit him. The story wasn’t over—he’d interrupted right in the middle of all the hand sweat! She sees that Alvar has lost the thread. His gaze has returned to the table with its embroidered cloth and candlestick back in the middle of Björke.
“Yes, it was,” Alvar says.
“We don’t want to keep you too long,” Pappa says. “It was very nice to meet you.”
Steffi looks at him and then at Alvar. “Though we were going to ask—”
“We can talk about it later.” Pappa interrupts her and gives her a meaningful look.
Then Pappa goes to speak with the nurses, as if Alvar were a minor who needed permission from the strict nurse, who would say Alvar is old but not suffering from dementia and he’d be able to handle a trip to Karlstad. Steffi could have told Pappa that if he’d listen to her.
She turns back to Alvar.
“Is he going to come with you from now on?” Alvar asks, glancing over at Pappa.
“He doesn’t like jazz,” Steffi replies. “He just wanted to check you out before we could go to Karlstad.”
“You and me?”
“And Pappa. They’re having a jazz afternoon at the library.”
Alvar looks at her with one of his wry expressions and she wonders if he even knows he makes them. Maybe he was shocked to hear her plan. She hadn’t exactly hinted at it before now.
“It’s Annie Grahn’s Quartet,” she explains. “Next Sunday. With Peter Furubäck on the trumpet. That’ll be good, right?”
“Good?” Alvar says. “More like greater than great. Hey, Ulla, did you hear that?” he says to a woman in a wheelchair not far from them. “I’ve been invited to a jazz party, though at a library, not like in our day but not bad, don’t you think?”
Ulla looks up from her wheelchair and smiles. “You’re talking funny again, Alvar, but you’re sure something else. If I were only twenty … forty years younger.”
When Pappa returns, he shakes hands with Alvar. Pappa has indeed made sure that Alvar would be up to the trip to Karlstad. As if they’d all be running a triathlon. Steffi feels she’s in the gap between who Pappa thinks Alvar is, who Alvar really is, and the jazz musician he once was. The hallway smells like old people. Alvar’s nodding his head. Sometimes he does this in seven-eight time because he takes pleasure in some of the experiments with rhythm in modular jazz. Only Steffi knows this.
— CHAPTER 11 —
Semlan says that Steffi has been skipping class and it’s an issue. “You’re a smart girl,” she says. “You have to understand that your future is at stake. You’ve been absent from gym and social studies sixty percent of the time this February, which means you aren’t even passing.”
She asks why Steffi cuts class so often. Steffi tries to explain.
“I can’t concentrate because people talk about me. They’re such idiots.”
Semlan nods and swallows and mutters something about how hard it is to be young and that there’s a counselor at the school. Then she repeats that Steffi is an intelligent girl. She has a good chance of getting into a good school if she just would make an effort these last few months. Semlan doesn’t know that Steffi plans to be a jazz musician and therefore doesn’t need a good grade in social studies. Steffi’s not about to tell her that.
“Can we agree on this?” Semlan asks, her exasperated face barely creased by a smile. “Full attendance these last months, so you give yourself … you give yourself a chance for a good final grade.”
“Except the fifteenth of March,” Steffi says. “I’ll be gone that day for an audition to see if I can get into a special gymnasium.”
“That sounds exciting,” Semlan says. “Which one is it?”
“I don’t remember.”
The music school in Stockholm has real musicians as teachers, and both Robyn and Sarah Dawn Finer had attended it. It was founded in 1993. You can study ensemble and jazz history and you get there by taking the subway to a station named Mariatorget. But her homeroom teacher doesn’t deserve to know all this. As Steffi goes out of the room, she notices Semlan pick up a trashy magazine and a piece of pastry.
* * *
Steffi doesn’t have music today, but she heads for the music room as soon as her last class lets out. She has no trouble walking right through the building, because Karro is still out with the flu. For a while the hallways
belong to everyone. Jake lets her in and lifts his hand a moment for a high five, but then he changes his mind and just winks. As soon as he leaves, Steffi turns off the lights.
