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  “I’d like you to meet Seymour and Charles on Friday and try out for us. I imagine that will work for you?”

  Seymour? Charles? Alvar could hear his heart pounding for an entirely different reason. Arthur Österwall, Seymour, Charles, put them together and they spelled Nalen! He tried to catch Erling’s eye, but Erling was gone. So was Ingmar. He was probably trying to get beneath Anita’s skirts.

  “Just … just me?”

  “No disrespect to your friends, but we’re looking for a bass player.”

  Then he was gone.

  Alvar found himself standing there with a slip of paper in his hand, an address and a time, and watched the man with the black mustache, who turned out not to be Hitler after all, walk away. His other arm was still clutching his lady companion, his string bass, and all around him, people were laughing and talking as if nothing special had just happened.

  “Alvar! Big Boy!” Erling was right next to him. “Do you know who that was?”

  Alvar turned his head to the excited clarinet player. His words came out, relaxed and easy. “It was Sten Persson. He asked me if I wanted to play Nalen.”

  “You?” Erling’s disbelieving eyes and the suspicion in his voice, the slip of paper in his own hand, and the relief of not being shanghaied into the German army made him laugh out loud.

  “Yes, me!”

  * * *

  The gramophone playing “A Sailboat in the Moonlight” is slowing down and the pitch of music drops as it comes almost to a standstill. Steffi gets up and lifts the needle. She puts it to the side as she winds up the gramophone.

  “I would hardly believe my ears if I heard I was going to play Nalen,” she says as she drops the needle onto the track.

  Alice Babs begins to sing again, from a groove in a disk of shellac.

  “Probability goes up with each attempt,” Alvar says.

  “As long as you’re not trying to do something impossible,” Steffi replies. “Like … trying to eat up an entire tree.”

  Alvar snorts. “Who would ever want to eat a tree?”

  Steffi shrugs and laughs. “Anything that’s completely impossible, I mean.”

  “On the other hand,” Alvar says, “who has the better chance of succeeding at eating the tree? The one who starts or the one who never tries?”

  Steffi understands what he’s getting at. The more times you try out to play at Nalen, the more likely you will finally find yourself playing Nalen.

  Alvar snorts again. “A tree! Where in the world did you come up with that!”

  “I was thinking of the record. It’s a 78. You said it has 78 revolutions. For some reason, that made me think of trees, or rather tree stumps. Now I always think about trees when I change the record.”

  Alvar can’t help smiling at her reply. He reaches for a pen and a memo pad. “You’re going to get this gramophone from me, I’ve decided. So I have to make sure I have your name spelled correctly.”

  She looks at him. “You’re dying?”

  “Not today. Or at least I hope not. But I will. And then you’ll get the gramophone and all the records, too.”

  Steffi doesn’t say what she thinks, because she knows it’s not logical. But this is what she feels: old people have always been around, and they’ve always been old for a long, long time. Therefore, they ought to know how to continue to be around for a long, long time. She doesn’t want to say it out loud, because she knows it sounds stupid. She just wants to hold on to that feeling.

  “Not for a long time,” she says at last.

  Alvar is handing her the memo block and the pen.

  “The sound you’re hearing, you can’t get it on your CDs and your mp3s and all the modern digital stuff. We wind it up by our own hand and there’s not a single electron involved. Just human knowledge of sound.”

  She doesn’t like the way he didn’t reassure her he’d be around a long, long time.

  It scares her.

  — CHAPTER 20 —

  Steffi has made an important decision. She’s going to stop taking lessons from Torkel. Or, rather, if Torkel doesn’t take her interest in jazz music seriously, she will quit. He’s getting one more chance, but he doesn’t know it yet. She’s going to ask him some well-chosen questions about his knowledge of jazz bass, and if he gives the wrong answer, she’s going to ask her mother to give Alvar money for lessons instead. Torkel will have to cram classic bass into the head of some other poor middle school student instead of hers. She has to concentrate on her own future now.

