The Ice Cream Man (20 page)

“Is Mom there?”

“Yes.”

“What’s Mom doing there in the middle of the night?”

“Why are you calling at this hour? Do you know what time it is?”

She goes silent.

“Do you know?”

“It’s a bit difficult to call from here.”

“Where are you?”

Kerstin yanks the receiver away. “Gunilla, you are where you are. Listen to me. You’re a big girl.”

“Mom?”

“If you don’t want to tell us where you are or who you’re with, that’s perfectly OK.”

“No, it’s not!” I roar.

“Don’t mind your father; he knows all too well what the boys are like over there.”

“Mom, pass the phone back to Dad.”

“Why haven’t you phoned me—even once? When has your father ever understood you?”

“Kerstin, give me the phone now.”

“Dad?”

“Is there anything else you want to say?” I ask once I have the phone back.

Gunilla goes quiet, so quiet that I think the line has been disconnected.

“Do you have enough money?”

“Yeah.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Just fantastic, Dad.”

VII

THE ROOM IN OLOMOUC

Once you’ve stepped inside, you’ll never get out again, because this is the direction in which you are born. I am the fly on the ceiling, but I am also the ceiling. You may call me The Room.

A young soldier on his way back from an evening’s leave gropes Gunilla on the train between Prague and Olomouc. It happens when she can’t find a seat and ends up standing in the cramped corridor with her backpack. Gunilla isn’t happy with her new perm and feels ugly. Her frizzy bangs stick up too much, revealing her broad forehead and high hairline. She stares out the window as the dirty-green crowd staggers past, laughing. The last one grabs her bottom and brazenly presses up against her. As he molests her, the clanking of the rails rises to deaden her ears; the metallic hammering is so loud that Gunilla barely notices her compressed space against the window and the soldier’s boozy exhalations. Only when she sees the expression on the soldier’s face as he goes on his way does she realize what he’s done with his hands.

Gunilla’s distress is noticed through the glass door of a seating compartment. From the compartment comes an expression of pity, and she is beckoned inside. She squeezes in to sit with a family and spends the rest of the journey glaring at the window to the corridor, awkwardly, past the family’s stares.

Despite all this, the first Czech word Gunilla learns is
zmrzlina.

Ice cream.

The landlady leads Gunilla up the stairs to the top floor of the house. Yet another staircase looms at the end of the corridor on the top floor, but it leads to the attic, where only pigeons live. The landlady opens the door to the room and gives Gunilla a push ahead of her. The air is musty, and the room is so dark that Gunilla’s eyes, not yet adjusted from the bright sunlight outdoors, can’t make out anything inside. The landlady pulls aside the heavy curtains and wrenches the tall window wide open, letting in a surge of light and air that instantly reveals the entire room, down to the tiniest detail. Over to the right are kitchen cupboards, a sink, and a cooker. There is a chipped enamel dishwashing bowl by the sink with a greasy brown stripe on the bottom from evaporated dirty water. In the middle of the room is a wooden table with two chairs. The floor is raised and springy in places, like plywood blistered with moisture. Along the wall on the right is a bed; the mattress is thick but hard. At the foot of the bed against the wall stands a massive wardrobe with one of its doors hanging at a slight angle. There is style and dignity in the size of this room. You could furnish it with anything kitschy and it would retain its breeding, like a woman with shabby clothes covering her excellent bone structure.

The landlady peers at Gunilla’s passport for a long time, not because there is anything unclear in it, but because her eyesight is so bad. Gunilla pays one month’s rent in deutsche mark notes and reclaims her passport. It has been a long time since the landlady has been surprised by anything, but she cannot help asking Gunilla in German, “What has brought you to Olomouc,
mein Kind
?” Gunilla takes the question at face value and replies that it was the train:
“Der Zug.”
The woman gives Gunilla the key to the room and makes her swear she will look after it. There is no spare key. It disappeared with the previous tenant.

Shouldn’t you have the lock changed?
Gunilla wonders, but she is too shy to say anything.

