The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

After a few more years of numbing work in a series of mills, my animal caginess had, I thought, been squelched for good and all.

Dull, menial tasks have always generated in me an almost somnolent torpor. My eyelids begin to droop, and my body slows down until it is practically inert. My mind wanders in aimless, dreamlike patterns. This does not make for a good millworker. In an industry that prides itself on efficiency and speed, I was often more of a nuisance than a cog. Regularly I was startled back into wakefulness by the line boss standing over my hunched shoulder and shouting into my ear that I was a “miserable slug.” And regularly I was fired. Only because my father was a foreman who had many friends and was well liked did I ever get rehired at different mills. And then the old bastard would lord it over me—yet another magnanimous act, like my very existence, for which I owed him.

I’m quite sure my co-workers, like my father, took for granted that I was slow or queer. Unlike most men of my age and class, I did not spend my free evenings in bars, descending into greasy sub-basements of drunkenness and singing Swedish folk songs. I saved my paychecks and privately gave a small portion of each to my mother. I did not marry or produce children whom I would rarely see. At the end of each day, I went home to my tiny dismal flat and read books about explorers and trappers and Sami reindeer herders. I drank, sometimes immoderately, alone.

When Olga finally married, to a terribly dull but unobjectionable fish merchant—Freyja had been wed at eighteen to a mill foreman nearly as insufferable as herself—I believe my mother finally gave up hope for my brighter future and accepted that I was a benign anomaly: a good boy, but an odd boy.

Of course I had attractions, but they were always far outside of the acceptable parameters for someone of my station: a wealthy barrister’s daughter who never once looked at me; a married baker who made the most delicious rolls and always let her fingers brush mine whenever I reached out to pay; and I might as well confess to the cliché, a prostitute, who gave me a venereal disease. Perhaps it is absurd to say that each one took an equally tremendous toll on my heart, when it was the infection that actually brought me closest to death, but I contend that unrequited, or unrequitable, love is more barbaric and murderous than any Viking axman.

These concerns were pedestrian, however, and I led a pedestrian life. The raw ache to blind myself with white light somewhere in the polar regions had faded, and with it, my sense of hope. I became something of a fatalist, or at least a cynic. I was bitter. At times I could even be cruel.

Olga was twenty-two when she gave birth to her first child, a boy. Sweet Olga. How openly she yearned for my approval; how childishly I mourned our separation and withheld it. Adulthood is not often kind to the closest of friends, or kin. I did not care for her husband, Arvid, who was a boor. Always cheerful when he saw me, always generous with the modest comforts of his kitchen and home, and always rebuffed by my coldness. Often I would use elevated language I’d learned from reading Nansen and other great men, striving only to alienate us further. It gave me no joy, but I did it anyway.

“Sven!” he might say, beaming. “How wonderful it is to see you. I trust things are well, or, shall I say, well enough at the mill. Please, come in, I will make you some tea.”

“Arvid,” I might reply. “Mechanized industry is nothing but a cancer visited upon the modern world. My servitude within the benighted hives of this city is an enduring nightmare from which I am unlikely to wake. Things are not well, and nor are they well enough. Where is my sister?”

This coldness could not help but spread to Olga, implicated by her proximity to Arvid. How was it that I held her to a higher standard? How did I expect so much more from her, when I myself had settled for so little? The memory pains me still.

When she gave birth to Wilmer, she did not simply write, or ask her husband to travel halfway across the city, to tell me the news. No, she packed up her mewling infant in a heavy swaddling cloth, wrapped him in scarves, and traipsed through the dirty corners of Stockholm by foot, so that she might present him to me in person. She had lost a not inconsiderable amount of blood in the birth only four days earlier, and was still weak. I do not know how she made it. It was an audacious act for a woman in her state. If only I’d had the sense to commend her at the time. My brave sister.

I was still on shift when she arrived at my apartment. With the door locked she waited in the hallway, no doubt trying her best to protect my neighbors from the bewildered cries of her child, for three hours. When at last I came home, she stood to greet me. Her face looked tired, unimaginably tired, but there was a light in her eyes I hadn’t seen in several years.

“Dear Sven!” she said. “Look! This is Wilmer. Can you believe he was living in me just a few short days ago? The world is such a very strange place.”

“Is it?” I replied, and opened the door.

Within my dingy cell, whose only view was a slab of bricks under the thin, weak light of an alleyway, we sat at the tiny table. I averted my eyes while she nursed Wilmer. I knew she was waiting for me to bestow some kind of praise or blessing upon her child, upon this staggering achievement, and the knowledge of this only irked me as it grew until it filled the room, and I could not speak. Young men are unparalleled in selfishness. It surrounds them like a mist.

“Sven,” she said at last. “I know your life is somewhat less than you might wish. As is mine, of course. But we are in it together. So, dear brother, will you not look upon this child and tell me he is wonderful?”

