No, I don’t think you’re bowing your head for Caryl Chessman, not even when the last minute comes, and not for Tumba-Tarzan either, I assume. Tumba-Tarzan is the Caryl Chessman of the rowanberry avenue. Tumba-Tarzan is hiding out in the woods around Tumba and Rönninge but has also been sighted in the forest around Havsbadet and in the woods near the riding school on the other side of the railroad bridge, and some people say they’ve seen his abandoned lair in the woods around the Ewos skull factory. Tumba-Tarzan’s lairs are always abandoned when the police find them. The hunt for Tumba-Tarzan never ends, and in the school playground we replace the hunt for Robin Hood with the hunt for Tumba-Tarzan. In the local paper he’s referred to alternatively as a desperado and a pathfinder, reflecting pretty well the atmosphere of combined terror and admiration that the hunt for Tumba-Tarzan arouses in the rowanberry avenue and surrounding area. When no one has sighted Tumba-Tarzan for a while, the local paper wonders anxiously if he’s left the vicinity, and when someone immediately thereafter spots a tent or a couple of bikes hidden under some spruce branches in the woods on the other side of the truck factory, the local paper hopes that they’re Tumba-Tarzan’s and he’s come back. When he’s finally caught, we’re all convinced he’ll soon find a way to escape. Tumba-Tarzan has broken out of a penal colony to go and find his Jane, whose name is Alice, and take her away, over the water on a raft, to live as an outlaw in the vast forests around the rowanberry avenue. They live on pheasants’ eggs they find on the ground and canned food they steal from empty villas and summer cottages, and they let the police find the stillwarm campfires they’ve just abandoned on their freedom flight through the Swedish summer. Tumba-Tarzan is the first rebel of the rowanberry avenue, and we keep on seeing him in the forest on the way to Havsbadet and in the woods around the skull factory long after he’s been caught.
Much later, I read the report of the proceedings at Södertörn District Court against Rolf Johansson and understand once again why he was a rebel and not just a common thief:
Tumba-Tarzan admitted all the charges against him and clearly had a good memory for his actions. He occasionally stated that the chronological order of some of the break-ins was wrong, and he made one objection in the course of his hearing. This concerned the theft of some bottles of beer, which he absolutely denied. The prosecutor accepted this and removed that particular charge.
The mapped-out future generates its rebels. After Tumba-Tarzan there are Tommy and Elvis, who split the school playground into two camps and fill the local paper with ominous warnings about young people going astray. Then Tumba-Tarzan again, in the form of two young brothers who quickly bring the brand into disrepute by behaving more like thieves than rebels.
The local paper is also full of debates about whether people were happier in the old agrarian society than in the new industrial one. Much space is given to a survey of Swedish factory workers, who answer the question with “an unqualified yes.” Much space, also, is given to a front-page article about a public meeting to protest against “the widespread vandalizing of parks in Södertälje.” Park vandals are held to include people creating their own paths across the grassy areas. Young children are said to vandalize out of ignorance (“training is needed here”), older children out of a desire for opposition (“they need to be guided toward other activities in which they can vent their feelings”).
I certainly know who vents their feelings by twisting the swings several times over the top of the frame in the playground behind the Co-op. I certainly know who eventually ends up in the young offenders’ prison at Hall. I certainly know there are things we do because they’re forbidden.
I’m no rebel, far from it, but I’m tempted by forbidden things, too.
In the light of later understanding, I think it has something to do with that mapped-out future, the one staring at us all and not blinking, not flinching, not paying any heed to the shadows behind us and the confusion around us and the fear inside us, the one we therefore want to see through and give the finger to, which is what the rebels are doing for us. Against the mapped-out future, the rebels hold out the forbidden dangers and freedoms of untrodden forest.
You’re no rebel either, far from it, but when the horizon of the truck factory refuses to open and the mapped-out future threatens to suffocate you, untrodden forest starts to attract you, too. “I’ve made a huge mistake in staying at the factory for so many years, I would have been better off doing a variety of jobs,” you write to Natek on October 11, 1957, my ninth birthday. The factory has started to measure the time each stage of your job takes, using a method called MTM, demanding that you do the same amount of work in a shorter time, and you’re beginning to suffer from persistent headaches that you suspect have something to do with your “unhappiness” at the factory.
You write the word in Swedish, vantrivsel, in a letter otherwise in Polish. Natek has made the leap from Borås to Tel Aviv, and you’re ready to make the leap from the truck factory to almost anywhere else. The more the horizon closes in, the more important the leap becomes, and the longer the leap is postponed, the more the horizon closes in. You tell Natek that you recently replied to an advertisement “for a job as a service engineer for the Toledo automatic car,” and the company called you back and everything looked very promising — until you told them you were thirty-five.
I know nothing about the Toledo automatic car (automat-vagnen). You’re writing in Polish, so the problem could have something to do with the translation, or with your Polish, which quite often has some Swedish mixed in, making it hard to understand what you mean, particularly when the Swedish and Polish words are similar. You may possibly mean a service engineer for the Toledo automatic scales (våg rather than vagn), but I’m not familiar with those either. What I do know is that you speak the language of Strindberg with the accent of Mickiewicz, and what I suspect, much later, is that the obstacle to your becoming a service technician for Toledo wagons or scales is not your age but the confusion of languages.
In a letter to Natek on February 17, 1959:
PS. If you have any good contacts with firms in the textile trade who are interested in exporting to Sweden (Scandinavia) and have still not been introduced into these countries, do try to get hold of some samples. It could be ladies’ blouses, thin cotton and wool sweaters, but only the latest fashion, original designs, and the right sort of price.
Time and again you raise your head to see if the horizon is opening, but instead you see time running out and the Project stalling.
Let me say something about the big horizon as I see it, much later. There’s something about the light. It’s too bright. It eats away the shadows and burns off the gray shades. The world becomes too light and too dark. The brightest of horizons shines over the darkest of experiences and the most menacing of times.
“The residents of Södertälje can protect themselves against a dreaded nuclear death by throwing themselves to the ground and ensuring that no part of the body is left uncovered,” pronounces Captain Curt Holmfrid at a public meeting of the Södertälje Civil Defense Association on April 29, 1957.