No. I don’t know anything.

But maybe you know the name of it?

No!

Interview with Kiruna resident number 2:

What do you know about it?

Well, nothing.

Do you know what year it’s from?

Well, no.

We couldn’t find a lot of facts about The Thinking Sami.

His name might be Olle. He looks pretty pathetic.

There it was again!

That word. They had used it in virtually every other sentence back then. Everything, absolutely everything, was potentially pathetic, in one way or another.

Wasn’t she being pretty pathetic now, digging through an old box full of memories from her childhood while a cold rain pelted a city that was about to be torn down? That was going to be packed and then unpacked. Be resurrected, but not really. Not ever.

Granted, a sculpture could look pathetic – especially a sculpture of a Sami from the twenties, when people were still wrapping measuring tapes around Sami people’s skulls. And the name. She obviously knew it alluded to The Thinker by Rodin, but given how the Sami were viewed back then, it acquired different connotations. Like how the unique thing about this particular Sami was that he was actually thinking.

But that’s not what they had meant when they had written that he looked pathetic. They hadn’t been capable of that kind of insight back then. They had slapped that word on to create distance to the assignment. To the requirement. A distance signalling rebellion. Against the school. Against everyone and everything. At the end of the day, everything was meaningless, but what were you supposed to do about it? Suck on a shotgun like Alice Älvros’ dad, who had made such an ungraceful exit it gave Alice bulimia. They had laughed about it behind her back, and the thought of that stung now when she wondered whether their jeers had ever reached Alice’s ears. So callous! So incredibly callous.

Joking like that and mistrusting anything that was less morose than a heroin-infused grunge ballad had obviously been a survival strategy. A pact that offered a certain amount of protection from the mechanical, masculine force at work in the mining town, which ground people into identically sized gravel with identical technical skills. Come to think of it, their attempt at resistance had been pretty heroic.

*

She remembered the day Susso had sauntered into the classroom clearly; she remembered the exact moment, like a film. The unconcerned look in Susso’s eyes when she shuffled down between the desks to her seat. That was eighth grade. Halfway through the school year, after the Christmas break, in 1994. An odd girl from the village school in Abisko who looked like she had walked all the way down to Kiruna on foot, because her cheeks were bright red and so was the tip of her nose.