Sleet: Selected Stories

by Stig Dagerman

  “What did they say?” says Grampa in a weak voice. “What are we getting?”

  “Sleet,” I say.

  Alvar comes in and picks up the bootjack. He pulls off his boots with a groan and then puts on his shoes. I look at the thermometer outside the window, the one I bought for Grampa when he turned seventy. He always wanted a thermometer outside the window. But when he finally got one, his eyes were so bad that he couldn’t read it anyway.

  “You bought one with too small numbers, boy. Little shit numbers!”

  It’s thirty-five degrees out. The wind’s blowing more and more, whipping through the lilac hedge, and the rain’s hitting hard against the windows. A lantern comes floating over the yard from the barn. It’s Sigrid on her way in with the pails. I’ve got a big bruise on my arm. I pull down the shade so I don’t have to think about her.

  When the clock strikes we’re all sitting around, waiting. All except Sigrid. She’s standing in the corner of the room separating the milk from the cream. Sigh-sigh-sigh goes the separator — that’s just what it sounds like. Normally Alvar helps her out with that, but not today. He’s sitting here at the table, giving me this creepy look. Maybe he wants to pinch me, too.

  “Did anybody hear the weather?” he says. “What are we getting?”

  He puts his hands up on the table, like giant sandwiches.

  “Sleet,” I say for the second time.

  And it sounds so strange, so crazy. It doesn’t sound the least bit normal. But it goes so well with all the other unnormal things that have been going on around here today: Grampa sitting on the chaff-cutter, Mama and Alvar dragging Grampa across the yard, the trespasser I scared off, Sigrid lying in the carrot tops with Alvar on top of her, Sigrid pinching me, the fire I started in the hen house, Grampa sitting speechless and pale on the daybed.

  Mama’s sitting next to Alvar. She puts her hands up on the table next to his. She looks at them and sighs. The separator sighs, too — sigh-sigh-sigh. Suddenly Mama looks at me to see if I need washing. She wrinkles her forehead. My beautiful mother. She leans across the table.

  “Who gave you that ugly bruise?” she says.

  The separator slows down, Alvar glares at me, and all of a sudden I’m scared again. Nothing scares me more than a licking. I look away from Mama. I look behind me and see Grampa sitting on the daybed, still so white, just staring ahead with quiet, unmoving eyes.

  “Grampa,” I whisper, as I look Mama in the eyes.

  Mama bites her lip. Alvar coughs. The separator speeds up again, sighing and sighing. I look at Grampa, but there’s no reaction. I’m sure he didn’t hear a thing. The time goes. The clock strikes another time. The separator sighs on, and I guess that’s why we don’t hear anything until the knock comes on the outside door.

  “Was that a knock?” says Mama.

  She looks at Grampa.

  “Daddy, it’s her,” she says. “She’s here. Shouldn’t you go out and meet her?”

  And everybody looks at Grampa, but he doesn’t move from the daybed. He just keeps on looking straight ahead into the empty air. But the thing is, none of us can bring ourselves to go out and open the door either. I pull up the window shade a little and peek out. There’s a car rolling out through the gate, picking up speed, rushing off toward the village. Next we hear some footsteps in the hallway, moving slowly toward the kitchen door. Another knock.

  “Daddy!” says Mama, almost pleading with him.

  Then the door opens. And all of a sudden, there stands the aunt from America, right on the threshold. A strange woman with thick lines of makeup on her face. She’s got tired eyes, and her mouth is all sunken-in, like she doesn’t have any teeth left.

  “Good evening,” she says in a strange accent and then blinks from all the light.

  She steps into the kitchen. The separator stands still from pure surprise. And now all of us are looking at Grampa. We want to see him jump up and throw his arms around this strange lady that none of us knows because we’re too young. We want to hear him call her sister. But he just sits there. And all of a sudden the aunt from America’s eyes fix on him, and she jerks back like she’s suddenly afraid of something. Then she moves forward and stops right in front of him with empty outstretched hands.

