Goran Rosenberg: A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

The first bird is a house sparrow in the barberry hedge outside the dairy shop. The first squirrel climbs up the first bark of the first pine outside the kitchen window. The edge of the first forest extends along the first route to school. The first woodland path is carpeted with the first warm pine needles and bordered by the first bilberries. The first pungent reek of surströmming , fermented herring, comes from the Hedmans’ apartment on the ground floor. The first street is called Hertig Carls väg and is bordered by the first pavement (play only on the pavement!), the first cycle path (watch out for the cyclists!), and the first rowanberries. It’s also paved with stones that resound with the rubbery bumping and thudding of the first automobile tires. The first automobile belongs to Anders’s dad in the next-door apartment and sometimes needs a starting crank to get it going and has a windshield I can’t reach when we’re allowed to play in the driver’s seat and turn the steering wheel. The first garbagemen in my first garbage truck hook the first garbage dumpsters onto a lift mechanism at the back of the truck and press a button to raise the dumpster into the air, fit it to a circular opening, and tip it forward so that the trash catapults down into the belly of the truck, the last bits shaken out with a few sharp tugs of a lever before the dumpster is lowered, unhooked, and carried on strong backs into the secret room behind the locked door in the concrete chill of the basement in the newly built apartment blocks where we live. My first garbage truck is a Norba, and three of them have been purchased at great expense by the Södertälje public sanitation department; they are described as a step forward in providing cleaner and more convenient refuse collection, having “a hood for spill-free emptying, a hydraulic dumpster-emptying device, and a scraper to distribute material in the refuse unit, plus a tipping mechanism.” My first garbage chute is presumably a backward step, since the shaft that carries the garbage down to the refuse storage room hasn’t been built correctly and there’s a kink at the bottom that sometimes makes the garbage get stuck, so the chute blocks up. This is in spite of the fact that the local housing committee directive for garbage chute construction, dated November 5, 1940, clearly states that “the shaft must run straight and vertically for its entire length, and the whole of its lower end must be entirely aligned with a refuse container, such that a vertical line drawn along the inside wall of the shaft will run 5 cm inside the edge of the container.” The regulations also say that “the refuse storage room shall be provided with sufficient electric lighting so that the entire room is well lit.” My first refuse storage room is not well lit. It’s dark and cold and gives off the sweet-sour odor of kitchen waste and a raw breath of damp concrete.

Early one morning I get a ride from my first garbageman in my first garbage truck while the two new arrivals who have become my father and mother are still asleep on the sofa bed in the living room with the blinds drawn and the street outside lies silent, apart from the chatter of the sparrows in the barberry hedge and the screech of brakes from the first morning train on its way south. My first mornings are always early and always bright, and on one of those mornings I slip out of the front door and down the stairs to the entrance hall and out onto the sunlit pavement, because I don’t have the patience to go on lying there on the pull-out settle in the kitchen and don’t want to wake the two sleepers until the alarm clock rings and the street is filled with the cries and sounds of the growing caravan of bicycles making their way down the rowanberry avenue with rattling chains and creaking saddles and a daily load of filled lunchboxes and drowsy riders.

So I take early possession of the Place without their really noticing; sometimes, in fact, while they’re still asleep. I’ve been told not to go off with strangers or accept anything from strangers, but the garbagemen aren’t strangers. They’re part of the Place, in the same way as the dockers and sailors at the port where I go fishing for my first roach, and the bakers and assistants all dressed in white at the bakery on the other side of the road where I buy my first crusty bread roll and my first milk is ladled out with a long-handled liter measure from a hole in the counter. The speciality there is a bread loaf known as the SS loaf, named after the shop, which is called the SS Bakery, named after the Place itself, Södertälje Södra; but that’s a loaf we never buy. Just to the right as you enter the dairy, my first bottles of fizzy pop are ranged in dark green crates stacked on end against the wall. The very first is called Pomril and tastes of apples.

Seated in the driver’s cab, I’m allowed to ride in the garbage truck from one end of the rowanberry avenue to the other, from the end where we live, in the last building before you reach the edge of the forest and the road to the Beach, all the way to the other end, where the row of buildings comes to an end and the street makes a sharp left turn and disappears under a railroad viaduct. The forest and the road to the Beach are part of my territory, but not the road beyond the viaduct. Beyond the viaduct is the big factory that swallows the caravans of bikes and spits out trucks, sheltering behind its front gates a world I can neither reach nor name. Dad’s a pipe fitter, but what a pipe fitter is I have no idea. He could just as well be a founder, borer, tracer, clerk, plater, punch-card operator, balancer, manager, smith, foreman, filer, capstan lathe operator, or designer. The words of the world beyond the factory gates can’t be seen or touched or smelled, so it’s impossible for them to lend their names to anything in my world. Thus an early distinction is drawn between the world I can make into my own and the world Dad must try to make into his, because at seven every morning he and his bike disappear through something called the Chassis Gate and I don’t see him again until Mom calls out of the kitchen window to say that dinner’s ready.

The boundaries of my world are sharp and forbidding, and the two garbagemen who have given me a seat with a view in their cab know very well where those limits are: the busy mainline railroad tracks, the railroad viaduct that spans the street, the railroad bridge over the canal, the canal itself, the steep-sided quays of the port area, the sharp fences around the factories and coal depots along the bay at Hallfjärden.

Steel and water. Fences and cul-de-sacs. Barriers and precipices.

The only road that doesn’t end at something hard and impenetrable is the road that continues where the paved street ends and the forest begins, the road that in spring is edged with cowslips and lilies of the valley and in summer is crowded with bikes and eventually with cars, and which on my long Sunday walks with Dad seems never-ending. This is the road to the Beach, Havsbadet, and it ends in a sandy shoreline. Havsbadet is the most open and inviting of the boundaries in my world, but a boundary it is nonetheless; the road comes only this far, and this is how large my world is allowed to be.

The area of predominantly new housing where the garbage truck stops at every block, empties every refuse storage room, and carefully shakes the last scraps out of every dumpster is no larger than can be explored by a young child on foot and is in fact a strictly encircled enclave comprising, roughly speaking, a railroad station with auxiliary red-brick accommodations for its employees; sixteen new, three-story housing blocks in yellow or gray plaster lining both sides of a stone-paved avenue; some smaller side streets with two-story detached houses; an open square; two playgrounds; a day nursery and a post office; two grocery shops, Kling’s with cooling water running in the window, and the Co-op with the first frozen-food counter; a tobacconist’s; a haberdasher’s; a bakery and a cafe. In front of the train station, there’s a newspaper kiosk and a telephone booth with a removable floor of wooden laths through which escaped ten-öre coins lie glinting. It’s a perfectly enclosed, idyllic world, which you can enter or exit only by passing under dark railroad viaducts, balancing across vertiginous railroad bridges, climbing over prohibited embankments, jumping on treacherous ice floes, or making holes in skull-marked factory fences.