At recess the others babble about clothes and makeup. About boys. Needlework: they will be making monogrammed aprons. Cookery: how to prepare food, how to manage household finances. She feels the familiar chafing of being an outsider, the gnawed sensation that comes from being painfully compelled to see herself through the eyes of others. That is the worst thing of all.
You are twisted out of yourself, fumbling blindly.
One of the girls in her class is called Eva. She rests her head on her hands and stares at the wall, her back demonstratively turned toward her classmates. Her hair is cut short, exposing a thin neck. When they happen to be walking next to one another down the stairs, she notices that Eva smells strongly of dog. She does indeed have a dog.
Like many of the other girls she is the child of an academic; she no longer needs to feel like an outsider in that respect. But Eva disappears quickly at the end of the school day, presumably to take her dog for a walk. What is it that is so appealing about her? It is the fact that she turns her back on everyone else with such haughtiness.
It speaks of integrity. And loneliness.
She would like to share her own loneliness with Eva. Might she be in love with her? For a while she suspects this might be the case. That’s all she needs—to discover that she’s abnormal, on top of the other aspects that make her an outsider. She can’t afford that.
Therefore she keeps her distance from Eva. She soon works out the social differences within the class: the girls who seem so advanced live in the west of the city. Those are the ones whose company she seeks. Not immediately, but as time goes by she joins them as they hang out in Lund, in desolate wanderings in search of boys. What are we doing tonight? Hanging out. It’s absolutely freezing.
Afterward she has to cycle all the way home. It takes forever.
The creature behind the gray metal door makes an attempt to accompany them to Lund. She appears as a shadow, even more emaciated than before. Here there is no door behind which she can live. She did provide company, of a sort.
For a long time. It was a consolation to take her the leftovers and sit on an empty box watching as she gobbled up every scrap. Now the creature must certainly disappear, if she is not to be outflanked by such a pathetic part of herself. Even if she feels lonely, she can no longer occupy herself with imaginary companions.
She is twelve years old, and wants to be grown up. She is implacable, and the creature fades away (but returns in dreams, hammering on the balcony door, starving and carrying a frozen baby; she doesn’t open the door).
Her sense of desolation must end. And fortunately she is given something else to think about. They are sitting around the kitchen table when the telephone rings. Dad answers; it’s a long-distance call from Grandpa. Ricki has disappeared!
She went abroad on a group holiday. Grandpa didn’t like the idea of her traveling alone, and made her promise to send a telegram from every hotel. So far she has done exactly that. Grandpa reads out the telegrams, and Dad repeats them.
At hotel in Paris. Stop. Everything fine. Stop. Ricki.
And from the next city, Lisbon: Everything fine. Stop. Your obedient daughter. From Portugal the group was due to sail to the island of Madeira. Over a week has now passed: no telegram. Ricki’s disappearance diverts the tension at home, which is a good thing.
But Grandpa’s anxiety spreads seismographically, via neural pathways and telephone lines between Stockholm and Lund, and between Lund and Aunt Laura in Gothenburg. She is Dad and Ricki’s older sister. Grandpa worked for the Royal Telephone Exchange in the past, and doesn’t have the same respect for telephones and telegrams as others do.
He knows the name of the hotel in Funchal, and sends a telegram. No reply. He then calls the travel agency in Stockholm; they know nothing. Grandpa is determined to get to the bottom of the matter. After a while he learns that Ricki is in fact staying at the hotel. Still no telegram. During a further intense interrogation of the travel agent, Grandpa demands that someone check Ricki’s room.
It emerges that she hasn’t slept there.
Poor Ricki—does she have to account for every move she makes? Mom thinks Grandpa is crazy.
Dad doesn’t like any criticism of Grandpa, and demurs. The travel agent gets hold of the Swedish tour guide who is responsible for the group; he assures Grandpa that everything is fine. Travelers are at liberty to choose from a range of excursions. That’s what Grandpa tells Aunt Laura.
