BACK AT THE TABLE, HER DISSATISFACTION with me still lingering, my mum folded the map, picking up her diary again, reorienting herself after the interruption. I picked a different seat, closer to her, without the bulk of the table between us. She showed me the entry marked April 16th, the date they’d first arrived at the farm. All that was written on the page was the note, “what a strange fast-moving sky.”
On the drive to Sweden, in our white van, I was excited but I was scared too, scared that I’d set myself an impossible challenge trying to reclaim this land as my home after so many years. The responsibility rested on my shoulders. Chris didn’t speak a word of the language. He had no more than a passing acquaintance with Swedish traditions. I’d be the bridge between our cultures. These issues didn’t matter to him—he was a foreigner, his identity was clear. But what was I? Was I a foreigner or a national? Neither English nor Swedish, an outsider in my own country—what name is there for me?
Utlänning!
That’s what they’d call me! It’s a cruel Swedish word, one of the cruelest words, meaning a person from outside this land. Even though I’d been born and raised in Sweden, the community would consider me a foreigner, a foreigner in my own home—I’d be an utlänning there as I’d been in London.
Utlänning here!
Utlänning there!
Utlänning everywhere!
Looking out the window I was reminded of just how lonely this landscape was. In Sweden, outside the cities, the wilderness rules supreme. People tiptoe timidly around the edge, surrounded by skyscraping fir trees and lakes larger than entire nations. Remember, this is the landscape that inspired the mythology of trolls, stories I used to read to you about giant lumbering man-eating creatures with mushroom warts on their crooked noses and bellies like boulders. Their sinewy arms can rip a person in two, snapping human bones and using splinters to scrape the gristle out of their shrapnel teeth. Only in forests as vast as this could such monsters be hiding, yellow eyes stalking you.
Along the final stretch of deserted road before the farm, there were bleak brown fields, the winter snow had melted away but the topsoil was hard and jagged with ice. There was no sign of life, no crops, no tractors, no farmers—stillness, but overhead the clouds were moving incredibly fast, as though the sun were a plug that had been pulled out of the horizon, and the clouds, along with the dregs of daylight, were being sucked down a sinkhole. I couldn’t take my eyes off this fast-moving sky. After a short while I began to feel dizzy, my head began to spin. I asked Chris to stop the van because I felt nauseous. He carried on driving, arguing that we were almost there and it made no sense to stop. I asked again, less politely this time, to stop the van, only for him to repeat how close we were, and finally I banged my fists against the dashboard and demanded that he stop the van right this very second!
He looked at me like you’re now looking at me. But he obeyed. I jumped out and was sick in the grassy verge, angry with myself, worried that I had ruined what should have been a joyful occasion. Too queasy to climb back into the vehicle, I instructed Chris to drive on, intending to walk the last distance. He refused, wanting us to arrive together. He declared the moment important symbolically. Therefore we decided that he’d drive at a snail’s pace and I’d walk in front. As if I were leading a funeral procession I began the short walk to our new home, our farm, the van following behind—a ridiculous spectacle, I accept, but how else could we reconcile my need to walk, his need to drive the van, and the shared desire to arrive simultaneously?
Listening to Chris boohooing crocodile tears to the doctors at the Swedish asylum, he presented this episode as evidence of an irrational mind. If he were telling the story now he’d almost certainly have started his version of events here, omitting any mention of the strange fast-moving sky. Instead, he would’ve described me as baffling and fragile, unstable from the outset. That’s what he claims, his voice strained with make-believe sadness. Who would have thought he was such an actor? Regardless of what he claims now, at the time he understood the emotions triggered by my return, an extraordinary feeling after fifty years, as extraordinary as the sky that welcomed me home.
Once we reached the farm he stepped out of the van, leaving it parked in the middle of the road. He took my hand. When we crossed over the threshold to our farm we did it together, as partners, as a loving couple starting an exciting new chapter in their life.