Daniel (6 page)

A little before three in the afternoon they arrived.

A man stood on the steps of the biggest house, waiting for them. He was missing two fingers on his right hand.

In resounding Swedish he said that his name was Wilhelm Andersson.

 

For him there was no doubt that Hans Bengler was Swedish.

No one but a Swedish shoemaker could have made leather boots as fine as those he was wearing.

Wilhelm Andersson welcomed Bengler warmly. His handshake was so powerful that it felt like he was trying to crush his hand. Then Andersson took off his shirt, turned his back, and asked Bengler to cut open a boil between his shoulder blades that was inaccessible to his own hands. Bengler stared at the distended boil and recalled the time he had fainted in the Anatomy Theatre. He stroked the scar above his eye.

‘It's probably best I don't. I can't tolerate the sight of blood.'

‘There won't be any blood coming out, just greenish-yellow pus and maybe some worms or maggots.'

Andersson spat on a knife with an ivory handle and handed it to Bengler. His back was covered in odd cracks and swellings. It was as if the desert landscape had carved its presence into his skin.

‘I've never lanced a boil before.'

‘Stick the point in the middle and press. When it opens, cut downwards. And turn face your away so it doesn't squirt in your eyes.'

Bengler put the knife point against the purple boil, shut his eyes and pressed. Then he squinted quickly and cut downwards. A viscous mess ran down Andersson's back.

‘Take this towel here and wipe it off. Then we'll eat.'

Still without looking, Bengler wiped off the mess and dropped the towel on the floor. Blood was trickling out of the incision now. Andersson gave him a piece of white cloth.

‘Put this over the cut. It'll stick and stay on. The sweat makes it sticky.'

Bengler kept swallowing and swallowing so he wouldn't vomit. Andersson wriggled into his shirt and buttoned it wrongly so that one edge hung down. He noticed but didn't do anything about it.

Only now did Bengler realise that Andersson gave off a horrible stench. He tried to pull back a step and breathe through his mouth. But at the same time he remembered that he hadn't been anywhere
near a bath in almost two months. Water for washing was the first thing he had rationed, only a week after they left Cape Town.

Andersson led him into a room that was filled with animal trophies. The odour of decay and formalin was very strong. In the middle of the room was a hammock, identical to the one Bengler had slept in during the passage on Robertson's schooner. It took a moment before he noticed that a short black man was standing motionless in the corner of the room. At first he thought it was a stuffed animal, but then he realised it was a live human being.

‘My only form of homesickness,' said Andersson. ‘Or possibly it's a sign of disgust. I've never been able to work out why I brought along a folk costume from Vänersborg and dressed my servant in it.'

This was a situation that Bengler had no background to help him understand. After two months in the desert he had reached a trading post where there was a Swede named Wilhelm Andersson who came from Vänersborg and dressed his valet in a Swedish folk costume.

‘I've tried to teach him to dance the polka,' he said. ‘But he refuses. They prefer to leap. I've tried to explain that God doesn't approve of leaping people. God is a higher being, higher than me, but we have the same view, that if there is dancing to be done it should take place in regular forms, in 3/4 time or 4/4 time. But they continue to leap and wiggle the most unexpected parts of the body.'

He offered Bengler a whisky and water. Bengler thought of his ox-drivers. Andersson instantly read his thoughts.

‘They will be taken care of,' he said. ‘They'll get water, food, conversation, be allowed to laugh, and at night there will be women who are warm and open. But you ought to shoot the oxen. You've driven the life out of them. Which brings me to the question: what are you doing here?'

Bengler felt the dizziness come as soon as he sipped the whisky. How can I explain something I can't even explain to myself? he thought. Then, surprisingly even for him, he excused himself by fainting.

