STEPHAN MENDEL-ENK

MONKEY IN THE MIDDLE

Apan i mitten Norstedts, 2020, 233 pages excerpt translated by Kate Lambert

Norstedts Agency [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [Pp. 5–64]

PART 1

ONE MORE WALKOVER and we’d be disqualified for the rest of the season. Ten players would do. Nine if the ref wasn’t too fussy. With me, we were seven, and we’d got less than an hour before the match was supposed to start. Guttkin flicked through the register of members of the congregation, dialling one after the other on the grey phone. He always began politely. “We’re a couple of men short. I was wondering if you might be able to help us out?” Then he’d switch to threats. “You’ve been using your blasted knees as an excuse for five years, Berkowitz. Now get over here or this city won’t have a Jewish team anymore.” Because that was what disqualification would mean, Guttkin explained to us in between the phone calls. Who would even bother putting in the effort to get things up and running again once we’d been chucked out of the league? Booking pitches, washing kit, mending cones. Fixing player licences. Negotiating with the football association so they didn’t give us fixtures on Shabbat. Well it wasn’t going to be him. We could be clear about that.

2

And then it would be over. This year, 1993, would be the club’s last. The end of more than 60 years of history. The end of Maccabi Göteborg, the first Swedish football team to be founded by a minority. The team had endured antisemitic insults and harassment, hidden refugees in the clubhouse during the war and then – in the years that followed – offered Holocaust survivors a community, a way into society, and an opportunity to keep the memories at bay for 90 minutes a week. Maccabi had shown Gothenburg that Jews aren’t just a collection of astigmatic bookworms, hopeless at any sport apart from chess. It was true that the team had lost by a goal margin in double figures more times than any other in the history of club football in Western Sweden, but its rapid, inventive short passing play had celebrated triumphs in its day. Like when the 70s were edging into the 80s, when every home game got turned into a party with the whole congregation crowded on the side-lines. The old folk in sun loungers, chickens on portable barbecues, English versions of Israel’s Eurovision entries on congregation chairman Zaddinsky’s car stereo. My first memories were of those matches. I remembered the orange drink all the children got, Zaddinsky’s dog Eshkol, keen to dash out onto the pitch, Mischa the striker who scored in every match. I remembered the clear blue October afternoon when he scored a left volley from the edge of the penalty area to secure our victory in division 6F Central Gothenburg for 1981.

3

It was the club’s biggest success ever. There was a framed photo of the winning team between the trophy cabinets in the changing room. The cellar where we changed doubled as the sports hall of the Jewish Pensioners’ Association. There was a sack of blue foam balls by the entrance. Wall bars were fitted on one of the green-painted stone walls. It was early August and a ray of summer light had made its way in through the bulletproof glass of the windows, along with the shouts of kids in the park and the sound of heels on the asphalt. From the shelf in the cupboard I took spare shin pads and boots. I picked up a black reel of tape from the floor, bit off long strips and attached them tightly round my socks. The sharp smell of liniment made my nose tickle when I sprayed it generously into the palms of my hands and worked the liquid into my thighs the way I’d seen Guttkin do.

It was my third match with the team. I’d been surprised when Guttkin rang and asked if I wanted to play. I was too young, I thought. Not good enough. Mostly I was surprised that anyone from the congregation was phoning us at all. No-one had rung us since my parents got divorced. I still went to the synagogue with my sister for the major festivals. Otherwise we never saw any of our old friends. I avoided the places where I might bump into them. The Jewish centre by the canal. The Jewish old people’s home where Mame lived. I hadn’t

4 even been to Dad’s grave in the Jewish cemetery since the headstone unveiling. I’d played two matches now but I hadn’t really got over my surprise. It was still strange to take the tram to Allén, go up the hill to the congregation building on Vasagatan and step up to the brown wooden door as if everything was just like it used to be. As if my presence there was as natural as it had been when I used to go there to nursery. All the time – crossing the grass in the inner courtyard, passing the rug-beater we used to play with, going down the small flight of steps to the cellar – it felt like I was doing something forbidden. Any moment, I imagined, someone might place a hand on my shoulder and say I was no longer welcome. The boots I’d borrowed were covered in a film of dried mud. The laces had only half their original length left. I missed out the two top pairs of holes to make enough for a double knot. While I did up my shoelaces, Guttkin’s booming voice bounced between the walls. “I don’t give a shit whose birthday it is! You’ll be back with her in two hours’ time. Go straight to the pitch. Goodbye.” He slammed down the receiver. So that would be eight of us then. We still needed at least one more player. After another few calls, Guttkin abandoned the membership register. His hunt for playable Jews in the region then entered its next, even more desperate, phase. Wronkow’s relative who was studying at a folk high school in Ljungskile? No, said Joel Grien – centre back and team captain.

5

He’d moved back to Stockholm. What about that Canadian who worked with Friedkin? Still on crutches. Hannah Turman’s new guy? Joel shook his head. Goy. The Israeli guy who sold bags on Kapellplatsen? Gay. Guttkin still hadn’t got his kit on. While he walked round the room his hairy stomach bobbed up and down over the edge of his underpants. His gold-coloured star of David, the size of a fist, dangled above the dip in his chest. His cheeks were puffed up like two balloons. He counted the number of players again, apparently in the hope that he’d miscounted last time. “Jacob,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “Didn’t you say Rafael was coming home this week?” “Day after tomorrow,” I said. Guttkin sighed and sank down onto the corduroy upholstered swivel chair by the phone. There wasn’t much more to be done. Some new people to contact were suggested, but mostly as a laugh – half-hearted jokes that got a lame chuckle in response. In any case, it was starting to be too late. Even if we got hold of anyone, it wasn’t certain they’d get there in time. Ten minutes the ref would wait, and then we’d be disqualified no matter how many players we turned up with. We could go anyway, someone proposed. Have an unofficial match, or a training session if the opposing team didn’t want to play us. Guttkin said no. If that was the best we could manage, he had better things to do with his time. After a while, Dmitri stood up and took off his match shirt. The other Russians in the team followed

6 suit. Our goalkeeper, Teddy Kovacs, kicked his bag and it sounded like something inside it broke. I sat still on my chair, not at all keen to start on all the tasks ahead. Off with the boots, socks and shin pads. On with my ordinary clothes. Go home without having played, without showering, without the post-match tuna and hard- boiled egg sandwiches. Guttkin said he’d ring the office on the pitch and see if he could get hold of our opponents that way. He’d tell the board tomorrow. The reels of tape and bottles of liniment went back in the cupboard. The bottles of water were emptied in the shower. The chairs we’d been sitting on had been carried down from the shul, where the services were held two storeys up. We had to put them back again and Guttkin asked us to get Kjelle so he could lock up after us. “What about him though?” said Teddy. Slowly Guttkin pressed the numbers on the keypad. No, he said, in a tired voice. Obviously, we couldn’t ask Kjelle. We were a Jewish team. He wasn’t a Jew. If we were going to abandon the rule the whole club rested on, it would only be for a proper player. Not a 60 year-old caretaker with a back problem who coughed his lungs up when all he was doing was raking the lawn. “I was just thinking he’s worked for the congregation for so long.” Out of the receiver, squashed between Guttkin’s shoulder and his ear, came the sound of a ringing tone. Someone answered at the other end but Guttkin said nothing. Instead he, like the rest of us, turned to look at Joel Grien.

7

I’d had Joel as a leader when I was younger and went to Jewish summer camp. He gave lessons in the Torah and Jewish history. He was the one who decided these kinds of questions. “It’s like you say, Guttkin, the rules are very clear,” he said, after a moment’s thought. His eyes looked apologetic, as if it was his fault the Torah didn’t make exceptions for these kinds of situations. “On the other hand…” he breathed in. “In the days of the temple, they did sometimes use non-Jews for particular activities and it is possible that they could be counted as Jews in special cases, but in such cases it only applied if...” Guttkin was out of the room before Joel had finished. In no time at all, he’d scooped Kjelle into his white Toyota and was putting his foot down up Vasagatan, running the red light on the crossing with Aschebergsgatan and crossing Avenyn, which was only open to trams. I sat in the back seat where Kjelle, protesting hoarsely, was kicking off his worn boots, sliding out of his leather waistcoat, struggling out of his black jeans and manoeuvring his sinewy body into our mid-blue kit. He kept on his dark aviator sunglasses. He was still wearing them when the ref blew the starting whistle barely ten minutes later.

8

THE COUGHS ECHOED between the high brick walls. Kjelle banged his clenched fist against his chest. A tracery of thick, purple-green veins stood out from his temples. Guttkin grabbed his right wrist. He leaned on the rug beater for support and stretched his thigh muscles. Then he did the same thing with his left leg. Then the stretching was over and we sank down on the worn grass of the little lawn. The evening sun didn’t reach us down here. We could just about see it gleaming on the roofs of the surrounding buildings. Light yellow streaks refusing to loosen their grip on the skylights, chimneys and TV aerials of Vasastan. I glugged down water from one of our white bottles. Even when my mouth was full, I carried on pouring, letting it run out of the corners of my mouth, past my throat and down inside my top. I sprayed it on the grazes on my arms and knees. The game had ended 1-6. Not that bad really. That was the general verdict of the match analysis going on around me. The first half we were on top of things. Might even have scored a penalty when Sasha got brought down. In the second half, they got in some easy longshots. Then we got tired. Hardly surprising considering the opposition had five more players than we did in total.

