Scandanavia 2002 / Ron Padgett
Currency Conversion Rates
1 Danish krona (DKK) = ca. $.13
1 Swedish krona (SEK) = ca. $.11
Sunday, August 11: Copenhagen
After a blessedly eventless overnight SAS flight from Newark, Pat and I land at Kastrup Airport, whose runways have that typical early morning foggy European airport look. Train (cheap and fast) to Copenhagen’s Central Station. Walk a few blocks to the Ibis Copenhagen Star Hotel (Colbjørnsensgade 13), which turns out to be the exact same hotel we had stayed at a few years ago—we had sworn never to do so again. It has cleverly changed its name! Now it’s 970 DKK per night for the two of us, buffet breakfast included. The check-in time isn’t until 4, though the smiling receptionist tells me that the room might be ready by 3. So we leave our luggage and walk to Radhusplads, the big central square, then turn right and go a few blocks, past the Tivoli Gardens, to the grand late-19th-century Glypotek, built by Carlsberg beer magnate Carl Jacobsen to house his sculpture and painting collections. But its atrium café, which I had yearned to take Pat to on her first day here, to start our stay pleasantly, is closed for renovations until later in the week, drats! But upstairs we see wonderful Danish Golden Age paintings by Købke et al and the impressive auditorium—with the words “Carl and Otilia Jacobsen” high over the podium—where some of us Americans had read last summer for a poetry festival. (Alas, I had read at the Royal Art Academy, a fine place, but no match for the Greco-Roman grandeur of the Glypotek auditorium.) Walk back to Radhusplads, where we have terrible hot dogs, stroll down Strøget, the pedestrian mall, looking for the traditional konditori (pastry shop) we had stopped at last time we were both here and where I had had a wonderful pastry (a kringla). Need cash. Back near our hotel we try an ATM, but it keeps saying “Invalid code.” Eh? How will we get cash on this trip? We try two other cash machines. No dice. Back to hotel lobby at 3. Room still isn’t ready. Clunk. We wait endlessly in lobby, now slumped and almost narcoleptic from the overnight flight. Pat retreats to the small garden, where she smokes a Panter cigarillo and falls asleep in a patio chair. I feel angry with myself for allowing the trip to begin so uncomfortably. Finally, at 4, room and nap.
Up at 4:30. Though visibly tired, Pat is taking it all quite well. Stroll to Nyhavn for dinner at Cape Horn. Sit outdoors. Good broiled salmon and a pint of tasty Danish beer. Cool evening air. Street entertainers. Somewhat restored, we walk back to the hotel. Copenhagen seems loud, with voices and cars in the street until dawn, then the requisite whining and banging garbage truck.
Monday, August 12
Ordinary buffet breakfast at hotel. Pat goes for a walk and a smoke. For some reason, the bank card now works! We check out. Train to Kastrup. Lunch and shop, mostly window-shop, at the many boutiques in the departures concourse.
Take Atlantic Airways 3:15 p.m. flight (2 hours) to the Faroe Islands. A bit bumpy, but not too bumpy. As we descend, spectacular views of islands, clouds, fog, and ocean—hence no fear of landing on what will later be described to us as the second most “difficult” airport in the world. During World War II it was built by the occupying British, who wanted to make landing challenging if not impossible for the Luftwaffe. Hence, they chose this location, with its tricky wind and weather, to build an unusually short runway. But Faroese pilots are fearless. Waiting for our luggage, we watch an excited black dog on the baggage conveyor leaping over and sniffing each bag for drugs. He finds one, the last box! (It’s been planted by his handler as a reward.) Happy dog. Poet Oddfrídur Rasmussen and Faroe Arts Festival organizer Oddvá Nattestad greet us, both cordial, she quite warm. Oddfrídur is a strongly built blond lad of 33. Another festival participant, John (I’ve forgotten his last name), was also on our flight, and after he finishes inquiring about his luggage, lost in a previous leg of the trip, the five of us pile into Oddvá’s car for the drive to the capital, Tórshavn, which is two hours away: 30 minutes on land, 30 minutes on a ferry, then one hour on land.
At the edge of Tórshavn we stop at small grocery store for breakfast provisions. Following John’s example, I buy a 30-DKK phone card. In town, Oddvá stops at her house, dashes in, and comes out with some of her husband’s clothes, until John’s luggage arrives. Oddvá and Oddfrídur drop Pat and me off at our lodging at 12 Tinghúsvegar, formerly William Heinesen’s sod-roofed cottage, a lovely little stone structure, two stories, with a modernized interior, in the middle of town. Heinesen is the most famous Faroese writer, revered mainly for his fiction, some of which has been translated into English. (See his engrossing collection entitled Laterna Magica.) He was also a talented graphic artist, especially in his satirical drawings of people he knew, including himself. Oddfrídur returns about 30 minutes later and drives us out to Nordic House, a modern glass and wooden building high up on the edge of town, for an evening concert of contemporary music based on folk music from around the world. The composer, who is also the lead singer, and the other four musicians are fine. The audience of perhaps 150 have a good time. Then Oddfrídur takes us to dinner at the Hotel Föroyer, a modern conference hotel perched on a hill overlooking the capital. There is a large group of us, including the musicians, at several tables. The pre-ordered dinner features roast beef—oddly, no fish. Between bites we look out the window at the pretty night view of lights sparkling in the distance.
Tuesday, August 13
Up ca. 8, a quick attack on our breakfast provisions, and then Pat and I go out and walk around the old center of town and the harbor area. Buy a large kringla at a bakeri. Snack at home, with the decaf tea I have brought from New York. (Decaffeination is almost unheard of in Scandinavia.) Oddfrídur arrives with his girlfriend, Rannvá, a cheerful lass in her early twenties. She is about to begin courses in teacher education. The four of us take a long, highly scenic, convivial drive—Oddfrídur has borrowed his family’s car for a few days—north to the village of Saksun, then briefly across one of the country’s few bridges to the island of Esturoy. Then back to Tórshavn for a late lunch (3:30) at Café Natur: tasty ground beef sandwiches on pita. Back to cottage at 4:30, where I change clothes. Oddfrídur then drives us to Nordic House.
In a bowl-shaped auditorium there I read in English, with Oddfrídur’s translations projected on the wall behind me. Then Faroese poet Jóanes Nielsen reads. The audience of around 50 seem reserved (a Scandinavian tendency at readings). My reading is okay, but I’m not entirely pleased by the way it has come off, though this feeling is eased by an attractive young Faroese girl who chats me up afterward. Her English is excellent: a painter, she lives in London. Part of the problem, I think, is caused by the projection of the translations onto the wall during the reading, more or less asking the audience to listen in English and read in Faroese simultaneously.
Oddfrídur and Rannvá drive Pat and me to the Hotel Föroyer again, this time for a buffet dinner. The dining hall is crowded by conferees attending a school administrators’ conference. At Oddfrídur’s urging I try the whale blubber. Ugh! Horrible tasting fat with a layer of indestructable gristle. “Good, no?” he says, smiling. We drive back to the cottage, where Pat conks out on the couch watching the BBC on telly.
Wednesday, August 14
Oddfrídur and Rannvá pick us up 11 and drive us to their small attic apartment on the edge of town for lunch: a tiny kitchen, small bedroom, small living room, and loo. Clean and cozy. (Finally we figure out that on entering anyone’s home we should follow the local custom of removing our shoes.) Then we drive to the ferry, stopping to visit the unfinished 14th-century Catholic church in Kirkjubour. Oddfrídur dismisses the sign on its crumbling stone walls warning visitors of the dangers of venturing inside. Then we take the ferry to Sandoy, Oddfrídur’s native island. On board he, Rannvá, and I sit out on deck and translate my prose poem “The Farmer’s Head” into Faroese for my reading that evening. Talking to Rannvà is delightful, for her sociability, her excitement at introducing us to Faroese culture, and her English, which occasionally results in something such as “In the Faroe Islands we grow sheeps big-time.” I don’t mean to make fun of her, for actually I am very impressed by her English, which she, like other Faroese of her generation, began studying around the age of 12.
At Oddfrídur’s parents’ house we meet his mother, Ada, and 65-year-old father, Leivur. (“Ada” is pronounced something like “Erda,” meaning earth.) Neither parent speaks English, so we communicate by gestures and the very few words of Danish I know. Both are retired, she from bank clerking and he from ocean fishing, a rugged occupation. Leivur limps, especially when he first stands up, because of bad knees. Both parents remind me of any number of local people I know in Vermont. The two-story home is extra clean and neat. Ada serves us tea, cake, and cookies.
Then Oddfrídur, Rannvá, Pat, and I drive to Dalur, a tiny village that, although only about six miles away, takes a while longer, given the 20 m.p.h. speed limit and the one-lane road, along one side of which is an unfenced 75-yard breathtaking drop down a cliff into the ocean. At one point I peer down and see sheep grazing on the cliffside! The road is well-paved, with little pull-off areas from time to time that allow for oncoming traffic to go by. The drivers are all very polite. Dalur is where Rannvá spent much of her childhood and where her grandparents are buried, in the churchyard. Pat and I notice terraces on the hillsides, which Oddfridur explains are created by cutting the turf for fuel, and we see farmers on sloping fields who are raking hay by hand. When the weather is wet, as it frequently is, they hang the hay on fences to dry.
After Dalur we visit the abandoned village of Skarvanes, a few of whose cottages, painted black with white trim, are being renovated. Back we go to Oddi’s parents’ house for a hearty dinner of fish and rice with a delicious tomato sauce. We are joined by Oddi’s teenage sister and a friend of hers who is so cute I can hardly keep my eyes off her, but I fear that if I am caught staring I will be subjected to some secret ancient Faroese torture.
