The Listener

by Tove Jansson

  When they arrived at Sandskär, the wind had risen to such an extent that it was just as well to spend the night and get started first thing in the morning. The island had a good harbour. There were no footprints in the sand. Holger followed the men and stood and waited while they found the key and unlocked the hut.

  The cabin was very small, very dark inside, and it had an abandoned smell. There were two iron beds with water stains on the mattresses and a stove and a table with a lamp and an oilcloth. Whoever slept there last had cleaned up after themselves, but there wasn’t much wood.

  When they’d got the fire started, the men went after the chainsaw. After a while, he heard its high-pitched whine on the other side of the island. It screamed each time it bit off the end of a log, then it was quieter for a while and then it screamed again. A chainsaw goes through an oak plank in six seconds, and it goes through regular wood as if it were butter. When the wood breaks, it gives a jerk and the saw leaps to one side, towards the hand that holds it.

  Holger didn’t take off his coat and cap and didn’t give a thought to the fire that was burning out. He was not an enterprising child. He rested his arms on the windowsill and looked at the waves, which were very long and wound around the island so that it was hard to tell which was the windward side and which the lea.

  When his mama could still worry about Nordman, she used to sit up and wait and talk about Moses’ Mountain and how wrong it was to split apart what God had joined together. It was only God’s lightning that might cleave asunder, and, when the time arrived, the earth would crack and the graves would open for those who had lived a quiet life and died a natural death.

  “You know what will happen,” she said sadly just before she died. Nordman defended himself and said he’d never suffered from anything more serious than the flu, and then she died, and he went on blasting.

  He came into the hut and dropped a load of wood by the stove. He didn’t look at the boy, but there was a hint of impatience in the way he fed the fire. Then he took the pail and went out again.

  Nordman and Weckström could do anything. Calmly, continuously, their big boots walked in a world where they altered things and mastered them, put things together and took them apart, killed seals and long-tailed ducks and skinned them and cooked them and ate them and rarely exchanged a word. He was so scared of them, so in awe of them, that there wasn’t the tiniest chance of winning their approval. It was a shame he hadn’t thought to put some wood on the fire. It would have been so easy.

  Now Nordman came back with the water bucket and made porridge. Weckström opened the food basket and took out the turnip loaf and some herring. “Go out and play while you’re waiting,” he said.

  “He doesn’t play,” Nordman said.

  After eating, the men lay down to nap. It was blowing too hard to set out a line for salmon.

  A fifteen-ton boulder must be enormous. When you blow it up, does it come apart in the middle like it was struck by lightning and the halves fall apart like an apple cut in two? Do the fragments fly out of a big hole, or does it split into spiny splinters, slicing knives that whirl through the air and cut off the blaster’s head? What happens if Nordman is dead and his head’s lying in the grass? No one will admire him any more, and no one will be afraid of him.

  Holger went out and straight across the island to the launch. It was anchored a little way out, and the plastic dinghy was drawn up on the shore with the chainsaw on its side in the bow. There were clouds in the sky, and he worried about rain. Rain is bad if you’re going to blast. He sat down in the sand and started digging with his hands. Pretty quickly, the hole filled with water. He tried to dig it deeper, but the sides caved in, so he stepped into it with his boots and filled in sand around them. Now he couldn’t move, he was planted in the ground. He was a plant with great long roots and couldn’t move or anything.

  The evening was fun. The lamp burned on the table and they ate sausages and potatoes and drank beer. Weckström hung a tarp over the window facing the wind, and the cabin grew warmer and warmer and smaller and smaller. But Nordman and Weckström grew large, so large that they almost reached the ceiling. After supper they did nothing, not even sleep. Their hugeness filled the room with repose and friendliness. Once, Nordman stood up and hammered a nail into the doorjamb. “That’s for your coat and cap,” he said, and Holger hung them on the nail himself. Pipe smoke covered the whole ceiling. When he got tired, he lay down on the bed that Nordman had made for him. The blanket smelled of motor oil. The engine was not actually as important as he’d thought. It was alone out there on the water, and, as long as it worked, no one worried about it.

  Outside, the sea roared and embraced the island and the cabin and all three of them, and by and by it was deep night.

