Jagannath

Some Letters for Ove Lindström

Hi, Dad.

It’s Saturday and it’s been thirty-six days since they found you. You lay in the apartment for three days before the neighbors called the police because the cat was howling. That was on a Friday. They said at the hospital it looked like a massive heart attack, probably quick. They asked if you and I were close. I said no: I couldn’t cope with your drinking, broke off contact with you many years ago.

That same night I dreamed about Mum for the first time in many years. She was standing at the edge of the forest, her back turned. Her dark hair tumbled in tangles down her back. The hem of her red dress dragged at the ground. I was sitting in the sandbox. I couldn’t move. She walked in among the trees and there was a tinkling sound on the air, like tiny bells.

I entered your apartment prepared for something like the last time I was there: floors covered by a thick layer of newspapers and milk cartons, piles of clothes, and dirty dishes on the furniture, and a layer of greasy filth over everything. Fruit flies in the kitchen. Maggots in the sink. The stench of rot and unwashed human.

But I opened the door to empty rooms and a smell of pine soap. Floors and surfaces were scrubbed clean, the kitchen immaculate. I couldn’t see any bottles or beer cans. Did you quit drinking? When? There was no smell of smoke either. I wonder when you quit the cigarettes and when you decided to clean out the flat. There were a couple of suitcases standing near the door.

I took care of the cat. I don’t know what you named her, but I call her Squeak—she’s thin as a pipe cleaner and meows like a squeaky toy. She’s hungry and pissed off, but fine.

I called Björn and Maggie. Björn said he’d talked to you on Monday. You’d said you were getting your act together: going out to the old schoolhouse at Munsö to start over. It was going to be just like old times.

“Maybe he had a feeling something was about to happen,” Björn said. “But on the other hand… I don’t know. He would do that about once a year. He’d clean the flat and go to Munsö to start over, and then he’d come back a couple of weeks later and it’d be just like before.”

“He never told me that,” I said.

“Maybe he was afraid to. I know I was. I didn’t tell you because I knew he’d just fall off the wagon again. Just as well you didn’t hear about it.”

I’m glad Björn didn’t tell me.

These people came to the service: Björn and Maggie, Per-Arne, Eva and Ingeborg, Peter and Lena, Dolores, Magnus, Alice. I hadn’t seen any of them except Björn and Maggie since I was maybe eighteen. They have changed. They’re not just older. They came in expensive cars, with rounded bellies under designer shirts and dresses. They’re not starving activists anymore. Björn and Maggie showed up in denim. That made me feel less abnormal. Maggie held my hand all through the service.

Most of them stayed for the funeral coffee. I had to answer questions about what I was up to these days. They offered apologies for not keeping in touch. It was because you had pushed them away. They hadn’t been able to cope with it.

Then they talked about old times, telling the obligatory story about how it all started. How a surly farmer (you) was persuaded to rent out the old schoolhouse to a bunch of hairy communists from the city. How the surly farmer eventually joined them and grew a beard. All the parties, and the harvest festival, and the magazine they printed on a hand-cranked printing press in the cellar; and the first commune baby (me), tiny and fat and precocious, who could chant “U.S. out of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia!” by the age of two. We didn’t mention Mum. Then it was over, everyone went home, and I don’t expect I’ll see any of them again except Björn and Maggie.

You’ll be buried next to Sten and Alva, your parents that I know nothing about. You never told me anything about them, only that they were sickly and died early. It seems to be a family trait.

Hi, Dad.

I finished the paperwork last week. I figured I’m between jobs anyway, so I might as well go on a trip. I’m sitting at the kitchen table in the janitor’s house at Munsö. That makes me the fourth generation to own the schoolhouse.

I brought Squeaky. She seems familiar with the place. She catches mice, crunching on them under the table. She’s a tidy eater, leaving only the hearts. I find them here and there, lying on the floor like red raisins.

You must have been here in the spring. The hothouse is full of squash, tomatoes, beans, and pumpkins, ready for harvest. The pantry’s full. There’s even firewood, and it’s clean. I found mint tea. It’s the same sort you used to drink when I was little. These are the smells from when things were good – firewood, mint tea, and old house.

I used to sleep on the sofa bed in the kitchen, you in the bedroom. You were too tall for the sofa bed, you said, otherwise you’d let me have the bedroom. You were always a little hunched over, hitting your head on doorjambs and lamps. I can see you standing over the sofa bed, reaching out with a long hand to pull the covers all the way up to my chin. Snug like a dolma, you would say.

I’m sleeping in the bedroom tonight. I’ve grown too tall for the sofa bed.

