Early one morning I get a ride from my first garbageman in my first garbage truck while the two new arrivals who have become my father and mother are still asleep on the sofa bed in the living room with the blinds drawn and the street outside lies silent, apart from the chatter of the sparrows in the barberry hedge and the screech of brakes from the first morning train on its way south. My first mornings are always early and always bright, and on one of those mornings I slip out of the front door and down the stairs to the entrance hall and out onto the sunlit pavement, because I don’t have the patience to go on lying there on the pull-out settle in the kitchen and don’t want to wake the two sleepers until the alarm clock rings and the street is filled with the cries and sounds of the growing caravan of bicycles making their way down the rowanberry avenue with rattling chains and creaking saddles and a daily load of filled lunchboxes and drowsy riders.
So I take early possession of the Place without their really noticing; sometimes, in fact, while they’re still asleep. I’ve been told not to go off with strangers or accept anything from strangers, but the garbagemen aren’t strangers. They’re part of the Place, in the same way as the dockers and sailors at the port where I go fishing for my first roach, and the bakers and assistants all dressed in white at the bakery on the other side of the road where I buy my first crusty bread roll and my first milk is ladled out with a long-handled liter measure from a hole in the counter. The speciality there is a bread loaf known as the SS loaf, named after the shop, which is called the SS Bakery, named after the Place itself, Södertälje Södra; but that’s a loaf we never buy. Just to the right as you enter the dairy, my first bottles of fizzy pop are ranged in dark green crates stacked on end against the wall. The very first is called Pomril and tastes of apples.
Seated in the driver’s cab, I’m allowed to ride in the garbage truck from one end of the rowanberry avenue to the other, from the end where we live, in the last building before you reach the edge of the forest and the road to the Beach, all the way to the other end, where the row of buildings comes to an end and the street makes a sharp left turn and disappears under a railroad viaduct. The forest and the road to the Beach are part of my territory, but not the road beyond the viaduct. Beyond the viaduct is the big factory that swallows the caravans of bikes and spits out trucks, sheltering behind its front gates a world I can neither reach nor name. Dad’s a pipe fitter, but what a pipe fitter is I have no idea. He could just as well be a founder, borer, tracer, clerk, plater, punch-card operator, balancer, manager, smith, foreman, filer, capstan lathe operator, or designer. The words of the world beyond the factory gates can’t be seen or touched or smelled, so it’s impossible for them to lend their names to anything in my world. Thus an early distinction is drawn between the world I can make into my own and the world Dad must try to make into his, because at seven every morning he and his bike disappear through something called the Chassis Gate and I don’t see him again until Mom calls out of the kitchen window to say that dinner’s ready.
The boundaries of my world are sharp and forbidding, and the two garbagemen who have given me a seat with a view in their cab know very well where those limits are: the busy mainline railroad tracks, the railroad viaduct that spans the street, the railroad bridge over the canal, the canal itself, the steep-sided quays of the port area, the sharp fences around the factories and coal depots along the bay at Hallfjärden.
Steel and water. Fences and cul-de-sacs. Barriers and precipices.
The only road that doesn’t end at something hard and impenetrable is the road that continues where the paved street ends and the forest begins, the road that in spring is edged with cowslips and lilies of the valley and in summer is crowded with bikes and eventually with cars, and which on my long Sunday walks with Dad seems never-ending. This is the road to the Beach, Havsbadet, and it ends in a sandy shoreline. Havsbadet is the most open and inviting of the boundaries in my world, but a boundary it is nonetheless; the road comes only this far, and this is how large my world is allowed to be.
The area of predominantly new housing where the garbage truck stops at every block, empties every refuse storage room, and carefully shakes the last scraps out of every dumpster is no larger than can be explored by a young child on foot and is in fact a strictly encircled enclave comprising, roughly speaking, a railroad station with auxiliary red-brick accommodations for its employees; sixteen new, three-story housing blocks in yellow or gray plaster lining both sides of a stone-paved avenue; some smaller side streets with two-story detached houses; an open square; two playgrounds; a day nursery and a post office; two grocery shops, Kling’s with cooling water running in the window, and the Co-op with the first frozen-food counter; a tobacconist’s; a haberdasher’s; a bakery and a cafe. In front of the train station, there’s a newspaper kiosk and a telephone booth with a removable floor of wooden laths through which escaped ten-öre coins lie glinting. It’s a perfectly enclosed, idyllic world, which you can enter or exit only by passing under dark railroad viaducts, balancing across vertiginous railroad bridges, climbing over prohibited embankments, jumping on treacherous ice floes, or making holes in skull-marked factory fences.
On the other hand, it’s a place that can easily be explored and taken possession of. Not only because it’s so small and so circumscribed, but also because it’s so new. In fact, it’s practically without a history. Not long ago, there were no people here at all, just pine forest and sandy heath. Not long ago, there was no railroad passing through here and there were no plans for one to do so. Not long ago, the intention was to put something else here, something grander and more visionary. Not long ago, the idea was for these unchartered backwoods to be the site of an ideal society, meticulously planned in every detail. “The forested area of Näset to the south of the city” was to become a workers’ paradise of self-owned homes, adjoining one-family houses, each with its own patch of garden, an esplanade punctuated with parks and hills, a square with a covered market, public baths, a church on a slight rise, a public park and sports area down by the factories, and a bathing beach, Havsbadet, by the sea.