Sleet: Selected Stories

For seasoned mail carriers, buildings become familiar as they do for no one else. Every building has its own distinct smell, whether pleasing or repugnant. There are proud buildings, like those on Folkungagatan, redolent of dining rooms and dusty carpets, and there are those like the ones on Södermannagatan that are honest and clean, if poor, exuding the sour aroma of mop and scouring brush. And then there are friendless, poorly-lit buildings that reek of squalor and poverty, like the ones on Kocksgatan. There are also buildings where invisible shadows linger in the stairwells and vestibules, where throats seem to close in on themselves as soon as those spaces are entered. On Folkungagatan, for instance, there is a building where a man was trapped inside during a fire and burned to death, and on Södermannagatan there is a particular doorway Håkan always hurries past apprehensively because a double murder occurred there. On the top floor of a building on Kocksgatan a young couple were asphyxiated by the gas stove. It happened so recently that he still has to deliver mail for them that arrives now and then from Norway. A picture postcard of Oslo Harbor came in the beginning of June, and even though it was in Norwegian he could make out the message: “We’re waiting to hear from you!” Then in the middle of June another card came: “Congratulations on your thirtieth birthday! We do so hope to get a letter from you soon!”

And now on Midsummer’s Eve day, during his second round of deliveries, another thick letter has arrived for them. He stands outside their door holding the letter in his hand, warming it for a long moment, before he lets it fall through the mail slot. He imagines writing a response to the return address in uncertain Norwegian: “Dear Unknown Friends: A letter carrier in the third district of Stockholm regrets to inform you that …”

But nothing comes of it. Nothing ever comes of anything. During his second round he is tired. The soles of his feet burn as though he’s been walking on hot stones and he keeps getting a cramp in his side in those buildings without elevators. A mushroom distributor on his route takes a whole armful of magazines off his hands. There’s only one building on Kocksgatan that smells nice, the one with the specialty store that deals in tropical lumber. Must be all that good foreign wood, he imagines. Today the store receives small oblong envelopes with hard contents. He once delivered a heavy packet there all the way from India. Wouldn’t it be great, he muses, if someday he had to deliver a palm tree there? He pictures a really big palm tree with coconuts hanging from the top and imagines all the letter carriers from Stockholm 4 coming along to help him carry it there. He would be the one to go in and knock on the office door, since it’s his route. Excuse me, he would say, a big package has come for you. A really big package. We’ve left it out on the sidewalk.

During the break between the second and third rounds of the day Håkan stops back home, where his father is sitting in the hot kitchen, shirt unbuttoned, drinking vodka with a couple of his co-workers. Håkan has removed the postal armband and stuffed it into his pocket because he doesn’t want to draw attention to his failure. But somehow it seems to show on him anyway, because all of a sudden his father says: “After five years of the best schooling Stockholm’s got to offer, you can bet your sweet ass Håkan’s more than qualified to lug people’s letters around town.” Håkan’s mother gets up then from the stool near the sink where she has been sitting by herself, listening, just listening. She leaves the kitchen, biting down on her lip as if to stifle an outburst.

Håkan himself goes into his little room and stands at the window. The sky is mostly clear and blue. Three white clouds drift in over the back lots of Södermalm, riding high in the sky like fugitive summer balloons. A woman is pulling laundry from a clothesline. Another is setting out potted plants in hopeful anticipation of rain. A man just across the way, in rare Midsummer form, whacks his wife on the fingers as they beat a rug together. Someone opens a window, and a gramophone starts to sing to the accompaniment of the drunken carpet-beater. Håkan’s mother enters the room behind him, but he doesn’t turn around. She sets a tray of food on his little table and goes out again. From somewhere in one of the other buildings, a baby begins to wail in a loud red tone that infiltrates every quarter in the chain of apartment houses. Down in one of the courtyards a street musician is playing the accordion, looking up at the apartments’ back windows with hopeful eyes, but the buildings are vacant as they can be only at Midsummer, and just a single penny clatters down on the cobblestones at his feet.