A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (33 page)

The price of having a WC, however, is Havsbadet, even if nobody wants to accept the fact and the payment keeps being postponed. Summer after summer, the question is raised of
whether Havsbadet should be closed or cordoned off so people who should know better will keep away, but summer after summer, thousands of people who don’t know better burrow their feet into the white sand of Havsbadet and take a dip in the tainted waters and reluctantly use the new beach showers to rinse off the E. coli bacteria afterward. The showers are installed after the fire and are intended to replace dips in the sea, but dips in the sea are not easily replaced. Particularly not as long as the Chemical Analysis Agency is vacillating about the water quality and the Public Health Board is vacillating about the closure and there are experts claiming they can purify the water at Havsbadet within two weeks. A Dr. Pettersson from Stockholm is given the opportunity to test his method, which employs compressed air to force the water from the bottom up to the surface and a propeller to push it toward the shore, which presupposes that the water at the lower level is cleaner than the water at the surface, a fact that even the local newspaper calls into question. “There’s doubtless a large volume of polluted water even at the deeper level, extending a good way out to sea.”

In the record-breaking hot summer of 1959, health inspector Torsten Lysell issues a warning in the local paper, saying that the water quality is steadily deteriorating and when last measured was found to contain 90,000 E. coli bacteria per liter, which is potentially life-threatening. He’s also worried by the fact that the public seems entirely unconcerned. A few weeks later, he proposes that Havsbadet be closed down, because people are tearing down the notices prohibiting its use and continuing to bathe there.

I don’t remember when we swap Havsbadet for the lake of Malmsjön. The transition is gradual and almost imperceptible. The summer I’m learning to swim, we go by car to Malmsjön. I
associate the swap more with the car than with the water. Malmsjön has no sandy beach, and no restaurant with evening dances and no horizon to hold your gaze, but there are no swimming lessons at Havsbadet anymore.

Yet I don’t remember that we stop going to Havsbadet.

That we ever stop going to Havsbadet.

Havsbadet continues to be a place we go, I remember, for the sand and the light, and the scent of resin and pine needles along the path through the trees.

What makes you go back to Łódź? I have no memory of your doing so and for a long time I live with the certainty that you would never have done so, but on April 24, 1958, you unquestionably write a letter to Natek from Łódź. It’s clear from the letter that you have a cousin, Jerzyk, still alive in Łódź and that he meets you at Kaliska station, although you have trouble recognizing him because you haven’t met for twenty years, but he recognizes you from the photo you’ve sent in advance. You write of how glad you are to see each other again, and how common memories have brought you close, and how cordially his “little family” welcomes you, but I find it hard to believe that you return to Łódź to meet a cousin, even if he’s the only cousin you have who’s still alive. I suspect you return to Łódź to confirm with your own eyes that the world you once made into your own no longer exists. I suspect, too, that it has something to do with the horizon, the one that’s not really opening, and with the Project, the one threatening to stall.

Your search for confirmation is soon over. “As for Łódź, the town made the most terrible impression on me, and I had a heavy heart those first days. All I wanted was to fly away, back home again. I haven’t felt so forsaken since the war. Like a child.”

No, there’s nothing left in Łódź of the world you once made into your own.

Not even the graves. You go with Jerzyk to the Jewish cemetery to look for your father Gershon and your brother Salek. You’re quite sure that Gershon’s grave, at least, must be there somewhere, since it’s registered in a document. In a small box, on the thin airmail paper the letter’s written on, you’ve made a note of the date of death given in the register, July 25, 1943.

So you stay in Łódź for three weeks instead of the planned two, to continue the search, but you don’t find the graves. Nor do you find much else from the world that was once yours. “There are so few Jews left here. Even in Stockholm, you’re more likely to bump into a
Jid
.”

You discuss the next leg of the journey with Jerzyk. His journey, not yours. As soon as the opportunity arises he wants to move on, ideally to America but more likely to Israel. There’s nothing to stay in Łódź for.

And your journey? Do you consider it over?

