The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

to lunch, coffee and sandwiches in the work shed, then from lunch until four, unless there was an unusual amount of work to be done and they had to stay late.

He usually came home around half past four, took off his dirty work clothes and went straight to bed. His body was hot and sweaty, his whole being exhausted. You were allowed in his room, but he didn’t say much. “Just need a bit of a rest.” Sometimes he dozed off, but thirty minutes later, he’d get back up for supper and what was left of the day.

Work was more than an occupation, it was an integral part of him; it broke him down, but it also made him hardy, it shaped and colored him. He was a fairly large man, not too tall, but muscular and top heavy. He was tenacious and strong. His upper arms were powerful and firm; both my hands together weren’t enough to encircle them. In the summers, he worked bare chested and got so tanned his skin looked like dark rust and the faded tattoo on his forearm, a simple anchor, grew almost invisible. (He’d gotten the tattoo before he was of age, drunk and lost in Nyhavn in Copenhagen, and why he’d picked an anchor was probably a mystery even to him, since he’d never been to sea.) His hands were big and ponderous with thick, leathery skin. One of his pinkies was missing; it had been broken so many times it had stiffened into a crooked grimace, like an oversized claw. He’d asked a doctor to remove it, and the doctor had obliged.

He’d worked for decades, and it showed. The warm, newly made asphalt he carried, shoveled, and flattened every day seemed to have seeped into his skin. He smelled profoundly of tar, even after washing up and changing his clothes. It was a mark of the working class.

When we were out driving, he would point to a paved street and say “I made that.” He liked his work and could almost, if pressed, admit he was good at it. His professional pride was of the natural, universal kind—the kind that comes from knowing you’re pretty good at something not a lot of people know how to do, and from knowing there’s a certain permanence to what you make and that other people value it.

But his identity didn’t revolve around being a paver. His profession was just a word. When he talked about himself, he called himself a worker, and contained in that concept were most of the things he considered central to his being. Nor did it seem to have been a matter of choice. He was a worker from birth and his identity was inherited. He was a worker because something bigger and stronger than him had chosen that life for him. The course of his life was predetermined.

But if that was his heritage, what was mine? Maybe—and herein lies the minute, barely perceptible shift that takes place between generations—a never-spoken but ever-present encouragement: No, all doors are not open to you, and time is shorter than you think, but, of course, you’re always free to try.

DURING THE SUMMER VACATION, WE SOMETIMES WENT DOWN TO the stream earlier in the day, while there was still light. Instead of bats, swallows swooped and dived above the water; from a distance they looked almost identical but they moved differently. The sun glittered in the stream and the tall grass waved drily in the breeze.

One early evening, we were standing by the willow tree a distance below the rapids.

“Think you can swim across here?” Dad asked.

“Of course I can.”

“I’ll give you ten kronor if you cut straight across.”

“Sure.”

“But it has to be straight across. Straight across the current. You can’t drift. If you swim straight across without drifting, I’ll give you a tenner.”

I undressed and stepped into the water. It was cold and dirty; I hesitated for a second or two.

“There,” Dad said, pointing. “Straight across right here, from the tree to the rock on the other side.”

I slipped down and out into the stream and started swimming; for about five feet, I did okay. I held my head up high and kept an eye on my target. Straight across to the rock. It didn’t feel particularly insurmountable. But then I reached the middle of the stream where the current was at its strongest; it grabbed me like a hand brushing crumbs off a table. I was swept along a few feet, pulled under, I swallowed water and coughed before I managed to turn against the flow and stay motionless in the middle of the stream for a few seconds, like a boat at anchor, paddling frantically against the current. Suddenly, I felt it lift me up and shove me forward; I virtually hurled myself toward the shore. I climbed out on trembling legs, about fifteen feet downstream from the rock.

Dad laughed and pointed from the other side.

“You get one more chance. Since you have to come back, too.”

“Can’t you come get me with the boat?” I yelled.

“Oh, no. Come on. Straight across.”

I walked over to the rock, shook the lactic acid out of my muscles and stepped back into the water. This time, I aimed upstream from the outset, launching myself out; the momentum helped me swim diagonally against the current for a brief moment. For those few seconds, I was also on the right side of the willow tree on the other side, but then the water caught on to what was happening and wrestled me violently downstream. I managed to steer my way to shore, grab a branch, and pull myself up onto dry land, three feet or so from the willow tree.

“That’s close, who would’ve thought?” Dad said and turned around to go get our fishing gear.

I stayed where I was, letting the last rays of the setting sun dry me. When he came back, I got dressed and we walked silently along the stream, out onto a narrow