9

Think how good we’ll be next week. Weissman and Sammy ought to be here again. Yossi will be back from Malmö. And then I’d like to have Rafael. Guttkin nodded towards me. “How long is he here for, by the way?” “Almost six weeks,” I said. “The longest time he’s been home since he left.” “Which year was it he went?” Guttkin wondered and when I answered he wanted to know who it was he’d gone south with. I mentioned a few names and he said, oh yes, I was there… in eighty- nine it must have been, and met them, by coincidence on Dizengoff. What a night! Except I don’t know if Rafael was there. Was he in the army by then? While Guttkin and I talked, the other conversations on the grass petered out one by one as my teammates started focusing their attention in my direction. They wanted to be part of our conversation. They wanted to know about Rafael’s years in the army too. How often he saw action. Which bit of the military he was in. What equipment he used. I felt my shoulders tense up. I had to take it slowly. Not get over-excited by the attention. But I didn’t want to disappoint them either. For once I was in the centre of the group and I had to come up with something spectacular. Otherwise I’d never have everyone’s eyes on me again. Surely I could come up with some anecdote? Some impressive story from the battlefield. “Like there was this dead cool thing he said happened in the Gulf war, the first night the Scud missiles came over…” That was the sort of thing I

10 wanted to say, that was what I wanted to sound like, but instead I just blurted something out quickly and then the chance was gone. Kjelle wanted us to get off the grass. It wasn’t good for it to have us sitting on it, he managed to say before his body was wracked by the next coughing fit.

Kjelle went down into the cellar ahead of us with a newly rolled cigarette in one hand and his heavy bunch of keys in the other. I pulled off my match kit and stood in the shower for ages, kicking myself the whole time over the opportunity I’d missed, that I hadn’t seized my chance to talk when I’d had it. I’d rushed to answer. Blurted the words out as if I just wanted to have the situation done and dusted. People often complained about it. They said I talked too fast. So fast that they didn’t hear what I said. There were so many ways people could ask me to repeat things. Every day I got the complete set. “What did you say” “Sorry,” “Pardon,” “Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” “What?” Could you say that again?” Some people got irritated when they didn’t hear what I said. “No, no,” they’d say, “now you need to calm down and take it slowly.” Others got scared. “What?” they croaked, blinking furiously, as if they hoped their eyelids might catch some of what their ears had missed. Some tried to compensate for my high speed by being as slow and detailed as possible themselves. “I didn’t quite hear what you said. Could you kindly repeat it please?”

11

It wasn’t just that I talked fast, they said. I mumbled as well. Lots of people were keen to advise me to articulate better. The word articulate was special, I’d noticed. No-one could just say it. It was compulsory to illustrate to me what it meant. “Remember to A-R- T-I-C-U-L-A-T-E,” they said, engaging all their facial muscles. I wondered when it had started. When had my speech accelerated to the sky-high speed everyone said I talked at now? I couldn’t remember it being a problem when I was little. Dad had never said anything about it either. In the speech he gave at my bar mitzvah, he made jokes about some of the less flattering aspects of my personality. The guests laughed when he talked about the bus passes and door keys I kept losing. The letters from school that vanished only to turn up in a back pocket, so crumpled and wrinkled that you couldn’t read what they said any more. But Dad said nothing in that speech about me talking too fast. That had been four years ago. It must have started happening at some point after that. Some time since then, I stopped talking so people understood me. But then there were a lot of things that had changed in the last four years. The changes had started just a few months after my bar mitzvah. One Thursday afternoon towards the end of summer, someone phoned saying he was a colleague of Dad’s. He asked for my mother and I said she wasn’t home yet. He gave me a number that I wrote down and I promised to tell Mum to phone it. Then I forgot all about it and only remembered when Mum had been home

12 for a while and dinner was almost ready. Then she asked me and Mirra, my little sister, if we knew where Dad was. “Oh yes,” I said. “Someone phoned. I wrote it down. Hang on.” But I couldn’t find the bit of paper and we ate dinner and later in the evening the phone rang again. Mirra and I were playing Go Fish on her bed. Mirra was unbeatable at Go Fish. I didn’t understand how. It was down to luck. No-one ought to be good at it. But she still won every time. We were just about to start a new round when the phone rang. Right after that there was a long, high wail from the landing outside where Mum had picked up the phone. We ran out but Mum shooed us back again. From back in the room we heard her ask the person on the other end to wait and then we heard her go down to the phone in the kitchen and continue the conversation there. We sneaked out, down the stairs one careful step at a time, but Mum had closed the door and we couldn’t hear what she was saying on the other side. We speculated what it might be about – a car crash? Had someone died? – and after a while the door flew open. Mum took a deep breath and said nothing was wrong. Dad had been working too hard, that was all. He was going to stay with his colleague for a few days. To rest, she said, and it was clear – from the firm way she said it – that we weren’t to ask any more questions. Three days later – late on Sunday night – Dad came home. His colleague was with him and helped him over the threshold. Mirra and I were sitting next to each other at the kitchen table. Dad didn’t look like he normally did. The skin under his eyes was grey. His

13 cheeks looked tight. The strangest thing was the way he didn’t look at us properly, and his voice, which was thin and distant. He didn’t hug me and Mirra, just stood in front of us with his arms dangling until his colleague took him into the bedroom. Nothing was the same at home after that. Mum and Dad argued all the time. They had argued before, but not like this. Plates were smashed, chairs thrown. A frozen chicken flew through the kitchen and scored a bullseye on the picture on the wall. I found out the reason for the rows bit by bit, later on. Mostly from Dad. He sat on the floor in my room. He half lay over the kitchen table with his face in his hands. He took me on long drives in the car and said that Mum had been having a relationship with her boss, Ingemar, for a long time. She wanted a divorce. Dad had refused. I asked what had happened that day his colleague phoned but didn’t get a proper answer. He had been about to do something stupid, was all he said. He hoped I could forgive him. “Forgive what?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “That’s a good question.” I didn’t understand anything. I didn’t understand how Dad could have changed so quickly. He was usually calm and understanding, the person I turned to when things were bothering me. He could be a bit sensitive, because when he and Mum argued, he was always the one who took it most to heart, but it didn’t usually last long. After he’d been sad for a bit, he perked up and was back to normal again.

14

It would be like that this time too, I tried to say, while we drove up and down the motorway. He hardly heard me, just carried on gabbling about how impossible everything was, what an idiot he was, and sometimes he realised I was only 13 years old and then he got cross with himself about that, that he was dumping all his night- black thoughts on a child, and finally he had to swerve off into some industrial area and fall apart over the wheel. I patted him on the back, on the hand – comforting him the same way as he had always comforted me – and repeated the phrases I’d heard other adults say. You’ve got good friends, you’re a good doctor, there are lots of other women. It will sort itself out, I said, but I wasn’t that convinced, because as the weeks went by it started to be clear that Dad wasn’t sad in any ordinary way. Other, stronger forces were at work and with every day that passed they pushed him closer to the brink of madness. One day he was convinced the phone was bugged. The next that the neighbours were spies. He told Mum that she could live with that Ingemar if she wanted to, as long as he himself didn’t have to move out. They could all live together, he thought. At night I heard him wandering aimlessly round the living room. He was supposed to be sleeping on the sofa in there but I heard the sound of his pacing for hours on end. Sometimes he was talking to himself. Sometimes I heard a soft, thudding noise as if he was banging his head against the wall over and over again. Before she went to bed in the evenings Mum put buckets of water at the top of the stairs.

15

The idea was that they would stop Dad if he tried to go up to the top floor where Mum, Mirra and I were sleeping in the night. He moved out at the start of October. One of the rooms in the flat he rented was meant for me and Mirra. We could stay with him some weekends, he said, but I quickly made it clear that I didn’t intend to spend a single night there. I’d started to be embarrassed by him. His desperate begging to Mum. The way he went around looking depressed. The clothes slumped and hanging on his body where he’d lost weight. I didn’t want anything to do with any of that. Dad was disappointed but didn’t push it. He didn’t sleep much in his flat himself. There were periods when he was an in-patient on psychiatric wards. Otherwise he stayed at his sister’s – aunt Dora – or with Mame and Grandpa. That was where Mirra and I saw him mostly. I sat on their sofa and tried to look as happy and untroubled as possible. When Dad asked what things were like at home, I said everything was fine. Ingemar had moved in and I said he was nice. Mum seemed to be doing better than ever, I added. I was even more cocky when any of our friends from the Jewish congregation interrogated me on the new situation. They weren’t speaking to Mum any more. Like Mame and Grandad, they thought she was heartless to have pushed through the divorce. And because she’d moved on so fast – and Ingemar had moved in, and he and Mum had even got married – even though Dad was in such bad shape. When they talked to me it was as if they were expecting me to complain about what had happened as well. They looked for signs of suffering in my answers, in my eyes. But I had no intention

