A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (31 page)

Yes, you do look very calm in the picture, your hands firmly gripping the pipe for bending, and your eyes fixed on the vise it’s clamped in.

Another photo: the Rosenberg family at the round table in the living room. On the table, a white lace cloth and the Vibergen prospectus. Your right hand’s holding up the prospectus, and your left is on my shoulder. I’m wearing a checked shirt and leather suspenders and looking down at the prospectus. Lilian’s eight months old, sitting on Mom’s knee and looking up into the camera. “Within the next year, the Rosenbergs hope to be living
under their own roof,” runs the caption. The piece that accompanies the pictures is headlined “
HOME AT LAST
,” and it relates

Well, that’s undeniably the way it may look; as if Södertälje were the last stop on your journey, and as if your future beneath the factory-subsidized roof were all mapped out already. It is, after all, an extremely favorable offer, practically a gift, from the truck factory, since it’s not only interest-free but also written off at an annual rate of 10 percent, which means that after ten years you owe nothing without having repaid anything. Assuming, of course, that you stay on at the factory for another ten years. If you want to leave before that, you’ll have to pay back the outstanding amount of the loan. If you want to leave after five years, you’ll have to pay back half. You say nothing in the magazine piece about your ambitions to be something other than a pipe fitter. Getting the loan requires no ambition. Getting the loan requires that you continue to be an able and industrious assembler at Scania-Vabis in Södertälje for another ten years. The house in Vibergen is, in short, the happy ending to the story of David Rosenberg from Poland and his family. Home at last.

It seems to me that the writer of the article in
Kilometern
does what he can to overcome the confusion of languages, the onerous kind. He writes of “the chimneys of the extermination camps,” of your brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers going up in smoke before your eyes in Auschwitz, of the dead and frozen bodies in the open freight cars on the railroad track en route to Ravensbrück, of the nineteen-year-old American soldier who on seeing you and Natek in Wöbbelin “bursts into floods of tears.”

Yet nowhere does he say that you’re Jews. The word “Jews” doesn’t occur in the text, nor the word “ghetto.” Is it because you don’t mention them? Is it because the writer doesn’t want to complicate the story?

A few weeks later, you receive a letter from the writer:

I see this letter as a sign that after ten years, the two of you give the impression of being at home. At any rate, you give the impression of being potential subscribers to
Dagens Nyheter
. A subscription to
Dagens Nyheter
is scarcely an issue one would raise with people who give the impression that they’re on their way somewhere else. Among the memory fragments from the two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue, there’s definitely the glint of a morning paper. I’d like to say it’s
Dagens Nyheter
, but it might just as well have been the local paper. The brightest glint comes from the glossy weekly
Folket i Bild
, which means “The People in Pictures.”
Folket i Bild
has large pictures on its covers. On one cover there’s a naked woman cooking food in a kitchen. On the inside there’s an illustrated story about nudists, which is a word I learn from
Folket i Bild
.

No newspapers ever get delivered to Vibergen. The following year, the address is gone from the telephone directory. The following year, we’re not under our own roof in Vibergen but in the small two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue. Nothing comes of Vibergen but a painstakingly cleared forest slope. This has something to do with the loan and the factory. With the fact that the conditions of the loan have tightened and the costs have risen, so that the ties to the factory have stiffened. With the fact that the factory doesn’t want you as anything other than an able and industrious pipe fitter. You don’t want to tie yourself to the factory for another ten years on those terms. The snow has long since melted and the air has become warm and humid and the mosquitoes are dancing in the evening sunshine above the whitewood stakes marking our plot at Vibergen when you close the prospectus for the last time and decline the loan and the house and the future mapped out by the factory.

I like to think the car has something to do with it. At any rate, the car comes into the picture the same summer as Vibergen disappears from it. It’s a hot summer, as I said, and the wind is blowing through the open side windows, and the freedom of the road tickles the nostrils, but a new Volkswagen, the 1955 model, costs 6,375 kronor (almost half your annual salary), “including delivery to Hälsingborg,” and even if you can purchase it with a staff discount from the truck factory and perhaps a small personal loan as well, it’s still hard to understand why you say no to the house but yes to the car—unless the car is part of a plan for another future than the one already mapped out.

