Sleet: Selected Stories

At a clearing along the shore, he lays the bike down on the ground. It is late now but still very light out. Empty white boats glide past with gulls trailing in their smoky plumes. He sits and follows their course with his eyes until they disappear in the dusk with their stern flags drooping. One of them blows its horn as a warning to the Tegelvik ferry, as if crossly scolding a dog. Everywhere he turns the evening is alive with music. Small campfires flicker on nearby islands and distant bluffs, with fires that leap out suddenly and stretch their flaming tongues over the water. From the dark gap where the mouth of Hammarby Canal meets the harbor, a white sail glides out toward him like a letter through a mail slot. In long silhouettes the cranes at the Stockholm shipyards stand out in rows against the skyline like lizards, their heads bent sharply forward as if preparing to drink from the water. Higher in the sky, more or less directly over his territory, hover clouds blackened as if gutted by fire yet radiant around their edges. He has read a book recently in which clouds of this sort were called “sleeping wrecks.” In an apartment deep below these clouds his father has just fallen asleep with his mouth open, hands folded against his chest. And at an open window stands his mother, combing her black hair before bed.

One day a palm tree will arrive from Africa for the specialty lumber dealer on Kocksgatan. It will be hard to get it around that tight corner there at the intersection of Östgötagatan, but in the end he knows that they’ll manage it nevertheless.

In time he begins to feel the evening chill, and so he takes up his father’s bike and rides again, clattering through the twilit night, off toward the sleeping wrecks.

Bon Soir

He knows precious little about life, the boy who mans the ferry newsstand, this fifteen-year-old who becomes so tongue-tied and ashamed one Sunday when he is startled by the cook’s husband up above the dock. The boy is loitering on the exposed rock between some bushes, poking and jabbing in through the branches with a sharp piece of board he found down near the shoreline. Who knows what rogues might be lurking behind them? And what better way to rout them out? But when the cook’s husband appears out of nowhere, the boy stammers something about there being wasps’ nests in those bushes, maybe even rats, then he gathers up his dignity and heads off to the other side of the cove, beyond the sunken barge, to lay in the sun on a shelf of high exposed rock. Nearby a dirty little canal wide enough for a rowboat flows out under an overhanging thicket, extending a small gray finger into the clear water. This is the very spot where he asked Barbro, the kitchen helper, if she’d like to play Adam and Eve one evening when they went for a swim. When she replied, “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” he lost his nerve and wished he’d never said it.

It turns out that there’s a good deal he desires but cannot find the nerve to do this summer. The little notebook he always carries in his pocket is littered with scribblings of those desires: he feels like a string that has yet to be played, a taut string fearful of being plucked lest it should break, or like a dynamo spinning and spinning without any outcome.

Now he lies here on the rock shelf in the broiling sun, drawing a small sailboat as it tacks in the sound. His boat isn’t bad, but he can’t say as much for his attempts to catch the water’s reflections shimmering in the midday heat or the flock of gulls that dive continuously into a yellow slick of something a couple sailors have poured out over a gunwale. On another island, just across the sound, two girls in red bathing suits are moving along the shore with small, timid steps, as music plays above them from a gramophone atop a rock cliff. Maybe they are afraid of snakes, which is enough to make anyone’s bare feet dart anxiously from toe to toe as they eye the grass before them. In boots you’re apt to take fearful lumbering steps as you whistle up into the empty air with a bit too much gusto. The strides of fear come in all walks, sure enough.