Straight into the Sun
Och jag är på väg rakt in i det blänkande klotet
by Gunilla Gränsbo
- Anamma Böcker, 1995
- Translated by Ken Schubert
- (Translation approved for the Internet by the author)
home
Contact us
Just as the 1950s gasped their last breath, I was born in a little village located almost as far down as you can go and still be in Sweden. At least that’s how it seemed for those who came from above. But for us, there were many long miles left to go – down through Eskilstorp, Håslöv, Trelleborg…
…daddy’s girl…
Yellow wooden ponies with red bridles emerge through the steely gray clouds. The riders, little mercenary soldiers with shining helmets, whip them so hard that blood gushes out of their sides and splatters the pasture, fertilizing it like the plowman’s very own tears. The lashes grow more furious by the minute, and the ponies gallop faster and faster, liberated at last from their wooden prison. No toy pony has ever moved like this before. Unused to such dizzying speeds, they begin to totter on their legs, and suddenly every last one of them hurdles to the ground, muzzle first. Blood is pouring out of their eye sockets. Will nobody come to their rescue? But look, there’s a huge group of black-clad men, interspersed with women in white wedding gowns, walking slowly and solemnly as if in a funeral procession. With their bare hands they dig the lacerated, slowly expiring ponies out of the newly-plowed soil and carry them gingerly back to the farmhouse as if they had just unearthed a rare archeological treasure. Finally they gather around a large pit. Humming a lovely funeral hymn, they lower the ponies into the earth.
Once upon a time a child rode them, but she’s long since gone.
The smell of hay…
The sun cracks like a gooey yellow egg and runs down over the people below. She’s riding off on her horse. Everyone else is working. Thousands of schoolchildren, their knees badly scraped, dig up potato after potato in the neighbor’s field. But she’s already far way, galloping over the freshly harvested barley fields. Even the hay has been gathered. At this time of year all the fields are wide open, and you can ride through three villages without taking a single road. She strains for all she’s worth, anxious to get to the open pasture beyond the road. That’s where all the animals are put out to graze for the summer. Reining in the horse so that they can both drink some water, she avoids the neighbor’s knowing look and thinks, “I’m wasn’t cut out for farm labor.” She lashes the horse and they dash on; in no time flat they’re down at the pasture and she’s opening the gate. Realizing immediately that strangers have come, the animals charge them and the horses began to fight. But it’s much too hot for that, and they soon stop. She spurs her horse one again, and they head for a clump of trees a little ways off.
Mom, I long for you…
My father and I walk and walk, we walk across the newly threshed field, the yellow stubble field that has yet to be plowed. First the stump that remains from the straw will be burned off; a huge fire will sweep over the field and obliterate the little yellow stubs. We walk and walk over the field, my father and I. It’s a fine summer day, not too warm, and there’s a lovely little breeze. Except for a tree off in the distance, I see nothing but huge fields – yellow and shining, brown with narrow ridges, or pale green. We’re walking together over the field. Slim, tanned, brawny, he’s wearing a pair of stained, raggedy shorts. I’m in my jeans and a brown sweatshirt. It’s as though my clothes have become a permanent part of my body. I never take them off, either at school or at home. Sometimes I even wear them to bed. The perspiration is running down my forehead. I have long, blond hair; my big brother’s friends say that some day I’ll be the prettiest of all. But first I’m going to be the ugliest. Now, as we walk along a narrow ditch toward the lonely tree, I’m neither pretty nor ugly, just sweaty. Dad is talking about all kinds of things, how badgers dig their burrows, how come birds can fly, where the prickliest bushes grow and what they’re called. He kisses me and hugs me and squeezes me to his mucky body, and I wish I were wearing more clothes. Or maybe none at all. But I can’t think like that. He belongs to mom, remember? I have to wear as much clothing as possible, she can’t suspect that there’s something going on between us. I long to go home to her, to the oven. The oven warms and consoles me more than the sun. If I could, I would creep into the oven and stay there forever. Just me and mom. I want to go home to her, but I can’t, dad insists that I accompany him as he performs his chores. I dawdle behind and stare at his back. It’s so handsome – still I could take a sword and run it right through him, make the blood splatter every which way. It’s a shame I’m only a girl, my spindly arms could never lift the huge, unbelievably sharp sword that I dream of stabbing him with. Can he guess my thoughts? Or maybe he will melt away in the fire. Ugh, that would be too cruel a death. To sizzle in the flames and then gradually waste away. I couldn’t do that, not even to my father. Or could I? I fall further and further behind, looking for the chance to turn around and go back, but he grabs me and squeezes me against him. He’s going to teach me everything he thinks I need to know. How to skin and castrate pigs, whip horses, hunt for and strangle stray kittens. I don’t want to. Every time he tells me to gather hen’s eggs, to throw s–t on the dunghill, I try to escape. I don’t want to, I don’t want to. I long to run away, but I don’t have anyone to turn to. I can’t hide in the oven, mom will pull me out and say that I have to help dad in the stable. I gather one egg after the other. First egg – why can’t they get a divorce? Two – that’s what I want, isn’t it? Three – someone has to take me away from this place. Four – why do the other children get to do all the fun things? Egg, egg, egg. Fifteen eggs. I’m all alone, have no friends, don’t know what I want, can’t crawl into the oven, can’t, can’t. The fire sweeps over the field, carries me in its arms. Let me burn, let me burn and make me into another person, another thing. Take me somewhere else, somewhere far off, where I can at least be someone, anyone.
If only I were in this story…
We would wander among nature’s beauty as in early childhood, very early childhood, away from these ponderous ridges, this heavy stone under which we have constructed our homes. Under which our charming, little homes are rooted for all time. Away from everything that weighs us down, that elicits our labored sighs, this heaviness, we will abandon it, leave it behind, far behind, stroll among the tall trees, the enormous trunks, the delicious air, the velvety moss. In the woods we will go, high and low, in weal and woe. Go and go, our charity show. Friend and foe, no blame know. Our love will grow, pure and blameless as the snow. All aglow, through the dazzling flowers tiptoe. We will go, friend and foe, ’til the blazing sun o’erflow. High and low, in weal and woe, our charity show.
Some frightfully ugly trolls (or could they be witches?) undulate hand in hand among the tall trees, swinging from the branches, trotting over the moss, warbling cryptic songs that have no beginning and no end. They’re carrying baskets and bags full of snakes and all manner of animals: frogs, rats, snails, worms. The slimy creatures writhe and squirm, but the grotesquely ugly women aren’t a bit frightened, they lull them with their singing and chatter so that they will stay in the baskets as they wend their way over the moss.
Everything’s so nice and cozy, they almost never fight, just sort of shove each other around sometimes. They live among the trees by a little lake, bathing their marvelously wrinkled and warty bodies in the warm water with algae that oozes like silky oil on their pliant, scraggy bodies. You would never guess that they’re only 25, but there they are, not a day older. They dive and paddle around in the lake with the worms, frogs, snakes, snails, and lizards, they splash each other and their skin gets even more wrinkled. Suddenly a particularly shriveled witch lets out a shriek, and their breasts begin to clatter in unison like a thousand clacking beaks. It would make a great “Wonderful World of Nature” program, but nobody’s here to film it, no one to capture the plump, little women bathing so magnificently with the frogs in the slimy marsh. Afterwards, they smear themselves with mud, letting it cake in order to deepen the wrinkles; they even have a contest to see who can keep the most mud on for the longest time. They wallow in the mud, kiss the frogs, roll around at the edge of the water. They’re totally content, have everything they need, except for one of them: she had a dream one night that a slender young prince clad in white roses walked toward her, winding his way through the trees. And now she sees a strange, pale light approaching from off in the distance. They all follow her gaze, squinting through the mud that runs down their faces, the rich, healing mud that can be found only in their swamp. Gradually the light turns into a prince, and they wipe the mud from their eyes and realize that he’s a completely new and different kind of being.
