The Bill Murray of the National Library

There was a date. There was an eleventh of July 1983. Just a day, one of those we have all the time, the sort that begins with waking up, continues with a throng of well lubricated routines and ends with going to bed. The kind of day that comes and goes and which you do not realise is life. This day was more life than the others, she wrote to me in the letter I only read once I could no longer ask any follow-up questions.

I spent a summer in the basement of the National Library among the microfilm screens and the bleary eyed, ploughing through newspapers. While the heat rolled over Stockholm we were fanned by cold air underground. Me and the others with so-called specific interests. We who had no joy of what was happening around us, who found ourselves in what had already happened, the static but undiscovered. Someone had become obsessed with Swedish spaghetti western films, another studied neoliberal tendencies on post-war editorial pages.

I myself read everything that happened on the eleventh of July 1983, since I had been given no more precise instructions than that. The date that was supposed to explain everything that later took place. The emigration. The attacks. The withering.

When I had coffee with one of the others, a bald doctoral student with an odour, who was already in his fifth year, he jokingly called me the National Library’s Bill Murray, after the Groundhog Day actor who never got anywhere in the calendar. For just like him I had become stuck in time, brooding over that Monday more than forty years ago as if every small notice could be read like Kremlinology.

There was nothing particularly special about that day really apart from one thing, which revealed itself at the first search. Some sort of heat record was broken then, 34.2 degrees Celsius, which was not surpassed until 13 July 1994 when the fire brigade sprayed the bridge to Nacka so that it would not swell in the heat. It was a clue of some sort, but to what?

Some days I spent hours on minutiae, articles about interest-rate changes or prisoner exchanges between Israel and Egypt, since they evoked a vague sense of importance. Somewhere in the mass of the eleventh of July 1983 I would find my way. Perhaps in the local newspaper Hallandsposten. Or in Sydsvenska Dagbladet. Possibly in Norrbottenskuriren. A key to the soul that only someone who knew how to search would uncover. In the endless mass of text she was there.

Or not, but what choice did I have but to search? It was not as if I had anything more important to do, neither now nor later. I would not get some summer warehouse job anyway and the inheritance would be enough to cover the rent for at least a year to come.

When I returned home in the evenings to her flat on Torsgatan, I drew all the curtains and pushed one of the VHS tapes into the player. Casablanca, Nils Poppe and Pinocchio. I let my mind be flooded by impressions so as not to get entirely stuck in that damned date.

What had I even done then? I kept no diary at the time. It was probably summer holidays. We were no doubt away somewhere, perhaps Greece again, or Mallorca, possibly Lanzarote. Delving into my memory yielded nothing. For me, the eleventh of July 1983 had been a nothing while waiting to become an everything. If only I had known. I would have taken notes, studied every minute with great seriousness, not allowing any detail to be lost. At the same time, I was a child. How are children? Children are carefree. They believe they will be granted new dates in eternity, even though they themselves live closer to non-existence than the adult, having only recently come from an eternity without dates. Still they stroll straight into lifetime and believe themselves the owners of it.

And then came afterwards, when I spent every waking hour leafing through the entertainment news in Borås Tidning to see if that interview with the revue actress might contain some valuable statement, or looked again at the templated TV schedule, but I had not yet examined it in Dalademokraten, there could be a glitch somewhere so to speak, but there never was. It was always the same programmes. The same time for Aktuellt. The same for Rapport. The same for Teknikmagasinet and the same for Landet runt. On the radio the news echoed through the schedule, interspersed with classical mornings, the land and sea forecast.

At night I began to dream of the programmes. It was as if I was there again on the leather sofa, as if I remembered what I could not remember.

August and September arrived. The weather turned, hard. It rained without pause and with infinite patience, said those who paid attention to such things. Newcomers who tried to make small talk with us in the basement, who sat down dripping wet in front of the projectors and thought it was some sort of social gathering, when all we did here was study what had come and gone to understand what had stuck between the lines. There was no such thing as bad weather, I wanted to say, but that would have prolonged the discussion. Better to let everything said hang in the air as if it had never been spoken.

I had moved on to the horoscopes now, thinking there might be something there. There had been nothing on the letters pages, nor among the sports results, neither had the comic strips given any indication (I was so tired of Beetle Bailey and Hägar the Horrible), and certainly not the classified ads (in which I had great expectations), but there could absolutely be something in the sign of Cancer, I assumed.

It said in Norrköpings Tidningar:

“The charm and energy you radiate today will affect everyone around you. A certain person may take a longed-for initiative.”

It probably meant nothing, since the other star signs described similar destinies, but it was at least something. I photographed the text and placed it in my folder of potential findings. Among these was the notice about the missing child in Flen (who goes missing in Flen?), the feature from the shelter in Uppsala (where one of the residents had previously worked as a priest) and the weather forecast showing sub-zero temperatures in Bohuslän (an obvious misprint, surely?). The idea was that I would go through everything at a later point, in order to possibly find a hidden pattern in the eleventh of July 1983.

Then it struck me, like a eureka moment: what happened on the eleventh would surely have been written about on the twelfth or thirteenth. A cold shiver of shame ran through me, followed by a feeling that could only be likened to pure joy.

I spent the rest of the autumn on the dates that followed, at first elated by my insight, but then increasingly disheartened that these newspaper days in many ways resembled the others, only with different names and portraits. An endless suite of everyday life. There was still drought in the bilberry shrubs outside Piteå and the bank robbery in Östersund was still unsolved, but at least I was moving forward, if only a couple of days, but it was a decisive change, I thought.

Just like Bill Murray in the movie I finally moved on with life, and it certainly felt as if I had a different shimmer in my gaze when I caught it in the mirror on my way down into the mine. Like a person who had found, or at least had a clear direction towards, the future. Someone who was on their way somewhere. Right? Was that not so?