SWEDEN'S FAITH
Andrew Brown witnesses
the apotheosis of the late Olof Palme
Stockholm THE Swedes will organise what other People only feel; one should not conclude from this that Swedes do not feel; they suffer instead from too much organisation. After the murder of Olof Palme, it took less time for the government to choose a temporary prime minister than for the Police to seal off the city centre. Perhaps these are the right priorities. Nothing one Lcould learn from the murderer, or do to will, could diminish the fact of death. `The light has gone out of Sweden,' said a political friend, with whom I had spent many long evenings bitching about the man. She was completely right: what could We talk about now but private sorrows? While Palme was alive, private and public emotion could be knitted together, not just by his own side, but by his opponents. What was extraordinary about his funeral s that it proved he could work the same trick — once more — after death. Stockholm is usually the brightest city in Europe. Water sparkles, the sky is high and clear. North of the Old Town, in the Political district, the buildings are extrava- gantly coloured, pink and yellow and red or Old stained brown. All these were dulled the day of Palme's funeral; even the Water was unmoving in the calm. The white ffm shone, pulled at slow walking pace for miles through the streets. Behind it, red banners — 284 at the start of the proces- s;ou, 6,000 by the end — had the sombre veyv of embers. The sky was the colour of ashes, and seemed to press down on the city like a millstone. The silence in the streets was almost absolute. Dulled bells tolled from the Old Town, muffled drums preceded the coffin. The family were trap- ped in limousines behind; it was so quiet and still that you could smell and hear the exhaust pipes as an intrusion on the day. As the cortege went past shoes slapped on tarmac, quietly; women wept silently; men sniffed. Within the area bounded by the route of the funeral procession, the streets were empty of cars, and almost of people. Those one saw walked in groups, but quite quickly, sometimes talking in normal voices that sounded absurdly loud about `I was expecting a wolf.' quite normal things. Few people dressed in black. It was a day too awful for solemnity.
I wept for my own griefs, and I think many others did. Yet shared grief was better than nothing shared at all. The Social Democratic paper Aftonbladet printed what it claimed was one of Palme's favourite poems, by a communist, Karl Vennberg, 'Anything is better than this loneliness'. It was a bad poem, but the man was right. The funeral was valuable be- cause it was an immense piece of collective theatre. One did not need to come to Stockholm to take part; there were simul- taneous ceremonies in most Swedish towns, and about half the entire population signed condolence books. All these things were worth doing just as work. We who could do them were alive, and compelled to make some use of this fact.
The new Prime Minister, Ingvar Carl- sson, read at the memorial service a letter he'd received from a woman who delivers newspapers in the provinces. What Rajiv Gandhi or Peres de Cuellar made of this can only be imagined, but their speeches were of course vain trumpery. (Palme would have liked that too.) Carlsson's speech was something else; an exposition of the religion in which Swedes really believe. The text he took — this woman's letter — described how terrible it had been to rise at four in the morning and see the news all over the front pages of the local papers she was to deliver; yet how she'd made herself go on, because other people depended on her work. This is — at best what 'Solidarity' means, a word I'd never understood before. It is a religious idea, in as much as it gives meaning to life, and helps us to translate emotion or experience into action. It is also quite admirably activist; the commandment is not to love your neighbour, but to work with him. Palme, alive, may have seen something like that in the word he used with such abandon. Palme dead was the occasion for the greatest collective 'charade' that Sweden has seen, if one remembers that charades convey the meaning of words.
`Sweden will never be the same again,' they said: it will in fact be more the same than ever. That is why we miss Palme. The funeral procession was a great affirmation of collective belief — in what? In the collective itself. The Swedish people de- monstrated through their mourning that nothing had really changed, least of all their faith in themselves, and that this faith retained its healing powers.
Where Palme was shot, a heap of single roses four feet high leant against the wall of the small shop on the corner. One could go there at any time and see fresh roses added, often with embarrassingly bad poems attached, from places all over the world — I noticed Argentina and the Canadian Arctic. It was the inadequacy of the gesture that made it moving; my friend the political cynic remarked that she wished she had shares in red roses.
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