I’m coming, I think…
We’re facing each other across a long rectangular room. We’re both naked; I’m so horny I don’t know what to do with myself, and I hope he is too. I fling myself all the way to the other side of the room and around his neck, devour him with burning kisses. I slip and slide up and down his body like one big vagina. He’s sopping wet and slippery as an eel, and I wriggle round and round, back and forth, until I come at the top of my lungs. Did he come too without me noticing it? After considering the pros and cons of the matter for a while , I forget the whole thing and fall asleep. Intoxicated by having orchestrated my very own screw, I sleep soundly, dreaming of a magnificent landscape where bucks run two by two through a meadow, across stubbly fields. When I wake up next, it’s the middle of the night. Horny once again, I make love to him just as ardently as before, drenched again in my own perspiration. But he’s worked hard all day, has to get up in a few hours. He tries to defend himself in his sleep, but it’s a losing battle. I won’t be stopped, dazzled by the vision of the perfect screw, the thing we came so close to achieving just a while ago. Still asleep, he wriggles painfully out of my arms and slinks down to the floor, dragging the blanket with him. I feel totally abandoned up here on the bed; I’m the most rejected creature who ever lived, all alone, surrounded by loneliness. Should I join him down there or not?
He’s circling around me in the huge bed. He’s hot and eager, has had an erection for at least half an hour now, but I feel nothing at all. I’m freezing, stiff as a board. I’m terribly stressed-out, afraid that he’ll think there’s something wrong with me if I don’t come. And he’s going to come any second now, although we’ve hardly begun to screw. Not as far as I’m concerned, anyway. Can I help it if it takes me so long? He’s so fast, is everwhere at once, does it all perfectly. I couldn’t ask for a better lover. He’s got a musical temperament. That’s requirement number one in my book, I’ve always thought so. He licks me up and down, which I ordinarily love, sucks on my nipples, strokes me between the legs; it’s all wonderful, but somehow it doesn’t really feel like we’re really making love. I want him to stop. I need a breather. For a while at least, don’t know how long exactly. Did he think I came when he stroked me there and I kind of arched my back? I hope not – what if he expects it to be that way every time? How am I going to get out of this mess? Maybe I should go into the bathroom and masturbate a little. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Once in the bathroom, my shivers get worse. I pee and pee, one last drop. Back in the bedroom, I’m terribly horny and I long to do it right away. But all he wants to do is lie there and have a cozy chat. What can I do? I’m about to faint from horniness, I can barely talk. Weary and frustrated, I drop off right in the middle of a sentence. The next time I wake up, he’s gone. I’m so horny I’m about to lose my mind. He comes home, we make passionate love for hours and hours. But no, that’s wrong, it was just my imagination. Actually, he doesn’t get home until late at night, and by that time I’m already fast asleep. I dream of bucks running through a yellowing meadow. Every once in a while they stop and look around in confusion, find each other after running madly around in circles, lose each other again, wind up down in a swamp. Hoofs beating on shoulders and backs, they mate with brutal abandon, only to lose sight of each other once again.
The question is, where did it all began? When did the membranes start to give way? Something, alien particles or tiny iron filings, managed to get under my skin and create havoc. The merciless light zapped me and there was no longer any turning back. It probably happened one day on the way to school. Or in the impenetrable fog of geography class, out of which no landscape, old or new, ever emerged, only a smoke screen of strange names. Or could it have been history class, when my fat, middle-aged teacher waved his pointer and rattled off incomprehensible facts about King Karl XII, Gustav III – Joe XVIII. What did I care who they were, what their fortresses looked like, what battles they fought, how they lived, died or were resurrected. I had my own history, and don’t think I didn’t write it. But I refused to let anyone on to what I had done with it. It was stuffed into a bottle, buried under stubble and stone. I saw it at the edge of the sound, bobbing up and down in the seaweed among the Danish butter wrappers, every time I went out riding. Reining in my horse, I would sit and watch the eternal landings and departures of the ferries.
Perhaps that’s when the whole thing fell apart. The teacher was talking about Albania, China, the U.S., France, West Germany, Sweden, Hitler, Nazism, Finnish women, trains, mmmmmmmm… Boom! Suddenly I no longer existed, and from then on entering the school building was like walking into a thick haze. I was ugly, always hung up on somebody, constantly riding alone in the woods, not home, not away, not doing homework, Not Not Not. Everything was Not. That there could be any more Not’s in my life was unthinkable. Tell me, what does a not-Not look like anyway? Ugly, pimply, tiny breasts, no period, no boyfriend, no decent grades, no playmates. A nice mother – an all too nice mother, one who was unable to just be herself. An eccentric father, who had absolutely no respect for a child’s needs. Unfeeling, an exploiter – or close to it. If the truth be known, he was a child himself, a big baby. A not that really was a Not. One more unbearable Not. So when had it begun? And, more importantly, when would it end? I left home – nobody could hold me back. But that just made matters worse. Now I really was back at square one.
They can’t possibly be so important, just think if more of us had followed Anki’s example and had them removed. We could have pointed to her and said, Look, she was the first one to liberate herself, to liberate herself from a man who comes home and demands this or that for dinner, who doesn’t want to talk, just read the newspaper and do “important” things. Yes, above all it was a man she liberated herself from.
Then we could have started to eat out, even take an occasional baby carriage along. Some of us would still have wanted to be mothers, of course. We could have sat there smoking and gossiping, while the men stayed home and tried to get together a meal from yesterday’s leftovers.
Anki is my heroine, in my eyes she’s a saint. I’m going to build an altar to her. I’ll sit in front of it and pray that she may live within us all, the woman who said no, who took matters into her own hands, so to speak. There’s no way I’m going to permit some old fertility goddess to cross my threshold. No woozy, big-breasted broad is going to sit on my stomach with her rolls of fat and banish me to the intellectual periphery. Go away from my door, and my window too! Only Anki is welcome. Long live Anki, the woman who dared.
So what’s really important? Is it to wrap yourself in a heavy wool sweater and throw yourself to the ground to see if it will hold, to test how many times you can do it without creating a dent? What if you never make a dent, just leave the earth a little flatter than it already is. What are you trying to do anyway, make some kind of “impression?” Is it worth the effort? What you really want to do is take a stamp the size of a telephone pole and press it into a lump of molten gold. The seal will glitter in the sun, the other sun, which really is no more than an image, a reflection, of the special seal I’ve created all by myself. With my own hands, teeth, forehead, I muck around in the gold; my feet, stomach, ass, vagina remold the warm metal, and I scream in ecstasy, It’s me who’s doing all this, me me me.
Am I satisfied now? At last?
and still further off…
I’m standing in the greenish-yellow field and the corn stalks are tickling my nose. The roots stick up through the mud, but the ground is soft enough for me to lie on my back and stare up at the sky. I’m invisible from a distance, someone would have to come right up to the edge of the field in order to see me. It’s steaming hot, and I’m wearing my filthy clothes. I just lie there idly as it gets hotter and hotter; soon the whole field will be bright yellow, yellow turning to red – at least that’s what my father says. Red as in “ready.” When the corn is fully ripe, I’ll be able to lie here even longer and feel my body evaporating in the heat. The aromas make my woozy, and I stagger home drenched in sweat. My brother won’t get me to take a bath tonight either.
