Norsjö is a village in Västerbotten, in the north of Sweden, the part of Sweden where the trees are taller than the buildings and the winter is longer than the summer and everyone knows everyone because there are not enough people to not know everyone. It is the kind of place where there is one pizzeria and everyone goes to it because it is the only one and because Swedish pizza is one of the great unacknowledged art forms of northern Europe.
Swedish pizza is not Italian pizza. Swedish pizza is its own thing. It comes on a thin crust. It comes with a free salad on the side — always, everywhere, non-negotiable — iceberg lettuce with cucumber and a pale vinaigrette that exists in every pizzeria in Sweden and has never been found anywhere else on earth. The menu has forty to sixty options. The names are aspirational: Vesuvio, Calzone, Quattro Stagioni, Capricciosa, Hawaii. The pizza is made by a man who may or may not be from the Mediterranean but who has lived in Norsjö long enough to understand that when a Swede orders a Kebabpizza Special, the Swede means it.
There was a man in Norsjö. He had a lisp.
A lisp is a speech impediment where the s sounds come out differently. In Swedish, this is already a problem because Swedish has a lot of s sounds. But in daily life, in Norsjö, in a village of two thousand people where everyone knows you and has heard you talk since you were a child, the lisp is not a problem. Everyone understands you. Everyone has always understood you. The lisp is not a barrier; it is just how you sound. It is your voice.
The lisp becomes a problem in exactly one situation: when you have to say a word that the listener does not expect, to a person who does not know you well enough to compensate, in an environment where the acoustic conditions are bad and the stakes are a pizza.
The man loved pizza. He loved, specifically, Capricciosa. Not Hawaii. Not Vesuvio. Not Kebabpizza Special. Capricciosa. Ham and mushrooms. The pizza of a man who knows what he wants.
But every time he called the pizzeria — and you have to understand, in Norsjö you call the pizzeria, you do not walk in, or maybe you do walk in, but the phone is also an option — every time he called and said "Capricciosa," the pizzeria heard something else. The c came out wrong. The s came out wrong. The whole word, filtered through the lisp and the phone line and the noise of the kitchen and the expectations of the person on the other end, came out as something that sounded enough like something else that they gave him the wrong pizza.
They gave him Hawaii.
Every time.
And they laughed.
Not cruelly. Not on purpose, probably. But the situation — a man calling and saying something that sounds like Capricciosa but not quite, and the pizzeria not understanding, and the man trying again, and the pizzeria still not understanding, and eventually the man getting a Hawaii because what else are you going to do — the situation is, from the outside, funny. From the inside it is not funny. From the inside it is the accumulation of every time you have tried to say what you mean and been given what you did not mean because the world could not hear you clearly enough.
One day the man called Emil.
That is the whole story.
That is the whole story and it is perfect and it does not need anything else.
"Och jag är så jävla trött på Hawaii" means "And I am so fucking tired of Hawaii."
Word by word:
Och — and
jag — I
är — am
så — so
jävla — fucking (literally: "devilish," but in Swedish profanity it is the universal intensifier, the word that turns any sentence into a statement of absolute emotional commitment)
trött på — tired of (literally: "tired on" — Swedish puts the preposition "på" where English puts "of," because Swedish is tired ON things, not tired OF them, which is a more physical image — the tiredness is sitting on you like a weight)
Hawaii — the pizza. Not the islands. In Norsjö there is only one Hawaii and it is ham and pineapple on a thin crust with a free salad.
It is perfect because of the escalation. The man does not start with the scream. He starts with "sorry to ask you this." He is embarrassed. He knows this is a small thing. He knows that asking your friend to order a pizza for you because you cannot say the word "Capricciosa" is, on the surface, a small thing. But the "sorry to ask you this" is doing the work of every time he has tried and failed and been laughed at and been given the wrong pizza and eaten it anyway because what are you going to do, send it back? In Norsjö? Where there is one pizzeria? Where the man who works there will remember?
And then the OCH JAG ÄR SÅ JÄVLA TRÖTT PÅ HAWAII — the eruption. The shift from quiet shame to volcanic rage. Not rage at the pizzeria. Not rage at the lisp. Rage at Hawaii. At the pizza itself. At the fact that there exists a pizza called Hawaii and that this pizza, this specific arrangement of ham and pineapple on dough, has become the symbol of every time the world did not hear him correctly. He is not angry at being misunderstood. He is angry at what he received instead. The problem is not the absence of Capricciosa. The problem is the presence of Hawaii. The wrong thing is not that he didn't get what he wanted. The wrong thing is that he got what he didn't want, over and over, until the name of the wrong thing became a swear word.
In Norsjö, the pizzeria also serves kebab. This is true of every pizzeria in Sweden. The Swedish pizzeria is not an Italian institution. It is a Swedish institution that happens to make pizza, and also kebab, and also sallad (with two l's, because Swedish), and also sometimes lasagne and baguettes and whatever else the village needs. The pizzeria is the házmester of Swedish food: always there, always open, serving everyone, knowing everyone.
The man with the lisp could have ordered a kebab. A kebab does not require you to say "Capricciosa." A kebab is a kebab. The word is short. The word is clear. The word survives a lisp, a phone line, and a noisy kitchen. But the man did not want a kebab. The man wanted a Capricciosa. And the tragedy — the beautiful, tiny, northern Swedish tragedy — is that he knew exactly what he wanted and could not make the world give it to him.
Until he called Emil.
And that's why you always leave a note.