Lady Corona coughs in the elevator!

 

Once, a very long time ago, I was married to a Latin American. I left him when my son was 6 months. The son grew up without a father and in Swedish culture, but is defined in the statistics as ”second generation immigrants”. That’s all silly.

As an adult, he applied for a job in a municipality and the interviewer said about his last name (the father’s) ”So good, then we have someone who can talk to the immigrants”. ”Talk to the immigrants,” said the son puzzled. ”Have you tried to say hi?”

Some decades later after my divorce, I had for while a relationship with a black guy from Africa. At one point when we were sitting in his kitchen talking, he suddenly put his brown on my chalk-white hand and said ”look is it not beautiful”. It was.

He had an English first name and Swedish sounded surname.

At one occasion he applied for a job a few miles out of town and was told on phone that he had gotten the job. When he got there, he was met by a very strange attitude. His intended employer was in the yard outside the workplace. And he looked at my friend leaving his car. Silence at first, then he said he was not ”him”, the man my friend asked for to meet. But then he was him! Yes! But yet not! Then he was at least ”he”, but troubled about it and didn’t know what to do with this situation. So he said ”wait here”. And then he went into the house and was away for a while. Then he came back and said ”there are no jobs here”.

”But …” said my friend, but he got it, of course he did! So he went back to his car and drove home again. ”You should have reported him, it was illegal what he did” I said. And it would have cost him heavy fines. ”Yes, I know” said the friend. ”But I became so low, I just didn’t have the strength to fuss. I just wanted to forget it ever happened and move on.”

That is Sweden.

Sweden is a small country, stale provincial, on the dominating cultural arena “right” defined fight with “left” defined and it is much about WORDS. Those declared themselves as radical and sworn anti-racists, decide what is to say and think. They actually not fight racism, they widen and affirm it. Salafists are oppressed civil rights fighters. Arabs and Muslims are nowadays not Arabs or Muslims, because to use such words can imply that you have prejudices. So now we have no Muslims or Arabs in Sweden, but ”brown men”. And because they are brown (and men!), they are oppressed and they are doomed to die young. Punto!

Now we have Minneapolis, everyone heard about! Thankfully, police officers in Sweden are not like in the US. The rotten eggs that shoots young black men out jog or tramples a black man to death, would never even be admitted to enter a Swedish police school.

All this said, I’m bored by those blacks or immigrants who, nota bene here in Sweden and not in US! , believes that reprimands and rules ”always” are about ethnicity. Sometimes they aren’t – and what does it do to you, if you can’t read the difference?

And now I come to my errand with this reasoning.

I live in a staircase with 18 tenants. Most people who live here are between twenty and thirty years. Five of eighteen are over 70 and according to the Public Health Authority, we should  avoid situations where we may be exposed to a covid-19 infection. I am 71 years old so I am ”the young one” among these five seniors, the four elderly old all have all home care service.

All five of us have in common we cannot get out without using the elevator.

It was for to get access to an elevator I moved to this house. It is very small elevator. In these Corona times it is too small for two people.

The other day, a neighbor put up a note that she would have guests this Saturday, a birthday party for her daughter. All guests would observe and obey given restrictions to avoid spread the virus infection, she wrote on the note.

We live on the same floor. And I thought about the elevator and that a lot of people would come here, using that very small elevator. I was worried. So I went shopping of Friday instead of on Saturday. I didn’t have to go out on Saturday then. But I was worried anyway.

Although I dislike tenants who write little notes for the stairways or the laundry room, I actually wrote two notes (for the first time in my life). One to put besides the elevator door at ground floor and one at the elevator door on ”my” floor.

I wrote ”Kindly! Avoid using the elevator to let it only be used by the older tenants living in this staircase who cannot walk in the stairs. This request, to avoid the spread of Corona virus. Thank you!”

My apartment door is just right opposite the elevator door. And in the afternoon I could hear a lot of people came to my floor. At 10 o’clock in the evening I went out to the kitchen to make tea. Passing the front door I heard people talk loud in the stairwell. Curious if they obeyed my note, I looked into the peephole. Well, it seemed so.

I went happy back to the kitchen. Then I heard some kind of turmoil in the stairs. Peeping again!

Some people had entered the elevator and kept the door open, just standing there and not leaving. A woman in red t-shirt walked in and out and a younger slim woman – my neighbour I guessed – ran back and forth…

”What are they doing,” I was thinking. It seemed strange it all… But I left and went out to the kitchen to make my meal. It was anyway clear that my note did not have the desired effect. I was now disappointed and felt a bit ridiculous.

Some minutes later and on the way back to the living room, I could still hear people talk at the elevator. ”But what are they doing!!!,” I thought again  – and looked again.

The woman in red t-shirt had now resolutely seized the elevator as hers and she was standing there coughing vigorously… She did it for a very long time too! Well, but I could not stand there so long! So I left to my living room.

But I could still hear voices from the staircase and when I again look into the peephole, she has just got out of the elevator – and then she took the stairs down.

I began be tired of this “peeping” and at a moment earlier I had an impulse to simply open the door and ask people what it all was about. Now I’m glad I didn’t as I think it might have been an intended provocation to create trouble with me.

Then for the rest the evening when I checked people quietly left and no one acted as odd as that woman.

As told before,  18 tenants live here. The majority are young people. Five are older and under the quarantine restrictions imposed due to the pandemic. Of 18 tenants, sixteen are adults, and one is a child. Two tenant are not white Swedes. These two, the child and her mother, was them having the birthday party. The woman coughing in the elevator was one of their guests. All guests were black (of them I actually saw i.e.)

Covid-19 does not take into account skin color but the age. But thanks to this woman who apparently was upset for my note and just had to cough in the elevator to insult me, thanks to her I was imprisoned in my apartment. Because I hardly can walk down the stairs without bad pains in my hips.

But I wanted to take my usual evening walk… Well, after midnight I took a plastic glove and wet washcloth with diluted chlorine and left my apartment. And wiped off the handrail and elevator buttons and went out for my late walk. But it was not as nice as it use to be. This whole thing, my wrongly understood note and that coughing woman in the red t-shirt had made me upset and I felt deeply insulted.

A cup of tea again when I came back home… But then sudden I thought ”oh damn, I have forgot to take the evening insulin”.

It happens sometimes that I forget it. But just as I was about to put the insulin pen in my pale white skin, I stopped and thinking – and then I checked the jar where I keep today’s utensils. Oh no! I had already taken my evening insulin!

I was so disturbed by this event that had been – the misinterpreted note and the hostile woman’s behavior – that I was on my way to double-dose my night insulin!

If I had done it, it would undoubtedly had led to a hypoglycemia during the night! What would had happened to me? Would I have woken up in time, before eventually coming into coma? That is what I think about now. ”Thanks” red Lady Corona, I hope I will never see you again!