Sunday at Maria Torget

Woe unto those who are locked in or out of their homes. Human beings in exile. Thank you Nicole Krauss for sending me Leon Gursky, that angel of a locksmith whom I’m just getting to know.

All of the post-this, post-that and post-it theories and practices and papers we’ve used to crown our lives. So much for all those years in analysis. But what about the plump old lady I saw shuffling across Maria Torget just this afternoon, the one with the green watering can and the withering white chrysanthemum of a hairdo. Everyone heard her bellowing “Anna, Anna” as though she had just managed to escape an overgrown bed of perennials and Anna was some crystal vase in which she was dying to be displayed. I followed her for a while, at a distance, but never saw anyone who looked even vaguely like an Orrefors or a Kosta Boda.

What about all the people whose portraits have never been framed or set atop someone’s chest of drawers, people whom no one has ever attempted to describe or even see for that matter, though they’ve been sitting right next to them on a park bench for nearly an hour now? Perhaps that’s why I was so happy I could leave church early today, before communion, and get some fresh air on a park bench at Maria Torget, before I returned home to write.

It was especially refreshing, since the image of a clergyman - slapping the back of my old friend and proposing a toast to “Bruderschaft” because they had served in the same army - suddenly overwhelmed me like a hot flash. Of course the priest didn’t know, and probably never found out as long as he was alive, that my friend actually deserted that army. And then I recalled only minutes later a remark made in my presence by another one of these priests: “What Californian would ever want to live and work in a cold place like Sweden?" in sympathy of the Swedish-American priest who had turned down an offer to serve in this local Swedish parish. I felt as though I was being skinned alive. I wonder if the trunk of a tree of knowledge would feel anything if it were debarked? And then there was the rapid hammering away at Our Father on the organ to boot. It went so quickly that I coud hardly breathe in between the phrases of the prayer, and so I had to levitate in the middle of it all. Perhaps we’re all invisible foreigners, uprooted from our native gardens to be the blind spokesmen and women of Genesis. I wonder what graves I might be desecrating in the process? As I write I can see the old priest on the sidewalk below my apartment, resting on the seat of his walker with his hands folded reverently on his lap and looking up, waiting perhaps for me to come out and play or at least have a chat.

All this happened such a long time ago that I had almost forgotten the answer to the catechism quiz question: how many sacraments are there? Correct answer: six for girls and seven for boys. Sometimes I wonder why so many of us fail (refuse?) to play the part of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or at least sing along. Perhaps she’s one of those mysterious treasures, like Anna, the hopeful role that we reserve for the autumn of our lives.

That’s why I’m glad I think I could at least recognize her today, get up off my knees and leave the pew while the sun was still shining. I’m glad I ran into my friend Joy out there and could have a chat, and then watch the clumsy pigeons and the fearless sparrows nibble at the crumbs. I could even chuckle at the tears that little Ervin shed when his mother broke the bun he wanted all for himself: “Ervin, mamma och pappa vill också smaka på bullen,” his mother said.

Postcolonial, postwar, postindustrial, postmodern. If colonialism is the patriarch of a myriad of postcolonial legacies, then whatever happened to his mother, sister, wife and daughter? Postcolonial theory is accused of shifting focus from locations and institutions - to the oppressed and dissenting individuals and their focus. So far so good. And what about the ideas, beliefs, culture, and social order that existed before colonialization? Who were the natives? Poof. Out like a light? Let’s not eulogize or romanticize. One day she just soared off in a gentle spring breeze, like a lace handkerchief or the tousled petals of her mum’s head, looking for her Anna.