Only much later did I learn that the place where I applied my first words to the world is a wrecked planners’ dream.
The name of the architect behind the dream was Per Olof Hallman, and the dream was inspired by a social movement that sought to replace the rectilinear, antinature urban ideal of the industrial age with something more organic, more in tune with the natural world. The town plan was to be adapted to the landscape, and not the other way around. Streets were to be built around or over rises and hills, not blasted through them. Existing natural conditions were to be exploited, not obliterated. “A town planner unfamiliar with the terrain can all but ruin a place with a few strokes of the pen,” Hallman wrote in 1901. Two years later, he put forward his plan “for the disused land to the south of, and belonging to, the town of Södertelge.”
Hallman’s ambitions, and indeed those of the whole movement, were far-reaching. The people involved wanted to plan away the disadvantages of industrialization, the dirt, the overcrowding, the ravaging of the countryside, the social injustices, and to plan forth its hidden potentiaclass="underline" a freer and more equal society, closer to nature. One of the movement’s leading proponents was Camillo Sitte, an Austrian who wanted to re-create the human community of the medieval town, with its winding alleys and irregular squares. Another was the Englishman Ebenezer Howard, who wanted to forge a new connection between country and town, between agriculture and industry, gardens and backyards. Bulging metropolises would be decentralized and green, and airy garden cities would be built in surrounding rural areas. A bit of forward-thinking town planning would enable the tenement blocks of industrialization to be peacefully torn down and a new and better society to be peacefully built. Ebenezer Howard was the author of Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, a book which Per Olof Hallman had undoubtedly read before he brought his draftsman’s pen to bear on the southern lands and forests. Here there were no tenements to be torn down, no streets to be reconfigured, no memories to be dug up, no traditions to be broken.
Nor were there yet any plans for the railroad embankment that would cut the place in two, nor for the deep furrow of the canal that would cut it off to the north, nor — obviously — for the railroad bridge or the viaduct or the factory fences or the oil terminals that would very soon turn Per Olof Hallman’s dream into wastepaper.
Much later I’d understand that this in a way was a speciality of the Place: nothing there ever turned out as planned. Not the development of the disused land to the south. Not the route of the railroad. Not the course of the canal. Not Havsbadet. Not the population. Not the town.
It was as if chance had developed a special affection for this particular place. And as if that same chance, like a magnet, had attracted the most fortuitous of human destinies, making the fact that he got off the train at this very Place to start his life anew perhaps the least arbitrary element in the story. A place perfectly chosen for doing exactly that, in fact, or so it sometimes, much later, seemed to me: no strong ties to the past, no fixed plans for the future, no readymade scenario to step into — or be ejected from.
Oh, that “much later”! How insidiously it creeps in, that all-narrowing perspective of hindsight wisdom and rationalization. How easy it is, with only a few strokes of the pen, to inscribe people into a narrative which to them must still be unwritten, burdening them with a knowledge they can’t possibly have yet, closing horizons which to them must still remain open.
So let me be honest about the hindsight, since it’s pervasive, inescapable, and treacherous. When I diverge from the story of myself as General Patton in a tank disguised as a garbage truck, busily inspecting my newly won territory, and slip into a digression on Per Olof Hallman and his abandoned plan for the southern fringes, I’m five years old and will in a few months’ time be caught hopping on ice floes in the canal. I will be seduced into doing this by Tommy Hedman, who’s two years older and lives in the right-hand apartment on the ground floor and comes from Falun and has parents who eat fermented herring once a year, though my parents think it’s a bag of rotting garbage caught in the unfortunate kink near the bottom of the garbage chute. I’m not allowed to visit the Hedmans, and I’m not allowed to play with Tommy.
Actually, to be perfectly honest, what I can remember of these events is fragmentary at best. The early mornings with the garbagemen are fragments of the sleeping apartment, the sun-warmed pavement, the pungent yet sweet smell of the garbage, the clatter of the dumpsters, the dirty, oily overalls, and the vinyl seat sticking to my bare legs. I’m not even sure if the fragments are real, still less whether I’ve put them together correctly. I’m not sure I remember the fragments either, if remembering means actively recalling something. How can you recall something you haven’t yet named and therefore don’t yet have a word for?
Reflections then, rather than fragments: diffuse reflections of physical perceptions, of sensory experiences without words or order. Jumping on the ice floes: the rasp of frozen trousers on skin blue with cold, the glare of chalk-white faces in a black door opening, the pressure of hard hands, the sound of sharp voices, the feel of a thrashing. In my world, thrashing is a word linked to the sensation of ice floes.
Other words come only much later, words like dread and desperation, and, later still, words for the nightmares wallpapering the small apartment facing the railroad tracks, and even finally the words for what the man who is my father and the woman who is my mother might think and feel when their united nightmares suddenly stand before them in the winter darkness of the hall, dripping deep-black water on their threshold, the thin ice crunching beneath their feet, the lethal cold burning against their skin.
Only much later can sensations turn into stories. Only much later can mute expanses of wordlessness be strewn with scattered fragments of language. Only much later do I slither behind Tommy down the steep slope to the canal bank by the railroad bridge and slide out onto the creaking ice and see dark cracks of water open beneath our feet and feel my feet slipping and the water getting into my boots and the cold and stiff trousers chafing against my body on the heavy way home and the sensations of dread and thrashing.
Only much later can I become the child who tells a tale. Only much later can I dig in the mute expanses for fragments, sieve them out of the layered deposits of time, and put them together into a story. It’s not the child who’s remembering. It’s me, trying much later to recall the child’s sensations.
“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater,” writes Walter Benjamin in an essay about the Berlin of his childhood.
It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the “matter itself” is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous investigation what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand — like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery — in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.