“I had no idea you couldn’t dance.”
Her disappointment could be heard above the band and all that glittering throng. Alvar shook his head and swallowed as he readied to prove his manhood. “I can!”
“What did you say?”
He shook his head and looked aside to see if he could catch the steps from some other men. He tried throwing one foot forward, lifting his arms and trying to mimic the swing others around him had in their elbows. He failed dramatically. Anita was laughing even more and he caught looks from at least ten other worldly, swing-dancing girls—perhaps from the entire room. His face burned and his eyes stung as if he, a seventeen-year-old who had traveled on a train, was about to burst into tears because he couldn’t dance.
Anita laid a hand on his shoulder. She let it rest there. From her fingers calm spread bit by bit throughout his tense body until he was completely still in a wild, dancing sea of “Jazz Me Blues.”
“Right foot first,” she said, tilting her head down without looking away from his eyes. “And don’t think about the music.”
Alvar did as she said.
“And back. Once more.”
He concentrated on doing the step again.
“Now your other foot. Forward, back, forward back. Good!”
Her praise sounded like a mother’s when her child is being potty trained. But he still listened eagerly. The second round went better and he was moving in time. Even though his feet were not sliding like the others, he was now one of them. By the time they’d done the steps for the fifth time, he could feel the music. Anita laughed again and he could tell she laughed because she was happy.
She took one of his hands and he was no longer worrying about sweaty palms—they were stepping in time to the same dance. Her head nodded like his. From his perspective, they seemed to be still together while the rest of the room was whirling around them. Her eyes during the “Jazz Me Blues” became the Stockholm of his dreams—and a moment later she was gone.
Erling had grabbed Anita’s free hand and simply twirled her away into a pirouette and then lifted her high into the air. This was real jitterbug. Alvar was filled with admiration, desire, and shame thinking he’d actually attempted this dance.
“Hey, Big Boy!” Erling grinned at him. “So the boy from Värmland found his way here!”
Erling had slicked his hair in a wave and then toward the back like all the other men at Nalen. Alvar wondered what they used on their hair to get it to look like that; he’d probably have to ask somebody, a daunting task.
Erling grabbed his shoulders and turned him toward the band. “There!” he said. “I’m going to be up there one day!”
“Doing a solo?”
Erling laughed and slung his arm around Alvar’s shoulder.
“Naturally, Big Boy.”
* * *
“Weren’t you angry when Erling began to dance with Anita?”
Alvar’s smile lifts one corner of his mouth, but he doesn’t say anything.
“I would have been mad,” Steffi continues. “If I’d just begun to dance with her and then Erling butts in … I’m not so sure I like this Erling guy.”
Her father gives her an inscrutable look. Why? Because she didn’t like clarinetists who think they’re big shots?
“You’d probably have liked him if you’d met him.” Alvar laughs. “Erling had a real effect on young ladies. Older ones, too, for that matter.”
Steffi thinks about that girl magnet Kevin, who rhymes lard with fart.
“He wouldn’t on me.”
Pappa looks back at her via the rearview mirror while Alvar laughs again.
“You would have been a very special and resistant young lady! Oh, look, here we are!”
The library has come into view and they drive past it to look for a parking spot. Then they all walk back, three across. Alvar’s excitement can no longer be hidden. His old man legs, once shaky, now have a spring to them and he laughs at everything.
They find their way to the small room at the library, where a handful of people have gathered to listen to jazz. A few older guys. A blond girl with lipstick and a colorful scarf. A woman wearing a French beret. Two men with beards. And a couple dressed alike in black clothes who’d be identical if it weren’t for the man being a foot taller. The library’s chairs are arranged in neat rows. Alvar quietly makes a quip about what a nice change it is to sit on library chairs instead of retirement home chairs all day. They find places far in the back, with Steffi in the middle.