The landlady almost forgets to show her the mailboxes along the wall in the stairwell. The one for Gunilla’s room is second from the left, and it opens with the room key. There is no name on the mailbox, but the room number will be enough if something arrives in the post, the landlady explains. Gunilla knows she won’t receive any mail here, but she inserts the key into the lock as if to assure the landlady that she won’t be any trouble. The mailbox opens to the side. The bottom is slanted, and a large stack of identical unbleached envelopes falls into her arms and onto the floor as if skidding down a small slide.

The landlady gives a sigh. “Are those still coming? Milena could have told them her new address.” They spend some time picking up the letters, and the landlady stuffs them into her apron pocket.

There is a small shop on the corner where Gunilla goes to buy some bread, cheese, and eggs. In the checkout line, she turns bright red as she tries to conceal her frightfully large bills, but she ends up giving the cashier such a large bill that there’s not enough change in the register. Everyone glares at the bill, then at Gunilla, in shame and anger; she cannot get her purchases to fit into her rucksack, no matter how hard she tries. Hatred radiates from every surface, living or inanimate. Nothing can explain it away, because every living soul will settle for a crumb of happiness and peace, no matter how small.

Back in her room, Gunilla stands in front of the gas cooker. She has never used one before, and that carries its own risk. She does not want to disturb the landlady, so she makes herself a sandwich and drinks some mineral water.

The next day, Gunilla gets a telling-off (in German) at the café when she asks for milk in her coffee (in Czech). Her coffee remains black; the glass display cases rattle. Gunilla sits at a table and waits for her coffee to cool down. It never does.

Gunilla opens her mailbox, and a pile of envelopes falls to the floor. She picks them up and rings the landlady’s doorbell.

“I don’t know how to use the gas cooker.”

“What’s so difficult about it?”

“I don’t know how to use it.”

“It’s very simple.”

“Yes, but I don’t know how.”

“Don’t you have gas cookers in Sweden?”

“Yes. But they’re not very common.”

“Did you get some mail?”

“These aren’t for me.”

The landlady takes the envelopes and peers at them in the dim greenish-brown light of the stairwell.

“Ah, yes. They’re for Milena.”

Milena was a sweet girl, but perhaps a bit fast living. There were soldiers running up and down the stairs, or maybe it was the same soldier all the time—who can tell when they’re all dressed alike? But whether there was one or more of them, only this one writes to her: some poor beggar by the name of Petr sends Milena a letter nearly every day. Milena was a country girl, the kind who dances whenever she gets a chance and slices bread against her belly. She didn’t have a penny to her name, and her dress was made from old curtains. In Olomouc, Milena worked as a cleaner in the hospital all winter and spring, and Gunilla can’t imagine how the cleaners rule the roost there. When a bucket clanks against the floor, everybody gets out of the way, even the doctors.

Gunilla calls her father in Gothenburg. She has written his number on a slip of paper, and the landlady has scribbled a few explanatory words in Czech below the number. She spends a long time waiting in the beige post office until an official points her to a phone booth with holes in its plywood partition walls, like Swiss cheese.

“Dad?”

“Gunilla?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Not very well. Where are you?”

“Italy.”

“Is that so? Whereabouts?”

“Rimini.”

“Is it hot there?”

“Yeah. Boiling.”

“It’s raining here.”

“Have you been out to sea?”

“What, in the rain?”

“I thought you might have gone fishing.”

“You girls keep your wits about you there.”

“Yes, we will.”

“That Hanne is kind of unpredictable.”

“You mean Annika. She’s a lot smarter than me.”

“Don’t leave your drinks sitting around on the table.”

“Oh, Dad . . .”

“Well, where are you two heading next?”

“Maybe Venice.”

“Ah, Venice. Be sure to take some pictures.”

“Pictures?”

“You do have a camera, don’t you?”

“I’ll send you a postcard. They have better pictures on them.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Dad . . . ? Can you hear me now?”

“Yes, yes, I can hear you. All right, send a postcard.”