  As soon as she opens her locker, she sees something’s wrong. At first she can’t take it in—the arrangements, the forms of everything inside—her books, her jacket, her bass, it’s all wrong. As she grabs her bass, she feels it come apart inside its case.

  It’s like trying to hug a human being whose head has just been cut off. That’s the first image that comes to her, complete with the same anguish, which now pushes down her throat and into her stomach. The neck of the bass is in her hand while the rest has fallen against the bottom of the case. Further down the hall, Karro and Sanja are sitting with their entourage. They keep glancing at her and waiting. Karro laughs, as if someone, most probably herself, has just said something funny.

  Steffi grabs the case by the handle and rushes off in the opposite direction. The severed neck of the bass droops beyond the handle like that of a dead giraffe. She doesn’t open her case until she’s inside the music school where she takes lessons from Torkel. She sits on a bench, takes a deep breath, and zips it open. The body is still nicely fastened by its Velcro straps, but at the first fret, the neck has been sawed from the body, and then, the neck itself has been sawed into many pieces.

  Steffi takes each one out. She presses her middle finger on the part where the D string should be and her index finger where the E string should be. She feels nothing at all, not even deep down inside, and she can barely breathe. Sends a thought to the eighteen-year-old Alvar who is about to play at Nalen, thinks: my bass is dead.

  As Torkel comes down the hallway toward her, she quickly puts the pieces back and zips the case shut. Torkel has never understood her bass. Why should he see it die?

  As he walks nearer, she gets up and looks at him, not right in the eye but at least chest level. “I’m not going to play today.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m quitting the bass.”

  Torkel scratches his head. “So, um … have you lost interest in it?”

  Steffi thinks about playing a walking line, stamping her foot, stopping at a blue note, syncopating with Hannes on guitar, feeling the rhythm in her stomach. She thinks about practicing Torkel’s lessons, playing scales and using his guitar to accompany his Bellman songs.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry to hear that. But I imagine you have a great deal to do in the ninth grade.”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  She cradles her bass in her arms. At first she doesn’t want to go to Alvar’s apartment, but she sees his white hand waving to her in the window and so she goes on in.

  “What’s happened to your instrument?”

  He asks that before she can even take off her jacket. She doesn’t answer but just sits down on his bed with the case on her knees. Breathes in the scent of soap, feels the broken instrument inside the nylon cloth. She has felt nothing all the way from school, but now she feels pain, as if her stomach was going to burst open. It is as if …

  “Anita would have offered you a cup of coffee,” Alvar says as he walks to the shelf with his records. “But I don’t have any here. So all I have to offer is ‘How High the Moon.’”

  “It’s as if they understood,” Steffi says.

  Alvar turns toward her, still holding the record in its cardboard sleeve. “Who?”

  “Karro and all the other mental cases.”

  Alvar sits down in his armchair, still holding the record. “What have they understood?”

  “That I don’t give a damn about what they say to me. That
they call me slut and all the rest. That I don’t give a damn.”

  Her voice breaks as she pronounces the word slut.

  Alvar furrows his bushy brows and leans sharply forward, his elbows on his knees, as if he were suddenly a younger man. His eyes seem filled with anger, though not at her. “They called you that?”

  He speaks as if she were an angel, and his warm Värmland accent stresses the word you.

  “But,” Steffi says, and she has trouble speaking around the lump growing in her throat. “But now … I mean … I don’t know how…”

  She hates that she’s crying. She hates that her nose is running, making her sniff loudly and that she can’t stop. She’s sitting on Alvar’s bed like a three-year-old and not a fifteen-year-old. She hates that in one second they’d managed to cut through her extra layers of thick skin.

  In a way, she also hates that Alvar is so kind, too, because it means she can’t make herself stop. Now he’s come to sit next to her. He puts a hand on her bass case. He looks down at it, his neck bent and his eyes as sharp as a hawk’s.

  “This,” he says. “This is the work of someone who does not know how to handle things in the proper way.”

