At the sign of the dodgy fish

Old Town, Stockholm, Sweden

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On my way to new places, I like to read mysteries that unfold in these landscapes. Stories in which a detective or a journalist is going to many addresses, runing down clues, are good for getting a vivid sense of geography and for acclimating to place names. So my reading en route to Sweden included Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Henning Mankell. Reading Mankell's Before the Frost on the plane, I was struck by the intelligent ways in which the author uses dreams to define character and sometimes to drive his plot forward.

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In between my mystery reading, on the long flight from Chicago to Stockholm, I leafed through the Scandinavian airline magazine and tried to memorize the name of a restaurant, Den Gyldene Frede. It was mentioned repeatedly in a long interview with Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, that was conducted here. My first phrase in Swedish. Den Gyldene Frede. The Golden Peace. It seems the members of the Swedish Academy dine here every week, on their way to choosing the next winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Understandably, Peter Englund was circumspect in fielding questions about his literary tastes, confining himself to mentioning dead authors, notably one of my own favorites, Jorge Luis Borges.

I have come to Sweden now because of a dream supported by a little riff of synchronicity. Late last fall, I found myself in a rather boring dream situation, wearing a power suit among a bunch of men in power suits, all preoccupied by business deals. The deals were going well, but I felt this was not my scene. In the dream, I pulled off my jacket and tie and went outside, into a pleasant wooded landscape. In the distance, I saw what I took for a retreat center. Then a great wooden sign was lowered over the landscape in front of me. Carved in the wood in huge letters were two words: THE SWEDES.

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Waking from this dream intrigued in the early hours, I went downstairs, fired up my computer and checked my email on my way to jotting down my dream report. I found that three emails had arrived within minutes either side of my waking. One was from a Swedish woman, hitherto unknown to me, who reported she had read in her local paper that I was coming to Sweden; she wanted to know how she could sign up for a workshop with me. The second message was from a man called Pär Wedin, a musician and shamanic teacher who had offered to host programs in Sweden for me a couple of years before. The plan had fallen through at that time but he had just heard from the publishers of the Swedish edition of my book The Three "Only" Things; they wanted to know if I was coming to Sweden. The third email was from a Swedish dreamer who had previously corresponded with me; someone had told her I was coming to teach in Sweden.

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Pär and I both found this dream logic irresistible, and quickly found dates in the calendar for me to lead programs in Sweden. So last Thursday, I landed at Stockholm's Arlanda airport to find him waiting for me, ready to host the workshops I had agreed to offer in Sweden. He had suggested that I spend the first night in Gamla Stan, the Old Town, a must for first-time visitors. On a cobbled street called Stora Nygatan, he stopped the car just short of an amazing restaurant sign. It displayed a pointing finger in a hand that shifted at the wrist into the body and tail of a fish, with the curious word Slingerbulten. As we walked back the other way, to the alley where my hotel was located, I resolved to find out the story here.

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Sven Vintappare Gränd - the Alley of Sven the Winemaker - was about as wide as I am tall. Packed ice would have made it impassable but for the gravel and salt liberally scattered on its surface. My tiny hotel, also named for Sven the Winemaker, was in a high and narrow seventeenth-century house where the office is in the kitchen. My welcoming innkeeper guided me up the tightest corkscrew staircase I have ever navigated en route to my room on an upper floor.

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Par met me for dinner that evening and led me briskly through the streets of the Old Town to Den Gyldene Freden, the one restaurant in Sweden (other than Slingerbulten) whose name I knew. It turned out to be a handsome 1722 tavern of many alcoves and cellars, preserved almost exactly as it was when opened. Until this meal, I had never suspected that meatballs could be fairly described as exquisite. But that was no hype for the Svenska köttbullar (pronounced "Shirt-buller-er") served with gravy and lingonberries, that we shared that night.

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Over the meatballs and Old Gold beer, I recalled the fishy sign and the strange word "Slingerbulten". Par smiled at the word, seeking an English equivalent. "It means something a little tricky, something that shifts or twists." "Like a fish?" "Maybe."

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I consulted an online dictionary later and found that the literal translation of slingerbulten is "dodge", as in the "artful dodger". This brought the playful sense that my first notable sighting in Sweden was an alert to notice what is shifting and a little tricksterish around me. Par pointed out that Dodge is the name of an American car. That didn't seem relevant until the next day, when I moved to a hotel on Nacka Strand, by a yacht marina south of Stockholm near the site of the weekend workshop and discovered that in the past, some of the area now occupied by an elegant modern development here was the location of an automobile plant that assembled...Dodge cars.

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I made this discovery after meeting Karlsson (as in Astrid Lindgren's beloved Karlsson on the Roof) buzzing around in the night sky over Stockholm while making my own astral tour of the archipelago, and then had a close-up encounter with the Archangel Gabriel on the icy shore at Nacka Strand. These adventures will be the theme of a further report.