She should have been a cartographer, the kind of person
who draws maps and borders with the aid of compass and
surveyor’s instruments. The family laughed when she
acutely cut up her meat until all the pieces looked alike.
”What a methodical girl,” cried her grandfather.

The sharp
knife fondly followed the marbled surface of the meat, which
looked like hieroglyphics on red papyrus. The unknown had
always attracted her.
The girl collected maps and travel accounts, wandering
with Burton through black Africa, sailing with Alvar Nunez
Cabeza de Vacas on ill-fated expeditions, climbing with
Amundsen and Scott over snow-covered mountains. There
was room for the whole world inside Grandfather’s worn old
bound books from which she had learned to read when she was
five.

But life required something else of her. In August, when
she arrived at the little airport in Växjö, for the first time she
felt that she was in an unknown landscape, that the names on
the map resembled nothing she had learned before. That
worried the girl with the dark gaze.
She looked around, but couldn’t find the courage to take a
single step, almost paralyzed with grief.

An observant
spectator would have been able to see (but only for a meeting
second, her self-control was so great) the way her face had
become young and innocent again, freed from the weighty
burden of the journey, from the mask that made her look
older than her twenty-four years.

The airport was deserted, silent and sleepy, a contented cat
sleeping off its dinner. But a few cars and a small welcoming
committee were there and she was taken to an even smaller place,
Alvesta.

She learned later that this new country was divided into many different
small lands, Angermanland, Smalland, but deep down she had
christened it Nomansland, the land that is not.
Again she smelled the indescribable scent that had followed
her since childhood; her own native country was also much
of a nomansland, squeezed like a wedge between two giants,
invisible, borderless like the kingdom of dreams. “Fool’s
Paradise” someone had called it.
The characteristic scent of nomanslands was nothing that
could be explained in words; it smelled like a stillborn child, a
shattered jar, burnt bread.

She thought Lazarus must have had the same smell when
he rose from the tomb. Martha and Mary scrubbed after him,
burnt incense, opened jars of fragrance, but nothing helped.
He brought with him a strange perfume from the tomb, from
the threshold between the living and the dead.

She came to her new country on 21 August, only a few
days after her birthday. She had scarcely noticed it, not to
mention celebrated it. Later she was to find that memories
manage to sift out the unpleasant, the uncomfortable, the
sorrowful, the mad.

The journey had been nightmarish, a study in humiliation
and uncertainty. She was one of thirty who had been granted
asylum in Sweden, at least fifteen of them small children.
They had neither passports nor money, and were traveling
with papers from the United Nations which guaranteed
them a new country. It was to be as if being born anew, the
enthusiastic official at the Embassy had said.

Frankfurt Airport was frightening and unfriendly. Her elementary English and her school German were just sufficient
to negotiate for an empty waiting room where the mothers
could feed their babies and change nappies, where the nervous
men could smoke as they had smoked when they had had their
first child.

Nearly all of them were descendants of European peasants and
workers who had sought happiness in America. They had come
in great ships, laden with heavy chests. They had sold their
patch of land to siblings and cousins. Yellowing certificates
stated where they came from, what their names were, whom
they had married. Old grandfather Francesco venerated an army testimony, signed by King Vittorio Emanuele, in which he is
praised for his “courageous contributions in the war”.
But old Grandfather, grown tired of war in distant places, Abyssinia, Eritrea, Istanbul, Montenegro, had sought out calmer territories.

Now their grandchildren were again making the journey. Like a circle
closing, a dog chasing its own tail, they were shadows of their
forefathers, constantly seeking happiness.
Later she was to realize that happiness is like grains of sand
flying in the wind when the shore is emptied of people, that
happiness is like a Tivoli after closing time, a lighthouse no
longer showing lost ships the way, a faceless carnival mask lifted
out of the shadows.

This was one of the least populated places in northern Europe,
far away from the Italy of her parents or from the Bavaria of her nuns.
The nuns had taught her geography with maps from 1942.
During her entire childhood, she and her school friends had
thought Europe consisted of one great country, Germany, and a
few other small insignificant places.
The nuns taught her that in northern Europe there lived some
barbaric tribes who spoke various dialects stemming from German
and lived off reindeer and fish. Polar bears roamed the town streets
and people traveled on skis along frozen streets and across market squares.

She quickly learned to recognize certain scents. New scents,
quite unlike anything she had smelt before. The trees smelt like
dull violins, the water left a vague taste of chlorine and chemicals,
people smelt different, rather paler, rather muter. But she
was soon able to distinguish and love the new scents, burnt birch-
wood, thawing snow, fallen leaves in autumn, wet soles of leather
boots, the scents of lilac and honeysuckle, the perfume of lily-of-the-valley.