I gazed briefly at the wrinkled parasite wriggling in her arms. She was right. She was always right. The child was something extraordinary. He had fought his way forth into the cold and dirt, and that was only the beginning. Every day from this day to the next would be just as difficult. He squinted at me, his eyes big and watery. I felt a grudging admiration for this semi-human thing. He was ugly but intrepid. I should have said so.

“Hmm,” I said. “No doubt he has a bright future sweating and straining in some hellish factory, hemorrhaging his meager wages so that he may survive until his early death.”

“Please, Sven.” She looked at me with pain.

“Please, yourself. If he is unimaginably lucky perhaps he will follow in his father’s footsteps. Then he may look forward to a life spent counting things, and buying things, and selling things, and always thinking about the supply and demand for things, and talking endlessly about the cost of things until he and everyone around him goes completely mad.”

I believe—no, I am certain—that she had tears running down her face when she left.

Four years passed. I became someone whose days did not constitute a life, but rather a death-in-progress. Time was something to endure. Because of my general lack of enthusiasm for work of any kind, I was shunted down to the worst jobs at the mill, and performed them during the worst shifts. There at the bottom I remained, either because of my father or because no one really knows or cares what happens during the night shift, so long as the simple tasks are accomplished adequately.

Freyja had four children whom my mother was always pestering me to see. I could not remember their names from one day to the next. Olga had two more after Wilmer: a daughter, Helga, and a third who died shortly after birth. In the years since Wilmer’s birth, I had allowed, or tacitly encouraged, a caustic void to open between Olga and myself—or so I perceived it—and I did not hear of this loss until a week or so later.

My mother came to see me and though she failed to mention it until we’d been drinking tea for twenty minutes, almost as though it were an afterthought, I believe that in her own old-fashioned way she was pleading for help. “Your sister is not taking the best care of herself,” she said.

It sounded unkind, but of course I spoke my mother’s secret language, as most children do, and understood the real meaning: Olga was distraught. Sometimes it takes an emotional knife wound to roust you from the veil of self-pity. I startled like a drunk who wakes in an unfamiliar place.

When I came to see Olga, Arvid was standing at the door. It was eight in the evening. He looked exhausted, but he greeted me with his usual exasperating politeness and invited me in. It was oddly quiet in the place—Wilmer and Helga must have been in bed. There were plates on the table. Evidently they’d eaten dinner late, or no one had cleaned up. Arvid glanced at the plates, and then looked back at me. “If only we had a maid!” he said with a forced smile. “A man’s work is never done.”

I grunted in response. I was still examining the table. Two small plates with the food all mushed together, some things eaten, others pushed deliberately to one side: Wilmer and Helga. Two large plates: one immaculate, as though licked, and one covered with food. Arvid watched me for a long moment. “I am glad you came, Sven, but as you can see, Olga has already gone to bed. Perhaps you could try again tomorrow? I’m sure she would be delighted to see you.”

I ignored him and stomped up the tiny staircase in my work boots. My sister was lying in her bed. The lamp was still lit and she had a book in her hands but her eyes were closed. As I sat down next to her the mattress creaked and sank.

“Sven,” she said, showing no sign of surprise at my lurking presence in her bedroom. Her face was strangely empty. “I missed you.” And then she began to cry. Great wracking sobs that made no noise, only a kind of croak or wheeze.

I held her in my arms and my shirt was quickly drenched with her tears. “I’m so sorry, Olga. Sorry I have not been here. These many years.”

She did not talk much that evening. She didn’t need to. Her pain was astonishing in its size. It sat upon her and held her immobile. It was a storm cloud that filled the room, the entire house. I did not doubt that her neighbors could feel it several blocks away.

After some time, she glanced at the clock on the mantel. “Your shift, Sven. You must go or you’ll be late. Mother says you’ve lost too many jobs and cannot afford to lose another.”

I grimaced. “Yes. I suppose. But—”

“I will be fine. Only, please come again. Wilmer and Helga would love to see you.” A look of shame darkened her face. She tried to smile. “I haven’t, well, I haven’t been the most attentive mother lately, and Arvid is run ragged trying to pacify them.”

I studied her and sniffed the acrid tang of despair that hung in the room.

“Perhaps I’ll kiss the young ones on my way out. Good night, sister.”

“Good night, Sven. Thank you.”

I snuffed the lamp, left the room and shut the door behind me. Tiptoeing so as to minimize the creak of old floorboards, I made my way to the children’s room and lifted the door-latch ever so slowly. They looked peaceful in sleep, their puffy faces slack and ruddy, hair tousled, arms wide in an exaggerated display of exhaustion, as though every day were a battle and sleep the final triumph. I didn’t dare kiss their foreheads. I knew child-sleep was not a thing to be trifled with. Instead I pulled a scratchy woolen blanket from the shelf and crumpled it on the floor between the two small beds. Then I took off my boots and lay down with my hands clasped under my head. I listened to their breathing. Stuffed noses, tiny snores. The night shift came and went.

