Daniel (17 page)

Daniel felt confined in the room. The ceiling was low; there were people beneath him that he could hear but not see. He searched for his skipping rope to keep himself from worrying. He began to skip, first slowly, then faster. The rope slapped on the floor in an even rhythm. It was like walking. He closed his eyes and imagined that the heat had returned. Somewhere he could hear Kiko's voice, his sudden laughter, and Be who talked so fast and always had a story to tell.

He was interrupted by banging on the door. He decided not to say anything so that whoever was standing outside would go away. But the door was flung open and a big man with a bare torso stood there staring at him.

‘I didn't say “Come in”.'

Daniel still spoke the language poorly. But he could pronounce some words.

The man stared at him.

‘I didn't say “Come in”,' Daniel repeated.

The man exuded a foul smell: from his body, his clothes, his mouth. Daniel breathed through his mouth so he wouldn't throw up. He was afraid. He hadn't said that the man could open the door and come in and yet he had done so. Daniel had thought that was a rule that no one could break.

‘My head is pounding,' said the man. ‘There's pounding from up here too. Are you the one who's stomping on the floor?'

Daniel looked at his skipping rope. It had been hitting the floorboards.

The man followed his look.

‘Are you completely possessed? A little black devil who skips on my head?'

He took a step forward and snatched the rope. Daniel tried to hold on to it, but the man was very strong and Daniel knew that he would lose it if he didn't use his teeth. He leaned forward and bit the man's hand. The man yelled in pain, but Daniel couldn't let go. He had a cramp in his jaws. The man howled and thrashed. Finally Daniel managed to loosen his jaws. The man stared at his hand, which was bleeding profusely. He had dropped the rope, and it now lay on the floor.

He's going to kill me, Daniel thought. He's going to bite me in the throat and shake me until I'm dead.

The man was breathing in heavy, panting gasps. He looked at his hand as if he didn't comprehend what had happened, then turned and staggered out of the door. Daniel closed it and wiped the blood from his mouth. There was no sound below him now. He didn't understand what had happened. Why did the man open the door without having permission to come in?

He stood still in the middle of the room.

From the street he heard a horse whinny. Then a dog barked and a girl shrieked.

He heard footsteps on the stairs. He recognised them at once. It was Father coming back. He was walking slowly, putting down his feet carefully, not stamping. There was a knock on the door.

‘Come in.'

Father stood in the doorway smiling.

‘You've learned,' he said.

Before Daniel could reply there was a racket on the stairs. The man Daniel had bitten stood in the doorway with a bloody rag wrapped round his hand.

‘Are you the one who dragged this troll from hell here? He tried to bite off my hand!'

Father looked confused. He had a greasy brown-paper packet with him that smelled like food.

‘I don't believe I understand,' he replied.

The man pointed at Daniel in a rage.

‘That black monkey tried to bite off my hand. Look!'

He unwound the bloody rag and showed him the wound, which dripped blood onto the floor.

Father stared at his hand and then at Daniel.

‘Did you do this?'

Daniel nodded. His tongue had swollen in his mouth. He couldn't squeeze out any words.

‘I'm a coal carrier,' said the man. ‘I work twelve hours a day. The sacks can weigh up to two hundred kilos. I carry them and I drag them. And I have to sleep. Then this thundering starts up here.' He grabbed the rope from Daniel's hand. ‘He's skipping. As if he was hopping on my forehead. I have to have quiet if I'm going to get any sleep.'

Father still didn't seem to grasp what had happened.

‘He's not used to things,' he said. ‘He's not used to floors and walls and ceilings. It won't happen again.'

The man wrapped the rag round his hand. Slowly he seemed to be calming down.

‘He looks like a human being. But he has teeth like a wild animal. I've been with women who have bitten me, but nothing like this.'

‘He's a human being from another part of the world. He's on a temporary visit.'

The man looked at Daniel. ‘Does he eat human flesh?'

‘Why would he do that?'

‘It felt like he was trying to tear off a piece of my hand.'

‘He eats exactly the same food as you or I.'

The man shook his head. ‘Life gets odder and odder. All this work. And then one night you meet a black boy who's skipping on your head. Will it ever end?'

‘Will what end?'

The man shrugged his shoulders and cast about with his bandaged hand in the air, as if searching for a word that was actually an insect.

‘Life. Which doesn't make much sense as it is.'

Then another thought occurred to him.

‘He isn't sick, is he?'

‘Why should he be sick?'

‘What do you know about the diseases he might be carrying? Last year smallpox raged through the city, and this spring the children were shitting themselves to death.'

‘He's not infectious. You won't turn black if you touch him.'

The man shook his head and disappeared down the stairs. Father closed the door.

‘I can understand that you were scared but you mustn't bite people.'

‘He came in and I didn't say “Come in”.'

Father nodded slowly.

‘You still have a lot to learn,' he said. ‘But I'll protect you as best I can.'

In the packet he had fish that tasted strongly of salt. Daniel almost threw up after the first bite.

‘You have to eat,' Father said. ‘I don't have any other food.'

Daniel took another bite. But when Father turned away to sneeze, he spat the food into his hand and kept it clenched under the table.

 

After the meal Father lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Daniel tried to enter his head and see his thoughts. He knew it was possible, Be had told him about it. A person you knew well did not have to say much, you could work out what she was thinking.

But Father was far away. Daniel imagined he could see him lying stretched out on a mattress in Andersson's house, in the room that had smelled so rank from the ivory.

The light from the candle flickered over his face. Daniel wondered about the pinched and often so sombre faces he encountered in this country. The girls who had skipped in the courtyard had laughed, even
the one who was very fat, but the grown-ups here were not like Be or Kiko. Life must be hard if they couldn't even manage a smile. Or their thoughts made it impossible for them to laugh.

