Goran Rosenberg: A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater,” writes Walter Benjamin in an essay about the Berlin of his childhood.

It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the “matter itself” is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous investigation what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand — like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery — in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.

The image: a shiny yellow disk of metal, sharp and uneven around the edges, a bit like thinly rolled-out gingerbread dough, and the size of a five-öre coin. It’s burning hot in my hand.

The later understanding: we’re romping noisily along the sleepers of the railroad track that runs along the path to my first school and leads to the factory where they make milk separators. It also leads to the factory where they prefabricate building blocks of aerated concrete and to the black mountains of coal and coke beneath the tall cranes on the docks and to the gigantic grain silo whose purpose we don’t yet understand. But the separator factory is what we’re running toward, because our school is just beside it, and because the separator factory’s renowned canteen (“Every housewife’s dream: appliances, appliances, and more appliances of every conceivable kind”) is where we walk to in a column every day and consume the free school meal to which we have just become entitled but about which we’ve already taken the liberty of developing cautious opinions.

But no, it must have been on our way home from school. On our way to school in the mornings, when we were always late and racing against the clock, the idea wouldn’t have occurred to anybody. So it’s in the afternoon, and we’re running along the sleepers leading away from the factory, and it must be from behind, from the factory, that the train is coming. Well, no, not a train really, just a shunting locomotive, and it’s making quite a racket because it’s a diesel. No danger, we can all see and hear it coming, and it’s coming only very slowly. But some danger still, because now somebody’s got the idea that we’re in a competition to see who’s last off the track. It’s not Tommy this time, he’s too old to be in my class. So who is it? The picture won’t come into focus.

The engine’s getting closer, nobody budges, I get an idea.

Am I the one who puts the two-öre coin on the rail? Is it really my idea?

We hide in the waste-filled and weed-covered ditch and watch the engine grow against the sky. The ground trembles. The rails screech. The coin vibrates.

I imagine myself in the place of the two-öre piece.

A shiny disk of yellow metal larger than a five-öre piece is lying thinly flattened against the rail. It’s burning hot in my hand.

The image: Anders and I on the pavement outside our house. I test out a word I’ve heard someone say, maybe Tommy. “If you say that word again, you can’t come to God’s party in Heaven,” says Anders.

I ask who God is. And where Heaven is. And who’s allowed to come to God’s party.

The later understanding: that’s how God and Heaven are added to my world. I’ve passed my fourth birthday and learned to read the words that Dad puts together on the floor with the letter blocks, but God and Heaven are not among them. Nor is Hell. These are words that Anders has learned before me, and he’s the one who teaches me them for the first time, and it’s on the pavement at the front entrance to our house on the rowan avenue that God and Heaven and Hell forever assume a sense of someone else’s party.

These are the sensations I dig for much later, when I want to tell the story of how my world came into being: the sensation of the images and the sounds and the smells of those moments when I put names to the world for the first time. And at best, the sensation of a small dark-haired boy who for some reason bears my name and somehow is me and who on a small plot of earth between the railroad bridge and Havsbadet, the port and the embankment, is busy making the world into his own.

There are times when I feel a bit ashamed for him. Not because his mother dresses him in home-knitted jerseys and plus-fours, and on special occasions, if I’m not mistaken, in a mottled brown woolen cap, all of which are quite possibly a source of shame for the little boy since no one else in his world wears such things, but not for me. Not for the person who much later is me. What that person much later is a bit ashamed of is his behavior. Of the fact that he so often rings the doorbell at Rickard and Bosse’s in the house next door and silently buries himself in their piles of comic books even when Rickard and Bosse aren’t home. I’ll wait for them, the boy tells their mother, and he vanishes into the adventures of Captain Miki in the twenty-five-öre Wild West comic that comes out weekly in a kind of checkbook format and always ends with the baddies in hot pursuit of Captain Miki, forcing the boy to read on through comic after comic, pile after pile.

It shames me to think of him reading so many comics when I know how hard his dad is trying to stop him from reading comics at all and to steer him toward the books carefully selected and brought home for him from the town library every two weeks in a brown leather briefcase.

He reads the books too, of course, sometimes with a flashlight under the covers when the reading light has been switched off for the night. Or if it’s summer and still light outside, with the book held up to the slightly wider chink of light at the edge of the blind. After a late night with Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Speckled Band, he dares not sleep with his back to the wall, for fear that a deadly poisonous snake will come crawling down it. After a late night with Poe and the Case of M. Valdemar, he dares not sleep at all, for fear of dissolving into a rotting mass.

So the boy is to be preserved from comics. As from so much else that the two new arrivals fear could bring down the world the boy is busy making into his own, and which for them is the only world they can pin their hopes on.

Actually, they’re not the only people having fears. Per Olof’s mom in number 43 gives the little boy who somehow is me a book entitled Young People Astray or Big City Dangers or Godless Inferno or something in that vein, which she thinks the boy ought to take home to his mom and dad. I must be about seven or eight and there’s a little sister now and we’ve moved across the road from our one-room apartment at number 42 to a two-room apartment at number 45, and like a one-man plague of locusts, I consume any reading matter that crosses my path, be it the shop signs along the main city street or the cereal box on the kitchen table. The book has a pulp-fiction-style cover, a black hand grabbing the naked arm of a woman against a background of flickering flames or something to that effect, and it’s easy to mistake it for that kind of a book. But that isn’t why Dad takes it away from me and insists that I return it right away with thanks for the loan, which is something I can’t do because the book is a gift and not a loan. No, it has something to do with Per Olof’s parents, and with something Dad calls propaganda. The book with the seductive cover is propaganda for Per Olof’s parents’ religion, which is not the same as my parents’ religion. Per Olof’s parents are Pentecostalists or Baptists or something like that. Part of their religion seems to be that children drink coffee with their parents. Per Olof always drinks coffee with his parents. My parents’ religion seems to stipulate that children under no circumstances shall drink coffee. At any rate, I’m never allowed to taste even a drop when they have it. I’m given my first coffee by Auntie Ilonka in her tobacco shop at Strängnäsvägen when I’m ten. I’m also entrusted by her with taking payments and counting change and putting money in the till, but not in the till for lottery tickets, which we must be very careful about. The coffee has been simmering all day and tastes bitter, and I feel no urge whatsoever to join the Pentecostalists.