  Steffi sniffs snot back into her nose loudly. “That’s one way to put it.”

  She doesn’t want to be here. Since only Alvar is listening, she says so out loud. “I just want to blink my eyes and when I open them, I’m in Stockholm at the music school and I have a bass that’s not broken.”

  She takes the record from Alvar’s hands and walks over to the gramophone because if she sits still any longer, she’s going to break into pieces. She winds the gramophone, sets the record in place, and sets down the needle.

  “When I was in Stockholm, it felt like all of Björke was just a dream. But when I’m here, Stockholm is just a dream, too.”

  “Yes, that’s how it feels,” Alvar says, his eyes looking far away. “Yes, indeed, that’s just how it feels.”

  Steffi comes back to sit down on the bed again. She takes out the pieces of her bass and lays them out in order on the crocheted bedcover. “How High the Moon” fills the room.

  She glances up at Alvar. “Tell me how it went at Nalen.”

  “Do you really want to hear about it now?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can talk about what’s going on at school instead.”

  “No, right now I’d prefer hearing about what happened at Nalen.”

  “At Nalen … it was just as advertised … full of people … a wonderful atmosphere…”

  * * *

  Nalen’s advertisements were legendary. Topsy Lindblom was irreverent in every way, from his typography to his spelling and, if his goal was to annoy all the Swedish teachers in Stockholm, he was certainly successful.

  Saturday 8–1, said the ad that Alvar was to keep for the rest of his life. Kick up your Heels to our FAMOUS ROOF. This Sat ONLY with Alvar Big Boy Svensson. Promising player from the HEART of Värmland.

  Erling had found the ad, and it was with both delight and ill-concealed jealousy that he showed it and in the same breath added that he should get a royalty because he was the one who had first encouraged Alvar’s talent and had come up with the nickname Big Boy. “Now we have a foot in the door,” he kept repeating at least four or five times that evening.

  Being in Nalen’s orchestra was totally different from being in the audience. Alvar was not religious, but before Nalen opened, walking across the empty stage to tune his upright bass, he felt something spiritual in the house, something divine that had brought him to that moment, right there on Nalen’s stage floor creaking beneath his feet. It felt as real as Charles Norman giving him an A from the piano.

  When the first people trotted in from the line outside, he shivered from his toes all the way up to the top of his head. Once he, too, had been down there on that dance floor, too nervous to dance the jitterbug but too excited to be able to sit down.

  Someone came up to him and slapped him on the back so that he hiccupped. “I heard you were going to play tonight!” Most of them, though, had no idea who he was—the anonymous bass player in the middle of everything.

  Erling walked up. “Want to come?”

  That meant that they’d leave the dance hall and take the stairs down to the restaurant for a couple of pilsners, and then return to Nalen, where alcohol was strictly forbidden, and pass the guards, who were there to make sure no alcohol came in, while keeping their mouths shut and holding their gaze steady.

  “Are you nuts? I’m going on in half an hour!”

  Erling grinned a grin that was hard to interpret. “Aren’t you the prima donna already!”

  Alvar didn’t allow himself to think of the names of the other musicians. If he thought about them, he wouldn’t be able to play a single note. Just like when he’d met Thore Ehrling. His hero worship would get in the way of his playing. Instead of their names, he focused on their heads and their hands. Swing was all that mattered, not the men who played it.

  Everyone was dancing. Every single person in the hall was spinning, bouncing, their feet moving back and forth, side to side, their shoulders and legs carefree and swinging. From Alvar’s position, they were a sea of bobbing heads: shiny with pomade, and curls from curlers or by secret methods. After their first set, he got a thumbs-up from Seymour Österwall.

  “He gave me a thumbs-up!” Alvar exclaimed to Erling, and his voice cracked into a falsetto. “I’ll never forget that thumbs-up as long as I live!”

  Erling laughed and thumped him on the back. “You made us all proud, Big Boy! Even if you missed a note here and there. Typical beginner mistakes.”

