Sune comes back inside on the middle deck with his bundle of evening papers, amid a gathering crowd eager to know the latest, or the next to latest, and it’s only then that he notices Greta standing in the doorway to the galley, watching him with a serious and intense absorption that no one has ever shown him before. Still, when the time comes he imagines everything will sort itself out. He begins to make his way through the boat, the magazines with their green and red emblazoned titles weighing him down. Compounded by the warm, stifling air of the ship’s compartments, the heavy bag soon has him perspiring prodigiously, sweat running down his arms and into his hands, down his forehead and onto his face, sweat dripping from everywhere into the bag. He makes his way onto the aft deck, amid all the passengers in their newly starched, freshly pressed tennis whites, through congested clusters of people with their own summer houses and summer tans, with their insistent voices, and he’s ashamed of his sweat and his dingy jacket, ashamed of the tips he receives and the appreciative bows he must give in return. Most of all he’s ashamed of his generally unsavory appearance as he enters the dining salon with its white table linen and sparkling clean glasses, its great gilded mirror and Alfhild’s white blouse, which has to be washed every day. At the very least he tries not to sell any newspapers in here that he may have dripped sweat on. When everyone has received his preferred newspaper — and many have bought the Evening Tribune while precious few have bought the Daily Leader — he makes his way forward again with his lightened bag to the foredeck. Along the way he passes a number of men leaning over their papers with betting-pool tickets in hand, a few of them exclaiming “nine right!” or “eight right!” or “almost got ten!” and he can’t help thinking to himself how they always say that.
To get his sweating under control he walks out onto the foredeck to be in the wind. Like so many others out there, he stands at the railing, listening to the steady pulse of the engines belowdecks and watching the shiny cylindrical oil tanks at Höggarn slip past. Now even the nearby islands are blue, and a tall silo looming on the horizon gives off a ghostly green hue. The restaurant at the Fjäderholmarna Isles glimmers from afar like a colored lantern atop a rocky perch. A tiny sloop has just docked there, unloading a cargo of festive passengers well on their way to a lost evening. Suddenly the city begins to rise up out of the waters ahead. There are no lights to be seen as yet, just a bluish band hugging the horizon, except for the church spires jutting up like small needles. And now Sune hears the voices of Barbro and Paul somewhere behind him, Barbro saying, “Yes, definitely,” and Paul mentioning that he’ll be alone in the fo’c’sle now for the whole trip back out. He hears him say, “Do you like gin?”
And then all his apprehensions fall away from him, all his disgust and resistance. He is gripped instead by a vigorous, intense feeling of delight. It’s just a matter of opening the door, taking off your clothes and pulling back the blanket, he thinks. And tomorrow you can talk about it as casually as anybody else. Everyone’s always going on about how it doesn’t matter what she looks like. It’s just that one thing that matters. And as he comes back into the light on the middle deck, he almost seems to be gliding along in an oddly charged aura, a feeling intensely good. And it seems to him that others should be able to sense this about him, that somehow they should know how in less than an hour he will lie with a woman in a bunk on this very boat, in a cabin right below this deck, and that when it’s all done he’ll go back into his own space in the aft saloon and lie awake the whole night long in the grips of this feverish delight.
When the boat begins to glide slowly into Nybroviken Harbor, sounding its whistle at an errant ferry that is in the way, he leans out over the railing of the upper deck to take hold of a small sandbag Paul is feeding up to him from a porthole on the lower deck. The sandbag is attached to a long, thin rope, and that rope to the rough hawser astern. The idea is that he will throw the thin line to shore as quickly as possible so that the heavy hawser can be pulled to the quay and fastened to the iron mooring ring. Every Sunday he is filled with dread when it comes time to perform this duty, because one Sunday he threw the sandbag too early, and it didn’t reach the quay. They had to hoist the rope up out of the muck of the harbor and their stern rammed right into another boat, The Ljusterö. But today he is full of confidence because there’s a cabin awaiting him with a willing woman. True enough, she’s nothing to write home about, but the cabin’s not bad. As they draw near the quay he grips the sandbag tightly in his fist like a weapon.
The usual crowd of relatives stands waiting on the quay with handkerchiefs and forced smiles at the ready, but among the rest Sune notices two unusual figures — one short and slender, the other tall and heavy-set — both wearing fully buttoned trench coats even though it’s summer. The heavy man is smoking a cigar and the smaller one stands with his hands brought together at the small of his back. Sune throws the sandbag with such force that it hits an older gentleman in the back of the crowd right in the chest before it tumbles to a halt near a blue car parked alongside the quay with its door wide open. The heavy man in the trench coat collects the sandbag and begins to haul in the stern line with his fat cigar projecting up out of the middle of his mouth like a canon. The smaller man, meanwhile, walks over to the gangplank with his hands still clasped at his back and then inspects each and every person as they disembark. The older man who was just hit in the chest begins to scold Sune for casting the sandbag the way he did, but Sune tells him that’s the only way to do it. The man then scolds him for his impertinence, but Sune is already busy by then double-checking that the gangplank is securely fastened to the upper deck before he darts down it himself, remembering all of a sudden that a girl has asked him to mail a letter for her in town. The whole time he’s off searching for a mailbox he’s nervous that the boat might depart without him before he makes it back there, and this thought is so distracting that he doesn’t spot a mailbox until he is as far away as Stureplan.
