“Positive. I’ve got to work. Besides, it’ll do you good, not having the children around.”
“I suppose so. And Helena does always look after me.”
“Good, then,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’d better get going.”
“Are you bringing them straight home or going to the playground first?” I gave a shrug.
“Can you give me a call if you’re going somewhere? So I can come too?”
“Will do. See you later.”
“See you.”
* * *
We went to Magistratsparken, the place the children called the “normal park.” Other parks we frequented were the “spider park” in the Pildammsparken, the “shark park” in the Möllevangen neighborhood, and Lugnet, a few streets behind where we lived. Besides these there was another playground we went to in the Pildammsparken, and one in the Slottsparken that we called the “troll’s forest,” as well as another one some distance away by the fire station, where we hardly ever went but which they liked because it had some very unusual apparatuses. Almost all their time outdoors was spent in these parks. The rest of the time they were inside, either at the nursery or at home. I didn’t like it, it was so remote from the upbringing I wanted to give them. But there were no alternatives, we couldn’t afford a house, and being registered bad debtors we couldn’t get a mortgage. On the other hand, they didn’t seem to be suffering in the slightest as their heads poked out from among the leaves of the tree they called the “climbing tree.” I sat on one of the three benches at the other end and skimmed through a newspaper I’d bought to keep myself occupied, glancing up at regular intervals and scanning the various children at play until locating my own. Vanja could be trusted completely, and I didn’t think Heidi would get it into her head to go off on her own anymore either, but John was still unpredictable, all of a sudden he’d be on his way across the grass toward the road that ran next to the park, and if I didn’t keep a watchful eye out and immersed myself in my reading instead he could be gone when I looked up, and I might only discover him when I extended my field of vision and noticed his little figure in the distance toddling off toward the road.
Now, though, he was standing tugging on the swing, calling for me at the top of his voice. I got to my feet and went over to him, lifted him up and put him in the seat, drew it back, and looked him in the eye. Are you ready? I said. Yes, he said in a serious voice. I pulled him back into the air and let go, and he immediately started to laugh. Ten swings, I said, and began to count. After ten I stopped him, he protested, and once he realized I was going to lift him up he gripped the swing tight with a look of panic in his eyes. No, no, no! I put him down on the ground, where he lay on his belly, pressing his face into the sand, shouting and screaming. By the time I sat down on the bench again his tantrum had turned to tears. He cried and sobbed heartrendingly, as if he’d been orphaned and hadn’t eaten for a week, and someone had smacked his bottom for good measure. I located Heidi and Vanja, lit a cigarette, and picked up the paper again. Subconsciously I must have registered the situation that would soon arise, and only a few seconds later I lowered the paper and the dad who’d been on his way toward the swing with his son held tightly to his chest now put him down in the seat. A big person launching a little person, the way a big boat launches a little boat, I thought to myself. But John was still lying underneath the swing, and he wasn’t thinking of moving for a while yet. I got up and went over to him. Up you go, out of the way, I said. Other people want to use the swing. He didn’t say anything, just kept on sobbing, his little shoulders shaking. I picked him up like a tortoise, lifted him a few meters to the side and put him down again. There we are, I said. You can go and play again now. I turned and went back to my bench. I felt guilty, I ought to have comforted him until he stopped crying, but for one thing the reason for his disappointment was completely disproportional to his reaction and I didn’t want him to start thinking this was the right way to deal with adversity, and for another, my strategy was to intervene as little as possible when I was out with them, I wanted them to be able to look after themselves.
But it wasn’t only children who had difficulty keeping things in proportion. When I thought about the way I’d dealt with Vanja and saw from the photos how little she’d been then, it was as if the bottom dropped out from under me. Had I stood yelling with rage at that little creature there? Had I snatched her up out of her stroller and put her down hard on the floor, dizzy with frustration and anger, she eighteen months old and utterly innocent of anything? It was the most painful thought I knew. How could I have done such things? What had I been thinking? How was it possible to so totally lose one’s sense of reality? I didn’t see how little she was, my objective view was completely absent, both she and Linda and everyone else around me were sucked inside that inner vortex where the most unreasonable things became reasonable and justified. And I didn’t have anything else to compare with, that was all there was.
John had stopped crying but was still lying with his face in the sand. I reasoned I had to give him a way out. The big swing was free now, I noticed, so I put down the paper and went over to him.
“Do you want to try the big swing? Would you like that?”
“Ye-es,” he said.
“Come on, then,” I said. He got up and followed me, wiping his tears away with his hand and leaving dark streaks on his cheeks. The big swing was in the shape of a cradle, there was room enough for several children inside, and mine at least loved to lie there and look up at the sky as they swung back and forth at speed. As I lifted John inside, Heidi and Vanja came running across the playground toward us.
“Us too!” they cried.
“Yes, but John’s with you now,” I said. “So I can’t swing very high, OK?”
“OK,” said Vanja.
“OK,” said Heidi.
I lifted them up and pulled the cradle as far back as I could.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Daddy. Swing us now!” said Vanja.
