Sleet: Selected Stories

There are some people who never do anything to be loved and yet still are. And then there are those who do everything to be loved, but never are. The very poor, it could be said, often find it hard to be loved. When Håkan’s mother had been a widow for five years, her father-in-law turned seventy. They were invited to his birthday celebration in the form of a short, curt letter some eight lines long; it read:

Of course you’re free to come if you want to, Elsa, but you got to bring your own bedding ’cause its cold in the back room. Besides, some people’s probably gonna have to sleep in the hallway. You ain’t the only ones coming. There’s the bank clerk and the store manager Mr. Jonsson. Both of them’s been invited and they’ll probably sleep in the living room. If you can come up a day ahead of time, then that would be nice. We’ll need some help with the cleaning and the tables and the cooking.

Best,

Irma

p. s. I’m sure there’s a few other things, like the dishes and such, that’ll have to be taken care of afterwards, and maybe Håkan can chop some firewood.

Håkan’s mother read the letter out loud one night under the lamp. She was tired and she gripped the edge of the writing table with both hands as she read. For the whole day she had been cleaning the ceiling of a large, lush apartment in Östermalm, and she had a terrible headache from all the hours spent with her head crooked upwards. After she finished reading, both she and Håkan sat quietly for a while without looking at one another. Håkan began flipping through his geography book: the waterfalls at Trollhättan have a natural beauty … the Dutch are a cleanly folk who scrub their pavements daily … under Mussolini’s harsh but effective rule, these unsanitary swamps were nonetheless drained … from Chile comes a fertilizer we call guano …

Håkan’s mother stared out into the room. Her hands were completely alone as they crumpled the letter into a rough ball. As he looked at those hands, Håkan could see that they were ashamed. The hands of the poor are always ashamed. They worked to smooth out the letter again, but it kept its wrinkles, like the face of an old woman.

That night the light burned long over the small desk, and Håkan went to sleep quite late. For a while he thought his mother had fallen asleep with the light on. But when he raised himself up carefully on his elbows, he could see that her eyes were still open. And he could see her hands on top of the blanket, at first crumpling up and then smoothing back out a small invisible letter.

The next night the light burned even longer. Fully dressed, his mother sat at his father’s old desk, writing. It was a letter that never seemed to be finished. By the time Håkan went to sleep, the desk top was littered with wadded balls of inkstained paper. When he awoke in the middle of the night, it was cold, and his mother was sitting on the edge of his bed. She was holding her hand on his forehead, as if he were running a fever. She waited until he was fully awake and then looked him in the eyes.

“It’s only twelve o’clock,” she said. “How do you spell ‘century’? With a ‘c’ or an ‘s’?”

The alarm clock said quarter past one. “C,” he whispered. He heard her tiptoe quietly back to the small desk and begin scratching with her pen. Then he fell back to sleep and slept the deep sleep of a child until morning.