After dinner Oddi and I translate “Chocolate Milk” into Faroese, a few minutes before we are to drive a mile outside of town to the edge of a large lake with hills all around: he and I will give a reading there at 7 p.m. in an 800-year-old sheepfold! My fear comes true: the only audience is Rannvá, Pat, Oddi’s parents, and us! But the setting is magnificent. Then, down the road from the village, we see a few people walking along on foot, then a woman pushing a pram, and before long we have an audience of 20, all nicely bundled up in down jackets. Oddi reads first, then I read, (and he reads his translations of my pieces). I feel an immediate rapport with the audience, all of whom, except for a lone German tourist, are from the village’s farming and fishing families. They are quite amused by “The Farmer’s Head.” The reading goes fantastically well: not intimidated at all, the audience really enjoy themselves. We finish as dusk is starting to descend on the hills around us, and suddenly I realize that I am totally elated. It is the most pleasurable reading I’ve given in years, and in such a spectacular place!
We drive back to the house, where Oddi and I have a beer, and then, when we go out for yet another spin, Rannvá takes the wheel. Faroese drunk driving laws are draconian: even a single beer can get you into serious trouble. Via an extra-small one-lane road we arrive at a beach 30 minutes before sunset—a single seal keeps popping up out of the ocean and peering at us. Rannvá yahoos to it, explaining to Pat and me that seals are curious animals. There, on the west coast of Sandoy, this spot is isolated, windy, cool, vast, and beautiful. We gaze out at the North Atlantic as the sun sinks below the horizon, and when a chill sets in we drive back to the house. There, using Ada’s computer, I email a quick message to [my son] Wayne. In the guest room, Pat sleeps well, I sleep like a teenager.
Thursday, August 15
Breakfast at 9. We walk with Oddi and Rannvá to what they call a “splash hole,” a rocky crevice the ocean waves gush up into and foam and froth around, while from the other direction a hillside stream trickles in. Then, back at the house, we watch a video of the locals doing traditional chain dances, something we had hoped to see live but which were scheduled for days when we wouldn’t be in the Faroes. Then another sit-down lunch. As we are having coffee Oddi realizes that the ferry is leaving in ten minutes, so we hastily say good-bye and thank you and speed away, arriving at the dock nine minutes later.
On the pleasant ferry ride back to Stremoy, the large island where Tórshavn is located, Oddi’s cell phone rings: it is his mother, telling him he forgot his reading glasses. (She has also given him a large bag of food.) We drive to Tórshavn, where the four of us take a walking tour of the old town and the harbor. Oddi shows us the interior of a very old cottage, now the Arts Council house (he has the key). The rooms are tiny, the ceiling at most six feet high, the beams even lower. We also see a lot of government administrative buildings built in wood painted red. In a shop Pat buys a wool headband for [Pat's sister] Tessie, a white conical wool hat for herself, and a nice scarf and hat for Oddi’s mom. Lunch at the Pizza Café: I have a rather tasty Hawaiian pizza—I love the idea of combining Hawaii, Italy, and the Faroe Islands. While Pat goes to the post office with Rannvá, Oddi and I go upstairs over the local sports gear store to the office of the Faroes’ main ice cream company and walk straight into the director’s office, where Oddi asks if I can buy one of their eye-popping full-color posters that features their 24 products flying across a rainbow sky: Oljudropi (14 DDK), Luxus Eskimo (12 DKK), Chupster (13 DKK), and others. The director insists on giving me one. (Getting this poster is a secret homage to Kenneth Koch, who for many years had an Italian ice cream placard in his office at Columbia University.) Pat and I walk back to the house, write postcards. Only 30 minutes for me to get ready for an informal meeting with members of the Writers Union.
It turns out there are ten present, including writer and translator Gunnar Hoydal, the group’s president and the son of the late Karsten Hoydal, a distinguished writer, translator (of English and American poetry, of Lorca, Neruda, etc.), legislator, and expert on the fishing industry. Gunnar is quite modest, asks me for a bit of help with some references in an Ursula LeGuin story. For about 90 minutes I speak about Teachers & Writers Collaborative and teaching poetry writing to children, trying to get the Faroese interested. They are. Good Q&A. I hand out T&W catalogs and show them sample books (Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and the Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms).
Then Oddi drives me back to the cottage, where Pat and I have tea and pastry. We walk to a nearby theater for a performance of Beowulf at 7:30: for 90 minutes an American fellow, occasionally strumming an ancient lyre, recites Beowulf—not the entire text, but plenty, believe me, though his memorization of such a lengthy Anglo-Saxon text is impressive. Behind him on a screen appears a clunky English translation. Fortunately Gunnar Hoydal had seen us at the ticket table and got us in free, saving us 250 DKK. After the show Pat and I have an uninteresting dinner next door at a supposedly Italian restaurant called Casablanca. Drizzle and wind. We then extract money from a cash machine and use our phone card in the lobby of the Hotel Hafnia to call Wayne. He says, “This is the first call I’ve ever gotten from the Faroe Islands.” It is exciting calling someone from the Faroe Islands, too. The call consumes the phone card at a rate of $.80 per minute, so it’s a brief chat. We walk home. Very windy night. To bed at 12:30. It sounds as if the ocean is pounding the yard outside.
Friday, August 16
Up at 8. Interviewed by local journalist Care Jóhan Jensen 9–10:30. Walk with Pat to SMS, the only shopping mall in the Faroes. It is comparatively small, but it does yield a copy of Franz-Jörgen Jacobsen’s novel Barbara in English, which Oddi and Rannvá have urged us to read. It’s set in the Faroes in the 18th century. We walk back to a down-home konditori in the town center, a place for locals: the hot lunch special consists of large, delicious meatballs, potato salad, beets, bread, and tea. Also two soft drinks from Restorffs, the Faroese beverage company. Total: a modest 88 DKK. It’s exactly the kind of place I love, and they are harder and harder to find. Pat goes for a solo stroll, I go back to the cottage. Oddi arrives at 1:30. The three of us drive to Nordic House to say good-bye to Oddvá Nattestad, the highly congenial festival organizer. She gives me a mailing tube for my ice cream poster. Then we go on to the Art Museum to see two large and only occasionally interesting shows of contemporary painting by a Ukrainian and a Russian (the latter has stolen too much from Chagall’s “Russian village” period). Then on to the National Historical Museum, which has all sorts of old objects, photos, etc., including some boats, all nicely displayed. As we gaze into a display case of whaling knives, Oddi repeats what Rannvá had told us: because of superstition, Faroese fishermen at sea never utter the word knife, for which they have a vast number of euphemisms. Outside are three or four traditional buildings transported here from rural spots. Getting to the museum (on the edge of town) pretty much requires a car, but the view here, overlooking the sea, is well worth the effort. We drive back to the cottage at 5:15.
One hour later we take Oddi and Rannvá to dinner at the Hafnia, Torshavn’s ritziest hotel. Very good buffet spread, 840 DKK for the four of us. Oddi consumes huge quantities. A few tables away is an Asian man with a shaved head, eating with a fierce self-involvement. “Maybe that’s Ping Chong,” I say. Ping Chong’s theater company is presenting a version of the Eddas, as part of the festival. My surmise isn’t clever, since there are virtually no Asian residents or tourists in the Faroes. Walk back home at 9. Ah, good: tennis on “Eurosport” TV show: Jennifer Capriati vs. Justine Henin in Montreal. They are smacking the ball. Then a BBC film, which I forget even as I watch it. Beginning at 12:30 and not ending until around 3:30 there is shouting and hubbub in the street, the spillover of drunken young revelers from the nearby club, pointlessly named Disco 20. A normal Scandinavian weekend blowout.
Saturday, August 17
Up at 7. Oddi and Rannvá pick us up at 8:20. “It was Ping Chong,” he says. We drive to the airport, arriving at 10:15. The 11 a.m. flight is on time. Several tour buses have delivered tourists to the airport, so there is a bit of a crush at the front door, especially since our flight leaves just 45 minutes before a Maersk Air flight. Rather bottleneck scheduling, since there are so few flights per day to and from the Faroes. Now it’s time to board. Good-bye, Oddi and Rannvá, you nice and generous people!
The flight back to Copenhagen is smooth all the way, but there is a long wait for luggage, then a long wait for the train, which is far behind schedule. Taxi from Central Station to the Comfort Esplanaden Hotel, 78 Bredegade, at the corner of Esplanaden. (The taxi’s credit card machine freezes, so the driver uses a swiper: I wonder, is he double-charging us?). Check in and unpack. A bit nicer hotel than the Star Ibis, in a far nicer neighborhood, and at the same price. Two-for-one happy hour Danish beer in the hotel bar (actually just a window).
We walk down Bredegade to Nyhavn via Amalienborg Slotsplads (where we peer at the royal residence). We like this royal square not so much for its handsome buildings as for the circular open space they create between them. Dinner at Cape Horn (again!), very pleasant. Stroll back up Larsens Plads, a narrow geometric park along the water, in the cool evening air. Tied up at the dock is an immense new boat (ship?) with a little sign on its gangplank saying “Private entry,” and when, on its stern, we read the words “Cayman Islands” we wonder: “Could this gigantic vessel possibly be a private yacht?” Through our heads fly visions of untold billions of dollars made in offshore banking by some latter-day Citizen Kane. Back to the hotel briefly, then across the street to the park (Churchill Park, named after Winston) and its old fort, the Kastellet, where we walk around the inner yards, find the old bakery building (the one in Købke’s painting of a young woman walking up toward what looks like a hayloft door), and stroll around the top of the ramparts, past an old windmill, to the gate area on the north side, which Købke also painted. Out in the water is the row of modern skinny white futuristic windmills—white propellers atop thin white poles—that we saw from the plane window as we were descending toward Kastrup. In the opposite direction, a big orange sundown. The Kastellet closes at dusk, so we walk back to the hotel. Shower. Just enough TV to get sleepy. Lights out.
