The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

by Tomas Tranströmer

  •

  The avenues trot

  in a harness of sunbeams.

  Did someone call out?

  8

  The grass is rising—

  his face is a runic stone

  raised in memory.

  •

  Here’s a dark picture.

  Poverty painted over,

  flowers in prison dress.

  9

  When the hour is here

  the blind wind will come to rest

  against the façades.

  •

  I’ve been in that place—

  all over a whitewashed wall

  the flies crowd and crowd.

  •

  Here where the sun burned . . .

  a mast holding a black sail

  from long long ago.

  •

  Hold on, nightingale!

  Out of the depths it’s growing—

  we are in disguise.

  10

  Death leans forward and

  writes on the ocean surface.

  While the church breathes gold.

  •

  Something has happened.

  The moon filled the room with light.

  God knew about it.

  •

  The roof broke apart

  and the dead man can see me

  can see me. That face.

  •

  Hear the swish of rain.

  To reach right into it I

  whisper a secret.

  •

  Station-platform scene.

  What unpredictable calm—

  it’s the inner voice.

  11

  A revelation.

  The long-standing apple tree.

  The sea is close by.

  •

  The sea is a wall.

  I can hear the gulls screaming—

  they’re waving at us.

  •

  God’s wind in the back.

  The shot that comes soundlessly—

  a much-too-long dream.

  •

  Ash-colored silence.

  The blue giant passes by.

  Cool breeze from the sea.

  •

  A wind vast and slow

  from the ocean’s library.

  Here’s where I can rest.

  •

  Birds in human shape.

  The apple trees in blossom.

  The great enigma.

  MEMORIES LOOK AT ME

  MINNENA SER MIG

  1993

  PROSE MEMOIR

  Memories

  “My life.” Thinking these words, I see before me a streak of light. On closer inspection it has the form of a comet. The brightest end, the head, is childhood and growing up. The nucleus, the densest part, is infancy, that first period, in which the most important features of our life are determined. I try to remember, I try to penetrate that density. But it is difficult to move in these concentrated regions, it is dangerous, it feels as if I am coming close to death itself. Further back, the comet thins out—that’s the longer part, the tail. It becomes more and more sparse, but also broader. I am now far out in the comet’s tail, I am sixty as I write this.

  Our earliest experiences are for the most part inaccessible. Retellings, memories of memories, reconstructions based on moods that suddenly flare into life.

  My earliest datable memory is a feeling. A feeling of pride. I have just turned three and it has been declared that this is very significant, that I am now big. I’m in bed in a bright room, then clamber down to the floor stunningly aware of the fact that I am becoming a grown-up. I have a doll to whom I gave the most beautiful name I could think of: Karin Spinna. I don’t treat her in a motherly fashion. She is more like a comrade or someone I am in love with.

  We live in Stockholm, in the Söder area, at Swedenborgsgatan 33 (now called Grindsgatan). Father is still part of the family but is soon to leave. Our ways are quite “modern”—right from the start I use the familiar du form with my parents. My mother’s parents are close by, just around the corner, in Blekingegatan.

  My maternal grandfather, Carl Helmer Westerberg, was born in 1860. He was a ship’s pilot and a very good friend of mine, seventy-one years older than myself. Oddly enough, the same difference in age existed between him and his own maternal grandfather, who was born in 1789: the storming of the Bastille, the Anjala mutiny, Mozart writing his Clarinet Quintet. Two equal steps back in time, two long steps, yet not really so very long. We can touch history.

  Grandfather’s way of speech belonged to the nineteenth century. Many of his expressions would seem surprisingly old-fashioned today. But in his mouth, and to my ear, they felt altogether natural. He was a fairly short man, with a white moustache and a prominent and rather crooked nose—“like a Turk’s,” as he said. His temperament was lively and he could flare up at any moment. His occasional outbursts were never taken too seriously and they were over as soon as they had begun. He was quite without persistent aggression. Indeed he was so conciliatory that he risked being labeled as soft. He wanted to keep on the best side even of people who might be criticized—in their absence—in the course of ordinary conversation. “But surely you must agree that X is a crook!” “Well, well—that’s something I don’t really know about. . . .”

  After the divorce, Mother and I moved to Folkungagatan 57, a lower-middle-class tenement, where a motley crowd lived in close proximity to one another. My memories of life in that tenement arrange themselves like scenes from a film of the thirties or forties, with the appropriate list of characters. The lovable concierge, her strong laconic husband whom I admired because, among other things, he had been poisoned by gas, which suggested a heroic closeness to dangerous machines.

  A steady trickle of comers and goers didn’t belong there. The occasional drunk would slowly return to his wits on the stairway. Several times a week beggars would ring. They would stand on the porch mumbling. Mother made sandwiches for them—she gave them slices of bread rather than money.

  We lived on the fifth floor. At the top, that is. There were four doors, plus the entry to the attic. On one of them was the name Orke, press photographer. In a way it seemed grand to live beside a press photographer.

