Paradoxically, it’s the successful combating of poor hygiene that in the twentieth century transforms polio from a benign childhood illness causing a temperature and a headache into a nightmare epidemic that paralyzes the nervous system. The virus is spread through excrement, and better toilet hygiene reduces the incidence of it, but better toilet hygiene also reduces the resistance to the virus and increases the risk that older children and adults with little resistance will fall victim to a life-threatening form of the virus. The advances in hygiene that work so successfully on cholera, typhoid, and diphtheria do not work on polio but actually make it more dangerous.
However, no mystery with no solution. Polio is almost eradicated now, and the battle against lack of hygiene is soon to be won. Not to mention the battle against weeds and pests, waged daily behind the fence in the forest between Havsbadet and the rowanberry avenue. The fence is marked with black-and-yellow skull signs. Inside the fence there’s a factory. Between the fence and the factory building, there are barrels with white skulls painted on them. Outside the fence, on the paths through the forest, there are dead rats, sometimes gnawed rat skulls. The factory isn’t situated along the footpath to Havsbadet but along a side path leading under a railroad viaduct to the other side of the embankment. Around the factory, a pungent smell of acid and decay. There’s a damp, cold draft under the viaduct, and it’s always dark, and on the way home I keep running until I get a glimpse of the houses along the rowan avenue.
I run as if I’m only playing, so no one will know how petrified I am.
The factory behind the fence with the skulls is called Ewos and manufactures products for the extermination of all kinds of things that get in mankind’s way. “Chemistry reclaims farming for the farmers,” say the advertisements in the local paper. “Parasites” is a recurring word. Parasites infesting animals and crops are getting in the farmers’ way, “microorganisms gobbling up hard currency” are getting in the way of paper and wood manufacturers, and in the barrels with the skulls there are, I assume, things that could kill not only parasites and microorganisms but also playing children from the houses on the other side of the embankment, and the danger needs to be signaled in some visual way. The parasites to be killed have names like cabbage seed weevil, pollen beetle, brassica pod midge, wheat blossom midge, and clover cutworm, and the preparations designed to kill them have names like Arsenol, Pyrenon, Rotoxol, and Ewotox, and they’re all rendered more effective by being sprayed from the air. Ewos’s handbook for growers and breeders is titled Death of the Millions.
I read in the local paper (much later, I admit) that the factory site is somewhat problematic in the sense that drainage for the plot on which the barrels are stored has to be routed through a culvert under the railroad embankment in order to run out where it should, into the sea by Igelstaviken, which is part of the deep, saltwater bay on which Havsbadet lies, with its soft sand and creaky diving tower. That in turn requires “the excavation of an open ditch to a maximum depth of 2.70 meters and a length of 260 meters” because the drainage is so poor. This is in December 1951, and the town finance office applies to the town council for 13,500 kronor to underwrite the project.
The factory is completed by the spring of 1952, and the drainage runs as intended.
Havsbadet is the light in the world I’m making into my own. Quite literally so, in fact, since it’s toward Havsbadet that the forest thins out, and the sky gleams through the pines, and the white sand reaches out to the sunlit water. Havsbadet’s always bathed in light, or perhaps it’s just that the memory fragments shine more brightly here. Normally, we walk to Havsbadet, or go by bike, but it’s the walks I remember, because what I remember is the warmth of your hand around mine, and the silhouette of your back against the sun when you hurry on, or is it me lagging behind to inspect the cowslips, the lilies of the valley, or the bilberries along the forest path and then having to catch up with the back ahead of me and slotting my hand into the warmth. The road we walk on is warm. The fragrance of the forest is warm. Havsbadet is warm.
The canal’s cold but Havsbadet’s warm.
When we go by bike, Mom’s always with us, with the child seat on her bike, which has a spoke guard. Gun, a girl living next door, got her foot stuck in the spokes, or so they say. Whether that’s true or not, she has a built-up shoe and walks with a limp. Maybe they just want me to be wary of the spokes. Maybe Gun has had polio, too.
When we walk we’re always on our own, you and me, that’s how I remember it, the road warm and the air heavy with the scent of resin, and from the sea a whiff of tarred wood as the sand gleams through the last pines.
The jetty at Havsbadet is as wide as a footpath with railings on both sides and runs out to a wooden castle with two side sections and a tower. From the top of the tower, flags flutter in the wind and brave bodies fly through the air. Reflections from the mirrored surface of the water play restlessly on the wooden planks of the yellow-painted side sections, and behind them naked people are sunbathing around an enclosed pool area. I’m allowed into the naked men’s pool, but not into the naked women’s. They say you can catch a glimpse of the naked women through the cracks in the plank, but that’s only something I hear, not something I remember doing. They also say you can swim under the jetties and see naked women that way. I don’t remember who tells me this. We never go to the nude bathing pools. Nor do we rent one of the changing huts on the beach. We always sit on a blanket on the sand, and all around us, on a succession of other blankets, sit new friends in a new world, talking and laughing, burrowing their feet into the sand, and touching each other with their hands, and everything looks so bright.
Södertälje bathing beach is a tourist attraction. There’s a wooden pavilion with a dance floor, and a restaurant, and a terrace overlooking the sea, and beneath the pines on the edge of the forest there are tennis courts and miniature golf courses, and along the beach toward the small cape at Näset there are boardinghouses and summer villas with rooms to rent, and every summer weekend caravans of bicycles and cars wind their way along the paved road through the rowanberry avenue, and people come by train from Stockholm and get off at Södertälje Södra and walk the last bit with their blankets and baskets. Is there a bus, perhaps? I don’t remember a bus. Before the war, during the summer season, there was apparently a temporary railroad stop as well, situated where the embankment came closest to the beach, but this is something no one any longer remembers.
On July 25, 1949, the local paper reports, “beach crammed with 1,840 paying visitors and 1,200 children.” Where do we pay? I can’t remember any kind of entrance to Havsbadet, still less a fence. Do we pay to sit on the sand? “Many of the visitors were from Stockholm and clearly there were also a good number of foreigners on the beach, to judge by the confusion of languages, though many of these were perhaps part of the more settled colony of foreigners living among us since the stream of wartime refugees.”
The source for the article is Kalle Åbom, the bathing beach superintendent. Did Kalle Åbom walk past our blanket? What does he mean by a confusion of languages? Everybody talks to each other all the time, of course, and the language they usually speak is Swedish. Maybe they don’t speak as fluently as Kalle Åbom, but it’s Swedish all the same. Janek from Poland speaks Swedish to Ulla from Finland, Birger from Sundsvall speaks Swedish to Ilonka from Sapanta in Romania via Bergen-Belsen, Moses from Poland speaks Swedish to Kato from Hungary, Karin and Ingvar speak Swedish. You and Mom speak Swedish to me and Yiddish and Polish to each other. The only language I remember myself speaking is Swedish, though I later learn that I speak Polish, too. There are many languages in my world, and their sounds fill it as naturally as the shrieks of the gulls over the flag-topped tower in the glittering water and the faint rasp of naked flesh on warm sand.