Sleet. Stig Dagerman

arm and pulls me along with her. She talks pretty weird, and I don’t really understand everything.

      “Are you the little boy without a father?” she says, among other things, while she looks me in the face for a good long time.

      I close my eyes and clench my teeth together. I mean, I can understand how they know at school that I don’t have a daddy – but Lord, to think that they know it all over America – I’m not sure if I’ll ever get over that. Anyways. We walk and walk until we’re finally standing outside the stable door. And since we’re suddenly there, I open the door and we go in. It’s warm inside. Nice and homelike. It smells just like a stable, hay and carrots. I hang the lantern from the big key in the stable door. And then the aunt from America – this is the amazing part – then she steps right over the carrot tops to the far corner of the stable and climbs right up on the chaff-cutter, exactly where Grampa was sitting.

      “So this old guy’s still here,” she says, and runs her hand along it.

      I climb up and sit next to her. Then she starts to cry again. She takes hold of my hand, caresses it, and cries the whole time in American, sometimes saying things in Swedish that don’t make a bit of sense. Below us are all the carrot tops, green and glistening, and over in their baskets the red carrots are shining, too.

      “We were in here all day, chopping and chopping,” I say, mostly for something to say. “The whole day we were just sitting in here, chopping and chopping. But now we’re all done chopping – now we are, mostly.”

      The aunt from America puts her arm around me, and it doesn’t hurt like when Mama does it. It feels soft and warm.

      “Poor little boy without a father,” she says. And when I think of how they know all over America – all over that incredibly big America on the other side of the Atlantic – how Arne Berg in Mjuksund, Sweden, hasn’t ever seen his daddy, then I can’t help it. Suddenly I don’t see the green carrot tops anymore and the tears drop slowly down on the chaff-cutter.

      “It wasn’t so bad when Gramma was alive,” I say. “At least then I had two mothers. But she died last year. Every morning she went out and looked for eggs. And then one day in April she didn’t come back. We were having our coffee, and then afterwards we went out and looked for her. And that’s when we found her, on her knees, right here by the chaff-cutter.”

“Por liddel boi,”^* says the aunt from America, whatever that means, as she pulls me up tight against her.

      “But if the Aunt wants to sleep out here,” I say. “Then don’t be scared ’cause it says Palestine on the wall. It wasn’t Jesus. Do you want me to carve your name on the wall?”

      “No, not yet,” she says. “Maybe in a little while.”

      She strokes her little soft hand across my face.

      “Are you crying?” she says.

      “No,” I say, and I dry and dry till the carrot-tops glisten green again, all freshly cut in the lamplight. “… It’s just a little sleet.”

* Swedish-American English phonetic rendering from the original.

      Salted Meat and Cucumber

      When I was nine years old and supposedly small for my age, the way to school passed by a creek with yellow, muddy water. In the winter you could stand there on the bank and throw stones until the golden ice cracked. But in summer, spring, and fall the creek became a race course for matchsticks, corks, and matchboxes – the matchsticks always won because the corks and matchboxes would get stuck between the rocks. Once my friend Inge and I found two fat, ugly lampreys squirming around on the bottom. We stuffed them in a sandwich bag and took them home. But nobody wanted them. So we had to throw them back in the river. I hope they lived. In those days our knees were always scraped, the scabs forever fresh and soft. And just when they had begun to heal, a brewery truck would almost always come down the road that you just had to tow behind, or a new log jam would form in the river that you just had to run across.

      Yes, the road to school was filled with adventures – not so much on the way there, but on the way home. The rich old farmer had an apple orchard with bitter, green fruit. And there was an old abandoned house that eventually became a chapel. Birds flew around in the dark under its broken roof, shingles had fallen in and covered the floor, and everything – the steps, the doors, the warped window frames – everything was rotten in a way that equally frightened, tickled, and enchanted.

      And then, of course, there were the old women of the district, always dressed in black, whom you could usually see walking through the trees toward some old roadside shack. To us, people were never as old as they were in those days – a couple hundred years was just barely middle-aged.

      And there were other things, too, forbidden things which we could never really know for sure, simply because they were forbidden. And yet the unawareness was but a myth, for if ever there was a time when life was filled with sticky symbolism, it was then. Almost everything we did had double meanings. If you threw a stone at a girl out of pure mischief, the act would certainly be interpreted as something else altogether.

      One time on the hillside by the river we found an old deck of left-behind cards half-destroyed by the rain. Only the queen of spades was still in fairly good shape, and I remember very well the many different ways this could be interpreted by those of us who were more experienced.

      When the washtubs simmered on the bank of the river, we would steal matches from the wood pile and light them up in the dark behind some barn wall. This gave us a gruesome pleasure which somehow made life even more doubly complex than it already was. I remember my friend Inge once took a single match to an entire box of stolen matches. When it burst into a hissing flame he flung it out through the air and into the creek. And I remember thinking what a terrible sin it was to waste something you had just stolen. No, we were never as moral as we were in those days.

      To us, the most important bits of knowledge often came in whispers. In the hallway at school, terror had a way of sinking its claws into you, because that’s where you were often pointed out by some secret whisper that could be followed from mouth to mouth. And the strangest thing about it was that you never got to know what your own secret was all about. It could be whispered of someone that his house was infested with lice, or of someone else that she had peed in her pants in class and had to stay in during recess to clean it up. But of my own supposed offences I was never once allowed to hear.