“My mother never drives. Never! Not at night.”
The policewoman gave her a look that managed to be both sharp and sympathetic. “I’m afraid she was driving tonight. Do you have any idea why she would leave home on a night like this?”
Anneli took a deep ragged drag, wanted to scream.
The policewoman’s voice came from far away, as if it were a mournful chant: “She must have had some reason. She had two cats with her in the car. None of them... well, it’s extremely slippery outside, black ice, you know. It comes every year, but still takes us by surprise. So your mother, well... she lost control of the car and drove off the road by the bridge... Must have been an hour ago... and I’m sorry to inform you...”
Part III
He Brutality of Beasts
The Wahlberg Disease
by Carl Johan De Geer
Translated by Laura A. Wideburg
Drottninggatan
Those nights on Drottninggatan! The building was an island in a sea of ruins; soon they’d be erecting Celsing’s bombastic Culture House, including an artificial pond with a huge phallic sculpture made of glass, surrounded by spraying water. Though at that time, there was nothing but a huge hole left by demolition, noisy by day and gloomy by night.
Drottninggatan 37 is in the center of Stockholm, now mostly known for a shoe store called Jerns. The original building was from the eighteenth century, but it had been rebuilt many times. In 1964, I had access to rooms there on the top floor, previously an old photography studio once used by the legendary photographer Arne Wahlberg. An enormous sloped glass roof over the main room let in plenty of light. Several smaller rooms had been used as storage space and an office.
I wasn’t actually renting the rooms. I’d run across an old friend and colleague, a fashion photographer, who’d rented the place with what in those days was called a “demolition contract.” He’d just moved out, relocating his studio to a more permanent address. We were having a beer at Löwenbräu, at the time still located on Jakobsgatan, just a block from Drottninggatan.
“Take them,” he said, tossing a key ring onto the table. “The building is completely abandoned. They’ll start tearing it down pretty soon. You can hang out there for now. The light is good. You’ll have to figure out the keys on your own.”
The building had been designated as a historical landmark by the Stockholm City Museum, which gave it some protection — at least, as far as the façade went. When I walked in, the abandoned shoe store seemed spooky. I had to go through it to get to the stairs. Shards of glass and unswept gravel covered the floor. In the evenings, the atmosphere was desolate and the crunching noise my shoes made echoed in a creepy way.
If you want to see what it was like, you can go to the library and look at page 49 in my photography book The Camera as Consolation: Part One (published in 1980). In Wahlberg’s former studio, my closest friends and I set up a ping-pong table. We met every Thursday at three o’clock in the afternoon. Håkan, Pierre, Staffan, Jackie, and me. We’d have little tournaments, and Staffan always won. When he was a teenager, he’d played for the team Engelbrektspojkarna. We should have realized that it was a bad omen: that our previous meeting place for ping-pong, the Co-op Union’s abandoned slaughterhouse and sausage factory, had burned to the ground one year before. The flames had eaten up our ping-pong table, complete with its net, paddles, and balls. We had no way of knowing that the same thing would happen again.
So I ended up spending lots of my time at Drottninggatan 37, high up on the sixth floor, working on my barely existent photography career during an extremely unhappy period in my life. I often had to stay in the building overnight. It wasn’t always easy. I realized right away that candles would be too much of a fire hazard. And flashlight batteries were expensive. Sometimes I’d have to choose between a Spartan dinner or a working flashlight at night. Earlier in the fall, things were more or less fine, since there was still running water and electricity, but as winter approached, the utilities were cut off. Soon I’d have to abandon the place.
As I said, it really wasn’t easy sleeping there. I would lie down on a lump of old clothes that smelled bad. I heard strange sounds in the supposedly empty building. I knew some homeless men lived here and they were restless at night. They had it rougher than I did; they slept right on the broken glass and trash. It was a real hell. They’d light fires in old tin cans, which made me nervous. They also snored. The most alarming sounds, however, were the determined footsteps coming up the stairs — and the knocking on my door. Then I’d grab my bag containing my ten-year-old Hasselblad 1000F. I’d gotten it cheap when Hasselblad released the 50 °C and all the professional photographers dumped their old 1000Fs — their shutters were loud and unreliable.
The sound is easy to imitate: cla-DUM-hiss. If that last hiss did not come, the shutter had frozen, which meant the shoot was over. I also had two magazines for 120 film, a Linhof tripod, and a Lunasix light meter. My camera bag was always packed so I could take off whenever I wanted. My only other possessions were a thermos and the clothes on my back.
The neighborhood around my building, with all its condemned and half-demolished buildings, did not invite strolls at night. I’d read that slums incited people to crime — a belief the psychologists and doctors of Sweden had held for a long time. According to them, this is how it worked: in these slum quarters, children and young people ran around without control, they’d shoplift, fight, and vandalize. A certain doctor by the name of Beijerot kept trumpeting this on television debates and in newspaper articles. Slums are vectors of criminality, he believed. The obvious cure was to tear them all down. I think he confused cause and effect; a rather common problem then, just like today.
Then a new concept came along to replace the old one: modernity. The city politicians, listening to the doctors, got caught up in the spirit of the times. Old buildings needed to be torn down because they were in the way. Highways were to be built through the city, opening it up to light and fresh air.
One night, smoke came in from under my door. I have never woken so fast in my life. I rushed down the stairs to locate the source. Broken furniture and heaps of old newspapers were burning in the stairwells of the fourth and fifth floors. I grabbed some fire buckets filled with sand (complete with small spades), part of the obligatory equipment of any office in those days. It was possible to put out small fires with them, which is what I did. I was coughing and sweating, my face and arms covered in soot, my clothes torn ragged by the time I got back up to the sixth floor. I opened all the windows I could and stood there for a long time, breathing in the city’s cool night air. I still had hot water left in my thermos, so I went to make coffee in another room. I used freeze-dried coffee, which I liked a lot back then. I also wanted to appear to be modern.
In those days, the old patriarchal society was falling apart. Changes in trade and manufacturing during the end of the fifties meant that many men (and it was mostly men who worked outside the home then) were losing their jobs. They comforted themselves with alcohol and, in their frustration, sometimes they beat their wives and kids. However, a new social structure was coming into being. Women started to demand, and get, divorces. If there were children, the women had the right to keep the apartment, so their former spouses were out on the street. Some of those became alcoholics with no other place to live but the street and they often met an early death. Perhaps it was a just punishment for treating their wives and kids so brutally.