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we all, us three, will ride

"Only Two"
by Eden Hemming Rose

I am groggy with jet lag, which I have never experienced before, but I am determined to not let it stop me. I stand on the platform of Stockholm’s subway on an overcast day in Sweden. The tracks rumble like the hungry stomach of an ogre, and then the train rushes into the station, slowing to a halt. Every door down the line of the long train slides open. I step over the gap between platform and train, into the warm yellow interior. Lucky for me, since I am extra shy, few people ride the train at three in the afternoon. The two other people who chose the same car as me both sit in the opposite end. I pick a seat that allows me to see the whole car, and gaze out the window. The conductor’s voice crackles out words that I can’t understand, and the doors slide shut with a definitive thud. The train lurches and begins to move, slowly at first, but picking up speed noisily.
The terrain is as familiar as a dream; I don’t know what I will see next, but I feel like I should. The granite rock on either side of the train’s tracks are the same kind of granite rock --the evergreen trees look like the same evergreen trees-- that fashion the hills and mountains near my home in Seattle. The people resemble those that walk Seattle streets. The buildings are similar, even if my curious eyes note the slight variation in architecture. Then I think of the vast Earth, and of how I stand practically on the opposite side, and the differences sharpen. I have traveled far from my familiar home to Sweden to cheer up my friend Munir, who is shifting into adulthood here, but I will leave Sweden with an expanded sense of the world and a diminished sense of my importance in it.
The train takes me through green suburbs toward the center of town. After a few wrong stations, I finally figure out how to get where I want to: the oldest part of Stockholm, Gamla Stan, “The Old Town”. Founded as a trading settlement in the late Viking age on a small island in a river, the city grew rapidly, eventually spilling onto the banks on either side of the river. The original boundaries of the island still isolate it somewhat from the modern bustle, and this interests me, this museum of antiquities still in use.
The narrow, winding streets mesmerize me, and I am soon happily lost. The light rain that starts falling doesn’t bother me; its familiarity comforts me. It isn’t the rain that drives me into the church, but the prospect of being inside one of these ancient buildings that I have wandered amongst for the past hour.
The heavy wooden doors open with an arthritic groan. They are three times taller than me, and set into an arch like a gaping mouth. The entryway is dim. I hesitate for a moment, unsure if I am allowed to simply walk in like this. Curiosity compels me forward, through the next huge set of doors and into the main room.
I close my eyes for a second, and the age of the place announces itself like a ghost. I hear the voice of the architect discussing the designs with his patron over a thousand years ago, and smell the sweat of the laborers who laid each brick in place to build this magnificent cathedral. I imagine the thousands of ceremonies performed under this roof: baptisms, weddings, and funerals. I listen raptly for a priest or bishop booming out his sermon. Yet these are just the imaginings of a girl fascinated by the extreme age of the place, older than anything man-made she’s ever seen.
Opening my eyes, I move reverently, taking it all in. My steps are light and slow. My hand grazes a pew as I walk past, down an aisle lined with wooden pews and the massive brickwork columns that rise high above my head to become the arches of the patterned ceiling. This, more than any other church I have been in, feels like a house of God; vast and yet welcoming, drawing me in with beauty and mystery. I consider sliding into one of the pews to pray, but instead I continue down the spacious aisle.
The immense altar across the huge room from the doors is close when I stop suddenly and pull my foot back. There are rectangular stones laid into the floor, all greys and browns and crowded together. Most are about 3 feet by 4 feet, but some sever others abruptly. They are all very worn, and only on a few can I discern any of the Latin inscriptions carved into their surfaces, but here and there is the outline of an idealized skull, or a sword, or a woman in a dress, or a man in armor.
I have never heard of gravestones in a church. Searching for some sort of explanatory plaque as most other artifacts have, I find none; I am amazed that they have let these intriguing gravestones remain a mystery, as if they aren’t important to visitors who don’t know their stories. Early Christian churches bought their power, so they couldn’t have been cheap. They must have been important once though, I decide, the way they jumble together as if the space itself were precious. These corpses must have been nobility, or close to it. Yet they are so faded that, in the scheme of history, they must not have meant much.
Again, I find myself imagining what the lives of the people under my feet must have been like, but backwards, from death to birth. Grand funeral processions with orphaned children weeping parade through my mind. This woman died in childbirth and that man died of pneumonia. Their daily lives are a mystery though. After all, history doesn’t care what daily life is like; it’s more concerned with the big events like birth, death, and war. These people, like most people, had lived their lives as best they knew how, and all that is left of them are gravestones ravaged by the footsteps of the generations that have come after them. Now here am I, a strange girl from far away both in time and place, standing over their graves and thinking they must have lived very different than I.
I continue on, but my mind keeps pulling me back. Long after I walk down the steps of Storkyrkan and out into the slick cobblestone streets of Gamla Stan, the feeling of being aware of something larger than myself stays with me.

My second Saturday in Sweden, Munir and I take the train north to Uppsala. Uppsala is the birthplace of Sweden and was the last stronghold of paganism in Sweden. Now it is merely a quaint college town with a castle overlooking it and a quiet river running through the center. We walk from the train station into the center of town and hop a bus.
It drops us off a few miles outside town, under a grove of birch trees next to a green field. A wide gravel path leads from our feet to a modern building in the midst of the field. Next to it, dominating the flat landscape, are three large manmade hills set very close to each other like camel humps. These hills are Tre Kungarna, the Three Kings, large mounds under which Viking age kings are supposedly buried. Just beyond them rises what appears to be a maroon-painted barn with a steep, black roof, surrounded by very old elm trees; it is the Christian church built on once-pagan ground. This is Old Uppsala.
We wander the dirt paths around the base of the mounds. Inscribed stone stands inform the public, but are written completely in Swedish, and I have only picked up enough to be able to read every eighth word or so. The pictures tell me nothing; I can’t identify any of the blocks or strange shapes they show.
Finally, on one I see “1800-talet”, and brag to Munir, who has been trying to teach me little bits of Swedish, “This one says something about the 1800s.” He comes to my side to examine the tablet.
“This…” he points, “says they excavated it in the late 1800s. Didn’t find much, though.”
I stare at the words, wishing they would give their secrets to me too.
“They dug into the hillside…” he announces slowly. He has only lived in Sweden for 3 months and is still having to recall the broken Swedish he learned in his childhood. His father is Swedish, and his mother Malaysian, but they reside in Singapore, where Munir grew up. “Those stones are markers of where they started the excavation.”
He indicates one of the standing feldspar stones that I had already wondered about. My first hope had been that they were rune stones, but I had inspected one closely and found no carvings. They are three upright sentinels stationed at the base of the hills.
Munir continues to narrate according to the block. A nearby farm in the valley below us was once a lake scraped out by glaciers that the ancestors of Swedes, the Sveas, had lived next to. The hills are believed to be the burial mounds of the first Svea kings, though the excavations had found only badly charred artifacts of the era and no human remains. There is still no satisfactory explanation for why the hills had been built, how, or by whom. That knowledge was lost to civilization with the cycle of time and the immense changes wrought by Christianization.
I walk closer to the fence that surrounds the three humps, still listening to Munir’s halting illustrations. From the outside, they look like nothing important, just large lumps that grow grass and wildflowers. Yet, to me, they sing like sirens of the beginnings of modern-day Sweden, pulling me in and making me want more.
Munir finishes the brief explanation and joins me.
“Its amazing, isn’t it?” I sigh. “Nobody really knows whether they are actually graves or not.” I pause, another thought sweeping through my mind, “There are, and have been, so many different people in the world. And we’re only two of them."
 







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