by Bill Bryson
I couldn’t bear to start the whole thing all over again. ‘Please,’ I said, speaking carefully, ‘I just want a one-way ticket to Stockholm for tomorrow morning at 10.05.’
‘Certainly,’ he said, as if he had never seen me before, took my money and gave me a ticket. It’s no wonder so many Swedes kill themselves.
12. Stockholm
In the morning it was still raining, and I gave up hope of exploring Gothenburg before catching my train. Instead I went to the station and spent my children’s inheritance on two cups of coffee and a leaden iced bun. The train left promptly at 10.05 and after four hours and twenty minutes of riding through the endless pine forest that is Sweden, I was making my way through the throngs at Stockholm’s pleasantly gloomy central station.
I went to the station tourist office to have a room found for me. I had to fill out a form with about 700 questions on it, but it was worth it because the hotel, the Castle on Riddargatan, about a mile from the station, was a charming little find, friendly, clean, and reasonably priced – in so far as that statement can be made about anything in Sweden.
I headed first for Gamla Stan, the old town, on the far side of the Strömbron bridge. It had an oddly Central European feel to it: narrow, hilly streets lined by severe, heavy buildings the colour of faded terracotta, sometimes with chunks of plaster missing, as if they had been struck a glancing blow by tank fire, and often with pieces knocked off the corners where trucks had carelessly backed into them. It had a kind of knocked-about charm, but was surprisingly lacking in any air of prosperity. Most of the windows were dirty, the brass name plates and door knockers were generally unpolished, and almost every building was in serious need of a good coat of paint. It looked much as I would expect Cracow or Bratislava to look. Maybe it was just the rain, which was falling steadily again, bringing its inevitable grey gloom to the city. Did it never stop raining in Sweden?
I walked with shoulders hunched and eyes cast down, avoiding the water that rushed down the steep, slickly cobbled lanes, glancing in the windows of antique shops, wishing I had a hat or an umbrella or a ticket to Bermuda. I retreated into a dark coffee shop, where I sat shivering, drinking a $3 cup of coffee with both hands, watching the rain through the window, and realized I had a cold coming on.
I returned to the hotel, had a lavishly steamy bath and a change of clothes and felt marginally better. I spent the closing hours of the afternoon studying a map of Stockholm and waiting for the weather to clear. At about five the sky brightened. I immediately pulled on my damp sneakers and went out to explore the streets between Norrmalmstorg, a nearby square, and Kungsträdgården, a small rectangular park that ran down to the waterfront. Everything was much better now. It was a Saturday evening and the streets were full of people meeting friends or partners and repairing in high spirits to the little restaurants and bistros scattered around the neighbourhood.
Starving as ever, I looked carefully at several and finally selected what looked to be the cheeriest and most popular of all, a cavernous bistro overlooking Norrmalmstorg called Matpalatset. It was friendly and crowded and wonderfully warm and snug, but the food was possibly the worst I have ever had outside a hospital cafeteria – a grey salad with watery cucumber and mushrooms that tasted of old newspaper, and a lasagne that was not so much cooked as scorched. Each time I poked it with my knife and fork, the lasagne recoiled as if I were tormenting it. I was quietly agog. Nowhere else in Europe could a place serve food this bad and stay in business, and yet people were queuing at the door. I ate it all because I was hungry and because it was costing me as much as a weekend in Brighton, but seldom have I felt more as if I were engaged in a simple refuelling exercise.
Afterwards I went for a long walk and felt more charitably disposed to Stockholm now that the rain had stopped. It really is an exceptionally beautiful city, more watery even than Venice, and with more parkland per person than any other city in Europe. It is built on fourteen islands and within a few miles of the city there are 25,000 more, almost all of them dotted with cottages into which the city drains its population every weekend. I walked far out onto the broad and leafy avenues and narrower side streets to the north of the downtown, all of them lined with six-storey apartment buildings, stern and stolid and yet oddly homy, and at least three-quarters of the windows were darkened. It must be a burglar’s paradise between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon.
