Sleet: Selected Stories

People hear voices saying that things were better before [Hitler’s defeat], but they isolate these voices from the circumstances in which their owners find themselves and they listen to them in the same way as we listen to voices on the radio. They call this objectivity because they lack the imagination to visualize these circumstances and indeed, on the grounds of moral decency, they would reject such an imagination because it would appeal to an unreasonable degree of sympathy. People analyze: in fact it is a kind of blackmail to analyze the political leanings of the hungry without at the same time analyzing hunger.

An imagination that appeals to an unreasonable degree of sympathy is precisely what makes Dagerman’s fiction so evocative. Evocative not, as one might expect, of despair, or bleakness, or existential angst, but of compassion, fellow-feeling, even love. The brief story “To Kill a Child,” as unsparing as it is — “Because life is constructed in such a merciless fashion, even one minute before a cheerful man kills a child he can still feel entirely at ease” — ends up being a lament, not a shrug; a lament for all of us at the mercy of merciless time, unwitting victims of life’s circumstances. Dagerman rivals Joyce in his ability to depict the intractable loneliness of childhood, but time and again, in stories like “The Surprise,” “The Games of Night,” and the marvelous “Sleet,” he tempers this loneliness with brief gestures of hope, connectedness: the poem on the phonograph record, the bright coins from his father’s drinking companions, the warm hand of the aunt from America. There are tears in these stories, for sure, cruelties, eruptions of violence, but none of this is offered without pity and even in his stories in which irony reigns — “Men of Character,” “Bon Soir” — Dagerman never turns a cold eye on his creations.

Greta in “Bon Soir,” a ship’s dishwasher with teeth that “look like they’re covered in cement, sweating cement,” has propositioned Sune, the story’s fifteen-year-old protaganist. He is repulsed by her but also charmed by the thought of a woman waiting for him in one of the ship’s cabins. And then, while the boat is docked, he sees her being led away by two detectives; he later learns she has been spreading venereal disease in the port.

As he approaches the gangplank Sune notices something peculiar and disquieting. Paul and the drunken first mate and several others are just standing around on the foredeck, idly waiting for something. And now the door swings open and out steps the small, slender man in the trench coat. He turns and holds the door for Greta, as the large, heavy-set man with the cigar clenched between his teeth walks directly behind her with a small, shabby suitcase in his right hand. In single file they walk up the foredeck gangplank and suddenly Greta spots him there. She looks up at him hastily, and later he will think back on that look many times — something impossible to forget.

“Bon soir,” she says and almost drops her handbag. “Bon soir.” And that’s when he notices she is crying.

Life may be merciless, but the creator of this scene — who notes Greta’s shabby suitcase, her hasty look, her pitiful “Bon soir,” her fumbled handbag, her tears — is not.

The long last story collected here, “Where’s My Icelandic Sweater?” is both a comic masterpiece and a heartbreaking depiction of degradation and loneliness. Knut is a bore, a drunk, a braggart, and yet even as the reader is absorbed into his careening and very funny interior monologue of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-delusion, we are given the opportunity to recognize, too, the very human longing at the heart of his nature. Like the cheerful man in “To Kill A Child,” what Knut wants is a simple impossibility: to gain back a single minute of his life.

Here on the old man’s couch, stripped pretty much naked, blubbering … And this is where we sat, me and him, the last time we ever saw each other … this is right where the old man put his arm around me and gave me a big squeeze. And then he got up and went over to that dresser there and rummaged around in the drawer for something. After a while he got his hands on what he was after and he laid it out right here on the table. A little sweater.

“’Member this, Knut?” he said to me. “’Member this Icelandic sweater? I picked it up for you one Christmas in the city. And you, well, I ain’t never seen a kid so goddamned pleased with anything in my life …”

I could do with that Icelandic sweater right about now. The old man, he had it in his hands the last time I was here. I sure could do with it, alright, to hold under the blanket whiles I think about the old man.