Daniel (14 page)

They stayed overnight in leaky barns and lived on dry bread and dried meat. They found water to drink in streams that ran next to the road. Daniel was always searching for signs that there was sand somewhere. Since they had travelled so far, surely they would have to come back to the desert soon. From Kiko he had learned that a long journey always ended at the point where it began. But he found no sand, only brown earth that was full of grey stones.

Late one afternoon, what Daniel had been waiting for finally happened: the forest opened up. The landscape brightened. Father pulled on the reins. Daniel watched his face. It was as if Father was airing out. He perked up, his eyes searched. Then he turned to Daniel.

‘My desert,' he said. ‘This is where I was born.'

He didn't think that Daniel had understood what he said. He handed him the reins and shaped a baby in the air and rocked it. Then he pointed to himself.

Daniel looked around. A green meadow stretched before him with a broken-down, crooked gate.

Then he saw the house. A whitewashed wall was visible behind a clump of tall trees. Father pointed at the gate and Daniel hopped down and opened it for the horse. When he tried to close it the gate fell off the rotten post. Father didn't seem to care, and Daniel hopped up on the wagon again. They stopped in the courtyard. Father sat still on the driver's seat. Daniel noticed that he was holding his breath. Then the door opened and a woman came out. In her arms she was carrying a little pig. Her clothes were ragged and her back was hunched as she walked over to the wagon.

‘There's nobody home,' she squawked ‘They're all dead.'

‘I've come back,' said Father.

The woman didn't seem to hear what he said.

‘Dead,' she yelled. ‘And I'm not buying anything.'

Father shook his head.

‘I knew it,' he muttered, thinking of the night he woke up when his father's grinding jaws suddenly stopped.

He climbed down from the wagon.

‘It's me,' he yelled into the woman's ear. ‘Hans.'

The pig jumped in fear and wriggled loose. It ran off squealing and vanished among the bushes. As if Father had stolen the pig from her, the woman started hitting him, pounding furiously on his chest.

Daniel held the reins. The horse didn't move. Father took hold of the woman's wrists.

‘Hans,' he shouted in her ear. Then he turned her round and shouted in the other ear.

She stopped yelling but began hitting him again.

‘Why have you come back?' she shouted. ‘There's nothing here to come back to.'

‘My father?'

‘He's dead.'

Then she caught sight of Daniel and shrieked as if another pig had escaped.

‘What in the Lord's name is that you're dragging with you?'

‘His name is Daniel. I've adopted him. He's my son.'

The woman began rushing around the courtyard and making sounds as if she were a pig herself. Daniel laughed. Finally he had found a person he thought he could understand. She was playing the way Be had played, and Anima, her sister, and all the other women, unless they were so old that they were about to go away to die.

‘Leonora,' said Father, pointing at her.

Leonora, thought Daniel. That's her name. Just as long, just as hard to pronounce as Daniel.

The woman vanished with a wail into the bushes. Father gestured to Daniel to climb down from the driver's seat. They went inside through the draughty door. Torn curtains hung in front of the windows, chickens had nested in the rafters and under the stairs, and shabby cats lay on chairs and sofas. The floor was covered with excrement. Both Father and Daniel grimaced at the stench. In the far corner stood a calf. Daniel broke out laughing again. He had come into a house that was alive.

But Father was angry.

‘This damned misery is nothing to laugh at. It's enough to make me cry.'

Damn. There was that word again. Daniel cringed from the blow he was sure Father was about to give him. But instead he grabbed a shovel that was leaning on a sofa, which had once been red but was now greyish-white from chicken shit. He started swinging at the cats and the chickens. They fled hissing and cackling in every direction. The calf slipped on the filth and Father kicked open the door and chased the animals out until only one hen was left, which flapped up onto a rafter. The effort had made him start coughing and the attack was so violent that he staggered outside to the courtyard and threw up. Daniel followed him. When it was over, Father sank down on the front steps.

‘I shouldn't have come,' he said. ‘That damn old woman has gone crazy.'

He lay on his back and covered his face with one arm. Daniel went
over to the horse, removed the traces and led it to the grass. The woman was gone. The horse looked at him with weary eyes. On the steps behind him Daniel could hear Father muttering like a child.

