10 minute read
by Eva Baron (p
by eva baron
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In my head, this is how the story unfolds: a girl, the corners of her apron smudged from her thumb, the one that ends up gripping the dirty plates. It’s charming, the fat stains climbing up her waist, and the men at the café where she waitresses tell her this. Hard-working, not afraid to get a little dirty. A year earlier, this girl jabbed the knot in her sister’s back so she’d inch over in bed. At night, she slept with her brother and sisters, the distance between them shrinking the more they grew, the tighter their skin stretched across their jaws. Look—in this way, the ten of them were packed together like the stones lodged in the earth beneath them, the same ones that punctured the crops her father would plant.
As the girl understood, to live over an unyielding land is to invigorate touch. Because beds are sparse when money is, the body beside you feels more permanent than it does fleeting, and skin is as easy to graze as the grass in the woods behind the family’s hovel. Here, inside their home’s one room, the girl shivers against the wooden walls in the winter, picks at the red paint peeling off of the facade in the summer. When it rains, the crooked shingles clang the way her mother’s tin cup does when she circles its rusted lip with a spoon. As the family eats dinner, the girl becomes a centipede, the legs and feet of her siblings tangling up with hers until a knot binds them together under the table. The only way to escape this, the girl thought, was to carve a gulf with a width of nearly 400 kilometers. The length between Småland and Stockholm, Sweden.
Later, this girl becomes a mother, the son latched to her hip eventually learning to walk on concrete instead of moss. Before she waves goodbye to him at school every morning, she grabs his hands, traverses his palms with a finger. A love like this shocks her, and, when she digs her cheek into the plump space between his neck and shoulder, she’s able to convince herself that she can keep this, the way a dog stubbornly clings onto a branch. What she doesn’t know, in these moments, is that her teeth aren’t as durable as she believes. That, when her son is ten, he’ll find her splayed across the floor of the apartment, her eyes glassy and her breath smelling like pilsner. Once the evenings begin to stretch out that summer, the mother will watch the sun fade from the narrow window in an unfamiliar room. She won’t sleep, even when the hospital staff knocks on her door, a small cup passed from their hands and, firmly, into hers.
Here’s another way the story unfolds: on August 15th, 1956, Dr. Lindström traces the light tremors whirring through Margareta Eriksson’s hands,
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the way her pupils dart around like a fish tugging on a metal hook. In between the jerky beats of her voice, she boasts about her son, the high grades he receives in his drawing classes. With his steady gaze, Dr. Lindström can also see the creases in Margareta’s dress. “Clothed somewhat sloppily,” he jots down in his notes, but, upon noticing the circles beneath her eyes, adds, “no makeup.” Across from Dr. Lindström, Margareta perches in her chair as if it’s a nest, as if she’s a newborn bird trembling against a life she didn’t anticipate cracking into. And, though there’s a certain fragility in her restlessness, the kind that’s coiled tight around the bone, Dr. Lindström can’t coax anything out of his patient.
“Most people are nervous,” Margareta concedes, “Name one person that isn’t nervous in this day and age.”
After a few days, this time to Dr. Lindgren, Margareta complains about poor sleep. She thrashes in her bed, the sunlight returning to the sky quicker than a dream. She firmly denies it, but, as she jolts awake after only two hours, she ambles backward in her memory to the shaky nights during which she swam through beer and schnapps and pentymal tablets. Nostalgia, in this way, is one of the more dangerous feelings we can experience. At night, the yearning opens up like a boundless ocean, and sailing across these waters is clean and sharp in a way that the present can never be. She indulges in this before she convinces Dr. Lingren that her husband “is exaggerating” the extent to which she abuses alcohol, sleeping pills, and narcotics. He writes this down, though claims, “because of her lively imagination, it’s difficult to believe anything the patient says.”
These notes narrate the first time Margareta Eriksson resided at Beckomberga, the largest psychiatric facility in Stockholm before it shut down in 1995. Now, Beckomberga and its surrounding areas have been converted into a residential neighborhood, lined with rows of homes and courtyards. Because of this, I can’t figure out how my great-grandmother’s in-patient files were retrieved by my grandfather and, nearly 70 years later, stored neatly in a folder in my mother’s closet.
I met Margareta on a hot afternoon this past July. A whole life stretched out ahead of me, a life in the shape of a tight document with a crooked staple in the corner. Flipping through the pages on her bed, my mother read a few lines to me, her voice as taut as a rubber band. Before we studied her life through her in-patient files, my great-grandmother appeared to me as an actress that commanded her own fantastical and unbelievable stage, someone I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
From the childhood memories my mother has since told me: Margareta ate thin slices of toast with a steady hand even after a pack of beer in the morning. She was rooted in the same chair by the kitchen table, tearing herself away only to fill up her coffee cup with cream or beer. Though she had other cats—the fat one she named after Tito, a Yugoslav communist revolutionary and statesman—she skinned her favorite, Prince, once he died. Beneath her in her kitchen chair, Prince’s orange fur rippled, arched as if his heart was still beating furiously against his little chest. When she finally understood that she’d remain tethered to her job as a waitress in Stockholm, rather than to her lofty ambitions of being a famous actress, Margareta eventually moved back to Småland, sharing a farm with her husband. During the summers when my mother and her two brothers visited her, Margareta insisted that they call her neighbors and recite sermons, bellow that, as children, they sought solace in God. For this, they received candy from Margareta’s cupped hands, the sugar dissolving in their hungry mouths.