 

When he woke up he was lying in the hammock. The black man in the folk costume was fanning him with something that looked like a piece of oxhide above his head. Somewhere in the distance he could hear Andersson singing a hymn, off-key and vehement, as if he hated
the tune. Bengler closed his eyes and thought that in a sense he had now arrived. He had no idea where he was, nor did he have any idea who the strange man was whose boil he had lanced, but he had indeed arrived. He had crept ashore on a strip of beach in this endless sea of sand. I ought to say a prayer, he thought. One that's not as insincere as the hymn I'm hearing now. But who should I pray to? Matilda? She doesn't believe in God. She's afraid of God the same way she's scared of the Devil. She's just as terrified by heaven as by hell.

He didn't say a prayer. He tried to catch the eye of the black man fanning him, but his gaze was far away, above Bengler's head.

He suddenly had the feeling that he was in the very centre of the world. Right in the middle of something that for the first time in his life was completely real. Something that demanded he take a stand, have an opinion, make a choice.

 

He got no further with his thoughts. He noticed that the real reason why he had woken up was violent nausea. He leaned over the side of his hammock to throw up. The black man stopped fanning and cupped his hands to catch the vomit. Bengler didn't manage to turn away. He sensed a kind of love in the fact that an unknown man in a folk costume from Västergötland accepted his spew in his cupped hands. He knew that his conclusion was wrong, that he would eventually change it, but right now he believed it was love. It was a mercy to be able to throw up into another person's hands.

Exhausted, he sank back on the pillow. The black man wiped his face. Andersson was still out there somewhere bawling his hymn, which seemed to have an unlimited number of verses. Or was he repeating them? Or singing the hymn in different languages? Even though Bengler was very tired, very close to dropping off to sleep, he tried to listen. Then he realised that Andersson wasn't singing the proper text. He was filling the verses of the hymn with his own words. He yelled at somebody named Lukas, who was supposed to have fixed a fence long ago. Then he sang about a raft that he once built on Lake Vänern, but soon returned to cursing Lukas, and Bengler realised that Andersson was either insane or drunk.

And yet he felt utterly safe.

He had survived in spite of everything. He had arrived somewhere.
The magnet had loosened its grip. He had arrived at an unknown point where there were people, a bit of Sweden, something he could recognise.

 

He woke himself in the dark because he was snoring.

But when he opened his eyes the snoring continued. Andersson was asleep, rolled up in a zebra pelt next to a burning whale-oil lamp. Bengler crept carefully out of his hammock to take a piss. He fumbled his way in the dark towards a door or a curtain, and, without actually noticing how it happened, he found himself outside. In the distance some fires were burning. People were talking in low voices, shadows flickered, a baby cried softly. He shuddered from the sudden cold and the night wind. Then he took a piss. As usual he wrote some numbers with his stream of urine. This time a four and a nine. He finished half of an eight. Then he was done.

When he came in Andersson was awake. He sat wiping off soot from the glass of the whale-oil lamp.

‘While you were sleeping I tried to figure out who you were. I went through the load on your wagon. All I found was a number of books and plates of insects and some jars with worms and beetles in them. That was all. It's like having a visit from a travelling insane asylum. Many people have passed through here, but none as crazy as you.'

He left the lamp alone and lit a pipe.

‘In your catechism I read that you were from Hovmantorp. I looked on my old map of Sweden, but I couldn't find it. Either you're lying when you write in your notebooks, or Hovmantorp is an unknown place, even though it surprises me that there are still blank spots in a country like Sweden.'

‘How long have you been here?'

‘That's not a very precise question. Where is here? In the desert? In Africa? Or in this room?'

‘In Africa.'

‘Nineteen years. It amazes me every day that I'm still alive. It also astonishes all the blacks around me. It astonishes the oxen and the ostriches and perhaps even the wild dogs. But sometimes I think maybe I'm already dead. Without having noticed it.'

He picked up a bottle of beer and took a drink.

‘If you hadn't lanced that boil I probably would have died. If it gives you any satisfaction, I would gladly say that you came through the desert like a gentle saviour and saved my life.'

‘I was supposed to become a physician, but I wasn't good enough.'