  Our next-door neighbor was a bachelor, well into middle age, yellowish complexion. He worked at home, running some sort of broker’s business by phone. In the course of his calls he often gave vent to hilarious guffaws that burst through the walls into our apartment. Another recurring sound was the pop of corks. Beer bottles did not have metal caps then. Those Dionysiac sounds, the guffaws of laughter and the popping of corks, seemed hardly to belong to the spectrally pale old fellow we sometimes met in the elevator. As the years passed he became suspicious and the bouts of laughter diminished in frequency.

  Once, there was an outbreak of violence. I was quite small. A neighbor had been locked out by his wife; he was drunk and furious and she had barricaded herself in. He tried to break down the door and bawled out various threats. I remember him screaming the peculiar sentence: “I don’t give a damn if I go to Kungsholmen!” I asked Mother what he meant, about Kungsholmen. She explained that the police headquarters was there. From then on that part of town evoked a sense of something fearful. (This feeling intensified when I visited St. Erik’s Hospital and saw the war-wounded from Finland being cared for in the winter of 1939–40.)

  Mother left for work early in the morning. She didn’t take a tram or bus—throughout her entire adult life she walked from Söder to Östermalm, Östermalm to Söder. She worked in the Hedvig Leonora School and was in charge of the third and fourth grades year after year. She was a devoted teacher, deeply involved with the children. One might imagine it would be hard for her to accept retirement. But it wasn’t—she felt greatly relieved.

  Since Mother worked we had home-help, a “maid” as she was called, though “child-minder” would have been nearer the truth. She slept in a tiny room that was re
ally part of the kitchen and which was not included in the official apartment-with-two-rooms-and-kitchen designation of our home.

  When I was five or six, our maid was called Anna-Lisa and she came from Eslöv, in Skåne, in the south of Sweden. I thought she was very attractive: frizzy blond hair, a turned-up nose, a mild Skåne accent. She was a lovely person and I still feel something special when I pass Eslöv station. But I have never actually stepped off the train at that magic place.

  Anna-Lisa was particularly talented at drawing. Disney figures were her specialty. I myself drew almost uninterruptedly throughout those years, in the late 1930s. Grandfather brought home rolls of brown paper of the sort then used in all the grocery shops, and I filled the sheets with illustrated stories. I had, to be sure, taught myself to write at the age of five. But it was too slow a process. My imagination needed some speedier means of expression. I didn’t even have enough patience to draw properly. I developed a kind of shorthand sketching method with figures in violent movement: breakneck drama yet no details. Cartoon strips consumed only by myself.

  One day in the mid-1930s I disappeared in the middle of Stockholm. Mother and I had been to a school concert. In the crush by the exit I lost my grasp of her hand. I was carried helplessly away by the human current, and since I was so small I could not be discovered. Darkness was falling over Hötorget. I stood at the exit, robbed of all sense of security. There were people around me but they were intent on their own business. There was nothing to hold on to. It was my first experience of death.

  After an initial period of panic I began to think. It should be possible to walk home. It was absolutely possible. We had come by bus. I had knelt on the seat as I usually did and looked out of the window. Drottninggatan had flowed past. What I had to do now, simply, was to walk back the same way, bus stop by bus stop.

  I went in the right direction. Of that long walk I have a clear memory of only one part—of reaching Norrbro and seeing the water under the bridge. The traffic here was heavy and I didn’t dare set off across the street. I turned to a man who was standing beside me and said: “There’s a lot of traffic here.” He took me by the hand and led me across.

  But then he let go of me. I don’t know why this man and all the other unknown adults thought it was quite alright for a little boy to wander by himself through Stockholm on a dark evening. But that’s how it was. The remainder of the journey—through Gamla Stan, the old town, over Slussen and into Söder—must have been complicated. Perhaps I homed in on my destination with the help of the same mysterious compass that dogs and carrier pigeons have in them—no matter where they are released they always find their way home. I remember nothing of this part of my journey. Well, yes, I do—I remember how my self-confidence grew and grew, so that when I did at last arrive home I was euphoric. Grandfather met me. My devastated mother was sitting in the police station following the progress of their search for me. Grandfather’s firm nerves didn’t fail him; he received me quite naturally. He was relieved of course, but didn’t make a fuss. It all felt secure and natural.

  Museums

  As a child I was attracted to museums. First, the Natural History Museum. What a building! Gigantic, Babylonian, inexhaustible! On the ground floor, hall after hall of stuffed mammals and birds thronged in the dust. And the arches, smelling of bones, where the whales hung from the roof. Then one floor up: the fossils, the invertebrates . . .

  I was taken to the Natural History Museum when I was only about five years old. At the entrance, two elephant skeletons met the visitor. They were the two guardians of the gateway to the miraculous. They made an overwhelming impression on me and I drew them in a big sketchbook.

