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Quinctilis "In the morning we think differently than in the evening. When I come to a difficulty, I wait until tomorrow. I can wait as an insect can wait" Raisin, that dark purplish red that's bluer and lighter than dahlia purple, paler than Bokhara For two and a half hours one showery afternoon, as in a blind, watching from a building corner a ring toss from the spot Ten years on, the platebook-size plaque, bronze, flush with the pavement, is apparently generally ignored Olaf Palme went down on the pavement dying, dead right there, and his killer remains unidentified In Norrmalm, on the sidewalk along the eastside of Sveavägen, a heavily trafficked street among generally ugly five- and six-story mid-century gray and blank brindled concrete office buildings At the corner of Tunnelgatan Those who visit the place from out of town or who have brought their kids so that they will know of the event react most to its baraka As at Dealey Plaza Some people grimace, turn away, exhale heavily passing the spot, and like all others who show any emotion at the site, avoid walking directly over the plaque More than half who pass Tunnelgatan, while not glancing down, or around, or up at the assassin's escape route, don't walk near the plaque, meaning that although seemingly oblivious they're aware it's there A very few walk directly across it A man in a suit deliberately flicked a cigarette to land near it Some stop, a few slow down and glance down, three or four older men wiped their eyes, a woman in her thirties stood and cried Fewer than a quarter of those who passed show any reaction at all And in the northern European first-person-singular way, virtually all who passed were walking alone Along the dull commercial street, a bank branch vis-ˆ-vis, nondescript storefronts, stairs to an underground arcade twenty feet away Tunnelgatan plunging east an Edvard Munch convergence of angles dead-ending against granite steps, abrupt and steep, leading up to the peculiar high-camber street above onto which the assassin disappeared He fired repeatedly, sprinted to the back of Tunnelgatan and up the steps to the upper street, turned right, was gone. A car may have picked him up there That's all A Mauser-packing Stockholm street thug, arrested soon after and released who is dead now is many people's best guess Palme was of Mandela's and Julius Nyerere's stripe, that sort of head of state His rectitude, his willingness to take a stance, his frankness, all too unequivocal and morally irrefutable for the sardonic European world with its surfeit of dried blood red of the past There is such profound and far-reaching significance of such single renegade acts Like the consequences of Rabin's assassin's success, of Hitler's assassins' failures We met on the church square in Gamlastan, walked down to the terrace restaurant on the Ridderfjärden embankment where she patiently described the course of the investigation lead to lead to an apparent dead end Scudding scupping on the granite embankment quai, silent pause in the general Swedish chagrin that it could go unresolved, this way, like Bosnia, Kosovo and so much of the corroded trust of the modern European historical cast Recent history eating into the present and cutting it back, the gray trimmers cutting it back With bemused, meticulous Swedish civility The ripple spreading coruscating light air and random puffs kicking up into a steady breeze out across the Baltic brackish Ridderfjärden Open water lined with Stockholm granite, enigmatically severe architecture, islands, long embankments The dignity of an old imperial capital, like Vienna, London, Tokyo, Rome, Moscow The waiter, glasses, blond wispy hair, rocks on his heels, leans in, fusses with the saucers and doilies, has been listening, looks as though he probably disagrees with what she's just said but doesn't venture, eases away The freshening breeze lifts up the table cover's corner, blows a lost paper napkin to the wooden deck, rattles a spoon in a tea glass, the waiter glances back at her The wind in off the splendor of Stockholm's open water. Saltsjön, Strömmen, Riddarfjärden, Mariebergsfjärden Long, heavy pause in the conversation as the breeze rattles a baffle behind the waiter's stand before we resume talking About Palme But there's nothing more, that's it, the prime minister of a large European country was shot on a street of its capital and the killer has never been named Apparently even no official knows more And there's nothing else to be said Coverup or ineptitude, like the New Jersey anthrax mailings in 2001 So there on Ridderfjärden we talk of Russia, of Japan, of what will happen next in China, of American obduracy about global warming, of the Euro, of Sweden in the Second War The Swedes and the Swiss, the Swiss and the Swedes, the sealed trains, the surreptitious supply of critical matériel In the century past The accommodating banks, borders mostly closed to refugees, the walleyed opportunistic insistences of neutrality Talk on until the wind lifts toward whitecaps on the water and drives us back off the embankment's terrace for a long walk and dinner in the city She says her grandfather was in Mannheim at a congress during the great ammonia works explosion of September 21, 1921. It killed 561 people and left 7,000 without a place to live The explosion was in Oppau in Mannheim's northern suburbs, her grandfather and others from the congress made their way out to Oppau to help She describes and then decries the closeness of Sweden and Germany, Hanseatic-Baltic Nordic-Teutonic and all that That the Nordic noun, Ungeziefer, literally meaning vermin or noxious or parasitic insect, was the proper German word for concentration camp inmates Then the evening concert The remarkable Twelfth of Handel's Concerti Grossi The astonishing second movement, Allegro molto capriccioso, of Bartók's Second String Quartet. His first work after the Austro-Hungarian chaos in the early years of the First War But always back to Palme She says she saw him many times, talked with him twice, begins to cry, excuses herself, and when she's told how few people acknowledge the death site plaque years on, she says that Sweden didn't deserve Palme After defeating Catherine the Great's alliance with the Danes, King Gustavus III was assassinated by a Swedish noble in 1792. Gustavus wrote plays and poems, was a patron of the arts And he was killed on the street outside the Stockholm Opera, the event having to do with his deep embroilment with the politics of the French Revolution In Stockholm's very center, down on Norrström "Cognitive relativism is nonsense, moral relativism is tragic" Dried blood red Out from Stockholm's core four blocks south of the Strindberg Museum if you stand near the plaque at the corner of Tunnelgatan staring at the steps up which Palme's killer got away, turn 180û and look down Olof Palmes gata, which is what Tunnelgatan has become on the other side of Sveavägen, the hilltop chapel in the distance is Palme's tomb Lined up in ironic syzygy +++++++++++++++ Sampling credits to Stravinsky and Ernest Gellner.

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