  “Gustav,” she says. “Is that you?” And none of us can figure out why she’d have to go and ask such a silly question.

  But Grampa doesn’t answer. Grampa doesn’t change his expression one single bit. It’s like he hasn’t even noticed anything yet. Then the aunt from America sinks down on her knees in front of him. Imagine, she gets right down on the floor in her pretty clothes and everything. She puts her arms around Grampa’s neck and tries to pull his head towards her. But she doesn’t have the strength.

  “Gustav,” she whispers. “It’s me. Me, Maja. You must remember me.”

  And then, without looking at her the littlest bit, Grampa says, “Take care of yourself. We’re getting sleet.”

  Then the aunt from America lets go of Grampa’s neck and stands up. She pulls a long necklace out from under her coat and fingers it helplessly while her face twitches all over, trying to hold back the tears. She kind of looks like one of those dolls that you move around with strings. Finally, she turns away and rushes out of the kitchen.

  “Excuse me a minute,” she says, just before the sobs begin to smother her.

  * * *

  I grab the stable lantern and run out after her. I figure I better light the way so she doesn’t go and fall in the creek. Outside, she’s standing just beyond the edge of the porch, out in the sleet, crying. When I get there with the lantern, she takes me under the arm and pulls me along with her. She talks pretty weird, and I don’t really understand everything.

  “Are you the little boy without a father?” she says, among other things, while she looks me in the face for a good long time.

  I close my eyes and clench my teeth together. I mean, I can understand how they know at school that I don’t have a daddy — but Lord, to think that they know it all over America — I’m not sure if I’ll ever get over that. Anyways. We walk and walk until we’re finally standing outside the stable door. And since we’re suddenly there, I open the door and we go in. It’s warm inside. Nice and homelike. It smells just like a stable, hay and carrots. I hang the lantern from the big key in the stable door. And then the aunt from America — this is the amazing part — then she steps right over the carrot tops to the far corner of the stable and climbs right up on the chaff-cutter, exactly where Grampa was sitting.

  “So this old guy’s still here,” she says, and runs her hand along it.

  I climb up and sit next to her. Then she starts to cry again. She takes hold of my hand, caresses it, and cries the whole time in American, sometimes saying things in Swedish that don’t make a bit of sense. Below us are all the carrot tops, green and glistening, and over in their baskets the red carrots are shining, too.

  “We were in here all day, chopping and chopping,” I say, mostly for something to say. “The whole day we were just sitting in here, chopping and chopping. But now we’re all done chopping — now we are, mostly.”

  The aunt from America puts her arm around me, and it doesn’t hurt like when Mama does it. It feels soft and warm.

  “Poor little boy without a father,” she says. And when I think of how they know all over America — all over that incredibly big America on the other side of the Atlantic — how Arne Berg in Mjuksund, Sweden, hasn’t ever seen his daddy, then I can’t help it. Suddenly I don’t see the green carrot tops anymore and the tears drop slowly down on the chaff-cutter.

  “It wasn’t so bad when Gramma was alive,” I say. “At least then I had two mothers. But she died last year. Every morning she went out and looked for eggs. And then one day in April she didn’t come back. We were having our coffee, and then afterwards we went out and looked for her. And that’s when we found her, on her knees, right here by the chaff-cutter.”

  “Por liddel boi,”* says th
e aunt from America, whatever that means, as she pulls me up tight against her.

  “But if the Aunt wants to sleep out here,” I say. “Then don’t be scared ’cause it says Palestine on the wall. It wasn’t Jesus. Do you want me to carve your name on the wall?”

  “No, not yet,” she says. “Maybe in a little while.”

  She strokes her little soft hand across my face.

  “Are you crying?” she says.

  “No,” I say, and I dry and dry till the carrot-tops glisten green again, all freshly cut in the lamplight. “… It’s just a little sleet.”

  * Swedish-American English phonetic rendering from the original.

