Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

I associate the Beetle with you.

With your tanned elbow leaning out of the open side window and the warm breeze blowing through your hair as the car zooms along, and the silvery Piccolo visible through the back window, following us on its sturdy bumper mounts.

I associate the uniform with the Beetle too. It’s a greenish sort of gray and has big breast pockets with deep pleats and bulging buttons, and a folded cap tucked under the shoulder strap, and really seems too heavy to wear in summer, but it’s early summer or late spring and you’re behind the wheel and we drive down an avenue of tall trees to a big, grand house and I see men in uniforms through the side window and gray-green military trucks through the windshield. I don’t know where we are, or why, but it has something to do with the uniform.

What I do know is that on May 15, 1956, you’re called up to the Royal Svea Logistic Regiment in Linköping, and between August 3 and November 12 you’re taught how to maintain and repair military vehicles. Not exactly a new horizon, but you shoot well. With the army-issue Mauser M-38 you shoot your way to the army’s Silver Medal for shooting, scoring 86 out of a possible 100. The only picture of you in uniform is in a weapons store with straight rows of Mausers lined up in racks behind you, and you’re holding an army-issue submachine gun, the M-45. It’s November and you’re in the army’s white winter camouflage coat with the fur collar, and on your head you have the army’s lined leather cap. You look small in the winter uniform. The summer uniform suits you better. You do most of your military service in the summer and autumn of 1956. Having completed 180 days, you’re excused from the remaining 180 days and the compulsory refresher course.

You’re thirty-three years old, and you have a family with two children to provide for.

And a horizon that doesn’t quite want to open up.

There’s something indistinct about the horizon, not just the small one, beyond the rowanberry avenue, the railroad bridge, and Havsbadet, but also the big one, beyond the radio set that stares at me with its blue-green Cyclops eye and over which you bend your head in the evenings. Sometimes you press your ear closer to the loudspeaker fabric and gently turn the right-hand dial and move the indicator through the radio stations, and the blue-green eye pulsates with the wavelengths of the world and the sounds of the world burst in from the big horizon. Much later, I realize that what comes bursting in are the sounds of war, the sounds of Israeli tanks charging toward the Suez Canal, and Soviet tanks charging toward Budapest, and in the small two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue you hang your uniform in the hall and bend your concerned head toward the world.

Are you concerned about Caryl Chessman, too? A Caryl Chessman fragment glints brightly in the darkness around the uniform and the radio set. Caryl Chessman is waiting for his death sentence to be carried out. Year after year, he waits for his death sentence to be carried out. Chessman is also a brand of cigarettes, sold in a yellow packet with black and white checks. Auntie Elisabeth on the other side of the railroad bridge chain-smokes Chessmans, and Chessman is reprieved, time and time again, until he’s taken into the gas chamber to die. There’s always a last-minute reprieve for Chessman. A film about Caryl Chessman, based on a book by Caryl Chessman, is showing at the Castro cinema, and I can’t stop thinking about death in the gas chamber when Auntie Elisabeth lights a new Chessman with the glowing end of the previous one.

No, I don’t think you’re bowing your head for Caryl Chessman, not even when the last minute comes, and not for Tumba-Tarzan either, I assume. Tumba-Tarzan is the Caryl Chessman of the rowanberry avenue. Tumba-Tarzan is hiding out in the woods around Tumba and Rönninge but has also been sighted in the forest around Havsbadet and in the woods near the riding school on the other side of the railroad bridge, and some people say they’ve seen his abandoned lair in the woods around the Ewos skull factory. Tumba-Tarzan’s lairs are always abandoned when the police find them. The hunt for Tumba-Tarzan never ends, and in the school playground we replace the hunt for Robin Hood with the hunt for Tumba-Tarzan. In the local paper he’s referred to alternatively as a desperado and a pathfinder, reflecting pretty well the atmosphere of combined terror and admiration that the hunt for Tumba-Tarzan arouses in the rowanberry avenue and surrounding area. When no one has sighted Tumba-Tarzan for a while, the local paper wonders anxiously if he’s left the vicinity, and when someone immediately thereafter spots a tent or a couple of bikes hidden under some spruce branches in the woods on the other side of the truck factory, the local paper hopes that they’re Tumba-Tarzan’s and he’s come back. When he’s finally caught, we’re all convinced he’ll soon find a way to escape. Tumba-Tarzan has broken out of a penal colony to go and find his Jane, whose name is Alice, and take her away, over the water on a raft, to live as an outlaw in the vast forests around the rowanberry avenue. They live on pheasants’ eggs they find on the ground and canned food they steal from empty villas and summer cottages, and they let the police find the stillwarm campfires they’ve just abandoned on their freedom flight through the Swedish summer. Tumba-Tarzan is the first rebel of the rowanberry avenue, and we keep on seeing him in the forest on the way to Havsbadet and in the woods around the skull factory long after he’s been caught.

Much later, I read the report of the proceedings at Södertörn District Court against Rolf Johansson and understand once again why he was a rebel and not just a common thief:

Tumba-Tarzan admitted all the charges against him and clearly had a good memory for his actions. He occasionally stated that the chronological order of some of the break-ins was wrong, and he made one objection in the course of his hearing. This concerned the theft of some bottles of beer, which he absolutely denied. The prosecutor accepted this and removed that particular charge.

The mapped-out future generates its rebels. After Tumba-Tarzan there are Tommy and Elvis, who split the school playground into two camps and fill the local paper with ominous warnings about young people going astray. Then Tumba-Tarzan again, in the form of two young brothers who quickly bring the brand into disrepute by behaving more like thieves than rebels.

The local paper is also full of debates about whether people were happier in the old agrarian society than in the new industrial one. Much space is given to a survey of Swedish factory workers, who answer the question with “an unqualified yes.” Much space, also, is given to a front-page article about a public meeting to protest against “the widespread vandalizing of parks in Södertälje.” Park vandals are held to include people creating their own paths across the grassy areas. Young children are said to vandalize out of ignorance (“training is needed here”), older children out of a desire for opposition (“they need to be guided toward other activities in which they can vent their feelings”).

I certainly know who vents their feelings by twisting the swings several times over the top of the frame in the playground behind the Co-op. I certainly know who eventually ends up in the young offenders’ prison at Hall. I certainly know there are things we do because they’re forbidden.

I’m no rebel, far from it, but I’m tempted by forbidden things, too.

In the light of later understanding, I think it has something to do with that mapped-out future, the one staring at us all and not blinking, not flinching, not paying any heed to the shadows behind us and the confusion around us and the fear inside us, the one we therefore want to see through and give the finger to, which is what the rebels are doing for us. Against the mapped-out future, the rebels hold out the forbidden dangers and freedoms of untrodden forest.