Sunday, August 18
Up at 8. Pat slept badly: too much traffic noise came through the windows kept open for cooler air. Nice morning weather. Big buffet breakfast, which even offers a bowl of multi-vitamins and one of fish oil capsules. We walk to the Statens Museum for Kunst, arriving at 9:55, and when the doors open five minutes later we are among the first to buy tickets (“Two seniors, please,” I say in a simulated senior voice). Aside from guards, there is virtually no one else here: dream conditions for looking at art, in this case a great Danish Golden Age collection: Eckersberg, Købke, Lyngbye, Lundbye, Marstrand, etc. At their best these artists were fabulous. Then a rest stop for tea and coffee in the slow, airless, overpriced, supposedly chic museum café. Then we dash in to see the special School of Cranach show (interesting despite—or maybe because of—the vast amount of wall text): mucho Martin Luther. By the way, the Statens Museum is woefully underrated by our guidebook, the Rough Guide to Scandinavia, which doesn’t even mention the Golden Age collection!
Around noon, we amble through the adjacent small park (where to my surprise I see three beautiful girls sunbathing topless) and around the corner to the Hirschsprungske Samling, a wonderful small museum. We visit old favorites, great as usual, such as Købke’s portrait of Sødring, and admire Lundbye more and more. Time to study him too! However, the Hammershois are all gone, back, it turns out, to the museum they had been on extended loan from. Buy postcards. Then walk through the nearby streets of quaint small brick houses, formerly for workers—streets named Eckersberggade, Marstrands Gade, and others named after Danish painters. Find lunch in a café at 2: ham and cheese sandwich with an Evian. Walk back to hotel, take a pee, then to the Kastellet where, it turns out, the Royal Danish Ballet is giving a free open-air performance. But “serious” ballet, it seems to me, is an indoor art, though the one comic selection (large dancing mice) works well outdoors. Take photos of Købke’s bakery and the bridge. Have a Magnum ice cream bar and coffee on a bench in the shade. (Warm weather continues.) 4 p.m. Audience in the background applauds. Back to hotel.
I plan tonight’s reading, then rest 30 minutes. Start walking toward The Huset, the reading venue. Leg weary, we grab a taxi—to the wrong address! Panic. I ask a group of locals in a courtyard: Where is the Huset? They send us off walking to 13 Magstraede. Almost there we see waving at us young poet and translator Pejk Malinowski—he thought he had just seen us going around the corner, but it was another couple. He leads us to nearby Buona Notte, a restaurant in an alley, with laundry hanging overhead to simulate a Neapolitan scene. Charming dinner with Pejk, his wife Sabine, René Jensen, his girlfriend Andrea, Martin Larsen, Lars Frost, and his girlfriend Helle, some of whom I met last year at the poetry festival here.
At 8 we all go upstairs to what seems to be a music club. The reading: René (a satirical letter to the Danish Minister of Immigration), Pejk (translations of John Ashbery), René again (translations of Kenneth Koch), then me (twelve minutes). Intermission. Then Lars (letters of Lewis Carroll that are unintentionally funny), then Martin (his own work), and finally a woman named Majse Aymo-Boot. The whole reading is convivial. Audience at tables with drinks, around 40 people, they seem to enjoy it. In the crowd are some I recognize from last year’s In the Making festival, such as Tua, the young fellow who had gone to high school in Maryland. Thomas Thurah, the main coordinator of that festival, comes over to say hi and to chat. Ca. 11 Pat and I, running out of steam, say good night and stroll toward the hotel, pausing in Nyhavn for a hot dog, a rather good one. Back in the room I examine the painful blister on my little toe, which I poke with a sterilized pin to drain its clear liquid, then apply a Band-Aid. Blessed relief. To bed around 12:15.
By the way, I keep wondering how much I ought to allow myself to notice the endless stream of young girls who are following the current fashion of high-cut tops and low-cut pants for maximum exposure of their silky, suntanned, vertiginous bellies and their lower backs that curve down into the rising of their hips. It’s almost impossible not to gape at them like an old lecher. (Hello.)
Monday, August 19
Got the 9:25 train at nearby Østerport Station—I now realize that a few days ago we could have stayed on the train from the airport and gotten off here, much closer to the hotel—to Hillerød, where Købke painted such gorgeous views of Fredericksberg Castle (not to be confused with Fredericksborg Castle, which is on the western edge of Copenhagen). Turns out the castle actually is quite a beauty. We walk all around it but don’t go inside, except to visit the gift shop for postcards—castle interiors don’t do much for me. Room after room of satin-covered sofas and chairs, bland mural paintings of rustic scenes, faded tapestries of hunting scenes, and gigantic mirrors always depress me with their emptiness, and although I have a penchant for the rosy-cheeked paintings of Greuze, Lancret, and especially Fragonard, I find it hard to imagine that I would have liked the people depicted in them. (Tall white wigs alarm me.) We stroll around the castle’s lake, stopping to watch a tiny steam launch ply its way across the blue water, and then we head back to the station for the train to Helsingør (in English, Elsinore).
In Hamlet’s town we lunch at an ordinary small cafeteria with outdoor seating. The meatballs and mashed potatoes are generic and fabulous. It’s a good thing we fortify ourselves thus, because it is a seemingly endless walk to Hamlet’s castle, which turns out to be ugly and heavy, though it would be an interesting place to stage the play, moving the audience from the battlements to the great hall, etc. Walk back to town, pausing for me to take a photo of Pat outside a pub called Oklahoma. A young man leans out the pub’s window and I say to him, “You won’t believe me, but she and I are from Oklahoma.” “So hey, come in and have a beer.” “It’s a bit early in the day for me.” “C’mon, this is Denmark!” he laughs.
We catch the train to Copenhagen but get off at Hummelbeck, where we take a local bus to Louisiana (the modern art museum), which actually is within walking distance. But Pat’s dogs are barking, so she sits on the garden café terrace with a Coke as I rush through the museum’s collection, which is as boring as it was last year, and through two large exhibitions of contemporary work that, stylish as they are, just don’t interest me. However, the outdoor sculpture looks pleasant, though it has been reduced to lawn decoration. The trees—one of them is a flat cedar only a few feet high but of enormous reach—and the view of the water and distant Sweden are the best things here. When the museum closes at 5, we catch a bus back to the train station, and are in our room at the Esplanaden by 6:20.
Taxi at 6:50 to René’s for dinner, a big outdoor cookout feast in his building’s courtyard. He, Andrea, Pejk, and Sabine have to carry everything down from the sixth floor, which they cheerfully do. A wonderful summer salad of fish with a delectable white creamy sauce, among many other dishes. These kids have gone to a lot of trouble for us. In addition to the forenamed, there is Palle Sigsgaard, whose great-grandfather Jens Sigsgaard wrote a children’s book, Palle Alone in the World, a classic in Scandinavia. I like its title. As dusk settles in we head upstairs for coffee and more talk. I notice Andrea’s latest fashion project on a designer’s mannequin, a pretty woolen dress that somehow looks both turn of the century and futuristic. René helps me access my email from his computer. Taxi to the hotel at 11:30.
Tuesday, August 20
Up at 7:30, big breakfast. Pejk arrives at 10. We three take a bus to the Assistans Kirkgaard to visit the graves of H. C.—the Danes never call him Hans Christian—Andersen, Købke, and Kierkegaard. Stroll over to a café for coffee and munchies, then take a bus to the harbor, a beach area. Masses of young Danes sunbathing, so many that toplessness becomes uninteresting. Too many breasts, alas. Lunch at a Community Center there. Walk on to Christianshavn, check out a restaurant for dinner tonight, then on to Christiania, the hippy dope community. At 5 Pat and I take bus 19 back to the hotel.
At 6:30 we take the bus back to another restaurant Pejk recommends, the Luftkastellet (The Air Castle, or maybe Castle in the Air) in Grönlandske Handels Plads. The dinner, with Pejk, Sabine, René, and Andrea, is on us. The Flugakastellet is a big room with a buffet line: you pay by the weight of your food (ca. 100 DKK per person, it turns out). Indoor seating is available, but on such an evening everyone is outdoors at the great many tables—the place is packed—on the white sandy ground, making us feel as though we are at a beach. Beautiful early evening light and cool air. Then we all walk to a nearby café for coffee (and cake, me). Say good-bye, walk all the way back to the hotel, arriving at 11.
Wednesday, August 21
Up at 7:30, breakfast, finish packing, shower, walk to photograph nearby attractive yellow row houses, check out at 9:45. Walk, with roller luggage, ten minutes to Østerport Station (we had promised each other that we would take taxis everywhere, but usually I prefer walking). Catch an earlier than expected train—the 10:11 instead of the 11:11. Over the Øresund Bridge we go and into Sweden, a short ride.
At the Malmö train station we get Swedish krone from a cash machine and buy tickets—a rather expensive 1200 SEK (ca. $130) for two people one way—for Nässjö. I call Vasilis Papageorgiou’s cell phone to tell him we’re early. He answers—only 20 feet away! We wave. He and poet-translator Michael Economou greet us. “Do you know of George Economou?” I ask. No. We lock our bags in Vasilis’s car, then walk to Gustav Adolfs Torg and around other parts of central Malmö. A big annual Celebrate Malmö festival is under way, so the streets are crowded and festive, though Vasilis and Michael say things like “I don’t like too many people.” Yet another beautiful sunny day—do they never end?—and a nice lunch at an outdoor café for only $9 per person. I have three grilled herring, red potatoes, salad, and beer. We stroll around and talk—often of Kenneth Koch. Vasilis is very saddened by Kenneth’s death. Back to the train station at 2:40. We take photos. Vasilis hands us a tourist brochure for some quaint town near Nässjö and tells us to try to visit it. Good-bye! Vasilis and Michael leave, we wait on platform 4 for the 3:14 train to Nässjö.