  Salted Meat and Cucumber

  When I was nine years old and supposedly small for my age, the way to school passed by a creek with yellow, muddy water. In the winter you could stand there on the bank and throw stones until the golden ice cracked. But in summer, spring, and fall the creek became a race course for matchsticks, corks, and matchboxes — the matchsticks always won because the corks and matchboxes would get stuck between the rocks. Once my friend Inge and I found two fat, ugly lampreys squirming around on the bottom. We stuffed them in a sandwich bag and took them home. But nobody wanted them. So we had to throw them back in the river. I hope they lived. In those days our knees were always scraped, the scabs forever fresh and soft. And just when they had begun to heal, a brewery truck would almost always come down the road that you just had to tow behind, or a new log jam would form in the river that you just had to run across.

  Yes, the road to school was filled with adventures — not so much on the way there, but on the way home. The rich old farmer had an apple orchard with bitter, green fruit. And there was an old abandoned house that eventually became a chapel. Birds flew around in the dark under its broken roof, shingles had fallen in and covered the floor, and everything — the steps, the doors, the warped window frames — everything was rotten in a way that equally frightened, tickled, and enchanted.

  And then, of course, there were the old women of the district, always dressed in black, whom you could usually see walking through the trees toward some old roadside shack. To us, people were never as old as they were in those days — a couple hundred years was just barely middle-aged.

  And there were other things, too, forbidden things which we could never really know for sure, simply because they were forbidden. And yet the unawareness was but a myth, for if ever there was a time when life was filled with sticky symbolism, it was then. Almost everything we did had double meanings. If you threw a stone at a girl out of pure mischief, the act would certainly be interpreted as something else altogether.

  One time on the hillside by the river we found an old deck of left-behind cards half-destroyed by the rain. Only the queen of spades was still in fairly good shape, and I remember very well the many different ways this could be interpreted by those of us who were more experienced.

  When the washtubs simmered on the bank of the river, we would steal matches from the wood pile and light them up in the dark behind some barn wall. This gave us a gruesome pleasure which somehow made life even more doubly complex than it already was. I remember my friend Inge once took a single match to an entire box of stolen matches. When it burst into a hissing flame he flung it out through the air and into the creek. And I remember thinking what a terrible sin it was to waste something you had just stolen. No, we were never as moral as we were in those days.

  To us, the most important bits of knowledge often came in whispers. In the hallway at school, terror had a way of sinking its claws into you, because that’s where you were often pointed out by some secret whisper that could be followed from mouth to mouth. And the strangest thing about it was that you never got to know what your own secret was all about. It could be whispered of someone that his house was infested with lice, or of someone else that she had peed in her pants in class and had to stay in during recess to clean it up. But of my own supposed offences I was never once allowed to hear.

  By inscrutable means, everything that required quiet talk found its way to our ears. One boy in the fourth grade was known to have tormented animals. It was common knowledge that he had once lured a tomcat into a cage full of hens, with disastrous results, and that afterwards the teacher had gone to his house to lecture him about it. Even though he was only in the fourth grade, he was already wearing a grown-up’s long trousers. He was tall, with shoulders that hunched forward. And during recess he would walk around kicking stones, and always by himself, because the judge that was somewhere inside all of us had long ago condemned him to a life of exile.

  At recess we would lie in the green grass and bite pine cones to the core, or we would take turns trying to kick a broken tennis ball through a small hole in the school fence — one time I even managed to get it through, even though I was from Stockholm. The girls, on the other hand, would stand in small groups by the schoolhouse wall. The line between us was hard and fixed, like nothing else.

  Speaking of the judge within us, it happened during one recess that the boy who abused animals — his name was Sivert — got yelled at by the teacher for scuffing up his shoes on some rocks in the school yard. They were actually the county’s shoes, because his family was too poor to buy him a pair on their own. When the teacher turned his back, Sivert twisted his face into a wild grimace. And then another boy ran to the teacher’s side. We called this other boy the Thief because it was well known that he had once stolen the janitor’s glasses during gym.