Annie Grahn’s Quartet has been around since 2008, when some jazz-loving souls found each other on a trip to Harlem and began to jam together on the plane, the representative of Karlstad Jazz Club informs them, before the quartet is allowed to take its place. The announcer adds that the quartet had been influenced by early Harlem as well as by later big stars like Norah Jones and Diana Krall, although eventually they developed their own style. This guy sure likes to talk, Steffi thinks. After giving them the Web site for the Karlstad Jazz Club and all the upcoming events, he finally beckons the musicians onstage. The quartet consists of the blond woman in the scarf, the two men with beards as well as one of the old men. This decreases the audience by almost a third.
During the first measures of the first verse, Steffi is struck by three thoughts. I’m never going to learn how to play like this! Damn! I have to learn to play like this! Then she glances at Alvar. His eyes are lit up and his head nods to the beat. He avidly follows the pianist’s keys and the singer’s dark wailing, the bassist’s quick fingers and the trumpet solo. This room should be completely filled with admiring people, with, perhaps, even a dance floor. She realizes her own head is nodding to the beat just like Alvar’s. He’s taken off his hat, and she sees he’s slicked all his remaining hair into a wave and back. She smiles, plucks up his hat, and pops it on her own head. He doesn’t notice then, but in the break between the first and second songs, he glances sideways at her and gasps, but she can’t tell if he’s just playing.
“Well, what a Nat hepcat!” He grins, speaking in the Stockholm accent he sometimes uses.
She wears the hat for the rest of the concert.
Steffi? Steffi who? Oh, her, Nalen hepcat!
* * *
The quartet pauses before playing their last song when something makes them stop. The old trumpet player waves to the man from the jazz club. They whisper together, shaking their heads and nodding. They call over the blond woman and another old man up from the audience. Something’s going on. The jazz club man then walks back through the audience, right over to them. He stops by Pappa, but he isn’t looking at him, or Steffi either.
“Are you Alvar Svensson?”
Alvar lifts his bushy white eyebrows. “In the flesh. Do we know each other?”
The man looks amazed, almost as if in religious wonder.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” he announces in a loud voice, as if everybody wasn’t already focused on them to find out what’s going on. “I have the great honor to inform you that in our audience today we have none other than the legendary jazz guitarist and bass player Alvar ‘Big Boy’ Svensson.”
All fourteen people break out in cheers. Alvar laughs nervously, elegantly bows, and Steffi could clearly see how he must have blushed as a seventeen-year-old boy in the big city. They escort him to the stage and diffidently ask if he would be so kind as to play something on the string bass for them. “It would mean so much for the club,” the representative says breathlessly, and the thirteen remaining members of the audience cheer in agreement.
Alvar laughs and lets himself be led up onto the stage. He’s already flexing his fingers before he even touches the instrument. They ought to be stiff; fingers get stiff in old age, right? Steffi thinks. Alvar’s don’t seem to be and Steffi holds her breath as he tunes the bass to a chord from the piano. Alvar’s stooping body moves in time as he makes music on this enormous upright bass; his foot taps as his fingers walk up and down the huge fingerboard, drawing out more emo
tion than Steffi believed was possible. He plays a whole piece through, verse and refrain, before he laughs and hands the bass back to its owner. He’s out of breath.
As he comes to sit back down next to Steffi, he says he’d once been better—he’d once had full control without having to fake it like he did today. But the jubilation among the library’s audience doesn’t end, and the jazz club representative says they’re going to put this event on the first page of their Web site and then asks to have his picture taken with Alvar.
Steffi has a proud lump in her throat. Her old guy.
* * *
After the concert, Alvar doesn’t want to go home. It’s been years since he’s been in Karlstad, he says, and they must get a souvenir of the day. Pappa says he’d promised the nurses to drive him right back to Sunshine Home after the concert. And after his wonderful playing, he must be tired, right? Steffi smiles when she hears Pappa call Alvar’s playing wonderful. Pappa says they must go straight back as soon as Alvar finds his souvenir.
