The Hand that Trembles

THIRTY-ONE

On the day of the Virgin, the eighth of December, Sven-Arne Persson returned to his homeland. That was the word he mouthed as he looked out of the aeroplane window, the first time in almost exactly twelve years that he had seen Sweden. Homeland. What a sick word, he thought, and recalled one of Uncle Ante’s timeworn phrases from his usual rant: internationalism.

The working class doesn’t have a homeland, has never had one, Ante Persson would preach. Sven-Arne smiled to himself. Apart from this, the trip had given him little to smile about. His temporary passport – issued in Delhi – had created problems at the Bangalore airport as well as in Paris. Prior to his departure three phone calls had been required: one to the Swedish ambassador himself, one to the consular section of the embassy, and finally a call with a roaring voice at the other end of the line, likely a local official, before he was allowed to leave the country. He did not know what had been said in these calls, but he guessed that the embassy had assured the Indian immigration serviceman that Sven-Arne was not a criminal, just a depressed Swede who – perhaps with religious searching as his source – had confusedly made his way to India and lived there under great privation. A non-threatening man who now had to be sent back home, perhaps in order to receive care. That was how he himself had strategized.

In Paris it had been only marginally smoother. That Sven-Arne’s French was non-existent had not made it easier.

It was with ambivalence that he spun his way from India to Sweden. He hated himself for having gone the political way to get his passport, knowing it was the only possibility to get around the Indian bureaucracy. At the same time he was relieved that the whole process had been so relatively painless. He would not have had the energy to do real battle with some overzealous and self-important Indian clerks. He would rather have backed down.

But now, a thousand metres above Uppland, on his way down to Arlanda, he felt only exhaustion. His joints ached. Strangely enough even his arm hurt, the one he injured in the Japanese section, which it had never done before. He saw it as a reprimand from Lal Bagh: ‘You are betraying us.’ He also saw Jyoti’s face before him: ‘You betrayed me.’ Where was she now? Perhaps in Chennai, a place that now seemed as foreign as it had done twelve years ago. And then Lester, who with a tone of amazement but also irony made his voice heard: ‘You were a powerful man in your country, a kind of governor.’

Even Ismael in his salon fluttered past. The Dalit women in the neighbourhood who swept the street and kept the worst of the filth at bay, who carried bricks when the city razed the old weaving factory and built a police station, who sold bananas in the corner toward the market – all of them looked at him with an unfathomable gaze, not repudiatingly, but with a painful distance that no words or assurances, no decency, could surmount. He had been a decent fellow. No one could say anything else. He convinced himself that he had been respected and regarded as a relatively honourable man given the circumstances. His clothing, his rough hands and feet – the emblematic mark of class – and his entire being on the street bore witness to a man who did not think of himself as above others. But still, he had never been able to overcome the distance, and it had pained him. The temporary passport burning like fire in his shirt pocket, and the fact that he was sitting in an aeroplane, were evidence enough to this.

The landing gear was unfurled with a muffled thud and Sven-Arne was shaken out of his reflections.

After having collected his bag and passing through the passport check without significant problems – were they alerted to his arrival? – he sat down in the arrival hall and bought himself a cup of coffee for the astounding price of three dollars.

Passengers and relatives, taxi drivers with signs in their hands with names such as ‘Lundgren’ and ‘Ullberg,’ airport staff – everyone arrived and disappeared just as fast, without giving him more than a distracted glance. He was a man on a bench, so far as anonymous as in the crowd in Bangalore.

His hand shook as it brought the cup to his lips. He slurped up the coffee, drinking it without milk for the first time in a long time. I’m going to be stuck here, he thought, suddenly desperate over hearing all the voices around him, Swedish voices. The coffee was drunk up and he placed the cup gently on the floor.

He ought to get up and go, but couldn’t make himself. He saw through the windows how it began to snow.

Most of all he wanted to lie down, curl up and feel some merciful person spread a blanket over him. He would live under that blanket.

Sven-Arne Persson sat as if turned to stone, for over an hour. He could have been an installation. Lone Man atAirport. He had turned off all systems, his breathing was barely noticeable, not a movement betrayed that he belonged to the world of the living. It was his eyes that betrayed him as they scanned the arrival hall. If he shut them he would collapse, he was convinced of it.