She’s already beginning to get nervous about the entrance audition. The fifteenth of March is not all that far in the future, and she still doesn’t know what she’s going to play. It has to be something special, because she’s competing with kids from all over Sweden and some of them have been playing the bass since nursery school. When she thinks about this, she can’t get a note out. She stands completely silent for at least fifteen minutes, turned to stone by the thought of all those other kids who play bass far better than she does.
Well, who did Alvar think he was when he got on the train to Stockholm? You have to think you’re something in order to become something. She plays an open A. The lyrics to her song start to flow as she walks the bass up the scale.
You’ve got to believe
To be somebody,
You’ve got to believe
To be the best
You’ve got to believe
The past can’t hold you
You’ve got to believe
And keep on playing
You’ve got to believe
To be free.
She does believe in the future, doesn’t she? Even though she feels most at home back in the forties.
Her bass makes more squiggles. That’s how she describes it to herself when the bass note is broken by slides on the E string by something that feels more and more her own. Having played it a few times, her fingers move on their own, and she can feel the rhythm in her legs. First she feels it on the downbeat but then she feels it in the downbeat syncopation instead until it goes through her stomach and her back like double pulses. When she turns up the volume, the whole room vibrates. She tries the slap bass on the walking bass line and then tries it again one octave higher. Goes back to slap on the syncopation and plays softly on the curlicues/squiggles/doodles. When she opens her eyes, three boys are standing between her and the door.
It’s Kevin, Hannes, and Ville here in the music room. Jake hadn’t locked the door. They had come into her darkness and they’ll expose her now as the girl in 9B who plays the bass and hums to herself because she thinks she’s somebody. The girl they all know as worthless, whose dreams are in their hands now like a fragile eggshell.
“Damn, you’re good,” Hannes says.
Steffi gasps out her surprise at not being immediately shot down. This is even more important. If she really is good on the bass, maybe she has a chance.
“I am?”
“What’s the name of that song?”
She almost admits she’s written it herself.
Instead, she says, “It’s called ‘Believe.’ It’s in English, but there’s Swedish lyrics, too.”
Hannes takes down an electric guitar from its hanger on the wall. Steffi can hardly believe she’s standing there with Kevin, Hannes, and Ville in a dark room and they’re talking while Hannes plugs the guitar into the amp system next to her own cable.
“I wanted to check if Jake was here because I wanted to show Kevin and Ville this thing on the guitar,” Hannes explains.
Steffi starts to lift off her bass. She realizes it’s time to wake up from this dream and go home. But Hannes stops her. “You can play along, right?”
Hannes’s “thing” on the guitar is in D-minor. It’s a riff between D and A, similar to many other riffs, and he plays it well. Steffi goes along by just playing the base note of the chord so she doesn’t mess anything up for him, but Hannes smiles whenever she does a slide or an intermediate note and then she begins to add the same syncopation she was doing before they’d come in. This does make him mess up at first, but he soon understands what she’s doing and he starts to imitate it on the guitar. They’re playing in synch on the same amp and they’re so loud the cymbals on the drum kit begin to vibrate on their own. Hannes nods in time so his bangs start swinging and he smiles at her when they happen upon the same note at the same time.
Then the lights are switched on.
It’s Kevin who did it. He’s laughing without a care in the world like he’s a king, a king who never has to pretend he’s anywhere else than where he is. “I thought the lights were broken,” he says. “Didn’t you ever think to turn them on?”
Ville and Hannes grin, but Steffi doesn’t say anything.
“Wasn’t that great?” Hannes says. “Let’s try it with the drums, too. I’ll show you what I’m doing.”
Ville sits behind the drums and Kevin hangs another guitar over his shoulder. Kevin’s the one who plays lead, he explains, while Hannes shows him how to walk between D and A. They’ve named their band the Lard Heroes and they’ve already booked two shows.
“Do you know what lard means?” Hannes grins. “It means ‘fat.’”
“Grease,” Ville corrects him.
“Grease is the same as fat.”
“It’s not.”
“And of course you know the difference? Between grease and fat?”
“Yes.”
Hannes looks teasingly at Ville, the way you look at a friend you’ve known since forever. “Tell me, then.”
“Grease rhymes with cheese.”
Kevin laughs at them and hits a high D on his guitar and tries to walk it down to A. “And lard rhymes with fart,” he says.
