Parentless
And Finding a Brother

I was well into my forties when, thanks to some good sleuthing by my youngest sister Pia, I found out that I had a brother.

Okay, so let’s back up a little.

I have two sisters: Lili-Ann, who is five years younger than I am, and Pia, who is eleven years younger. And for the longest time, that was all she wrote, siblings-wise.

Well, come to find out:

My parents up and vanished sometime during the summer of 1952.

I was three-and-change at the time, so no one bothered to brief me on the details. However, now and then after their disappearance, I must have wondered what had happened to them and so asked Grandma Olga about where were they, Mamma and Pappa? To be truthful, I do not remember asking, but I do remember being told—every so often and in somewhat evasive terms—that soon someone (Dad was mentioned most often) would come for me.

Would come for me soon. Just a little longer.

Something important to look forward to is how I seemed to have grasped these promises. It would not be long now. He’ll come for you, or she’ll come for you, by train. They’ll come for you. Not long now. But these, what I must have taken as odd promises never really explained my parents’ absence, and I never managed to wrap what wits I had at the time around precisely what was going on here. All I knew what that my parents were not around, but would come and get me soon. Soon. And by train.

What was going on here, precisely, was this: My Mom Lisbet, sometime in the spring of 1952, had had a brief affair with one of Dad’s friends. This illicit encounter had produced offspring, and by early summer Lisbet had begun to show—at least, this is what I gather in retrospect.

Two things to keep in mind here:

For one, Mellansel, that little clearing in the northern forest we called home, was a primitive and very religious village. It was one of those everybody-knows-all-about-everybody-else clearings in the forest, and for Mom to be pregnant with a child not Dad’s spelled scandal and outrage with capital S and capital O respectively. Going-straight-to-Hell kind of scandal and outrage, to be exact—Grandma Olga heading up the lynching mob.

For two, since this was not Kjell’s child (so they both assumed), they decided that Lisbet would offer this stray up for adoption upon birth.

So, Lisbet begins to show, and she and Kjell board the next train out of Dodge, this village replete with potential stern judgments and sterner damnations.

Destination: Stockholm.

Young Ulf is left behind with grandmas Olga (80% of the time) and Irene (20%).

And that is how I came to spend that fall and winter to the tune of “Someone would soon come to get me.” Truth be told, by late fall, I don’t think I asked much more about them. Not that I had forgotten them altogether, but I no longer really missed them for Olga did a great job pampering me, the Angel Child, and Irene (who took me in during that 1952-53 winter) was a decent pamperer as well, so life was ticking along quite nicely in my book, parental void notwithstanding.

In the end, as it happened, no one ever came for me. Instead, one day in March 1953 (would be my guess), Olga puts a four-year-old boy (me) on the train to do the catching up with his parents on his own. I’m told that the train conductor and other relevant railway personnel were asked to keep an eye on me, which they must have done since I’m still here, typing away.

Amazing, in retrospect, that they got away with that—sending a four-year-old by train on his own.

Lisbet met me at the Stockholm Central Station, and I guess there must have been some sort of joyful reunion, though I remember none of that.

Now, let’s fast forward a whole bunch of years: Lisbet’s stray son, Dag, adopted just after birth by very nice Stockholm parents, one day decides to track down his birth-mother, and he succeeds.

(I actually met his adoptive mother at one point, who told me about the handing-over of Dag—a very sad story, she said, since Lisbet was really broken up about it and did not want to part with her newborn son; still she did, gave him away, turned around and never looked back).

So one day Dag shows up at my Mom’s house. Hi, Mom. My sister Pia (who lived next door at this time) meets Dag as well and cannot help but notice how much like Daddy Kjell Dag looks. Three blood tests confirm: Yes, Dag was not Kjell’s friend’s son; Dag was Kjell’s son. Oops.

I met Dag in the 1980s. Yes, Kjell features. Especially the nose and mouth. No getting away from that. Dad’s son.

It’s an odd thing that, discovering a brother this late in life. It should have been quite the event, but it wasn’t. Then again, perhaps I’m not wired correctly, for I’m sure it would have been a huge deal for someone more affectionately assembled. Well, to be fair, I’m living in Los Angeles at the time and Dag in Sweden. Also, he was not an enthusiastic letter writer by any stretch, and neither was I. Nor did we call each other on the phone—too expensive at the time, and with not too much in common (apart from that minor detail called parents), there was not much to talk about either.

Yes, we’d meet up during my occasional Sweden visit and spend an afternoon or so talking about this and that, like brothers are supposed to, but nothing earth-shattering. Today, there’s an email a year, if that.

To my knowledge, Kjell never met Dag. I understand that Pia gave him hell for abandoning his child, and I don’t think Kjell was able to muster too much by way of a defense. Kjell is dead and gone now, so there’s no asking him about it today.

As a side note (I’m kind of addicted to them): I did not have maternal grandfather (morfar). Grandma Olga apparently had only one romantic episode in her otherwise sinless life, and the second party to said episode did not stick around. Lisbet was born and raised fatherless, as it were, and she never knew or met her dad.

Dag, bolstered perhaps by his success in tracking down his birth mother Lisbet, now, of all things, sets out to track down Lisbet’s father: and, lo and behold, succeeds!

From what Mom told me, she and her father even talked on the phone once or twice. At one point, Lisbet was even going to go visit her Dad in whatever little town he now lived in and even got on the train to do so. But, she told me, she never got off that train.

As the train pulled into the station, she sat by the train car window, half-concealed by a curtain, scanning the platform for potential fathers. By the description she had from Dag, and (I guess) from the man himself over the phone, she spotted him and then and there, still hiding behind the curtain, changed her mind. She never told me why, but in the end, she never met her dad.

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