  At six o’clock the next morning it was still blowing, but they decided to set off anyway. It was very cold in the hut. He lay rolled up in his blanket and watched the men. The Thermos was on the table, and they drank standing up, put down their cups and started packing. Their huge shadows moved across the walls in the lamplight, back and forth.

  He got dressed and took his coat and cap from the nail. Weckström took down the tarp and stood for a moment with his hands on the windowsill, looking at the weather. It was still dark, and there was no let-up in the roar of the waves.

  When they stepped outside, the door blew open and banged against the wall. It was lighter outdoors, a thick grey twilight in which the men were the darkest shapes. He followed them down to the shore and stood and waited while they got the dinghy into the water.

  They all climbed over into the motor launch, and he sat down on the middle seat, drew his head down between his shoulders, and waited. The engine started slowly, coughed and spluttered, and then, with a lot of heavy gasping, set itself to rights and the boat arched out of the bay. As soon as they poked their nose beyond the point, the whole grey sea swept over them, the launch rolled wildly and unpredictably, a helpless feeling until the boat and the sea got used to each other. Nordman and Weckström sat on either side of him on the middle seat, as solid as stone and smelling of wet wool. Gradually the boat began adjusting to the waves, which vaulted towards them and vanished giddily behind. Sometimes the boat stopped and shuddered from bow to stern before the screw grabbed hold again and the engine went back to work, defiantly, belts galloping. The sky above the waves had grown brighter. They were approaching the skerry with the great boulder that was a landmark from the east.

  He’s going to blow it up. He’ll light the fuse and the flames will creep along fast, and he’ll stand and look at it and then turn and run! No more landmark. Heaven and earth will fly apart and, later, people will come to the skerry and step ashore and shake their heads and say, “This is where it happened.”

  The tiny inlet was not a good spot for the boat, but they had to tie up somewhere. At least there was a cable running across it, and the stern line ought to hold. Nordman hooked a grapnel to the cable, which sank low under the weight and then went taut with each swell. “Keep an eye on it,” he said to his son. “If it starts swinging, that’s not good. If it flies straight up, we’ll have to go back.”

  They took the crowbar and the box of dynamite and walked onto the skerry. Holger sat down on the granite and kept an eye on the grapnel. The launch jerked forwards with each wave and then lurched back again, pulling on the lines. The grapnel rose and dipped back down towards the water with each breaker, but it didn’t swing. He watched it the whole time.

  He couldn’t see the boulder from down here. Will they shout or just run? How am I supposed to know when it happens?

  Now Nordman started up the drill and went to work in a frenzy. The noise swallowed the wind and the waves. He held the heavy drill at an angle against the rock. He grimaced with the effort and showed his teeth. Rock dust flew about his ears, and the drill bounced and tried to find a hold, screaming in his hands. Nordman knew precisely what it could do and what it would tolerate.

  Weckström sat and twist
ed together blasting charges.

  It might be that the whole thing was a huge and terrible mistake. If the world’s biggest boulder sat on a skerry way out at sea, then it was probably God in his infinite benevolence who’d put it there. And then, the boy thought, then along comes Nordman. He doesn’t care what God has decided. He looks at the boulder and says, This has to go!

  The wind had eased. The grapnel was dipping less and less but he kept his eye on it steadily.

  A little past eight o’clock, Nordman took the boy with him to the other side of the island and showed him an overhang where he could wait. “Crawl in there,” he said. “And don’t move. We’ve got another place. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded with his hand in front of his mouth. He went in under the overhang and waited.

  He doesn’t understand. He thinks I’m afraid. I’m not the one who gets blown up or sinks into deep, grey water. He’s the one we wait for, who might never come home.

  The detonation was short and muffled, a great animal growling in its sleep.

  The boy shouted out loud and ran straight out onto the bare granite where he waited for the debris. And it came, fragments rained down all around him, the reality exactly like his picture of reality. There they came, saw-toothed and sliceful, heavy lumps of granite and narrow shards like spears, but they were all for him, for him and no one else. Invulnerable, he watched the fragments lay themselves to rest all around him in the order that Nordman had ordained.

