I have to admit to a certain partiality here, but the Piccolo’s a splendid invention that efficiently and elegantly solves a luggage problem inherent in all VW Beetles. It’s a splendid leaflet, too, personal and persuasive, even providing our telephone number—0755/38157—which can be called anytime before 8 p.m. You assure the reader that the Piccolo has been subjected to strenuous testing and has proved itself “the sturdy, convenient, and reliable luggage carrier with which all VW owners should be equipped.”
I don’t know what strenuous testing you subject the Piccolo to, but Anders and I subject it to two children swinging up and down on it, which makes the Beetle rock violently while the Piccolo stays firmly in place. The matte silver color gives the Piccolo’s tubular steel a silky surface that feels warm to naked skin, a detail that the leaflet neglects to mention.
Much later, I’m holding the yellowing leaflet in my hand, astonished by your energy and initiative. Where do you find the time to do all this? I don’t remember anybody helping you. Yours is the only name on the leaflet. It is to you that customers are told to phone or write. You’re the inventor, manufacturer, and salesman, all in one. You’re working forty-eight hours a week at the truck factory and you’re clearing a forest plot in Vibergen and you’re the father of two children in a tiny one-room apartment below the railroad station and you design, make, and sell the Piccolo.
I don’t know how many Piccolos you make and sell. All I know is that the Piccolo disappears from our lives as abruptly as Vibergen.
Or maybe the Piccolo disappears first.
Or maybe the two disappearances are connected.
The memory fragments refuse to piece themselves together.
Much later, I can see how alone you are with your invention. There’s no evidence of a partner or financial backer.
Much later, I’m surprised at how far you get with it, alone.
I don’t know what causes the project to founder in the end, but I suspect it’s lack of capital and contacts and possibly, when I think about it, a lack of that kind of boldness that borders on foolhardiness. You’re bold enough to invest, but not foolhardy enough to keep on once you realize the risks you’re running. Or rather, once the fear of risking the life you have gets its claws into your ambitions to start a new life. At any event, this is how I, much later, feel impelled to interpret the momentary explosion of energy and activity and confidence in those first years after the Israel crossroads, and the equally swift retreat to your starting point as an able and industrious fitter, bending pipes at the truck factory. You simply cannot be allowed to fail, and when the demons of failure get their claws into you anyway, you lack the required boldness (or foolhardiness) to take up the fight. The Piccolo fades away, leaving behind an unembellished black Volkswagen Beetle, and Vibergen becomes a small two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue, where the kitchen window looks down on the outer harbor and some small villa gardens, their apples ripe for swiping as the hot summer of 1955 turns into fall.
In the year 1955, 25,452 VW Beetles are sold in Sweden. One in every five cars sold is a Beetle. The Beetle’s the best-selling make of car in the country. A Piccolo on one out of every hundred, at least to start with, and you would have owned your own business and lived in a house of your own. Now I see only one Piccolo in the Södertälje area, and I don’t recall us ever using it for anything but tests.
Do you ever have doubts?
I mean, not just about the invention, but about the Beetle itself, which after all was Hitler’s contribution to motoring. Much later, I come to understand that there were people who wouldn’t even consider driving a VW, let alone buying one, but when the import ban on foreign cars is lifted in 1954 and the Beetle becomes the best-selling car in Sweden, few people associate it with Hitler.
I associate the Beetle with you.
With your tanned elbow leaning out of the open side window and the warm breeze blowing through your hair as the car zooms along, and the silvery Piccolo visible through the back window, following us on its sturdy bumper mounts.
I associate the uniform with the Beetle too. It’s a greenish sort of gray and has big breast pockets with deep pleats and bulging buttons, and a folded cap tucked under the shoulder strap, and really seems too heavy to wear in summer, but it’s early summer or late spring and you’re behind the wheel and we drive down an avenue of tall trees to a big, grand house and I see men in uniforms through the side window and gray-green military trucks through the windshield. I don’t know where we are, or why, but it has something to do with the uniform.
What I do know is that on May 15, 1956, you’re called up to the Royal Svea Logistic Regiment in Linköping, and between August 3 and November 12 you’re taught how to maintain and repair military vehicles. Not exactly a new horizon, but you shoot well. With the army-issue Mauser M-38 you shoot your way to the army’s Silver Medal for shooting, scoring 86 out of a possible 100. The only picture of you in uniform is in a weapons store with straight rows of Mausers lined up in racks behind you, and you’re holding an army-issue submachine gun, the M-45. It’s November and you’re in the army’s white winter camouflage coat with the fur collar, and on your head you have the army’s lined leather cap. You look small in the winter uniform. The summer uniform suits you better. You do most of your military service in the summer and autumn of 1956. Having completed 180 days, you’re excused from the remaining 180 days and the compulsory refresher course.
You’re thirty-three years old, and you have a family with two children to provide for.
And a horizon that doesn’t quite want to open up.
There’s something indistinct about the horizon, not just the small one, beyond the rowanberry avenue, the railroad bridge, and Havsbadet, but also the big one, beyond the radio set that stares at me with its blue-green Cyclops eye and over which you bend your head in the evenings. Sometimes you press your ear closer to the loudspeaker fabric and gently turn the right-hand dial and move the indicator through the radio stations, and the blue-green eye pulsates with the wavelengths of the world and the sounds of the world burst in from the big horizon. Much later, I realize that what comes bursting in are the sounds of war, the sounds of Israeli tanks charging toward the Suez Canal, and Soviet tanks charging toward Budapest, and in the small two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue you hang your uniform in the hall and bend your concerned head toward the world.
Are you concerned about Caryl Chessman, too? A Caryl Chessman fragment glints brightly in the darkness around the uniform and the radio set. Caryl Chessman is waiting for his death sentence to be carried out. Year after year, he waits for his death sentence to be carried out. Chessman is also a brand of cigarettes, sold in a yellow packet with black and white checks. Auntie Elisabeth on the other side of the railroad bridge chain-smokes Chessmans, and Chessman is reprieved, time and time again, until he’s taken into the gas chamber to die. There’s always a last-minute reprieve for Chessman. A film about Caryl Chessman, based on a book by Caryl Chessman, is showing at the Castro cinema, and I can’t stop thinking about death in the gas chamber when Auntie Elisabeth lights a new Chessman with the glowing end of the previous one.