“It’s a hat, of course,” Alvar says. “For Steffi, who is going to be the next star in the jazz sky.”
It takes them a while to find a hat store open on a Sunday. Pappa sighs deeply at least three times, but only Steffi hears him. After three streets, Alvar is walking more slowly and Pappa suggests again that they just head home. But then they see the hat. Both Alvar and Steffi. It seems to leap to their attention from the display window and both their heads turn to it at once.
“Were you really that famous?” Steffi asks as she tries on what would soon become her very own new hat.
Alvar laughs in embarrassment. “Well, maybe.” He adjusts the hat on her head. “Look, it fits as if made just for you.”
“Do I look like a Nat hepcat?”
“An honest-to-goodness Nat hepcat. Of course, girls wore different clothes in those days. Swing dresses, they were called.”
Steffi looks at herself in the mirror. The hat gives her a different air, like Steffi with extra spice.
“Dresses are not my thing. But this hat, I like it. Were the girls also called Nat hepcats?”
“No, but Anita was a really jazz crazy girl.”
Steffi smiles at all the names. Pappa looks at his watch.
“But what was it like, being famous?” Steffi asks. “How did it happen?”
“I’ll tell you when we reach that part of the story,” Alvar says. “But let’s make your father, Eduardo, happy and go get in the car. The hat’s my gift.”
* * *
It is eleven thirty at night and Steffi is looking at herself in her bedroom mirror. She’s already taken thirty-four selfies on her cell phone. With the night-light shining down from above, all you can see is the hat, a deep shadow, and the corner of her chin. In coal-black profile, she’s become someone else.
Still wearing her hat, she sits at her computer, blinks at the bright shine of the screen, and logs in to The Place. “Hi, whore!” Karro has written in her guestbook. Steffi stares at the phrase and realizes Karro must really miss her if she’s still online to talk to Steffi even with the stomach flu. She wonders if she should write something back, but doesn’t. This is a game she can’t win.
She logs out from The Place, from the parties she’s not invited to and the chitchat she can’t be part of like everybody else. She still wears her hat as she stares at The Place home page. Then she clicks the log-in button and creates a new user.
— CHAPTER 13 —
Create a new user. If only it were that easy in the real world.
In the real world, all the students at Björke School have to eat breaded fish. It should be good, but the breading was so disgusting that they figure the lunch ladies made it especially to torture them, so it was called “Punishment Fish” by everybody.
In the real world, Karro has come back to school. “Have you made yourself extra disgusting today or did I just forget how ugly you are?” Karro sneers in a normal conversational tone while they stand in the lunch line.
Sanja, Morgan, Linus, Jenny, and another student from class 9A are all listening. Jenny and Sanja giggle as Karro scrapes the breading from her fish and dumps it onto Steffi’s plate.
“Yours, too.” Karro gestures at Sanja’s and then Morgan’s plates.
Linus has already taken his food away. Perhaps he doesn’t want to play along; perhaps he actually likes Punishment Fish. Everyone else’s breading turns into a huge gray pile on Steffi’s plate.
“You sit here so we can make sure you eat properly.”
The question is, why is she the one who has to sit and eat three people’s collected fish breading? It is no longer a desperate question and now has become more of a philosophical one: How did these people decide that she was disgusting? How can a person be disgusting? Can a person’s genetic composition be disgusting via some unknown quality? Sometimes she feels so disgusting that she hates herself, and sometimes she hates them instead. Her best moments come when she thinks they are the disgusting ones.
Someday Steffi will figure out how to explain it all. Until then, she has to force herself, bit by bit, to eat the spongy breading as everyone looks on. It’s the only way to avoid a tougher punishment in the locker room or the bathroom later. Somebody snorts that one of the lunch ladies is actually a man and that he puts his sperm into the breading. That would explain a lot. They laugh so loud they’re howling.
But a second later, Karro silences them with one look, and everyone’s attention turns to her. “Some guy in Karlstad has been on my Web page.”
