Part 5 (1/2)

'I see,' I said, trying to sound casual. 'I a.s.sume it has a private bath and colour TV?'

'Of course.'

'Free shower cap?'

'Yes, sir.'

'a.s.sortment of complimentary bath gels and unguents in a little wicker basket by the sink?'

'Certainly, sir.'

'Sewing kit? Trouser press?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Hair dryer?'

'Yes, sir.'

I played my trump card. 'Magic-wipe disposable shoe sponge?'

'Yes, sir.'

s.h.i.+t. I had been counting on his saying no to at least one of these so that I could issue a hollow guffaw and depart shaking my head, but he did not and I had no choice but to slink away or sign in. I signed in.

The room was pleasant and business-like, but small, with a twenty-watt reading light when will Europeans learn that this is just not good enough? a small TV, a clock radio, a good bath with a shower. I tipped all the lotions from the bathroom into my rucksack, then tossed in the little wicker basket, too well, why not? and went through the room harvesting matchbooks, stationery and all the other items that were either complimentary or portable. This done, I ventured out into Gothenburg, still famished.

The rain was falling in sheets. I had thought I might stroll out towards the famous Liseberg Gardens, but I got no more than a couple of hundred yards before I was turned back by the pitiless downpour. I trudged back to the city centre and tried to have a look around the main shopping district, sprinting squelchily from doorway to doorway and from one dripping awning to another, but it was hopeless. I wanted a restaurant, one simple, wholesome restaurant, but there seemed to be none. I was soaked and s.h.i.+vering, and was about to return in a desultory spirit to my hotel to take whatever food was offered there at whatever price, when I noticed an indoor shopping centre and darted in, shaking myself out like a dog. The shops were mostly dreary Woolworth's-type places and they were all shut, but there was a surprising number of people wandering around, as if this were some kind of marvellous place to take an evening stroll. There were a lot of young drunks staggering about too, most of them at that noisy and unattractive stage where they might want to be your pal or pick a fight or just throw up on you, so I gave them a wide berth.

One of the more striking features of Sweden and Norway is how much public drunkenness there is. I mean here you have two countries where you cannot buy a beer without taking out a bank loan, where successive governments have done everything in their power to make drinking not worth the cost and effort, and yet everywhere you go you see grossly intoxicated people in stations, on park benches, in shopping centres. I don't begin to understand it.

But then I don't begin to understand a lot of things about Sweden and Norway. It's as if they are determined to squeeze all the pleasure out of life. They have the highest income-tax rates, the highest VAT rates, the harshest drinking laws, the dreariest bars, the dullest restaurants, and television that's like two weeks in Nebraska. Everything costs a fortune. Even the purchase of a bar of chocolate leaves you staring in dismay at your change, and anything larger than that brings tears of pain to your eyes. It's bone-crackingly cold in the winter and it does nothing but rain the rest of the year. The most fun thing to do in these countries is walk around semi-darkened shopping centres after they have closed, looking in the windows of stores selling wheelbarrows and plastic garden furniture at prices no one can afford.

On top of that, they have shackled themselves with some of the most inane and restrictive laws imaginable, laws that leave you wondering what on earth they were thinking about. In Norway, for instance, it is illegal for a barman to serve you a fresh drink until you have finished the previous one. Does that sound to you like a matter that needs to be covered by legislation? It is also illegal in Norway for a bakery to bake bread on a Sat.u.r.day or Sunday. Well, thank G.o.d for that, say I. Think of the consequences if some ruthless Norwegian baker tried to foist fresh bread on people at the weekend. But the most preposterous law of all, a law so pointless as to scamper along the outer margins of the surreal, is the Swedish one that requires motorists to drive with their headlights on during the daytime, even on the sunniest summer afternoon. I would love to meet the guy who thought up that one. He must be head of the Department of Dreariness. It wouldn't surprise me at all if on my next visit to Sweden all the pedestrians are wearing miners' lamps.

I ended up dining in a Pizza Hut in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the shopping centre, the only customer in the place. I had forgotten to bring anything to read with me, so I pa.s.sed the time waiting for my pizza by staring thoughtfully at the emptiness around me, sipping a gla.s.s of water and making up Scandinavian riddles Q. How many Swedes does it take to paint a wall?A. Twenty-seven. One to do the painting and twenty-six to organize the spectators.Q. What does a Norwegian do when he wants to get high?A. He takes the filter off his cigarette.Q. What is the quickest way in Sweden of getting the riot police to your house?A. Don't take your library book back on time.Q. There are two staples in the Swedish diet. One is the herring. What is the other?A. The herring.Q. How do you recognize a Norwegian on a Mediterranean beach?A. He's the one in the snowshoes.

and chuckling quietly in the semi-demented manner of someone who finds himself sitting alone in damp clothes in an empty restaurant in a strange country waiting for a $25 pizza.