When he finally got up, the ground swayed and he took a side step. The coffee cup on the ground clattered.

‘What am I doing here?’

After a couple of seconds everything became still and the floor stopped swaying. He reached for his bag, took a couple of tentative steps toward the exit, and stepped out into the cold December air.

He was dressed in a pair of brown, baggy trousers of unknown origin, a blue and white nylon jacket, and his best sandals.

In his wallet – the same one he had started out with twelve years ago – he had twelve hundred American dollars, which constituted the extent of his earthly possessions.

Subconsciously he had assumed that he would be met by a delegation at the airport, perhaps police officers, and that they would be in charge of the program. But no one cared about the suntanned and somewhat stooped man in the out-of-place clothing. He wasn’t sure where he should go. Arlanda he knew well. He had travelled from here many times during his political career. Back then he would take a taxi or be picked up.

He was cold and had to make some kind of decision. He looked around. A taxi marked UPPSALA TAXI was pulled up to the curb. The fact that the company still had the same phone number, which was written in large numbers on the side of the car, set him in motion.

‘Uppsala,’ he said, once he had sat down in the backseat.

The driver turned around and examined his passenger. The snowflakes in his thin hair started to melt in the warm interior.

‘What address?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sven-Arne Persson said truthfully. ‘What do you suggest?’

He received a chuckle in reply.

‘Home, perhaps?’

Sven-Arne Persson tried to visualise the town house. He felt a need to explain himself to the still smiling driver, suddenly convinced that he would make time to listen to him, understand his situation, and after some additional questions produce a sensible solution.

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Iran,’ the driver replied. His smile had disappeared.

‘What did you do when you came to Sweden? Where did you live?’

‘I was at a refugee centre in Alvesta for eight months.’

‘I am like a refugee, but the opposite, do you understand? I am a refugee in my own country.’

‘You don’t have a home?’

Sven-Arne shook his head.

‘No family?’

‘No.’

The Iranian had an almost pained look on his face.

‘No family? You must have a cousin or something.’

‘I have an uncle.’

‘Where does he live?’

The suburb of Eriksdal had basically been levelled in the midseventies. Only a few houses had been spared. Sven-Arne Persson had been party to the decision. The construction company Anders Diös had won the contract – he still remembered the negotiations. It took place within a kind of brotherly understanding between representatives of the county and the builder. Everyone breathed good intentions and mutual understanding.

He recalled the protests and the demolition. The renters in some buildings had refused to move out. The diggers had begun their work, taking out roofs and walls, breaking up concrete, demolishing one-hundred-year-old sheds as if they were houses of cards. Once upon a time they had been used as outhouses, then were transformed into storage areas for the surplus objects of the renters, finally to fall together into an unsorted pile of rubble.

A flat had been revealed when an outer wall disappeared in a cloud of dust. Sven-Arne had been standing on the street and had studied the scene. A guitar had been hanging on the wall. There was a bed below it. The whole thing looked like a stage set. No one would have been surprised to see a person get out of the bed, take down the guitar, and play a song.

The digger had stopped its enormous shovel. A photographer from the newspaper Upsala Nya Tidning had rushed forward. Sven-Arne Persson had hurriedly left the area.

Thirty years later he was back on the same street. The area was no longer called Eriksdal except by some older Uppsala residents who still found some value in the old names. Now rows of town houses dominated. Sven-Arne thought they looked like barracks in an internment centre with small exercise yards surrounded by high fences.

A number of day care children in troop formation marched by on the pavement. A rubbish lorry was driving along on Wallingatan. The sour smell lingered in the air, reminiscent of the canal behind Russell Market in Bangalore. The children screamed and held their noses.

On the way here, he had stepped out of the taxi at the Central Station, gone in and located the storage lockers that were still in the same place, pushed in his bag, and quickly returned to the taxi, which proceeded to take him to Ringgatan as far up as the Sverker school. For the past hour he had been wandering aimlessly through the neighbourhoods, and now he approached the nursing home with great dread.