Once he tells me about his last day at work. He left his job at six o’clock on September 14, 1954. He stood in the yellow changing hut with a bunch of flowers in his hand. It consisted of two tulips and three green twigs. He held the flowers pinched between thumb and index finger and heard one of the assistant directors of the construction company speak. The air was muggy and hot because of the bad ventilation and the stench from the damp raincoats and boots. There were nine of them in the cramped little hut. From his description, I get the impression that it was even smaller than the cabin that to all intents and purposes later became Oskar’s home.
Oskar had intended to go on working until Christmas that year, but then he changed his mind.
“I just don’t know why. But the closer it got, the more pointless it seemed to keep on working, since I didn’t have to. So one Friday I told them. Next week will be my last. They didn’t really say anything. Even in those days there was no room at work for older men. So don’t think there’s anything new about this idea that you’re old before you’re even forty. But there weren’t so many people then.”
When the cleaner came to clear up the hut at four in the morning on September 15, the flowers were still on the table. Oskar never says whether he left them there on purpose or forgot them.
“The flowers never made it home. I suppose they got left behind.”
On September 15, Oskar stayed in bed. He lay there and listened to the trams clanking past in the street and was glad not to have to go outside in the slush. He clearly remembers how it rained that morning. He remembers that it was a sustained, heavy downpour, and he remembers the awning on the balcony of the apartment above flapping in the wind.
He lay in his bed and heard the mail thump down into the letterbox. He felt no regret that his work was over. He lay there thinking that next year, next summer, he would move out early to the archipelago.
In the afternoon he leaves the apartment and buys a calendar. He has never done that before. But now he buys one, which he hangs up in the kitchen. It is a tear-off calendar where one page has to be removed every day. With a large disc that he rotates once every month. The theme on the disc changes according to the seasons. For September that year, 1954, there is a black-and-white picture of people in rain gear waiting for a yellow number 34 bus.
When the assistant director has finished his speech, he pats Oskar on the shoulder and calls for three cheers. A roar goes up in the hut and then the assistant director leaves. After that Oskar and his workmates start to change to go home. Oskar throws his blue work trousers into a box that serves as a trash can. They lie there among sausage skins and greaseproof paper.
Then they all go off, one after the other.
“Have a nice time, then. In this weather.”
“Thanks.”
“Only two more years to go.”
“They’ll pass quickly.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Thanks for all our time together.”
“You too.”
Then they all leave the hut and pick their way across the muddy ground. Some take their bicycles; others practically run away. Oskar walks toward the tram stop.
“Can’t for the life of me remember what he said. It wasn’t much. But there was something about the accident.”
Oskar and the accident always go together. Everyone mentions it as Oskar’s distinguishing feature.
“An old boy who was blown up but somehow managed to survive.”
“A thumb that looks bloody awful. But he’s a decent sort.”
“He certainly gets by in spite of it.”
Oskar hardly ever talks about the accident. On the rare occasions that he does, he sounds hesitant and not at all forthcoming and gives the impression of being disconnected from what once happened.
Oskar is lying in bed. It is the evening of September 15, 1954. He has switched off the bedside light and lies there in the half dark, looking out into the room. Then he gets to his feet and goes into the kitchen. He takes a pencil from the kitchen table and draws a little cross over September 13. He puts down the pencil and goes back to bed.
The following day, when he is having his coffee, he notices that he put the cross over the wrong date, but he does not bother to change it.
“All of that autumn and winter I sat and waited for spring. I don’t think I did anything else. But I had a yearning in me and you can live on that for a long time. Not only when you are young.
“The days passed. I mostly just waited. And luckily the winter was short that year. So it wasn’t too long.”
When Oskar leaves the Social Democratic Party, it is no sudden and dramatic decision, rather the result of a long series of developments. But when he talks about it, it is mainly because of his feeling that too little happened over too long a period of time. He never explains exactly what he means. All he says is that something came to a standstill. And since Oskar very rarely discusses the reasons for the changes he himself has brought about, all he really mentions are the words “standstill” and “too slow.” He makes no comparisons between the party he leaves and the one he joins. All he does is change his party membership.
But once, one evening in August during one of the last summers, he says that his pension has increased and adds in passing that he has often found that one never has anything to lose by changing one’s opinions, if necessary. He says that one can easily change party once a year if one really thinks it worthwhile.
“But your pension? How do you mean?”
“It’s gone up.”
“Yes?”
“Well, it should have gone up even more. You know what food costs.”
“Yes, of course. I know.”
“Well. Precisely.”
One evening, Oskar tunes in to a radio drama for the first time, and after that he repeats the experience a couple of times a week. This continues over two summers. But the third summer, he no longer listens. Not that he switches over to some other program. The radio stands there silent. Instead, he has started to solve crossword puzzles. He has picked out a dozen or so of them from old newspapers under his bed. He has torn them out and put them on the table in front of the radio. He starts in May and by one of the last days in August he has solved them all, and as we burn trash one evening, I see them catch fire among the leftover food and cardboard.
But one of the puzzles is left behind, has slipped down and gotten stuck behind the table. When the time comes to move the sauna after Oskar’s death and the table is carried out, the yellowing piece of paper drops onto the floor.
