A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (28 page)

I don’t think the two of you can yet imagine such a world, still less dream about it, but before long the Child is planted in one of the newly established kindergartens of the model social state. State-supported kindergartens are a newfangled addition to social welfare, and the official term for them is daycare centers, but kindergartens live on in the language. Kindergartens and crèches. A linguistic affirmation that daycare centers too are expected to provide both care and love.

The Child instantly takes root, he has no problems with being left in the morning and no longing to be picked up, and one evening when the picking up is taking a long time and he’s left alone with Miss Naima and it’s getting dark outside, it still takes a while for him to get anxious. Miss Naima lives in Vagnhärad, which is one railroad stop to the south, and if Mom’s too late the Child will go to Vagnhärad with Miss Naima on the train. Mom’s
late, and it’s dark outside, and anxiety has grown into fear, and all that remains of being picked up so late is the sensation of a soft fur collar against a cold coat in the doorway.

The Child’s two years old when he starts being left and picked up at the new daycare center on the bottom floor of one of the apartment blocks below the railroad station. Before the center opens, the local paper informs its readers that “those wishing to avail themselves of the option of having their children cared for during the day should register their interest at the Child Welfare Office in the old town hall.” The daycare center comprises two rooms and an office, which is to be used as an isolation room “in the event of a child falling ill during the day and it not being possible to contact the parents.” It’s a small daycare center, taking fifteen children at most, which according to child welfare assistant Kerstin Malmkvist is a drop in the ocean because there are all too many children in the apartment blocks along the rowanberry avenue, and there are bound to be far more applications than there is capacity, so means-testing will be needed, and it will be “primarily single mothers who can count on getting a place for their children here.” Anyone interested in a place at the daycare center is however encouraged to apply, “even by telephone if necessary,” and by one means or another you apply to the Child Welfare Office in the old town hall, and one of the fifteen places is given to me, which means that your Haluś can again cycle off in the mornings to sew clothes at piecework rates to the accompaniment of music in Tornvall’s garment factory.

Otherwise, most mothers stay at home with their children during the day and are referred to as housewives or homemakers, and for them ever-new machines or products are invented to make housework easier and more enjoyable. “A brighter living for Mother,” notes the local paper, which is nevertheless somewhat
concerned that housewives “are weighed down by the bad habits of previous generations” and therefore don’t yet fully understand how to use the new machines. In the advertisements in the local paper, a housewife is always a well-dressed woman, smiling as the machines do her work.

The new machines are also supposed to make life easier for the increasing number of women who nevertheless must go off to a factory in the mornings, and who may sometimes be late picking up their children in the afternoons, but who are still expected to fit all the housework into what’s left of the day. “Many have a working day of up to 16 hours, sometimes even more,” declares the head of the Domestic Research Institute in the local paper. She doesn’t see machines in the home as the solution to the problem. The solution to the problem is to shift housework out of the home and allow the model social state to supply not only daycare centers but also the tidying, cleaning, sewing, baking, and cooking. A few machines at home may still be a good idea, a pressure cooker and a vacuum cleaner, for instance. The vacuum cleaner can encourage children to help with the housework because they like pressing buttons and changing the nozzles, so they feel like “proper mechanics.”

In the small one-room apartment overlooking the railroad platform, there’s no room for machines. In the two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue, there’s room for a round, sausagelike Volta vacuum cleaner, but it fails to make me a button-happy vacuum mechanic. I fear my mother is one of those weighed down by the bad habits of previous generations. To make my favorite dish, she sets sheets of newspaper alight in the sink and singes the last feathers off a chicken. Chicken soup is food for weekends and special days, as is gefilte fish, which she makes with fresh bream that she buys from the lift-netters
on inner Maren, the small sea inlet in the middle of town. The big lift nets are wound up and down from little boats moored to the quayside. The bream have big scales that glitter as they flap in the lift nets. On the draining board in the kitchen, they’re still flapping. By the time Mom has scaled and stuffed them, they’re not flapping anymore.

