PRELUDE

i.

I, the street whose shadow lingers over these pages, was born in an amber-colored morning. The light came out of the darkness in the east like tender fingers reaching toward the sea. The cold men came walking through the copper colored mist and appeared like shadows or apparitions out of the light. We were surrounded by the sweet quiet scent of meadows and fields. In that growing light, I could feel my spirit and purpose grow. The men around me laughed at something and stopped to stretch their tired muscles. One of them pointed at a bird flying slowly over us toward the south where the sea waited in a salty cloud. It was the seagull with the black head, the one we in Sweden call the Laughing Seagull.

The men were shy because they were trying to hide that they felt part of something new, and that something of what I represented had entered them also, a new entity, called progress brought energy to the tired men who wrestled with tar and clay in the early morning. I sensed their hunger. I heard their curses. They were walking men, building houses and roads for people richer than they. Their work stirred in them the ancient human longing for harbors, the dream embedded even in the most vagrant of men to one day find a home.

I answered their longing because I understood my double nature, my dual purpose. I made leaving possible. Thus, I could also make homecoming real.

ii.

They surrounded me just before dawn. I hadn’t heard them arrive but just as the copper light came shooting from the east like a swarm of arrows and mist swirled and eddied like a sea in storm over the wet fields, I felt their presence. All night I had been alone. First, I missed the men, their laughter and their swearing, but after a while I came to enjoy the silence and peace that surrounded me. I stretched calmly from East to West as my form hardened and shone like a black diamond under the moon. I was proud of my shape and once I became aware of my connection to the big superstructure of roads everywhere, I became prouder still. In the East I connected directly with the E117 and followed it easily. Up north to the great cities of Gothenburg and Stockholm. Down south to Malmö and Trelleborg. Across the Baltic waited Copenhagen and the great Hansa cities of Lubeck and Hamburg. I had plenty to explore!

The mist from the fields was impenetrable and I knew it was the home of many old-fashioned fairy creatures that fill the pages of Scandinavian mythology. These beautiful, and sometimes cruel, beings have many names: älva, huldra, tomte, troll. They can lure men away from their path and cause madness or even death. They have also been known to help a child with some good directions or advice. Always generous with children, they also share food and even the unfathomable hordes of gold which they famously store in their caves and mines. The old ones--as I thought of them--did not trouble me. I was solid enough and rooted in the modern world, but somebody or something was standing behind me. I could hear the breathing now and feel the warmth from bodies. I wondered and waited.

Then I knew, as surely as the shaft of light from the east traced my long black surface smooth as a pebble from the sea although manmade. I knew who had come to visit and who wanted to see what I was all about. Behind me were fields with sugar beets and wheat. Behind the fields was an ancient small forest with old crooked oak and birch trees on low undulating hills. Behind the hills were meadows with wildflowers and the salt marshes stretching out into the sea. They were home of a herd of wild horses that had lived there for hundreds of years. The horses, they said, had come from the Hansa towns of Germany, a thank you gift to the Swedish King, when pirates lured the ship too close to land and looted it and killed most of its seamen. The horses had waded onto land and run away into the forest before the pirates could catch them. They had lived there ever since. And now they had come to visit me. To check me out. I felt like royalty, and stayed as still as I possibly could, hardly breathing, letting them take their time. I knew at a moment’s notice, they could all turn and run and I would never see them again.

These horses were small and elegant, with long manes and tails. They were swift and intelligent and had their own sense of freedom and pride. I was trying to let them know that, although I was mostly immobile, I too had integrity and self-respect. The black horse who was their leader put a hoof on me, a gesture both possessive and tender. You are mine, it said. You belong to me. He scraped my new surface, exploring it, not knowing what to make of it. Then suddenly, as the morning mist evaporated and the sun rose over the horizon, he lifted his beautiful head and neighed once. One loud call to arms as if from a brass trumpet and he galloped down my whole length, his hooves sparkling on the hardened new coat of asphalt. Soon the other horses joined him and they ran from one end to the other with thunderous joy. It was the proudest moment of my young life. I had discovered a new budding feeling of something I didn’t know existed. I had found friends!

iii.