But it’s on track 1! We run, catching it a scant ten seconds before it glides away. Turns out it’s an X2000, a high-speed train. Outside the window, farmland alternates with forests of tall skinny pines. We arrive in Nässjö at 5:15. I call Goy Persson, the Nässjö Poetry Festival organizer. He’s surprised! I’m a day early (actually I have followed the instructions of his assistant). The room isn’t ready. He tells me to take a taxi to the Hotel Högland—the festival will cover it. Outside, no taxi. Pat sees a big sign 50 feet away: Hotel Högland! We walk. Receptionist tells us they’re all booked, but she has talked to Goy and we can go to the Stads Hotell. She’ll call a taxi. Taxi comes. She says something, adding that the Stads Hotell is right in the center of town. Taxi drives about 13 miles ($25)—to another town! Eskjö, 600 years old, now restored, is picturesque and free of tourists. We check in. Unpack a bit. Pat glances at the tourist brochure Vasilis gave us—it was for this very town! Nice big old hotel, spacious rooms, slightly—no, very—sleepy place. We walk around the old town, looking for restaurants, but by 6:15 have found only one, a low-key pizza place, in addition to the hotel restaurant. So the latter it is. On the porch we eat an appetizer of reindeer (I’m surprised that it tastes like a mixture of good smoked ham and salmon). Pat’s bacon cheeseburger comes with a mountain of French fries—I have never seen so many on one plate. Around 8 p.m. the evening cool sets in. I open the windows in our room. To bed at 11:30. A few revelers in the main square below.
Thursday, August 22
By the way, I had been told the “correct” pronunciation of Nässjö by any number of people, most of them sounding different. It turns out that there are two ways: “Neh-kruh” (with a deeply guttural kr), which is the older pronunciation and the one favored by inhabitants of southern Sweden (anywhere below the city of Jönköping, I believe) and “Ness-rhuh,” the one favored by northerners and even by some younger people in the south. By extension Eskjö is pronounced, in the old way, “Eh-kruh.” I assiduously practice the old versions, to the point that Swedes are surprised. “Ah, very good!” they say.
Up at 7:30. From our top-floor window, a nice view of the main square, an equestrian statue of (probably) King Gustav Adolf, and the Domkirken (cathedral), which is surrounded by scaffolding and green netting, getting spruced up for next year’s celebration of the 800th year of the town. (How they celebrate the 800th anniversary of a 600-year-old town is beyond me.) Buffet breakfast in a spacious, high-ceilinged, faded-elegance dining room. Out at 9:45 to walk, first to the tourist office. Along the way we notice an odd miscellany of objects in the windows of private homes—little statues, bizarre plants, a hammer, a birdhouse, an inkwell, etc. The streets are silent, though there are riots of windowboxes and hanging plants. Blue sky, sunny, mild, a light breeze. At 10:30, we sit down on a bench in a small flower garden overlooking the tiny stream that runs through town, with the local history museum (not yet open) just behind us. I’ve just learned that “Eksjö” breaks down into Ek (oak) and sjö (lake). Hence Oak Lake. So where is the oak lake? Back to the hotel to rest until 11:50. Check out, leave our bags, go buy a few tea towels as gifts, stroll around the old streets and duck into historic courtyards, sit by the stream, then head back to the main square, looking for lunch. We decide against our hotel, whose chalkboard menu proudly announces “Salladsbuffé, dryck, smör, bröd, kaffe & kaka.” That last item is the clencher. We have lunch (Pat a sandwich, me crêpes with cheese and shrimp) on the porch of a traditional konditori just across from the Domkirken. A large bird (a skade, in Danish) steals a pastry paper from a nearby table and carries it away so he can nibble the blueberry jam from it.
We amble to the now open museum (20 SEK each). Three floors. Ground floor: works by Albert Engstrom (1869–1940), very good satirical cartoons, handsomely installed, along with his desk and even wadded-up letters in his wastebasket (facsimiles). One of his paintings is of a group of pansies, turned to face the viewer, like people, and they seem to be wearing shoes! So Joe [Brainard] wasn’t the first to have this perception. Second floor: a show of paintings and sculptures by Tom Reed (American? Brit?) inspired by The Magic Flute (Trollflotta?), odd and interesting, with music from that opera piped in. Top floor: local history (everyday objects, period rooms, photos, documents), worth a look. Buy postcards at the museum shop. At a boutique on the way back to the main square, we also acquire a set of antique pillowcases and an old sheet with nice needlework, a long-sleeve army undershirt (heavy white wool, only 65 SEK). Back to the konditori for a snack, this time in their courtyard garden in the back. Retrieve bags, get taxi at 3:30.
Drive to Sörängens Folkhögskole, a “people’s high school” that is also the poetry festival venue, on the edge of Nässjö. Find Mr. Alf Ostuffdahl, the head of the school. Hardly anyone else is around. He shows us our room (#21)—ultra clean and simple and airy, with even a little balcony that has steps leading down to the ground. We unpack and stroll around the school, orienting ourselves. I think we are the first to arrive. Around 5 we go to the dining hall, where we run into Goy Persson. We ask him for more specific info about what is to transpire, but he doesn’t seem to be into organization, he likes to be spontaneous. Hmmm. Now others have arrived. Dinner at 5:30 in the dining hall: pasta salad and bread, that’s it! Hmmm. At 6:30 we get into his car with him and his very pleasant wife Sally—she’s a language teacher—and ride into town to the park for the festival’s first event, an outdoor group reading in a small bandshell.
We chat with a young and seemingly shy Icelandic poet named Kristín Omarsdottir, who, it turns out, comes to New York at least once a year. She has met Eileen Myles. Then we poets have to carry chairs from the park’s café so the audience—of perhaps 50 people, including 27 festival participants—will have somewhere to sit other than on the grass. Is this going to be a do-it-yourself poetry festival? The readers today are Lina Ekdahl (she gets laughs from the Swedish women in the audience); Anna Hallberg (very pregnant, reads softly and slowly what sounds like a sound poem); Pal Vannanirak (Cambodian, she reads like a sincere child what appear to be structured, rhymed poems that all sound identical to me), alternating with her translator; 48-year-old Yu Jian, a chunky fellow with a shaved head and the aura of a thug, reads in an intense whisper—the sound system is excellent. He sounds good, but reads only one poem! The end. I spy Jörgen Gassilewski, the Swedish poet-teacher whom I had met a few years ago in Gothenburg, so I hasten over to say hello. He introduces me to Anna Hallberg—the baby is his, it turns out.
Then we all go back out to the Folkhögskole, where we endlessly await more food (sandwiches), get attacked by mosquitoes, and, when the “caterer” finally arrives, go indoors to eat, just before another reading starts up. The readers are positioned in virtual darkness: Roger Melin, an intense Swede, reads what must be lyrical poems; Jörgen reads part of a serial poem (it has 120 parts in toto), each page with 12 lines whose syllable counts alternate between 8 and 4. Some words and phrases are repeated, so it begins to remind me of Ted’s Sonnets. The last reader is Aase Berg, who reads in a very quiet, tired style that sounds good at first, then starts to drive me a little crazy. Goy Persson spontaneously invites Yu Jian to read some more, but he declines. Goodnight.
Back to our room. I gossip with Pat and plan my reading for tomorrow. But what’s this? Mystery spots have appeared on my new silk shirt. And I wore it only once, in the Faroes or in Copenhagen, and there were no spots on it afterward. Ugh! Lights out at 11:30. The bed has a thin foam-rubber mattress that turns out to be perfectly comfortable: is it one of those “miracle” Swedish mattresses I’ve seen advertized on American television?
Friday, August 23
I’m up at 7, Pat snoozing away. I stretch and tiptoe out for a walk ten minutes down the highway to a gas station/convenience store at the traffic circle—good to know about, in case the dining gets rough! Jog back. Get coffee for Pat from the dining hall and wake her up. Dress. Back to dining hall for breakfast. She and I explore the pathways in the small, Vermont-like wooded area behind our dorm. It turns out that the festival coincides with a summer writing course for adults at the Folkhögskolen. Ah, that’s the audience! At 10:30 we run into Swedish poet Göran Palm in the hallway—he’s our neighbor. Very jovial. Take a liedown in the room.
11:45 rendezvous with Goy et al for the drive to the park in town. Set up chairs. Reading starts at 12:30 (the park readings are called Lunch Lyrics or something like that, making me regret not having brought some of Frank’s poems to read). Audience of ca. 35. Children joyfully loud in distant play area. Readers: Göran Palm (OK, I guess!). Then me (with translations read by Jörgen, who looks, with his shaved head, like Mayakovsky, especially when he reads my poem about Mayakovsky). The reading goes well—I get serious compliments. Then Kerstin Norborg (seems OK) and the surprise addition of Roger Melin, who has to return to his home in northern Sweden. I get the feeling that he is the meditative woodsy type who would have been at home in northern California in the late 1960s.
We drive back to the school, lunch at 1:30. Pat reads in the shade while I go up to Jörgen and Anna’s room to plan our workshop on Sunday. At 3:15 I go down to check with Pat, then head off to a Chinese poetry seminar in the airless auditorium. The Swedish translator-moderator goes on for 15-20 minutes. The Chinese sit there. Not a word! They don’t even move. I flee. Check out the indoor basketball court. No balls. So I go look for a ball, opening doors, and behind one of them is Alf, the school’s director, in his underwear! Excuse me. I think he has just taken a sauna. I go upstairs to the library, where I find computers with internet access. A young woman shows me how to get online. I send brief messages to Wayne and Tessie, read my own mail, answer some. Back to the room. Then, on our way to dinner, I veer off to the school’s main office to ask about laundry facilities. I run into Alf again—we chuckle—and a Swedish woman who is a French professor with blazing red hair. She recites a Swedish poem to me, her eyes never leaving mine. I like her but it is excruciating, especially at a distance of two feet.