‘It's common for Europeans who weren't good enough to come to Africa. Here they can assert their skin colour and their god. Don't have to be able to do anything, or want anything. Here you can live well by forcing people into submission. Illiterates from Germany come here and suddenly they're the bosses of a hundred Africans whom they believe they are entitled to treat any way they like. East of this desert the Englishmen are doing the same thing; north of us sit the Portuguese, singing their sentimental songs and whipping the hide off their black workers. We export our skills to America. Those who come to Africa are either revivalist preachers or lazy brutes. And I'm neither a preacher nor a brute.'

‘What are you?'

‘I have foresight. I make deals.'

‘I met a man in Cape Town named Wackman. He spoke of the importance of realising that the piano will create great fortunes in the future.'

‘Exactly. For once that man is right. Wackman is a vile person. He slashes the soles of his whores' feet so they'll never forget him. His real passion is small boys with light brown skin. He rubs them with oil. Rumour has it that on one occasion, after having mounted such a lad, he found it so wonderful that he set fire to the boy. The oil made the boy burn very quickly.'

Bengler tried to assess whether Andersson was as cynical as he made out. How deep had the night cold and the loneliness actually penetrated him? Were there only frozen spaces inside, feelings embedded in blocks of ice, the same way that his beetles were drowned in alcohol? Or was there also something else?

‘I was searching for another focus in my life,' Andersson said. ‘My father was a pharmacist and thought I ought to exhibit the same passion for liniment that he did. But I was born with a hatred of all salves. So I left. Stowed away on a wagon taking Lidköping porcelain to Gothenburg. And from there out into the world. Until I drifted ashore here. I went home one time, to bury my father. I arrived six months after he died,
but they had left a hole in the ground so I could toss a little dirt on the coffin. Although I actually gave him desert sand. That was when I brought back the folk costume for Geijer.'

‘Is his name Geijer?'

‘I've forgotten his real name, but I christened him Geijer. A fine name. A clever fellow who wrote some poems that I still remember. Is he still alive?'

‘Erik Gustaf Geijer is dead.'

‘Everybody's dead.'

‘You're living in the middle of a desert.'

‘I hunt. I have the only trading post where the blacks are allowed inside. No Germans come here. They hate me the same way I hate them, because they know that I can see straight through them: their brutality, their fear.'

‘You hunt elephants?'

‘Nothing else. What were you thinking of putting in your empty glass jars?'

‘I'm going to catalogue insects. Systematise and name them.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it hasn't been done yet.'

Andersson looked at him for a long time before he replied.

‘That's an answer I mistrust. Doing something just because it hasn't been done yet.'

‘It's the only answer I have.'

Andersson lay down and pulled a cover over himself.

‘You can stay here. I need company. Somebody to eat with, someone to lance my boils.'

‘I can't pay you much.'

‘Company is enough.'

 

He stayed in the place that Andersson had named New Vänersborg. At the back of the room where he spent his first night there was another room where Andersson stored his elephant tusks. This room was emptied and cleaned, and he moved in. The ox-drivers were dismissed, the animals were slaughtered, and Andersson helped him find new draught animals and ox-drivers, although Bengler had a feeling that Andersson was using them to spy on him. Andersson knew everything
he thought, all the plans he had. He also suspected Andersson of reading his diaries and rummaging through his clothing. They ate dinner and talked in the evenings. But now and then Andersson would withdraw with his bottles of beer when a very beautiful black woman came to visit. That's when Bengler would feel a fierce desire for Matilda. He resumed his habit of masturbating two or three times a day.

Sometimes Andersson disappeared and might be away for several weeks at a time. During these periods the place was supervised by Geijer, who never seemed to take off his folk costume. The trading post carried salt, sugar, some grains, simple fabrics and ammunition. No money changed hands, everything was done on the barter system. The black men who showed up like lone ships in all that white came bearing tortoise shells or tusks. He never saw anything else. Then they vanished with their fabrics and their sacks. With Geijer he could hold simple conversations in Swedish. Andersson had taught him the language. For some strange reason Geijer spoke in the Gothenburg dialect. But since his vocabulary was limited and he always seemed to be struck by sadness when he didn't understand what was said, Bengler never entered into very complicated discussions.