I never forgot that first encounter with the wild horses, my new beautiful friends so strong and free. They visited me again, always in the copper-colored dawn when nobody else was around.  They shared with me their history and their worry that their habitat was shrinking. Everywhere, men were taking over, binding nature into husbandry and service. “Soon we’ll have to move away in search of territory,” they whinnied sadly. “If you have to go,” I answered, “I will miss your company. My advice is for you to head north, then east. In a night’s work, you can make it to a stretch of mountains, which divides the southern part of Sweden from the north. Some of them are moraines left over from the ice age. It’s a wild and lonely terrain. When the Swedes fought the Danes for this fertile part of the land, they often hid in caves up there. They were a small guerilla band named after the verb to grab or snatch, Snapphanare. If you follow the moraine east, you find deep dark forests north of it. I am sure you can make a home there.” I don’t know if they followed my advice, but they came by less and less often, and once men came to build the houses, I never saw them again.

MY SISTER AND HER DOG

Together we burst into the sunshine on the lawn in front of the house. The puppy runs ahead and falls behind. When we come to the wooden gate, she edges close to me and puts her wet, cold, eager nose into the palm of my hand. I feel the heat from her breath. I look up and see my sister standing by the gate with her hand lodged between her teeth. She has a wretched look on her face.

“What’s the matter?”

“The dog was a gift. The farmer had a litter and he said I could have one. I picked Molly!”

“She’s wonderful! What is the trouble?”

“Mom will never let me keep her. It’s just a game they are playing.”

I look at my sister and at Molly. “Wait here,” I say as I run into the house to grab the belt around my old bathrobe. I hear my mother’s bitter voice turning louder: “And for how long are they going to take care of it? You are never home,” she’s accusing my father and she does have a point. “I am NOT taking care of this animal! All my life I had to care for and clean up after animals. I don’t want it!”

I run out of the house to my sister and tie the belt around the dog’s collar. “Let’s go,” I say. “Let’s take Molly for a walk.  This is going to be some battle. What we need is a strategy worthy of Napoleon!” My sister has a new stiffness around her soft lips and a stern wrinkle between her eyebrows. 

“Do you remember that movie they showed us at school the last week before summer vacation?” she asks. I nod, vaguely remembering a boring documentary about the Second World War with a lot of black and white film clips of soldiers running around in mud or snow.

“WHY? How can you talk about a movie right now when we face a major emergency?”

“That’s just it,” says my smart sister. “You made me think of it when you said battle earlier. Remember? How did Hitler lose the Second World War? They talked about it in that movie. In 1941 Hitler seemed undefeatable. He had reduced England and France to helplessness and was marching toward Moscow with only minimum resistance. So what happened?”

“I really don’t know and I don’t care! We have bigger problems than a history lesson right now!”

“If we don’t learn from history’s mistakes, we’re bound to repeat them. But we won’t! Because we remember! I remember! Let’s take two lessons from Hitler’s war campaign. We can use them! Think about it. Hitler was in cahoots with Italy and Japan. They were sworn brothers-in-arms, but they didn’t present a united front—so they lost the war. You and I must present a united front at all cost and not go out on our own, like Japan did, when it attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. The attack on Pearl Harbor pulled the US into the war. Do you see? If we’re going to win this battle, we need a two-front strategy!” My sister was marching ahead as if she singlehandedly had won the Second World War. I followed.

“What do you mean? I don’t understand!”

“I mean we must approach our parents from two different directions. It’s not enough to just promise that we will care for Molly, and mom doesn’t have to do a thing. A. She won’t believe us. B. She hates animals.”

We had stopped close to the old train tracks, where Molly was sniffing at the rabbit holes and peeing on the roots of a wild honeysuckle. The flowers were still in bloom and an intoxicating scent surrounded my sister and me, and the buzzing of bees filled our ears.

“Well, what do you say?” my sister shouted impatiently. “What’s our strategy? Our plan?”

“A. She believes in school. B. She hates dishes.”

“Awww,” said my sister. “I think we have a plan. I have had some trouble with math lately, not because it’s difficult but because I hate it. And you? You have trouble in every subject besides English and Literature! You can certainly pull up your grades across the board you lazy bum.”

“And we can take turns. After dinner, when you walk Molly I’ll do the dishes and vice versa!”

