Boman’s Two Worlds 33
look into it whenever I wish, even while I’m at work down there in the big factory. But it is only in the evening and at night -- for I often dream of it -- when I visit there. When I’ve spent an hour in your and your friend’s company, I’ve prepared myself by listening to your talk about Sweden and then I go home. It doesn’t matter where I live now, but I have a little apartment with two rooms and a kitchen. The one room is like all other American rooms and I don’t need to describe it. The other, the inner most, will perhaps surprise you a bit. The old fashioned wallpaper with its checks and dots is from a land far away, likewise the sofa bed and the cuckoo clock. That sofa from far away came with the mattresses to pull over your mouth when the freight costs climbed to a hundred times its value. And all the paintings, photographs and portraits which hang on the walls in their simple frames -- they don’t have anything to do with this country. Neither do the books, a couple of hundred, nor the newspapers in their small formats and large type. The peasant weavings, no they also remind one too much of home to be at home here. And what is in the corner, do you think? A porcelain stove, sir, a porcelain stove, think of it! One can’t light a fire in it, that’s true, but it is built according to a well known design and the brass hinges are polished like mirrors. In his night shirt Boman sits in a rocker and reads the small newspapers and the books in their simple bindings by the glow of a common kerosene lamp with a porcelain base. And then, then he dreams about his other world, he dreams so vividly that he is there. The snow lies blue white in the early dusk over the quiet earth. The pine forest stands black against a broad yellow stripe in the west. The fire’s dying light falls over the rag rug’s pattern and a cat curls on grandmother’s lap who