Father sat up with a bellow. His clothes, which were dirty to begin with, were now filthy from the dung of the animals. He started crawling on all fours across the grass. Daniel followed at a distance with the horse. They reached a clump of dense bushes. There was a hole in it. Father crawled in among the bushes and disappeared. Daniel wondered if he wanted to be alone. But in his experience crying, crawling people seldom wanted to be alone. He crept into the hole in the bushes. Inside there was a space with no roof. For the first time Daniel realised that in this country rooms could be found without doors, and open to the sky overhead. Inside among the bushes, stood a rickety wooden table and a chair. Next to the chair on the ground lay a white clay pipe, the same kind Daniel had seen Geijer smoke at Andersson's trading post. Father pulled himself up onto the chair. Tears were running down his cheeks. Daniel supposed that this visit was a ritual, perhaps a method of sacrificing to a god. The woman who had run off screaming and the animals that lived in the temple were part of this ritual. The chair where Father was now sitting was a throne. And one of the gods must have forgotten his pipe.

This is a land where all the gods have fled, Daniel thought. They don't hide behind the rocks, their hearts don't beat behind these bushes.

Father coughed again, hacking and hoarse. Then he wiped his face with his dirty shirt.

‘This is where my father sat,' he yelled. ‘My father. Can you understand? My father, old Bengler who was good for nothing, sat here with his wasted life, with syphilis all through his body. Syphilis. And I yearned to come back to this hellhole. When I was wandering about in the desert I longed for this place. In my dreams, while the mosquitoes bit me, I longed for this place. Can you understand that, Daniel? Can you understand?'

Father was talking very fast. Daniel assumed he was saying some kind of prayer.

Father sat still on the chair until evening fell. Insects began to suck blood from Daniel's arms. Father was asleep. Daniel waited.

They stayed at the farm in Hovmantorp until the middle of October. With an energy that resembled rage, Father, with the help of the bent woman, cleaned the filthy ground floor. Daniel was given his own room upstairs. Father nailed a lattice of planks in front of the two windows, and every night he locked the door. Before they started the cleaning they had visited a churchyard and a gravestone shaped like a cross. Daniel understood that the ones who lay dead with their names on the cross were Father's parents. He was amazed by this churchyard, where dead people lay in rows beneath stones and crosses. The dead wanted to be in peace, they didn't want any traces to be left. No one was supposed to return to a grave in the desert until he had forgotten where it was. Kiko had taught him that. Here it was just the opposite. Father had also behaved strangely at the grave. He had wept. Daniel didn't understand why. You could cry for people who were sick or had been injured by some animal - they were in pain - but the dead had only gone their way.

The bent woman named Leonora had changed after her screaming fit on the first day. She never came near Daniel, never touched him, but she gave him food and sewed a new sailor suit for him, and she didn't yell at him when he went barefoot. She let him spend time with the chickens, the cats, the calf, the horse and the pigs. After the house had been cleaned and the stink faded, Father began unpacking his wooden cases. Daniel was astonished at all the insects he had dragged home. Why did he need all these dead creatures? He began to wonder if Father was a sorcerer, whether he had a special relationship to the powers that controlled people's lives. Could he talk to the dead? Daniel watched him as he arranged the insects in various groups, pinned them down and built display boxes with glass tops.

Father began to teach Daniel his language in earnest. Every morning and afternoon they would sit in the arbour, or in an upstairs room if it was raining. Father had great patience, and Daniel fell that he had nothing to lose by learning the odd language. He let the axes drop inside his throat, learned the words, and realised there was something there that even he could comprehend. Father never lost his temper or scolded him. Now and then he would stroke his hand over Daniel's cheek and say that he was learning fast.

Besides the language, Daniel also had to learn how to open and close doors. The practical training was done with the door that led into Father's workroom. By the time the practice sessions began, Daniel was already starting to understand the language.

‘Door are just as important as shoes,' Father said. ‘People wear shoes on their feet to protect them from the cold and wet. But they also have shoes to show their dignity as human beings. Animals don't have shoes, but people do. The same is true of doors. You knock before you walk through a door. You don't go in if you don't receive an answer. Then you knock again, possibly a little harder. But not impatiently, not at all. You can even knock a third time without losing your patience. Go ahead and try it. Knock, wait for an answer, open the door, bow, close it behind you.'

Daniel went out and closed the door. Then he knocked and opened it.

‘Wrong,' said Father. ‘What didn't I do?'

‘The gentleman said nothing.'

‘You mustn't call me the gentleman. I'm your father. So call me that. Father.'

‘Faather.'

‘Don't draw out the letter “a”. How many times have I told you that? One more time.'

‘Father.'

‘That's better. Practise with the door again.'

Daniel went out and closed the door. Once again he caught a quick glimpse in his mind of how Kiko had painted the eye of the antelope red, then he knocked on the door again. There was no answer. He knocked again.

Father opened the door.

‘Too hard,' he said.

He showed Daniel how to do it.

‘It has to be like a determined drumbeat. Not like a bird pecking.'