Medborgarhuset (The Citizens’ House) was built around 1940. A big four-square block in the middle of Söder, but also a bright and promising edifice, modern, “functional.” It was only five minutes from where we lived.
It contained, among other things, a public swimming pool and a branch of the city library. The children’s section was, by obvious natural necessity, my allotted sphere, and in the beginning had enough books for my consumption. The most important was Brehm’s Lives of the Animals.
I slipped into the library nearly every day. But this was not an entirely trouble-free process. It sometimes happened that I tried to borrow books that the library ladies did not consider suitable for my age. One was Knut Holmboe’s violent documentary The Desert Is Burning.
“Who is to have this book?”
“I am . . .”
“Oh no . . .”
“I . . .”
“You can tell your father he can come and borrow it himself.”
It was even worse when I tried to get into the adult section. I needed a book that was definitely not in the children’s section. I was stopped at the entrance.
“How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“You can’t borrow books here. You can come back in a few years.”
“Yes, but the book I want is only in here.”
“What book?”
“The Animals of Scandinavia: A History of Their Migration.” And I added, “by Ekman,” in hollow tones, feeling the game was lost. It was. Out of the question. I blushed, I was furious. I would never forgive her!
In the meantime my uncle of few words—Uncle Elof—intervened. He gave me his card to the adult section and we maintained the fiction that I was collecting books for him. I could now get in where I wanted.
The adult section shared a wall with the pool. At the entrance one felt the fumes from within, the chlorine smell drifted through the ventilation system and the echoing voices could be heard as from a distance. Swimming pools and suchlike always have strange acoustics. The temple of health and the temple of books were neighbors—a good idea. I was a faithful visitor to the Medborgarhus branch of the city library for many years. I regarded it as clearly superior to the central library up on Sveavägen— where the atmosphere was heavier and the air was still, no fumes of chlorine, no echoing voices. The books themselves had a different smell there; it gave me headaches.
Once given free rein of the library I devoted my attention mostly to nonfiction. I left literature to its fate. Likewise the shelves marked Economics and Social Problems. History, though, was interesting. Medicine scared me.
But it was Geography that was my favorite corner. I was a special devotee of the Africa shelves, which were extensive. I can recall titles like Mount Elgon, A Market-Boy in Africa, Desert Sketches . . . I wonder if any of those books still fill the shelves.
Someone called Albert Schweitzer had written a book enticingly called Between Water and Primeval Forest. It consisted mostly of speculations about life. But Schweitzer himself stayed put in his mission and didn’t move; he wasn’t a proper explorer. Not like, for instance, Gösta Moberg, who covered endless miles (why?) in alluring, unknown regions, such as Niger or Chad, lands about which there was scant information in the library. Kenya and Tanganyika, however, were favored on account of their Swedish settlements. Tourists who sailed up the Nile to the Sudd area and then turned north again—they wrote books. But not those who ventured into the arid zones of the Sudan, nor those who made their way into Kordofan or Darfur. The Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, which looked so big on the map, were also unknown and neglected areas on the Africa shelves, making them even more attractive.
I read a lot of books while in the library—I didn’t want to take home too many books of the same kind, or the same book several times in succession. I felt I would be criticized by the library staff and that was something to be avoided at all costs.
One summer—I don’t remember which one—I lived through an elaborate and persistent daydream about Africa. I was on the island of Runmarö, a long way from the library. I withdrew into a fantasy and was leading an expedition straight through central Africa. I trudged on through the woods of Runmarö and kept track of roughly how far I’d gone with a dotted line on a big map of Africa, a map of the whole continent that I had drawn. If I worked out, for instance, that in the course of a week I had walked 120 kilometers on Runmarö, I marked 120 kilometers on the map. Not very far.
At first I’d thought of starting the expedition on the east coast, more or less where Stanley had begun. But that would have left too great a distance to traverse before I could reach the most interesting parts. I changed my mind and imagined that I traveled as far as Albert Nyansa by car. And this was where the expedition proper started, on foot. I would then have at least a reasonable chance of putting most of the Ituri Forest behind me before summer ended.
It was a nineteenth-century expedition, with bearers, etc. I was half aware, though, that this was now an obsolete way of traveling. Africa had changed. There was war in British Somaliland; it was in the news. Tanks were in action. Indeed, it was the first area where the Allies could claim an advance—I took due note of this, of course—and Abyssinia was the first country to be liberated from the Axis powers.
When my Africa dream returned several years later, it became modernized and was now almost realistic. I was thinking of becoming an entomologist and collecting insects in Africa, discovering new species instead of new deserts.