So began a relatively happy time in my life. At the age of twenty-eight I left the world of industry and became nanny to my sister’s children. Arvid, bless his dim soul, could not have been more pleased. How easy it would’ve been for him to resent this intrusion into his home, or his wife’s “failure” in her duties, or the additional strain on his financial stability (although this was very little, as I employed my savings to buy groceries and clothing for the children). He must have known his neighbors and friends were muttering about the woman whose brother had to move in because she wasn’t taking care of her children. But he only ever expressed relief. Emotionally limited as he was, he hadn’t known how to handle the situation, and not knowing made him anxious. He knew quite well how to buy and sell fish, and how to be a pleasant husband. But decompensation in the face of unimaginable loss was outside his meager realm of expertise.

My God how those children tried my patience. After the first blush of delight in one another’s strange new company, there passed a month or two in which we knew only enmity. Their training in the arts of obedience and civility had been cursory at best. Arvid was a toothless taskmaster. He could compel Wilmer and Helga into little more than an immovable wall of resistance. Bearing witness to his pathetic attempts to make them eat, for example, was a trial. And my sister—well, it is difficult to say. Perhaps she’d had more capacity for discipline before the death of her unnamed third child. I doubt it, somehow. But losing one certainly caused her to see her two living children as precious beyond reproach.

Oh, they wished to please her, particularly when she drew inward, her eyes far away. And they knew she would never deceive them, which is a concept that children can grasp earlier than we think, even though they do not yet know the boundaries of this world—what is real, and what is not. They simply ran rampant. Arvid was referred to regularly as “Fish Guts” or “Crab Ass.” They loved him but did not respect him.

Naturally I took it upon myself to introduce some discipline. Knowing, as I did, nothing about children or their willfulness, I was in for a surprise. They were shocked at first—wounded, even—by the things I was willing to deprive them of when unheeded (e.g., their lengthy, rigidly dictated nighttime rituals of bath, story, and song). They were awful beasts—truly dreadful. Most children are. But gradually they began to see that I was not all bad—in fact, far more tolerant of behavior and activities that most other adults seemed to find aberrant or unwholesome (e.g., a coarse, freely employed interpretation of the vulgate)—and we developed a respect for each other. They learned how stubborn I could be, and I learned how stubborn they could be. I could not be moved, for example, when it came to sufficient nourishment, or adherence to a bedtime early enough to regenerate humanity in all parties. Their anchors held fast on matters of hygiene, vulgarity, the existence of certain equatorial predators in their closet, etc.

By necessity, the rules of stalemate and cease-fire evolved over time, and I grew to love the horrible little urchins. Their strange, unjaundiced observations often took me aback, and they had a joy in the ridiculous inanities of daily life that rejuvenated me. I think fondly of the occasion when Wilmer, age five, noting an absence of lard in the pantry and wishing to fry some herring—a favorite of Olga’s—attempted to render his sister. We smelled it before the shrieking began. When Helga stumbled from the kitchen, her arm crimson and dotted with angry white blisters, Wilmer followed, explaining blithely, “Mother always says how Helga still has the plump rolls of a baby seal,” at which Helga looked up from her wounds and began to laugh and laugh.

It sounds absurd, I suppose—and certainly trite—to suggest that two such unempathetic tyrants could have given me something to live for, but that is indeed how it seemed. Perhaps I was just too busy to wallow.

When Wilmer went off to school, I stayed and formed a particular bond with Helga. Whereas Wilmer had begun to display some decidedly Arvid-like tendencies, growing weak-willed, even obsequious in certain situations, Helga was a powerful storm that only became stronger with every passing year. She could be alternately jaded and sincere, obtuse and clever, sharp-tongued and forgiving.

I knew I would be adrift when she went to school at last, but failed, characteristically, to devise an alternate plan. I had no intention of returning to factory life in Stockholm or, worse yet, choosing between Arvid’s charity and homelessness.

It was Olga, of course, who found my way out.

“Sven,” she said to me one day as she, Helga and I were eating breakfast together. I could tell from the musical way she said my name that she was not at all certain how she’d be received.

“Yes, sister?”

“Have you considered what you might do after Helga goes off to school?”

“I’m not going to school,” Helga said. “I’m going to cross Antarctica with Uncle Sven.”

“Yes, dear. Now let me speak to your uncle.”

This was greeted with a look of astonishing insolence, which amused me. Otherwise, perhaps, I might have been less inclined to entertain the query.

“Yes, sister. I have considered it. Thought I might try my luck in the cod fisheries. Or buy a tin hat and join the war in France.”

“Be serious, Sven. Do you know what you’ll do?”

“Of course I don’t, Olga. The question is near to me always, and bringing me rather close to despair.”