5:30: dinner is meat patties, broccoli, baked potatoes. We sit with Kristín Omarsdottir, Jörgen, and Anna. Then my translator for this festival, Ylva Hellerud, arrives, lively and friendly. Her English is terrific—she lived as an au pair girl with a family in New Jersey and then taught Swedish for three summers at a language camp in Minnesota. And she knows Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic. Back to the room. Pat is out on our balcony smoking and reading. Now it’s 6:50: time for the evening reading. First: Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson, a tall slender blond guy who, I learn, is a psychotherapist at the psychiatric hospital in Gothenburg. (He is also an editor of the avant-garde poetry journal, Oei—the vowels in the Swedish word for poetry.) He reads each poem slightly differently, gets laughs. (How excluded we feel, we who have no Swedish!) But he goes on for 20 minutes. Second: Kerstin Norborg (who read earlier today in the park) reads with some expression, but not too much, what comes across as prose. I notice that Swedish poets don’t introduce their poems much or add commentary. (Light gray seems to be the national color.) And of course now she immediately gives an ample lead-in to her next poem!
It hits me: this past year Morris Golde, Joe LeSueur, Philip Whalen, Kenneth, Larry Rivers—all have died.
She reads 16 minutes. Third: Icelandic poet Agneta Enckell. Quiet, somber, almost immobile, reads poems about despondency and death. Fourth: two performers, Claire Parsons (fiddle and accordion) and Sara Edin (dancer). Awful, clunky, you-play-fast-I-dance-fast pieces. Intermission, hurrah! Clear crisp air outside. (Everywhere we’ve been in this hottest summer in Swedish history we have found stuffy rooms with windows that remain closed until we open them.) Next reader, Yisha, a chunky 36-year-old Chinese youth who reads like a Sumo wrestler. (How does a sumo wrestler read?) The Swedish translations sound limp next to his vocalizations. Then Kristín Omarsdottir (40). She has a charming, klutzy style I like, as does the audience. I wonder what her poems say or do. Then—? Who? The Swedish fellow who was the moderator of the Chinese poetry panel searches for the texts. It appears that Hong Ying isn’t present, just him, the translator, Göran Sommardal, reading her poems in Chinese. Actually he is rather brilliant. Final reader: Carolina Thorell. Dressed in tight jeans, she plants her feet wide and reads in a quiet voice while giving subtle but alarming thrusts with her pelvis. (Ulla Montan, the Swedish photographer who took my picture in Stockholm three years ago, has also taken hers.) She reads a long poem with pauses, or maybe it’s a lot of short untitled poems. Then Goy Persson makes all of tonight’s readers come back on stage so he can present them with roses while the audience applauds. The show ends at 9:30.
Outside I approach the Chinese group. This seems to delight them. One of them is a skinny 29-year-old girl named Yin Lichaun, very cute and stylish, even if her teeth are gray. She speaks some French, which she majored in at university in China. Through her I tell Yu Jian and Yisha I regret not knowing Chinese, because I would like to understand their poems. They immediately whip out two collections of their work in English. Yisha, showing the thumbs-up sign, says, with an enthusiastic grin, “Frank O’Hara!” He is also a big fan of Charles Bukowski! I continue to chat up Yin Lichuan in French. I actually just want to kiss her a little. Then Pat and I try to phone Wayne, but his line is busy. We all drift back to the dining hall, where more food awaits us in the form of large sandwiches and drinks (mainly beer).
The late-night session begins with Yu Jian, who reads with great energy, almost ranting. He’s quite interesting, he has charisma. The dining hall is nearly full, around 70 people. Haven’t they had enough poetry? I have, for one day, so at 10:45 I duck out. At 11:25 I ring Wayne and Kenward [Elmslie], getting only their voice mail. Back to the room to select poems for my reading tomorrow night, the biggie in the auditorium. Then I leaf through the English translations that Yisha and Yu Jian gave me. Yisha is OK, even good at times, sort of adolescent at others. The first poem of Yu Jian’s not only strikes me as familiar, I am able to anticipate every line. The same is true of the next poem and the next and the next . . . A very odd feeling creeps over me. What gives? At the end of that section of his book I read the credit: “Translated by Wang Ping.” These are the very poems I helped her translate about seven years ago in New York! I remembered the poems but had forgotten the poet’s name.
Saturday, August 24
Up at 7:30 after a good sleep. Have breakfast. Start the wash cycle in the basement laundry room. Outside, run into the Chinese poets, who are sitting around a table in the shade with Göran Sommardal. I have to admire this guy, he really is brilliant. I interrupt their conversation and, through Yin Lichaun, tell them of my surprise discovery in reading Yu Jian’s poems last night. A delighted Yu Jian replies, “Perhaps it is destiny!” We all laugh. I go for a 20-minute jog on the highway to town, and on the way back I see coming toward me Yu Jian, Yishan, and Lin Yuchian. We laugh again.
Shower and shave. Meet outdoors with Ylva to go over her translations, at her request. She is very sharp, but it is good we check: she thought “Sacred Heart” took place on board a ship, instead of in a hospital room! We ride in her car into Nässjö for another lunchtime park reading at 12:15, then she, Pat, and I have lunch in town and stroll over to see the controversial temporary façade on the local historical museum: that of a garishly colored mosque. But the museum has closed—at 2 p.m. on a Saturday?—so we drive back to the school.
I mark my books for reading tonight, then pick some kids’ poems from Wishes, Lies, and Dreams for tomorrow morning’s seminar. At 3:30 I duck into the seminar in the auditorium—they are discussing why the big Stockholm daily newspapers pay no attention to Swedish poetry published anywhere other than in the capital, and I duck out, dash upstairs to the library to do some emailing. Then, back downstairs, I happen into a room that turns out to be the festival bookshop (no one had mentioned it to me), but I’m feeling fussy and don’t buy anything. On the way back to my room I stop to chat with Kristín Omarsdottir, who promises to send me some of her poems in English translation. I’m curious about them. Back to room at 5. Almost time for dinner (5:30). Eat said dinner. Go back to the room for a 15-minute rest, then have a major fashion dilemma. All the other poets have dressed very casually for their readings, but finally I put on my new silk jacket and head for the auditorium.
The reading begins at 7:10. Good crowd of 80-90 people. First reader is Lennart Sjögren, who gives a quiet, dignified performance. Second: me, with Ylva reading her translations. We begin with a stichomythic bilingual reading of “Nothing in That Drawer.” It works. Audience laughs. Then she reads her Swedish version of “Joe Brainard’s Painting ‘Bingo.’” I follow with the original. Audience laughs. Whew! The rest is a breeze—and goes over well. After I read “Flower’s Escape” Ylva surprises me by handing me a small wildflower. I look at it for a moment, then bite off the bloom and chew it up. (It tastes rather good.) I like my selection of funny and “serious” poems. Third poet: Pal Vannanirak, dressed in a satiny traditional Cambodian dress, gives an astoundingly long introduction to her first poem, and an even longer one for the second. In a wobbly and impassioned voice, she sings each poem in a mode that is interesting because it is alien (and grating) to this western ear. Into her 35th minute (the time limit for each poet is 20 minutes), she shows no sign of stopping, so Goy rises from his seat in the front row and, crouched down low, shuffles over to the side of the stage, where he whispers to Pal’s translator to give her the hook, Pol Pot or no Pol Pot. I decide not to notice how embarrassed I feel for her. Taken by surprise—or had no one given her the time limit?—she sort of staggers off the stage. Then dancer Teresia Björk and guitarist Richard Rolf perform a partly improvised piece. She is extremely pretty and he is a very talented guitarist. (One of the best in Sweden, I am told later.) Then intermission, ah, air! (though Pat and I had snuck in earlier and ventilated the auditorium). The evening resumes with Yin Lichuan, who is so cute onstage. (You sexist pig!) The audience likes her poems, but since even the translations are in Swedish I have no idea what she’s saying. Then Göran Palm reads a satirical poem in blank verse that the audience likes, though it seems to have its longueurs. He is followed by Carolina Thorell in her quiet, pelvic style, and Yu Jian, who reads one long poem that interests me even though I don’t know what he is saying either. Finally, at 10 p.m., Goy has all the evening’s poets come back on stage together for long applause and the distribution of roses, pausing before each of us and saying a few words privately, like an Olympic official awarding medals. To me he says, “You are a very good poet and a very good man.” I playfully bop the rose on the top of his head and we laugh. (He likes spontaneity. I’m starting to like him.)
We all mosey over to the dining hall for sandwiches and beer. As I walk in I say to Teresia Björk, “Thank you for your performance.” “You’re welcome,” she says. Pat eats and hastens outside to escape the reading by the Chinese poets. I decide to tough it out for a while. (Listening to poetry in foreign languages hour after hour, day after day, takes its toll.) The hall is packed. The first reader, Yang Xuheng (35 years old) is okay, very modest, but Yisha (same age) brings down the house with his humorous and satirical poems, in one of which he talks about trying to make a lot of money with a new form of pornography in which the Sphinx penetrates the Statue of Liberty, and Hitler and Stalin become lovers. Yu Jian is also well received. Afterward, as people sit at their tables and talk and drink beer, Teresia Björk comes over to me and asks who I am. She sits down and we chat for about 20 minutes. She is coming to New York to perform in November and December. When she says that she is tired, I ask her if I may walk out with her—it has been a long day. As we stroll past the poetry fanatics I am embarrassed to find myself hoping that they will assume that this gorgeous young dancer (and model) has picked me up! Outside, a full moon in a clear sky. I get back to my room at 11:45. No hanky panky. I ask Pat for her honest assessment of my reading. As usual she gives me the top rating. Get to sleep around 12:30.
Sunday, August 25
Wake at 5:30, drift off and on until 7:20. Cream of wheat etc. for breakfast. Chat with an admirer from last night’s reading, a transsexual named Maria Davidson who is taking part in the writing seminar. She wants to know if Norman Rosten, whom she greatly admires, is still alive. I promise to find out and let her know. Also chat with Göran Sommardal, who seems to know everything! I’m afraid he might be a genius. Back to room: brush teeth, shave, pack. Time for my 10 a.m. seminar with Jörgen and Anna on teaching children to write poetry.
