In what language do Karin and Ingvar become your friends? Not only your sole friends outside the refugee colony, but your best friends at that. You celebrate your first New Year’s Eve in Södertälje in their home. They’re the first to see your first curtains in your first apartment on Villagatan. You raise your first glasses in a toast to Karin and Ingvar’s firstborn child. You also serve coffee in your first glasses, since Ingvar doesn’t drink tea. Ten months later, when your firstborn is due to arrive, Ingvar comes along to the hospital, so that there will be no confusion of languages. After all, Ingvar has some experience by now, and he’s from the Place.
Confusion of languages is my term for the invisible wall rising up between you and the Place, not a wall between languages so much as a wall between worlds, between the world you carry with you and the world you hope to make your own; a wall that no language whatsoever can penetrate. After all, the words are there already — ghetto, death camp, gas chamber, annihilation, extermination — but nobody understands what they mean.
Insofar as they care what they mean.
It must be lonely to live in a place where nobody understands what the words mean, even though you take such pains with them.
Karin writes that you search among the books on their shelves and ask for Strindberg. She writes that you learn Swedish by reading Strindberg and that before long you can write “without spelling mistakes and completely grammatically.”
It’s certainly in the language of Strindberg that you study for your correspondence courses late into the night, in the hope that the horizon will open and the confusion of languages cease.
It’s also certain that as soon as the Child can add one letter to another on the living room floor, you come home carrying a briefcase heavy with library books. The Child’s early reading includes classics like Children of the Forest, Hat Cottage, Cat Goes on a Journey, and Spotty, about a rabbit who’s different from all the other rabbits; but also — and far too early—Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan, by Stefan Zweig.
Karin and Ingvar understand you better than most people, not because they understand more of your words but because they like you and want to understand you and want you to stay on so that your children can grow up together and you can all cycle out together to the little wooden summerhouse Ingvar has built out of spare packing cases from the truck factory.
The fact that you two hesitate for so long over whether to move on or not, I believe, has something to do with Karin and Ingvar.
On July 9, 1953, carrying two heavy suitcases, you board the train to Marseille via Copenhagen and Paris. You spend a few days in Paris, lugging the cases around. Your French is not on a par with your Swedish, so when you happen to knock into someone on the sidewalk you say S’il vous plaît instead of Excusezmoi, which doesn’t go down very well. You immediately learn to say “sorry” and not “please.” Another sort of confusion of languages, for sure, and easier to sort out.
In Paris you also carry lists with names and addresses of people who might have known people who might have survived the world you come from.
That’s what’s left of the world you come from: lists of names and addresses.
In Paris, one of the names at one of the addresses takes you along to Jo Goldenberg’s newly opened Jewish restaurant on rue des Rosiers, where they serve food that smells and tastes of the world you come from.
That too is left of the world you come from: smells and tastes.
In Marseille, if not before, it comes home to you that the Place is a paradise after all. In Marseille there’s destruction and poverty as far as the eye can see. Walking that last bit through the district around the docks, you keep a tight hold on your suitcases, which are loaded with necessities from Paradise for the Promised Land: clothes, fabrics, canned goods, batteries, lightbulbs. On the ship, a photograph of you in profile. You’re standing by the rail on the top deck, gazing toward the horizon. You’re wearing white shorts and white sandals and are stripped to the waist, your ribs just about visible beneath the tanned skin, no scars visible anywhere. The wind’s blowing your hair back from your high forehead. I’d like to read yearnings for another world into your gaze, but I don’t know whether the picture was taken on the way to Israel or on the way back, so it could just be that what I see is homesickness for the one-room apartment on the rowanberry avenue.
In Israel you’ll find most of the names and addresses on your list of persons who might know persons from the world you come from. Israel is largely populated by people from the world you come from. Israel is a world you don’t have to make your own since it already belongs to you, a world where you don’t have to be afraid of being foreigners, still less of being Jews, since this is a world of Jews.
At any rate, that’s how it looks on paper.
On paper, it’s a very attractive world, and it will take a lot to make you turn your back on it.
Six weeks later, you turn your back on it. The photos of your trip reveal nothing of what makes you do that. You have a very nice reflex camera that makes a resolute click as it takes sharp pictures of trimly dressed people in bright sunshine. There you are on the promenade in Tel Aviv with a warm breeze ruffling your hair, and Bluma has her hands on Jacob and Isaac, who are standing there in white shoes, white shirts, and white shorts with white suspenders, while in the background men in white shirts and women in flowery dresses stroll along; it must be a Saturday afternoon. There you are on the slopes of Mount Carmel with Bluma and Moniek Wyszogrodzki, who has opened a cake shop and cafe in Haifa and has just been handed spare parts for a bread-making machine out of one of the suitcases you’ve brought along, and you’re all looking out over Haifa Bay, where the cargo ships lie at anchor in the humid summer haze.
What the pictures fail to reveal is the economic crisis. You come to Israel at a time when everybody asks if you’re out of your mind, thinking of leaving Paradise for Hell. Yes, this is how they describe the situation in the country. I don’t find any letters from your trip to Israel, but the question is clearly stored among the fragments of my memory: are you out of your mind? The country is on the brink of ruin and all consumer goods are strictly rationed: meat, bread, vegetables, clothes, shoes. In the shops, the rations run out and leave people still standing in line, the factories have been brought to a standstill by a lack of raw materials and electric power, the newspapers have halved in size because of the paper shortage. It’s not even certain that you’ll be allowed to emigrate here. The Israeli government is toying with the idea of rationing Jewish immigration, too, so that there can be sufficient food and necessities to go around for those who are here already. The idea is that only Jews in acute physical danger will be allowed in. The idea never has to be put to the test, because there are so few Jews knocking on the door in these days of distress. The years of mass immigration from Europe are over, and the years of mass immigration from North Africa are yet to come, and for a few lean years in between, people shake their heads despairingly over anyone crazy enough to want to leave Sweden for Israel.
In the summer of 1953 the Israeli economy is turning around, but you probably don’t notice it, and people probably don’t dare to believe it, and besides, there’s an ominous clamor about the main reason for the upturn: the Reparations Agreement with West Germany. On July 30,1953, in the middle of your trip to Israel, the first delivery of German iron under the Reparations Agreement is loaded onto the freighter Haifa in the port of Bremen. Some people use the term “damages,” but the German word is, Wiedergutmachung, “reparations.” The Hebrew word is simply shilumim, “payments.” The summer you turn your back on Israel, West Germany starts to compensate for the annihilation of your world by means of cash payments and deliveries of iron and steel for the construction of the state of Israel, thus allowing the economy to turn around. In the 1950s, reparations from West Germany cover 29 percent of the deficit in the Israeli balance of payments. Soon the Israeli economy is growing by 8–9 percent, and within ten years the per capita income rises by 74 percent. If your trip had been a year or two later, no one would have shaken their heads despairingly at you. Two years later, your brother Natek is divorced and moves from Borås to Tel Aviv, while we move from one side of the rowanberry avenue to the other. That’s all.