16 of giving them any. Instead I acted as if nothing to do with any of the things that were going on affected me at all. “What situation? Oh, that. Haven’t thought about it really. But it’s better they’re divorced than arguing.” They looked at me as if I was nuts. It didn’t bother me. They could think I was as hard as Mum if they wanted to. As long as they didn’t get the idea I was as weak as Dad, that I was carrying the same illness he’d got. The months passed. A year. A year and a half. Tiny signs of improvement in Dad’s mood could be detected, only to be followed by massive setbacks. He was given electric shocks. He took pills. He was signed off work. He went back to work. He got signed off again. Nothing helped, other than for short periods. It carried on like that until one day in February. A Thursday, spring in the air, dry gravel on the pavements of Linnégatan. I’d agreed to meet up with Dad after school. We were on the way to his friend Bernie Friedkin’s, who had a shop where Dad was going to buy a jacket. He had started working again and was going to go skiing at the weekend with some mates from work. That alone was progress, him doing something like that, and it sounded as if he was even looking forward to it. A few times he laughed at things I said and the laughter came without a delay, without effort. Behind the small pitch at Skansberget, Dad spotted a football. A dirty, half-deflated football that had overwintered among the trees and now rolled to the fence, as if it sensed that it might be useful again. Dad picked up the ball and brushed off the cluster of

17 dead leaves stuck to it. We had a bit of a kick-about and when we left the pitch, Dad took the ball with him. He was going to see if he could get it pumped up, he said, so we could play again when he came back from his trip. But it wasn’t to be. Some time on Saturday morning, aunt Dora rang Mame and Grandad. She asked how it had gone, whether Dad had left that morning like he was supposed to. “We thought he was at yours,” said Grandad. Then Grandad rang Dad’s flat and didn’t get an answer. He took the car and drove all the way to Dad’s door, keyed in the code, went up two floors in the lift and unlocked it with his spare key. He found Dad on the bathroom floor. He had two bruises on his forehead. There was an empty bottle of pills on the kitchen table, together with the letters he had left. The ambulance came and the paramedics said there was nothing they could do, they would have needed to have arrived hours earlier. The funeral was held two days later. I’d hoped Rafael would come, but he didn’t have time to get back from Israel. My clearest memory of the funeral was of Mame. Mirra and I were sitting at the front on the right. The seats next to us that were meant for Mame and Grandad were empty for ages. The chapel filled with people; they crowded through the entrance and stood in double rows along the walls. But no-one sat on the chairs next to us and I wondered whether they might not turn up, whether they were so paralysed by sadness that they couldn’t get out of bed. The rabbi waited. The buzz of voices increased and finally the big doors slid open. I saw

18

Grandad in the doorway, with Mame with his arm round her looking terrified. One careful step over the threshold and then she wrenched herself loose, rushed forwards and flung herself over the coffin. Her stubby fingers tore at the smooth wood and she screamed – a thick, howl of pain that hit the white walls of the chapel. I had decided I wasn’t going to cry. Doing so would have been to admit that I’d been wrong all the time. Everyone would point and whisper. Things are obviously not as fine at home as he pretended. He must be as depressive as his father despite everything. But Mame made it difficult. I had to bite the inside of my bottom lip and swallow hard. My face stayed calm as I listened to the Rabbi, as I threw sand over the coffin after it had been lowered into the ground, as I hugged everyone who came up and sniffled auf simches afterwards. Still, two and a half years later, no-one had seen me cry over Dad. When Guttkin phoned and asked if I could play with Maccabi it was one of the first things I’d thought. Maybe it was a trap, I thought. Maybe they’d had a meeting in the congregation. He’s kept away a good while now, they’d have said, lure him into the football team and we’ll see how long he can hold it together. Then they’d stand on the side-lines waiting. Aha, they’d say if I looked moody after missing an opening, now it’s starting to catch up with you! Now the tears are coming, but now it’s too late. You should

19 have shed them years ago. If you’d cried, maybe your mother would have slowed down. And maybe your father would still be alive. During the matches I was often more preoccupied by those thoughts than by the game. But that would change, I thought, when I wasn’t alone in the team any longer. When Rafael came home and we were playing together, it would all be easier. He would be able to impress them with his anecdotes from the army himself and no- one would think about what had happened in our family. After I’d showered and changed, I sat at the round table in the changing room. There were the sandwiches waiting, set out in rows on a black tray. I got three of them down me while Guttkin told us about the next week’s match. I drank two cups of the tea, which came with powdered milk. The last thing I did before leaving the changing room was to put the shoes I’d borrowed back on the shelf and check whether there were any there in Rafael’s size.

20

WE GOT TO THE AIRPORT almost an hour before his plane was due to land. Mirra went to the cafeteria with Mum and Ingemar. Grandma was parked by the barrier in front of the door where the arrivals came out. From time to time she cast a disapproving look at the heavy clouds on the other side of the glass walls. “I hope your mother’s brought an extra sweater for him. Otherwise he’ll get a shock. He’s used to 40 degree heat.” She was wearing her best blue dress. Big buttons led up to a white collar with thin red stripes. Cuffs in the same colour and pattern squeezed her skin just above her elbows. With her pocket mirror ten centimetres or so from her face she added an extra layer of lipstick and then, when Rafael finally emerged from between the automatic doors, she was the one who was first to hug him. He laughed and bent down so she could spread her bright red marks over his cheeks and forehead. Mum had to push her out of the way. While I hugged him, Mirra put her arms round his middle. Ingemar and Rafael exchanged a slap on the shoulder. When we got home, Rafael put his suitcase in my room, next to the mattress he was going to be sleeping on. The whole house

21 smelt of the chicken and potato gratin Grandma had made. She cooked the same food every year when he came home. The routine also included Rafael handing out presents from our relatives in Haifa. They had a shop selling oral care products and used to send me and Mirra keyrings. Sometimes they were in the shape of single teeth, sometimes whole jaws. Rafael didn’t have any with him this time. “I didn’t have time to see them,” he said when Grandma asked. It struck me that I didn’t know much about what Rafael’s days in Israel were like any more. In his first years there he sent letters home ever month. Light blue airmail letters with lots of stamps and postmarks above the address. Dad read them out loud over dinner. In an amused voice, he repeated Rafael’s descriptions of linguistic mistakes he’d happened to commit and the pig-headed Israeli bureaucrats he’d had to deal with. In my letters back I wrote about how things were going for IFK Göteborg and the songs I was listening to most at the time. I told him about tests I’d had in school and enclosed the recent drawings I was most happy with. After a year or two I stopped sending the drawings. And when the situation at home changed, I stopped sending the letters too. It was Mum who had to tell Rafael what had happened to the family. The tough news he got from home in those years was in sharp contrast to the news he sent to her himself. At the same time as our family was breaking up, everything was going right for him. He had a girlfriend – an Israeli girl called Sarit. He got into Israel’s

22 most prestigious technical university and got top marks in test after test. The most recent good news he had produced was the most spectacular so far. In the spring – before he had even graduated – he received the call he’s been dreaming of ever since starting his degree. An offer of a job at Israel Aerospace Industries’ head office in Tel Aviv. His new job was the big topic of conversation over dinner. At least, Mum tried to make it the big topic of conversation. Rafael seemed reluctant to say very much. “It’s very unusual for them to take someone straight out of university,” said Mum. “Maybe,” said Rafael. “I was talking to Betty and she said it’s never happened before.” “Betty? What does she know about it?” “She’s talked to people. She knows lots of people down there.” Betty Moysowich was the only one of their old friends that Mum still saw. It was because they were cousins. Otherwise Mum wouldn’t have had anything to do with her either. She thought Betty was a bit dim. That made it surprising that she was now citing her as an expert on the Israeli aerospace industry and its recruitment practices. But at the same time, what Betty had said was flattering and when it came to flattery, Mum was always willing to make allowances. Grandma put the last pieces of chicken on my plate. Rafael and I were the only ones still eating. Mum switched to one of her thin,

23 white cigarettes. Grandma was poking bits out of her bottom teeth with a forked toothpick. Ingemar emptied his glass, which was the only one on the table to have contained wine, and organised the abandoned plates into a pile. Mirra had left her chair long ago and moved to Rafael’s knee. She took off the hair elastic holding her plait and battled with Rafael’s tight, black curls until she got enough of a handful to tie up. She swapped glasses with him, asked Mum if his round ones suited her, and laughed at what he looked like – with his hair in a tuft in the middle of his head and her plastic frames far too small for him. “But what about a flat?” asked Mum, stubbing her cigarette on the big, triangular ash tray. “How are you going to manage that? They’re hard to get hold of in Tel Aviv these days.” There were deep lines above Rafael’s temples when Mirra took off the glasses. As he put down his cutlery, she reminded him of the photos he had promised to look at with her after dinner. “I can stay with a friend this autumn,” said Rafael. “If I want to. We’ll see.” He told Mirra to look in his suitcase. The inside pocket with the zip. She thudded down on the floor and left the kitchen with quick steps. She came straight back again with a yellow Kodak envelope. I looked at the photos over her shoulder. I’d seem most of them before. There were only a few new ones since last year. Mum looked over Mirra’s other shoulder and then passed the pictures on to Grandma. Similar comments came back across the

24 table with a slight time lag. That was a nice top, why didn’t he wear it more often? Who was that lad playing beach tennis? How pretty Sarit looked with her hair like that. What had been decided, was she going to come and see us? I wondered about that too. I hoped she would. The year before, we’d taken her to Liseberg amusement park. We took the ferry to an island in the archipelago and saw the seals in Slottsskogen. She’d never seen a seal before and wanted to stay watching even when it was pouring with rain. On her last night, Ingemar had taken everyone out to a fish restaurant – starters, main course, dessert – and I was wondering whether it would be the same place this year when Rafael said no, she wasn’t coming. “What’s happened?” asked Mum instantly and Mirra stopped flicking through the stack of photos. The pictures she was looking at were from Purim last year. Rafael in a gorilla costume on a street in Tel Aviv. He had the monkey mask round his neck and was carrying beer bottles in both hands. “Nothing,” he said, taking Ingemar’s pile of plates to the sink. They weren’t together any more, that was all. Since just over a month ago. For several reasons. He scraped gnawed chicken bones into the bin. He turned on the hot tap and rinsed the plates before putting them in the dishwasher. “You should have said something,” said Mum. “She was so nice. What went wrong? A relationship – listen to me Rafael – a relationship isn’t always easy. It’s up and down, that’s part of it. Have you met someone else? Why didn’t you tell us?”

