There’s a photograph of you at the factory, surrounded by your workmates in the pipe gang. It’s taken in 1951. You’re standing in the front with your welding goggles flipped up; you’ve taken off your peaked cap, and you’re smiling as if you’ve just completed a perfect weld and know your own worth as a pipe fitter. The others in the picture are wearing caps or berets and look more impassive. I recognize one of them from the world outside the factory, perhaps from the sand at the beach, but the factory is part of your world, not mine. You vanish in there for forty-eight hours a week, including Saturdays, and exactly where it is that you go once you’re inside the factory gate beyond the viaduct, I don’t know. The factory’s bigger than the rowanberry avenue, in fact bigger than the little town itself. The town has other factories besides, one of which swallows up your Haluś in the mornings, and sometimes in the evenings, to speed-pack tablets in bottles, or sit by a conveyor belt sewing clothes to music, and you’re both exhausted when you get home and soon you have two children in a one-room apartment with kitchen, and it can’t be taken for granted that you’ll have enough money and stamina to sit through late evenings and nights to educate yourself to be something other than a pipe fitter.
Nor that the big truck factory will want you for anything else. Among your papers I find the following letter from the personnel department:
With reference to your application to our punch-card department for training as a punch-card operator: As a result of inquiries undertaken by us in response to your application we have learned that punch-card operators are not currently being recruited. Nor is it envisaged that there will be any expansion of staff in that department over the coming year.
It may not be your greatest dream to be a punch-card operator. What does a punch-card operator do? Punch-card machines are early computers, fed with data from punch cards. A punch-card operator ensures that the right card is accessed in the right order, or something like that. I don’t see it as any kind of natural progression for a man who can weld perfect pipe joints to become a punch-card operator, but I sense that what you’re really seeking here is confirmation that your horizons are open again and that you’ve started a new life in a new world, in line with the main thrust of the Project.
I call it the Project, as you will have noticed, because that’s how I perceive it much later when I want to connect your early concern for the Child’s reading ability and your late-night poring over course books and your restless ambition to move ahead in a life that still surprises you every morning, and which is built on survival and reunion in a configuration too miraculous to be allowed to stagnate or, God forbid, to come apart. Within the parameters of the Project, the letter from the personnel department is no mere trifle, but no disaster either. The Place offers other dreams to be fulfilled. Such as a two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue. Or a black 1955 Volkswagen, offered at an employee discount. Or a factory-subsidized house of your own, expected to be built largely by yourself.
Perhaps I’m exaggerating the role of the Place in the Project, I know that you too dream of the road onward, although for various reasons your road doesn’t lead onward. And after all, the Place seems to offer a world in which every dream is feasible, since it’s a world where no dreams have been shattered, including the dreams that were shattered in the world you come from, which is a world the Project will help put behind you. In that sense, the Place is an ideal one because so few people here remember what you have to put behind you. That is to say, there’s no lack of information about what you have to put behind you, the local paper does actually report a thing or two, but it’s not something anyone here has experienced or had any direct part in and is therefore easier to forget. There are those who have to forget because they don’t want to remember (and therefore remember all too well), and there are those who forget because they have nothing particular to remember. The past doesn’t have a very strong position in this place, and oblivion is the foundation of the Project. Oblivion and optimism. As far as optimism is concerned, the Place has a competitive edge against practically the whole world, since optimism has never been challenged here. While the outside world collapses, and with it most people’s futures, here nothing’s collapsing. Here the best of all worlds is in full swing and needs only to take a short break before beginning again where it left off.
The best of all worlds is called Folkhemmet, “the home of the people,” otherwise known as the welfare state or the social democracy, and it’s an exceptional invention that knits together the individual’s need for security and a sense of belonging with her yearning for freedom and self-fulfillment, all of which seems even more feasible after the break than before. In the best of all worlds, no one will ever be without a job and a livelihood and a roof overhead, and all schoolchildren will get a free meal a day, and everybody will be entitled to free medical care and a guaranteed pension at retirement and able to afford the stream of ever-new appliances with which ever-new personal freedoms will be attained. In the best of all worlds, a pipe fitter can become a mechanical engineer or a punch-card operator, or at least a home owner and car owner, and the son of a pipe fitter can become practically anything. By November 25, 1950, the local paper is able to announce that Sweden “is well on the way to being a model of the social state.”
The two of you are still categorized as foreigners and have to renew your work and residence permits every six months, and you’re not permitted to settle in the big city across the bridge, but conditions for beginning a new life in a new world must nevertheless seem favorable, since a new world is in fact being realized here. “From cradle to grave we will provide care for our citizens to an extent that the pioneers of the labor movement surely could never have dreamed of,” writes the local paper, and much later I envision people pinching themselves in the arm as they read on:
At the foundation is maternal care: free medical support for mothers during pregnancy and childbirth, supplemented with maternity benefits in cash. For families with children up to the age of 16, the load of providing for them will be alleviated by annual cash allowances. In addition, there will be free care for infants. A higher living standard for families with children will be achieved through housing subsidies for large sections of the population. This will continue at school with free school meals, free dental care, and, during vacations, with free outings and country sojourns. At the appropriate age, talented students with limited financial means will be eligible for financial support. And when the next generations enter the labor market, they will be secured against loss of earnings resulting from illness, accidents, or unemployment.… On top of all this comes social assistance for times of particular need, doing away with the old poor relief.
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.