Chapter Two - The Storm before the Calm before Storm
In the middle of February 2020 I was scheduled to go to Prague to do software testing for a couple of weeks, which turned out to be a particularly frustrating and boring job. At this stage there were horror reports coming from China about this new virus, but I was quite unconcerned and I remember one of the other testers, a Danish guy, who’d come down with quite a vicious cold, making a joke about how he would be the first European to die of covid and we laughed about it. I thought the virus would remain a scare, like previous epidemics, (for example swine flu, which never really made it to Ireland, or at least never to the extent that I paid any attention to it) that never had any impact on my daily life.
Just before I went to Prague, I had received a phone call from the home help in Timrå that my dad had been taken to hospital as he was poorly and had a bit of a fever. He was 77 at the time and had been diagnosed with Parkinson's about 10 years earlier. He’d also had a stroke in 2015, from which he had mostly recovered, through sheer stubbornness and will-power. I was of course a little worried about him, but I spoke to him on the phone and also to the nurses at the hospital and it didn’t seem that serious, so I set off for Prague thinking he would probably be home again in a couple of days.
While I was in Prague, I rang the hospital once a day and spoke to a nurse or a doctor and to dad, who seemed in decent form. There were some tests that they wanted to do, but all in all, there seemed to be no major cause for alarm. On the fourth or fifth day in Prague, I called the hospital as usual and the nurse I spoke to said that dad was going to be discharged that afternoon, which clearly sounded like good news.
I got back to work and planned to call dad before leaving the office for the day, when he would be back home again. When I called, I expected him to be in good mood, but as soon as he answered I could hear that something was wrong – he was very muted and his voice sounded broken. Are you not happy to be out of the hospital, I asked and he answered, “Anders, I have cancer in both kidneys and there’s nothing that can be done about it.” I was of course shocked by this, doubly so because the person I’d spoken to at the hospital just a few hours earlier had given me no reason to believe that there was anything wrong with dad (apart from the Parkinson’s) and all I could think to say was “Well, no one lives forever”, which in hindsight probably isn’t what someone in that situation wants to hear, but dad said it was a wise thing to say, for some reason. I also asked how long he had left, to which he replied that he didn’t know, but it was probably a matter of days or weeks, which made me ask if he wanted me to come home. He said that he would like that. I finished the call and went looking for the project manager. I told her my news and that I was going to Sweden to be with my dad. She made no objections.
I booked a flight for the next day and although I still remember the overwhelming feeling of sadness while waiting around at the airport, at the same time I was not that upset about having to leave – I’d done similar jobs for the same company a couple of times per year since 2014, and normally I enjoyed going to Prague, but this particular project really was the pits. Obviously I wished the circumstances were (a lot) happier, but I’d got out of another two weeks of mind-numbing drudgery, which far outweighed losing out on two weeks’ pay.
Looking through my emails from early 2020 I see that I must have flown to Nyköping, because I stayed at Good Morning+ Nyköping on the 14th of February, before taking the train to Sundsvall the day after, but my only memories from these days are that I hadn’t expected to be back again so soon (we’d spent Christmas and New Year in Sundsvall) and a general feeling of sadness and misery. After dad had his stroke five years earlier, I’d reconciled myself to the fact that dad wouldn’t live forever, but I hadn’t been prepared for it to happen this way. Still, I put on a brave face as we discussed funeral arrangements, what to do with the house, and the like. My girlfriend also came from Berlin for a couple of days to say goodbye to dad. Again my memory is hazy, the only thing I vividly remember is meeting her at the train station in Sundsvall and being unable to hold back my tears and saying something like “Yeah, the situation is not good”.
To complicate matters further, we had, long before I found out about dad’s condition, decided to leave Berlin and move back to Ireland. We’d told our landlady that we’d be moving out in March, so while I was in Sweden, thinking dad only had a couple of weeks to live at most, I also had to figure out how to wrap things up in Berlin; the flat had to be cleaned out and there were plenty of loose ends that needed to be tied up after having lived in Germany for seven years.
I therefore decided to fly back to Berlin on the 4th of March. The plan was to go back “home” once we were done in Berlin, so I could stay with dad until the end. Being a big fan of travelling by train, I booked tickets to Copenhagen via Hamburg for the 16th of March. I would then stay overnight in Malmö and continue on to Sundsvall the next day. Back in Berlin, we went to work on cleaning out the apartment, but we also found the time to see and do some things that we still hadn’t got round to after 7 years in Berlin. For example, we went for a meal in the restaurant in the iconic Fernsehturm (the old East German TV-tower at Alexanderplatz). After dinner, we went downstairs to the bar for a few drinks. We spoke a little to the bartender who told us he’d just been to Singapore. He said that their pandemic measures were much stricter and better organised and that he believed it wouldn’t be long before things closed down in Berlin and Germany as well. I didn’t contradict him, but I remember thinking to myself that I couldn’t imagine how something like that would be introduced in Europe. Note the date: 12th of March.