25

“Such a pretty girl,” said Grandma. She polished her reading glasses with a little cloth that she was soon forced to bring to the corner of her eye. Rafael rinsed the frying pan and the salad servers, the water carafe and the glasses. The more Mum and Grandma asked, the briefer his answers got. The less he said, the more questions they asked, and in the end he flung his arms in the air. “Well you go and marry her then! I can’t stand hearing another word about the wedding she’s going to have or where we’re going to live or all the bloody children we’re going to have.” His voice got squeaky when he was upset. Now he was also making an effort to be heard over the water that was still surging from the tap behind him. “Go on, you two marry her. I’ll give you her wishlist for the wedding. Let’s hope you’ve got a few hours to spare.” Steam rose around the flow of water. It hit something – the edge of the dish or the salad bowl – and hot water spurted in all directions. Rafael swore and leaped to one side. Then the tap was turned off. In the minutes that followed, the kitchen was virtually silent. I wiped the water off the floor with a cloth. Rafael left the room with his wet shirt in his hand. Grandma cut up her nut cake into triangles. The saucepan of water for tea boiled on the hob. When everyone was back around the table again, Ingemar said that of course Rafael should do whatever felt right for him. Love could not be forced. The new job would probably be quite

26 demanding, he continued, at least to begin with, and it would be quite sensible to focus on that initially. “Well that was another thing I was going to tell you,” said Rafael, who had changed into a grey T-shirt with the word Coca- Cola written across the front in the Hebrew alphabet. “I’m not going to take it.”

27

I WAS TEN the year Rafael moved to Israel. He’d gone travelling in the summer straight after finishing school. I was going to do the same. First work for a year on a kibbutz, then do military service and then study. Everything Rafael did, I wanted to do. I listened to his records until I learned to like them. I copied out his old notebooks to teach myself his handwriting. I wanted to write like him, talk like him, think like him. Since he’d moved to Israel, he came on a visit once a year. Two or three weeks in the summer. The weeks he was home I didn’t see any of my friends. I wanted to be with Rafael all day long. What he was doing didn’t matter. I was overjoyed if I got to go with him to renew his passport, queue up at the tax office or visit the student finance agency. I listened to the way he expressed himself, storing his sentences in my memory so I could use them myself. After he had lived in Israel for a few years, he started to forget what things were called in Swedish. I wanted to have that problem too.

28

“A car I think looks great,” I might say, “is the Audi shmonim, no, what am I saying? In Swedish it’s the... eighty, that’s it. The Audi 80. Dead cool.” I tried to share his passion for planes. Rafael loved everything that flew. Boomerangs, frisbees, space rockets. He knew how they flew, what made them rise into the air, and how they stayed up. He tried to explain it to me. Once we sat on the beach and he drew the basics of aerodynamics in the sand. He explained thoroughly, patiently, making sure I was keeping up. “Do you understand?” he asked at regular intervals. “I think so,” I said. He pointed to birds and talked about the differences between the different techniques they used. Some flapped their wings all the time. Some flapped to get up lots of speed and then glided. Some went a long way up and came down gently through the sky. “Look how it’s using its wings. The same principle as surfing. See?” “Yes! Now I get it!” I said. He looked at me and smiled. With his hand on my neck he helped me to look at the bird he’d actually meant.

In the turbulent years, I’d especially looked forward to Rafael’s visits. Just having him in the house made things bearable. He was stable and certain when everything else was falling apart. He made jokes as usual, teased as usual and we did our usual things. Went into town. Pressed the button to get a ticket for the queues in the tax office and the student finance agency.

29

I’d even thought his visits might make Dad well again. I knew I wasn’t being entirely realistic, but considering the huge effect Rafael had on me, it would have been odd if he hadn’t had some effect on Dad. One night we were at a restaurant, a Mexican place where all of us – me, Mirra, Dad, Rafael – were each served a mountain of spicy mincemeat. Dad drove us home afterwards. Mirra and I had to climb out while Rafael stayed in the car. It must have been an hour he and Dad sat there talking. I kept an eye on them from the kitchen window, shadows growing darker and darker, gesticulating in the front seats. “What did you think?” I asked Rafael when he finally came into the house. Perhaps he had seen something hopeful, I thought. Something that indicated that Dad was heading in the right direction. Or maybe he’d said something that had made Dad think again, get himself together. “I told him to get a grip. He seemed to understand,” I expected him to say. “I think he talks a load of sentimental drivel,” he said. “So do I,” I said. I still found myself thinking about that exchange sometimes, years after it happened. Rafael’s answer had made something inside me sink, a lump that slid down my throat and lay hard and cold on my chest. But at the same time there was something strengthening and honest about it. Rafael didn’t sugar-coat reality, didn’t try to smooth things over. He saw thing as they were, not as they ought to be, and that made me admire him even more.

30

But even I didn’t understand why Rafael had turned down the new job. Mum had been so shocked at the news that she’d gone to bed without trying to change his mind. She came back with new tactics at breakfast the following morning. She painted a nightmare scenario, including descriptions of the catastrophic consequences that awaited if he didn’t reconsider. She knew how employers worked, she said. If he turned it down, he wouldn’t be able to come back again later. Her words had a huge impact. On me. I wanted to fling myself at the phone, ring them up and say yes on Rafael’s behalf, apologising for taking so long to reply. On Rafael, Mum’s arguments made no impression whatsoever. He shrugged his shoulders and said he was thinking about working somewhere else. Maybe trying something completely different.

Rafael was far more interested in his list of records. He usually brought one with him every year. A piece of paper on which he had written the names of records he was interested in that he couldn’t get hold of in Israel. There were ten years between us and more than anything it was music that helped to erase the age difference. I took the biggest leap in Rafael’s direction when I abandoned chart pop for his records. He liked punk, reggae, sweaty rock bands, screeching guitars. When we went through his list and he asked if I knew this band or that, whether I’d heard some song or other, it felt as if I was

31 on the way towards crossing a boundary. I was no longer a child who he’d agreed to babysit. We were on the way to becoming proper friends, who both got something out of our time together. After we’d eaten, we took the tram into town – to the shacks that sold second-hand vinyl and the elephantine complex with two storeys of CDs. By the afternoon, Rafael was starting to be satisfied. In the last shop we visited, I spotted a record by Ofra Haza, the Israeli artist, on a shelf of newly arrived titles. I passed the sleeve to Rafael, who looked at the back, wrinkled his nose and put it back. “I don’t like her singing in English,” he said in the whisper that we used to discuss Jewish things when out in public. He expanded on his stance once we’d left the shop and were walking down Stigbergsbacken. “She’s always sung in Hebrew before,” he said. “Why isn’t that good enough suddenly? OK, you want an international career, but does that have to mean forgetting where you come from?” His reaction surprised me. I had handed him the record because I’d thought it would make him happy. It was unusual for Israeli artists to get any attention in Sweden. Outside military contexts, international Israeli successes were pretty rare. We usually cherished the few that cropped up and were pleased, without making objections. And nor did I understand Rafael’s argument. The fact that some of the songs on Ofra Haza’s album were in English didn’t have to mean she didn’t care about her Jewish origins. But I didn’t say anything. I usually didn’t contradict Rafael.

32

Even if what he said seemed weird, he was sure to be right really in some way I hadn’t thought of. But a bit later he said that Jewish artists were generally wimps. They tried to hide their background, he said. They changed their names, had nose jobs, kept a low profile instead of standing up for Israel when it was unfairly criticised. I couldn’t help contradicting him then. Barry Manilow, I said. He can’t possibly have had a nose job. “Yes but no-one remembers him,” said Rafael. “He doesn’t count.” Henry Kissinger then, I tried. Golda Meir? Her nose had a whole electoral district of its own. Yes, yes, said Rafael. Obviously. But she’s been dead for ages. And she was a politician. That was different. If we were talking about politicians, there were loads of impressive examples. I took a sneaky look at his nose and thought it was more of a typical Jewish nose than mine was. Mine was mostly wide. His was long, with an ambitious nasal bone that seemed to be on its way to detaching itself from his face before changing its mind at the last minute and turning towards his upper lip. Our appearances differed in several ways. My hair was lighter than his, my skin was darker. My eyes were brown. His were green. I didn’t like it when people pointed out that we didn’t look alike. Partly because I wanted to be like Rafael in every way and partly because it put the finger on the fact that we only shared one parent.