I grew up wanting to live in buildings like these. It needn’t necessarily have been in Europe – it could have been in Buenos Aires or Dar es Salaam, say – but it had to be in the midst of a big foreign city, full of noises and smells and sights unknown in Iowa. Even now I find myself drawn to these neighbourhoods and able to walk for hours through their anonymous streets, which is what I did now, and I returned to the city centre feeling pleased with Stockholm and content everywhere but in my stomach.
I passed the cinema on Sveavägen where Olof Palme, the Prime Minister, was gunned down in March 1986. He had walked with his wife from their flat nearby to see a movie about Mozart and they had just emerged from the cinema to stroll home when some madman stepped from the shadows and shot him. It seemed to me one of the tragedies of our age because this must have been almost the last important place in the world where a prime minister could be found walking the streets unguarded and standing in movie lines just like a normal person.
The Swedish police did not exactly distinguish themselves. Palme was killed at 11.21 p.m., but the order to watch the roads didn’t go out until 12.50 and even then the police in patrol cars weren’t told what they were looking for, and the airports were not closed until 1.05 a.m. The police cordoned off a large area outside the cinema and brought in forensic experts to make a minute search of the scene, but both of the assassin’s bullets were picked up and handed in by passers-by. A 300-member police unit spent eleven months and $6 million investigating the murder before finally arresting an innocent man. They still don’t know who did it.
I strolled aimlessly along Kungsgatan, one of the main shopping streets, past the PUB department store where Greta Garbo used to work in the millinery department, and along the long pedestrian shopping street called Drottninggatan, and felt as if I were entering a different city. Drottninggatan is a mile and a half of concrete charmlessness, and it was awash with rain-sodden litter. There were drunks everywhere, too, stumbling about. I paused to look in some shop window and realized after a moment that a middle-aged man a few yards to my right was peeing down the front of it, as discreetly as he could on a lighted street, which wasn’t very discreetly at all. He was seriously intoxicated, but he had a suit on and looked prosperous and educated, and I felt immensely disappointed in him, and in all the hundreds of people who had dropped hamburger boxes and crisp packets all over the streets. This was unworthy of the Swedes. I expected better than that.
I grew up admiring Sweden because it managed to be rich and socialist at the same time, two things I believe everyone ought to be. Coming from a country where no one seemed to think it particularly disgraceful that a child with a brain tumour could be sent home to die because his father didn’t have the wherewithal to pay a surgeon, or where an insurance company could be permitted by a state insurance commissioner to cancel the policies of its 14,000 sickest patients because it wasn’t having a very good year (as happened in California in 1989), it seemed to me admirable beyond words that a nation could dedicate itself to providing equally and fairly for everyone, whatever the cost.
Not only that, but the Swedes managed to be rich and successful as well, unlike Britain, say, where the primary goal of socialists always seemed to be to make everyone as poor and backward as a shop steward in a British Leyland factory. For years, Sweden was to me the perfect society. It was hard enough to come to terms with the fact that the price to be paid for this was a scandalously high cost of living and an approach to life that had all the gusto of an undertakers’ convention, but to find now that there was litter everywhere and educated people peeing on shop fr
onts was almost too much.
Still starving, I stopped at a mobile fast-food stand near the waterfront and paid a small fortune for the sort of hamburger that leaves you wondering if this could mark the start of a long period on a life-support machine. To say that it was crappy would be to malign faeces. I ate a third of it and dropped the rest in a bin. The rain began to fall again. On top of that my cold was growing worse. I returned to my room in grim spirits.
I woke with my head full of snot and my sneakers full of water, but Stockholm looked better than ever. The sun was out, the air was clean and crisp, more like late October than early April, and the water of the harbour sparkled, as blue as a swimming pool. I walked along Strandvägen, a grand residential boulevard with the boat-lined harbour on one side and imposing apartment houses on the other, out towards Djurgården, an island given over entirely to parkland in the midst of the city. It is the most wonderful place.