Afterwards, just to make an evening of it, I went to the station to purchase a ticket on the next morning's express to Stockholm. You cannot just hop onto a train in Sweden, but must think about it carefully and purchase a ticket in advance. The ticket hall had one of those systems where you take a number from a machine by the door and wait for it to appear above one of the ticket windows. My number was 415, and the highest number seeing action was 391. I waited for twenty minutes and the numbers advanced only to 393, so I wandered off to the station newsagent to look at girlie magazines. The newsagent, alas, was closed, so I looked at a couple of travel posters, and then wandered back. Not entirely to my surprise, I discovered that there had been a frenzy of activity in my absence, and number 415 had come and gone. So I took another number 432 this time and a seat and waited for half an hour. When at last my number came I presented myself at the window and asked the man for a ticket on the 10.05 to Stockholm the next morning.

He regarded me sadly. 'I'm sorry, I do not speak English,' he said.

I was taken aback. 'Everybody in Sweden speaks English,' I protested feebly.

His sadness grew. 'I don't. Please you must to go to window sree.' He indicated a window further down the line. 'She speaks vair good English.'

I went to window three and asked for a ticket to Stockholm the next morning. The woman, seeing the number 432 crumpled in my fist, pointed to the number above her window. 'You have the wrong number. This window is for number 436.' Even as she spoke a ferocious-looking lady with grey hair and a d.i.c.ky hip was hoisting herself out of her chair and charging towards me. I tried to explain my problem with the monoglot at window five, but the ticket lady just shook her head and said, 'You must take another ticket. Then maybe I will call you. Now I must deal with this lady.'

'You are at zer wrong window!' the old lady announced in the bellow of someone whose hearing is going. 'This is my my window,' she added, and tossed a haughty look to the rest of the room as if to say, Are foreigners stupid as s.h.i.+t, or what? window,' she added, and tossed a haughty look to the rest of the room as if to say, Are foreigners stupid as s.h.i.+t, or what?

Forlornly I shuffled over to the machine and took another number. In fact, I took three I figured this would give me some insurance then retired to a new seat to watch the board. What a lot of fun I was having! Eventually my number came around again. It directed me to return to window number five home of the only man in Sweden who speaks no English. I crumpled this ticket and waited for the next to be called. But he called the next one, too. I scampered to his window and begged him not to call my remaining number, but he did.

I couldn't bear to start the whole thing all over again. 'Please,' I said, speaking carefully, 'I just want a one-way ticket to Stockholm for tomorrow morning at 10.05.'

'Certainly,' he said, as if he had never seen me before, took my money and gave me a ticket. It's no wonder so many Swedes kill themselves.

12. Stockholm

In the morning it was still raining, and I gave up hope of exploring Gothenburg before catching my train. Instead I went to the station and spent my children's inheritance on two cups of coffee and a leaden iced bun. The train left promptly at 10.05 and after four hours and twenty minutes of riding through the endless pine forest that is Sweden, I was making my way through the throngs at Stockholm's pleasantly gloomy central station.

I went to the station tourist office to have a room found for me. I had to fill out a form with about 700 questions on it, but it was worth it because the hotel, the Castle on Riddargatan, about a mile from the station, was a charming little find, friendly, clean, and reasonably priced in so far as that statement can be made about anything in Sweden.

I headed first for Gamla Stan, the old town, on the far side of the Strombron bridge. It had an oddly Central European feel to it: narrow, hilly streets lined by severe, heavy buildings the colour of faded terracotta, sometimes with chunks of plaster missing, as if they had been struck a glancing blow by tank fire, and often with pieces knocked off the corners where trucks had carelessly backed into them. It had a kind of knocked-about charm, but was surprisingly lacking in any air of prosperity. Most of the windows were dirty, the bra.s.s name plates and door knockers were generally unpolished, and almost every building was in serious need of a good coat of paint. It looked much as I would expect Cracow or Bratislava to look. Maybe it was just the rain, which was falling steadily again, bringing its inevitable grey gloom to the city. Did it never stop raining in Sweden?

I walked with shoulders hunched and eyes cast down, avoiding the water that rushed down the steep, slickly cobbled lanes, glancing in the windows of antique shops, wis.h.i.+ng I had a hat or an umbrella or a ticket to Bermuda. I retreated into a dark coffee shop, where I sat s.h.i.+vering, drinking a $3 cup of coffee with both hands, watching the rain through the window, and realized I had a cold coming on.

I returned to the hotel, had a lavishly steamy bath and a change of clothes and felt marginally better. I spent the closing hours of the afternoon studying a map of Stockholm and waiting for the weather to clear. At about five the sky brightened. I immediately pulled on my damp sneakers and went out to explore the streets between Norrmalmstorg, a nearby square, and Kungstradgrden, a small rectangular park that ran down to the waterfront. Everything was much better now. It was a Sat.u.r.day evening and the streets were full of people meeting friends or partners and repairing in high spirits to the little restaurants and bistros scattered around the neighbourhood.

