A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz Read Online Free PDF

lands and forests. Here there were no tenements to be torn down, no streets to be reconfigured, no memories to be dug up, no traditions to be broken.
    Nor were there yet any plans for the railroad embankment that would cut the place in two, nor for the deep furrow of thecanal that would cut it off to the north, nor—obviously—for the railroad bridge or the viaduct or the factory fences or the oil terminals that would very soon turn Per Olof Hallman’s dream into wastepaper.
    Much later I’d understand that this in a way was a speciality of the Place: nothing there ever turned out as planned. Not the development of the disused land to the south. Not the route of the railroad. Not the course of the canal. Not Havsbadet. Not the population. Not the town.
    It was as if chance had developed a special affection for this particular place. And as if that same chance, like a magnet, had attracted the most fortuitous of human destinies, making the fact that he got off the train at this very Place to start his life anew perhaps the least arbitrary element in the story. A place perfectly chosen for doing exactly that, in fact, or so it sometimes, much later, seemed to me: no strong ties to the past, no fixed plans for the future, no readymade scenario to step into—or be ejected from.
    Oh, that “much later”! How insidiously it creeps in, that all-narrowing perspective of hindsight wisdom and rationalization. How easy it is, with only a few strokes of the pen, to inscribe people into a narrative which to them must still be unwritten, burdening them with a knowledge they can’t possibly have yet, closing horizons which to them must still remain open.

    So let me be honest about the hindsight, since it’s pervasive, inescapable, and treacherous. When I diverge from the story of myself as General Patton in a tank disguised as a garbage truck,busily inspecting my newly won territory, and slip into a digression on Per Olof Hallman and his abandoned plan for the southern fringes, I’m five years old and will in a few months’ time be caught hopping on ice floes in the canal. I will be seduced into doing this by Tommy Hedman, who’s two years older and lives in the right-hand apartment on the ground floor and comes from Falun and has parents who eat fermented herring once a year, though my parents think it’s a bag of rotting garbage caught in the unfortunate kink near the bottom of the garbage chute. I’m not allowed to visit the Hedmans, and I’m not allowed to play with Tommy.
    Actually, to be perfectly honest, what I can remember of these events is fragmentary at best. The early mornings with the garbagemen are fragments of the sleeping apartment, the sun-warmed pavement, the pungent yet sweet smell of the garbage, the clatter of the dumpsters, the dirty, oily overalls, and the vinyl seat sticking to my bare legs. I’m not even sure if the fragments are real, still less whether I’ve put them together correctly. I’m not sure I remember the fragments either, if remembering means actively recalling something. How can you recall something you haven’t yet named and therefore don’t yet have a word for?
    Reflections then, rather than fragments: diffuse reflections of physical perceptions, of sensory experiences without words or order. Jumping on the ice floes: the rasp of frozen trousers on skin blue with cold, the glare of chalk-white faces in a black door opening, the pressure of hard hands, the sound of sharp voices, the feel of a thrashing. In my world, thrashing is a word linked to the sensation of ice floes.
    Other words come only much later, words like dread and desperation, and, later still, words for the nightmares wallpapering the small apartment facing the railroad tracks, and even finallythe words for what the man who is my father and the woman who is my mother might think and feel when their united nightmares suddenly stand before them in the winter darkness of the hall, dripping deep-black water on their