It was strange, but she had never learned the names of Bowers
and trees in her own language. To her mother, a tree was a tree, not
a specific and unique creature, as complete as a human being.
After a while in the new country, the postman became the most
important person in her life. She looked out for his bicycle,
counting how many minutes he stopped at other houses, sulking
when he was asked in for coffee or delayed by a talkative old person.

She and old people were the only ones sitting waiting at home.
The old people often talked about the old days, when the post came
twice a day, the morning delivery, the afternoon post, the mail
order catalogues from which you buy everything from a jersey to an
electric drill.

She was ill and alone, homesick, longing back to her dead grandparents, to their house, to the house Grandfather had had built for
his family, the house which had been her childhood fortress,
protecting her from the world. The house which was always inhabited,
open to all, a refuge for abandoned cats of the district, and lost
girls, whom Grandmother took under her wing and they became
her nursemaids.
Home to the town she had naively believed was the center of the
universe, to the mighty river as wide as a sea. Receiving letters was
the only thing that healed her. She was the district doctor’s favorite patient, challenging his knowledge and talents, making him
go on reading books he hadn’t touch since his student days.

Physically she was perfectly healthy, her blood count normal, her
reflexes good, her organs and cells showing no sign of mortal change,
but all the same, she was wasting away like a fish taken out of water,
a piece of ice melting in the hot sun,
Fish species were also something she learned about here, her new country. Perch, pike, angler-fish, pike-perch, whitefish, cod, sole, carp, roach, plaice, swordfish, salmon, trout, haddock, turbot.

At first the doctor thought she was the victim of a tropic disease; he
saw himself as a new Albert Schweitzer victoriously taking her off
to various medical congresses. He would cure her melancholy and be
mentioned in books and journals all over the world. His disappointment
was great when she pointed at the map of her native country, almost as
far from the tropics as his own.

Her mother was well, her father sent his love, her little nephew asked
when she was coming back. They had taught him to look up and identify
the planes of the various airlines “Look, there goes Lufthansa. Can you
see the bird?”
The winter had been cold and windy, the white beaches of Rio de la
Plata rigid and frozen like blocks of ice; some fishermen said they
had seen sharks and a small whale. That wouldn’t surprise her – in the
days of Claus Gill, back in the twenties, Montevideo had been the last
outpost of the whale. As all the indications now pointed to time being out
of and moving backwards, it was not impossible that the sea around
Uruguay would again be allowed to provide shelter to sharks and killer
whales, dolphins and seals.

She thought about her birthdays, hot chocolate and hands that could
not find the curly ends, could not open presents in any way except with
scissors that cut through the difficult knots.
She had never been good at handwork. The nuns tried in vain to teach
her embroidery. They showed her lovely ornamented cassocks, purple
for Holy Week, red and white for the Resurrection and Baptism,
green and black for all the solemn ceremonies of the year.
How had she ended up here, so far away from home? But none the
less the new landscape was not alien.

The endless expanses also belonged to her country, though there they were green and here they
were as white as sheets.
Like the white sheet with which many years later she was to cover
her mother’s face, the sheet she had lifted in the naive hope of seeing
someone else’s face and that a cruel joker had been playing a trick on her.
Behind the carnival mask were hidden her mother’s fine features,
so like her own. Arlecchino, Pulcinella, Pierrot, a masquerade with
shadows, a theater built by a mad king for his mistress. Death had enamelled her mother in soft pastel colors, the brittle bones glowing
through the cheeks; she was illuminated from within.

Who is holding that lantern?
She thought of herself as Siegfried, that her mother and her grand-
mother had made her invulnerable and their invocations would for
ever protect her from pain and death, from sorrow and loneliness.
But people now found themselves at the end of time, in times
the Book of Revelations had already announced.

Gene-manipulated calves and implanted pigs’ hearts, castrated pederasts, sectioned schizophrenics, all AIDS sufferers,
those who prayed and swore in three thousand languages to
hundreds of different gods, to icons and statuettes representing
gods with dog-heads, gods with bull necks, gods with serpent bodies.
A mighty king shall come. His kingdom shall maketh other
kingdoms into shadows, other kings shall kneel before his glory
and say: “Here is my sword, for you are the King of Kings.
Be merciful to us.”
But no one had shown them mercy, their houses burnt down, their
most beloved possessions scattered to the winds – Grandfather’s
books on insects and chemical formula, Father’s riding whip, Mother’s handwritten cookery book – and they themselves had been taken prisoners.
“By the waters of Babylon we sang of our vanished fry of our
disappointments, of our fear.”