Certainly, certainly, says my teacher, standing outside the two-storey stucco building in the middle of the village that serves as our schoolhouse.
It’s not that she doesn’t do her work, everyone knows that she’s the smartest kid in her class, but she daydreams all the time! And when it comes to her organ playing, that’s not going very well at all. As a result, the morning prayer isn’t what it used to be. I’ve had to play myself, and you can imagine what that sounds like. The other children need her, she raises the general level. None of them are very bright, don’t their parents ever teach them anything? If I were you, I would pull her right out of school. But, why are we standing here, let’s go up and have some coffee. The girl can play with the cats, they’ve gotten so big since last time you were here, God help me. They’re about to claw my furniture to shreds.
Somehow Mom and I struggle through the coffee hour in my teacher’s dark, tiled apartment. But where is her husband anyway? They say that he has his own room in the basement, where he sits all day long and… God knows what he does. Is he sick or something? Mom and I drive back to the farm in our turquoise VW. I slink down the long corridors of our house. There’s a heavy silence in the air. I refuse to clean my room, refuse to do my homework, refuse to… Looking at myself in the mirror, I fantasize about shutting the door late at night and taking out the green eye shadow Lena gave me. Her mom works in a cosmetics shop. The eye shadow is made by Rimmel.
Dad’s gone, and nobody knows where he is, although my brothers have their suspicions, their theories, a new one every day. As far as I’m concerned, it’s good riddens, he just disgusts me with all his clasping and clutching. Most of all I hate it when he puts his arms around me and peers knowingly at my almost non-existent breasts. I have the smallest ones in my class, but still they’re too big. The house is dead silent, and I’m sitting in my pink-wallpapered bedroom. There’s no traffic out on the road today. I’d bet my life that nobody has ever been this bored in the history of the world. I’ve tried on all my makeup a thousand times – without leaving the room, of course. Well, once or twice I slunk by the kitchen and off to school wearing my bright green eye shadow. They all noticed it, because of my unusual behavior if nothing else, but nobody dared say anything – except my big brother, who permitted himself some nasty insinuations about my tangled hair, ugly glasses, non-breasts, and high grades. He calls me teacher’s pet. At night he hides under my bed and jumps up just when I’m about to turn off the lights; a couple of times I nearly wet the bed. I’m desperately trying to get used to it. If only they didn’t pay him to help me with my chores.
Mom stands in the kitchen, a lonely tear running down her cheek. The raspberries aren’t very plump this year. Everything’s falling apart here; her sons just lie around the house and doze. She dreams of going far away. Would she be able to find a job, an apartment all to herself? Live in the city, reclaim her own body? The images flash before her eyes. But the only image her daughter sees as she lurches past the kitchen window on horseback is her mother standing there at the counter. Over and over again, the horse stops suddenly and she tumbles off. Her gums are bleeding. Her brothers get out of bed and stagger into the kitchen in their filthy work clothes and thick-soled shoes. Breakfast is waiting for them, chipped dishes and soiled linen napkins. Mom’s job is to hold the filth at arm’s length, scrub their mucky underwear. One day she’s going to have her own apartment. At last her daughter comes in. Time once again to drive her to the dentist.
TO YRSA STENIUS
Someone has said that women’s history will be written in blood. Written in breast milk that runs down the pages of the book. Written in p–s, s–t, and so on. But maybe women’s history will be written without any of these things.
Maybe women’s history will be written by someone who has a top corporate position, enjoys her work, has a lover and is content – almost content. Maybe women’s history will be written by a politician who campaigns to preserve the welfare state. Maybe she doesn’t even do her own housekeeping. Maybe she’s totally dedicated to her job. (Does it advance the cause to idealize women who work themselves to the bone? Isn’t that just one more way of propping up a patriarchal system?) Maybe women’s history will be written by lesbians, women who can’t have children, women who don’t want to have children, women who lead their own lives – more or less. Blood surges through them, shrieking Look at me! Suddenly it’s pulsating in the veins of my hands, one day on my way to the bus stop it’s just there, gushing everywhere, in the tears pouring out of my eyes, shouting Look at me, look at me, look at me, I’m here, I suffer, struggle, weep, enjoy myself, and life is worth every last drop of it. It stains the whole sky, spurts over waterfalls, fills reservoirs, floods subdivisions, flows out of faucets, ditches, brooks, cracks in the ceiling. Nobody can stop it, it generates its own power, finally tingeing the whole planet blazing red.
Who decides what constitutes the tragedy of women’s lives – the lack of a career or the lack of children? Certainly not women themselves.
The scraggy, grotesquely ugly, slightly naughty young women wash off the mud at the edge of the water, their wonderfully russet flesh glimmering in the sun. They’re so silky and smooth now, exhale such a pleasing fragrance, cleaner and leaner and meaner than ever before. They’ve waded and wallowed and amused themselves in their private swamp, and now it’s time to go home with the snakes and worms and snails in their little baskets. They sling their bags over their shoulders and trot across the moss dancing and swaying and warbling “Ever Nearer, oh Nature, to Us,” and the woods resonate like one big echo chamber. Leaves fall, boulders roll, rodents dash out of their burrows, everything is in motion, writhing like thousands of intertwined boogying bodies. Soon they’re back to their little hovel, the dive where they thrive, no need to strive. It’s all so charming and secretive; nobody, absolutely nobody, knows who they are, what they do, where they come from. They knead and roll and bake and feed the pigs and live exactly as they please, sleep in the barn, unconcerned lest someone discover them curled up together in the hay fully dressed. Everything is so enchanting, so tranquil, so mysterious, and none of them can say where they are or what they’re doing here or how long it will go on. They sit in the kitchen and ladle and spatter and cuss and chew tobacco, and the porridge runs down their cute, wrinkly little russet chins. It splashes and squishes and squelches, and somehow they know that their innocent days are over, that they must go out into the world now and, as the saying goes, be someone – young instead of old, smooth instead of wrinkled, cleaner (though actually dirtier), happier (though actually sadder). They take the mud along – you never know who or what you’re going to encounter along the way.
They’re going along clutching their little cloth bags, butterflies in their stomachs, something new is about to happen. Bundles of clothes, books, pots and pans are strapped to their backs. They lurch over boulders and roots and twigs. The moss no longer massages their feet, hands, backs, asses, stomachs, heads (when they lie down to rest) – it’s hard and dry, suitable only for candle wicks. They’re going far, far away, so far that they have no idea where it is, even though it looms large in front of them; all they know is that they’re slowly approaching it, that they must see it, must go inside it. But who will they be then and what will happen to their friendship? Despite the bundles on their backs, the clattering pots and pans, they prance lightly over the moss, literally bouncing along in sandals that are virtually plastered to their feet. They hold each other by the hand, secure in the knowledge that they’re finally on their way. The thing that towers up in the distance, is it a mountain? Houses? Bare trees stretching toward the sky with glistening, scraggy, goldish-beige arms? Nobody can say. All that matters is that they’re on their way, finally on their way.