If only you’d kept a journal. The only thing that tells me how much time you spent here are the newspapers by the stove. About once a year, for a few weeks at a time, just like Björn said. According to (which you insisted on reading despite calling it a bourgeoisie rag), the last time was in May.

I went over to the schoolhouse today. The front door had warped, and was difficult to get open. In the cloakroom I turned right and the long tables still stood there, and the benches, and the serving table at the back. The breeze blowing in from the open door stirred up dust in the air. The flypapers spiraling down from the ceiling were black with little corpses. I went into the kitchen at the back: the old orange curtains still hanging in the windows, the massive rounded refrigerator graying in the corner. Through the kitchen into the common room with its brown corduroy couches and the IKEA bookshelves: dust and silence. The smell of wood and mold. Through the common room, full circle into the cloakroom. Up the steep stairs at the back of the cloakroom, with the rosette window halfway up. The attic with its bedrooms that used to be storage, like empty monk cells in a row. I remember everyone leaving: Lena packing the huge toy turtle, its plush skin worn through where I had sat on it every day. I cried when she stuffed it into a box.

The empty gravel driveway, the hothouse that slowly went to seed, the absence of voices, before you boarded up the schoolhouse and janitor’s house and packed our things into the car.

In the photos of you and Mum, you’re so in love, so lost in her. One of the pictures is of the schoolhouse steps. She’s standing with a hand on the rail, looking into the camera. She’s wearing a knee-length black dress with a white yin-yang pattern, her belly big and round. You’re wearing jeans and an orange shirt, one hand resting on her belly. Ignoring the photographer, you’re looking sideways at Mum with a soft smile. She’s so tall. You’re not hunched over next to her. You smile like that in all the photos from then, Dad.

Hi Dad.

I got your bike out from the shed – you kept it in good shape – and went down to the old co-op for food. I used the forest path that goes past the lake. It took about half an hour when I was a kid, but this time I must have taken a wrong turn; here and there I couldn’t recognize where I was. It took me an hour to get there. Things are supposed to feel much smaller when you visit places from your childhood. The old co-op was unrecognizable. They’ve renovated. Not that it helps. They don’t know what tofu is.

This is my very first memory: it was August. I was three years old. Vladimir Vysotsky was rasping through the gramophone. The air smelled of damp wool and crayfish and toast. It was getting cold. You opened your cardigan so I could climb inside, and then buttoned it up again so that I sat there like a kangaroo pup, head sticking out, your beard tickling at my neck. When you sang along in the chorus, my whole back vibrated. Mum sat across the table. She was staring at us, her face very still.

Of course she refused to give birth in a hospital. Maggie has told me so many times. She gave birth in the janitor’s house, assisted by one of the commune members (Annika?) who happened to be a certified midwife. It took eleven hours. I was healthy and weighed three-and-a-half kilos. You didn’t take me to the hospital. I wasn’t to be registered, checked, or vaccinated. You wanted the authorities to stay out of our lives.

It’ll be the twenty-fifth anniversary of her disappearance, soon.

“Do you know what your father used to say,” Maggie said once. “He used to say that your mother just came out of the forest one day.”

I’m having tea on the veranda. It’s still warm out. A few more weeks and the forest will be full of mushrooms. And all the vegetables in the hothouse, I wonder if I could learn to can them so they don’t spoil. Weren’t Lena and Peter fanatics about that stuff?

The cell phone rang for the first time since I arrived here. It was my case worker at the unemployment center who wanted to know why I didn’t show up for our meeting yesterday. It had completely slipped my mind. Caseworker wants me to report for inspection immediately. If I don’t provide a list of all the jobs I’ve applied for this month, my benefits will be cut off. I figure that’s about to happen anyway, so what difference does it make? I’ll be cut off, and then I’ll have to apply for welfare, and they’ll tell me I can’t have any because I own property. Then I’ll either have to sell this place, or tell the welfare people to sod off. In which case I’ll settle out here and live on mushrooms and canned vegetables. I wonder how long I could do that. I wonder how long it would take before anyone except my caseworker missed me.

Hi Dad.

I’ve been weeding in the hothouse. Some of the plants died during the summer, others are growing wild. It’s not much of a hothouse, what with the hole in the roof. The vegetables going nuts are the ones that got rain on them. I don’t think I could survive on them if I lose my benefits.

This is my second memory: I know now that it’s about a week after the crayfish party. I was sitting in the sandbox outside the house. The sand was cold and damp under the dry top layer. I had taken my shoes off, digging into the chill with my toes. Mum kissed my forehead and then she walked away. She was wearing the red dress. She was barefoot. Mum walked in amongst the trees and there was a tinkling sound on the air, like tiny bells.

