A Place of my Own

Hi there readers, if readers there be.

With the holidays over and yours truly back in Istanbul, an update is in order. Christmas in Sweden was nice. Lots of stories told by my grandmothers about the way things were, about the men in their lives who have gone on. At one point over a delicious Christmas dinner at my grandmother's house with everything in it just the way it had been 25 years ago, I looked at her aged face and realized with wonder that the tale she was just then telling about her father had played out well over a hundred years ago. It was about how his mother on her deathbed had implored her adoptive son, the one sired by a snake-charmer, to take care of my great-grandfather Hjalmar once she had passed on, to take him under his wing. And how Hjalmar, distressed at being seen as defenseless, had carried this formative slight with him forever after as it spurred him from strength to strength, from one achievement to the next as he tried to show his mother's ghost that he was indeed someone to be reckoned with. I also liked the story about the portrait of himself he had commissioned many years later as a gift to his wife during the halcyon days when he ran a steel mill, which story had it that he would always have to rouse the painter out of his drunken slumber when he came by on his lunch breaks to sit for the portrait, and that he had been scowling at the painter in a hot fury on the day of the portrait's finishing touches, producing an effect on the canvas that delighted Hjalmar: "Now that is what a boss is supposed to look like!" That portrait has been sternly presiding over my grandmother's living room since before I was born. Another story has it that a Polish handyman who was helping her around the house quit on the job one day because he could no longer endure Hjalmar's ceaseless scowl.

I realized something about my family's history I should have known before: Both sides have been involved with metals and mining at some time. It would seem that my own fascination has something congenital about it, no? There was even an African connection--circumstance took my grandfather Gunnar to Ghanaian mines on a business trip in the 1950's.

On my first day in Sweden I got an e-mail from my cousin Sebastian to let me know that he would be getting married a week from then in Bonn, Germany. I managed to find a flight and be at the wedding, which was very pleasant and dignified. Sebastian and I reconnected after 12 years or so of not seeing each other this summer, when he and his then-fiancee Veronique visited New York for a few days. Sebastian, who is a painter, was telling me how much the portrait of Hjalmar had also terrified him on his childhood visits to our grandparents in Sweden. The wedding was held at City Hall in Bonn, and was really very nice. The chambers where they exchanged vows before the state were high-ceilinged, wood-paneled and decked out with somber portraits of somber statesmen who have been dead for two hundred years. And I thought the officiant, who must wed dozens of couples a week, discharged the duties of her office with admirable seriousness.

I also generally enjoyed connecting with this German branch of my family. Both my Aunt Katarina and Uncle Bertil have roots in Sweden, so the family speaks Swedish at home. Actually it's a curious mixture of Swedish and German that I dubbed Sveutsch, and which they call Svyska. There is even some of that playful linguistic invention that results out of all human intimacy: The word for bed in their family, for instance, is örk, with heavy emphasis on the throaty German 'r'. Veronique, who is Quebecoise, speaks neither of those languages, so it was a polyglot affair, full of translations and twisted tongues. Late on the night of the wedding celebration, Katarina brought out an old photo album with pictures from the time she flew to visit her brother (my father) and my mother during their early years in Canada. I noticed with some astonishment that my father looked slim and dashing in these images, in which he was younger than I am now.

After that I went to Geneva to ring in the new year with an old friend. We went to church on the eve of the new year, something I haven't done in nearly a decade. It was in the Cathedral of St. Pierre, where Calvin preached (my friend disputes this, but she is wrong) his hard message nearly 500 years ago, but the message this time was more in line with the warm and fuzzy and marketable new-age Christianity, and for at least that evening, I sensed a diffuse sort of spirituality stirring within me. My flirtation with the numinous may also have had something to do with my reading of Crime and Punishment (no Zosimov in that book, but it beckons the reader back into the congregation's fold all the same), so you see, I was being subjected to very strong influences. I think I may have struck an atheistic pose in the past, but I think I may be too humble to dare state categorically that God does not exist. Uncertainty is the natural state of man--read the brilliant section about the dream of the disease of strong convictions at the end of Crime and Punishment for reinforcing effect at the hands of a hoary master. Other than the exalted setting and the festive air, the service appealed because of its multilingualism. Various men and women bestrode the pulpit to spread the word in something like 8 languages. I liked it, though Swedish was not one of them, which in its turn stirred a diffuse feeling of national offense. After the service ended, we stepped out of the cathedral right into the countdown on the public square. Dix, neuf, huit...it was a very elegant end to the year.

Now I am back in Istanbul. I took over the apartment from a departing Darren yesterday, and am planning to be here for two months for the time being. It is a good arrangement, and one which I hope will promote good work. The spirit of Calvin lives on.

I might also note, for any of you who are interested, that I won my fantasy football league in convincing fashion.