“Mine, too! But he didn’t write anything!”
“He didn’t write anything to me, either! What if it’s the same guy? What was his name again?”
Hepcat, Steffi thinks. His name is Hepcat.
“Is he cute?”
Of course they can’t tell if he’s cute or not. Steffi’s picture is a black profile with her hat over most of her face.
“Of course! He’s hot! And mysterious! Perhaps like a guy in Stockholm or New York. Not like the guys around here!”
“I don’t know why he didn’t write anything. No boys visit my site without writing something! Isn’t that true, Karro?”
Karro doesn’t understand and neither does Jenny. This mysterious guy is self-confident, that’s for sure, they think. They’d all checked his page. He’d written a description of himself and some girl he’d dumped. But in rhyme! He’s definitely complex, they agree, their eyes shining. A difficult guy in Karlstad.
* * *
Alvar is sleeping when she comes to visit. It’s not like him. He puts it down to the excitement of their adventure yesterday, but when she asks if it would be better if she left, he gets up quickly. “Oh, no, this old man still has some song in his heart.” He uses both eyes to wink at her. “Or I should say, song in his fingers.”
“You were really good yesterday,” Steffi says honestly.
“Do you want to play for me now?” Alvar says.
“Yep.” She pulls out her bass guitar and they sit down like they usually do, she on the chair and he in his armchair, close enough to hear the notes without an amplifier.
“I thought I’d show them I know stuff. I thought I’d play something written down, like Torkel forces me to play, and then something I’ve written myself—or that I’m still writing, I should say. I’m not finished yet.”
“Let me hear.”
“I’ve written lyrics, too.” She blushes as she says this. She’s not sure she really wants to sing aloud.
“I’m looking forward to hearing them,” Alvar says.
“OK.”
She sings her song for Alvar. She plays her bass with syncopation on the downbeat and sings the song about believing you’re somebody, and the song and the bass notes weave around each other until she feels exactly what she meant when she first wrote it:
“You have to believe you can to do it.
You have to believe in your smarts to get through it.”
Alvar nods in time, looking first at her
and then up at the ceiling. When she finishes, he seems deep in thought.
“You did something very nice in the bridge there,” he says at last. “You should repeat that and make it stronger in the refrain.”
“Make it stronger?”
“You could take it and make it the base of the entire refrain. Perhaps in another key.”
“Maybe in F.”
She looks at him to see if he caught her joke. He has.
“Yes, why make things too easy?” he snorts.
He’s silent for a moment. He’s thinking about something.
She’s thinking about something, too. “Alvar.”
“Yes?”
“Do you think I can get really good?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“Do you think I’ll get into the music school in Stockholm?”
“I’m absolutely sure you will.”
He says nothing more. He just seems to mean exactly what he says. She’s not so sure, but she thinks about her lyrics one more time and decides to believe she is somebody.
“Are you going to tell me how you got so famous?”
Alvar is silent for a long time, but Steffi can wait him out.
“It’s hard to say where things begin and end. But one of the first times I started to think I could become good was in that basement space at Åsö Street. Erling had had an argument with his bass player, Sigge.”
* * *
The bass player in Erling’s three-piece band was named Sigge. He was big as well as tall, almost a foot taller than Erling, and he hit the bass strings with convincing power. But one day he’d let a shop melt one of Erling’s records. At least, that was Erling’s version of events. Sigge’s was that Erling had given him the record long before so he had the right to let it be melted down. Such desecration could happen because record shops had demanded old records in exchange for new ones, due to the lack of shellac during the miserable war. So you could blame the war when Erling said that Sigge was a German lackey, so cuttingly effective, since Sigge resembled a certain German soldier from the First World War more than he resembled the small man he called father. The hateful words flew across the rehearsal space because of a melted-down Louis Armstrong record, and finally Sigge simply strapped his bass onto his back and left.
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