By the time he makes it back, the quay is crowded with people, but the boat is empty and waiting. Alfhild has already cleaned the dining salon and is emptying dustpans filled with ash and paper into the harbor. As he approaches the gangplank Sune notices something peculiar and disquieting. Paul and the drunken first mate and several others are just standing around on the foredeck, idly waiting for something. And now the door swings open and out steps the small, slender man in the trench coat. He turns and holds the door for Greta, as the large heavy-set man with the cigar clenched between his teeth walks directly behind her with a small, shabby suitcase in his right hand. In single file they walk up the foredeck gangplank and suddenly Greta spots him there. She looks up at him hastily, and later he will think back on that look many times — something impossible to forget.
“Bon soir,” she says and almost drops her handbag. “Bon soir.” And that’s when he notices she is crying.
Then everything breaks up, the whole scene. The waiting car starts up and pulls away, and no one but Sune looks after it for very long. The skipper, who has been pacing impatiently back and forth on the bridge, rings the bell and the upper deck gangplank is rolled away amid a great deal of clatter, the hawsers are loosened from their rings as iron clangs against stone, and the foredeck gangplank is thrown down on deck. The skipper rings the bell a second time and as the engine starts a throbbing beat begins to pulse belowdecks. The bell rings on the engine order telegraph, and a small, eager boy loosens the bow line and throws it aboard. The bow slowly glides out from the quay. Nothing is lit, and everything is blue: the tall trees in front of Berns Hotel, the cars cruising up toward the wicked club The Atlantic, the residences of Strandvägen standing like great Diebold safes. Slowly the boat comes round in the harbor until the bow lines up with the Admiralty Shipyard. Several boats with high shining lights enter the harbor, listing appreciably from all the passengers congregating aport.
As Sune opens the door to the inner middle deck, he steps right into the news report. Paul is standing there in front of t
he bell with his legs spread wide and the palms of his hands pressed flat against the overhead deck. Surrounding him is a small cluster of crew, including Alfhild, the ship’s engineer, the rummy first mate, one of the old salts, the restaurant manager, the cook, and Barbro.
“According to the police,” he explains, pausing to push his hands still harder against the overhead deck. “They said she’s been spreading it around again. Some poor sons of bitches picked it up from her last time in town. Dumb bastards.”
Barbro looks over the shoulder of the restaurant manager and winks at Paul. It isn’t long before the gathering breaks up and then all head their own separate ways in the large, empty vessel, which still seems to echo from the laughter and voices and footsteps of recent passengers. But Sune goes into the men’s head and carefully locks the door behind him. Locked securely inside, he slides down the small window and looks out. They are just passing a large, white steam cruiser, whose passengers cluster at the railing above in dark bunches, looking down at this boat, probably thinking “Hmm, look at that little rust bucket …” The lights have come on in the old folks home at Danvik and a short brightly lit train is making its way over the London viaduct. But before he is able to take in more of the unswept view, the landscape folds in on itself like a map before his eyes as his skinny body doubles over almost to the point of breaking and he begins to vomit.
The next time he looks out the window, they are passing the mill. He can just glimpse the flashing shapes of seagulls through his tear-blinded eyes as they sketch white lines across the dour facade of the great mill. Further along the shoreline, a lone scow lies at anchor alongside a quay, and paper and garbage swirl up out of the vessel’s belly as a gust of wind suddenly sweeps in. Even further along the shore, a small group of girls in light-colored dresses stand at the water’s edge, pointing to the boats, while a man stands nearby folding up a flag in the twilight. Someone yanks impatiently on the locked door, and as Sune slides the window up again he can hear two voices from the middle deck. The first is Alfhild’s and the other voice is Barbro’s. Then the door to the foredeck slams shut behind Barbro, and she doesn’t come back.
“Just how filthy does the whole thing have to be?” he wonders, and flushes the toilet.
A Game of Pocket Chess
It was an ordinary morning in a winter that would not let go. We were wearing out the gray benches furthest up in the auditorium, just under the balcony, at our backs twelve high windows snowed in by drifts, down below us the grade schoolers’ little heads bathed in the light of electric votive candles hanging throughout the auditorium in clusters of eight. A lamp glowed in its green shade atop the lectern down in front, while a gloom redolent of melting snow hovered around us. A snow squall had moved in that morning and its muted sheen settled over us like a gray shadow. The intractable winter had left us gray as well. Everything was gray, except for the pages of our books, which shone forth with surprising brilliance among the desktop rows. We could sense one another’s anxious eyes fleeing over the words like a defeated army crossing hostile territory.