Given the day of the week and the time, and the fact that it is the final event of the festival, we have decided to move the seminar from the auditorium to a lounge, where we can have a comfortable conversation with what we expect to be very few people. Actually around 25 show up, and around 10:30 are joined by some of our young friends from Copenhagen: Pejk, Sabine, Rene, Andrea, with two of their friends, Pieter de Buysser (a playwright who had studied in Paris) and Sara Vanagt (a film student at the same London school as Sabine), both from Antwerp, and Palle Sigsgaard (writer) and Rose Maria Rex (a tall blond attractive Danish girl whose parents direct films—I don’t know what she does). (All of these kids are in their mid- to late 20s.) The seminar concludes at 12:15. We all amble to the dining hall for a final lunch there—Goy generously offers our young friends free lunches. He has won me over. Big good-byes.
At 1:30 Pat and I get in a small car with Pieter, Sara, and Rose Maria, while Pejk and the other four cram themselves into a Citroen CV2, and we all head for Jönköping to visit the Match Museum. The first safety matches, which the French call les allumettes suèdoises (Swedish matches), were invented and manufactured in Jönköping. On the way the CV2 runs low on gas, so we sidetrack to fill it up. Arrive at the Museum at 2:20—it closes at 3. I take a quick but satisfying look. It’s as if I have only the time that it takes for a match to burn out. Some of the matchbox designs are wonderful in their crude printing of exotic motifs, and in the gift shop one can buy sets of them at very reasonable prices, not reproductions but the actual original printed labels. They still have thousands of them, explains the very cordial and helpful woman at the cash register. When I ask about the nearby Radio Museum, she quickly checks to see if it’s open, but alas it’s closed Sunday and Monday. I had read that it houses something like 3,000 radios—is that possible?
Outside the Match Museum, Andrea realizes that she has left her purse back in Nässjö! Pat and I, with Sabine and her two Belgian friends, continue south in the larger car toward Pejk’s grandmother’s summer house, one and a half hours away, while the others backtrack one hour to Nässjö. On the way, our group stops in a small, sleepy town at a supermarket that is miraculously open. We need dinner provisions. Pat contributes four packages of the Barilla tortellini we have been having back in the States. Finally we find ouselves driving down dirt roads into a pine forest, past a large, sparkling lake that is only a few minutes’ walk from the summer property, a farmhouse, a converted barn, and several other outbuildings. Sara, Pieter, and I take a dip in the lake’s chilly but not heart-stopping water: it is beautiful, the way all isolated lakes are. Back at the house we sort of laze around waiting for the others to return. I start to worry about them: fantasies of the CV2 wrapped around a telephone pole, etc.
Then, at 7:30 (sic) the poor things arrive. It had been very difficult for them to find someone to unlock the school, which had been totally shut down at the end of the conference. And Sunday evening! As Sabine takes charge of the cooking, the rest of us lie on the lawn and chat, and then Pejk gives Pat and me a tour of the little outbuilding that his grandfather, Ivan Malinovski, used as a study and where he wrote and translated many books, including Doctor Zhivago and volumes by Brecht, Trakl, and Neruda. Ivan, part of the Danish youth resistance during World War II, was a leftist. The studio is unchanged since his death—even his books are in the same order. Pejk also shows us, in the converted barn where all of us are to stay, his grandmother’s weaving studio, a plain, attractive room with a big serious loom and some examples of her handsome, geometric work.
Upstairs, ca. 9:15, dinner! Large bowls of tortellini and Greek salad, with good bread and wine and beer. At one point, as the ten of us sit at the table eating and talking, I lean back for a moment and see us all there, out in the middle of nowhere in Sweden in the late summer night, and the young friends seem so natural and easy with one another, so generous and kind, so bright and talented, that they seem to be shining, and I feel blessed to be sitting among them, an old fart almost in tears at their humanity. Then fatigue brings me down to earth, and at 11 Pat and I trundle off to bed in the guest room downstairs, which has a continuous sofa or bed on three of its sides. On the porch outside the air is cool.
Monday, August 26
7:30: Pat and I are the first up. Dressing, I feel something crawling in the sleeve of my shirt, so I absent-mindedly give it a little whack. Ouch! (A wasp.) Sleepyheaded but game, Pejk and Sabine join us for breakfast. (Yesterday the young ones had to get up early to get from Copenhagen to the seminar, and now up early again.) The others slowly wake and stretch and climb out of beds and sleeping bags to say good-bye, smiling sweetly. Pat and I climb into the 2CV (the grandmother’s car) with Pejk and drive 40 minutes to the train station in Vänamo. On the platform I take Pejk’s cigarette pack and draw on it—as Kenneth had done on mine around 40 years ago on the 7th Avenue IRT headed downtown from Columbia—a skull and crossbones. Pejk laughs and says, “Yes, I know I must quit.” When our train arrives at 9:45, I thank him and say, “You’re the best.” He is such a sweetie.
It is a small train, an old type I like, that takes us to Alvesta, where at 10:24 we transfer for the 10:30 X2000 to Linköping. Because the car location diagram on the station platform was backward we have to slog down the narrow aisle with our luggage to the other end of the train. The conductor is grumpy or perhaps just self-important. We finally plunk down in first class—second class was sold out to Japanese tourists. Again the landscape reminds me of Vermont, a much flatter Vermont, that is. In addition to being expensive, this particular X2000 is broken, hence it leans when taking curves at 200 km/hr. I ask another conductor if there is a snack service. He irks me by referring me to the club car, ignoring the fact that in first class we are supposed to get a free light meal delivered right to our seats. Strike two for this train. However, the waiter is quite courteous and assiduous, the first such employee I’ve encountered on an X2000.
We arrive at Linköping at 11:58. Outside the station we spy a place called the Park Hotel. I go over to check it out. It’s a nice old hotel whose owner greets me when I enter. She is chatty and welcoming. A double room is $99 per night, breakfast included and free coffee and tea all day. Number 308 is spacious and pretty, with a view of the adjacent park. Armed with a city map, Pat and I stroll toward the center of town, aiming beyond that to the perplexingly distant tourist information center. It is yet another warm day—Pat had packed for the Faroes and a normally cool Sweden—so she finally gives in and buys two light cotton blouses. At last we reach the info center, only to learn that the Kinda Canal doesn’t operate tours today or tomorrow. The reason we had chosen Linköping was that Pat wanted to take a trip on a canal with locks, something she had never done, and the Web site with Linköping tourism information had neglected to mention the unexpected off days of Monday and Tuesday. So phooey. But we are adults, now able to let such disappointments wash over us and flow away. On our way back to the center of town we stop in a park, part of a local botanical school, to have a snack, then walk through the old part of town to the main cathedral, which is enormous—its only feature, but certainly an impressive one. Then back to the hotel to rest and have a coffee and a few cookies, and out we go again, across the street to the bus station, where we take bus 202 (16 SEK each) out to Gamla Linköping (Old Linköping), ten minutes away.
Gamla Linköping is a bit like an inferior version Kulturen in Lund: old buildings transported here and restored to form an old village. Most of the buildings are closed because the season is over, though it’s still very warm for Sweden. So we settle for a snack in a garden café, always a pleasure in Scandinavia.
Then we hop a bus back to the station and buy tomorrow’s tickets for Stockholm and, after a brief liedown in our room, phone our Stockholm b&b hostess to confirm that we will be arriving tomorrow as scheduled. At 6:15 we have dinner at a modish outdoor Italian restaurant called Riva. The pizza is okay but the prices are on the steep side. Instead of dessert we stroll along the banks of the canal as evening sets in and huge flocks of birds wheel and dive in freeflowing amorphous waves above us. Back at the train station we are helped by a young woman who tells us that the Bankomat cash machine there will not dispense more than 2000 SEK at a time, even though one of the message screens asks us if we want 500, 1000, 2000, 3000, or 4000. Back in our room I switch on the TV and see Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing Meadows: the US Open live.
Tuesday, August 27
Up at 7. Buffet breakfast on the hotel’s terrace. Pack, clean up, watch TV, check out at 10. Catch the 10:38 to Stockholm, an older train that I like.
Arrive at 1 p.m., taxi to 83 Regeringsgatan (53 SEK). Meet our b&b hostess, Mrs. Linn Segerfalk. In perhaps her early 50s, she has a lot of hair cascading around in streaky curls and she enjoys conversation. Her apartment, where she lives with one of her two daughters and with her lapdog Caesar, is chock-a-block with furniture and knickknacks redolent with the 18th century. She tells us that she didn’t like practicing law, so she switched to painting. One of her oils, a portrait of an 18th-century Swedish man in a fancy uniform who made an innovation in heat stove design, hangs above the mantel, his larger-than-life eyes staring down at us. Mrs. Segerfalk asks us what time we will take breakfast. When I say 7:30 she seems to recoil slightly: “Perhaps 8 or 8:30?” “Okay, 8.” In our room, Pat whispers that she is not sure if she can take the claustrophobia—we are hemmed in by bookshelves and plants and art objects and a huge couch temporarily stored in the bedroom, and what seems to bother Pat most, no closet space. We might have to take a loss and move to a hotel, but we’re here, so she will try one night.
We ditch our bags and hasten out for lunch: sandwiches at a shop on nearby Kungsgatan. Then on to the tourist office in Hamngatan for ferry info re: the Stockholm archipelago. Then we walk down to the harbor, where a large outdoor exhibition of aerial photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand is on view—the same show I saw in Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen last summer. They really are stunning, as if all one had to do was go up into the air a little and look down and be amazed. Then we verify the boat info at the quay across from the Grand Hotel, and continue up to the corner of Riddargatan and Sibyllegatan where a few years ago Ulla Montan took the dramatic picture of me that I have been using as an author’s photo. We stop for a coffee frappe on Nybrogatan, just down from the Hotel Orsnskold, where we stayed the last time we were here. The street is noticeably more trendy, with coffee bars, boutiques, and even a multiplex movie theater. The Capri restaurant, where we had dinner with John [Ashbery] and Kenneth and Karen [Koch] last time, is still there, hardly changed. We walk up Birgen Jarlsgatan to Stureplan, then down Kungsgatan to our street. Six p.m.: time for a rest.
