“The atom bomb can shorten wars and reduce casualties,” asserts Colonel Erik Graab at the meeting of the Rotary Club on August 20, 1957.
“More than half of New York’s eight million inhabitants are estimated to have died in a mock attack in which five hydrogen bombs were dropped,” reports the local paper on July 21, 1956.
“The USA has hydrogen bombs that can displace the earth’s axis by sixteen degrees,” says the local paper on October 27, 1956.
“The mystery of life will soon be solved and religion abolished,” pronounces the director of studies at the Workers’ Education Association, Torvald Karlbom, in the assembly hall of my local school on August 18, 1956.
“Ours is an age characterized by lack of moral and spiritual direction,” warns study ombudsman Thorsten Eliasson of the Workers’ Education Association in the music room of my local school on August 21, 1957.
Light in the assembly hall, darkness in the music room.
Light on the big horizon, darkness on the small.
Darkness descends only gradually, almost imperceptibly, over Havsbadet. On July 11, 1956, the local paper reports a water temperature of 19 degrees C (66 degrees F) and two thousand bathers. On July 18, 1956, the Chemical Analysis Agency reports 7,000 E. coli bacteria per liter of seawater. On August 6, 1956, the local paper reports sunshine and a party spirit at a packed bathing beach for the 38th swimming gala, “the loveliest element unquestionably the formation floating, which a bouquet of pretty girls had mastered to perfection.”
The darkness is falling and nobody notices.
Nobody wants to notice.
Havsbadet is too indispensable to be unfit for use.
The unfitness follows from the toilets. Year after year, human waste is flushed from toilets straight out into the bays of Igelstaviken and Hallfjärden and can sometimes be seen washing up on rocks and beaches in semisolid form. Over the course of twenty years, the number of toilets in Södertälje increases twentyfold. Toilets — called water closets or WCs — are to be found in all the apartments in the blocks along the rowanberry avenue. It’s only the tenements in Baltic that still have dry privies in the yard, or dry closets as the local paper calls them. The dry privies are rows of dark stalls, separated by thin walls of rough planking. I can hang on for days to avoid going to the dry privies. I’m scared to death of something crawling up out of the dark holes or of falling into them. The WC is a blessing for humankind in general, and for me in particular.
The price of having a WC, however, is Havsbadet, even if nobody wants to accept the fact and the payment keeps being postponed. Summer after summer, the question is raised of whether Havsbadet should be closed or cordoned off so people who should know better will keep away, but summer after summer, thousands of people who don’t know better burrow their feet into the white sand of Havsbadet and take a dip in the tainted waters and reluctantly use the new beach showers to rinse off the E. coli bacteria afterward. The showers are installed after the fire and are intended to replace dips in the sea, but dips in the sea are not easily replaced. Particularly not as long as the Chemical Analysis Agency is vacillating about the water quality and the Public Health Board is vacillating about the closure and there are experts claiming they can purify the water at Havsbadet within two weeks. A Dr. Pettersson from Stockholm is given the opportunity to test his method, which employs compressed air to force the water from the bottom up to the surface and a propeller to push it toward the shore, which presupposes that the water at the lower level is cleaner than the water at the surface, a fact that even the local newspaper calls into question. “There’s doubtless a large volume of polluted water even at the deeper level, extending a good way out to sea.”
In the record-breaking hot summer of 1959, health inspector Torsten Lysell issues a warning in the local paper, saying that the water quality is steadily deteriorating and when last measured was found to contain 90,000 E. coli bacteria per liter, which is potentially life-threatening. He’s also worried by the fact that the public seems entirely unconcerned. A few weeks later, he proposes that Havsbadet be closed down, because people are tearing down the notices prohibiting its use and continuing to bathe there.
I don’t remember when we swap Havsbadet for the lake of Malmsjön. The transition is gradual and almost imperceptible. The summer I’m learning to swim, we go by car to Malmsjön. I associate the swap more with the car than with the water. Malmsjön has no sandy beach, and no restaurant with evening dances and no horizon to hold your gaze, but there are no swimming lessons at Havsbadet anymore.
Yet I don’t remember that we stop going to Havsbadet.
That we ever stop going to Havsbadet.
Havsbadet continues to be a place we go, I remember, for the sand and the light, and the scent of resin and pine needles along the path through the trees.
What makes you go back to Łódź? I have no memory of your doing so and for a long time I live with the certainty that you would never have done so, but on April 24, 1958, you unquestionably write a letter to Natek from Łódź. It’s clear from the letter that you have a cousin, Jerzyk, still alive in Łódź and that he meets you at Kaliska station, although you have trouble recognizing him because you haven’t met for twenty years, but he recognizes you from the photo you’ve sent in advance. You write of how glad you are to see each other again, and how common memories have brought you close, and how cordially his “little family” welcomes you, but I find it hard to believe that you return to Łódź to meet a cousin, even if he’s the only cousin you have who’s still alive. I suspect you return to Łódź to confirm with your own eyes that the world you once made into your own no longer exists. I suspect, too, that it has something to do with the horizon, the one that’s not really opening, and with the Project, the one threatening to stall.
Your search for confirmation is soon over. “As for Łódź, the town made the most terrible impression on me, and I had a heavy heart those first days. All I wanted was to fly away, back home again. I haven’t felt so forsaken since the war. Like a child.”
No, there’s nothing left in Łódź of the world you once made into your own.
Not even the graves. You go with Jerzyk to the Jewish cemetery to look for your father Gershon and your brother Salek. You’re quite sure that Gershon’s grave, at least, must be there somewhere, since it’s registered in a document. In a small box, on the thin airmail paper the letter’s written on, you’ve made a note of the date of death given in the register, July 25, 1943.
So you stay in Łódź for three weeks instead of the planned two, to continue the search, but you don’t find the graves. Nor do you find much else from the world that was once yours. “There are so few Jews left here. Even in Stockholm, you’re more likely to bump into a Jid.”
You discuss the next leg of the journey with Jerzyk. His journey, not yours. As soon as the opportunity arises he wants to move on, ideally to America but more likely to Israel. There’s nothing to stay in Łódź for.
And your journey? Do you consider it over?
One day we take the train to Stockholm, you and I. I don’t know why it’s just the two of us or why we’re not at school and work, respectively. It must be falclass="underline" you’re wearing your herringbone-patterned coat and black hat, and the station platforms, wet with rain, are glistening yellow, and I rush to the compartment window to catch sight of the black canal running vertiginously far below the railroad bridge before the train almost immediately stops in Östertälje. The station names along the way are reassuringly familiar, whereas Stockholm remains a thoroughly strange and scary city. I hold your hand from the instant we get off the train until we’ve gone through a tall front doorway and into a big entrance hall with a red carpet on a marble floor and solid walls of dark wood, and into the first-ever elevator of my life. I let go of your hand only when you tell me I can press the elevator button. It’s a big moment, the first press of my first elevator button, and I get a faint sinking feeling in my stomach as the elevator silently carries us up past floor after floor of dark wood doors and shiny brass plates. On the floor where we get out of the elevator and go through a door, a long corridor with yet more doors is revealed, and from the corridor with all the doors a short man with a bent back comes toward us, greets you, and addresses me by name, asking me to wait in a room smelling of cigars while he talks to you on your own.