From The Literal Heaven

You finally go to the doctor. Why do doctors’ consultation rooms almost always have that poster with a person’s muscles exposed, an image of a flayed person on the wall? The image actually makes you feel real, physical discomfort. Is it because doctors must remind themselves at regular intervals what our muscles look like before they go in and operate, or just so that they can feel if some lump is in the right place? 

This can’t be an easy examination. How does it go? The doctor is washing his hands when the nurse lets you into the consultation room. He has a stethoscope around his neck and a round mirror attached to a broad elastic band around his forehead. ‘I play the ukulele myself,’ he says. ‘Although of course in my case, it’s mostly in my free time. Can you lie down on the bed? Can you remove the clothes from your upper half? Can you raise your arms above your head, Al?’ Hmm, wait, maybe you’re wearing a disposable surgical bib around your neck? The doctor has to get past your gag reflex in order to take a good look at your throat, and small fibreoptic scopes certainly didn’t exist in the spring of 1937. He pulls out a small dental mirror. ‘Although we do put on shows sometimes,’ he continues. ‘My band. You should come listen to us sometime. If you’re passing by.’ Does the doctor have to put you to sleep so you don’t throw up in his face? Or at least anaesthetise you? Because this is no ordinary throat infection. ‘Aha, there we have it!’ Somehow the doctor manages to work his way down until he can see your vocal cords.

‘Well, you’ve got a wart on one of your vocal cords. Can something be done about it? Well, no, there’s nothing I can do for you. Unfortunately.’

[...]

I get a sore throat. I come home; I’ve been plodding through the snow. It’s already gotten dark outside. November. Snow has fallen unusually early this year, and in large quantities. I put my bag down inside, by the door. 

It’s a few days after Kristina’s fourth round of chemotherapy. She’s been out walking in the snowstorm. She has to keep her blood circulation up. When she gets back home, she has a temperature of 38.4. The doctor has previously said that she should call if her fever exceeds 38.5. She thinks it must be a side effect of the chemotherapy, now that her immune system is weakened and the injection she got to help the white blood cells work hasn’t taken effect yet. Kristina would rather not go to the hospital unnecessarily. 

A few hours later, her throat is an open wound. She can barely swallow. It’s evening, so we call the out-of-hours service. ‘Go to the hospital immediately,’ says the nurse. ‘If it gets into the lungs, it all happens quickly if there aren’t enough white blood cells.’ Kristina gets into the front seat while I dig the car out of the snow. Our younger daughter is with us. Our older daughter is sleeping over at a friend’s house. I take the car to the parking lot, while the other two go into the entrance to the emergency room. 

We notice that the staff immediately understand the seriousness of the situation. The nurse quickly gets Kristina into a private room, and takes tests, then more tests. She makes jokes, but her eyes are serious. A young doctor with a beard listens to Kristina’s heart, her lungs. ‘No, she doesn’t have enough white blood cells.’ They admit her. They administer strong antibiotics in a drip. My daughter and I go home in the end. It’s the nurse who urges us to do so. ‘There’s nothing you can do here.’ Maybe they want us out of the way? But my daughter wants to stay. ‘No, go home and sleep a bit instead.’ 

It’s early morning. We’re quiet in the car. We drive along Route 73, no traffic to speak of. But it’s slippery; snow is sweeping across the asphalt. I see our daughter in the rearview mirror. The car lurches and I look at the road. I look back at her again. I understand that she’s scared, terrified – based on how scared I feel myself. This is precisely the scenario that I’ve been so worried about. And it’s me who brought the bacteria into our home. Please, don’t die now. I look at my daughter in the mirror. And then back out at the road. I don’t dare take my eyes off the road for more than a few moments in these conditions. Kristina will stay in the hospital for a few days. It’s impossible to sleep. Then things change. She calls, she can talk. The antibiotic is working. The injection that activates the white blood cells has kicked in. The pain in her throat has subsided somewhat.

[...]

We are on the marshes out at Sandemar, late in the afternoon, with August beginning to seep into autumn. It’s nearly the blue hour. During the day, the sun has swung across the sky like a slow sway-pole artist, and now it has only a short distance to go before it falls behind the tree line. A few dramatic clouds have appeared, surrounded by the sky in shades of blue.

I haven’t seen a single admiral butterfly this year. They overwinter down on the continent, come back in the spring. They don’t care about borders. They lay their eggs on the host plant, and then they hatch. The larvae eat the stinging nettle and pupate. The new generation of fully grown butterflies sometimes gather on the gravel path and feed on remnants of fallen cherries. Not this year, though.

