PETTERSON, Per

I Curse the River of Time

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If I walk from the college at the corner an down Goteborggata, which I often did, I soon reached the Freia chocolate factory. My mother worked there. She stood at the assembly line in Confectionery eight hours a day, five days a week, plus overtime and had done so for many years. All over Daelenenga and Rodelokka there was the smell of chocolate, of cocoa, in the mornings especially, when the air was sharp and a little damp maybe, and it was only when I had been out drinking too many pints the night before that I found the smell unpleasant. Otherwise there was a feeling of comfort about it that brought back to me certain days in my childhood, with certain faces attached and family gatherings with tables laid and tablecloths and the slanting sun through the gleaming white blinds and then me, in the middle of it all with this sudden feeling that everything around me was so fine, so perfect. Sometimes, in the late nights, in my small flat at Carl Berners Plass, in Daelenenga, I allowed that feeling to well up from the past, and then I would long for my childhood with such teeth grinding intensity that I almost frightened myself.

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