I did as she said.
John cried out in protest.
“I don’t want to!”
I stopped the swing, lifted him out, and put him down. He stretched his arms toward me. I ignored him and pulled back the cradle, and he began to wail.
“OK, if you’re going to be stubborn,” I said, lifting him up then holding him with one arm while I swung the girls with the other. His little body against mine felt warm and good. He put his head on my shoulder. The cradle came toward me, I sent it back. The girls were lying on their stomachs with their heads poking over the edge, staring toward the road. Their dresses and their hair flapped in the wind. All around there were children, crawling, waddling, running, and climbing, the figures of their parents poking up, some with sunglasses on and cell phones in their hands, others absorbed in their children’s activities. Beyond the playground there were lawns where tall trees stood, sedate and bathed in sun, offering circles of shade to all those who had come to the park that afternoon. Most were young, nearly all were white. Many lay on their own in the grass next to a bike; the way they had rolled their trousers up and removed their T-shirts suggested improvisation, a sudden impulse followed on the way home from work. Others sat around in groups, mostly students from the gymnas or university students. Here and there a couple lay tightly entwined, completely immersed in each other. The Pildammsparken on the other side of the old football stadium attracted mainly immigrants, whole families out picnicking into the evenings, occasionally the thud of drums could be heard rising up through the sunlight, as if from the depths of a dream. The way the shadows grew with evening, and the way the sun sank down, not into the sea or the forest, but into the city, had a dreamlike quality about it, I always found myself thinking when we were there. The world dissolved when filled with sunlight, that was the feeling I had, the relationships between all things vanished, everything seemed suddenly to exist on the same level. It was th
e job of culture to define those relationships, establish hierarchies of connections and draw together what lay dispersed into particular, meaningful patterns. That was why we had novels, films, TV series, poems, and plays, but also newspapers, television news, and gossip magazines. That a culture originating in a sun-scorched landscape, underneath a burning sky, along the fertile banks of a river, would draw the world together in a different way and create other meaningful patterns was obvious. I had no idea what the difference consisted of, for it was so big that their language to me sounded like so much coughing and spitting, and the letters of their alphabet looked more like bushes in the desert than writing, but I had an idea that everything surely had to be impenetrable to begin with, and while it might gradually open up as the language became understood, it could never be as self-explanatory as it was to us, and presumably never become possible, nor therefore desirable, to embrace. For culture’s greatest role comprised the way it worked between people, its tissue of collocations, accentuations, and self-imposed constraints was so fine and complex that most within the culture were familiar only with the particular shadings that concerned his or her own layer of society, and possessed only superficial knowledge of the others. But everything had its own significance, that was what culture was. The fabric of a pair of trousers was significant, the width of a trouser leg was significant, the pattern in the curtain hung in front of a window was significant, the sudden lowering of a gaze was significant. The particular way a word was pronounced was significant. What a person knew about one thing or another was also significant. Culture charged the world with meaning by establishing differences within it, and those differences, in which everything of value existed, varied from culture to culture. That the units were becoming increasingly bigger, and cultures increasingly similar, was a discouraging thought, at least for someone like me who was fascinated by differences and attracted by impenetrability. The wonder of Japan, a country that had been isolated for so many hundreds of years and had developed what seemed to us in every way to be such a peculiar culture, almost completely closed to us, and yet existing before our eyes. The thought of that culture dissolving into that of the West and being lost forever, to exist as a mere variation of our own, was as great a loss as the extinction of any species of animal. But the Western world was so strong, and so expansive in its nature, that it would soon have the rest of the world subsumed within it, not by violence, as in the days of colonialism, but by promise. In this wide perspective, I was against immigration, against multiculturalism, against notions of sameness of nearly every kind. In the narrower perspective, that which related to the tangible, day-to-day reality of where I lived, in Malmö, it was hard not to look on immigration as an enormous resource all the while I could see how explosively vibrant and full of energy the city was compared to, say, Stockholm, where all the immigrants lived in the urban outskirts and the faces you saw in the city center were practically all white. Malmö, it’s true, was run-down and poverty common to see, but at the same time the city vibrated in its contrasts, which all had to be brought together in synthesis and most surely were a gift to anyone who grew up there, with so many different experiences and backgrounds existing together side by side, and where a lot of what came about for that same reason came about as if for the first time, with all the freshness and vigor of the new.
“I envy them that,” Linda had said one evening not so long ago after we’d picnicked in a corner of the big park and were heading home again with the kids in tow.
“Envy them what?” I said.
“The whole family out together. Parents, grandparents, children and grandchildren, uncles and cousins.”
She nodded toward a congregation of people gathered around a barbecue, perhaps twenty in all, the elderly seated on chairs, the youngest running around playing. There were more like them, scattered across the lawns. The air all around smelled of smoke and grilled meat.
“It used to be like that here, too,” I said. “Three generations ago, maybe. In rural areas at least. My maternal grandmother grew up with it. Well, not barbecuing in the parks, exactly. But they lived together in big families.”