Now only letters from home became her link with the outside world.
All letters that came were received solemn ceremonies. First, look
at the sender. Then, look at the stamps and investigate which day
the letter had posted. Sometimes bizarre letters came, from authorities or organizations wanting her to do this, that or the other, go to a
medical check-up, to group therapy, support-group counseling,
an association meeting, a church coffee morning, a neighborhood
gathering, a Co-operative Society meeting, a party congress, a
parent-teacher meeting, consult with the teacher, someone’s hen-party,
a fortieth birthday party, a wedding.
She had not felt that important before; at home with her grand-
parents no importance was attached to children. They were at an
intermediate station, childhood a kind of waiting room for adult life.

Letters were something unknown to her. She had never
previously written letters, received letters, worked, had a house
of her own, paid rent, received a salary. Everything was so new to her,
so unique. She felt chosen; fate had chosen her among so many others,
like being born anew, the of had said, the same official who had
described the new country as an idyll, with little red houses and good
kind people who would invite her to coffee and homemade buns.
She would sit on the parlor sofa and look at photographs of “what
it was like before”, when this country had emptied of people who
went away, when lice and scurvy were common, when backward
people were sterilized, when eyes were closed to Red Cross wagons
filled with arms, where Povel Ramel was young and time was still
a promise, when Ingvar Kamprad cycled round Smaland and sold
seeds and condoms.

She was like a young knight watching over his spurs, afraid of
making a fool of herself, tense and wondering. Was there a life
after this? Would all these people like me, consider me worthy
of sharing their happiness?
Of course it was a happiness to live in a country where they
could all say what they wanted, where no one was imprisoned
for his or her opinions, where freedom prevailed, where everyone (at least on paper) had the right to work and a place
to live, to free education and a secure old age.

She was born in a melancholy town, where the sky changed
color a hundred times, where voices sounded polite but
slightly cool, where smiles mere slightly strained, where the air
was thin and as sharp as a scalpel. Her home town’s music was
Satie’s sorrowful cracked tunes, an abandoned harbor where
skeletons of ships dream of other days and other places,
a woman running and losing a shoe, a choir singing in an empty
church. Allegro, minor, piano, pianissimo. In Montevideo’s symphony there was neither staccato or fortissimo.
That was what was most difficult, learning the voice of the new
town. The tune could at first mislead, making the anger think this
time it was also melancholy and weary. But to the trained
ear, it was easy to make out that was only a stain of mist, that the new
country was as savage and forceful as a young centaur not yet
decided whether he is human or animal.

The country was as heathen and barbaric as a cave painting.
Their gods were the young warriors condemned to endless
fighting in the eternal paradise of the battlefield. She felt a
thousand years older than her new countrymen; she was born
in a churchyard with old trams and ancient cafes where the
castaways from the whole world’s shipwrecks had gathered to
remember, where palace and patrician apartments had been
taken over by rats and bats, like a film set left behind after
the film crew has gone home, where predatory animal and
wild dogs gnawed at nameless bones.

For lack of any other material, the bridge between the two
towns was built of stacked shoe-boxes and extended over a
desolate landscape, covered with ice and reeking lava.
She had to cross the bridge with cautious steps, for one false
step would banish her into oblivion, to nothing.
Sometimes she sought in vain to remember what she was
like when young, what she was like as a girl, as a child.
She had asked older aunts and cousins, but was given
only disconnected details, taken out of context.

The picture became blurred, one of those sepia co-
loured photographs of Grandmother as a sixteen-year-old
beauty. So beautiful “the bells rang for her as she went past”,
her grandfather used to say.
With an effort, she was able to trace herself as an
adolescent, a stubborn dreamy child, always reading. As a
hunting hound sniffs eagerly at the place where the prey
has stopped to collect itself, she felt like that whenever
a small detail from her past appeared. The definition in-
creased, and an old picture swam in the developer.

Her first ball, the red dress, dancing with older brothers
of school friends, secret smoking, her younger sister, a growing shadow, a clumsy colt. Every day she asked the
mirror who she was; she had no desire to risk forgetting.
So many people woke in the morning without knowing
who they were, where they came from, in what language
they usually said: “Good morning”.

The mirror always responded with references, a tired
sibyl constantly forgetting the ritual words, who would
have preferred to have gone on sleeping undisturbed:
‘you are the daughter of Helena, grandchild of Ophelia,
cousin of Pablo, of Pedro, of Jose. You were born under
Leo one early morning in August. It was cold and your
mother was afraid; you looked at her with dark accusing
eyes. She maintains you did not wish to be born. The sun
was in Leo then, as was the moon, Venus and Mars.
So you have a great deal of fire. You will die young,
of spontaneous combustion.’
Grandmother was the only one who could handle her fire.
She was cool and as sharp as a diamond pin and scratched
unforgettable traces in the girl’s soul, invisible to others,
written in a secret code only the two of them knew.

