Sleet: Selected Stories

Mornings in the cramped kitchen smell of bedclothes, coffee, and gas. His father drinks from the faucet, making slurping sounds, as his mother stands in front of the mirror combing her long black hair. The boy, Håkan, sits half-dressed, with his back against the firewood rack, sipping scalding-hot coffee. When his father is ready, he lifts the little sack with his Thermos off the firewood rack and leaves with a short, mute nod. When his mother has finished combing her hair she opens the window and cleans out the comb over the courtyard. Håkan goes into his little room and makes the bed, then smokes a cigarette as he pages through a book with clammy fingers. It is a hot, stupid summer, the summer of his failure. Right above his chair hangs his new uniform jacket, with its armband bearing the postal insignia. He thinks it looks like a mourning band.

Sometimes he takes his schoolbooks out of the little sugar crate under the window and sits down on the floor in the middle of the room to look through them. It’s a stupid and pointless exercise, a way of punishing himself. Yet he does it all the same with a kind of merciless gloating, as if he were his own worst enemy. Poor kids often have old schoolbooks their parents have picked up at used bookstores, scarred with the marks and stains of others before them. On the front page just inside the cover the name of the book’s original owner can usually be found sketched out in bold block letters impossible to rub away. Poor kids write their names under this first one in weak lead letters that are easy to erase, so their mothers can get a better price when they sell the books back at the end of the school year. His books are filled with marks and notes from a string of previous owners, and he sometimes thinks that this is why he failed. It’s not alright for poor kids to fail, partly because of the shame and partly because of the cost. On some of these hot stupid June mornings, just before he packs off to the post office, he stands there in the middle of the room flipping painfully through his old schoolbooks. Then he carefully sets them back in their little crate, as if he’d broken some taboo. And maybe he has. They are no longer his. They are forfeit. Each and every book will be sold back again in August, just before the start of the new school year.

The morning of Midsummer’s Eve begins like any other day: it is hot and he is sluggish, his bag heavy with bulk mail. The streets smell faintly of birch bloom and gasoline. His skin prickles in the sun. The bells begin to chime at the Stockholm Community Center. On the corner of Götgatan and Folkungagatan, his English teacher comes bounding up to the street from the subway, whistling, a leather briefcase swinging from his hand. This is a teacher who inspires fear, always whistling right before he pounces. He sees Håkan and greets him with the kind of forced cheer with which teachers always meet their students during vacations. Håkan is lugging too much bulk mail to shake the teacher’s hand.

“Well, Mr. Bergström,” the teacher says. “Highly commendable — your taking a job during the summer break!”

“It’s not a break,” Håkan answers. “I’m done with school.”

The teacher gets embarrassed then, as if he’d mistaken Håkan for someone else, and hustles along on his way, still whistling. To be a schoolboy and a mail carrier is commendable. But to be just a mail carrier, and nothing more, that’s another story. No one will sing his praises for that. If he gets stuck between floors in an elevator, he’ll likely be chided for not having taken the stairs in the first place. If he delivers a bent-up letter, the disgruntled recipient will probably open the door and yell down the stairwell that it’s the goddamned carrier’s fault. If he rings a doorbell because an envelope can’t fit through the mail slot, he’ll get an earful for making someone get up out of her sick bed, as if he should have known she was sick to begin with. If he forces an oversized envelope in through the slot the next time round, the very same person, now well again, may be outraged over possible damage to the parcel’s valuable contents.