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

had changed almost everything. It wasn’t individual class mobility, it was collective. Three decades of social reform in Sweden had moved the working class, at least parts of it, from laborer’s cottages and cramped apartments to their own houses, complete with garages, fruit trees, and greenhouses. It had been a mighty movement, like an ocean current.

Dad was born in the summer of 1947. His mother, my grandmother, was twenty years old at the time and had already been working for more than six years. After seven years in school, she had her Confirmation and then, at the age of fourteen, started working as a maid. The morning after her Confirmation, she rode her bicycle to her first job. She had bought the bike on credit, paying it off in monthly ten-kronor installments. Her salary was twenty-five kronor a month.

She lived with her parents and five siblings. Her parents were agricultural contract workers who were paid in kind with food rather than money: a whitewashed form of slavery. The family lived in a typical contract worker’s cottage. Three rooms: a kitchen, a bedroom in which all eight members of the family slept—two to a bed—and a parlor no one was allowed in during the day. Outhouse, wood-burning stove, and drafty windows. A violent father. They were people without possessions, and even after the contract worker system was abolished in 1945, they stayed on in the house, living and working much like before. Contract workers knew their place. As did the children of contract workers.

My grandmother was beautiful in a simple, unpretentious way; she smiled often and had shy eyes with a touch of melancholy about them. She worked as a maid in about ten different households during her teens. Doing dishes, dusting, and so on, from seven in the morning until seven at night. She had Sundays and one afternoon a week off. She slept alone in a maid’s room and she was unhappy—unhappy being a maid, unhappy living as a stranger in other people’s homes, unhappy with the scoldings and contempt and submission. She was constantly homesick, for her sisters and brothers and childhood.

Right before my father was born, my grandmother moved back in with her parents and found work at the rubber factory in town. She preferred working in the factory to being a maid, but she was also a single parent to a small child. She was given two months of parental leave and then had to go back to work. Her parents and younger sisters were in charge of my father during the day.

He was seven when he and Nana moved to the farm by the stream.

It was a tenant farm, owned by the church, with pigs and fields and a garden full of flowers that my grandmother cared for. Dad was put to work on the farm from the start, but he also liked boxing and using a slingshot. He ran across the fields to the stream and learned to swim just above the rapids. He went to school and was interested in history and science but eventually dropped out. He started working, transporting pigs for the abattoir. He did his military service and met mom and got a job as a paver, which he kept until the end of his days.

While Dad was growing up, Sweden introduced universal child support, income support, and occupational pension. Income taxes had been individualized. Healthcare, maternity care, childcare, and elderly care had all been expanded. Wealth had been redistributed. Two guaranteed weeks of vacation had expanded to four. Society and the state had taken over large sections of the social safety net from families. In other words, it had become possible for a road paver and a day care worker mom, my parents, to live a life that was different in every way from the lives previous generations of the working class had known.

Nothing about my parents’ life was a given, of course. But nor was it chance. Strong forces had been involved. They had been willow leaves in a mighty current. They had traveled across an ocean without really moving at all.

Dad was twenty and mom seventeen when they had my big sister. Just a few years later, they took out a loan from the bank and built the white brick house.

ONE DAY, MY DAD PLACED A LONG, NARROW, STRANGE-LOOKING object made of metal hoops and mesh on the lawn in front of the house.

“It’s an eel trap,” Dad told me. “I bought it.”

I don’t know who he bought it from; either way, it wasn’t new; there were several large holes in the mesh, which we mended with sewing thread, but there was something awe-inspiring about it. It was about fifteen feet long, considerably wider at one end and tapering toward a point at the other, and it had two mesh wings by the opening that could be extended out to either side, making it at least ten feet wide. I pictured it on the bottom of the stream, catching everything carried into it by the current. It would be full to the brim with fish. This was something other than setting spillers. This was something that upset the balance of power. With this trap, we would no longer be temporary, unobtrusive guests in the constant cycle of life and activity in the stream; we would be almost omnipotent. It was as though we could now intervene in the fundamental order of things.

We had dinner and Dad pushed some snus up under his lip and then we were on our way down to the stream while there was still light. We skidded down the slope and drove along the wide tracks, parking by the willow tree. It had been raining for days and the water level was high; the stream was at least a few feet wider than usual and bursting its banks in places, forming small pools of stagnant water, out of which solitary blades of grass protruded.

Our boat was moored next to the willow tree, tearing