And yet I also know about my great-grandmother through the typewriter words of her in-patient files. I know that she was born on October 16, 1915 with the name Göta Linnéa Johansson in Göteryd, Småland. A compact fist in southern Sweden, Småland translates to “little land” in English, a land that couldn’t contain the ferocity that bristled down my great-grandmother’s spine. In Vilhelm Moberg’s 1949 novel Utvandrarna (The Emigrants), Småland is revealed to be what Margareta already knew: a depleted landscape, one that thrust its residents away from its infertile soil mixed with sand and boulders. Due to the starvation and intense poverty caused by a lack of crops, nearly 64,000 of the 324,000 that emigrated from Sweden in the 1880s abandoned Småland. From their wagons, these farmers and peasants and families must’ve watched as Småland’s towering forests, its gaping lakes, receded from their view. What they left behind are the stones they dug up and lined into walls, snaking up the dirt roads with their mossy scales.
This history, I’ve come to learn, haunted my great-grandmother. It urged her to shed the “ugliness” of “Göta Linnéa,” to rip off the skin of a name typically reserved for the cows crammed inside farmhouses across Småland. It urged her to harden into “Margareta,” into the royalty that accompanied this name that the Crown Princess of Sweden shared. It urged her to conjure a “lively imagination,” as Dr. Lindgren wrote, to constantly “wield lies” that elevated her from Småland’s poverty, from its confines (she swore, throughout her life, that she was related to Carl Michael Bellman, an 18th century pioneer of the Swedish musical tradition). And it urged her to marry her husband “because he had a car.”
From her Beckomberga files: Margareta Eriksson undergoes insulin
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Everything I've Ever Let Go Of
I've imagined this story with multiple endings. I go through all of these threads until I realize that the sad ending is the only one that's possible.
shock therapy to counteract her “restless,” “impatient,” and “sleepless” behavior, even though she complains that “those shots are filled with fox poison.” Over the phone, she yells at her husband and, later, rambles to her Finnish lover incoherently, the same “Finn” that allegedly provides her with alcohol and narcotics. At a café one afternoon, Margareta’s husband claims to have found her and the Finn unconscious from drinking, the police nudging their shoulders.
Another detail: a year later, on May 15, 1957, Margareta returns to Beckomberga again.
I’ve imagined this story with multiple endings. There are those that conclude with my great-grandmother fulfilling her promise of attending treatment programs and continuing her medication after being discharged from Beckomberga. There are those in which she sails across the Atlantic, away from these little lands, and instead cuts across a terrain that reveals itself to be limitless. And, other times, there are those in which she becomes a mother again, a grandmother, someone who propels her startling love into one that doesn’t lend itself to her annihilation. I go through all of these threads until I realize that the sad ending is the only one that’s possible.
The way this story unfolds (the true version, this time): Margareta lies in her bed in her apartment on Västgötagatan, the sheets beneath her “soiled with urine.” Two days later at Beckomberga, Dr. Hullegård veers around the lurches in Margareta’s voice, the eager agility that commands her as she speaks. Within the cage of her chest, her heart races while a tremor yanks at her eyelids and hands. Later, her husband explains to Dr. Viding how Margareta crawls around on the wooden floors of their apartment, threatening suicide when he squeezes himself through the front door after work. Between her jagged teeth, Margareta jeers about her husband, how much he “exaggerates,” how he’s locking her away in Beckomberga so he can “take women home.”
Instead of insulin therapy, Margareta is prescribed hibernal, an antipsychotic that, only a year earlier in 1956, was first distributed in Sweden to 106 women in Mariebergs Mental Hospital. Though “reduc[ing] the indiscriminate use of electroconvulsive therapy,” insulin shock therapy, and lobotomies, hibernal induced what the surgeon Henri Laborit called an “artificial hibernation” by stabilizing the central nervous system. For over a month, Margareta swallows 100mg of hibernal three times a day, the white tablet plummeting into her stomach and, as her file enthusiastically indicates, permitting her to sink into a “calm and orderly” state within a few weeks.
By the time she’s discharged from Beckomberga, it’s almost August. Before she steps into the cool evening, the summer light still spreading out across the sky, Margareta sits with Dr. Blomqvist and Dr. Viding once more. She’ll file for divorce with the husband she claims to hate. She’ll move into her own apartment in Saltsjöbaden, a small neighborhood overlooking the Baltic Sea. She’ll begin working again as a waitress the day after. She’ll abstain from alcohol. She’ll say all of this, but, in this iteration of her life, she’ll drink beer, her legs dangling off her kitchen chair, her gaze unsteady as she watches her husband toiling on their farm in Småland.
Look closely—it’s easy to miss as the car hurtles down the highway. Roll your windows down, the sharp breeze slapping your cheeks, and look. There, once the birch trees become thinner, their black spots peeking out and confronting you with their own set of eyes. This is where my grandfather pulls over, descends into the woods with us. I’m four, maybe five, but this is a story that can also be told—my grandfather, my mother, and me, the leaves above us a shield against the bright sky.
Her family’s hovel isn’t here anymore. Except, years later, my grandfather still knows the land as if it’s etched into his skin, its valleys and its moss and the stones nestled deep within the dirt. Even though he never lived here, the hovel, too, is marked on his body, its lopsided roof and thin door and one room. This is why he takes us here, points to the ground and says, right here, this is where she lived. Here—everything she ever let go of, every life, every conclusion. Right here, in this earth, her hands open toward us as we cry, her palms exposed and shaking. ■