  Alvar couldn’t remember dropping a note, but on the other hand, he was so excited he wouldn’t have noticed if the ceiling had caved in.

  “You were perfect,” Anita said when she’d found them in the bar. “You were absolutely wonderful!”

  Inga-Lill came up from behind and hugged her arms tightly around him. Then she swung around and kissed him on the mouth. “My man!” she said loudly. “You were so elegant up there with the orchestra!”

  Alvar wiggled loose. Elegant! Why couldn’t she ever come up with a word besides elegant?

  “Time for the next set. Now you will really get the chance to dance!”

  He knew it wasn’t right to look at Anita while he said this. Because Inga-Lill was his girl, of course. He felt a little prick of conscience during the first measures of the next set, but then the swing music caught him like a whirlwind spinning through his body. Nalen was pulsing and Alvar’s eager fingers were getting everyone to move.

  Once the dance was over, girls flocked around him. Tall ones, short ones—all in swing skirts, all with smooth skin and lips that smiled, smiled, smiled. For a second, Alvar remembered himself as the shy seventeen-year-old waiting in the line to get into Nalen and frightened to death of just these girls. Now he was able to laugh.

  “No, I don’t think I’ll be a band member. Arthur is back tomorrow.”

  “Alvar plays in Erling’s Trio.” This came from Erling, who was standing behind the most eager girls.

  “Oh, that’s right! I saw you at the Zanzibar!” one of them exclaimed.

  “That’s right,” Erling answered, even though the girl wasn’t looking at him.

  “How old are you?” another girl asked Alvar with a glint in her eye.

  “So you want to know if he’s legal?” said another girl to her, even more forthright.

  Alvar blushed, but laughed it off. “Any other questions?”

  “Yes, I have one,” a quiet voice came from behind him. “Are you planning to go home to Björke anytime soon?”

  * * *

  It was the blond girl from the train.

  She was thinner now and he could see some crow’s-feet around her eyes that hadn’t been there before. But when they were sitting at the Gramophone Café over cups of coffee, he remembered her voice as if it came straight from his childhood.

  “I’ve watched
you a few times,” she said. “But I didn’t want to … oh, I didn’t know if I should talk to you. Or if you would even remember me.”

  She was staring at him intently, but he couldn’t figure out why. But he made his voice sound low and reassuring. “Yes, I remember that train ride like it was yesterday.”

  “Why haven’t you gone home?”

  The question hit him hard, just as it had done outside Nalen. He remembered his mother hugging him and warning him about Germans. She’d just baked bread and she’d told him to call as soon as he reached Aunt Hilda. She smelled like kitchen and children.

  “There was no reason to.”

  “Not even for Christmas?”

  Two Christmases had gone by since he’d left Björke. Every Christmas he’d regretted his decision to stay in Stockholm, but that feeling lasted only a few days.

  The girl looked at him with something like desperation in her eyes. He didn’t understand what she wanted from him. At least he was being honest. “I came here to play jazz music. You see, there are a lot of musicians already here who are much better than I am. They’ve been playing a long time. Some even studied at the conservatory … but at least I have the will.”

  “And the talent.”

  “So I took every chance that came my way. I’m still working off the debt on my bass and I learn everything anybody has to teach me. And it’s … it’s what I have to do. Do you understand?”

  She nodded but added, “Still, you must think about your mother now and then.”

  “We write letters.”

  It came out more harshly than he’d intended, but he didn’t want to go into details with this girl, whom he really didn’t know that well. Sometimes when he thought of his mother, tears came to his eyes. Sometimes that happened even when he thought of his father.

  The girl stirred her coffee. She didn’t say anything. He started to speak, but then the images of his parents were mixed with his brothers and his neighbors and he couldn’t open his mouth.

  “Anyway, I was wondering,” the girl said at last. “If … when … you go to Björke…” Her voice was choking, as if she were holding back tears. “If you could … go see my little baby.”