THE LIBRARY

My sister was something of a Scheherazade. Her stories taught me a number of things about the art of story telling. I learned about phrasing, timing, suspense, and the importance of a mesmerizing hook. I learned to appreciate a narrative voice, dramatic structure, and dialogue. I began to recognize the spark, whistle, snap, and bite of an unexpected verb with attitude. I began to hear the lullabies of language, the musical fragrance of a sentence, the poetic leap of thought, and the magnetism of sound landscapes. Most importantly, I was given the gift of listening. This skill, so underrated in our day and time, is probably the most necessary and rarest knack we have. Without it we don’t learn or grow. Without it we’re bound to repeat the same thing again and again. We’ll be the metronome and not the music. Yet every gift comes with a shadow. The ability to listen has a dark side and the dark side has a name. The name of the dark side is lack, lack of agency, lack of control, lack of initiative, lack of authorship. I have come to believe that the first half of my life was deformed by it.

Deformed or not, my sister and I also knew how to use the library to our advantage. My parents did not go out often, as restaurants were expensive and concerts rare. Once in a while they would go to the movies. One of our babysitters was a shallow, lazy, and rather stupid young woman who would tease us and be mean. One evening after she had called my sister stupid and me silly my sister pulled me down behind the sofa and whispered. “Watch this! I know how we will get rid of her. She thinks she’s so smart and clever, but we will outsmart her and make her work for her salary for once. This will be fun. Just nod and agree!” I was still not six years old because I hadn’t yet gone to pre-school, but I already knew that when my sister had one of her ideas, I had to go along even if I did so with a thundering heart and sweaty hands. I was watching my sister climb up on the itchy sofa next to Lina, the baby sitter, and looking at her she sighed deeply.

“Lina,” she said. “My sister and I really like you and think you are our best and nicest baby sitter, so we’re a little worried. Yesterday we heard our mother talk to our father about how much work there is in this apartment and that maybe they should hire an older woman to not only babysit us but also do some kitchen work and some laundry. My father seemed to think that was a good idea and mentioned a TP (Thankful Patient) whose wife was looking for just that kind of position to earn a little extra money, as her husband is unwell. Then they both discussed the random and chaotic order of the books in the library. I mean, just look at these books. There must be hundreds of them and all of them dusty and arranged in no particular order.”

“But they are in the order of the alpha . . .,” I objected when my sister kicked me hard, aiming straight at my shin. I grabbed my hurting leg and gave her a murderous look.

“Do you girls really think that my work here might be in jeopardy?” Lina sounded alarmed. She had just spent a whole lot more money than she should have on a pink lipstick and brown mascara. She had shown her new make-up to us girls earlier in the evening. “If I lose my job right now, it would be catastrophic! What can I do? What can I do?”

My sister was looking particularly angelic with her silver crown of hair and her large golden brown eyes. 

- “Maybe we could do something with the books?” she suggested. “My mother particularly objects to its looks. Maybe we could arrange them, say, in order of size, for example?” My sister nodded her head slowly and sadly looking at the messy shelves. 

- “We could take some towels and dust off the books while we’re at it!” Ready for service, my sister jumped off the sofa and ran to the corner cabinet. She quickly pulled out the drawer filled with our grandmother’s hand-loomed towels we never used and gave Lina a couple. 

“Let’s get to work! Our mother will be so excited when she returns!” My sister handed me a towel also and winked at me.

“It’s a foolproof method, little porcupine! Since my sister always gave me nicknames after birds, I knew the porcupine was code for: play along!

We worked at the shelves for hours, and our white towels turned black from dust and grime. Finally, Lina came down the ladder and took a step back to inspect the effect of our work. Most of the shelves were now organized from tallest book spine to least tall. Lina nodded with delight and told us it was a great improvement sure to please the Mrs. Doctor and secure Lina’s position. 

“I might even get a raise,” she mused happily. “But now you young ladies must go to bed. Don’t forget to brush your teeth!” Usually, on baby sitting evenings, I would sneak into my sister’s bed and fall asleep to one of her stories, but this particular evening I was so worn out by re-arranging and cleaning all those books, my hands and arms aching, so I just climbed into my narrow bed and fell into a deep sleep. I didn’t hear my parents return that evening, but woke up to my mother’s horrified scream. She screamed louder than the Christmas pig when my grandfather slaughtered it. I dug myself down under the covers and pretended to sleep, a sly smile on my unwashed face.