33

I had discovered this one afternoon when I was about six. One day when Dad and I were playing with my cars on the pavement outside our house, he had said that he wasn’t Rafael’s father, in a way. Rafael called him Dad, just like Mirra and I did, but in Rafael’s case there was another man who was his father too – although he never saw him. It must have been in that conversation that I found out that Rafael’s father was from Italy. Still – more than ten years later – I didn’t know much more about him than that. What I did know was that Mum had been married to him when she was living in Italy. I also knew that she had left him and moved to Sweden when Rafael was very small and that Rafael hadn’t heard anything from this Italian ever since. When Mum got together with my father, Rafael was about five and in my eyes it was as if that was when his life started properly. It was from then that there were photos of him as a little boy and that was when all the stories I had heard about his childhood were set. I didn’t know if Rafael ever thought about his biological father or if he thought about whether he looked like him in any way. I thought it would have been hard not to, but at the same time I found it difficult to imagine Rafael preoccupied by those kinds of thoughts. I never asked him. I was afraid he would think the question was silly – backward-looking and slushy. And also, even bringing up the subject of his Italian father would be to give the biological difference an importance between us that it hadn’t ever had. We had been in the same womb, until he moved to Israel I’d

34 spent practically every day of my life with him. We had the same mother and we called the same man dad. That was the only important thing, I thought, and there was no indication that Rafael saw it any other way. It only came up sometimes when Rafael did or said something I hadn’t expected at all. Then I couldn’t help thinking maybe it had something to do with his first father, that the reason I didn’t understand was that parts of him originated in a person I’d never met. It wasn’t often those thoughts came into my head, but they had popped up when he said he’d turned down the job in Israel. And they had come up again – just quickly flickered past – when he talked about Ofra Haza. But I didn’t bring it up this time either. Instead I elaborated further on the theme of Israeli politicians and their noses. I said that Ben Gurion’s looked as if it was really heavy. We felt that Shimon Peres’ version was quite discreet. Former foreign minister David Levy’s almost cute. The current Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, definitely had a proper nose, but as Rafael pointed out, it wasn’t hooked. It maintained a straight line all the way down to the tip where it blossomed out into a powerful ball of skin and tissue.

On Masthuggstorget the Jehovah’s Witnesses were handing out their magazines with their double-breasted jackets hanging over their arms. We took one each and a plastic cup of water each too. It was properly warm for the first time all summer. Even the porn shops on Andra Långgatan had their doors open. Dogs panted in

35 the shade with their tongues hanging out. The outdoor tables at Haga were filled with people who seemed to have cut their working day short as quickly as they could. They moved out chairs, took over steps, crowded on the edges of pavements with what I suspected were mixed feelings – gratitude that the sun had lasted into late afternoon and resentment that it had only bothered to show up now when they’d just gone back to work after their holidays. I still had more than a week of the school holiday left. In a way I was looking forward to going back. I was about to start the second year of upper secondary school. I liked it much better than secondary. Upper secondary didn’t have woodwork. No mopeds you had to spend the breaks discussing. No swastikas carved inside lockers. I remembered when Rafael was in his second year there. Even then he was starting to prepare for Israel and the army. On Saturdays he worked in Bernie Friedkin’s shop to earn money. In the evenings he went jogging or did judo. I liked reminding myself that I was as old now as he had been then. We were on our way to see Rafael’s friend Jenny Weitz. We needed to kill some time before she got home so we found a patch of empty grass in Hagaparken. There were groups of people sitting on blankets all around us. Lads with their trouser legs rolled up above knobbly knees. Girls with sunburned shoulders. I took off my shirt, scrunched it up and used it as a pillow. I went through Rafael’s haul from the record shops we’d scoured. He’d bought seven CDs. His finances were a mystery. Just as he existed between me and the adult world in age, his budget seemed to do so as well. If he saw a

36 record he liked, he grabbed it. If he was hungry when he was in town, he bought what he fancied. If I was with him, he bought for me too. Still, his money never seemed to run out completely, not like mine did. In Israel he worked in a warehouse sometimes for extra cash but still. Seven CDs. The church clock struck five. In the space of a few minutes the whole city had grown quiet. The cars stopped stressing and glided in a well-behaved stream down Allén. The road workers turned off their drills. The tram psychos stopped threateningly waving their crutches. The sky above the park grew cool and soft as seawater. A fat bumble bee floated past me and on towards the rock chicks in their denim shorts in front of us. I propped myself up on my elbow but still couldn’t make out their faces with the sun in my eyes. A general blonde gleam was all I saw. I asked Rafael what time Jenny had said we should come. I asked him twice but it didn’t seem as though he’d heard me and I lay down again with my hands behind my head. Thin clouds slowly meandered by. My eyes started to droop. My eyelids closed. I saw Yitzhak Rabin in front of me. He looked like both my grandfathers and before I nodded off completely all three of them had melted together so you couldn’t tell them apart.

37

THE TOP OF THE VOLUME button had come off on Jenny Weitz’s stereo. You had to twist a little spike to turn the sound up. It was difficult, Rafael complained. The spike was thin and it didn’t move the way it ought to. How can you live like this? He asked her. How, he wondered, did she put up with that tiny little spike every time she changed the volume? Jenny lived in the congregation building on Vasagatan, two floors above the Maccabi changing room. Guttkin lived immediately above her. Immediately underneath was the shul, a place of worship that was basically just a long room with some benches and a Torah cabinet. This was where the most holy members of the congregation went. We had been there sometimes when I was little, when my parents had a sudden attack of religious zeal and thought the ordinary synagogue was too feeble. What had made the greatest impression on me at the time was how old everyone there was. There were some ancient characters at the ordinary synagogue too but they had hardly hit puberty compared with the bags of bones that dragged themselves to shul every Shabbat. Their hands and lips were blue, their skin like clingfilm,

38 their skeleton constantly on the verge of poking through the thin membrane. I remembered the smell in the shul too – a mixture of mothballs and kosher sausages – and a hint of that smell seemed to force its way through the floors up to Jenny’s flat. I sat on her sofa while Rafael put his newly purchased CDs on her stereo one after the other. I liked it at Jenny’s. Every time I imagined having my own flat, it was Jenny’s I saw in front of me. Dark red curtains. A loft bed with a desk underneath. Plastic flowers, fairy lights, books spilling out of the shelves on the wall and piled on the floor. Everything was a size or two too small. There weren’t enough boxes for all the LPs. There were too many necklaces and earrings for the box under the mirror. The pot plants were spreading over the windowsill, climbing up the sides, rambling down over the menorahs of various sizes set amongst them. She had a kitchenette with a hot plate. A spiral of tubes that turned orange when the power was turned on. Steam rose from the top of Jenny’s silvery coffee maker. She carried three cups on a round tray to the upside-down wooden crate she used as a coffee table. She wanted to hear what Rafael had been up to in Israel last, about the Mexican guy he’d shared a student flat with and other mutual friends. She already knew about him breaking up with Sarit. When she heard Rafael wasn’t going to take the job at IAI she asked if he’d got grenade splinters stuck in his brain. “I’ve lived there for eight years,” said Rafael. “I want to try something new. Is that so strange?”

39

But a chance like that, said Jenny. He ought to at least give it a try. A year or two. Good pay. He could put something by. Then he could go round the world or whatever it was he was planning. Rafael shook his head. “I’m going to look for other jobs,” he said. “Other countries. Europe. Maybe America.” He knelt down to change the CD again. It wasn’t impossible, he thought. People with his qualifications were needed all round the world. “But seriously,” he said. “You’ve got to do something about your stereo. I’ll be needing to get a physiotherapist to look at my hand tomorrow.” “And why not here?” asked Jenny. “They make planes here too, don’t they?” Her accent was pure Gothenburg, even though she hadn’t lived in the city that long. When she was little, she’d lived in some hole at the back of beyond. I thought it might have been Värmland. Not even Rafael knew very much about her childhood. Just that her dad was a goy and her mum had died when Jenny was at upper secondary school. Her father got a new girlfriend and Jenny had had to move out. Her mother’s family in Gothenburg had helped her get the flat on Vasagatan. The first time Rafael met her was at a camp run by the congregation. They ended up next to each other in the dining hall. He taught her the words of the Israeli songs they sang after dinner. He transcribed Hebrew for her so she could follow the morning prayers. I remember how sorry I felt for her when Rafael came home and told us. When he talked about his new friend, it all

40 sounded so lonely. I was deeply involved in Jewish life back than and could hardly imagine anything worse than growing up without Jewish friends, without knowing anything about the religion. Even less could I have imagined that one day I too would find myself in a similar situation, that I would lose contact with the congregation and not know whether I really was welcome to play for Maccabi. When Jenny moved to Gothenburg she changed her name to the surname her mother had had when she was little. She learned Hebrew and spent a few years in Israel. You could even tell by looking at her that she had become increasingly engaged in the Jewish community. Her dark blonde hair had grown and curled over her shoulders in thousands of advanced corkscrews, just like on Israeli girls. Since I’d last been in the flat, it too had gained Jewish features. There was now a list of kosher rules on the wall by the kitchen table. Magnets in the shape of Hebrew letters attached a timetable of lectures to the fridge. When Rafael got up, he started flicking through the book To be a Jew which was on top of a pile on the desk. Essential Talmud and The Rebbe Says, I read on the spines of the books immediately below it. “I don’t know,” he said for the third time since Jenny had asked the question. Every time, he sounded more sceptical about the very idea. “Here? What would I do here?” It wouldn’t work, he continued, not now he’d got used to something different. How would he learn to put up with the cold again? The darkness? The silence? The people here, he said, didn’t open their mouths other than to fill them with alcohol. Or to talk about alcohol at least. God,

