The Venice of the North

The meteor shower had turned all asphalt into water, a metamorphosis the chemists found entirely reasonable, though it carried serious implications for life in the city. The countryside was more or less spared, but where I lived no one could cross a street without some kind of floating device. On the black market, gondolas soon fetched spectacular prices, and nearly every Stockholm resident tried, of course, to lash together rafts of empty milk cartons, plastic bottles and bits of timber, since we now all lived in an archipelago landscape, each block its own island.

I had always cheated at swimming lessons, and later in life I avoided all water-related activities for fear that someone would discover I couldn’t actually swim. It may sound odd, but I saw the risk of drowning, which would happen immediately if I fell in, as a better fate than being hauled up by some sturdy man with a swimming badge.

These new circumstances did not, however, frighten me as much as I had expected, since, pardon the expression, we were all in the same boat to some extent. Soon ferries replaced buses, and that way, after only a few days, I could reach my workplace where, of course, we discussed the new state of things, though only for the first three or four days, after which the waterways became the new normal.

At night I sometimes practised swimming strokes in secret in the courtyard, in a shallow spot between the bicycle racks and the oak tree, and after a few weeks I could actually keep myself afloat for more than a minute. There is something strengthening about this situation, I said later at the coffee table, and my colleagues were surprised by my sudden optimism, I who otherwise belonged to the habitually bitter, the ones muttering about “no resources”. What do you mean? asked our deputy director. I said: No matter how much water flows in, all we can do is swim, that’s all. As long as we stay on the surface, nothing else matters.

Everyone nodded approvingly, as if I had just read aloud from a fable.