Who calls Lund to inform Dad that there has still been no word from Ricki. Whereupon Dad calls Grandpa and reiterates that there is probably nothing to worry about. It might be difficult to get in touch from an island in the Atlantic. Everything has an explanation. No cause for concern. However, according to Grandpa, anything could have happened.
Ricki could have broken her leg. Been stricken by sunstroke. Gotten carried away by the Atlantic currents while she was out swimming. Fallen victim to Portuguese bandits. And when the telegram still doesn’t arrive, Grandpa suspects that she has been kidnapped by slave traders to be transported to Africa, which isn’t all that far from Madeira.
The white slave trade, that’s what it’s called.
Your father is crazy, Mom says again.
But by now Dad is also beginning to think the situation is a little strange. Ricki is a reliable person. He talks to Aunt Laura, then Grandpa, then Aunt Laura again. It is during this whipped-up telephone frenzy that the subject of fortune-telling is mentioned for the first time. Dad talks about it, but attaches no importance to it. She, on the other hand, takes a very different view. What?! Has Ricki had her fortune told? Really?
When she is home alone, she makes a long-distance call to Gothenburg. Aunt Laura is a little hesitant at first, but then she tells her what she knows.
Yes, Ricki and Lisa went to see a fortune-teller a long time ago. Ricki was told that she would undertake a journey alone, and would fall in love with a dark man. She would part from him, but he would get in touch with her again. She would marry him and give birth to two sons.
This is staggering.
She doesn’t know anyone else who has had their fortune told.
Ricki must have met the great love of her life on Madeira. She talks excitedly about the prediction at the kitchen table. Dad isn’t interested, and Mom thinks that Laura is probably a little crazy too.
But prediction or no prediction, can’t Ricki have a little fling in peace, without Grandpa snapping at her heels? That’s what Mom thinks. She agrees with Mom, who like her seems to be imagining something erotic and forbidden.
Who can the man be? Is he Portuguese? An Arab sheikh, an American millionaire? Let’s not dramatize, Dad says. Typical. The Earth could collide with an asteroid or an undiscovered planet and he would say, Nothing to worry about, let’s all calm down.
So Ricki’s cool, calm demeanor is no more than a thin veil, concealing passion and adventure. Grandpa knows nothing about such things. Nor does Dad. She cycles to school, her nipples and the bead between her legs burning. Ricki becomes her stand-in for this encounter with Lund. She is swept up in erotic presentiments of skin and melting kisses.
The fortune-telling brings color to the cobblestones, to the square where vegetables are sold, to the gray stone of the cathedral and the red spire of All Saints Church.
Straw-covered wine bottles in the dreary apartment on Banérgatan, emptied and forgotten, pop into her mind. Has Ricki made previous attempts? This time she will succeed. She is together with Ricki, experiencing a love that exceeds anything in Netta Muskett’s novels.
Ricki meets a tanned, sinewy shepherd, not unlike Johnny Weissmuller, on a mountain pass. He takes her to his humble abode and lights a fire. The sheep are moving around them. They make love on his sheepskin rugs.
He is a mountaineer. They are sitting on a rocky outcrop; they start chatting, and there is a spark between them. When darkness falls he asks her to stay, and puts up his tent. After a while they crawl into his sleeping bag. They lie in each other’s arms.
The moonlight casts its glow over the mountains. As dawn breaks, there is the scent of thyme outside the tent.
Or even better: Ricki is sitting on the beach with a book. A man approaches. He is handsome, with melancholy eyes; he is muscular, like Johnny Weissmuller. He stops by her recliner and bows politely. He has noticed her.
So, she is traveling alone? He invites her to supper at his hotel. They dance to a white-clad orchestra on a terrace in the moonlight.
They sip the effervescent drink of love, champagne.
They are overwhelmed by their feelings. As she is, riding along on her bicycle. In the hotel room tall candelabras surround a bed beneath a white canopy and the sea swell roars in the distance and they can wait no longer. To be continued in the next issue, as it says in Allers magazine. Her fantasies blunt the sharp edges of her encounter with Lund.
Which looks like a stage set. An overpainted facade.