Gunilla sits on the tram and thinks how easy it would be to take photos of Venice, how easy it would be to stand around in front of a palace and gaze at the people streaming by, or even just at the walls, without anyone taking notice. Now everyone is looking at Gunilla: men, women, and children, as if they should be taking a photo of her and not the other way around. In the space of one week, Gunilla swells up, taut, tender, and pink, especially her lips, eyelids, and fingers. Salt gets absorbed with all the water that passes through her, and nothing slakes her thirst because the salt is everywhere: in pork chops, roast potatoes, cucumber salad. Even the curtains in the
jídelna
are stiff from the salt. How difficult it is to go for a walk outdoors. Most difficult of all is to walk past the barracks so early that the soldier on guard duty has nothing to look at in the deserted cobblestoned side street besides a pink Gunilla.

One day, a shiny-flanked Mercedes, the latest model from West Germany, drives up to the fruit and vegetable market. Even Gunilla stares at it as if she were witnessing an act of public masturbation: revolted, but powerless to tear her eyes away.

The morning is cool. Bird droppings stink on the asphalt after the overnight rain. On a plot of bare ground on a side street, two men
run a cement mixer every morning for no apparent reason. Gunilla walks past patches of lawn bleached the color of newsprint, and it feels good to her to see that something is repeated every morning, the same way and in the same places: the streets, the houses, even the men running the cement mixer. After Sportovní Hala comes the outdoor pool. A faded ice cream stand crouches on the edge of the parking lot. On the weekends, people can buy raffle tickets from a trailer and win all kinds of garishly painted things and cassette tapes with peroxide-bleached women showing off their legs on the covers. The city center traffic, stiff with the morning cold, rumbles beyond the park. Gunilla’s shoes get wet as she takes a shortcut across the large expanse of grass. It ends at a broad main road that goes through the city. It is still empty, and the mist moves slowly and intrepidly over the lines painted on the road.

A boy is sitting among a group of soldiers on the back of an army truck. The moment is fleeting and distractions are many—Gunilla never should have noticed him. The heavy engine roars. The truck comes around a bend in the road, going too fast. Of course, the rabble in green, like dirty-trampled moss, spots Gunilla right away; the soldiers leap to their feet on the back of the shuddering truck and start hollering and gesturing to attract her attention, but that one boy, the very one who should be yelling loudest of all, is so silent and motionless that Gunilla has no chance of seeing him. As they go past, all sorts of requests and suggestions are directed at her, but one order they bark at the driver in unison: “Slow down, slow down!” So the man in the cab lets up on the gas and even brakes a little, and strangely enough, everything seems to slow down, making the gesticulating loudmouths start to look as unreal as if they were in a slow-motion film; but the one who is silent and motionless stands out from the rest precisely because of his motionlessness, as if to affirm his existence.

Once the heavy truck has rolled past and the shouts have faded away, the silence of the unknown soldier remains. Gunilla is still standing by the side of the road, and though there was no danger, she is breathing as if someone had pulled her out of the path of the truck right in the nick of time.

That evening, in her room, Gunilla opens the first letter. She understands only the beginning and the end.

Dear Milena. Yours, Petr.

Sealed letters tumble to the floor. They keep coming every day; they strive to escape from the mailbox like a shout missing its words and punctuation. Petr will not give up; Petr has a great deal to say. It becomes clear that Milena does not care about the letters, and Milena’s indifference has brought about circumstances in which Milena no longer deserves them. Gunilla is unable to regard opening the letters as a gross invasion of privacy; after all, she understands nothing of them. But gradually it begins to hurt, the incomprehensibility of the language, because it contains everything Gunilla thinks she has been left without: above all, her father’s mistake, which was made for purely emotional reasons. The next letters she tears open as if they no longer contained anything intended for someone else.

After she finished school, Gunilla went to work on the tills at Konsum, though she could have gone anywhere she liked. Her parents thought these diversions were a part of youth and kept their mouths shut. There is nothing parents long for more than their youth, but they do not sense themselves longing for those side tracks. The importance, excitement, and superiority of the main track are an illusion. The only true track is the eventually forgettable one off to the side. It is slow enough for Gunilla; the weeds will withstand wear from the slow-turning wheels that pass on rare occasions, and she has time to have a good, close look at everything that’s important: history, the landscape, and Petr on the back of that truck.