Her flame grew tame and warm whenever Grandmother
was near, her presence enough to set limits to the mad
dance of the Fire.
But in the new country, the mirror had been almost mute
and the memories of Grandmother paler. So few people knew
her by name, so few knew who her parents were, in which
house they lived, whether they were old or young, whether
they loved her.
Her name was also a worry. At all costs, she wished to avoid
being known by her real name, the holy name her mother had
given her when expecting her.
She herself had almost forgotten it until she heard her mother
whispering it again, before she went away into the kingdom
of mist, to the place where time and place are muted,
to the eye of the storm, the only place in the world that
could be called home.
But at the same time, she longed for someone to whom she
could tell that secret name. The chosen one would know
everything about her, everything about her tangled inner
geography, where there were rivers that often overflowed,
high inaccessible mountains, dark fragrant valleys, narrow
paths, abandoned towns, plundered churches, soured lakes,
polluted shores, remains everywhere. Dusty ruins of magnificent dreams, ash from burnt-out bodies, the sweet-
sour scent of decayed corpses, pale and half-eaten human
bodies.
‘Thou shalt not consume that flesh. Thy lips shall not taste
this blood.’

But man is the wolf of man, and now no one was safe.
Vampires and arms dealers, assassins and cannibals,
mercenaries and werewolves, false prophets and corrupt
politicians, bribable policemen and uniformed butchers.
The horsemen of war were already on their way to the meeting
decided on since the beginning of time, the horsemen
of disease and hunger spurring on their swift steeds,
the horsemen of death already there.
Her new freedom intoxicated her, no family to see to,
no voices telling her what was right, what was wrong.
Her future was no longer determined, and she could
be whatever she liked. No lawyer’s office waiting
for her degree, no inherited posts, no convent school
to teach in.

She was like a tightrope walker walking a taut rope
high above the ground with no safety net, somewhat
shaken by all that was new, but for the first
time ever one with herself, concentrated, sharp as a
laser beam making holes in the hard steel.
Then she suddenly discovered the language. She
was not aware of it before, like a fish swimming but not
knowing anything about water; she had been that deaf
to the language.
But now the language was something both outside
and inside her, a colorful mixture of ritual forms
and inherited formulations, a liturgy of ceremonies
and actions shaped and sketched when the world was
young, when darkness reigned.

‘In the principle was the word. And the word created
the world.’ Let there be light, and the universe was drowned in an explosion of white and yellow, red and green.
Let there be earth, and the soil smelt strongly of manure
and decaying frogs. Let there be sea and rivers and all
inconsiderable streams and lakes flowed like liquid silver.

Let there be life and all was filled with cooing, squeaking
and lowing. Unicellular animals, four-footed giants,
fish and trees, birds and juniper bushes, squirrels and lemon balm.
In the new language, she recreated the world, and not a
single one of the words she knew from the old world were
put to use.
The old magic formula seemed to have lost heir magical
force, no longer meaning anything She said “caballo” and no
horse appeared. She mumbled “te quiero” and her beloved did
not turn in the wide bed she had bought secondhand. Only
scars from Grandmother’s sharp character continued to live
within her, independent of the new order, as immovable as
the gates of Troy before the fateful horse had been allowed in.

Her language had become a Janus face, one half pointing
towards the past, the other pointing to the future, which was
not yet.
But this new idiom did not become the language of her
heart until she met the chosen one. He had infected her with a
desire for language she had never felt before. She craved it
with the same passion as she craved his soul. She wanted to
drown in the new language with the same intoxicated joy she
allowed herself drown in the skin of her loved one, in the
scents of her beloved. Lemon and myrrh, sea-sale and freshly
ground coffee, burnt sugar and vanilla, warm new-laid eggs.

The language lit in her a flame that spread sparks of
warmth and light wherever she found herself. She was like a
bonfire on Walpurgis Night, a homage to life and what is
secret, to the magic formula that the new tongue had given
her, to the new world which allowed itself to be remarked by
her groping words.

The new world took no notice of grammatical norms or
rules of spelling. She was a sorcerer’s apprentice, who one day
would be initiated into and in agreement with all the secrets
of the language, its most hidden nuances, in the holy of holies,
the chamber where the language cared for what was not yet
what had not been mentioned before, what was
patiently awaiting to be discovered.
With the same childish curiosity that had marked the descriptions
by chroniclers of the new world they had
discovered, she wrote letters home with stories of her new
life.