One day we take the train to Stockholm, you and I. I don’t know why it’s just the two of us or why we’re not at school and work, respectively. It must be fall: you’re wearing your herringbone-patterned coat and black hat, and the station platforms, wet with rain, are glistening yellow, and I rush to the compartment window to catch sight of the black canal running vertiginously far below the railroad bridge before the train almost immediately
stops in Östertälje. The station names along the way are reassuringly familiar, whereas Stockholm remains a thoroughly strange and scary city. I hold your hand from the instant we get off the train until we’ve gone through a tall front doorway and into a big entrance hall with a red carpet on a marble floor and solid walls of dark wood, and into the first-ever elevator of my life. I let go of your hand only when you tell me I can press the elevator button. It’s a big moment, the first press of my first elevator button, and I get a faint sinking feeling in my stomach as the elevator silently carries us up past floor after floor of dark wood doors and shiny brass plates. On the floor where we get out of the elevator and go through a door, a long corridor with yet more doors is revealed, and from the corridor with all the doors a short man with a bent back comes toward us, greets you, and addresses me by name, asking me to wait in a room smelling of cigars while he talks to you on your own.

I remember the trip mainly for the watch. After meeting the man in the building with the elevator, we go to a fancy shop and you buy me a watch, an Atlantic. I haven’t asked for a watch, nor is it my birthday, but perhaps you have something else to celebrate. You seem happy.

We celebrate the new watch together by counting the minutes and seconds between the stations on the way home.

On November 5, 1959, I too write a letter to Natek. I write that I’m sorry for not writing sooner. Why am I sorry? Why do I write the letter at all? I’ve just had my eleventh birthday and I write a letter to my uncle in Tel Aviv with a pen I have just been given by my Auntie Kerstin and my cousin Assa, who have come to visit us that day. They’re divorced, Natek and Kerstin, and by this
time they’ve also divided up my two cousins Assa and Anders, both about my age, Assa to Borås and Anders to Tel Aviv. I see them increasingly rarely, and before long hardly at all, but I don’t miss them. Not in the way I realize, much later on, that you must miss your brother and Mom must miss her sister, making your letters to each other loaded with longing, admonitions, and guilt.

Why haven’t you written? Why this silence? Is there anything wrong? Please, don’t wait to answer!

As for me, I pen a very dutiful and self-absorbed letter, prompted by the fuss of my cousin’s rare visit, which serves as a reminder of how small our family is, how scattered and fragile, and how important, therefore, it is for me to take up my new pen and write a letter to Uncle Natek and cousin Anders in Tel Aviv, and how I really ought to apologize in some way for not having written earlier. So I make my excuses and complete the correspondence duties imposed on me in a rapid, careless hand:

With my letter to Natek, starting on the same sheet, comes a letter from Mom in which she apologizes for my “chaotic” account, giving as an excuse the fact that I have been exposed to “too many impressions all at once.” She’s also keen to supplement my uncritical image of television:

You’re not at home when Auntie Kerstin and cousin Assa come to see us and the two letters to Natek are being written.

Nor are you at the factory.

You’ve handed in your notice, and you’re on the road.

It’s not clear from Mom’s letter where you are or where you’re going, only that it has all happened very fast and things are still rather vague, and that you will explain more yourself, in your next letter.

Nor is it clear from the letter that only a day has passed since you left the factory.

“Left on 4 Nov. 1959 at his own request,” says the official testimonial from the personnel department at the factory where you worked for twelve years.

“Final hourly wage rate: 294 öre. Conduct: Creditable. Working capability: Excellent.”

For a day now, you’ve been in untrodden forest.

The local paper on December 16, 1959, runs a picture on the front page with the caption: “Göran Rosenberg and Paul Överström played Campra’s ‘Minuet’ in fine accord.”

I can’t remember your being there.

What became of the duet by Pleyel?

In the local paper on January 24, 1959, a thought for the day as usual. On this particular day, a thought about the Jews. In the story of the Good Samaritan in St. Luke’s Gospel, Jesus wanted to show “how wrong the Jews were in their hatred” and how “unprecedented it must have been for a Jew to listen to Jesus” and how Jesus “does what no other Jew would have done,” namely follow the commandment of love and not that of self-love.

Much later, I find out that you’re involved in a violent argument at the factory. It happens in the changing room, where you try to throw a punch at someone and this someone slams you against a locker so hard you end up with a concussion. This someone had wondered out loud what a person like you was doing among the ordinary workers. Why someone like you was not busy lending money or living off other people. Said he’d never seen a Jew working.

After the argument in the changing room, your headaches come more often. The headaches and the nightmares. Early one morning in May, I hear you calling unfamiliar names in your sleep. I don’t remember the names, but your voice frightens me. It’s not your usual voice. It’s a child’s voice, wailing helplessly through the wall between the living room and the bedroom where you both sleep. It’s already light outside and I lie awake waiting for the day to begin, because it’s the day the king’s coming to visit the truck factory and all the children of Södertälje have been given time off school to wave flags along the motorcade route, and I associate the sound of your voice calling out with the day I didn’t get to see the king.