Unfortunately Ricki contacts Grandpa. It has indeed been difficult to send a telegram. She spent a night away from the hotel because she was with a group of tourists who were interested in botany, under the leadership of a local guide, when they were caught out by a storm.
They had to spend the night in a cave up in the mountains. The following morning the storm had passed, and they all trooped down the mountain and back to the hotel. She is just as calm as always. Everything is absolutely fine. Nothing terrible has happened.
She is on her way back to Sweden.
Sleeping in a cave with a group of tourists? An unlikely explanation. Sounds highly improbable. Does anyone really believe her? Grandpa, apparently. And Dad. But Ricki returns to Stockholm and turns her attention to her drawings once more. She herself still doubts that peculiar explanation.
Her fantasies about Ricki and the fortune-teller’s prediction continue unabated.
She devours everything she can find about fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, and mediums in magazines like Vecko-Revyn and Fick-journalen. Mediums are people who can see things that other people can’t. They have what is known as a sixth sense.
They can’t explain how they know what they know.
Nor can anyone else, but they perceive things that no one else can see. She reads about a medium in Ystad who tipped off the police about where a thief had hidden stolen goods. And about a clairvoyant in Norrland who told them where to find a man wanted for murder. She reads about famous mediums from the past.
Madame Blavatsky. Annie Besant. Madame du Barry and her crystal ball. And Madame Athena in Paris, who read the cards and practiced palmistry. She reads about a man called Blaise Pascal, who believed that life is a dream, and that true reality is when we wake from that dream.
She would like to wake up to a better reality.
She is unhappy with most things, not least with her body. Her ass, which is too big. The cellulite, which can be cured with orange peel. Her hair, which should be washed in boiled chamomile. According to the weekly magazines, every part of her body should be subjected to treatments which she is too lazy to carry out.
But if Ricki has met a man on Madeira, then a little breach into the unknown will open up. She has definitely met someone and fallen in love. Personally, the girl would like everything—school, homework, loneliness—to fall to pieces like a scrap of very old fabric, and for a completely different reality to appear. One that is truer.
And much, much bigger.
Life in Lund is gray and depressing. Soon Mom is just as irritable as she was in Årsta. Dad tries to cheer everyone up. After dinner his mouth is full of cheerful exhortations. If we all rinse our own dinner dishes, someone soon may grant our wishes!
They rinse their dishes. Then it’s homework.
Mom is sitting at the typewriter, smoking frenetically. She wants to write short stories, but is unhappy with what she has produced and rips the paper out of the machine. The best thing is when Mom and Dad go off together to some academic event. Mom checks her appearance in the hallway mirror, trying on dresses and painting her lips.
When they have gone the apartment feels lonely, but better.
Lund is an isolated planet out on the plain. A particular atmosphere under intense pressure. A bell jar placed over impenetrable changes in the weather. Sundays are the worst.
She stays in bed, listening to the cacophony from the cathedral, which makes her feel strangely oppressed. She listens to Mom’s impatience as she nags at them: don’t waste the whole of Sunday, up you get, please tidy the shoes in the hallway.
Sundays are a persistent headache in her entire body. And they are followed by countless schooldays, chafing at her soul.
Who was Ricki really? An independent bachelor girl in silk pajamas or a submissive daughter? Much later, after my father’s death, I read the family letters.
Most of them were pretty nondescript.
But not Ricki’s. They were a joy to read. The characteristic handwriting, angular and easily legible. The tone is frank, expressive, with ironic undertones.
She lives with her parents (until she is over thirty).
After the outbreak of the war she writes to Laura in Gothenburg telling her that there is a special offer for students who would like to subscribe to Göteborgs Handels- & Sjöfartstidning. She wants to read what Torgny Segerstedt has to say about Nazism in Germany and the Swedish appeasement policy, so she takes out a subscription.
The price might be reasonable, Grandpa says, but why that particular newspaper? Ricki dodges and weaves. She wants to keep herself informed, she replies.
