Sleet: Selected Stories

One time on the hillside by the river we found an old deck of left-behind cards half-destroyed by the rain. Only the queen of spades was still in fairly good shape, and I remember very well the many different ways this could be interpreted by those of us who were more experienced.

When the washtubs simmered on the bank of the river, we would steal matches from the wood pile and light them up in the dark behind some barn wall. This gave us a gruesome pleasure which somehow made life even more doubly complex than it already was. I remember my friend Inge once took a single match to an entire box of stolen matches. When it burst into a hissing flame he flung it out through the air and into the creek. And I remember thinking what a terrible sin it was to waste something you had just stolen. No, we were never as moral as we were in those days.

To us, the most important bits of knowledge often came in whispers. In the hallway at school, terror had a way of sinking its claws into you, because that’s where you were often pointed out by some secret whisper that could be followed from mouth to mouth. And the strangest thing about it was that you never got to know what your own secret was all about. It could be whispered of someone that his house was infested with lice, or of someone else that she had peed in her pants in class and had to stay in during recess to clean it up. But of my own supposed offences I was never once allowed to hear.

By inscrutable means, everything that required quiet talk found its way to our ears. One boy in the fourth grade was known to have tormented animals. It was common knowledge that he had once lured a tomcat into a cage full of hens, with disastrous results, and that afterwards the teacher had gone to his house to lecture him about it. Even though he was only in the fourth grade, he was already wearing a grown-up’s long trousers. He was tall, with shoulders that hunched forward. And during recess he would walk around kicking stones, and always by himself, because the judge that was somewhere inside all of us had long ago condemned him to a life of exile.

At recess we would lie in the green grass and bite pine cones to the core, or we would take turns trying to kick a broken tennis ball through a small hole in the school fence — one time I even managed to get it through, even though I was from Stockholm. The girls, on the other hand, would stand in small groups by the schoolhouse wall. The line between us was hard and fixed, like nothing else.

Speaking of the judge within us, it happened during one recess that the boy who abused animals — his name was Sivert — got yelled at by the teacher for scuffing up his shoes on some rocks in the school yard. They were actually the county’s shoes, because his family was too poor to buy him a pair on their own. When the teacher turned his back, Sivert twisted his face into a wild grimace. And then another boy ran to the teacher’s side. We called this other boy the Thief because it was well known that he had once stolen the janitor’s glasses during gym.

“Mr. Andersson,” the Thief cried out. “Sivert just stuck his tongue out at you!”

Suddenly the teacher whirled around and with one hand he grabbed Sivert by both cheeks, palming his face and pulling him up to the tips of his toes. He leaned forward so that his and Sivert’s eyes were just a few inches apart. And that’s how they stayed for a long minute, silently staring at each other. But at last he lowered Sivert back to the ground. Releasing his grip, he turned abruptly and headed up towards the school. But then to everyone’s shock Sivert stuck out his tongue again, his expression much uglier this time. Yet before the Thief had a chance to yell anything out, one of us grabbed him by the mouth and forced it shut. Something told us the whole thing had gone far enough.

We had our own system of justice, a code for measuring the seriousness of a crime, and the punishments were carefully chosen. Stealing was nothing compared with torturing animals. Once when the Thief was standing at the blackboard the teacher reached down into the Thief’s pocket and found that it was full of chalk. He had to stay behind when we went out for recess, so we waited for him at the bottom of the steps, gripped with fear, restless with admiration. When he finally came out, we had a feeling that something about him was different. A smell? His way of walking? Of spitting? And hostile as always when encountering the unfamiliar, we remained coldly silent. But the Thief jumped towards us, excitedly.

“I got to keep the chalk!” he said. “He only pulled my hair, the bastard! He said to me, ‘It starts with a piece of thread and ends with your neighbor’s bread.’ But I got to keep the chalk!”