Starving as ever, I looked carefully at several and finally selected what looked to be the cheeriest and most popular of all, a cavernous bistro overlooking Norrmalmstorg called Matpalatset. It was friendly and crowded and wonderfully warm and snug, but the food was possibly the worst I have ever had outside a hospital cafeteria a grey salad with watery cuc.u.mber and mushrooms that tasted of old newspaper, and a lasagne that was not so much cooked as scorched. Each time I poked it with my knife and fork, the lasagne recoiled as if I were tormenting it. I was quietly agog. Nowhere else in Europe could a place serve food this bad and stay in business, and yet people were queuing at the door. I ate it all because I was hungry and because it was costing me as much as a weekend in Brighton, but seldom have I felt more as if I were engaged in a simple refuelling exercise.

Afterwards I went for a long walk and felt more charitably disposed to Stockholm now that the rain had stopped. It really is an exceptionally beautiful city, more watery even than Venice, and with more parkland per person than any other city in Europe. It is built on fourteen islands and within a few miles of the city there are 25,000 more, almost all of them dotted with cottages into which the city drains its population every weekend. I walked far out onto the broad and leafy avenues and narrower side streets to the north of the downtown, all of them lined with six-storey apartment buildings, stern and stolid and yet oddly homy, and at least three-quarters of the windows were darkened. It must be a burglar's paradise between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon.

I grew up wanting to live in buildings like these. It needn't necessarily have been in Europe it could have been in Buenos Aires or Dar es Salaam, say but it had to be in the midst of a big foreign city, full of noises and smells and sights unknown in Iowa. Even now I find myself drawn to these neighbourhoods and able to walk for hours through their anonymous streets, which is what I did now, and I returned to the city centre feeling pleased with Stockholm and content everywhere but in my stomach.

I pa.s.sed the cinema on Sveavagen where Olof Palme, the Prime Minister, was gunned down in March 1986. He had walked with his wife from their flat nearby to see a movie about Mozart and they had just emerged from the cinema to stroll home when some madman stepped from the shadows and shot him. It seemed to me one of the tragedies of our age because this must have been almost the last important place in the world where a prime minister could be found walking the streets unguarded and standing in movie lines just like a normal person.

The Swedish police did not exactly distinguish themselves. Palme was killed at 11.21 p.m., but the order to watch the roads didn't go out until 12.50 and even then the police in patrol cars weren't told what they were looking for, and the airports were not closed until 1.05 a.m. The police cordoned off a large area outside the cinema and brought in forensic experts to make a minute search of the scene, but both of the a.s.sa.s.sin's bullets were picked up and handed in by pa.s.sers-by. A 300-member police unit spent eleven months and $6 million investigating the murder before finally arresting an innocent man. They still don't know who did it.

I strolled aimlessly along Kungsgatan, one of the main shopping streets, past the PUB department store where Greta Garbo used to work in the millinery department, and along the long pedestrian shopping street called Drottninggatan, and felt as if I were entering a different city. Drottninggatan is a mile and a half of concrete charmlessness, and it was awash with rain-sodden litter. There were drunks everywhere, too, stumbling about. I paused to look in some shop window and realized after a moment that a middle-aged man a few yards to my right was peeing down the front of it, as discreetly as he could on a lighted street, which wasn't very discreetly at all. He was seriously intoxicated, but he had a suit on and looked prosperous and educated, and I felt immensely disappointed in him, and in all the hundreds of people who had dropped hamburger boxes and crisp packets all over the streets. This was unworthy of the Swedes. I expected better than that.

I grew up admiring Sweden because it managed to be rich and socialist at the same time, two things I believe everyone ought to be. Coming from a country where no one seemed to think it particularly disgraceful that a child with a brain tumour could be sent home to die because his father didn't have the wherewithal to pay a surgeon, or where an insurance company could be permitted by a state insurance commissioner to cancel the policies of its 14,000 sickest patients because it wasn't having a very good year (as happened in California in 1989), it seemed to me admirable beyond words that a nation could dedicate itself to providing equally and fairly for everyone, whatever the cost.

Not only that, but the Swedes managed to be rich and successful as well, unlike Britain, say, where the primary goal of socialists always seemed to be to make everyone as poor and backward as a shop steward in a British Leyland factory. For years, Sweden was to me the perfect society. It was hard enough to come to terms with the fact that the price to be paid for this was a scandalously high cost of living and an approach to life that had all the gusto of an undertakers' convention, but to find now that there was litter everywhere and educated people peeing on shop fronts was almost too much.

Still starving, I stopped at a mobile fast-food stand near the waterfront and paid a small fortune for the sort of hamburger that leaves you wondering if this could mark the start of a long period on a life-support machine. To say that it was c.r.a.ppy would be to malign faeces. I ate a third of it and dropped the rest in a bin. The rain began to fall again. On top of that my cold was growing worse. I returned to my room in grim spirits.

I woke with my head full of snot and my sneakers full of water, but Stockholm looked better than ever. The sun was out, the air was clean and crisp, more like late October than early April, and the water of the harbour sparkled, as blue as a swimming pool. I walked along Strandvagen, a grand residential boulevard with the boat-lined harbour on one side and imposing apartment houses on the other, out towards Djurgrden, an island given over entirely to parkland in the midst of the city. It is the most wonderful place.