When you’re a kid, being poor is hell on earth.

You’re an outsider. You see your friends travel; even a bus ride downtown sets you apart when you can’t afford the ticket. We never went to the movies. We never went out to eat. We never took walks together. We sat at home in silence, hoping. What we were hoping for is difficult to say now that I look back. A way out. I started stealing at school, not much, just enough to get by. Still, even if I had a bit of pocket money, I couldn’t make myself spend it. I didn’t know what to do for fun. Someone with high morals might say: you can’t have fun with stolen money. Sure you can, that wasn’t the problem. I could feel: excitement, anger, fear.

Sometimes desire and lust. But enjoyment? I still struggle with the pointlessness of doing things for fun—I keep waiting for something else to happen.

*

And—after six months of being at the Yard almost every day—betraying no one’s trust, falling asleep on the bus as often as the others, lying to the foreman as much as them—I’m one among many. Nothing more, nothing less. Perhaps that’s what I’d always dreamed of in my writing: being part of an unconditional collective that flows and crashes, surging back and forth.

We wear yellow reflective clothes, heavy-duty gloves, shoes with steel toes. It’s difficult to move. In winter, the wind transforms the water spraying up from the dock into sharp ice crystals.

All is cold. All is loneliness. A big black hole that expands and devours everything. That’s how I got my class rage back. It disappeared when I started writing regularly for the newspapers and was able to spend my mornings in bed. But my rage came back on the seventh of January, around eight o’clock in the morning on a day with relentless wind and rain. Four of us had been assigned to the H fence, where some brand-new cars were waiting to be loaded onto a Japanese cargo ship. We had to scrape the cars clear of ice, drive them thirty meters onto the dock, walk back, and repeat. It took us about ten minutes per car. There were nine cars parked in a row along the fence, and three of us. Behind another row, barely visible from where we stood in the cold, one of the foremen had parked his tiny car. When the wind blew our way we could hear he’d tuned in to the oldies radio station. His task seemed to be making sure we did our job.

Scrape the car, back it up, drive it onto the dock. Again and again. He looked up from his papers and down again. Looked up, then down. He repeated the procedure with every car we moved. I waved at him, at which he looked down at his papers.

“Don’t mind him!” Ahmed yelled at me against the wind.

“But what the fuck is he doing?”

“I don’t know. Watching us, I guess?”

“It’s annoying as hell.”

“Yeah, but don’t fucking start anything.”

That’s just it. If I do something wrong, the whole group gets punished. If I were to walk up to Bengt and ask why he’s sitting in his car, watching us scrape windows for piecework pay, our entire group would probably get reassigned—and we’d been afforded a certain amount of trust that day.

We’d been chosen because they knew we’d do our job, not linger in the cars to avoid the wind and rain. We were loyal. Bengt himself was probably slacking, avoiding some task he didn’t want to do. Life: a spear piercing my chest.

When I was a teenager my mother would sometimes phone my friends’ parents and tell them about her problems. She made sure my girlfriends were kept abreast of the conflicts in my family and the extent of her conspiracy theories. I was a lonely kid.

*

Early morning, January. The sea is the color of steel, restless. A gigantic Japanese cargo ship is docked next to a smaller ship flying a Limassol flag. We do our best to stay warm. The temperature is negative two degrees Celsius. That’s not the worst part. The worst part is the wet, the rain, the snow that’s sometimes rain and sometimes snow. We’re soaked through to the bone. We’ll spend two hours and twenty minutes out here on the dock.

“So we’ve made two hundred and twenty-five krona before tax.”

Ahmed laughs. Makes a sound like a cash register. Ka-ching. Two hundred and twenty-five krona. Ka-ching.

He does that sometimes. Two hours is nothing. Two hours in the freezing cold is inhumane. What sends me over the edge is the guy in the car.

“Who is he?”

“Bengt, from the office.”

Right: the office. He’s like the Pope lording it over Catholics. A god among men. From the office.

Today is the day I get my class rage back. The haves and the have-nots. As simple as that. After two hours and twenty minutes he turns his car around and drives back to the office . We walk the same way. It takes us fifteen minutes to walk from the dock to the office. We struggle against the wind. If one of us were to need the bathroom he’d better realize it fifteen minutes ahead of time. But it’s not a problem. None of us wants to interrupt the workflow. If someone left it would mean a thirty-minute delay and additional time out in the cold for the rest of us.

Today is also the day my friendship with Ahmed becomes just that, a friendship. A sense of belonging. Understanding. We are nothing, but together we are everything.

“Ignore them.”

“The fucking nerve, though?” “Yeah.”