Something strange happens out at Sandemar. If Kristina and one of our daughters, our younger, hadn’t been there, I would have doubted my memory. Thought it was a dream. The atmosphere, the stillness. We are standing in the soft yellow sidelight that appears to be propelled into the landscape by the setting sun. At least twenty admirals are evenly spread across the grey-white bark of the trunk of a birch. 

I get the impression that the tree has suddenly opened its eyes to the world – its countless dark eyes looking straight at us, like openings in the bark, as if there is a world inside or behind the tree. We discover even more admirals in the grass around us. There are probably about fifty butterflies in all. They are the first admirals we have seen all summer. And almost the last too. Have they just emerged from their pupae? Have they gathered here to fly south? It’s late in the season, but the climate is out of control. Hot, as if it were the middle of the summer. 

The colourful butterflies against the dirty grey tree trunk overwhelm my senses. It’s like nothing else, nothing I’ve ever seen before, nothing I could have imagined. The marsh that flattens out towards the bay, the shifting blue spectrum in the sky, the dramatic clouds, the yellow evening light from the still-warming sun, the proximity to Kristina and our younger daughter: all of it combined means that I can never forget this, even though the situation is empty of movement, empty of external events, empty of all drama. We stand there, completely still, looking at the tree trunk. Are we saying something? Well, I’m probably saying something; I usually have a hard time hiding my enthusiasm for this type of experience, which is at the outer reaches of reality. Events that suggest that the world is bigger than our senses, or that our senses are bigger than the world.

[...]

I walk to Bromma church. It’s a beautiful Saturday in October, sunny, the leaves turning yellow. Although a striking number of leaves are still green. Climate change? I haven’t brought any flowers. I walk up from the parking lot, continue along the gravel path. I circle the church, touch the gate. Locked. I stand and look at a gravestone for a while. It’s a family grave with a slightly unusual name, the same surname as a classmate. Although neither her nor her parents’ names are carved into the stone 

There is an upper-middle-aged couple sitting on the terrace in the memorial grove. I don’t want to sit next to them. I take the paved path up towards the small wooden benches at the top of the slope. I walk slowly. Then I sit down, try to focus. Focus on my dead parents, on my father and my mother, whose ashes were recently scattered here, and on myself. What do I feel? How am I supposed to take in everything that has happened? I discover that someone has lit two garden candles in the grass just in front of me. There’s a single, cut flower between the candles. Then, the couple from the terrace comes walking in their puffer jackets. They’re taking the same paved path that I just walked, skirting the small grassy slope of the memorial grove. They look at me. Haughtily. I could have written hostilely and that would also have been true. I feel embarrassed, because they really are walking right towards me. I lean back on the bench; I want to maintain social distancing. But they keep coming closer. 

Then I realise they’re probably the ones who lit the candles. They stare at me, as if they think I’m going to do something. Like what? Spit on the flames? Steal the flower? They pass me, their distrust a silent threat. As if their relatives are more important than mine. I feel like screaming at them. I don’t. Is it their child they’ve buried here? Maybe it’s unlikely to be a child in the memorial grove. But I feel that stand-offish Bromma attitude that I grew up with coming off them. Is it my flower-patterned shirt, or my pandemic-length hair? Something about me is bothering them. You morons. Their cheap candles send out black smoke and the wind drives it back at me.

So I move to the next bench. Close my eyes, try to refocus. Think about Dad. It’s not working. But the sun: it’s shining. I close my eyes again and feel the heat on my face, my eyelids. I think I might get sunburned. I think...I’d better hurry home now because I’ve promised to drive our elder daughter to a friend’s. Try to focus again. No, it isn’t working. And I really don’t want to be late for my daughter. I get up and walk to the car in the parking lot. 

Later that evening, I lie in bed with my notepad. But I don’t write anything about the visit to the memorial garden; not a word about it. Instead, I write down a completely different memory. We’re at Cuckmere Haven, in Sussex. The whole family. We have parked the car and are walking up the steep path towards the first of the Seven Sisters limestone cliffs. Our daughters are quite small. They run ahead of us. Kristina is still healthy, my mother-in-law is with us. The sun is bright, the sky a cloudless blue – the clouds seem to have fallen into the green grass and are lying there, like grazing sheep. 

The shimmer from the English Channel is both beautiful and so painfully strong that I have to shield my eyes with my hand over my eyebrows. The larks’ singing is ubiquitous, and we breathe it in. The grass is cut short by the sheep, but there are still flowers. Wild thyme. Blueweed. Yellow bedstraw and bird’s foot trefoil, some wood avens. I stand for a while on the slope, look down at my white gym shoes, my hairy, Britishly pale legs below my knee-length shorts. Around my ankles there are black-and-white checkered butterflies. I don’t know what type they are, but they are everywhere here. Like little chessboards flown out from the covers of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland – like the lilies of the valley at Sandemar, they seem more drawn from literature than reality. The sun is so bright – the larks, the sheep, the checkered butterflies, our daughters running ahead, Kristina talking softly to her mother a little way off – and in the evening I find that my legs have been burnt. The soreness of the skin makes it impossible to sleep. The touch of the duvet stings. Under my eyelids, bright sunlight still pulses, like a burning, orange sunset.