  “Mr. Andersson,” the Thief cried out. “Sivert just stuck his tongue out at you!”

  Suddenly the teacher whirled around and with one hand he grabbed Sivert by both cheeks, palming his face and pulling him up to the tips of his toes. He leaned forward so that his and Sivert’s eyes were just a few inches apart. And that’s how they stayed for a long minute, silently staring at each other. But at last he lowered Sivert back to the ground. Releasing his grip, he turned abruptly and headed up towards the school. But then to everyone’s shock Sivert stuck out his tongue again, his expression much uglier this time. Yet before the Thief had a chance to yell anything out, one of us grabbed him by the mouth and forced it shut. Something told us the whole thing had gone far enough.

  We had our own system of justice, a code for measuring the seriousness of a crime, and the punishments were carefully chosen. Stealing was nothing compared with torturing animals. Once when the Thief was standing at the blackboard the teacher reached down into the Thief’s pocket and found that it was full of chalk. He had to stay behind when we went out for recess, so we waited for him at the bottom of the steps, gripped with fear, restless with admiration. When he finally came out, we had a feeling that something about him was different. A smell? His way of walking? Of spitting? And hostile as always when encountering the unfamiliar, we remained coldly silent. But the Thief jumped towards us, excitedly.

  “I got to keep the chalk!” he said. “He only pulled my hair, the bastard! He said to me, ‘It starts with a piece of thread and ends with your neighbor’s bread.’ But I got to keep the chalk!”

  That was the first of probably four hundred times we would come to hear the “theft verse” in school. But you could tell the Thief was scared because he looked like he was ready to fight. He turned and started walking out in front of our enormous group towards the back of the large red schoolhouse, and the space between him and the rest of us was filled with our contempt. In back of the building a ladder hung down from the roof, and it swayed back and forth in the wind.

  “I bet you I can climb up there and draw a cross on the roof,” he said, spitting the words out at us. And some of us spat back: “The hell you can!” But by the time the challenge had left our mouths he was already several steps up.

  So we sat down in the grass and followed his steep ascent. Like little angry dogs his hands clamped their teeth onto the ladder’s rungs with more and more fury the higher he went. We understood of course that he was very scared, and the closer he got to
the top the more he began to slow down in hope that the school bell would ring. The wind was blowing much harder now, ripping into the ladder. We let him climb three-quarters of the way up before we finally shouted that the teacher was coming. That was his sentence for stealing.

  But then everything else went as usual. He got to sit on our bench in the hallway during lunch, eating sandwiches like the rest of us. The girls sat on a different bench, towards which we all threw our crumpled sandwich wrappers. Only Sivert had nowhere to sit. Most of the time he just stood by the window, drawing pictures of queer little people on the white sill with his pencil. Sometimes he would go outside and throw stones at the birch trees, and then we would get up and go to the window to see what he had drawn, filled with a strange sort of resentment. We always hoped the teacher would come along and get a look at what Sivert had drawn.

  During lunch my friend Inge and I always sat together. His father owned a vegetable stand, and maybe that’s why he always had cucumber on his sandwiches. He detested cucumbers, but he was too timid to say anything at home. Sometimes I got salted meat in my sandwiches. At home they thought I liked salted meat because that’s what I had always been given when I lived in Stockholm. But what they didn’t know was that back then I was in the habit of dropping my salted meat into one of the empty desks at school. Naturally, Inge and I could have exchanged sandwiches, but he didn’t like salted meat either. For that matter I didn’t like cucumber. So one day it occurred to us that we could take the thin slices of salted meat and cucumber and drop them discreetly behind our lunch bench, which stood against the wall and extended all the way to the floor. That entire fall and throughout the winter we dropped salted meat and cucumber behind the bench, and on our way home from school we fantasized about how a flood of salted meat and cucumber would flow out over the floor and drown the whole school if we ever moved that bench. But we never dared to move it. Instead, we continually searched for new places behind the bench to drop our toppings so that the load would be distributed as evenly as possible.