She surprised her mother when she told her abou
sophisticated cooking. Indian dishes, sushi, creme caramel,
bread-crumbed cheese, Greek sheep’s cheese salad, Turkish
cakes, Jansson’s Temptation, iron pans and garlic presses,
raw preserving and microwave ovens, so very far from
Grandmother’s copper pans, from the aunts’ home baked teacakes
and thick jams.
Her new life had few points of contact with the old life.
The house in the fashionable district of her hometown had
become an apartment in an anonymous suburb, old leather-
bound books cheap paperbacks, the traditional oak and
ebony furniture transformed into untreated pine, chipboard,
the seasons reversed.

The first snow filled her with wonder, the landscape
shrouded in white, lakes frozen, the air itself as sharp as a
sword blade.
The town slumbered, like Sleeping Beauty, waiting for
spring. Under the snow lived myriads of small creatures,
centipedes, morses, beetles, ants. Their almost invisible tracks
in the snow helped her find her way home one evening when
she had gone astray. It was easy to go astray in this town.
She lived in a suburb built in the sixties, a suburb of several
high rise blocks and a few shops. When the shops closed and
people hurried home, the streets were deserted and inhospitable. No café to sit in to write poems, no cinema, no food
shops open at night.
Sometimes a neighbor’s father might came on a visit and
say: “To think that I hunted deer here only thirty years ago.

All these buildings, all these cars. There was nothing here but
forest and game!”
The neighbor used to invite her back home and the she could
taste the culinary delicacies of the country which she usually
bought ready-cooked. He worked nights at the post office and
studied economics in the daytime. Hash, black pudding, dried fish,
potato dumplings, bee-stings pudding, black soup from goose giblets,
veal brawn.
One of her favorite places in the new town was the library. There she
could read newspapers and books written in all the languages of the world.
She borrowed books and took them home. Many of them she had read before,
but she wanted to see what they were like in the new language. Did Camus
sound the same in Swedish, was Virginia Woolf as gripping in the new
language?

Once she had joined them in the longest queue, patiently vraiting to be
allowed to read a paper. They were mostly older men, all a trifle sorrowful, as if in exile. When her turn came, she found that the newspaper was the Västerbotten Courier, a local paper in Norrland.
The girl asked the librarian why so many people wanted to read just that newspaper, full of local news. The librarian patiently explained that most of those men were born up in Norrland and they had had to move to the city to find work. They had never felt at home in the suburbs of the city and longed for the forest, the wide expanses and the great lakes.

They read the newspaper for news from home, to see who had married, who had had children, who had died. One day they would go back.
She recognized the feeling. She had felt like that for the first years. Then the memory of home faded, ties and feelings weakened. When she had finally been given permission to return, she found to her horror that there was nothing to go back to, the home town she remembered had gone, wiped off the earth. The cafes had become video game arcades, theaters had become assembly halls, cinemas discotheques, and the prison where she had spent four long years had been turned into a vocational school.

Friends had grown up and become strangers, school friends had become diplomats’ wives and politicians, someone had committed suicide.
Her first boyfriend, now a young grandfather divorced for the third time, was drowning his sorrows in drink. He mourned the vanished tow where he had written his best poems, where they had played chess with old Hunga masters, castaways from all the wars of the world.
She felt all towns were alike, scenery for human lives, for all the plays of everyday drama. Tragedies and comedies followed one another in a perpetual performance changing place and time.

She was an exile from a time and not from a place. Not against her will, she searched like Proust for a vanished time when everything had seemed clearer and cleaner, full of trust. A time in which everyone had called one another brothers and sisters, in which the Messiah had a beard and a beret and had taken his asthma medicine into the jungle, in which paradise lay round the corner and where all antagonisms where allowed to exist.

But she would take the consequences. Although the new time offered no truths, although the new time was a lonely place to be in, although the tune of the new time sounded alien to her ears, she did not want to flee.
Life wanted her to cope, as witness from another time, from another place in the world. Like an animal through a genetic mutation gives birth to another animal in a later generation, better prepared for the new climate equipped for the new conditions of the world, more intelligent, sharper, humbler, that was how she would be. The girl felt she was a hybrid, a mixture of fish and lizard, belonging both on land and in water, an arrow flying through the air but not yet reached the target.

She was still a sketch, a will, an unspoken dream first time she felt she was not afraid that the one dreaming her would wake. In the new town, among all these
new people, she knew the dream was her own, and she need not to be anxious.
The dream of herself was more real than all scenery.