What a miserable thing, standing here and trying to talk to a roomful of family and the unmentionable trash they’ve brought into it, ’cause not an ear in the room is paying me the least bit of heed. It’s enough to drive you crazy. You’re alone, Knut-boy, and you’ve always been alone. Is it any wonder you start to sob?
“He can have my suit,” Tage says. “I’ve got my uniform. I can wear that to the funeral.”
And then that son of a bitch radio dealer says he thinks Tage’s clothes should do the trick, long as he don’t mind they might end up with puke all over them.
“Getting motion sick can happen to anybody,” I tell that no-good lout. “If they ain’t used to riding in a car like that. Not everybody’s got the luxury of coasting around every day like some kind of showboat in their Volvo ’39, or whatever the hell it is.”
“Pontyak,” the radio dealer says. “Tage’s suit will fit good enough. For being thirty-three years old he still has the build of a tenderfoot.”
“You don’t gotta be a fat-ass,” I say to him, “to bust a fella in the chops so hard he’ll be sorry he ever opened his goddamn mouth. If it comes to that.”
“Well, then, maybe you should start with Elinda’s boyfriends,” he blurts out. “Before they eat you out of house and home.”
Here you stand at this table, alone and grieving, and as you do your woman is climbing into bed with another man. And your own family, wouldn’t you think that they would listen for even half a second to what you have to say? Don’t kid yourself. You’re on your own. And you’ve always been on your own. So now you cry. How can you not cry when your sister Lydia just keeps at you with no end in sight?
But then finally she comes up and says, “Let’s get you to bed.” She must be good and worn out, ’cause she has to lean on me all the way into the old man’s room. The air’s so damn stuffy in here I start to feel the motion sickness all over again. But at least I manage to throw myself down on the old man’s couch before it all comes up again. Except it don’t come up again, ’cause I’ve learned by now how to control myself. But I should probably get up and have a tinkle.
But Lydia rears up and snaps, “You just stay put, you!” and then she starts pulling my trousers off me. So of course I’ll have to hear about this till my dying day. “Knut was so damned drunk the night before the old man’s funeral his own sister had to take his pants off him.” And my jacket, ’cause she pulls that off me too. Treating me like a goddamn storefront dummy! But Lydia and her radio-dealing slug got another thing coming if they think they can treat me any old way they want. And so that’s what I tell her, right to her face. And the scolding starts all over again.
“You’re nothing but a damned liar, you! ’Cause you never want to Mamma’s grave with no flowers!”
“I did so,” I say. “I even raked the gravel!”
No way for her to know anyway.
And then she really gets furious and yanks at my arm so it almost comes right out of my shoulder.
“You’re drunk and you’re a damn liar,” she says. “’Cause the family plot is all dug up for Dad! So there ain’t no gravel to rake. Nisse and I saw that with our own eyes when we went there this afternoon!”
So I went and left flowers on the wrong grave. And if they ain’t still there tomorrow that’s just eight crowns right down the drain. And now you’re branded a liar. And you’re sick. And back in town your own dear woman is lying in bed with another man. And every time you come home your own little boy, Yngve, runs and hides. So they badmouth you to everyone, near or far, big or small. Is it any wonder you lay here and blubber?
Here on the old man’s couch, stripped pretty much naked, blubbering. So many nights the old man laid right here himself, on this very spot. And this is where we sat, me and him, the last time we ever saw each other. So you should know that, Lydia, you should know that this is right where the old man put his arm around me and gave me a big squeeze. And then he got up and went over to that dresser there and rummaged around in the drawer for something. After a while he got his hands on what he was after and he laid it out right here on the table. A little sweater.
“’Member this, Knut?” he said to me. “’Member this Icelandic sweater? I picked it up for you one Christmas in the city. And you, well, I ain’t never seen a kid so goddamned pleased with anything in my life …”
I could do with that Icelandic sweater right about now. The old man, he had it in his hands the last time I was here. I sure could do with it, alright, to hold under the blanket whiles I think about the old man.
“Where’s my Icelandic sweater?” I say to Lydia.
Lydia stands there besides the couch. Her nose looks like the knob on a copper pot, her face so red it’s shining.
“Where’s my Icelandic sweater?” I ask again but she don’t answer. Probably thinks I’m rambling.
But then she says, “Your Icelandic sweater! I suppose you’re going to try and wear that to the funeral, instead of a proper suit of clothes! That suit of yours you might as well give to some lost soul in the poorhouse now.”
So Lydia, she don’t understand nothing. Not a goddamn thing! And I can’t really look for it myself ’cause the second I lift my head up a little I get a throatful of the stuff. Motion sickness is a son of a bitch.
Lydia stands there with my suit draped over her arm like it’s done her some kind of terrible wrong.
“And I see now you lost your armband!” she says.
The grieving band! My body suddenly turns cold and the grudge I bear the others just falls away like nothing. I stop thinking how everybody’s out to run me down. And I pretty much forget Elinda. I don’t cry anymore on account of my misunderstood heart of gold. Instead I lay here on the old man’s sofa bed and see myself for the fucking pig I am. To lose the grieving band like that — that’s like losing the grief. I took the wrong path somewhere and let that band slip from my arm. That’s my memorial to the old man — getting shitfaced drunk and losing the reminder of my loss. What a lousy pig I am. Always have been and always will be. And much as I try to close my eyes and block it out, the shame is there all the same. I can picture that black band laying in a pool of puke or dangling from the barbed wire outside the Pavilion. Or maybe somebody’s picked it up there by the outdoor dance floor and said, “Look! Someone went and lost their armband! That miserable slob Knut, of course. That goddamn boozehound that can’t keep sober once, not even the night before his old man’s funeral. Same damn thing when his mother got buried. What a piece of work that son of a bitch is, good old Knut Lindqvist — spelled with a ‘qv,’ like he told the deputy! He sure has come up in the world since he moved to the city to pick up other people’s garbage.”