And then something comes up, and in the biographies about Bowlly, it almost sounds like a holiday. In the summer of 1938, Lew Stone and his band get an engagement at a ‘holiday camp’, Billy Butlin’s new holiday camp at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. ‘Let’s go, Al, bring Helen and come along. You’ll get to sing with the band.’

Something has happened in these intervening years. The band members move freely now with the holidaymakers. These are not the audiences that once spilled onto the dance floor of some exclusive hotel restaurant, in your heyday before you went to the States. These are radio listeners, who sit glued to their transistor radios on Tuesday nights, push aside their dining tables, roll up the rug and dance with their little sisters or cousins for lack of anyone better. No longer do the women scream when they see you. Just to be on the safe side, you try to make sure that Helen is always at your side.

On your way down to the beach, you stop and exchange a few pleasantries with a young couple who danced to your voice a few years earlier, in the ’30s. You linger there with them, standing in the sand, talking relaxedly. You can tell that the woman is both delighted and a little shy, wearing her sundress, holding her little daughter in her arms. Her husband is right next to her, a big smile on his face. No, he doesn’t seem jealous or nervous that his wife is talking to the Al Bowlly. He just seems very happy with his little family. As if the war is never going to come. You make sure to include the husband in your conversation too.

Your audience has simply grown up, calmed down – but they still want to hear you sing. You enjoy this audience, your old radio audience. No, you’re not a snob, never have been. And Billy Butlin doesn’t want any sort of formal atmosphere here in Clacton. He wants you to walk around in striped jerseys all day long. Yes, even when you’re on stage at the terrace, playing along to the afternoon tea. Tea dance. In fact, even when you’re playing in the big ballroom in the evening. Jerseys and chinos... So there’s no question of a tuxedo. And maybe you feel a kind of...gratitude from the audience. A gratitude towards you personally. That you exist. That you were there on the radio when they were growing up in the shadow of the Depression, filling them with hope and bringing them together. 

Their right to statutory, paid holidays has just been pushed through in Parliament. So as you meet them here, face to face, on the English seafront, at one of the many summer camps that spring up along the coast when the working classes are allowed to take a holiday, all they want to say is thank you. ‘Thanks, Al.’ Not take cuttings of your hair, not shout excitedly in your ear, not tear your clothes. Does this make you feel old? No, I don’t think so.

The pictures from this summer camp are so relaxed. Helen at your side, in your striped shirts. If you were holding a surfboard, Lew Stone’s band would have been reminiscent of the early Beach Boys, the years before ‘Good Vibrations’.

You politely part ways with the young couple. ‘I expect to see you at the tea dance this afternoon,’ you say. ‘I promise to talk Lew into playing “Don’t Change”, and you’ll know we’re playing it just for you and no one else.’ Then you can’t help but sing a few lines right there. You can see the effect it has on them. You can’t help but smile and wink at them before you part.

You wisely don’t reveal that you’ve already rehearsed the song and were planning to play it anyway. It will become one of the central memories in this couple’s lives, perhaps the very memory they bring up during a marital crisis, that can keep them together, help them move forward – how you and Lew Stone’s orchestra performed ‘Don’t Change’ just for them. But of course this is not something you and Helen are thinking about at this moment, because you’re already on your way down to take a dip in the North Sea. Then, Helen notices that she’s forgotten her beach shoes in the room. There are plenty of sea urchins on the bottom here and ideally you wouldn’t want to go in without a good pair of beach shoes. Helen runs back up to your temporary accommodation, your room – is it in a hotel or a bungalow? You’re left standing alone on the beach, looking out over the water. The horizon. On the other side, the Netherlands. And for a short while you think of Marjie, of when you were there on the opposite shore. The slow breathing of the sea. The rhythmic lapping of the waves against the beach pebbles. A few seagulls further away, scrabbling and working on something they found in the sand. No, don’t say it’s a carcass. 

But this isn’t just a holiday; this summer camp is actually quite hard work, but it’s also something more. And suddenly you feel like you want to thank them, the audience, for being there…because they’ll continue to be there. ‘Thank you for an unforgettable night I never can replace, thank you and good night’ – well, that’s how you’ll end the evening. You’ll really mean it too.

[...]