  After a time, those visits to the Natural History Museum stopped. I started to go through a phase of being quite terrified of skeletons. The worst was the bony figure depicted at the end of the article on “Man” in the Nordic Family Lexicon. But my fear was aroused by skeletons in general, including the elephant skeletons at the entrance to the museum. I became frightened even of my own drawing of them and couldn’t bring myself to open the sketchbook.

  My interest turned to the Railway Museum. Nowadays it occupies spacious premises just outside the town of Gävle, but back then the entire museum was squeezed into a part of the district of Klara right in the center of Stockholm. Twice a week Grandfather and I made our way down from Söder and visited the museum. Grandfather himself must have been enthralled by the model trains, otherwise he would hardly have endured so many visits. When we decided to make a day of it we would finish up in Stockholm Central Station, which was nearby, and watch the trains come steaming in, lifesized.

  The museum staff noticed the zeal of the young boy, and on one occasion I was taken into the museum office and allowed to write my name (with a back-to-front S) in a visitors’ book. I wanted to be a railway engineer. I was, however, more interested in steam engines than in electric ones. In other words, I was more romantic than technical.

  Some time later, as a schoolboy, I returned to the Natural History Museum. I was now an amateur zoologist, solemn, like a little professor. I sat bent over books about insects and fish.

  I had started my own collections. They were kept at home in a cupboard. But inside my skull grew an immense museum and a kind of interplay developed between this imaginary one and the very real one that I visited.

  I visited the Natural History Museum more or less every second Sunday. I took the tram to Roslagstull and walked the rest of the way. The road was always a little longer than I had imagined. I remember those foot marches very clearly: it was always windy, my nose ran, my eyes filled with tears. I don’t remember the journeys in the opposite direction. It’s as if I never went home, only out to the museum, a sniffling, tearful, hopeful expedition toward a giant Babylonian building.

  Finally arriving, I would be greeted by the elephant skeletons. I often went directly to the “old” part, the section with animals that had been stuffed back in the eighteenth century, some of them rather clumsily prepared, with swollen heads. Yet there was a special magic here. Big artificial landscapes with elegantly designed and positioned animal models failed to catch my interest—they were make-believe, something for children. No, it had to be quite clear that this was not a matter of living animals. They were stuffed, they stood there in the service of science. The scientific method I was closest to was the Linnean: discover, collect, examine.

  I would work slowly through the museum. Long pauses among the whales and in the paleontology rooms. And then what detained me most: the invertebrates.

  I never had any contact with other visitors. In fact, I don’t remember other visitors being there at all. Other museums I occasionally visited—the National Maritime Museum, the National Museum of Ethnography, the Museum of Technology—were always crowded. But the Natural History Museum seemed to stay open only for me.

  One day, however, I did encounter someone—no, not a visitor, he was a professor of some sort. We met among the invertebrates—he suddenly materialized between the display cases, and was almost as small in stature as I was. He spoke half to himself. At once we were involved in a discussion of molluscs. He was so absentminded or so unprejudiced that he treated me like an adult. One of those guardian angels who appeared now and then in my childhood and touched me with its wings.

  Our conversation resulted in my being allowed into a section of the museum not open to the public. I was given much good advice on the preparation of small animals, and was equipped with little glass tubes that seemed to me truly professional.

  I collected insects, above all beetles, from the age of eleven until I turned fifteen. Then other competing interests, mostly artistic, forced their attentions on me. How melancholy it felt that entomology must give way! I convinced myself that this was only a temporary adjustment. In fifty years or so I would resume my collecting.

  My collecting would begin in the spring and then flourished of course in the summer, out on the island of Runmarö. In the summerhouse, w
here we had little enough space to move around, I kept jam jars with dead insects and a display board for butterflies. And lingering everywhere: the smell of ethyl acetate, a smell I carried with me since I always had a tin of this insect killer in my pocket.

  It would no doubt have been more daring to use potassium cyanide as the handbook recommended. Fortunately, this substance was not within my reach, so I never had to test my courage by choosing whether or not to use it.

  Many were involved in the insect hunt. The neighborhood children learned to sound the alarm when they saw an insect that could be of interest. “Here’s one!” echoed among the houses, and I would come rushing along with my butterfly net.

  I went on endless expeditions. A life in the open air without the slightest thought of thereby improving my health. I had no aesthetic opinions on my booty, of course—this was, after all, Science—but I unknowingly absorbed many experiences of natural beauty. I moved in the great mystery. I learned that the ground was alive, that there was an infinite world of creeping and flying things living their own rich life without paying the least regard to us.

  I caught a fraction of a fraction of that world and pinned it down in my boxes, which I still have. A hidden mini-museum of which I am seldom conscious. But they’re sitting there, those insects. As if biding their time.

  Primary School

  I began in Katarina Norra Primary School and my teacher was Miss R., a tidy spinster who changed her clothes every day. When school ended each Saturday, each child was given a caramel, but otherwise she was strict. She was generous when it came to pulling hair and delivering blows, although she never hit me. I was the son of a teacher.