He has solved the crossword. But I see that he has made a spelling mistake in one place and as a result has gotten the wrong words to fit in. He has written “ögonblick” without a “c.” And after that, a whole section of the crossword is skewed, but he has still managed to fit in words so that the letters match even though the clues in fact referred to quite different words. He has solved his crossword puzzle and with his spelling mistake created a new one.
The picture of Oskar is obscure. Contradictions and empty answers, silence and ambiguous pronouncements are just a part of the unfinished picture. Sometimes, too, minor events break into the picture, opening up cracks, ensuring that all the way through the picture remains incomplete.
Sometimes I think Oskar is doing it deliberately.
At other times, I’m sure I’m wrong.
Once I forget my wallet on the table. When I fetch it the next day and later want to take out a postage stamp, I find that it is gone.
Another time, as we are sitting in the gloom of the cabin with the radio turned off and his index finger drumming on the wax tablecloth, Oskar suddenly bangs his fist on the table and in a loud and tuneless voice starts to sing a few verses from the chapbook song “Elfsborg Fortress.” He sits with his head bowed over the table and sings at the top of his voice. Then all of a sudden he stops, midverse, and the index finger begins to drum on the table again.
A third time Oskar asks me to buy him a pornographic magazine when I go to the mainland to do the shopping. First, he lists the usual things he wants. Milk, coffee, bread. But then he adds that he wants me to buy him a girlie magazine. He does not know of any particular title and asks me to choose. When I return, I have bought Kriminaljournalen and Cocktail. His only comment is that one would have been enough.
Then he sits down and flicks through the magazines. He is not interested in the text. He just turns the pages, pausing for a brief moment at each picture. Then he continues, and when he has finished he simply puts them away with the other newspapers he has in the house.
A fourth time he is asleep when I arrive to take up the nets with him. He is breathing evenly and when he opens his eye and sees me in the doorway he just turns over and goes back to sleep.
“I sometimes think it would be nice if it was all over.”
Only once do his words suggest that he is fed up and tired. It happens one beautiful day as we are sitting outside the cabin and the flies buzz around us. We are watching a fishing boat, packed with tourists, sail past, and they wave at us. This time Oskar does not wave back with his stump of an arm. Instead he raises his voice to be heard over the sound of the thumping engine.
“I sometimes think it would be nice if it was all over.”
He says nothing more. Soon afterward another boat comes past, equally full. This time he waves back.
“I think I’ll keep on waving.”
“Yes.”
“Because they look like a happy lot.”
“They’re on holiday now.”
“That will soon be over.”
“They’re lucky with the weather.”
“You can never be sure.”
“But you can always hope.”
“Yes.”
The picture of Oskar that never becomes complete is inextricably linked to the society in which he has lived. Oskar as a presence, but almost never a participant, runs like a red thread through the description he gives of himself. The incomplete fragments, the half words, half sentences, the short and disconnected episodes that he produces from his memory are his way of confirming what he means. The image he gives of himself is that of one who was present. But the person who he is every day, during the years when we meet, is a participant. Oskar tries to create a false picture of himself, and his story has to be seen and developed in the context of whatever motivated this choice. One of our last summers together I try to be more methodical in the way I put my questions, but it leads to the only episode of mistrust that ever arises between us. For a little more than a month he is reticent, taciturn even, sometimes a little gruff. But then one day he is back to normal again, stuttering out his own account of himself at irregular intervals. His words almost never seem to follow any thoughts he bears within himself; instead they give the impression of taking him by surprise, emerging from a room he would rather see closed and locked, slipping out almost unintentionally. Every memory, every word that has to do with his life is followed by a silence that is scarcely noticeable. Then he sometimes goes on to talk about things we are busy with, but there is still a small silence behind the words. And in his telling, there is rarely any enthusiasm. What he says can sometimes be incredibly insistent, but he almost never raises or lowers his voice. Here the unexpected song, the sudden outburst with “Elfsborg Fortress,” is a mysterious exception.
Once Oskar said that he had not been to the cinema since the midthirties. I remember him saying that it had simply not appealed to him. Then I asked him something and he once more replied that he simply did not like it, and that he himself found that a bit odd.
One summer Oskar develops a strange itch where his eyelids have grown together. It gets so bad that he begins to scratch the scar at night and one morning he sees pus on his pillow. He travels to the hospital and is admitted for a week. The scar is opened up and the infection healed. Then the socket is sewn together again and he can return to the island. A week later he goes back for the day and has the stitches removed. When he returns, he says that the doctors told him that they found a tiny piece of grit embedded in the socket and that it had presumably been there ever since the accident. Oskar gives a knowing smile and unfolds a handkerchief. I see a grayish-white piece of grit on the white fabric. Then he blows it onto the floor and it vanishes.
“I took it with me so you could see.” Then, just when I’m about to leave:
“In the olden days someone might have written a song about this grit in my eye.”
And the speck, which had been wrapped in the handkerchief, and bounced across the floor and disappeared down some crack, is the last episode I can remember. After that there are no more memories clear enough for me to describe.
The stone.
The piece of grit.
Those terse words.
All those summers.