I'm sitting on a bench on Hurn Stull looking at my phone. It's cold, the wind is blowing off the water, it's December in Stockholm and everything looks like it was made to last: the bridges, the facades, the people, the silence.
I read on Facebook that Igor died.
We studied together in Budapest in the late nineties. A Macedonian, a poet, a translator, a man who knew how to talk about literature as if he were talking about the weather forecast — calmly, precisely and completely committed. We haven't seen each other in years. From time to time I would hear how he is doing, what he is translating, where he is publishing. A month ago, I read his status: he gives up on theory, says that literature is still more meaningful. Something like that. I didn't remember exactly.
I get up from the bench and start walking along the shore. I don't have a goal, I just walk. On the other side of the water, the wind twists, blows and wets a huge Swedish flag. It seems solid, as if it is sewn from some material with a denser weave than ordinary flags.
Sometimes I wonder if Swedes are dying at all.
Of course they die, but here even death seems orderly, administrative, like something that comes on time, without much fuss. It is different in the Balkans. There, people die suddenly, from the heart, from nervousness, from history, from unspoken sentences. Here I imagine that a man just slowly stops breathing while it is snowing outside. Maybe that's why people here speak more quietly. It's as if the language is adapted to that slow, controlled passing. In Swedish there is something almost administrative about emotions. The sentences are short, precise, without excess pathos. Grammar suggests answers with yes and no, without many buts. Even grief seems organized, as if there are unwritten rules for how long you can be silent, how many times you can mention the dead, how much space you can take up with your own pain.
It's different with us. In the Balkans, death is never just the death of one person. It always brings something else with it: the collapse of the state, war, family, moving, a failed life, some old injustice that suddenly opens up again. People do not die alone, but together with the entire worlds that surrounded them. Maybe that's why funerals take a long time here. We say goodbye not only to the person, but also to the time that disappeared with him.
I'm thinking about Budapest. He is definitely dying of old age there. The whole city seems to be older than its own history. The facades, the trams, the smell of the entrance, even their language sounds like something that has lasted for centuries. I remember how we sat around the smoky cafes and discussed books, politics, revolutions, but actually we were just trying to survive the end of the nineties and our own years. We read theory as if our lives depended on it, as if a clear articulation and a properly spoken sentence would help us defend ourselves from the world that was falling apart around us.
I didn't plan for death to be my topic this day. I went for a walk because at this time the coast is empty. The joggers finished their workouts, the parents took their kids home, and we were the only aimless walkers left.
Christmas is in a few days.
I think about my aunts Milica and Ljubica. For years, death was so close to them that this is probably why they fled as far as possible from Serbia, to Sweden. Today, Milica is ninety-one years old and says that she is "Swedish by choice, and Serbian by instinct and memory." I always add: and by sadness. A few days ago, she informed me that Ljubica had died. She said it calmly, without emotion, and then added: "It's a shame that she won't see Christmas." That sentence completely disarmed me. It was as if she was more affected by the missed celebration than by the death itself. I remember how my aunts in Sweden learned for years to reduce their own emotions, almost to translate them to a Scandinavian measure. It was as if grief had to go through integration as well. But then sometimes, completely unexpectedly, some small thing would emerge from them: the smell of sarma, an old song, news from Serbia, and everything would fall apart in a few seconds. Then I would understand that emigration is perhaps never a matter of language or paper, but of the way a man carries his dead.
I'm thinking about Igor. About Budapest. About the flag in the wind. About how people disappear, but their sentences remain, which suddenly return years later.
Sometimes I think people actually die only when there is no one else to repeat their sentences. Maybe that's why Igor's death hit me more than I expected. Not because of the closeness we lost through the years of silence, but because I suddenly realized that there was no longer that voice that knew how to talk about literature without any theatricality, as something that belongs to everyday life as much as time or bread. And maybe that's the only thing that really survives. Not big events, not ideologies, not countries. Rather, someone's way of saying a sentence, the rhythm of their voice that you only remember many years later, some passing thought that you didn't even know you remembered until it suddenly came back. Like a flag in the wind that you can't see anymore, but you know it's still there, somewhere behind the darkness and the water.
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