Essentially it is just a city park full of grassy knolls and woodland, but scattered through it are all kinds of diversions – a museum of Nordic life, a funfair, a permanent circus, a ‘Komedie Teatern’, a biological museum, a vast open-air museum called Skansen, a technological museum, and much else. Everything was just stirring to life when I arrived. Kiosk awnings outside Skansen were being cranked into place, chairs were being set out at little open-air cafés, ticket booths readied for the happy crowds that would soon be arriving.
I pushed on into the depths of the island, warmed by the morning sunshine. Every couple of hundred yards the road would branch into three or four side roads and whichever one I took would lead through some new and captivating landscape – a view across the water to the green copper roofs of the downtown, a statue of some hero named Gustavus or Adolphus or both astride a prancing horse, a wooded dell full of infant leaves and shafts of golden sunshine. Occasionally I would pass things I wouldn’t expect to find in a public park – a boarding school, the Italian embassy, even some grand and very beautiful wooden houses on a hill above the harbour.
One of the many wonderful things about European cities is how often they have parks – like Tivoli, the Bois de Boulogne, the Prater in Vienna – that are more than just parks, that are places where you can not only go for fresh air and a stroll, but also go for a decent meal or visit an amusement park or explore some interesting observatory or zoo or museum. Djurgården is possibly the finest of them all. I spent half a day there, making a lazy circuit of the island, constantly pausing, knuckles on hips, to survey the views, having a coffee outside Skansen, watching the families arriving, and came away admiring Stockholm all over again.
I walked back into the city to Drottninggatan, and it didn’t look half so bad in the spring sunshine. Two street-sweeping machines were collecting up the Saturday-night litter, which I was heartened to see, though in fact they were only playing at it because anything that was in a doorway or under a bench or trapped against a wall or in any of the hundreds of other places where most litter ends up was beyond the reach of the machines’ brushes, so they left behind as much as they gathered up. And people passing by were already depositing fresh litter in their wake.
I thought I would treat myself to an English newspaper and I needed some tissues for my leaking nose, but there were no shops open anywhere that I could see. Stockholm must be the deadest city in Europe on a Sunday. I stopped for coffee at a McDonald’s and helped myself to about seventy-five napkins, then strolled over a low bridge to Skeppsholmen and Kastellholmen, two lovely, sleeping islands in the harbour, and thence back to Gamla Stan, now magically transformed by the sunshine. The mustard-and ochre-coloured buildings seemed positively to glow and the deep shadows in the doorways and windows gave everything a texture and richness it had entirely lacked the day before.
I made a circuit of the colossal royal palace (and I mean colossal – it has 600 rooms), which may be one of the most boring buildings ever constructed. I don’t mean that it is ugly or unpleasant. It is just boring, featureless, like the buildings children make by cutting window-holes in cardboard boxes. Still, I enjoyed the sentries, who must be the most engagingly wimpish-looking in the world. Sweden has been at peace for 150 years and remains determinedly unmilitaristic, so I suppose they don’t want their soldiers to look too macho and ferocious; as a result they make them wear a white helmet that looks disarmingly like a bathing cap, and white spats straight out of Donald Duck. It’s very hard not to go up to one of them and say, sotto voce out of the side of the mouth, ‘You know, Lars, you look quite ridiculous.’
I walked back down the hill to the waterfront and crossed the Strömbron bridge, stopping midway to lean on the railing and be hypnotized once again by the view of bridges, islands and water. As I stood there a raindrop from out of nowhere struck me on the head, and then another and another.
I looked up to see a turmoil of grey clouds rolling in from the west. Within seconds the sky was black and the rain was in a sudden freefall. People who a moment before had been walking lazily hand in hand in the mild sunshine were now dashing for cover with newspapers over their heads. I stayed where I was, too dumbfounded by the fickleness of the Swedish weather to move, staring out over the now grey, rain-studded water, blowing my nose expansively on McDonald’s napkins and thinking in passing that if there were a market for snot I could be a very wealthy man. At length I gazed up at the unkind sky and took an important decision.
I was going to Rome.
