Stig Dagerman - Sleet - Selected Stories

“She’d have been so goddamn happy to see everybody having such a good time!”

And must be I said this a little too loud, ’cause the looks I got from my brothers and sisters, well, it was enough to make a man’s blood run cold. But the old man, he saw it just the same way. He was getting good and tight himself by then, and who could blame him for that? The old man never did have much of a chance in this house to let go of things. And that evening me and him sat down together in his room here.

And that’s something you’ll never forget.

And as you sink now, further and further down, you know it’s gonna be the same tomorrow. The same but not the same. ’Cause the old man, he ain’t gonna be there to invite you into his room and talk to you like you’re a regular person. Ain’t nobody else left but the ones that cluck their tongues at you and treat you like you don’t matter. Tomorrow you’ll be on your own. As alone as it fucking gets. Is it any wonder you lay here now, sobbing yourself to sleep in this room, undressed by your own sister, drifting down into a murky drunken sleep? Is it any wonder you’d like to have your old Icelandic sweater to hold in your hands and stroke under the blanket? And so you ask Lydia one more time.

“Where’s my Icelandic sweater?”

But it’s too late. A second later and you’re out of reach, deep down under, where you don’t hear nothing and there ain’t no understanding.

But no, that’s not really true, ’cause for just a little shit part of one second you hang in there and stay alive. And that’s when you hear Lydia say in a voice weak and weary, but still clear as hell.

“You bastard.”

And a cuckoo calls high up in the air.

The old man’s clock is going again.

A number of stories in this collection first appeared in the following publications: “The Midsummer Night’s Chill is Hard,” Lightship Review 1, 2013; “The Stockholm Car,” Agni Online , 2013; “The Surprise,” Southern California Anthology 8. Los Angeles, CA: University of Southern California, 1996, 60–66; “Men of Character,” Southern Review 32:1. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, 1996, 59–79; “Salted Meat and Cucumber,” Prism International 34:2. Vancouver, British Columbia: University of British Columbia, 1996, 54–60; “Sleet,” Confrontation 54/55. New York: Long Island University, 1994, 53–62; “The Games of Night,” Black Warrior Review 20:2. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama, 1994, 107–17; “In Grandmother’s House,” Quarterly West 38. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah, 1994, 160–67; “To Kill a Child,” Grand Street 42. New York, 1992, 96–100.

Stig Dagerman’s letter to Karl Werner Aspenström, which appears in the translator’s note on page 14, is quoted from Robin Fulton Macpherson’s introduction to Stig Dagerman’s German Autumn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1.

The translator gratefully acknowledges the support of the Swedish Arts Council. He also wishes to thank the Dagerman Society for their invaluable support of the translation process, in particular the encouragement and helpful advice of the society’s chairperson, Bengt Söderhäll.