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smell of barn and a hint of sour milk, “pungent” as his father put it, born in Rasbo, a not completely unpleasant aroma, but “different” as his mother, originally from Karungi in Norrbotten, would have expressed it.
    And then naturally the kitchen sofa bench, inherited goods that stood under the south window in the otherwise quite modern kitchen. A completely misplaced piece of furniture, most of all because the associate professor had done nothing to improve its worn appearance. On the contrary, it was with great tenderness that he observed the worn, dirty brown original paint that could be glimpsed under the equally worn-down green outer layer that was his childhood shade.
    It was the work of a village carpenter, with a few curves and flourishes on the back, a couple of carved, stylized flowers on the front of the drawer. Otherwise nothing exaggerated, instead a worthy and typical representative of the furniture used most by poor people, indispensable day and night. He had spent his first thirteen years in it.
    He was lying on his back on the bench staring up at the ceiling. The usual calm would not appear. He understood what the cause of it was. They were arguing. His father in his languid Uppland way, his mother in her bare Norrbotten dialect. It was as if their respective provinces shaped their speech and gestures.
    They carried on, wreaked havoc, pulsed in his circulation, his cheeks burned, made him remember and sense the sweet-and-sour in his childhood and life.
    With the years the din had become louder and increasingly frequent. Perhaps natural, he thought, the older you get, the more strongly the odors and veins of memories appear, it’s an old truth.
    He had no major problems with these memories, there were seldom any really gloomy recollections that floated up, but sometimes they came traipsing, like the shabbily clothed men on the road outside the family’s little cottage, those his mother insisted on offering coffee, sometimes a little food. Despite his mother’s assurances that they were harmless, just hungry, he was afraid of their mournful appearance; perhaps he had been frightened sometime when he was very small. Perhaps it was his mother’s words that it could just as well be themselves who were tramping along the roads.
    It was called the “big road” but was no more than a narrow and crooked, poorly maintained gravel road that connected the station in B ä rby with the highway toward the coast. There, a few kilometers north, his grandfather lived in a cottage on the farm in Str ö ja. These points—the cottage, his grandfather’s place, and then Fr ö tuna, the estate where his father worked—formed a triangle whose few square kilometers basically constituted Gregor Johansson’s whole life during his early years.
    Sometimes they went to see Aunt Rut and her husband Karl in Selkn ä , less than ten kilometers north. “Kalle” had been a road worker, and in northern Sweden met his future wife. Later he got work on the Roslag line, brought Rut with him, and moved to Selkn ä . Then, when his mother rode the twelve hundred kilometers to visit her sister, she met the cattleman Harry Johansson at a barn dance in Gr å munkeh ö ga. So she too moved to the province.
    The outings to Selkn ä , and a few times by train into Uppsala, were adventures. The station hand in B ä rby, also named Kalle, was already exciting enough.
    Then came the black years, as his mother called the war. For Gregor the period was a strange mixture of worry and a kind of expectation. Worry that the strange men with hard voices from the radio would come to Rasbo, but also a time when the adults seemed exhilarated. There had probably never been so much talk between the farms and houses, gossip and speculation, with constantly new rumors in circulation.
    In 1943 came the deathblow. Just as the fortunes of war on the continent were turning, the luck of the family also turned. His father fell down from the hayloft, broke