Steffi casts a secret glance at Kevin. The corners of his mouth are turned down as he struggles with his finger placement. Not that she really cares how Karro and Sanja rank the boys, but she could never see herself being interested in this boy. Kevin was certainly not the one who had come up with the band’s name. It was too cool.
“Lard Heroes!” she says to herself, amused, and Hannes turns toward her.
“Yeah, isn’t it great?”
He’d heard her even though she’d barely spoken above a whisper.
* * *
Steffi realizes that saying Kevin plays lead guitar is more of a way to make him feel important rather than describe what he actually did.
Hannes had explained to him that the lead guitar carries the whole song while the second guitar just plays background melodies—without telling Kevin that those background melodies were actually solos. So Kevin, with great concentration showing in his eyes, plays between D-minor and A-minor while Hannes tries out new riffs on his guitar.
Steffi plays along with Hannes sometimes and at other times finds her own way, while behind them Ville does his best to find a steady rhythm on the drums.
When Kevin stops, the others stop, too, and Steffi dampens a bass note that had echoed for an embarrassingly long time. Hannes waves his hands in excitement.
“Damn! We sound really good with a bass!”
Ville agrees, and so does Kevin. They’re looking at her, and she feels so horribly visible but she still finds she’s feeling really happy. It hits her like electricity: they’re going to ask me to join their band!
“Yeah, the bass gave us what we need, didn’t it? Especially at the end. We can go places with a bass!”
Steffi’s already blushing. What is she going to say when they ask her?
“All right, then,” Hannes says. “So we’ll have to find a bass player. But he’s got to be really good!”
Her relief is, oddly, greater than her disappointment. Actually, her disappointment was more than minimal, but her relief was still bigger. It would have turned the world upside down if Steffi Herrera suddenly was playing in Kevin Storfors’s band. It would have been absurd.
As she walks home, her old walking bass line comes back to her along with the lyrics that tell her she is somebody. As the snow crunches under her feet, the song repeats itself all around her. It manifests in the blue air and holds everything a fifteen-year-old could expect from the future. It feels like another life.
— CHAPTER 12 —
It is a very well dressed man who meets them at the entrance to Sunshine Home exactly on time. His pinstriped suit is a bit roomy throug
h the shoulders and long in the trousers. He wears a hat with a narrow, straight brim, and on his feet, his polished black shoes shine. Steffi’s father looks almost shabby in comparison, even though he’s put on his stylish black leather jacket.
In the car, Pappa and Alvar discuss a politician forced from office for some reason, and it is so boring Steffi doesn’t need to pay attention. She doesn’t understand why her father picked this topic—after all, they were heading to a jazz club!
She leans forward to Alvar. “Did all the men wear hats like those at Nalen?”
“Not inside! No, no, then we’d have died of heat exhaustion. And our hats would have come flying off while we danced. Have you ever seen people dancing the jitterbug?”
“Isn’t that the one where you throw yourself around?”
Steffi had Googled jitterbug, Nalen, modular jazz, and “neat.” And once she’d even typed “Anita and Nalen” in the search engine, but only people who’d been really famous in the old days showed up.
“Did you do throw Anita around?”
“What? Throw Anita up in the air with my trembling deer legs? I told you I had sweaty palms, didn’t I? I had to discreetly wipe them off before I even tried to dance.”
* * *
Alvar tried to discreetly wipe the sweat from his palms on the cloth of Anita’s tailored dress but became ashamed when he saw a dark spot spread on her innocent back. So he took a moment to shove his hands into his pockets to absorb the wetness there, but this just made new waves of sweat pour from his palms, as if he were engaged in a matter of life and death. If he was going to dance as wildly as the other boys on the floor, his partner would eventually simply fly unhappily out of his hands, over the dance floor, and into the band.
These visions filled his mind while Anita led him directly to the middle of the dance floor. Without any warning, she simply began to move her body. He watched her as if hypnotized. The band was playing “Jazz Me Blues.” Anita’s body made the music real. Alvar had once read in a music magazine that jazz was the music of the flesh. Anita’s arms and legs moved to an internal rhythm and her eyes glittered as she looked at him and laughed.
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