The bridge across the canal splits the little town into its two historically incompatible interests. The interests of those who just want to pass through demand the quickest possible thoroughfare, while the interests of those who want people to make a stop demand that they be able to slow down, park, and get out of their cars. The years when I’m noting down the exotic plate numbers of cars in stationary traffic lines are the years when the big plans for the town center are finalized. One plan proposes pulling down the old wooden buildings and widening the shopping street to provide more space for the cars and the thoroughfare while also making room for cars to stop for a while. The other plan proposes that a new road and a new bridge over the canal bypass the heart of the town, taking a route near the railroad bridge, leaving Södertälje on a turning off the main highway, just as it was left at the end of a spur off the main railroad line.
For a time the plans exist side by side, unresolved.
All futures still seem compatible and possible.
Everything that’s new heralds brighter times, including the traffic lines and the drawbridge misery.
If a forest or a town or a bathing beach happens to stand in the future’s way, the future has precedence.
I prefer traveling by train rather than by car. The train that runs on the single-track spur between Södertälje Södra and Södertälje Central is powered by a shunting engine and has coaches with open platforms and wooden benches. The journey takes five minutes. From fourth grade on, I take the train to school. The train to Stockholm has bigger engines and bigger coaches with corridors and compartments with upholstered seats. On the express trains making their brief stop at Platform 1, closest to the rowanberry avenue, there are coaches going to Copenhagen and Hamburg, and clattering dining cars, and sleeping cars from foreign railroad companies marked Schlafwagen or Wagon-Lit, their curtains drawn. One day I find myself peddling the Södertälje specialty, twisted buns, on Platform 1. Or perhaps someone else is in charge of the peddling and is just letting me have a try. The memory fragment will not shine forth. The passengers reach out from the windows. Where are they going? Where have they come from? With trains, you always know that sort of thing. It’s written on the signs hanging down from the platform roofs and on the signs attached to the sides of the coaches, and it’s announced from the loudspeakers fixed to the platform pillars. On Platform 1 I stay in close and frequent contact with the towns of Katrineholm, Hallsberg, Nässjö, and Alvesta, and by extension with the world as far as I can imagine it. I can’t imagine the world any farther than the town of Borås, with a change of train in Herrljunga. In Borås there are black steam trains, hissing and belching out smoke. Borås is where my uncle Natek and my two cousins live. Trains are for traveling from one place to another. Trains don’t run or stop just anywhere. Taking the train is always a bit of a ceremony, and people buy special platform tickets so they can meet and wave good-bye, and laugh and cry as the trains pull in and out of Platform 1 and the rowanberry avenue comes into and out of view.
So I don’t really understand why we need a car. To get to Havsbadet, we walk or cycle. To get to work, the two of you take your bicycles or the branch line. Going to Stockholm or Borås we take the train, as I’ve explained. Cars aren’t very common on the rowanberry avenue. Anders’s dad has a car that’s usually parked in the yard outside the house and sometimes needs to be cranked up with a large handle, but then Anders’s dad has a store in the main square selling spare parts and maybe that’s why he needs a car.
Our car’s a 1955 black Volkswagen, registration number B 40011, and it’s the latest model, with a small back window and semaphore arms for directional signaling. Anders keeps going on about the Beetle’s having its engine at the back and being cooled by air, whereas his dad’s car and all other cars have the engine in the front and are water-cooled. It’s safer to have the engine at the front and the petrol tank at the back, Anders says, but I’m not interested in the difference. Nor am I particularly interested in the car as such. One hot summer day, it just happens to be there. I remember that whole summer as very hot and very nice, and we use the car for day trips on holidays and Sundays. A car isn’t for going from one place to another, but for going nowhere in particular to unpack a picnic basket or a deck chair, or just see the world through the car window. A car ad in the local paper reads “Everything’s so much easier now. On Sundays and work-free days we can get out into the countryside, go for a dip, pick berries and mushrooms — or just take a spin. Try a Volkswagen for that wonderful feeling of independence.”
We take the car to Lake Malmsjön instead of walking or biking to Havsbadet. We take the car in the summer when Aunt Bluma and my cousins from Tel Aviv stay with us in the small two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue. We take the car to Karin and Ingvar’s self-built little country cottage. We take the car to Stockholm now and then, even though the train is quicker. We never take the car to Borås. When the car’s full of people, I squeeze into the little space between the back seat and the engine compartment. The roads are narrow and winding, and the wind rushes noisily through the open windows, and the engine whines through the compartment wall, and it’s tiring to travel by car. Lots of people on the rowanberry avenue spend their Sundays and work-free days washing and waxing their cars until they shine like new.
The simple truth is that a car is a luxury, just yesterday unthinkable for a pipe fitter at Scania-Vabis and a seamstress at Tornvall’s, but in the new life in the new world, so many things that were unthinkable only yesterday are not anymore.
The car becomes a part of the Project in the same way as the plans for a self-built house in Vibergen and citizenship.
On May 7, 1954, the two of you become Swedish citizens.
The clearest indication that I overestimate the Place’s importance to the Project is that for quite some time, you continue to consider leaving it and moving on. Many of the people who contribute to the confusion of languages around our blanket on the sands of Havsbadet in the first years do what the express trains do, they make only a brief stop and then move on. Some cross the bridge to Stockholm once that route is opened to them, but most move on to begin their lives anew in another world. The other worlds are called Israel and America, Jisroel unt Amejrika. The Wyszogrodzki family, who live in the apartment block opposite ours on the rowanberry avenue, move on to Israel, where one no longer has to travel illegally by freighter. Moniek Wyszogrodzki is a pastry cook and a racing cyclist and my godfather. In Jewish tradition, the duty of the godfather or sandak is to hold the child’s head at the circumcision ceremony, which takes place when I am eight days old. My image of Moniek Wyszogrodzki is formed much later, when he’s a pastry cook and a racing cyclist in Israel, living with Mania and four daughters in a lovely house on the slopes of Mount Carmel, looking out over Haifa Bay and the gold-glittering Bahá′i Shrine. Moniek, now Moshe, Wyszogrodzki has red hair, a freckled face, and gray-blue eyes that radiate the energy and will of a competitive personality. Mania bears the physical marks of the road to and from Auschwitz, a lined face and gaps in her teeth, but not Moshe. Moshe lives by the cycling theorem: if you don’t keep pedaling, you fall off. In Södertälje, he’s a member of the Amateur Cycling Club.