We’re standing across from each other in the room, our backs to the wall. We’re both naked. We look at each other, he at me and I at him. I must try to get pregnant. Sometime or another it will have to happen. We glance shyly at each other. Should we have a child? Do we want to? Deep down? If so, why? How does it go now? I can hear my biology teacher’s voice. The man places his penis in the woman’s vagina, then releases his seminal fluid, the seminal fluid finds its way to the egg that’s waiting inside the uterus, and zap! – the child is conceived. So simple. Now we’re going to do it. You man, I woman, penis vagina in out, biology lesson over. I’m perspiring, the anxiety runs down my back, I’m skinny, fat, ugly, pretty, someone asks me to dance, no one asks me to dance, I have ugly glasses, no period, no breasts, big breasts, my body is sticky, gooey, gummy. He’ll never want a child with me. Why should he anyway?
He’ll be overjoyed – the biggest compliment a woman can give a man is to have a child with him. He’s going to be ecstatic. I simply decree that it shall be so. I try to forget the biology lesson, it’s obvious that I’ll have to begin at the other end. The sun. Ochún with his honey, the eggs, don’t gather the eggs, the doe that springs dazed through the woods, dad, mom, penis, vagina, now we’re on the way, on the way to conception, the sperm swills around inside the little head, a fluid rich in healing substances, a balm for the aching head, a massage. Now it stirs a little, sways and swishes around, cuddles up and rubs its back against the sides of its burrow. Suddenly it trembles violently and jumps up and down in rage and screams I want to play too, I want to, want to play too. Now it’s there, and I’m incredibly horny, and I know that he is too, isn’t, is, isn’t, is, isn’t…
Did our mothers know what they were doing back in the 50s as they stood in their homey, unadorned kitchens in a tiny country called Sweden and made gravy in large cauldrons? Did they know what they were doing as the gravy got thicker and thicker, until they finally thinned it out with milk? At our house the cauldron was blue. In our homey, unadorned kitchen the biscuits would rise, the bacon fry, the steam fly out of the cauldron and coffee kettle, while the little girls sat and rocked dolls and teddy bears in their arms. Did our mothers know what they were doing in that the heyday of Swedish domesticity, when the houses stood in long rows among dazzling flower beds? No way. No way did they know that they were raising the most militant, aggressive, and man-hating feminists the world has ever known? As the sauce thickened into a hard, doughy lump that scorched the cauldron until it cracked, Mom wept, her apron crumpled up and her marriage fell apart.
Later, much later, the woman with the crumpled apron would make far greater demands on her new husband than anyone could have imagined. It was just then that her daughter began to make compromises in a desperate attempt to find an alluringly unattainable husband. But that’s another story. Her mother was gradually adopting the frighteningly earth-shattering insights of feminism. But that’s another story.
“The other” had already began to wedge its way into the closed, little universe of my birth. Despite that world’s secure, rustic conservatism, eternally unchanging values, and snug, cozy oppressiveness, the other – the city, the NLF, the hippies, vegetarianism – charged in with drugs and alcohol and sex and nakedness and all kinds of foolish ideas. Into that world of suffocating domesticity, homey, unadorned kitchens and neat, little flower beds where I was born one day (something that they were unfailingly to remind me of once a year). But what did they know about the real significance of that day, about the little, tiny being they had created? About her friends and the big, brutal feminist world she eventually found her place in. Were there any men out there? Men who could do a day’s work, real men who knew how to push a wheelbarrow? Did they have sticks and stones, pigs and cows, threshers and tractors, harrows, rollers and silos? In the big world? Presumably not.
The yellow ponies sleep under the bed; somewhere in the room cling tiny, little bells. Sleepy John dangles by the crook of his arm from the cord of the blinds and tries to capture the attention of the ponies. He blinks drowsily.
There’s a girl asleep in the room, her legs hanging down from the much too short bed, almost touch grazing the floor. She’s dreaming about a grove of blue oaks, far beyond the potato fields, mating couples and cruising teen-agers. The gentle night air bathes the room in dust, and the dazzling roses on the wall bloom redder than ever, constantly shooting out new buds. The wallpaper is buckled by the weight of the flowers, and the steady trickling from the leaves gradually loosens it. Before long the wall will be torn down completely and someone else’s bed, someone else’s clothes and secret possessions will occupy this place where her room once was.
I dash out of the house and stumble down the hill. But I’m not really here, I’m someplace else completely. I pretend that I’m a mongoloid; when I was down in the village with mom recently, I saw some of them for the first time. They were on an outing, and I took an immediate liking to them. Now I pretend that I’m one of them and run around the house and scream at the top of my lungs. Mom watches me from the window. I feel totally free. I run behind the stable, to where the pigs are grubbing in the marvelously gooey mud, mixed with everything you can possible imagine. I jump around for a while in their sty and frighten them. Finally I go over and lie down next to the dunghill. It’s so soft and warm here; the ground is covered with straw. I creep down into the dung and feel a wave of harmony sweep over me. The smell of ammonia stings my nose. “Nothing can reach me now” runs through my mind like a far-off refrain. I’m completely shielded from the outside world. But now it’s time to do my chores, to feed and groom the horses. They can’t survive without me, poor darlings. Their bodies are so snug and cozy, so totally undemanding, merely big and warm. My favorite thing in the whole world is to go into the stable when it’s just been cleaned and sniff the fresh straw. The horses stand there and chew their hay, and I can hear it crunch between their teeth along with their soft whinnying as they welcome me, and if it’s cold enough, I can see their steaming nostrils. There’s a kind of magic here, and nobody can understand what we say to each other, no matter how attentively they listen.
The question is which of all those personalities is dad. There are so many to choose from. He could be, for example, Captain Hook, Tinkerbell, the wicked stepmother, a mouse, Happy or Dopey. Dopey is the most likely. He throws couches out the window, wears strange hats and pretends that he’s a transvestite. The neighbors look up to him, they’ve never been at the theater before. The play continues the whole day long in our kitchen, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s for real. One person is crying, another one laughing. A third person is listening to the whole thing outside the kitchen door. The voices get more and more strident. Black shadows slink out through the crack in the door, coiling around each other, fusing together and struggling to the floor. As they skirmish and pull each other up and down, the door is sucked open by a blast of wind, and I’m drawn into the battle and get stuck to the gooey shadow boxers. I cling tight, then try to extract myself and return to the hallway, but it’s no use, I’m pulled back into their dance, and I’m sticky and greasy, and at last I shrink down turn into a black, oily lump that slowly melts away on the plastic mat. Shaking me, they weep and try to lift me up, but it’s too late, I fade away just like at the end of one of those fuzzy, old 8-millimeter movies dad took of us when we were little.
The question is where it all began, how it found its way in. The Fat Man said something about Skåne, Sjöbo, Sweden, Finnish women, Nazism, Anders III, Karl XII, Joe XXXVIII. But where did it all begin. The light penetrated the viscous membranes, forced its way in with ever greater insistence, boom boom boom boom, it was like a war, and I had to stand there in the line of fire without an army or battle gear to shield me. Boom boom boom, the doors slammed in the classrooms, in out recess in out recess, English, best in the class, highest score on all the tests, boom boom boom, worst in the class, lowest score on all the tests, best worst best worst, boom. Somehow it began as I stumbled, drenched in sweat, over the stubby fields, somewhere in Gässie, Hököpinge, Tygelsjö, Eskilstorp, Vellinge, Klagshamn, all the way to where they’re going to build the bridge to Denmark and kill all the fish. Boom, boom boom, it began sometime back then. It never began, it has been going on the whole time, it was all laid out long before I was born – the highway, the bridge, no highway, and I was there whether I liked it or not. Was there, wasn’t there, didn’t choose it, chose it because there was no alternative. But finally the light made its way through the viscous membranes of black oil, splattering it in a thousand directions and destroying everything beneath the surface. I left home, and the only thing I could be sure of was that I was back at square one.
