Sleet: Selected Stories by Stig Dagerman

Author:Stig Dagerman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
Published: 2013-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

The Midsummer Night’s Chill Is Hard

A boy and a room. The room is hot and small, with a single narrow window facing out on life. Through it the boy sees the sky as a thin margin wedged between the tops of tall buildings and his eyelids. He is young, and in his impatience, he thinks his eyelids keep him from seeing all that he might otherwise. The window opens onto five adjacent courtyards of masonry and asphalt. In one stands a lone poplar. In the other four perennial laundry hangs yellowed and drooping like wilting leaves. At night he cannot sleep. He keeps the lamp lit on his table, even though this is forbidden, so that he can read the books he has borrowed. But they are never the right books. In the mornings, once he has fallen asleep at long last, his father pounds on the door until he answers.

Mornings in the cramped kitchen smell of bedclothes, coffee, and gas. His father drinks from the faucet, making slurping sounds, as his mother stands in front of the mirror combing her long black hair. The boy, Håkan, sits half-dressed, with his back against the firewood rack, sipping scalding-hot coffee. When his father is ready, he lifts the little sack with his Thermos off the firewood rack and leaves with a short, mute nod. When his mother has finished combing her hair she opens the window and cleans out the comb over the courtyard. Håkan goes into his little room and makes the bed, then smokes a cigarette as he pages through a book with clammy fingers. It is a hot, stupid summer, the summer of his failure. Right above his chair hangs his new uniform jacket, with its armband bearing the postal insignia. He thinks it looks like a mourning band.

Sometimes he takes his schoolbooks out of the little sugar crate under the window and sits down on the floor in the middle of the room to look through them. It’s a stupid and pointless exercise, a way of punishing himself. Yet he does it all the same with a kind of merciless gloating, as if he were his own worst enemy. Poor kids often have old schoolbooks their parents have picked up at used bookstores, scarred with the marks and stains of others before them. On the front page just inside the cover the name of the book’s original owner can usually be found sketched out in bold block letters impossible to rub away. Poor kids write their names under this first one in weak lead letters that are easy to erase, so their mothers can get a better price when they sell the books back at the end of the school year. His books are filled with marks and notes from a string of previous owners, and he sometimes thinks that this is why he failed. It’s not alright for poor kids to fail, partly because of the shame and partly because of the cost. On some of

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