Be that as it may, this is the point at which you invent and construct a luggage rack for VW Beetles. It’s made of “top-quality tubular steel” painted a matte silver shade “to go with any automobile color” and simply slots into two holders screwed to the back bumper mounts. Thus fixed, a bit outside the rear hatch and just above the license plate, this platform can accommodate two stacked suitcases or a bicycle or everything one needs for a picnic. It’s an ingenious construction that admittedly has the slight disadvantage of needing to be removed if one has to check the oil or change the fan belt or do anything else that requires opening the rear hatch, but on the other hand the rack can be neatly folded and stowed away in that little space under the front hood and above the gas tank that’s not much use for anything else. You name your invention the Piccolo, weld together a couple of prototypes all by yourself, and market it with a spartan leaflet, slipped under the windshield wipers of every VW in sight. On a few Sundays I come along
to help out and keep you company, and I don’t know too much what it’s all about, but a Beetle I can recognize, and the windshield wipers I can reach, and I manage to place a few leaflets. “Volkswagen owners! Novelty!” it says at the top of the leaflet, and below are two pictures of our black and still shiny VW with the Piccolo mounted on the back and the Piccolo folded in the front, and a presentation text written by yourself, concluding with “Yours faithfully” and a signature. It’s a well-written and informative text, telling the reader that “Piccolo doesn’t come into direct contact with the bodywork, obscure the license plate or brake light, or obstruct the air-cooling system.” At the bottom of the leaflet there’s an order form that can be cut off along the black line and sent directly to D. Rosenberg, 42A Hertig Carls väg, Södertälje, to place an order for a Piccolo “at 55 kronor plus shipping, with full right of return within eight days.”

I have to admit to a certain partiality here, but the Piccolo’s a splendid invention that efficiently and elegantly solves a luggage problem inherent in all VW Beetles. It’s a splendid leaflet, too, personal and persuasive, even providing our telephone number—0755/38157—which can be called anytime before 8 p.m. You assure the reader that the Piccolo has been subjected to strenuous testing and has proved itself “the sturdy, convenient, and reliable luggage carrier with which all VW owners should be equipped.”

I don’t know what strenuous testing you subject the Piccolo to, but Anders and I subject it to two children swinging up and down on it, which makes the Beetle rock violently while the Piccolo stays firmly in place. The matte silver color gives the Piccolo’s tubular steel a silky surface that feels warm to naked skin, a detail that the leaflet neglects to mention.

Much later, I’m holding the yellowing leaflet in my hand, astonished by your energy and initiative. Where do you find the time to do all this? I don’t remember anybody helping you. Yours is the only name on the leaflet. It is to you that customers are told to phone or write. You’re the inventor, manufacturer, and salesman, all in one. You’re working forty-eight hours a week at the truck factory and you’re clearing a forest plot in Vibergen and you’re the father of two children in a tiny one-room apartment below the railroad station and you design, make, and sell the Piccolo.

I don’t know how many Piccolos you make and sell. All I know is that the Piccolo disappears from our lives as abruptly as Vibergen.

Or maybe the Piccolo disappears first.

Or maybe the two disappearances are connected.

The memory fragments refuse to piece themselves together.

Much later, I can see how alone you are with your invention. There’s no evidence of a partner or financial backer.

Much later, I’m surprised at how far you get with it, alone.

I don’t know what causes the project to founder in the end, but I suspect it’s lack of capital and contacts and possibly, when
I think about it, a lack of that kind of boldness that borders on foolhardiness. You’re bold enough to invest, but not foolhardy enough to keep on once you realize the risks you’re running. Or rather, once the fear of risking the life you have gets its claws into your ambitions to start a new life. At any event, this is how I, much later, feel impelled to interpret the momentary explosion of energy and activity and confidence in those first years after the Israel crossroads, and the equally swift retreat to your starting point as an able and industrious fitter, bending pipes at the truck factory. You simply cannot be allowed to fail, and when the demons of failure get their claws into you anyway, you lack the required boldness (or foolhardiness) to take up the fight. The Piccolo fades away, leaving behind an unembellished black Volkswagen Beetle, and Vibergen becomes a small two-room apartment on the other side of the rowanberry avenue, where the kitchen window looks down on the outer harbor and some small villa gardens, their apples ripe for swiping as the hot summer of 1955 turns into fall.

In the year 1955, 25,452 VW Beetles are sold in Sweden. One in every five cars sold is a Beetle. The Beetle’s the best-selling make of car in the country. A Piccolo on one out of every hundred, at least to start with, and you would have owned your own business and lived in a house of your own. Now I see only one Piccolo in the Södertälje area, and I don’t recall us ever using it for anything but tests.

Do you ever have doubts?

I mean, not just about the invention, but about the Beetle itself, which after all was Hitler’s contribution to motoring. Much later, I come to understand that there were people who wouldn’t even consider driving a VW, let alone buying one, but when the import ban on foreign cars is lifted in 1954 and the Beetle
becomes the best-selling car in Sweden, few people associate it with Hitler.

I associate the Beetle with you.

With your tanned elbow leaning out of the open side window and the warm breeze blowing through your hair as the car zooms along, and the silvery Piccolo visible through the back window, following us on its sturdy bumper mounts.

I associate the uniform with the Beetle too. It’s a greenish sort of gray and has big breast pockets with deep pleats and bulging buttons, and a folded cap tucked under the shoulder strap, and really seems too heavy to wear in summer, but it’s early summer or late spring and you’re behind the wheel and we drive down an avenue of tall trees to a big, grand house and I see men in uniforms through the side window and gray-green military trucks through the windshield. I don’t know where we are, or why, but it has something to do with the uniform.