The yellow cloth ponies gallop through the steely gray clouds, plush velour ponies, neighing joyously through their red bits. On their backs are ugly little sorceresses who have just finished bathing in the lake. The mud is still running down their bodies. They gallop through the clouds and laugh and laugh and sing age-old feminist songs with new lyrics and new melodies. Somehow everyone knows the words. The women go wherever they feel like, they go to India and back, they go to Latin America, they sit home and drink coffee with their friends for days on end, and the whole world could disappear and they wouldn’t know the difference. They ride off in all directions, and the ponies do exactly what they tell them to do, despite their loose-jointed cloth legs. They can make it a while longer. But only a short while. The unstuffed legs began to give way, and the horses collapse into a heap of cloth and are sucked down between the furrows in the meadow. Once upon a time a child played with them, but she’s gone on to other things. She’s moved to the city and joined the revolution.
Honestly speaking, compañeros, comrades, friends. Why won’t they let us play too? Why is the world so unjust and we so few, so charming (although so oppressive with each other)? And the pale dream that shines between the trees and telephone poles as we shuttle between airports and suburbs, work, school, political meetings in Majorna, Hammarkullen, Santiago and Cienfuegos – why does it grow paler and paler? Is it an evil dream? Injustice is like a big black hole sucking everything into its enormous stomach that churns out the tools of war, starvation, exploitation of women’s bodies, the destruction of play, hope and ease. The hole consumes itself like a tornado with a vacuum for a center, but the centrifugal force can’t touch me, I’m sitting here at Sandeslätt 14 in Hammarkullen, totally unaffected, eating and sleeping and just as bored as can be.
Mauricio and I are taking a walk. He’s got curly, greased-back hair. I’m 3 inches taller than him and blond (it’s dyed, but he doesn’t know it). We’re walking around the huge Hammarkullen housing project. We cross the Sandeslätt mall, which is quivering in the drizzle. The amazing thing is that it sounds so much like Söderslätt, the street in Skåne where was born. Sandeslätt extends before us like a billowing meadow. You can sit among the tall, dark trees in the little groves and barbecue, or just cool off. Way up at the top of the hill the grills are screwed into the ground. The backs of the buildings look out over the woods. People with a patio can almost pretend that they have a cottage in the wilderness. The courtyards form a series of inverted three-leaf clovers. Sandeslätt, Söderslätt. How indistinguishably two worlds can merge!
Mauricio takes me to the “Latin Corner,” where two Chilean women are minding the store. The younger of them stands behind the counter; I recognize her as a member of Chile Lindo, a Chilean dance group; I think she’s the organizer. They dance at carnivals all over Sweden. But I’m enchanted most of all by Bolivain dances. Then there’s Los Copihues… and CDC Libertad – they’re the Bolivian dancers. If you’ve had enough of the housing project, you can take a pleasant walk in the woods down to the lovely valley at the Lärje Creek, sit by the water and listen to it murmur and ripple. Then there are the white waters, the farms…there’s nothing you can’t find here.
If you tire of the idyllic nature, you can go to downtown Gothenburg and wallow in the noise and the dust. But my favorite thing is to take the number 9 streetcar back home and look in on all the neighbors before turning in. I can choose among Anders and Eva, Anna and Gorgios, Milena, Anna-Karin, another Anna-Karin, Marcelo, and Jim. It’s never too late to drop in on Jim. He floats night and day in his little womb at Hammarkulletorget 39. He sure wouldn’t notice it if his apartment drifted off somewhere else, just as long as his computer went along, of course. He sleeps on the balcony, has his TV in the kitchen and his study in the closet. A little one-room apartment has magically blossomed into a four-roomer. It’s the nicest place he’s had in his whole life. Finally, I return to my own apartment. How long am I going to live here? What’s going to happen to me? Will I ever leave? My brain is working overtime. Can you know anything at all about the future? But wait a minute, isn’t it already inside the computer, just waiting to be printed out? The laser cuts through the paper like a razor; it’s a merciless servant. But who am I in the whole process? Could I change the program, the text of my life, the typeface, style, size of the letters? I can hear everything rattling around inside the machine – the characters, punctuation marks, sentences – they crash against each other, change places, clump together, bicker, grumble, complain, protest, whine, and shriek: Leave us alone! We want, we want, we want to live our own life! And that’s exactly what they do. They go for walks, dally with their little viruses, search out secret hiding places in the woods, climb up the promontories and gaze out. The creek can’t drown them, nor can the woods entice them into their murkiness. They live their own life, and all I can do is sit here between my trembling walls and listen to the sizzling electricity inside and the sputtering fireworks outside. If thousands of immigrants, here in Hammarkullen alone, managed to leave their villages, their nests, their fortresses, in Somalia, Eritrea, Chile, El Salvador, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Denmark, the U.S., Tunisia, if they managed to tear themselves away, cut the apron strings, disengage from the great matriarch who raised them, shouldn’t I be able to extract myself from this infantile situation, this stagnant place where I’m stuck in the quicksand of my old life? And if I don’t have the strength, who am I then? An immigrant in my own country?
Standing on the gray plastic mat in the kitchen, I try to create a little bubble of safety. It’s as if I’m floating in space, or sitting on an islet in the middle of the lake. It’s afternoon and Mom is at the stove. I try to stand right where I am and not let anyone pull me in either direction. Not backwards towards the fridge, with its white, concave door and shiny yellow lumps of cheese, nor the radiator, where it’s so warm and cozy and the cat has just lain down and cuddled up in the wooden bench under the window, nor towards the stove and the door to the front hallway. I’m standing as straight as I can and letting the barely perceptible breeze waft me now one way, now the other – toward the window, the door, the refrigerator. Closing my eyes, I feel the slight undulations of my body. Suddenly a more powerful puff of air grabs onto me, and then another, it sweeps through the house and opens all the doors and windows. I regain my balance and stand straight once more. But wait a minute, I’m falling! The wind is getting stronger and stronger, it’s pulling and tugging on me. Mom, help! I’m losing control, I’m dragged first toward the stove and then the door and finally the cat by the radiator, and she surrounds me with her warmth. Now I’m caught in her soft, fluffy fur, and I rest my head on her belly, and she grows and grows and becomes enormous and looks right through me with her sparkling green eyes, her paws placed gently on my back. I rock back and forth on her belly. She hold me up to the light and laughs, and I can’t feel her claws at all, and she tosses me into the air, and I fall back down, and she grabs hold of me and I’m lying on her belly once again. This time I can feel her claws on my back. Suddenly her whole body stiffens and her claws begin to dig deeper and deeper into my flesh. Help, Mom, can’t you hear my shrieks? I scream and scream, but nothing comes out. Clutching me spasmodically to her belly, the cat casts herself back and forth on the bench. At last she digs her teeth into my scalp, and I no longer exist, no longer can think, I’m nothing more than the teeth of a cat boring farther and farther into the head of a little girl.
The snowflakes float down outside the window and blanket everything in soundlessness. Slowly the woman who will turn 34 in five weeks and has just lost her job opens her eyes and gazes out through the wooden wide-shuttered blinds she recently bought at the furniture outlet. It reminds her of Haiti, the day when it rained so hard that it splashed right in through the blinds. Like magic, it relieved the dreadful heat, and the next minute the sun was shining again.
