I remember the trip mainly for the watch. After meeting the man in the building with the elevator, we go to a fancy shop and you buy me a watch, an Atlantic. I haven’t asked for a watch, nor is it my birthday, but perhaps you have something else to celebrate. You seem happy.
We celebrate the new watch together by counting the minutes and seconds between the stations on the way home.
On November 5, 1959, I too write a letter to Natek. I write that I’m sorry for not writing sooner. Why am I sorry? Why do I write the letter at all? I’ve just had my eleventh birthday and I write a letter to my uncle in Tel Aviv with a pen I have just been given by my Auntie Kerstin and my cousin Assa, who have come to visit us that day. They’re divorced, Natek and Kerstin, and by this time they’ve also divided up my two cousins Assa and Anders, both about my age, Assa to Borås and Anders to Tel Aviv. I see them increasingly rarely, and before long hardly at all, but I don’t miss them. Not in the way I realize, much later on, that you must miss your brother and Mom must miss her sister, making your letters to each other loaded with longing, admonitions, and guilt.
Why haven’t you written? Why this silence? Is there anything wrong? Please, don’t wait to answer!
As for me, I pen a very dutiful and self-absorbed letter, prompted by the fuss of my cousin’s rare visit, which serves as a reminder of how small our family is, how scattered and fragile, and how important, therefore, it is for me to take up my new pen and write a letter to Uncle Natek and cousin Anders in Tel Aviv, and how I really ought to apologize in some way for not having written earlier. So I make my excuses and complete the correspondence duties imposed on me in a rapid, careless hand:
We have already had a bit of snow but it melted right away. We have bought a TV too. I am still playing the violin and getting on very well. Lilian is getting big now and goes to preschool. I have my model train out at the moment, it is a Märklin train and really good. It is quite rainy and there are big puddles in the roads and sometimes it literally pours, so I mainly stay at home and play with my train or read a book. On my birthday (Oct. 11) I got a game which I play sometimes. Tomorrow I will start going to school by train. I used to go by bike. At school we are going to learn about Iceland in Geography.
We often watch TV because there are lots of interesting programs full of information. And we are mostly at home so it is useful to have that (the TV, I mean, not the information). I played the violin for Assa and Auntie Kerstin, and they thought I played well, but it takes more than that before you can be called good. I mostly play classical music, e.g. Pleyel, Bela Bartok, Mozart, Bach and Handel. My teacher, who is from Borås, is very keen on modern music. I am going to perform at Christmas. I will be playing a Pleyel duet with my teacher.
With my letter to Natek, starting on the same sheet, comes a letter from Mom in which she apologizes for my “chaotic” account, giving as an excuse the fact that I have been exposed to “too many impressions all at once.” She’s also keen to supplement my uncritical image of television:
It has revolutionized social life here. People largely stay at home, because TV has something for everyone, just like the radio. The programs are mainly broadcast in the evenings, and even if one has guests, everything and everyone is focused on the TV.
How are you both? Why don’t you write more often? We know you are very busy with your work but you must have a little time to set aside for your brother.
You’re not at home when Auntie Kerstin and cousin Assa come to see us and the two letters to Natek are being written.
Nor are you at the factory.
You’ve handed in your notice, and you’re on the road.
It’s not clear from Mom’s letter where you are or where you’re going, only that it has all happened very fast and things are still rather vague, and that you will explain more yourself, in your next letter.
Nor is it clear from the letter that only a day has passed since you left the factory.
“Left on 4 Nov. 1959 at his own request,” says the official testimonial from the personnel department at the factory where you worked for twelve years.
“Final hourly wage rate: 294 öre. Conduct: Creditable. Working capability: Excellent.”
For a day now, you’ve been in untrodden forest.
The local paper on December 16, 1959, runs a picture on the front page with the caption: “Göran Rosenberg and Paul Överström played Campra’s ‘Minuet’ in fine accord.”
I can’t remember your being there.
What became of the duet by Pleyel?
THE SHADOWS
In the local paper on January 24, 1959, a thought for the day as usual. On this particular day, a thought about the Jews. In the story of the Good Samaritan in St. Luke’s Gospel, Jesus wanted to show “how wrong the Jews were in their hatred” and how “unprecedented it must have been for a Jew to listen to Jesus” and how Jesus “does what no other Jew would have done,” namely follow the commandment of love and not that of self-love.
Much later, I find out that you’re involved in a violent argument at the factory. It happens in the changing room, where you try to throw a punch at someone and this someone slams you against a locker so hard you end up with a concussion. This someone had wondered out loud what a person like you was doing among the ordinary workers. Why someone like you was not busy lending money or living off other people. Said he’d never seen a Jew working.
After the argument in the changing room, your headaches come more often. The headaches and the nightmares. Early one morning in May, I hear you calling unfamiliar names in your sleep. I don’t remember the names, but your voice frightens me. It’s not your usual voice. It’s a child’s voice, wailing helplessly through the wall between the living room and the bedroom where you both sleep. It’s already light outside and I lie awake waiting for the day to begin, because it’s the day the king’s coming to visit the truck factory and all the children of Södertälje have been given time off school to wave flags along the motorcade route, and I associate the sound of your voice calling out with the day I didn’t get to see the king.
On Thursday May 23, 1957, the king of Sweden and the queen of the Netherlands visit Södertälje. It’s a glorious late spring day, and just in the driveway down to the truck factory’s main offices the local paper counts thousands of children, all waving flags presented to them by Scania-Vabis as the king and queen drive past in a black Daimler and get out onto a red carpet to sit on a royal blue platform, and the reception committee bows and curtseys, and the entire program runs “immaculately.”