41 that was all he’d done in his last five years in the Swedish education system. Listened to classmates discussing how to get hold of drink, where they could get drink on the cheap, who got off their head the most, who did the stupidest thing when they were drunk, had the worst hangover, started drinking again after the shortest break. He turned the pages quicker and quicker, all the time looking at the book as if it was mostly it that he was talking to. After he’d shut it, he looked at the cover for a while. “But I have to say one thing,” he said in a milder voice. “The girls here. We were in the park earlier…” He sat beside me on the sofa. The palms of his hands were turned upwards. His mouth opened but no sound came out. I had never seen him behave like that before. We didn’t often talk about girls. When Rafael did bring up the subject it was usually more as if he was passing on neutral information. That girl was good-looking, so was she, Yemenis were the best-looking girls in Israel. That was that. Now he was so blown away that he didn’t have any words, and I wondered how he could show that, and in front of a girl even. But Jenny didn’t seem to think it was strange. She just nodded understandingly. “Shikse fever,” she said. “They all get it when they’ve been in Israel too long.” She brushed away sugar that had fallen next to the cup and said it was the result of solely surrounding yourself with Jews for a few years. You started drooling over anyone who was blonde and had long legs. “Anyway, are you hungry?” she asked, getting up. All three of us were soon standing in front of her open fridge. Leeks and carrots

42 were lying with their tops hanging over the edge of the shelf. One lone gherkin was swimming in the bottom of a jar. In the compartment inside the door there was a bottle of green sauce with something in Spanish on the label. Jenny took out a red plastic container that she said was full of left-overs from the Jewish old people’s home where she sometimes filled in. She took the lid off and eyed the contents. Then she said we’d better go and eat out. She named some new places that had opened nearby. Places round the corner, places that had shut and new ones that had opened, a Chinese where she had a loyalty card, a restaurant with a vegetarian buffet where she usually ate too much and got an upset stomach. She looked at Rafael’s watch and debated with herself whether we ought to wait for Gabbe or leave him a note. Rafael asked how Gabbe was doing and Jenny said he was going to be working at the court in Alingsås until next spring. It was a tough job. Early mornings, long days, a lap full of preliminary investigations on the commute home. “And in the evenings,” she said, pointing to the pile of Jewish literature on the desk, “he’s got all that to think about.” Gabbe had been studying for the rabbi for more than seven months, she said. He’d got at least half a year to go. He sometimes complained about the amount of studying involved, but Jenny said she’d been clear from the beginning. If they were going to get married, he had to convert. Kacha kacha, she answered, when Rafael asked what his parents thought. Her left hand waved from side to side. They were from

43

Argentina. Socialists. Against all forms of religion. But, she continued, the parents weren’t the biggest problem. That was Guttkin. Several nights a week he knocked on her door. To begin with, she let him in. Now she kept the door ajar and blocked the gap. She imitated the movements Guttkin made to try to get his face into the flat. Up on his toes, down with his back, his neck craning past her head or under her arm. “How’s it going?” he would ask. “You will say if he needs any help?” Then he would shout encouragement into the flat. “Study harder!” “You’ll never finish at this speed!” He often carried on from the other side after Jenny had pushed him out with the door. Then he stopped pretending that his concern had to do with anything other than Maccabi. They could hear his increasingly distant voice as he moved up the stairs. “We need you this season, Gabbe. Step it up now.” It was Argentina that did it, Jenny reckoned. Just because Gabbe was from the same country as Maradona, Guttkin thought he was amazing at football. She had also heard Guttkin complaining about the problem of getting people to join the team. I recognised Guttkin’s words when she repeated them. The young and talented focused on their goy clubs. The slightly older ones left town. “But you’ve started playing, at least,” said Jenny looking at me. “We saw you out of the window on Sunday.” She smiled in a slightly secretive way as if she had more to say and needed to think about how to put it. She probably thought it was odd that I’d suddenly turned up on the team. Perhaps it looked as though I didn’t have a given place anymore and that I was

44 pretending to be involved rather than taking part properly. Something cold spread through my chest. Stones lay there scraping against each other. The whole congregation probably thought it was weird. It might be arrogant in some way, being away from the congregation for several years and then just wandering back when it suited me. Chiding voices from every Jewish home in town whirled round my head. If you’d visited your father more often. If you hadn’t let Ingemar take his place so easily. I wanted to say sorry, I wanted to defend myself, but it was stones from my stomach all the way up to my throat. “Gabbe’s sister was here,” said Jenny. Her smile was broader now and she was talking as much to Rafael as to me. “I think she fancied you.” She was going to make sure we met, she said, and wrote something in felt tip on a notepad. She tore off the page and left it on the kitchen table.

45

“WHAT IF IT’S ALL based on a misunderstanding,” said Rafael from his mattress that night. “What we call God is the devil. What we call the devil is God.” He was holding one of the magazines we’d got from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Sometimes he held it out to me and pointed at something I ought to read. I hummed along and laughed where required while I thought about the word “fancies”. What did it really mean? It sounded as though Gabbe’s sister might be really interested. But could you tell just from seeing someone at a distance? I hadn’t seen her at all, come to that, and thinking about her was still making me jittery. This was mostly down to Rafael. I assumed that Gabbe’s sister was a few years older than me. If I was lucky enough to go out with her, my and Rafael’s worlds would merge, I thought. He might get together with one of her friends and we’d be in the same friendship group. At the same time as I was thinking these thoughts, along came others that said I was embarrassing. Rafael would never think like that, they said. Because he’s an adult and realistic. You’re childish and romantic. That difference alone makes the friendship you’re dreaming of impossible.

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It was true that the differences between us were massive. You only had to look round the room we were sharing to be reminded of that. The room had been Rafael’s before I took over and it was still dotted with things from his past. On the wall next to my bed, for instance, there was a poster showing the inside of a cockpit. On the bottom shelves of the bookcase there were random circuit boards, coiled cables in different colours, open plugs with straggling wires. To Rafael these things meant relaxation, something to fiddle with when he had a bit of spare time. To me they might just as well have been test tubes containing an alien virus. The only reason I let his things stay there was that I thought if I touched them I’d break them or possibly set the house on fire. On the desk I had notebooks full of poems and drawings that Rafael reacted to in a similar way. He did usually praise me for my writing and drawing, to be fair, but he was most preoccupied by how the works should be categorised. “Does this count as poetry? Or is it lyrical poetry? What’s the difference? Why are there so many words if they mean exactly the same thing?” And then there were the technological aspects. “Why don’t you get a computer?” he might ask, as if it was me who was responsible for expensive domestic technology purchases. “You’d get a better overview then. Everything in one place.” There were also major differences between us in terms of friends and girls, problematically enough the two areas I hoped to use to bring us closer together. Sitting on the bed like me, pondering backwards and forwards over how the word “fancies”

47 should be interpreted, was something I was sure Rafael had never done. So there was no point asking him for advice, or asking him how much significance he thought I should give to what Gabbe’s sister had said. “What does it matter?” he’d just answer, “you’ll find out if you meet her. And if you don’t, the question’s irrelevant.” All this posed major obstacles for the intimate friendship in my head. Though you never knew. Things could change fast. The last few years had taught me that things that were unthinkable one minute could be reality the next. In the four years that had passed since my bar mitzvah everything had been turned upside-down. And it wasn’t just my family. It was the whole world. At my bar mitzvah, I’d read out a piece about the Soviet Jews. It was a standard feature in the Jewish confirmation ceremony at the time; the same text that other bar and bat mitzvah girls and boys had read before me. It described the terrible conditions in which the Soviet Jews lived. It ended with a quote from the Russian- Jewish freedom fighter Anatoly Sharansky. “L’shana haba’ah b’yerushalayim” – next year in Jerusalem – the words he had said when he was sent to the Gulag a few years earlier. Sharansky was a familiar figure to me and my friends. The Jews of the Soviet Union had been like a continuing serial throughout our childhoods. Our parents went on demonstrations outside the Soviet embassy. At Jewish preschool we drew pictures to send to other children on the other side of the Iron Curtain. When we were older and went to Hebrew class once a week, we plagued our teachers with questions about when the situation would improve

48 and whether the Soviet Jews would ever be free. One day, they said. One day when God wills. It was the same answer as when the Messiah would come. And it felt about just as likely that we’d experience that. And then it happened. In the autumn, just months after I’d read Sharansky’s words in the synagogue, the Berlin Wall fell. Country after country was free. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania. Finally the Soviet regime gave up too. The great power fell apart. Happy Jews threw off their fur hats and streamed out of the collapsed empire. It was also the time that a flame of hope was lit for the other global political question that dominated our childhood. At preschool and at Hebrew class – when our teachers weren’t telling us to draw pictures for the Soviet Jews – we used to have to draw things to do with the Jewish festival that was next on the calendar. Once that topic was exhausted we got to draw doves and rainbows. We wrote Shalom – the Hebrew word for peace – in big letters under the arch of the rainbow. It would happen one day, our teachers said. One day, when God willed, Israel would be able to live in harmony with its neighbours. That dream was in the process of coming true too. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War meant that none of the old rules applied any more. All the locks could be picked, all the doors could be opened. Even in the Middle East. Only a year or two earlier it had been considered unlikely that the countries’ leaders would address anything but declarations of war to each

49 other. Now they were holding peace conferences. Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres swooped round the region making agreements with one old man after another. The thought inspired hope. If even Israel could obtain peace, it ought not to be impossible for me and Rafael to develop into proper close friends. I looked down at him lying on the mattress. He had abandoned the religious literature and was flicking through a book that, to judge by the diagrams and bar charts on its pages, must have belonged to Ingemar. Soon Rafael yawned and asked if I was OK to turn out the light. Afterwards I lay awake in the dark and without closing my eyes I saw the pictures in front of me. The faces of people I hadn’t met yet. Parties in flats that I’d never been to. Me and Rafael on the way home on the first tram of the morning, tired and exchanging banter about the events of the night.