It’s as if there’s also snow inside; she patters around in the silence of her apartment, lays down for a while on the sofa, then on the guest bed, meditates. After a while, she put on her jogging suit and began to do her warm-up exercises. Feels for her energy center, somewhere below the navel. Her hand moves downward, around her hips, over her ass. She curves her back, lifts her legs, lowers them again, leans forward, further and further, until her whole body is completely warm and open. Lies on her back and free associates – Dad, Larry, car, bicycle, city, country, cock, pussy. As usual, she winds up imagining herself in the warmth of a foam rubber nest and humming snatches of long-forgotten melodies. Finally she grows weary of the game. Though lying there in a fetal position is her favorite fantasy, she’s almost always completely bored by the time she leaves the womb.
Maybe she should go outside, start to make something of her life. Get the whole operation going already. But no, not yet! She wades around in the snowdrifts of her apartment; it’s windless and totally silent, and she’s still in the womb and feels the blood coursing through her veins.
The sleds go up and down the white slopes of Sandeslätt, and the children laugh and shriek and fall down and get up again, and everything’s completely white. They speed down the slope, and there are no cars as far as the eye can see. Their parents sit inside, shivering and sipping hot chocolate. Of course, they have their tussles with everyday life – tests to correct, rent to pay, divorce papers to sign. Her belly is like the moon on a summer night, just as gently round as a lump of soft yellow cheese. She has to show all her friends the photo of her belly, before it disappears and becomes flat again, leaving only little wrinkles to prove that she has become a real woman. But it will never be as flat as it once was, nor her breasts as firm. Still she will proudly carry her less firm breasts as evidence that she has given birth to a child, a child who will live far into the 21st century, long after her parents are dead. She will eat, read, dance herself into a sweat, have a circle of friends in Sweden or someplace else, walk, talk, ride to and from work on the streetcar. The sleds fly down the slope. In the summertime there’s a shower here under which you can cool off after sunbathing. But the children are every bit as warm now; they don’t notice the cold, the snow in their socks and the sleeves of their coats. Their parents sit inside and shiver. They’re pale from worry, anxious to have a little fun as well. But that’s easier said than done, what with the pressures of everyday life and everything. They lie awake at night and wonder.
They pursue me…
…and what about the others? Do they sit and wait for God to descend from his fluffy cloud with a huge, eternally erect penis and loads of high-quality sperm to scatter out into the moonlight over her prone body?
Or maybe they sit in their dressing gowns and wait for the day when the mailman will knock on the door with a letter that’s too big to fit into the mail slot, and when he comes in, they fall in love at first sight, and she gets pregnant right away. The cigarette smoke in her stuffy, tenth-storey apartment is thick from the first dozen Marlboros of the day. Is that what’s going to happen? Naturally, the baby will be another Jesus. The act of defilement is long gone now. Except for the sheets, of course, the crumpled sheets.
It’s got to work…
She’s in a room illuminated by a single lamp. She’s just turned 16, and the huge, dark-green piece of material is spread out before her. For days on end she’s sat there with the material that billows and creases through the whole room and out the door and far, far away, beyond what anyone can imagine. The material billows, and she sews and sews. Her fingers are raw, her eyes bloodshot. There’s so much to do, nothing else exists. She has to complete all the tiny, glimmering pastel stitches, sometimes with ragged flesh-colored thread, sometimes with rope – she has to tug to get it through – sometimes with thin, velvet strands that pass so lightly through the material. Occasionally she adds tiny beads or a piece of silk As she sits with the embroidery, she tries to look into the future; everything has to be put in its right place – the pink little piglets running wild over the velvet, the big black elk butting and jabbing each other with their horns and slashing the material until it’s worn and threadbare. Now there are blisters on her fingers and her eyes are smarting. The pigs and the elk come together, the pigs slip between the elk’s legs – they’re too small to catch – and the elk walk behind with their horns to the ground. How they would love to run after the pigs, to bend their knees and crawl on all fours and roll around in the velvet. But for the time being they’re still too big; they have to wait for everything to soften, shrink, slacken, for pointed, scarlet tongues to grow out of their mouths like the small, pink, carousing teddy bears whose red, glass-pearl eyes peek out everywhere. Frolicking and poking about, the pigs try to grab the velvet with their teeth, but it’s is too smooth and even. Finally, one of the pigs discovers a black hole in a corner; it’s bordered by blanket stitches like spider’s legs fervently creeping around the edges. The material is wrinkled and frayed here, with only border stitches to hold it together. Suddenly it’s obvious that the entire piece of embroidery proceeds from the hole; the elk and pigs are all either running toward or away from the wrinkled, frayed corner. The pigs are dashing up and down the creases of the material as if they were the furrows of a newly-plowed field, so muddy that the farmer has to wear rubber boots. Climbing and climbing, they finally make it up to the hole and look down, but they’re afraid to jump.
It’s always us who have to wait out here and them in there, us in here, the others out there, always us, them, us, out in out in. Them vs. us, us vs. them. I stand on the window sill and flatten my nose against the pane. Just think if I could doze off and dream about lush, faraway places where brooks ripple, children and leopards frolic, trees soar, waters roar, kittens purr. If I were there, or if they were here outside my window gazing in at us as we loll in the verdant hills, bite open cans, drowse by the gurgling water. It’s always us, always somebody else looking in through a stranger’s window, looking out through the crack in a another person’s wall, longing to go out, longing to come in, to go far away, to come home, in, out, where I, they, we, the others sleep, snoozing among sardine cans, toys, bears, banana peels, fish bones, glimmering stuffed velour seals bobbing at the edge of the lake where we joyously splash with our fins and arms and paws until the sun rises over the hills. We’re together, always together. We dream about each other we’re together, at least in our fantasies.
Nina, Hal and I…
I stroll around the edge of the roof, high above all the hustle and bustle, and I can see for miles around. It’s completely lovely. The roof swells like a meadow. Red clusters of flowers. Green, yellow, white tendrils reaching for the sun. I’m totally at home up here, do exactly what I please, either alone or with my friends, who are all just like me. We hang out in greasy basements, sleep there until our fur gets all matted, the stench of garbage stings our noses, and we’re practically buried in banana and orange peels. We survive on the refuse from restaurants – Chinese food, pizza, apple pie, sausage, mashed potatoes, kidney beans – and we’re completely stuffed when we go back and frolic in the dusty furnace room. Climbing up to the roof, I let the wind blow through my fur; it’s a little heady and it’s nice to have a good friend along. I just stand there, and it almost feels as though my paws are being lifted into the air. On windy days I actually float a little above the roof, otherwise I just enjoy the cooling breeze. On hot, windless days the tar burns underfoot and I creep down into a chimney and lie there biding my time with my eyes shining in the darkness. I send thought messages to the sun – I can also shine, just you wait! I just lie there curled up in the chimney, and nobody knows where I am. Finally hunger drives me out to the winding, twilit streets of the city and the narrow alleys behind the restaurants. Finding some fish or meat, I eat my fill, then go on. I’m exhausted, and despite the fact that I have everything I need, I’m at a loss as to where to go. I can visit some of my older friends, but they just lie around all day and frolic among the teacups or straw mats and smoke their eternal pipes. I don’t like smoke, and I especially don’t like to sit and meow and meow and claw old planks of wood. I need to be out in the fresh air and chase rats and things like that. I can do without vegetables, they just give me a queasy feeling. I know what my friends are doing now, they’re banging their paws on the table in unison and meowing and meowing. They’re so kind to each other and they’re having the time of their life, but I’ll never be one of them, they’re already far away and I’m on the way out of this life I’ve been leading, these paneled apartments with bureaus, litter boxes and old saucepans. All the others are going to remain there, get new litter boxes and saucepans and pretend that everything’s just fine. And what about me? Will I find my own saucepans to drum on? Nobody can give me an answer. One night I just slip out the door and push it closed behind me. The cold stone stairway makes my paws shrivel up. It’s totally dark – the light bulb has gone out. I have no idea where I’m heading, all I know is that I can’t stay here. I roam the streets all alone, and the cars honk at me when I slink across the street without looking in both directions. I’m going someplace far, far away. Something looms up before me at the end of the street – a mountain, a tree, rolling hills? Do they have wild cats there, rats and mice, honey and cream? Surely they must. Now I see that it’s a kind of luminescence, and it grows brighter and brighter and expands until it’s all I can see. I run toward it, exultant except for the hunger that gnaws and gnaws in my stomach.