“It all looks so himla mysigt. They all seem to be having such a fine time,” she said. “And here we come with our tiny little nuclear family. There’s only us! Imagine if there’d been more of us, think of how different it would have been!”
“Yes, but our life’s not that miserable, is it?”
“No, no, I don’t mean that. It’s just that – ”
“You’re a romantic. You see the aura of it, and you want it too.”
She shook her head.
“It’s not that I want it. It just seems so … well, as if there’s so much more life around them.”
“Your mother’s stayed with us. And my mom’s been here quite a lot. You’re always glad to see the back of them.”
“I know, but that’s exactly it. It’s all so centered around us, you, me, and the kids. Think what it’d be like if there were lots of others we could be with, we could forget all about ourselves!”
The sun behind us had been red and hung like a bauble above the rooftops, I remembered, and then I looked at John to see if he’d fallen asleep on my shoulder for once, but I found myself looking straight into his open eyes and stepped a few paces back.
“All right, that’s your lot,” I told the girls.
“But, Daddy!” Vanja said. “We’ve only just started!”
“Just a bit more?” said Heidi. “Please!”
“No,” I said, putting John down so I could go back to my bench, and then I saw Linda crossing the circular gravel-covered area with the wall around it in the middle of the park.
“Look, Mommy’s here,” I said. The girls crawled from the cradle to meet her, John toddled off toward her, and her face broke into a wide and joyful smile as she crouched down to receive them. A stark contrast to the times I came home and she would be lying in bed oblivious to their expectant calls of Hello? and Mamma? as they came in.
I went over to the bench and folded the newspaper and was about to drop it into the basket under the stroller when a sudden unease came over me.
Where had it come from?
I looked over at Linda, she was on her way toward me with the children all around her. It wasn’t that.
The book.
Of course. That was it.
“Hi,” said Linda.
“Hi,” I said. “You haven’t got any cash on you, have you?”
“No, I don’t think I have. What for?”
“So we could get some ice cream at the kiosk over there. I’ve only got twenty kronor and I don’t think they take cards.”
“Yes, they do now.”
“Do you want ice cream?” I asked them, looking down at their little faces.
As we walked beneath the trees a few moments later on our way toward the pedestrian crossing, I argued against my unease, telling myself I hadn’t written anything bad about the people now reading it, reminding myself that I’d been afraid of how Yngve would react and yet how well that had turned out.
“Were they all right at nursery today?” Linda asked.
“Yes, I think so,” I said. “I didn’t ask. They were happy enough when I picked them up.”
We stopped at the crossing, and Linda and Heidi scrabbled to press the button first, but Vanja got in before them and pressed it triumphantly. Heidi started to cry.
“You can press it next time,” I told her.
“Vanja pushed,” she said.
“You shouldn’t push, Vanja,” said Linda. “But look, we can go over there now and then you can have your ice cream.”
Heidi stayed put with her head lowered as we began to cross the road. I went back and lifted her up, and carried her the rest of the way to the kiosk.
“Why does Heidi get carried and not me?” said Vanja.
“Because she was crying,” I said. “I can carry you a little on the way back.”
I poked my head through the hat
ch and seeing no one there I rang the small shiny bell on the counter.
Jan Vidar was perhaps the person whose reaction I was most nervous about. He was and always would be fifteen to me, and I hadn’t exactly depicted the world we had together back then as anything fantastic. Maybe it was fantastic to him? Maybe he gilded the past?
A woman, Romanian-looking, appeared from a small back-room and came up to the counter in front of me.
“OK,” I said, looking down at the children. “Just point to the one you want, but don’t be too long about it.” I looked up at the woman. “Two coffees to start with. Milk in one.”
“I want a … Calippo,” said Vanja.
“Cola flavor, or the green one?” I asked her.
“The green one,” she said.
“And a Calippo fruity,” I said to the dark-haired woman.
“I want one, too,” said Heidi.
“We’ll make that two,” I said. “What about you, John? Can you point?”
He pointed to an ice-cream sandwich. Whether he knew what he was doing or not was a different matter.
“And a sandwich.”
She entered the amounts, I held out my card, she shoved a little card reader across the counter and pressed some keys. I inserted the card and she stepped over to the freezer. Behind the few chairs and tables, a fat young man came walking along the path with a little dog. I saw how Vanja followed it with her eyes. He was so fat I thought he must be on disability benefits. Cheap, khaki-colored shorts, air-force-gray baseball cap, black T-shirt. His entire body quivered as he went, he seemed almost to roll at the joints. I entered my PIN. The woman straightened up.
“What sort of dog was it, Vanja?” I said, pressing OK.
“A terrier, I think,” she said.
Heidi sat on Linda’s lap, in the shade of the parasol. John had climbed onto the chair and was trying to press a straw, now flattened at the end, into a crack in the table.
“Sorry, we’re out of Calippo fruity,” the woman said. “Will cola do instead?”
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 9