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LEADERSHIP WAS WHAT it was about, I saw later – the book that Rafael had been flicking through. He would never have looked at it voluntarily. It was something new and unexpected, just like what he’d said about Swedish girls at Jenny’s. It could be a sign that something in him was changing. Except I didn’t know in what direction. There was no clear pattern, it was impossible to say where they were pointing, these new aspects that had emerged since he got back from Israel. And the next surprising comment didn’t make it any clearer. We were sitting in the garden. Seagulls were circling around lazily. One of the neighbours was listening to local radio. I was doodling on a rectangular pad of post-it notes. Rafael was reading the local paper and commenting on every news item. When he got to the sport, he noted that IFK Goteborg striker Johnny Ekström had been sold to the Italian club Reggiana. He should have gone to a better team, said Rafael. Then he fell silent for a bit and then he asked Mum if she could teach him Italian. “Why do you want to learn Italian?” said Mum without moving any part of her body other than her mouth.

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She was lying on a sun lounger with her arms stretched out over the arm rests. Her facial expression was concentrated as if the sun needed her active participation to have an effect. The temperature needed to be at least 22 degrees for her to ask Ingemar to bring out the sun loungers. Once she had established herself in one, she didn’t leave it easily. From morning to evening, she lay on her back in her silver bikini with her coffee cup, her book, her cigarettes and her ash tray on a stool beside her. “It will be difficult,” she said when Rafael said that he was thinking about looking for a job in Italy. “They’re so patriotic. If you don’t speak the language fluently, you haven’t got a chance.” She came up with more arguments. It sounded as though they were based on nothing but objective facts, as if her feelings didn’t have anything to do with it. She carried on talking while Rafael said that he could try at least. He had known Italian once, after all. Maybe it was still there somewhere.. Mum didn’t seem to be listening to anything Rafael was saying but after a while her arm rests clicked. The back of the chair pushed her forwards and with a deep sigh she said that we probably had a beginner’s textbook somewhere. “If I could only remember where I saw it last.” She put her feet into her flipflops and clattered in through the open patio door, over the parquet in the living room and up the stairs. I didn’t know how Rafael dared. You couldn’t bring up Italy with Mum just like that. You had to be much more careful. Wait, sense what kind of mood she was in, sneak the topic into the

52 conversation and drop it immediately when she made it clear that she didn’t want to talk about it. I loved hearing her talk about Italy. But it was almost impossible to get anything out of her apart from limited phrases. She had only said more on a few occasions and they were a long time ago. Nights in the soft glow of the bedside lights, the whole family on Mum and Dad’s double bed. Their shared memories took the conversation further and further back in time to when Mirra and I were little, to the party in the congregation where Mum and Dad got together, to when Mum was 18 and hitchhiked to Rome where she’d worked as a waitress. The restaurant was frequented by celebrities, artists and musicians. She would happily talk about them on those nights – as Dad listened with a fascinated smile and Mirra sat in her arms sucking her thumb with concentration, as Rafael moved nearer and nearer until he was leaning on Mum’s shoulder and I saw the smoke rise from her fingers, up to the ceiling and out of the open window. It was then – when she got onto the celebrities she’d been with – that she shut down again. No, she didn’t remember what date they got married. Where? No idea, somewhere in Rome. She hadn’t been wearing anything special. Not much fitted. The third month maybe, she didn’t remember. In the only photo I’d seen from those days, Rafael was about two. He was sitting on his father’s shoulders and holding his hands. Mum was walking beside them, looking up at Rafael with glowing eyes.

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Mum couldn’t tell us where or when the photo was taken. Or why she left Italy and the celebrity just before Rafael was three. “He had a bloody temper,” was the only explanation she’d given, once when Mirra – who was bolder than me or Rafael – had pushed her on the subject. Even if Mum didn’t want to talk about her life in Italy, our home was full of traces from those years. Rita Pavone records, battered comics where Mickey Mouse was called Topolino. We supported Italy in the World Cup. If an Italian film came on the telly, we were allowed to stay up to watch it even if it went on late. If Mum felt she had been cut up on the road, she unleashed a rapid salvo of Italian swear words over the steering wheel. Italian influences were most noticeable in her cooking. Mum almost always made Italian food. I used to sit on the draining board while she chopped onions and parsley, sliced courgettes, squeezed the liquid out of an aubergine. Pasta was to be treated with respect. In other words, not in the way I had witnessed in the homes of my classmates. They chopped their spaghetti up into little bits. They drenched it in ketchup. They ate it on flat plates. We were not allowed to behave like that under any circumstances. It was like a whole extra set of kosher rules that only applied to our family. Mirra asked for the pad I was drawing on and I pushed it over to her side of the white-painted table. It was only the morning but it was already hotter than the day before. I thought about cycling to the beach. From inside the house we heard the noise Mum made when she was looking for something. She talked constantly,

54 shouting out places where she thought the book might be: “I know, the wardrobe!”, grumbled when it wasn’t there, gave up: “No, there’s no point. It’s gone,” tipped something over, shouted “Ow!” launched into heart-rending monologues about the unfairness of having to look for things on her day off. “…one second I got to relax, one second...” Parlate con noi it said on the green book she finally came out with. “I knew it! I was sure it was somewhere in…” Several times, she was just about to pass the book to Rafael and every time she got distracted and stayed standing by his chair looking at the text. After a while, she sat down beside him. Mum read from the book: “Dove sei, Chiara?, Sono qui mama, in cucina,” and told Rafael to repeat it. When he had said the phrase, she corrected his pronunciation: “Tzsono qui – see? A bit of a t there – tzsono.” Rafael said this was no way to learn a language. First you needed principles. Grammatical rules. You’ll pick those up as you go along, said Mum. First you had to speak. Feel your way. Mirra took the book and pronounced sono qui exactly the way Mum had tried to teach Rafael. I asked if anyone wanted to come swimming. Both Rafael and Mirra said yes but all the bikes had punctures so we had to go in the car.

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BEFORE RAFAEL’S FIRST MATCH with Maccabi I wondered how good at football he actually was. It was years since I’d seen him play. Even if the memories had been more recent, I wouldn’t have been able to trust them. As his little brother, I couldn’t judge his skills objectively. Not in any area, probably, but especially not at football. My own development as a footballer had been hindered by the vision problems I’d had when I was a child. I’d had a strong squint in one eye. To fix it, they put a plaster over the other eye – the one that worked. The result was that for a few months I might as well have been blind. Those months seemed to be the ones my body had scheduled for developing fine motor skills. What made the greatest impression when I could see again – once I’d had eye surgery and the plasters replaced by a pair of thick-lensed aviator glasses – was the leaps of progress my classmates had made in the time I’d spent in darkness. They had left the pedal cars far behind and were swishing past on bikes without stabilisers. They climbed up and down the playground fence with ease while I was still struggling with the wide steps to get up the slide. Running forwards in a straight line was a major challenge for me. Doing that and controlling a ball with my feet at the same time – which the avant- garde amongst us had started doing – was unthinkable. Rafael took

56 on the task of bringing me up to a level where I could join in my friends’ games without them falling about laughing. We went to the local football pitch in the evenings when everyone else had gone home. There he taught me the basics. We fought thousands of matches against each other. Thanks to them, I was eventually able to put up a decent performance even when playing with friends. Things improved again a few years later when my sight was declared back to normal and I was able to chuck the glasses. All in all, I’d probably played more football than Rafael had, but my image of his capacity was still shaped by the matches we’d played on that empty pitch. He was unbeatable in those days, a supernatural being whose long hairy legs could magically be everywhere all at the same time. When we got to the Maccabi changing room, I showed him round proudly. “You can borrow boots from here,” “This is where the liniment is,” “Use the black tape, it sticks better than the white one.” Then I changed quickly and took my brush and my tub of hair wax into the toilet with me. I wanted to show my best side in case Gabbe’s sister was standing staring out of the window again. With the help of the brush and the wax, I forced the curls down into a centre parting. I pulled out two tendrils to hang down the sides of my forehead. In front of the bathroom mirror I sucked in my cheeks, squinted and tried out different expressions. A nonchalant smile, Joking. Engaged in an important conversation. I only went out when Kjelle banged on the door. Guttkin told me to carry the ball net. Rafael took the water bottles and the first aid kit. Everything was loaded into the boot of the white Toyota. I