Larry and I are sitting on the pretty, little couch and having such a good time; we’re so close to each other. I long to go away somewhere, but I also want us to be even closer to each other on this little, blue couch that we’re already so close to each other on, although we so rarely get together.
Quite simply, we don’t have time, at least I don’t. I’m busy realizing myself, re-aligning myself, releasing myself. We’re so close to each other. Where is he now anyway? Mexico Argentina Tunisia Ecuador Peru, I’m just waiting for my chance to go there, though he’ll be gone by the time I arrive, of course. I need to make my own journeys; My God, at some point I’ll have to start doing things on my own!
How long should I wait for him to come back? How long can I resist the urge to leave?
We realize ourselves, re-align ourselves, release ourselves before we’ve had time to commit ourselves. How can we possibly know that just the two of us are meant to realize ourselves together? He attracts me, that’s all I know. He transmits a kind of code on an utterly unconscious, utterly reliable level, sort of a bonfire for small, wayward boats to anchor by. And then there’s his most important quality – he doesn’t oppress me, quite possibly the only man who never has. At least from my point of view, and that’s the main thing. It’s as if every other time, I’ve had to position myself underneath. But is it really so different now? We sit on the couch for hours on end, the clock just ticks away, and we’re with each other, far from the center of the city, in a place where the air is a little thinner and purer, and I do exactly what I please, with virtually no interference from friends, acquaintances, neighbors. Almost what I please, that is. When will he come? When will he go? When will I make my very own friends, with whom I can sit and dwell on all the travails of love and life and, of course, Sex Sex Sex, and children. We’ll harp on all that at dinner, at coffee breaks, while we do our woodwork and write our poems and think about wombs, umbilical cords, diapers, bellies, washing machines, cloth diapers, paper diapers, children – his children and hers.
My very own friends, who I can sit in a little circle with day after day, until we completely suffocate from our constantly running around and from the wretchedness of our relationships, driven as we are by our paranoias, our therapists, lack of therapists, lack if introspection, too much introspection, lack of self-confidence, too much self-confidence. Above all, we’re suffocated by our obsession with realizing ourselves. Realizing ourselves – it just never ends; soon I’m going to gobble up the entire planet in my zeal to realize myself; I’m going to chew it into tiny pieces and swallow it like a gluttonous witch. Come to think of it, I am a witch; I squat on the floor and bellow, try to go within myself and discover the source of my creativity, while everything on the outside – men, children, the bustling city – becomes totally peripheral, virtually non-existent. There’s nothing left but me, and I dwell in my own little world for just as often and as long as I please, with or without my friends; like me, they go back and forth between their inner and outer lives. But only on very rare occasions does a man show up who also wants to sit on the floor and bellow and discover the creative center just below his navel. Because it isn’t our belly buttons we’re staring at, but our wombs. We sit in the light of the full moon and go inward, outward, upward, downward, deeper and deeper, and the roof could fall in and I’d stay right where I am. The full moon shines high above, and I’m the prime minister, although nobody knows it except me. I howl. The winter air is thick with electric cows, and in the middle of the apartment stands a cow who’s a distillation of all the cow fetishes the world has ever known. Her body is huge and sensual, and she masticates the grass with her big, white teeth, and nobody, absolutely nobody knows what she’s meditating about. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that she’s meditating – she’s the essence of poetry incarnate. Though apparently heavy, she suddenly floats several feet above the ground, and her black and white stripes reflect the sunlight and send out wave upon wave of encoded signals: I’m a cow, I’m a cow, I’m a cow.
We sit together on the couch. I’ve realized myself, and so has he. Now we’re weary as can be; we cling to each other and feel old – much to my dismay.
Coasting down the hill, the sleds brave the bitter wind. It’s as if they’re self-propelled; spinning around and going back up the hill, they do little pirouettes when they reach the top. Their energy is unlimited; they leap into the air in higher and higher spirals and land with perfect grace, like calves who have just been let out of the barn. The children follow behind them, curious to discover which sled can jump the highest. They gambol up and down the hill for hours on end, and the glittering snow under their runners turns into brilliant neon coils that announce which child lives where. There are the upper and lower courtyards, and there’s the little courtyard, out of which the Pharaoh ants parade through the woods all the way to the deserts of Saudi Arabia, or to Syria, where my neighbor comes from. It smells so strange when you pass his apartment on your way up the stairway. If you pay him a visit, he will unfailingly hand you some of his super-sweet candy, sweeter than a native Swede could ever possibly imagine. Despite repeated efforts by the rental company, the ants haven’t been exterminated yet, and the children ride them all the way to Persia, Turkey, Latin America (especially Chile), occasionally even to Somalia. Though it’s closer to Somalia if you start over on Bredfjällsgatan St., where the tall, skinny, gray-brown-beige men live with wives who nobody has ever talked to. Wives who don’t have any genitals left, who wear long flowery skirts with quilted Swedish jackets and gym shoes or sandals that don’t look very comfortable. A good number of the apartments in that part of the Hammarkullen housing project are empty now; voices echo in the stairway, and the patios on the first floor are poor attempts to evoke the idyllic Swedish countryside. Over at the Sandeslätt mall it’s a whole other world – truly idyllic and spacious, with little red laundry cottages and daycare centers. That’s where I live, I who am such an utter coward. I sit on the patio and drink coffee with my friends. On one side of the patio is a centuries-old wooden horse that has been eaten away by woodworms. It comes from a village so far out in the countryside that it hardly exists. On the other side of the patio is a compost heap that’s like balm to my nostrils; should I take it with me if I move? It would undoubtedly be the first time someone loaded compost into a moving van.
it’s possible, it’s possible…
I stand in front of my apartment building, Sandeslätt 14. It’s already dark, and everything billows before my eyes: the grass on the mall, the little playgrounds, the tiny groves. I’m 9 years old and completely naked. Although it’s the middle of winter, I’m not a bit cold; I’ve make sure to keep my inner flame burning. I have a miniature oven in my chest, and if I breathe too deeply, the flames will shoot out through my mouth. The gas has to be turned down to medium. With the warmth of my body, I can thaw the ground and make oranges (where do they come from?) roll across the lawn. A voice from far away keeps repeating that nobody can touch me anymore, that I’ve finally become a real person. Suddenly the hill where the children were just playing divides like the Red Sea and rusty old army tanks come rattling toward me; emitting a loud sigh, they fall over and are transformed into little toys. I have no idea where I’m headed or where I’m coming from, I only know that I have to go on. Walking out into the darkness, I cleave the wind like a pickax in order to make it to the top of the hill. Whirling ’round and ’round, I’m sucked upwards in an ever widening spiral, as from the eye of a tornado. I spin higher and higher over the hill, until the whirlwind suddenly recedes and I plunge down into the grove, aching and exhausted.