You came back from the store to find me howling in the sandbox. You put off calling the police until the next day. You tried to report her missing, but were told she didn’t exist. She wasn’t in the national registry.

Of course, neither was I, which they found out. I was registered and received a personal identity number and the mandatory vaccinations.

And that was that. Mum didn’t come back.

You did what a dad is supposed to do. You made sure I went to school; you cooked dinner; we watched television together; you helped me with homework. I was never yelled at. You were never mean. When you started drinking it was quietly, in the armchair by the television. You’d get distant and fall asleep at odd times. I learned to make myself dinner.

I feel almost jetlagged. The sun is so low in the sky. The sunset just goes on and on.

Hi Dad.

I thought you might want to know what I was doing while you were getting drunk. Once we’d moved into the two-roomer in Hökarängen I was over at Maggie’s and Björn’s place most of the time. You didn’t want to see them. You were at work, or you were watching television at home, drinking. One evening I was in Maggie’s and Björn’s kitchen—we had just finished dinner—and I asked Maggie about you and Mum.

“Actually I don’t remember how it was,” said Maggie. “She didn’t arrive with any of the others – it was me, Björn, and Peter from the Jester commune, Eva and Ingeborg from Nyköping; Per-Arne was from Norrköping, he was Ingeborg’s friend from FNL… but your mother, I don’t remember how she ended up there. But she was there from the start, that she was. A very private person. She and your father were a good match that way, I suppose. They liked keeping to themselves.”

“How do you mean, private,” I said.

“She never talked about herself. I mean, she didn’t talk about personal stuff, or offer opinions. I never found out what she thought about anything, not in all the years she was there. We thought she was a bit touched, or she’d been through something difficult, so we didn’t make a big deal of it. And then there was that bit about her not being in the national registry. Maybe her identity was protected. Maybe she’d run away from an abusive husband. That’s what I think. But why she left you and your dad…” Maggie patted my cheek. She put an arm around me. “That was a shitty thing to do,” she said. “If I’d had a child like you, I wouldn’t have left you for a second.”

I sat quietly inhaling Maggie’s scent, a mix of softener, cigarettes, and warm skin.

“Do you know what your father used to say,” Maggie said. “He used to say that your mother just came out of the forest one day.”

I tried to call Maggie just now, but for some reason I have no reception. It would be good to hear her voice.

Hi Dad.

When I was little, I could sit for hours looking out the window. It could be because of a certain kind of music, or because it was dusk, or a certain slant of the light. There was a sensation in my chest, a churning. I couldn’t put words to it then. But it was a knowledge that there was something out there. That there was a hole in the world. And a longing to go there. I still have that longing, but it doesn’t overwhelm me like it used to. Until now. There’s something about the light here that makes the longing bloom.

I’m thinking about the last time I saw you alive. It was four years after I had left home. You called sometimes when you were drunk, saying everything would get better. In the end I changed my phone number.

Then it was your fiftieth birthday, and I thought I’d give it a chance. I knocked on your door at about seven in the evening. There was no reply, but the door wasn’t locked. In there was the wino den. Something under the garbage rustled in a corner.

You were in the couch, watching TV. You looked up when I came in, old milk cartons crunching under my boots.

“I was at the school house, you know?” you said. “I did clean up in here. And I went to the schoolhouse. I waited for her to come back. But she didn’t.”

You started to weep. It was a wet and forlorn sobbing. I turned around and left. It would be six years until I saw you next.

Inside the schoolhouse, I pretend that no time has passed. Closing my eyes, I can hear the others. The rhythmic thud of kneading dough. Something being chopped on a cutting board. Someone strumming a guitar and humming the melody. Footsteps on the stairs. The smell of baking bread and tea and onions frying in butter. A hand caressing my cheek in passing. I pretend that it’s dinnertime. We sing together, and then we fill our plates. I can sit in anyone’s lap. I lean against a shoulder. When I’ve fallen asleep, they carry me to the brown corduroy couch in the corner of the dining hall and put a blanket over me. The corduroy is rough against my face. The buzz of voices rising and falling.

Dad

The sun didn’t rise today. I can only see it as a glow on the horizon. I was in the kitchen when the noise came. I could hear it all the way inside. I went out onto the veranda. It was the sound of little bells. I hadn’t heard it since the day Mum left.

I tried to call Maggie. No reception. So I’m sitting here on the steps. The sound of bells still hangs in the air. And the twilight just lingering there, that won’t go towards night or day.

Dad, I think Mum is coming soon.