57 didn’t look up at Jenny’s window until just before I got into the back seat. I knew there was only a small possibility that Gabbe’s sister was standing there but the empty, dark panes of glass still made me disappointed. “Centre backs are Joel Grien and Vlad, Dmitri you go right.” We sat in a circle next to the pitch and clapped at every name Guttkin read out. When he’d called out the starting eleven, he told Kjelle to start on the bench. My starting position was on the far left, midfield. Rafael was on the far right. At the end of the first half, I intercepted a dangerous deep pass and got praise from Joel Grien. A little way into the second half I saw Rafael get past a defender on the edge of the penalty box. With a broadside, he then placed the ball to the side of the goalie. The goal meant we’d reduced the score to 1-2. Right after that Yossi snapped up a stray ball from the opposition’s goalkeeper and equalised. Guttkin tapped two fingers against the top of his left wrist. “Blow the whistle,” he shouted. “It must be time now.” The referee said no, there were seventeen minutes to go. Once three of the minutes had passed, one of their centre backs got away a high shot that sailed in over Teddy Kovacs into our goal. One goal down against a team at the top of the league. It was nothing to be ashamed of but when the match was over my teammates left the pitch with their eyes fixed on the ground. “We stop running,” muttered Yossi. Vlad and Dmitri were having a heated discussion in Russian. Sammy talked about some mates who’d like to join us. Good guys who he’d played with in

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Frölunda. We were nearly there, he said. With just a few, slightly better players we’d be considerably higher up the rankings. “Two or three would do it,” he said later while Guttkin put paper plates out on the table in the changing room. “Who answer when they’re called, turn up on time. I mean that’s more important than what religion you are, surely.” I pulled on my jeans and sprayed my armpits with deodorant. Players dripped out of the showers in fragrant clouds of shampoo. Together the scents combatted the odour from our socks, tops and shorts that filled the laundry baskets by the wall. Dressed only in towels, people started to help themselves to the sandwiches in the middle of the table. Yossi agreed with Sammy. Something had to be done. Soon we wouldn’t have a single player left. The best ones gave up. He wasn’t sure how long he was willing to go on for himself. Guttkin had ignored the question up to that point. Now he buttoned his white shirtsleeves and said that nothing was going to change. There were thousands of clubs for goyim. Only one for Jews. Where would we play if not for this team? “Take him, for example,” he said, pointing at Vlad, slowly eating an egg sandwich. “If we didn’t exist, where would he play then? A 45 year-old Russian who doesn’t speak Swedish. Or Teddy Kovacs,” he went on. “What team would have him? A goalkeeper who’s only five foot seven.” Our next match was soon, the following Thursday. A home game at Heden. We’ll keep the same team then, I assume, said Guttkin and everyone in the room nodded. Then he took the ink

59 pen from the notepad by the phone. He drew a new line next to Yossi’s name and wrote in my brother’s on the list of strikers for the season.

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RAFAEL’S GOAL WAS THE FIRST one anyone in my family had scored in a Maccabi shirt. Dad had mainly been a reserve. Mum had only played once, for ten minutes, in one of the club’s annual family matches. I had scored a goal in a junior match, it is true, but it was discounted when they discovered I was two years older than the other players on the pitch. “What do you want us to do? We haven’t got any more players in that age range,” our trainer had complained to the referee. The only member of the family who had made any significant achievements in Swedish-Jewish sport was Grandma. She played for the Maccabi bridge team for 28 years. She won the club championship five times. The small silver trophies were on the sideboard in her living room. The year of the triumph was engraved on the base of the cup, under Grandma’s name. She achieved most of her successes playing with old man Wronkow as her partner. They had an intuitive mutual understanding. But only as long as they were playing bridge. Away from the table Grandma mainly found him irritating. He didn’t’ know how to dress, she said. His Swedish was terrible. Not even

61 when they played with goyim did he get his act together. Even then he made jokes in his thick Yiddish. Three afternoons a week Grandma went to the board room at the top of the congregation building where the bridge club met. When we were younger and Grandma was looking after us, Mirra and I used to get to go too. Grandma would give us a pack of cards with the Maccabi emblem on the backs. We sat on chairs with a chair between us to play on. Between our games of Go Fish, we tried to understand something of the advanced matches going on around us. But because that was impossible, we soon switched to studying Grandma’s fellow players. Several of them had bent, sunken backs, as if they had adapted to the room’s low ceiling. The brown tone of the wallpaper rubbed off on everything else in the place. The plastic floor, the thick blinds covering the windows, the egg timers that ticked on the tables set out in the room, the jackets, far too thick for the indoor temperature, the men wore. They were all the same colour. A reddish kind of brown that was shared by the labels on the bottles of Club Soda all around the room. Grandma and her teammates drank so much Club Soda that I suspected this was the secret purpose of their meetings. While the games went on, there was the constant sound of bottle tops being unscrewed and bubbling water being poured. Then came the fizzing worry before the liquid had got used to the glass, the sounds of enjoyment as it glugged down their throats and finally the relaxed gurgle once it reached their stomachs and slowly splashed out into their intestines.

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Sometimes some of Grandma’s fellow players would come past and show us a card trick or demonstrate how expert they were at shuffling. I knew most of them by sight from other Jewish contexts. Grandma’s friend Lily Frum, for example. Or the old lady whose painted-on eyebrows made her look permanently surprised, or the Squirrel, who suffered from some affliction that meant his jaws were constantly moving. I was more fascinated by the others who I never saw anywhere else. Grandma called them “Bridge Jews.” By that she meant that the card game was their only link with the Jewish community. There were several other, similar groups. Yom Kippur Jews, for example, which is what Mum and Dad usually called the ones who only came to the synagogue for the major festivals. Or Posh Jews, which is what they called the ones whose families had come to Sweden back in the nineteenth century and stopped thinking about their religious background ages ago. At the other end of the scale were Ghetto Jews, which is what Grandma called Wronkow between clenched teeth when he made a mistake. Some groups were named after their jobs. Shmatte Jews if they worked with textiles. Number Jews if they were commercial lawyers or accountants. Business Jews if their business was successful. There were Mummy’s Boy Jews (see Number Jews), Culture Jews (big curly hair, glasses, unpredictable mood changes), Smooth Jews (who wore tight jeans, well-polished shoes, got to jump the

63 queue to the nightclubs on Avenyn and answered “Italian” when asked where they came from). Yemenis was the term for all the Jews who came from the Arab world. Yekkes were the ones who came from Germany, or were lacking a sense of humour for some other reason. 68 Jews were the group who came from Poland when the regime decided to purge the country of Jews in the late 1960s. Some of them called themselves 69 Jews instead. This made them the target of a number of puerile jokes, but that was a price they were prepared to pay. Better that, they seemed to reason, than risk being confused with a different group, also known as 68 Jews, but on entirely different grounds. That group had got its name because they were thought to have got stuck in the left-wing political movements of 1968. They, in turn, were hard to distinguish from the category of Self-hating Jews, who got their name from the fact that they tended to take the side of Israel’s enemies in the media debate. Their opposite was Honorary Jews, a small circle of pundits who lacked a clear link to Jewry and still defended Israel and urged the general public to remember the Holocaust.

The most memorable of our visits to the bridge club was the time I tried to drink a whole bottle of Club Soda. Back then, I couldn’t drink any fizzy drinks. They burned my tongue. The bubbles drilled through my palate, over my cheeks, behind my eyes, up into my scalp. Only Mirra knew of my problems. She had no such difficulties. She slurped Fanta, Cola,

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Seven Up. But she refused to have anything to do with Club Soda. There was practically nothing in it apart from bubbles, she said. Even lots of adults avoided it. I thought the Club Soda might be a way for me to solve my problem. It was the worst. If I could manage to drink it, then I could drink anything. Mirra thought it was an interesting theory, but issued a warning. Perhaps my body would go into shock because I wasn’t at all used to the fizz, she said. “Good. Go on. Not much left now,” she said soon afterwards when I was sitting with the opening of the bottle pressed against my lips. My cheeks were burning. I held Mirra’s hand tight like I’d done when she went with me to the dentist earlier in the year. Just like then, I had tears in my eyes. A thousand needles tingled in my mouth and throat but I carried on drinking and had almost got half of it down when I heard a soft thud and almost dropped the bottle. In the space of a second, everyone had flocked round Grandma’s table. Mirra’s grip on my hand tightened. She kept behind me, just peering out over my shoulder, but in some way she was the one who led us forwards. Her fear made me calm. Without it, without her agitated questions about what had happened, I wouldn’t have dared force my way through the forest of backs. I wouldn’t have got all the way to the table, as close as it was possible to get, so close that for a short time I was staring straight into the Squirrel’s wide open eyes. Unbutton his shirt! Fetch water, I heard voices saying. Between my fingers I saw arms grasp the old man’s upper body.

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From white plastic cups they poured water over his lips, over the tidily placed strands of hair on his head. Something cold had crept in under his skin. His cheeks, his eyelids, his lips had become several kilos heavier and however they pulled him, however many people helped, he was constantly sucked back to that felt-covered table top. Soon his face was lit up by a rotating blue light that sliced in through the slats of the blind. The ambulance crew came up the stairs in their green uniforms. It wasn’t the first time medical personnel had been called to the club premises. Of Maccabi’s groups, the bridge club was by far the most accident prone. In her time on the team Grandma said she had witnessed two heart attacks and one stroke. Only a few months earlier Lily Frum’s partner had broken an arm at a game in Kållered. Lily Frum herself thought she’d caught bronchitis at the last match with Maccabi Stockholm. The place where they played had been draughty, she said. Since then she’d had a stabbing pain in her chest every time she coughed. Stabbing, said Grandma, then it isn’t bronchitis. But listen, said Lily, coughing into her hand. A dry, hacking cough that she broke off when the ambulance crew asked her to move so they could get past with the stretcher.

* * *

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