Can’t you keep yourself informed by reading Svenska Dagbladet and Nya Dagligt Allehanda? Those are the newspapers Grandpa reads. Ricki points out that her paper has an excellent crossword. Grandpa, an inveterate crossword solver, concedes. Now we meet in the hallway, Daddy and I, and exchange a slightly sardonic smile as we pick up our respective newspapers.
So Grandpa objected to Ricki’s paper?
Evidently. He had admired Germany from his early youth—hardly surprising, given his boyhood fascination with galvanism, magnetism, and electricity. He had German colleagues who were famous nuclear physicists. On top of that, there was the natural distrust of a soldier’s son toward the Russians.
According to Dad, during the war my grandfather didn’t believe the tales of concentration camps and the persecution of Jews. British propaganda, he insisted. Ricki’s letters made it clear that Grandma had a different view. Along with her two unmarried sisters, she went to see the play He Who Sits by the Melting Pot, by the Danish playwright Kaj Munk. It was performed at the Vasa Theater in 1938, and is about the Germans’ treatment of the Jews.
Which is clearly demonstrated on Kristallnacht, the Night of the Long Knives; it upsets Grandma, but the topic is never discussed at home.
Grandma doesn’t want to rock the boat.
Ricki also writes about Aunt Tutti. She was Grandpa’s sister, and an ardent supporter of Hitler and Nazism. When this loud, hearty sister-in-law from Småland comes to visit, Grandma gets a headache.
On one occasion when Grandpa isn’t home they are listening to Tutti enthusiastically singing the praises of the Führer. A strong man. Stylish. Sorted out the economy. Able to stand up to the Communists. Exactly the leader Germany needs.
The paean keeps on coming, while Grandma and Ricki look down at their plates in silence. However, Laura is visiting from Gothenburg. She is a member of the Liberal People’s Party and a keen reader of Handelstidningen, and she flies into a rage. She slams her fist down on the table and manages to shut Tutti up. That’s our brave sister, Ricki writes (to Dad).
Was Grandpa really a Nazi sympathizer? It’s not impossible. In which case he would have behaved in accordance with his position in society, keeping quiet and maintaining his reserve. What did he think after the war? No one knows.
An unusually long letter from Ricki to Laura, written over the course of several days: it’s all about the Nobel Prize being awarded to the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi in 1938.
Grandpa was a m
ember of the Nobel Prize committee and the secretary of the Academy of Science, so he was probably the one who informed Fermi of the award. Early one icy gray morning in November he and Ricki, who is twenty-three years old, meet Fermi and his wife and children at the central station in Stockholm after their journey from Rome.
Grandpa gives a dinner in his honor at the Academy of Science in Frescati, where they were living at the time. Fermi’s wife does not attend. The Nobel Prize winner is a little stiff, according to Ricki, and his mind seems to be elsewhere all the time. After dinner the young people want to dance, and she puts “hot” jazz records on the gramophone. Fermi receives many invitations from the ladies, including Ricki, but remains sitting at the table “like a stuffed shirt.”
The occasion turns out to be a welcome opportunity for Fermi to get out of Italy; his wife is Jewish. Grandpa tells Ricki about the escape plan, and gets involved himself. Immediately after the ceremony the family heads for the United States, where Fermi contributes to the development of the atom bomb. This was their very last chance to escape.
This letter reveals nothing about Grandpa’s political stance, but Ricki’s letters say quite a lot about her. She had definite anti-Nazi views. Quietly and without making a fuss, she did exactly what she wanted to do.
She keeps quiet about the fact that her father is a professor. And the fact that her mother is a professional pianist; it could be construed as showing off, although now of course she has classmates whose fathers are also professors, and who don’t find it in the least unusual.
However, just as when she was living in Årsta, she doesn’t want to appear to be showing off.
She would prefer not to be noticed at all. That’s the way things are for a long time.
She looks up professor in the Swedish encyclopedia; it means academic teacher, and comes from a Latin word which means to explain. No person should be designated a professor unless his skills are apparent and he is regarded as being more worthy of this office than any other man who might be considered.
A Fortune Foretold Page 6