I think the only semiprocessed product she ever uses is frozen cod fillet. She breads and fries the fillets until they’re an appetizing golden brown, but frozen cod fillet isn’t my favorite semiprocessed product. Frozen food is seen as a major step along the road to easier and more enjoyable housework, but I can’t fathom why, because there’s not a single kitchen in the apartment blocks along the rowanberry avenue with a freezer to keep the frozen food in, only a refrigerator at most, where you can’t even keep ice cream for more than an hour or two. For a while the new Co-op below the railroad station boasts the biggest freezer cabinet in town (10.8 shelf meters of cold, as the local paper puts it), and it’s precisely here that so many housewives and so many children and so many big plans for the future can be found.

Big plans for the future are the hallmark of the Place. It’s believed to have a great future, although the plans haven’t yet been finalized. Since the railroad drew a line through the plans for a meandering garden city with a church on a hilltop and a square with a covered market and a tram running to the sea, there are now plans for a modern cityscape housing six thousand people. A new tunnel will be dug through the high embankment, and around the growing cityscape land will be set aside for new homes, industries, and workplaces.

Including the land where the rowanberry avenue ends and the forest toward Havsbadet begins.

Beneath the sparse pines behind the Co-op, town planning architect Fritz Voigt is planning a playground, and in the forest toward Havsbadet he’s planning industrial units.

The forest is larger in my memory than in real life. In my memory the forest is both dark and light, and the houses on the rowanberry avenue are both visible and invisible from it, and the trampled paths through it are both familiar and secret.

A forest doesn’t need to be any larger than that to compete with architect Voigt’s playground.

Architect Voigt has plans for the town center, too. One plan is to make more space for the growing numbers of cars that have to pass through the center on their way between Stockholm and the world. This plan presupposes that large parts of the existing center will be pulled down and rebuilt, and that the low wooden buildings along narrow pedestrian streets will be replaced by tall concrete buildings along wide thoroughfares. In America, architect Voigt has learned that cars can be parked on third and fourth “decks” above shops at ground level. For the fifth floor he proposes “a green deck” with playgrounds for children. That way, the cars that have to pass through the town center anyway will have an opportunity and a reason to stop for a while.

On Sunday afternoons, the growing numbers of cars that have to pass through the center of town are congested into traffic lines several kilometers long. Most of the car models are bulbous in shape: Saabs, Volvos, Morrises, DKWs, and Volkswagens, all shimmering like beetles in the sun. From a rise just above the southern approach to the town, I can see the line stretching to the horizon and unmoving for long periods of time. The air must be blue-hazed from all the exhaust fumes and heavy with the
noise of engines, but I’m deaf and blind to such things. I keep a note of unusual makes of car and unfamiliar license plate numbers in a school exercise book. In Sweden, cars are registered by county. The local ones all have a B, the cars from Stockholm an A. It’s much less common to see a Z, Y, AC, or BD. I can’t imagine that the recording of car makes and plate numbers is my idea; I never learn to recognize car makes, yet there I am, sitting on the rise with someone I can’t remember, taking an interest in car makes and plate numbers. The traffic jams are an intrusive Sunday sight and we have to come up with something to make it more fun. The best thing of all is to stand by the bridge over the canal, see the drawbridge rising, and watch the motorists reluctantly getting out of their cars to catch a glimpse of the ship interrupting their passage, and listen to them complain about the “drawbridge misery.”

The bridge across the canal splits the little town into its two historically incompatible interests. The interests of those who just want to pass through demand the quickest possible thoroughfare, while the interests of those who want people to make a stop demand that they be able to slow down, park, and get out of their cars. The years when I’m noting down the exotic plate numbers of cars in stationary traffic lines are the years when the big plans for the town center are finalized. One plan proposes pulling down the old wooden buildings and widening the shopping street to provide more space for the cars and the thoroughfare while also making room for cars to stop for a while. The other plan proposes that a new road and a new bridge over the canal bypass the heart of the town, taking a route near the railroad bridge, leaving Södertälje on a turning off the main highway, just as it was left at the end of a spur off the main railroad line.