13. Rome
Well, I’m sorry. I had intended to reach Rome as you would expect me to, in a logical, systematic way, progressing diligently down the length of Germany, through Austria and Switzerland, across a corner of France and finally arriving, dusty and weary and in desperate need of a launderette, by way of Lombardy and Tuscany. But after nearly a month beneath the endlessly damp skies of northern Europe, I longed for sunshine. It was as simple as that. I wanted to walk down a street in shirtsleeves, to sit out of doors with a cappuccino, to feel the sun on my face. So it was with only the odd wrenching spasm of guilt that I abandoned my planned itinerary and bounded with a single leap across 1,500 miles of Europe. Travelling is more fun – shit, life is more fun – if you can treat it as a series of impulses.
I hadn’t been to Rome before, but I had been wanting to go there for about as long as I could remember, certainly since I first saw La Dolce Vita as a teenager. I love Italian movies, especially the truly crummy ones – the ones that are dubbed by people who bravely refuse to let a total absence of acting skills stand in the way of a good career. They always star Giancarlo Giannini and the delectable Ornella Muti and have titles that tell you just how bad they are going to be – A Night Full of Rain, That Summer in Naples, When Spring Comes – so you have no anxieties that you will be distracted by plots and can concentrate instead on the two important things, namely waiting for Ornella Muti to shed her clothes and looking at the scenery. Italian films are always full of good background shots – usually of Ornella and Giancarlo riding a buzzing Vespa past the Colosseum and the Piazza Navona and the other tourist sights of Rome on the way to having either a brisk bonk or a soulful discussion about how they can’t go on like this, usually because one of them is living with Marcello Mastroianni.
Movies everywhere used to be full of this kind of local colour – every film shot in Britain in the 1960s was required by law, if I am not mistaken, to show four laughing swingers in an open-topped Morgan roadster crossing Tower Bridge, filmed from a helicopter at a dizzy angle – but now everyone but the Italians seems to have abandoned the practice, which I think is a huge pity because my whole notion of the world was shaped by the background scenes in films like To Catch a Thief and Breathless and Three Coins in a Fountain and even the Inspector Clouseau movies. If I hadn’t seen these pictures, I would be living in Peoria now and thinking that that was about as rich as life gets.
Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria. It was everything Stockholm was not – warm, sunny, relaxed, lively, full o
f good food and cheap drink. I went to dinner on the first night with an American expatriate friend who had lived there for twenty years and he complained the whole time about how expensive and impossible it had become, but it seemed wonderfully cheap after Stockholm and in any case, as I asked him, how could you sit in the open air on a warm evening eating a splendid meal and bitch about anything at all?
‘Sure, sure, but you should try to get your plumbing fixed,’ he said, as if that settled everything. After dinner he took me on a brisk walk around the city and showed me how everything had deteriorated – how the bars of the Via Veneto had no class any longer and were full of German and American tourists too stupid and sluggish to know that they were being mercilessly ripped off, how Rugantino’s, the nightclub near the Spanish Steps made famous by La Dolce Vita, is now a McDonald’s, how some once-charming restaurant or hotel had been vandalized by tasteless proprietors whose only motivation was greed.
I listened, but I didn’t hear. Everything seemed wonderful to me, even the monumentally impassive waiters, even the cab drivers, even the particular cab driver who bilked me out of the better part of 30,000 lire – the pricehe quoted to take me from Roma-Termini to my hotel, without bothering to inform me that it was two and a half blocks away and could be walked in thirty seconds – because he did it with such simplicity and charm, forgiving me my stupidity for letting him do this to me. I was so touched that I tipped him.
My hotel was in a battered, out-at-the-elbow district just off the Via Cavour – it was the sort of neighbourhood where you could pee on the buildings and it would be all right – but it had the compensating virtue of being central. You could walk anywhere in the city from there, and that’s what I did, day after day, just walked and walked. I rose daily just after dawn, during that perfect hour when the air still has a fresh, unused feel to it, and watched the city come awake – whistling shopkeepers slopping out, sweeping up, pulling down awnings, pushing up shutters.
