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Have you ever walked along Kammakargatan, up the hill from Torsgatan then on down to Drottninggatan?
Have you walked along there on a Saturday in early November, when only a stone’s throw away there are crowds of people out shopping or meeting friends for coffee or lunch in town, maybe looking for a Father’s Day gift?
Have you noticed the striking difference between Kammakargatan and Drottninggatan, although they are so close together and actually intersect at one point?
Kammakargatan is quiet and peaceful, almost deserted, even during the weekday hours when the inner city is at its busiest. Everyone is on Drottninggatan, crisscrossing among the many shops, cafés and restaurants.
On Kammakargatan nothing happens. You go there only if you have a specific reason to do so.
For a few months in the fall of 1997, I had just such a reason.
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The acceptance letter came in July, I still remember it with an almost bizarre precision. During this period of my life I had time to spend entire mornings waiting for the mail van, and as soon as I heard it I would rush down to the mailbox. Usually I was waiting for something perfectly ordinary—a magazine, a letter, a catalog—but for the last week I had been expecting something special.
On this particular day a whole bundle of envelopes had arrived and I leafed through them frantically, found one from the Higher Education Authority and ripped it open immediately, quickly scanned the sheet of paper inside: I had been accepted onto the Cultural Studies program at the University of Stockholm, my first choice, the only thing I could imagine doing.
I sat in the shade of the birch tree on the terrace of my childhood home for a while, staring at the letter. It was strange to see my name there, in a context that had seemed so abstract for years but was about to become a reality, and I realized this meant I was going to have to find somewhere to live in Stockholm. With a sudden burst of energy that still kicks in when I am stressed, I cycled down to the local Konsum store and bought a copy of the classified ads paper. Back beneath the birch tree I looked through the rental properties available, which didn’t exactly make me feel any calmer.
Basically, I couldn’t afford anything. The inner city was out of the question, as were the suburbs closest to the center. Several ads seemed too suspect to warrant a response. However, a terraced house in Skogås was advertising for a tenant, with a rent that was actually within my budget. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever heard of Skogås before, I checked out the map of Stockholm in our old atlas and discovered that it was south of the city, too far out to be a part of the subway system, but there were commuter trains and I didn’t have the luxury of being picky. The studio apartment had its own kitchenette and bathroom, and when I called I was informed that I was the only interested party and I was welcome to rent it.
I said yes without having seen the place, and when I did eventually see it on a cloudy August afternoon, after my parents had driven me from Kolmården to Skogås with a selection of my belongings—clothes, the compact little stereo I had received on my eighteenth birthday, my favorite records and a selection of books I felt I couldn’t live without—there was no chance of backing out, because registration was due to take place the very next day. There wasn’t really anything wrong with the room, except that the decor was ugly and unimaginative, there was a funny smell in the bathroom, and of course it was in Skogås.
After my parents had gone—Mom cried, which with hindsight I don’t think was as over-the-top as I thought at the time, after all it was the day I left home for real—I followed my landlords’ directions and walked down to the station so that I would know where I was going and how long it would take the following morning. I bought a travel card at the convenience store (dark purple, a color I have always liked) and did a little shopping in the Konsum supermarket: peppers, onions, pasta and crème fraîche, the makings of the kind of cheap pasta dish I lived on back then; bread, butter, ham, orange juice and instant coffee for breakfast; Coca-Cola, potato chips and a packet of candy for the evening—because I could make my own choices now.
I went to bed early, lay there with a book I found it hard to concentrate on, Magnus Dahlström’s Home, which I had borrowed from the library in Norrköping (I still remember its bright yellow cover on the old pine chair that functioned as a night-stand). I was nervous about the purely practical details as usual: what if I missed the train, made a mistake when I had to change at the central station, arrived too late and didn’t manage to pay my student union fee before registration, got lost around the campus? The fact that I wouldn’t know anybody was also part of the picture, but it wasn’t worrying in the same way—almost the reverse, in fact. It was part of the reason why I was in Stockholm: because this was going to be the start of something new.