But he knew that this wasn't true. From the street he kept hearing people laughing. He thought about Kiko, who sometimes grew tired of all his questions. Now he felt that he was growing tired of himself. He could have been lying there in the sand, with his limbs hacked off and the blood flowing, but he was alive, and one day he would finish painting the antelope that Kiko had started. The gods were waiting there inside the rock, and he couldn't forsake them. That would be like forsaking Be and Kiko and the others who had been killed, or all those who had died before them.

The candle had almost burned down. Father was asleep. Daniel blew out the flame, waited until its glowing wick was swallowed up by the darkness, and then undressed and crept into bed. Far below him he could hear a man snoring. He didn't regret biting the man on the hand. It had been necessary to defend his rope. But maybe he had bitten too hard.

 

The next day Father led him through the narrow, stinking alleys to a square where a man was sitting on a horse.

‘That's a statue,' Father said. ‘A man who will never move. He will always sit there and point. Until someone tips the statue over one day.'

They cut across the square and went through a big, tall gateway. The staircase was very wide. When they got halfway up the stairs Father stopped and put his hands on Daniel's shoulders.

‘The most important thing now is to get some money,' he said. ‘A man lives here who wants to measure and draw you. For that he will pay us money. I wrote to him from Hovmantorp. He's waiting for us.'

Daniel didn't know what the word
measure
meant, Or the word
draw
either, but he knew that what he was supposed to do now was something good. Father looked at him with a smile. His eyes were wide open now, not absent-looking as they were so often when he spoke to him.

 

They entered an apartment that was very large. A woman in a white apron asked them to wait. She gave a start when she first saw Daniel, even though he remembered to bow.

After a while a man in a long red dressing gown with a pipe in
his mouth came in through a curtained entrance. He moved soundlessly. Daniel discovered to his surprise that the man was barefoot. He had no hair on his head but his face was covered by a beard. He smiled.

‘Hans Bengler,' he said. ‘Six years ago we sat on a bench outside the cathedral in Lund.'

‘I remember.'

‘I told you the truth. Do you remember?'

‘I do.'

‘That nothing would ever become of you.'

Father laughed.

‘You had no dreams. You didn't want to do anything. But something must have happened.'

‘I began to take an interest in insects.'

‘I read what you wrote in your letter. Is your vain father dead?'

‘He is gone.'

‘And you inherited?'

‘Almost nothing.'

‘That's a shame. Parents who don't leave anything to their children are worthless. My father was a very unimportant man who nevertheless was clever enough to speculate in British railway stock. That's why I can now forgive him for his otherwise wretched life.'

The man with no hair knocked his pipe out in a silver bowl.

‘I said back then that you would never amount to anything.'

‘Nor have I. But I did discover a hitherto unknown insect in the Kalahari Desert.'

‘And you have a black boy with you. Do you sleep between his legs?'

Father was upset. Daniel didn't understand why.

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘Just what I said. Some men prefer their own sex. Particularly if they're exotic young men. I had a professor of geology who was forced to cut his own throat. Stable boys used to be called up to his flat. The matter was hushed up, naturally. But everyone knew about it.'

‘He's an orphan. I've adopted him. There's nothing improper in what I'm doing.'

‘I'm known for asking impertinent questions. Surely you haven't forgotten that?'

Father threw his arms out and then put one of them protectively around Daniel's shoulders.

‘I'm leaving him here.'

Father squatted down in front of Daniel and said to him, ‘This man's name is Alfred Boman, and he's an artist. He does pictures of people. He draws them. He is also interested in how people look in another way. A scientific way. He measures their heads, the length of their feet, the distance between their mouth and eyes. I'll leave you here and you must do as he says. I'll come to get you this evening.'

Then he was alone with the man named Alfred. He smiled and walked all the way round Daniel. Then he turned and went back the other way. His pipe smoke smelled rank. The man was also surrounded by a smell of perfume, but above all he was barefoot. Daniel had sores from the new shoes he had been given before they left the house in the forest.

‘Let's go inside,' said the man.

Daniel followed him. The walls were covered with pictures. Stiff, pale people stood on some tables, but compared to the man on the horse they were small and white as if their skeletons had come out through their skin. They entered a room with a big window in the ceiling. Along the walls hung various pictures. On a table lay paints in tubes and tins.

Daniel noticed that one of the pictures showed an animal that resembled the antelope that Kiko had worked on. Unlike the picture that Kiko had carved into the rock, this animal was utterly still. Its face was turned towards Daniel and it looked directly into his eyes. The man who had made the picture was very skilled.

‘A stag,' said the man. ‘I painted it when I didn't have anything else to do. I only paint animals when people make me too discouraged.'

Daniel couldn't tear himself away from the picture.

‘It's telling you something,' said the man with the pipe. ‘The only question is what.'

Daniel didn't reply. He cautiously touched the picture with his fingertips. The eyes were very dark, not red like Kiko's antelope.

Suddenly Kiko was there with him. Daniel could hear him breathing. Then a cloud of smoke from the pipe hit his face and the breathing was gone.

‘You must stand on this blue cloth,' said the man, who had put down his pipe. ‘You can put your clothes there on the chair.'

Daniel undressed. There was a fire burning in a stove right next to where he was supposed to stand. The man had put on a pair of gloves and was holding a paintbrush in his hand. He walked around Daniel again, touched his arm, and asked him to stand with his legs further apart.

‘Humans are strange animals,' he said. ‘I think I'll call this picture
Black Saviour
.'