At 7 we go out and just down the street to an Irish pub, a popular place where the beer and cider are good but the food is bland and the kitchen is slow (340 SEK). Down—literally, a staircase leads down—to Kungsgatan, where we call Vermont to talk to Wayne and Siobhan, but no one is home. Back to our room at 9:20. Pat is asleep by 10. Lights out at 10:15. At midnight I hear bongo drumming in the street below our open window (it is still hot), drumming that continues sporadically—punctuated by the shouts of eight young men—until 12:30. I can’t find anything to hurl at them. Pat snoozes away.
Wednesday, August 28
Sleep on and off until 7. Breakfast at 7:45, a typical Scandinavian spread. We take a 20-minute stroll down to the harbor and catch the 9 a.m. ferry to Vaxholm, a pleasant ride. It’s almost always nice to go out onto water.
We dock at 10, buy film, phone Gunnar Harding about dinner, try ringing Jörgen and Anna and Anders Edgren, get a local map, and walk around the small town, stopping at 11 in a nice little lunch café for coffee and pastry. They have a pitcher of water with cucumber slices floating in it, just as I had seen last year in Copenhagen and forgotten about. How refreshing it is! Now the sun comes out and we walk around town a bit more, noticing how many oldsters seem to live here. I phone the Opera for information about La Bohème, but all I get is a recording in Swedish. Grrr.
Since there seems to be nothing left for us to see or do, we catch a bus to Stockholm at noon. It arrives at its last stop, the Teknista Högskolen, at 1:15. From there we take the T-bahn to Kungsträdgården and dash into the National Art Museum. Lunch in their atrium cafeteria is delightful (I think that the last time I was here it was an overpriced café with uniformed waiters and linen tablecloths). Then we head up in search of the one painting I want to see, Fragonard’s The Beautiful Servant Girl (La Résistance inutile), which depicts a servant pulling away from her aristocratic master, twisted amidst satin bedcovers. It is—pardon the word—ravishing, still. We also see an excellent spooky Zurburan, The Veil of Veronica, showing Christ’s face imprinted on her garment. The museum’s design wing is okay but way too hot and airless—one can barely stand to be in it. Unfortunately it seems to be the only design collection in the capital. Back down to the atrium for coffee and a cookie. I search the museum bookstore but, of course, find no reproduction of the Fragonard, and so I sneak back upstairs, return to the Fragonard room, and, ten seconds after the guard has moved into the adjacent room, I swoop down on the picture, whip out my camera, and—No Flash Photography—I take a flash picture, slip the camera back in my pocket, and saunter away, pausing to glance at this picture or that, feigning interest.
Outside we walk to Stromparterren, a beautiful little park below one of the bridges to Gamla Stan, the old part of town. I like to revisit Stromparterren because of Valery Larbaud’s description of it in his long poem Europe, the section called “Stockholm”:
Stromparterren, square where one drinks, at the water’s edge,
As if in the water, and under a bridge, with leaves overhead,
In the evening, caloric punch . . .
(Earlier in the poem, he refers to this mysterious beverage as “iced caloric punch.”)
Gazing at Stromparterren I think of the moment when, in my adolescence, I “memorized” a scene so that I would be able to recall it forever, and of course then forgot it. This moment in Stromparterren immediately becomes unreal when I realize that it too—in all its fullness and exactitude—will fade from my memory.
But on we go to Gamla Stan, walking down Västerlanggatan—ah, this is where all the tourists are!—to the square with Sundberg’s konditori, where we ate a delicious baked potato three years ago. Sitting in the square I wonder what it is “like” to be Swedish. (No idea.) We walk back to Stromparterren, where I have Pat take a photo of me as one who is drinking iced caloric punch, “under the trees, near the bridge,” then we walk back up Regeringsgatan to NK department store, where John, Kenneth, and I gave a reading during the trip a few years ago. In fact, Pat and I go up to the store’s bookshop where the reading took place: a pleasure I have in traveling is to return to exact spots and stand there for a moment. Then we go to housewares, so I can show Pat a toaster I almost bought in Copenhagen last year. I must be a nut. Then we walk back up Regeringsgatan to an Italian restaurant near our place, called Witkowa. Our Rumanian waiter is personable and efficient. At 6:55 we finish our first course. The food is overwrought, like most Italian restaurant cooking outside of Italy, and it’s slightly overpriced, but we’re sitting down and it is outside and we have credit cards and we’re over 60.
Then we peek into the ballroom auditorium across the street from our b&b: someone is projecting huge slides on a screen for a musical event later tonight. The ballroom is old, ornate, and lovely. Too bad those bongo drummers did an evening of salsa last night and then couldn’t stop themselves as they stood around in the street waiting for transportation.
Back at the b&b, we chat with Mrs. Segerfalk about country property. It’s relatively cheap in the “outer” parts of Sweden (away from Stockholm). She shows us pictures of a property that includes a large manor house, two large flanking houses (for quite a number of servants), and, she says, 16,000 hectares, offered at $650,000. I remember that real estate office windows in Nässjö and Eksjö advertised summer cottages for $15-20,000. My first impulse then was to buy one, simply because they were bargains. Mrs. Segerfalk wants to own a castle or country estate and to decorate it in 18th-century style. She tells us that she grew up in a castle, that she owns a rental condo in Stockholm, that there is her mother’s condo, etc., giving us the impression that she could afford a new place. She anticipates my question: “I take in guests for a bit of extra money,” she says. Hmmm. Pat and I fall asleep at 10.
Thursday, August 29
Up at 7. Shower in the tiny bathroom. Shave in the even tinier loo. Breakfast at 7:45. Out ca. 8:30. We walk down to the harbor for the ferry to Djurgården, but the ferry doesn’t go until 10. I explain this to a group of French guys, who decide to get in line for another ferry, taking them I don’t know where and I don’t think they did either. Pat and I start walking—it takes only 15–20 minutes. We arrive at the Vasa Museum, which is supposed to be open at 9:30, but it isn’t, so we have to kill 30 minutes, which we do by wandering over to Junibacken, the museum devoted to Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstockings, but it isn’t open either and we probably wouldn’t go inside anyway. At 10 we charge into the Vasa, to be confronted by a huge galleon, which sank in Stockholm harbor on its maiden voyage in 1628. It looks like the pirate ships in Hollywood films, only bigger. I’m not particularly interested in old ships, but I have to admit that this one is impressive, and the museum is well designed, with a good gift shop to boot. We buy a few oddball items. Out at 11. Outside I notice a sign with a wavy black line and the word Farthinder.
We walk further into Djurgården to an outdoor café called Blå Porten (The Blue Gate), which Mrs. Segerfalk had recommended. The food is generous and delicious and the enclosed flower garden is delightful. (220 SEK for two.)
At 12 we walk on to Skansen, the immense open-air museum, in fact the first one in the world (1891). We take a very long stroll through it, up and down its hills, visiting its buildings, stopping to rest and to have coffee. I try the Opera number again, but it’s busy, and I’m getting very frustrated by their inaccessibility. Another sunny day, but the tourist crush has been finished for several weeks, so it’s an ideal time to visit Skansen. A few high points: 1) We learn that in the (I think) 17th century people decided that it was unhealthy to stretch out flat to sleep, so they slept propped up, hence the tiny beds. 2) Gliding seals, sleepy reindeer, a lanky moose. 3) Inside some of the buildings are people dressed in costumes appropriate to the structure: baker in the bakery, etc. In one cottage, featuring a large 18th-century kitchen, sits a young woman in traditional dress, reading in the half light. She greets me with a Swedish hi and I mosey about the room and the adjacent one. On the way out I can’t refrain from saying to her, “I have a question for you. What are you reading?” “A book,” she replies. “I know, silly, but what book? Who’s the author?” She shyly holds up the front cover, which says, in Swedish, The New York Trilogy. “Unbelievable,” I say. “Did you know that Paul Auster was just in Stockholm?” “No, I didn’t.” And then of course I add, thumping my chest, “Paul is a friend of mine.” 4) How Skansen is a combination of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, Central Park (with the children’s zoo), and Disney World. 5) The general calm. 6) Old windmills. 7) The tallest belfry in Sweden. 8) Roof caps, how tricky they were to do in the past, given the building materials. 9) The bakery with freshly baked apple and blueberry rolls for sale. 10) The reasonable admission price (60 SEK). Finally we get a coffee and sit on the terrace of the Tobacco and Matchstick Museum. I wonder if people get more or less jet lag on the Concorde. What causes jet lag, distance covered (time zones) or speed or what? The girls here seem to have very ample bosoms. The weather is a bit cooler today, with a nice breeze, couldn’t be nicer at 4:15. I look up at the empty tables and chairs on the terrace and take a snapshot of them, so oddly appealing they are just being there. We are tired, but the Tobacco and Match Museum is just inside and I can’t resist. There I discover the world’s largest cigar—112.5 kg! This nice little museum features cigar box labels, cigar bands, matchbox labels, lighters, pipes, ashtrays, etc. Then we say good-bye to Skansen and catch bus 47 via Hamngatan to Torgels Square.
I decide to try the Opera number one last time. They answer! It’s on! Tonight! We walk home, arriving at 5:20. After 30 minutes’ rest we go across the street to Milan Pizzeria, thinking it’s a restaurant, but it’s mainly a takeout place with a few tables, self-service, with no décor. We get two large pizzas and two drinks and two small salads for a mere 104 SEK. And the pizza is pretty good!