And as I sink further down into a yellow gloom, so warm and vile, I can remember all at once how things went at Mamma’s funeral. How the first thing I did that day was get up and puke out the window, just as Ulrik was passing by with a couple of milk pails, and how he spat out his contempt at me.
“I ain’t gonna make you clean up your mess on the footpath out front, not this time, but you can be damn sure you’re gonna scrub all the puke off the front stoop!”
And I remember waking up again, a while later, with no trousers on my legs, ’cause of course they got caught on a metal latch and torn at the knee as I stumbled through the gate drunk. So Lydia, she was up early sewing them together again in the kitchen. And then I had to sneak down to the basement to have a stiff one in secret to steady myself. And the rest of them, they could see it in my step, ’cause there wasn’t anything else in my stomach. If it wasn’t for the old man I’d have had to make it over to the car on my own, but he took me by the arm. And then I got woozy from the drink and had motion sickness in the car, so it took us right up to the last minute before we all got to the church, they had to drive so damn slow. And then down in the dead room Nisse and Ulrik unfastened the coffin lid, and there lay Mamma with her pointy nose, so yellow and scrawny. And then Ulrik laid the handkerchief back over her again and I was w
eeping so bad I almost put out the flame on the candle I was holding. And then there was the sound of that lid creaking the way it did as they screwed it back on for the last time. And the caretaker, he walked ahead of the rest of us as we took up the coffin.
“You ain’t so sturdy,” Ulrik said to me, “so you get in back.”
And truth be told, I didn’t look like much in that suit, so I pulled up the rear. And boy, was it full in the church. Mostly old folks, sitting there staring. It was July and hot like the blazes, so the sweat was just pouring off me, and what a relief it was when I could put my end of the coffin down in front of the altar. And then afterwards I just held my handkerchief up in front of my face, and the gravel from the priest’s trowel sounded like a rattlesnake. And then up we went again to bear the coffin, and my shoulder was aching something awful, so bad I could scream. And I got the straps mixed up ’cause I was flustered. And Nisse, he wanted to say something smart to me, I could tell, but then I guess he remembered he was in church, so he bit his tongue. And I held up my end as best I could going out the church, but all the way back over to the dead house I felt sick right down to my toes. And Mamma, well, she was starting to smell a little. Just a little. Maybe I was the only one that noticed. And then as we was all lowering her into the grave I let go just a bit too soon, I was so wiped out. If the others wasn’t a good bit stronger than me to begin with, the whole thing would’ve just crashed down into the hole. I really wanted to speak a word there at the grave, but I couldn’t get a word out for all my bawling, so I just dropped in the wreath. And then we all headed back to the cars for the ride back to the funeral dinner. And at table Lydia leaned over to me and whispered that I brought too much brännvin, ’cause now all the old guys was getting drunk. I told her I thought Mamma would’ve liked to be here for this.
“She’d have been so goddamn happy to see everybody having such a good time!”
And must be I said this a little too loud, ’cause the looks I got from my brothers and sisters, well, it was enough to make a man’s blood run cold. But the old man, he saw it just the same way. He was getting good and tight himself by then, and who could blame him for that? The old man never did have much of a chance in this house to let go of things. And that evening me and him sat down together in his room here.
And that’s something you’ll never forget.
And as you sink now, further and further down, you know it’s gonna be the same tomorrow. The same but not the same. ’Cause the old man, he ain’t gonna be there to invite you into his room and talk to you like you’re a regular person. Ain’t nobody else left but the ones that cluck their tongues at you and treat you like you don’t matter. Tomorrow you’ll be on your own. As alone as it fucking gets. Is it any wonder you lay here now, sobbing yourself to sleep in this room, undressed by your own sister, drifting down into a murky drunken sleep? Is it any wonder you’d like to have your old Icelandic sweater to hold in your hands and stroke under the blanket? And so you ask Lydia one more time.
“Where’s my Icelandic sweater?”
But it’s too late. A second later and you’re out of reach, deep down under, where you don’t hear nothing and there ain’t no understanding.
But no, that’s not really true, ’cause for just a little shit part of one second you hang in there and stay alive. And that’s when you hear Lydia say in a voice weak and weary, but still clear as hell.
“You bastard.”
And a cuckoo calls high up in the air.
The old man’s clock is going again.
Acknowledgments
A number of stories in this collection first appeared in the following publications: “The Midsummer Night’s Chill is Hard,” Lightship Review 1, 2013; “The Stockholm Car,” Agni Online, 2013; “The Surprise,” Southern California Anthology 8. Los Angeles, CA: University of Southern California, 1996, 60–66; “Men of Character,” Southern Review 32:1. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, 1996, 59–79; “Salted Meat and Cucumber,” Prism International 34:2. Vancouver, British Columbia: University of British Columbia, 1996, 54–60; “Sleet,” Confrontation 54/55. New York: Long Island University, 1994, 53–62; “The Games of Night,” Black Warrior Review 20:2. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama, 1994, 107–17; “In Grandmother’s House,” Quarterly West 38. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah, 1994, 160–67; “To Kill a Child,” Grand Street 42. New York, 1992, 96–100.
Stig Dagerman’s letter to Karl Werner Aspenström, which appears in the translator’s note on page 14, is quoted from Robin Fulton Macpherson’s introduction to Stig Dagerman’s German Autumn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1.
The translator gratefully acknowledges the support of the Swedish Arts Council. He also wishes to thank the Dagerman Society for their invaluable support of the translation process, in particular the encouragement and helpful advice of the society’s chairperson, Bengt Söderhäll.
Sleet: Selected Stories Page 20
