The Whistlers

It’s halftime and your team’s down by two. Lightly buzzed and properly annoyed, you’ve found your way to the toilets beneath the stands. One stall is free and you slide in, feeling a pale relief rise through your torso as the stream splashes against the porcelain. You start to whistle. The melody that comes to you is Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie. That’s just what it is. Out of all music, only that.

A bombastic march erupts from within you, through your lips, claiming the air. Everyone in here is forced to endure your whim. The metal walls create a powerful, trembling echo. Riding the double wave of release, you lean into the chorus from your locked stall with a little extra oomph.

Then you hear someone whistling along, what you interpret as a harmony line. It’s a sharp whistle, far more skilled than your own. Together and anonymously, you perform the march for thirty seconds, your streams gradually losing force until they stop altogether. A magical, fluttering sensation rises in you, the kind that comes from finding a soulmate.

You zip up, step out toward the sinks to rinse your hands and dry them with stiff sheets of paper. You wait, patiently and thoroughly, for your fellow whistler to appear beside you. But they don’t. You crouch to check if you need to wait longer, but there are no feet visible in the stalls. Apparently, you’re alone.

A quartet of heavily tattooed firm members crash in through the sliding door and occupy the urinals along the short end. They shout in unison about their intent to burn down Linköping, rhythmically, sure, but with questionable pitch, and you start to wonder how anyone could get so worked up over something as harmless as Linköping, with its sleepy streets and mild-mannered bourgeois charm. Surely, there must be more deserving targets for destruction.

Still, the whistler doesn’t appear. The mild surrealism of the situation makes you laugh. Was the whistling a delusion, a hallucination brought on by a slightly elevated blood alcohol level? Honestly now, who among these bellowing dudes who’ve been flinging beer on each other and waving flags could even identify that piece, let alone find the correct harmony? At best, they might guess Rossini lifted the World Cup in 1982.

Relieved of several pints of surplus liquid, you tiptoe past the snack line and burger grill, step on plastic forks and smoldering cigarette butts. There’s an autumn chill in the air, damp and raw, but your hair has gained some volume at least, and stays put when you run your fingers through it.

As you climb back up the stands, you start whistling Rossini again and recall the opening scene in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. That was the same whistle and the same melody, though then it was accompanied by pasta water and an unexpected phone call. A powerful storytelling chord, you thought when you read it, and maybe your fellow whistler under the away stand in Uppsala shares that very association?

If they even exist. You pan your gaze across the faces on this chilly October evening: the cocky boys and the juvenile old men, the overly disappointed and the overly ecstatic, the puffy, red-cheeked ones and the creepily bony ones. One of these creatures knows something more, you think, just before the referee blows the whistle for the second half and your attention returns to the match, which now begins to pour into you like morphine.