One night at the end of May 1954, Havsbadet burns down. I can’t imagine the world without Havsbadet, but the building’s yellow wings with the separate pools for men and women burn down, and the jetty and its railings burn down, and the scent of tar is overpowered by the smell of burned wood, and nothing remains but the tower, standing alone in the water like a sooty chimney.
The beach and the sand remain too, for now.
What remains for the longest is the light.
On September 25, 1953, assistant vicar Yngve Junel at the parish civil registration office in Södertälje attests “that former Polish citizen Dawid Rosenberg can speak, write and read the Swedish language to a proficient level.” I can attest in addition that you’re doing all you can to teach your four-year-old son this language, using homemade wooden alphabet blocks laid out on the floor of our living room. I’d assert that you make an excellent job of it, too, or at any rate, that your son is an early and omnivorous reader. He reads the names on the shop signs along the main road, he reads the destination boards hanging from the canopies of the station platforms, he reads the small print on the boxes of washing powder, he reads everything that crosses his path, and you make energetic efforts to ensure that what crosses his path is worth reading, though you don’t always succeed. He also reads when you would rather he didn’t, with a flashlight under the bed covers, or in the fading evening light that comes through the crack at the side of the blind.
What must be attested to, above all, is that you have ambitions, not only for your son but for yourself too. You journey on to the town with the big truck factory because you’re convinced you have a brighter future as a truck builder than as a weaver. At any event, the wage is higher and rises faster. Between 1950 and 1953, it rises from 5,740 kronor to 11,600 kronor per annum. Trucks are in hot demand. South America needs trucks, too. The truck factory’s main problem is finding accommodation for all the workers it must recruit to build the ever-increasing number of trucks required to build the world anew. It’s a great time for truck builders, and especially for a truck builder who only recently was building trucks in a German slave labor camp, and who instead of sharing a room in a Swedish bachelors’ barrack with a “young and quiet snail” is now sharing a modern one-room apartment with the woman who is the mother of the child who is to become me. At the truck factory, they need not only fitters but also designers and engineers, and you have no intention of remaining a pipe fitter all your life. I don’t know what a pipe fitter does, or rather what sort of pipes you fit, where they’re located on the truck, or how they work, but I know you’re a champion at bending and welding pipes.
One day you come home with an eight-branched candlestick made of curved, welded brass pipes. A ninth branch is welded at an angle to the rest, to hold the candle used to light the other candles. You’ve made the candleholders out of six-sided brass nuts. I remember the candlestick as well as I remember the Christmas tree, a small one for tabletop use, that I nag you into buying at an early stage. A full-length tree is out of the question, even if everybody else has one. I know that we don’t celebrate Christmas and that the candlestick is a sort of compromise. It’s a Jewish candlestick, a Hanukkah candlestick, and the eight candles are lit from the ninth, one evening at a time, to commemorate an event in the Jewish calendar that coincides well enough with the season of Christmas tree lights and orange advent stars for one set of lights to be equated with the other. And then there are the Lucia candles, which somehow belong to us all. The Lucia Day celebration is a festival everybody at the big truck factory participates in, with hundreds of employees and their families sitting in the huge assembly shop at long tables set with festive ginger biscuits, and the children fishing with long rods over blue fabric screens to pull out bags of presents. The Lucia celebration is my only close contact with the big truck factory, but the sensation of oil, metal, and soot persists in my nostrils and the sparkle of Lucia candles shines in my memory. The intention of the Lucia celebration is to build “bridges between management and employees and between the shop floor and administrative staff,” and to strengthen something called the Scania Spirit. To strengthen the Scania Spirit, the employees are also offered subsidized study circles and holiday cottages and loans to build their own homes, and they’re given gold pins or gold watches for long and loyal service. There are no two ways about it: the big truck factory is doing all it can to give its employees no cause to dream of a future other than the one already on offer. Benefits for the workers, rewards for the loyal, promotion for the ambitious.
It’s a bright time, in short. A time for bright dreams and big projects.
Your Project is to start life anew in the town with the big truck factory. I’d like to see the town as the given place to do it in, since it’s the place that’s given to me, but one of the reasons you get off the train in Södertälje Södra, apart from your qualifications as an experienced truck builder for Firma Büssing in Braunschweig, is that you’re not permitted to get off the train in Stockholm. Nor are you permitted to get off the train in Gothenburg or Malmö. On the series of six-month work and residence permits issued to you from March 1946 to January 1952, those are the stipulated exceptions: not valid for residence in Greater Stockholm, Gothenburg, or Malmö. Once or twice we go to Stockholm on the train that crosses the bridge over the canal and I chant the names of the stations along the line, but for some reason you have no right to live and work there. Nor does Mom.
Perhaps it’s just as well. In the forbidden books at Per Olof’s, I read nothing but dark things about the morass of the big city, and in the little town with the big truck factory the future looks bright even to foreigners who have just stepped off the train. After work, you stay up late into the evening with your head bowed over the booklets and exercise books of your correspondence courses, since you have no intention of remaining a pipe fitter forever.
Correspondence courses are the Place’s dream factory. With the help of correspondence courses, anybody in any small town can become anything. You want to become a mechanical engineer, and on the small round table in the living room lies a thick book with a red binding and the title Forge and Machine Work. It begins: “Every individual benefits from being able to do calculations.” Hereafter follow calculations galore, thousands of pages filled with detailed, illustrated instructions in the method and technique of handling all the machines of the modern engineering industry: automatic lathe and turret lathe operation, pressure turning, arc welding, spot welding, seam welding, welded pipe bends. The book is recommended by representatives of every interest group and social class in the Swedish dream factory, the trade unions, the employers, the engineers, and the professors, and claims to provide “precisely the modern, practical instructions required for today’s accelerated pace of production.”