It was an ordinary morning just as everything was ordinary in those days. The organ’s pipes shimmered like dark icicles in the murk of the music loft while down below in the light Mr. Lind, the head lecturer, held forth with a sermon for the general assembly before prayers. A small dark figure, he stood behind his desk, or rather a step or so too far behind it. And it made him seem lonely, like a rider without a horse. And it made us insecure, out of our own fear of loneliness. We couldn’t hear anything. His lips moved, that much we could see, and we could see how intent his eyes were as they bored into the ceiling high above him, perhaps in an effort to drill right through it to the light of day. But his words didn’t reach us, other than as a poorer kind of silence. The sleep and dreams we’d so recently shaken off still hemmed us in like a low ceiling.
It must have happened just before we were about to stand up for prayers. I was sitting there looking at Mr. Lind, thinking to myself: “If there really is a God, I bet Mr. Lind stands there and talks to him.” And then suddenly I felt an elbow nudging mine gently. Just once at first, and then again. So it wasn’t a random thing — it was a signal. I turned my head slowly to the left and looked at Ekman.
He wanted me to see something there in his lap. It didn’t look like much: just a little brown wallet or something resting on his pant leg, no bigger than his two palms opened side by side. Didn’t seem like anything to get excited about. I was about to turn away when I noticed Ekman’s hands starting to quiver just a little, the way they did whenever he was about to do something with them. So I stuck with him and watched his fingers tremble in anticipation as they began to open the little wallet. And what do you know! It wasn’t a wallet after all. It was a little brown and gray chess board, with tiny slots in the squares for the pieces to fit into, miniature painted figurines on little celluloid pegs.
I could tell he was waiting for me to take up the chess set and run my hands over it in admiration. So I lifted it carefully out of his hands as we stood up from our benches. And as the “Our Father” ascended up to the ceiling, if not quite to His heavenly kingdom, I let my fingers play over the pieces, from the kings’ wide crowns to the bishops’ crosses to the rooks’ sturdy battlements. And the whole time I could feel — right through my drowsiness, right through the icy light and the organ tones and the “Our Father” — that I was in the presence of a friend. Like a source of warmth emanating from my left.
Our first subject that morning was history, with Mr. Lind. We spent that year in what they called the Flower Room, an odd-shaped classroom right across from the auditorium. It was narrow like a hallway, with our eight desks lined up side by side along one of the long walls. The teacher’s desk was on a small platform along the opposite wall. Behind it, covering the whole wall, hung a painting depicting a small gathering of girls in long white dresses picking flowers on a meadow in full bloom and fashioning wreaths from the flowers. We always felt a bit sheepish looking at that painting, since it seemed to show a very private scene. They were picking flowers for each other, not for the eight of us going through our first year in the three-year classical studies line. But there they sat before us, tarrying in the tall grass among the flowers, fashioning wreaths for each other’s coffins as they longed for old age.
It was cold that morning, heavy snow swirling outside the windows. The lamp overhead shone like a sun above the meadow scene, but a chill permeated the room. The classroom door was wide open. Students from the writing class were making a lot of noise out under the columns, while the steps of stragglers arriving late to class echoed in the stairwell. The air was thick with the smell of chalk. Our wooden benches were very hard. We were waking up. I hadn’t gotten around to giving the pocket-chess set back to Ekman yet. I set it on my desk and started putting all the chess pieces in their proper positions just for something to do. As I was finishing up Mr. Lind came into the classroom.
As usual, he entered the class quietly and hastily. With a perfunctory nod to the rest of us, he stepped up to the desk and took up the class roster. A few moments later he was down in front again, standing before us with his right hand fingering his chin. He always appeared to be dressed for mourning, his faint smile forever tempered by a look of melancholy, as if he’d recently lost a close relative. That’s how he looked now as he turned to me, with an expression both slightly embarrassed and a little sad.
“Today,” he said. “We’re going to talk a little about the decline of monarchy.”
Talk a little. That was Lind in a nutshell. Where other teachers interrogated or browbeat us, he talked with us. He talked us through the history of the world in a voice that was never raised nor tinged with disbelief at our ignorance. It was as if he considered anything plausible, be it the evils of human history or our own immeasurable stupidity. That’s why we never feared him as we did the other teachers, why instead we respected him as we did no one else. I think he was actually the very first one to teac
h us that fear and respect were not one and the same but actually each other’s opposite.
Still, even Lind had one person who was afraid of him. And this person feared him because he feared everybody. Everybody and everything. Most of all, he probably feared himself. This person was none other than the kid who sat next to me, my friend Ekman.
But Ekman wasn’t always my friend. He wasn’t now, for instance. He wasn’t a friend of mine before class, and especially not during class. I would watch him from the side, though he never noticed. The only thing he ever noticed was the open book in front of him, today turned to the French Revolution. He always did his homework except when his anxieties got the better of him. He always knew what he was supposed to know, and yet he always doubted himself. I would sit there beside him as I was doing now, witnessing the terror he could work himself into, and the spectacle was enough to make my blood run cold. Suddenly I couldn’t stand him. I felt hurt somehow, betrayed in some strange way. And so the pocket chess set was instantly forgotten, just a dead clump of lead packed away in my pocket.
Sleet: Selected Stories Page 13
