Sleet: Selected Stories

By the time he begins his third round of the day, every building he comes to is empty and silent. The stairwells smell of dust and desolation. The shops are all closed, and his clacking footsteps echo over every cobblestone courtyard. The Church of Catherine’s tolling bell chases him every fifteen minutes, hastening him on from doorway to doorway. On each and every mail carrier’s route the tolling bells of some church lash out like a long, harsh whip. The air is now stifling, and there are no shadows on the streets. The weak blue smoke of afternoon hangs over every courtyard. All those who have gone away for the holiday have drawn their blinds, and so all the buildings seem to be in mourning.

When he comes home again, his father is gone. In the big room with the full-length mirror on the doors, his mother sits in front of the clothespress, teasing out her hair. Under her stool is a wadded-up handkerchief. She has been crying. Håkan goes into his room.

He lies on his bed and leafs through his English grammar textbook as far as Should/Would. Then his mother comes in and sits at the foot of the bed, letting the silence between them grow warm before she says anything. The sounds of the city meanwhile needle their way into the room: a steamboat in the harbor sounding a loud whistle, thick with anxiety; a window slamming shut with a bang, panes a-rattle; an ambulance with its morbid music approaching and then disappearing again slowly, leaving behind a trail of disquiet. His mother grabs hold of his ankles with a sudden force that is still somehow feeble.

“You really should go outside,” she whispers. “Go out and have some fun. It’s Midsummer’s Eve. You can’t stay inside on Midsummer’s Eve. I won’t let you.”

The Church of Catherine’s bell sounds a single tone, soft like a piano note. Håkan closes his eyes but says nothing. She leaves him alone. After a little while he hears his father come home, hears his steps faltering as he bumps into things in the kitchen, first opening and then closing cupboard doors, then knocking chairs into one another. Full of regrets he has probably brought home flowers, tulips most likely. As he lumbers back and forth in the large room, Håkan’s mother is silent. After a good while, it seems they have become friends. Words are exchanged in muted tones. His father’s steps now creak in the corridor, approaching Håkan’s door. When he knocks Håkan scrambles out of bed and moves to the window. His father enters the room and approaches Håkan from behind, excruciatingly slow. Then comes the arm hooked round the neck, the murderously suffocating embrace.

“You can’t sit here at home, boy,” he says. “Not on Midsummer’s Eve.”

The father lifts up Håkan’s face, holding it in his hands like a stone.

“OK,” the boy says. “I’ll leave.”

“Take my bike,” the father says to the stone. “It’s out on the street.”

And so he takes the bike and rides down Katarinavägen. It’s an old bike, with fenders that rattle. The city is quiet. The only noise seems to come from his own clattering fenders. Through the thin blue haze of ferry smoke and dusk he can make out the light-spangled serpent of the amusement park across the water, writhing about in powerless despair. He rides around the wide and meandering harbor shore and then casts himself in among the lights and sounds of the bustling crowds with his fenders clattering. Like a leper, he thinks, since he has read somewhere how lepers fasten warning bells to their clothes. On the winding, shadow-soaked roads of Djurgården he startles a hare and more than one amorous couple. No one else is riding a bike. In all of creation’s vast expanse, he is the only one journeying forth on a bicycle. If I wasn’t on this bike, he thinks, I wouldn’t be so alone.