And then it happened. The very next day. Danish PM Mette Fredriksen announced that Denmark was going to close its borders with effect from noon, Saturday the 14th, which meant that my travel plans had been scuppered. After some hemming and hawing (and trying to find out if this really meant all trains to Denmark were cancelled; they were) I decided to book a flight for the 20th, the same date my girlfriend was supposed to leave, she to Ireland and I to Sweden, but now we had started wondering if we’d actually get out of Germany at all.
One of the memories that has stuck in my mind from the final weeks in Berlin, apart from people hoarding toilet paper and pasta (those shelves were pretty much empty in all the supermarkets, but I’m happy to say we never resorted to any stockpiling lunacy, and I’m hoping it wasn’t just because we would be leaving the country shortly), is the last time we went to our local Greek restaurant – they had already more or less closed down and we were the only two guests. During the meal we heard about the harsh measures introduced in Austria: No more than two people were allowed to meet. Outside. I had obviously seen the reports of the situation in northern Italy and I remember the reports of the first cases in Sweden, but it wasn’t until now, with Denmark having closed its borders, that it finally hit home that this virus was going to cause serious problems, also for us. In all fairness, I had quite a lot on my mind at the time, but looking back at it now, almost five years later, it strikes me how blissfully ignorant and naïve I was, especially considering that the storm had been brewing for a good while. Here’s a summary of the situation report from the Robert Koch Institute, the German public health agency, from the Wednesday of the following week, the 24th, showing what was happening in Germany (and most other European countries) at this time.
(We shall have reason to return to this list of measures when discussing the many attempts to misrepresent and misconstrue the Swedish strategy, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
Our final day in Berlin came, Friday the 20th of March. We got our bags ready, left the keys for the flat in the post box and hailed a taxi. The last thing we saw as we left our neighbourhood of seven years was how people were queuing to get into Edeka, the local supermarket; they must have introduced a restriction on the number of people who could be in the shop. On our way to the airport we passed through Neukölln, a district with a high proportion of immigrants from the Middle East where the hustle and bustle was the same as always and we remarked to the taxi driver that this would soon change. Literally just a few minutes later we heard on the radio that the government had decided to introduce a lockdown, coming into effect on Monday. At the airport we thanked our driver and told him to look after himself.
Schönefeld Airport was the old East German airport, which has since been closed down (finally replaced by the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport, Willy Brandt which opened in October 2020, with a delay of about 8 years and countless billions of Euros over budget). Before the pandemic Schönefeld was certainly drab, but often bustling, now almost everything was closed down and the atmosphere was funereal. Because of the restrictions and closures, I had to say goodbye to my girlfriend even before we went through security. The mood at the airport, combined with the stress of the last months with dad’s situation, all the work with emptying our flat, the pandemic and the uncertainty of it all got too much and I couldn't hold back the tears, not knowing when I’d see her again. In the end, it would be almost 16 months.
Once I landed in Stockholm, I had to stay overnight in a hotel near the airport before getting the train north the next day. Although there were a number of restrictions in place, e.g. the breakfast room at the hotel was closed and I was given a bag with the breakfast and had to eat it in my room, it still struck me how relatively relaxed people in Sweden seemed to be. I remember thinking “this will be a disaster if people don’t take it (i.e the virus) seriously”, obviously coloured by my experience from Berlin. That last week in Germany the general feeling of anxiety kept rising and I don’t think it was just us. We had shared a bottle of wine nearly every evening, thinking “what the hell is there to do anyway?”.
I also remember feeling quite paranoid on the train to Sundsvall. I was worried about bringing the virus home and making dad seriously ill or even sending him to this grave even quicker than the cancer would, something which I didn’t want on my conscience. I’d booked a rental car in Sundsvall, to avoid having to use public transport.
So on the 21st of March I found myself back “home”, a place which I’d quite happily left at the age of 19 in the mid-90s. I was in equal measures clueless and worried about both the pandemic and my future, adding to my general anxiety about the pandemic was the fact that I’d caught quite a bad cold in Berlin and I still had some symptoms, including a bit of a cough. I’m not sure about the timing here; in my memory I caught the cold in February, but that can’t be right as I went straight from Prague to Sweden on the 14th of February and I know I didn’t have a cold while I was in Prague, so I must have got it after the 4th of March. I do remember getting a coughing fit on the S-Bahn and mumbling to people nearby “Es ist nicht Corona”, but maybe it was…? I went to the local pharmacy in Timrå and spoke to the staff, saying I’d been abroad and had some symptoms, but as I didn’t belong to a risk group, I was told I didn’t need to get tested. They were all out of fever thermometers, but I went to another pharmacy which still had a few in stock (a forehead thermometer for babies, but I bought it anyway). Even though I felt reasonably well and dad didn’t have any symptoms at all, I checked my own and dad’s temperature several times per day. Some readings showed I had a mild fever, which did nothing to alleviate my anxiety.
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