For a time the plans exist side by side, unresolved.

All futures still seem compatible and possible.

Everything that’s new heralds brighter times, including the traffic lines and the drawbridge misery.

If a forest or a town or a bathing beach happens to stand in the future’s way, the future has precedence.

I prefer traveling by train rather than by car. The train that runs on the single-track spur between Södertälje Södra and Södertälje Central is powered by a shunting engine and has coaches with open platforms and wooden benches. The journey takes five minutes. From fourth grade on, I take the train to school. The train to Stockholm has bigger engines and bigger coaches with corridors and compartments with upholstered seats. On the express trains making their brief stop at Platform 1, closest to the rowanberry avenue, there are coaches going to Copenhagen and Hamburg, and clattering dining cars, and sleeping cars from foreign railroad companies marked Schlafwagen or Wagon-Lit, their curtains drawn. One day I find myself peddling the Södertälje specialty, twisted buns, on Platform 1. Or perhaps someone else is in charge of the peddling and is just letting me have a try. The memory fragment will not shine forth. The passengers reach out from the windows. Where are they going? Where have they come from? With trains, you always know that sort of thing. It’s written on the signs hanging down from the platform roofs and on the signs attached to the sides of the coaches, and it’s announced from the loudspeakers fixed to the platform pillars. On Platform 1 I stay in close and frequent contact with the towns of Katrineholm, Hallsberg, Nässjö, and Alvesta, and by extension with the world as far as I can imagine it. I can’t imagine the
world any farther than the town of Borås, with a change of train in Herrljunga. In Borås there are black steam trains, hissing and belching out smoke. Borås is where my uncle Natek and my two cousins live. Trains are for traveling from one place to another. Trains don’t run or stop just anywhere. Taking the train is always a bit of a ceremony, and people buy special platform tickets so they can meet and wave good-bye, and laugh and cry as the trains pull in and out of Platform 1 and the rowanberry avenue comes into and out of view.

So I don’t really understand why we need a car. To get to Havsbadet, we walk or cycle. To get to work, the two of you take your bicycles or the branch line. Going to Stockholm or Borås we take the train, as I’ve explained. Cars aren’t very common on the rowanberry avenue. Anders’s dad has a car that’s usually parked in the yard outside the house and sometimes needs to be cranked up with a large handle, but then Anders’s dad has a store in the main square selling spare parts and maybe that’s why he needs a car.

Our car’s a 1955 black Volkswagen, registration number B 40011, and it’s the latest model, with a small back window and semaphore arms for directional signaling. Anders keeps going on about the Beetle’s having its engine at the back and being cooled by air, whereas his dad’s car and all other cars have the engine in the front and are water-cooled. It’s safer to have the engine at the front and the petrol tank at the back, Anders says, but I’m not interested in the difference. Nor am I particularly interested in the car as such. One hot summer day, it just happens to be there. I remember that whole summer as very hot and very nice, and we use the car for day trips on holidays and Sundays. A car isn’t for going from one place to another, but for going nowhere in particular to unpack a picnic basket
or a deck chair, or just see the world through the car window. A car ad in the local paper reads “Everything’s so much easier now. On Sundays and work-free days we can get out into the countryside, go for a dip, pick berries and mushrooms—or just take a spin. Try a Volkswagen for that wonderful feeling of independence.”

We take the car to Lake Malmsjön instead of walking or biking to Havsbadet. We take the car in the summer when Aunt Bluma and my cousins from Tel Aviv stay with us in the small two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue. We take the car to Karin and Ingvar’s self-built little country cottage. We take the car to Stockholm now and then, even though the train is quicker. We never take the car to Borås. When the car’s full of people, I squeeze into the little space between the back seat and the engine compartment. The roads are narrow and winding, and the wind rushes noisily through the open windows, and the engine whines through the compartment wall, and it’s tiring to travel by car. Lots of people on the rowanberry avenue spend their Sundays and work-free days washing and waxing their cars until they shine like new.