Out we go, on our way to the Opera. I walk straight in to the box office and get two tickets (300 SEK each), which turn out to be for excellent seats in private boxes with comfortable velvet-covered armchairs. The large-but-small theater itself is way-over-the-top baroque and totally gorgeous. When the curtain rises and I see that the performers are wearing modern clothing, my heart sinks: oh no, it’s going to be like a King Lear in which Lear is a CEO of a large corporation, but by the time the first act ends, with Rudolf and Mimi floating off into the dark on a luminous blue rectangle, I am enchanted. Its rather busy action aside, the second act has the same values as the first: good direction, fine sets, and some good singing (though Mimi’s voice seems weaker than it has to be). Intermission. We dash out onto the spacious balcony, Perrier in hand, and below us is Gustav Adolfs Torg, the Parliament to the left, dimly lit, with Gamla Stan, cool breeze, the joys of evening, wow, we’re so lucky! And then, thinking of the bargain cottages for sale near Nässjö and Eskjö, I notice a yellow VW going by below and say to Pat, “For what that costs, one could have something bigger and which stands still.” For some reason this remark strikes me as witty. Pat simply nods. Inside for acts 3 and 4, and when the rounds of applause and bows end I am reluctant to leave the theater. After some lingering, out we go, back up Regeringsgatan to Kungsgatan, where we stop for a beer and a Diet Coke. I think of Kenneth and Karen at the Opera three years ago, and of his going to Skansen around 50 years ago.
Home around 10:30. Mrs. Segerfalk tells me I can check my email on her daughter’s computer, which I do, but email, despite its wonders, seems insignificant next to opera! To bed at 11:30. All night I keep writing, in my head, two sentences about Kenneth.
Friday, August 30
Apparently it rained last night, the first since the Faroes. Up at 7:30. The usual breakfast. T-bahn to Central Station, then the 9:40 to Uppsala, via the uninteresting suburbs of Stockholm. A conductor comes down the aisle and says something to us, and when I explain we don’t speak Swedish he amiably says in English, “We are doing an investigation on this train.” I like his sentence, but what he means is “We are conducting a survey about train service.” This car is airless, like all the others we’ve been in. Swedes don’t seem to open windows. Also, they seem surprisingly sensitive to cool air: 65 degrees and they reach for their jackets. Anyway, we don’t qualify for the survey. Every once in a while a forlorn farmhouse slides past.
Arrive Uppsala 10:20. Walk to tourist info office, get map and brochures, then go on to the Domkyrken, the largest cathedral in Sweden, in which Linnaeus and Swedenborg are entombed. Linnaeus has a relatively modest stone in the floor, whereas the mystic has an entire chapel and a big sarcophagus. The church also houses a few relics of Saint Brigit, but, if memory serves, they are inside a small marble box and can’t be seen. We walk back to near the tourist office for lunch at 11:30 at the Color Café (a chain in Sweden): baked potato, salad, and drink (60 SEK each). Tasty potato. Walk to the Linnaeus Museum, where we learn that he grew the first banana in Sweden, in 1752. Walk to the university library, use their free email service in the lobby, buy a few postcards. Then walk to the Botanical Garden, have a drink in the Café Victoria there, again a nice, quiet outdoor terrace. Sit a spell, until 2:45. On a napkin, I write down the two sentences I wrote last night in my head, for fear that I will forget them. Time to start back to the train station, but first a cheeky black, yellow, and white bird the size of a finch eats crumbs from the plate one foot away from my arm—then loses its confidence and flies away. Bus #7 back to Stora Torget (Big Market Square), then walk toward station, stopping at Ahlens (department store) to look for a notebook. No dice, they’re all ugly or spiral-bound. Arrive at the station at 3:20, take the 3:36 to Stockholm. I look for a notebook at the larger Ahlens there, but they have the same stock as in Uppsala. On the walk home, though, I find a nice notebook in the Academic Bokhandel. Buy one for me and one for Kenward.
We rest, dress, and walk to Gunnar Harding’s apartment, 19 Tegnersgatan, which turns out to be in our neighborhood, arriving at 6:40. He is renting it from his friend Margreta. We chat and have a beer (Samuel Adams, the brand his son prefers), then at 7:30 we meet Margreta at an Italian restaurant down the street. A long, pleasant, funny dinner. Margreta is a huge Byron fan—she faithfully goes to London for the annual meeting of the Byron Society (or whatever it’s called). Gunnar teaches me the proper pronunciation of the Swedish phrase for ”chocolate cake.” He also explains that the word farthinder means speed bump. A little before midnight we say good-bye.
Back to Mrs. Segerfalk’s, where we meet two visitors from Portland, Oregon—both of them academic lawyers—and Susanne, the person who operates the b&b booking agency. It turns out she is deaf, which is why the agency doesn’t have a phone number; she does all her business by the Internet. We sit and chat with them, then lights out at 12:45.
Saturday, September 1
Up at 7:30. Breakfast at 8. We walk to the Stadhuset, taking the long way around it—there are no signs—trying to find the ferry to Drottningholm, the palace that Eleanora, the widow of King Karl X, ordered in 1662. (Drottning = queen, holm = flat land near a body of water.) Our perambulation takes us 40 minutes on this cool, breezy, pleasant morning. Tickets one way are 70 SEK. The boat is clogged with a German tour group. As usual I dislike their accents—one of my few prejudices, this one ingrained by all those anti-Nazi films I saw as a child. (I love the sound of Heine’s poems, though, especially as set by Schubert.) Otherwise the cruise is enjoyable.
We pile off the boat at 10:55. At 11:30, accompanied by a rather shy guide, we visit the Court Theater, built in 1766 by King Gustav III. When he was assassinated—at the Opera in Stockholm—the building, which includes rooms for the resident and traveling troupes he maintained, was sealed up for 120 years, hence never altered. We go into the theater itself, where the guide goes backstage and activates the thunder and wind machines. The mechanisms for scenery changes, flying characters, moving clouds, etc. are intricate. The room is magical—it is as if we are in the 18th century. Suddenly I think: How remarkable the impulse to build a theater and have people perform in it! (In the gift shop I should have bought the book about the theater’s engineering.) Then Pat and I walk to the outdoor café next to the Kina Slot (Chinese Castle) that the king built for his queen, sort of her version of the Petit Trianon. Ham and cheese sandwiches beneath an overcast sky at yet another pleasant outdoor cafe. Then a superb waffle (väffla) topped with jam and something similar to Devon cream. (I just realized that I have not seen a single supermarket in Stockholm, except inside the big department store NK.) We go inside the Chinese Castle, then outside to a smaller adjacent building that houses the billiard room. There I read a placard that says, “In the 18th century, turning on a lathe was a recreation for the royals and the nobility of Europe.” I find this difficult to visualize: with their sleeves roled up, royalty marveling and chuckling as the curls spin off the wood? Determinedly uninterested in castle interiors, we stride briskly back to the dock to catch the 2 p.m. return ferry, which we board amidst the crush by simply flashing our used tickets to a bored young attendant. Thus the free ride back to Stockholm is doubly enjoyable. (Pat says that I momentarily reverted to a con-man tactic of my youth.)
We duck into NK to see if they have any better notebooks, but they don’t, so we have coffee and a bite, then buy five big yellow lilies for our dinner tonight at Jörgen and Anna’s. I was going to buy wine, but the state liquor stores—the only places to buy it—closed at 3. We walk up to Hedegren’s Bookshop on Stureplan. Pat sits outside smoking while I cruise through its good selection of books in Swedish, English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. They devote a yard of shelf to Paul Auster, who has just been in town promoting his Book of Illusions. Back to the b&b at 4:40. Shave and rest. I lance the blister on my little toe again.
At 5:30, downstairs to meet the waiting Anders Edgren. Just as we greet him, the sky opens up and a torrential rain falls. Pat goes back upstairs to get an umbrella, but by the time she gets downstairs the rain has abated. We hasten along the glistening street and down a long stairway. “Right down there at the next corner,” Anders tells us, “is where Olaf Palme was assassinated, as he strolled along in the evening with his wife. He never used a . . . what do you call it?” “A bodyguard?” “Yes, a bodyguard. The assassin escaped up these stairs and has never been found.” I have a flash fantsy of a young man taking the steps three at a time, his hair whipping behind him. But then I can think of nothing else about it. We take the T-bahn to Jörgen and Anna’s, who live in an apartment building in Enskededalen, a suburb south of Stockholm. (Rent in the capital is very high, everyone says.) Nice conventional apartment. We meet Jörgen’s son Aron, a friendly kid around age 11. Dinner in the small kitchen is a tasty roast beef, roasted potatoes, and sliced tomatoes, washed down with wine and followed by a nice custard pudding topped with lingonberries. Then coffee. Anna is 8 and 1/2 months pregnant and very much so. Jörgen talks about a long work he is going to write about last year’s rioting in Gothenburg, the only socio-political trauma in Sweden he can recall, other than that of the assassination of Palme. At 10:15 Pat, Anders, and I catch the T-bahn back to Stockholm. On the way Anders gives us two tee shirts, one for the educational radio group UR, where he works, and another for the town of Sundsval, which he had suggested we visit, in the north. He also gives me information about his “One Moment” project with young children, in which he has teachers all over the country get their children to describe a single moment in which something very memorable happened to them. (Sort of a variant of I Remember.) He then tape records the kids reading their Moments and airs them on his radio show, the shortest one in Sweden (three minutes and thirty seconds). We get out at the Hortorget stop and walk down Kungsgatan, then say good-bye. Anders is off to meet some friends at a bar, Pat and I back to the b&b to shower and pack. It is now almost midnight.
Sunday, September 2
Sleep spotty. Up at 7:30. Breakfast. Linn—we are now on a first-name basis and I find I rather like her—calls us a taxi. We leave at 8:30. Fine morning, little traffic, a 30-minute glide to Arlanda airport. Check in. Eight-hour flight, only a few bumps here and there. And we have bulkhead seats, hence plenty of leg room, which matters more than one might imagine. Newark. A long wait for our bags, then a long wait for a taxi, then a traffic-clogged ride to Manhattan. Home at 3:30. The apartment is still here, waiting for us in silence.
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