in my own picture…
I’m lying on the cold tile floor, and the clock is chiming insistently. The red, glass-pearl eyes of the pink little pigs fall out and roll across the floor, under chairs and tables. Glittering at me, they drip the reddest drops you could possibly imagine. The whole floor is splattered with the glistening drops. The cold is both painful and pleasurable, and I can feel it in my entire body; the trick is not to make the slightest move, just experience it and be one more of the elk that lie here and cool their muzzles on the floor. For days on end it’s been so hot that we’ve hardly been able to breathe. It’s so wonderful not to have to get up and go anywhere. What exists beyond us, what we’ve left behind, is a matter of total indifference to us just now; we’ll worry about it when the time comes. All we have to do is lie here and feel the fluid pour out of our eyes, mouths, vaginas, armpits. Flowing out across the floor, it covers everything, seeps under the door. I’m hurting all over; my thoughts swirl chaotically in my head, and anxiety spurts out through every pore of my body. I’m immersed in my anxiety as in a hot bath of sulfur dioxide and dioxins and assorted poisons. It all seethes in a horrible witch’s brew that eats its way into the hardest metals, perforates and corrodes the sky and turns it into lilac-red-pink-yellow bands that merge, separate, and merge once more to form a single simmering, steaming, upside-down cauldron. As I splash around in the brew, it gnaws through layer upon layer of skin until I finally climb out on wobbly legs, soft and satiny as an infant. My eyes are pink and shimmering, ears delicate and supple as flower petals, toes softer than a cat’s paws. Now I’m definitely not a pig, I’m a cat, and I begin to sharpen my claws. But I’m no ordinary farm cat, I have green luminescent eyes and glistening black fur. Without warning, I jump up onto an old, cane-seated oak chair and dart out the door onto the broiling street.
someday we’ll be there too…
Rolling around on the hill, we claw and tear and lick and thump each other on the back. We’re so close to each other, so alike; there’s not a one of us who doesn’t hunt rats and bite off their heads and leave them half-eaten. We have our little lairs on the back side of the hill – our main enemies, of course, are the farmers with their merciless rifles. According to them, creatures like us shouldn’t be permitted to live, not even to chase rats in their silos. We s–t everywhere, mount tame she-cats and meow all night outside their windows. One night they caught some of us and castrated us. The poor things now live in the stable, where we never seen them; they spend their time licking up cow milk and sleeping in the hot pig sty. Those of us fortunate enough to have escaped the knife are scrawny and tousled and, more often than not, mean to each other. The children throw rocks at us, and there’s nobody to show us off the way they do with their darling little house cats. Still, we frolic on our stubbly hill and try to keep ourselves amused. On rare occasions a person, generally a child, brings us a sardine can, and you’d better believe that that’s the signal for an old-fashioned brawl. We scratch each other and lunge for the can, and finally there’s nothing left to eat, but that’s not the end of it, no way – we carry on the battle until our gums and paws are all bloody from the jagged tin. We’re so happy, so well-provided for; we’ll always have each other, even if nobody else wants anything to do with us. Is it our fault if we come from the wrong side of the track, deprived of hearth and home, master and mistress, food bowl and leash? We sleep on the back side of the hill and dream that we’re lying on soft, little couches in cozy nurseries with teddy bears and dolls and toys all around us.
give me air!
The question is where it all began, why, when everyone else was trying to get in, I was groping along the wall with my chafed fingers looking for a way out. Why could I never just sit there and wait for my slightly older classmates to visit me in the cramped apartment they envied so much? Weeping and shrieking in ever growing panic, I banged my head against the wall, while they just sat there, said their prayers, ate their exotic cheeses and told me how lovely it was in India, Latin America, Peru, or wherever it was they had climbed to the top of a mountain, eaten tropical fruits, listened to strange music and admired the view. For my part, I had no time to wait for their stories to come true. It was all too palpable for me as I banged my head against the wall of the stuffy apartment on 12 Bergsgatan St. (near Värnhemstorget Square in my hometown of Malmö), trying to catch of glimpse of blue sky. But the sky wasn’t the least bit blue, it dripped dark red drops and mighty waves roared across it. Just as the May Day parade, escorted by mounted police, streamed out of abandoned barns (it was as if they had just sat there for years waiting to be of some use), I left the apartment and headed toward the newsstand on the other side of Nobelvägen Blvd. But to my utter amazement, there was absolutely no way I was going to get across that street. This was totally unheard of! But why had I chosen this of all days to crawl out of my hiding place behind the thick velvet curtains, to go outside and breathe the fresh air and feel the stinging rays of the sun on my pallid face? Clearly the fates had long since decreed that on this particular day I was to remain on my side of the street.
The question is where it all began. All I remember is that it was wonderful, but when it happened or even what it was exactly, I couldn’t really say. Still, it must have all started on that May afternoon long ago when I, a lanky teenager and champion high-jumper, was enrolled through the agency of my gym teacher into an NLF youth brigade. But what did I know about the Vietnamese revolution and rice paddies and that kind of thing? My girlfriends and I giggled our way through two weeks of boot camp in Saigon. We learned to pee standing up. We had pillow fights. We filled each other’s pillows with rice until they burst at the seams and spilled out all over the floor. Each grain of rice was a Vietnamese peasant who we gingerly picked up, placed in a big wooden crate and boiled for lunch. All day long we squished around in the mud under the watchful eyes of representatives from the NLF youth organization. Just like them, we wore little red kerchiefs, which we wiped ourselves with when we went to the bathroom. Everyone loved us. On our way back to the airport, we gazed with tear-filled eyes at the roadside posters of smiling peasants. It was as if we were driving straight through the posters, causing the masonite to whirl about and the smiles to shatter onto the pale yellow foliage. Many children were born during that time, all of whom turned into fat, little, snotty-nosed cursing trolls with sweaters that shrieked No to the EEC, Scandinavian Women Against the EEC, Cultural Resistance Movement, Violinists Against the Bridge to Denmark, Bake Sale Against Boring Christmases, A Trip to the Caribbean Against Society’s Claims on My Future. Lying out in the Cuban sun, I melted down to nothing, an overripe tomato – totally brain dead. I tried to learn their dances, walked around the suburbs and stared at the 1970s-style concrete apartment buildings. Laundry was always flapping over the white balconies, and the heat was oppressive. Unlike in the downtown tourist area, the children were shoeless, and they clung to my long white dress. Despite their ration cards, people out here could barely scrape up a daily subsistence. Still, their radios blared out the latest pop tunes from morning to night. The heat had a strangle hold on me now; I was approaching the boiling point. Having broken down long ago, all the dioxins and metals had run down into the sewers, leaving only a soft, trembling lump that slowly made its way along the broiling sidewalk, the mulatto children, men and women clutching at its dress, its hair, its money (which it didn’t have). Everyone was smiling and trying to drag me into their fastidious little homes and pour me a few drops of rum. My body was like melted glass, then watery oatmeal; at last nothing was left. With a tremendous effort I had finally managed to escape from myself, and it felt completely wonderful.
home
Contact us