In the arts section of my local newspaper I learn about a conflict, a literary skirmish, between a coalition of romanticists and a more language-oriented group. I live in a dark well. Looking up I see: clouds, stars, distant voices. I think: I’m more human than I was before. I think: any poem that fails to give testament to our condition is only a meaningless murmur. My psychiatrist schedules a checkup. I don’t go. He calls me and says we have to adjust my medication, it’s not good for me to avoid our appointments. I tell him, being completely honest for the first time in a long while: “I can’t take it much longer.” He responds: “Sure you can, after rain comes sunshine. Remember that. It might seem trivial, but it’s true!”

*

It’s the first day in the Trelleborg harbor.

We made it to April. The rains come and go. I think: I’ll never have the energy to write about the world I live in. The dream wriggles off, like a slick snake between my hands. I never get to what I’m trying to say, I keep getting lost. I want to speak about my mother. I want to speak about the labor that dehumanizes us, that turns us into objects among objects. Instead: a gathering wind between the empty warehouses, wild rabbits running free.

They let us borrow a van to go to Trelleborg. Four of us will wash cars, two of us will check battery levels.

There’s a certain sense of freedom in the air since no one’s supervising us yet. We’re a group of six. We make a pit stop, of course, at the Lebanese baker on Norra Grängesbergsgatan and buy some bread. He puts a couple of extra buns in our bags. The harbor in Trelleborg looks like the one in Malmö. Seagulls. Caws. Distant traffic. Absence of human life.

It’s as if death were already gathering us to itself.

We’re in an area surrounded by an electric fence connected to an alarm, a high wall protecting us on one side.

The electric fence stays on day and night; a few times we get zapped. The roadside ditch just inside the fence is filled with trash and the occasional small dead animal. A seagull. The foreman warns us, saying: “If the alarm goes off, you’re paying!” Mohammed asks, “How much?” The response: “A couple thousand crowns, so stay the fuck away.”

“Kristian, is he serious? What if a seagull flies into the fence while we’re here? That wouldn’t be our fault, right? Would we still have to pay?”

“I don’t know.”

I no longer have the energy to soothe the others’ anxiety. The death wave crashes within me; I can’t catch a break. There are days when all I see in my face is death and devastation; when my hand’s too tired to move across the page. The work paralyzes me. One time, it was an early morning, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper spread before her. She was circling letters with a pen. It was early, must have been fall. I asked: “What are you doing, shouldn’t you go to bed?” She didn’t look up, didn’t react. I walked up to the table and looked at the newspaper. She had circled individual letters. I couldn’t see a pattern. I asked again: “What are you doing?” She responded without looking up: “See? Your father wants to come back home!”

The same sense of hopelessness I felt in that moment overwhelms me now. The two worlds never meet. The world I’m forced to submit to, the world the rest of you are living in. I couldn’t fall back asleep that morning. If I remember correctly I got dressed and walked to Malmö Central Station, strolled along the canal and sat down on one of the benches in the departure hall. How old could I have been? Fourteen? Where was I going? Nowhere. Toward my own annihilation. My mother had created her own system of rendering meaning from the world.

*

Our job today is to move just under four hundred cars from a graveled yard to a paved area right next to it. We also have to clean the cars with a power washer. The work is more demanding than I expected. It’s particularly difficult to wash the car roofs and rails, we can’t quite reach. My coworkers are extremely careful, nervous about betraying the trust we’ve been afforded. We’re free here, as free as can be. We realize that we have to wash around fifty cars per day. The foreman’s look of disappointment when we handed him our list of forty cars on the first day immediately let us know it wasn’t enough—now we avoid forgo short breaks. Nothing is said outright, everything is implied. It’s more efficient that way. We enforce the strict schedule ourselves.

On the first day in Trelleborg we eat our lunch outside the harbor office. The staff doesn’t want to let us in. We knock on a window by the front desk. A woman looks us up and down and then away. We knock again. A man comes up to the window and shakes his head. There’s six of us today. We eat outside, in the parking lot. The food is cold, the rain is cold. A foreman walks by and overhears us.

He asks: “Why are you sitting here?” “No one will let us in.” The task of asking and answering questions speaking and asking questions always falls to me. He tells us to wait while he goes inside to investigate and returns a few minutes later, saying: “It’s all good, they thought you were Polish. You know.Those guys are bad news. Feel free to come in.” I remember the foreman laughing. Like it was funny. We’d already finished eating our cold food so there was no reason for us to go inside anyway.

Loneliness. Believe me. When the rest of you think you’re lonely, you’re still lightyears away from what it can entail. True loneliness is incomprehensible, opaque.

A Lebanese, an Egyptian, two Iraqis, a Swede, an African. But—at least we weren’t Polish. “You know what I mean, they live in their cars and never bathe, they smell like shit, you can’t let them in furnished rooms.”

My mother’s illness would come to pulsate and surge back and forth, ebb and flow. We never knew what our day would look like, what was going to happen or how. I feel now what I felt then: chaos and fear, nothing else.