  Lucio’s Friends

  ACTUALLY, THERE’S NOTHING the matter with him except that he’s so terribly nice. Maybe that’s natural for a big endomorph like Lucio, but it doesn’t seem to me that endless, almost heart-breaking niceness of that kind can be natural for a person who has had so many disappointments. I heard about those indirectly, not from him; he never talks about himself. I really don’t believe I’ve ever heard him make any voluntary statement about anyone he knows or has ever known or been introduced to. It creates an empty space around him.

  Of course we all love Lucio. But it’s an affection that borders on despair and can even cross over into irritation.

  Through his job at the Institute, he meets a great many people, and most of them consider themselves his friends after one or two encounters. That’s not surprising. In every respect, Lucio meets people’s expectations, no, their dearest hopes, for what they will find in a friend. Just the way he talks and listens, the way he looks at you and smiles, seems to promise an unswerving dependability. And, believe me, one can really depend on Lucio. He is unswervingly loyal, interested, and helpful. But there are times when he completely withdraws.

  Let me put that another way. The fact is that friends everywhere are constantly commenting on their other friends. With amusement, and often with love, they talk about each other’s failings and peculiarities, quite simply about what their friends have said and done. A large part of all normal social life consists quite naturally of precisely this. There’s no malice in it. No one would ever tell tales or make remarks in the presence of strangers that would be unthinkable. Anyway, on such occasions, Lucio withdraws. He pulls back into a kind of perplexed silence and looks down at the table. He smiles to show that his silence is not in any way reproachful. Nevertheless, you feel almost if you’d been guilty of a betrayal. And then, when the conversation turns to other topics, he lights up with such gratitude that it’s almost embarrassing.

  Now I don’t want to paint a misleading picture of Lucio. He’s not afraid of having opinions, and he defends them vehemently and happily, maybe not so much to persuade as simply to speak, to form words. His Swedish is excellent, but slow, and his choice of words is somewhat dramatic. Lucio always chooses the prettiest synonym and gives the most quotidian things a kind of melodious exaggeration, which is maybe why we don’t always take him seriously. But as I said, it is only personal matters – remarks about human behaviour – that silence him. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to find things to talk about.

  We see quite a lot of him, and I think we all make it clear how much we like him. I’m always amazed that he has time for so many things and yet never seems to be rushed or tired, and he always seems to have time to talk when you call him.

  Every time I visit him at home, I think of chestnuts, shiny brown and white inside. I filled my pockets with them as a boy. His whole apartment is painted white, with heavy, dark-brown pieces of furniture here and there – chests and straight-backed chairs and tables that are too high and too narrow. Even Lucio’s pictures are dark brown, and I could swear that he constantly polishes all of it with nut oil. We often joke about it – with great affection. Once I looked into his bedroom while he was mixing drinks in the kitchen, and, sure enough, Lucio slept in a big dark, brown bed with four tall, turned bedposts, utterly matrimonial. His eyes are the same dark, polished colour and express a disconcerted gentleness, but oddly enough he’s completely bald. He ought to have long brown hair.

  Lucio greets people quietly and without any kind of excess, and yet he gives everyone to believe that no meeting on earth could have given him greater pleasure. Although Lucio uses a dramatic vocabulary, we realise that it’s pretty much a lexical phenomenon, so we automatically translate to what he really and truly means. And nevertheless he gives the impression that at any moment he might burst into song or throw his arms around you – in other words, go overboard. It makes us nervous and leads us to speak too openly and with larger adjectives than are really called for.

  Lucio is always too cold. His apartment is full of heaters. He’s bought himself a big wolfskin hat and tries to amuse us by pulling down the earflaps and growling. We laugh every time. He often does it at the wrong parties and when the parties are just starting. Lucio drinks practically nothing, perhaps a little wine with dinner. Despite his more or less natural melancholy, Lucio is a cheerful person, and he can get almost boisterous if something really amuses him. Of course we tell him funny stories (though never about sex). It’s such a pleasure to watch his tense, expectant face and his boundless joy at the punch line. “That’s priceless!” he cries. “How can you remember so many jokes?” Lucio never tells anecdotes himself. Come to think of it, he never tells stories of any kind but rather ruminates and comments. His intense attentiveness is less about people than about the things and day-to-day events that surround them. I’m thinking of when the conversation glides into history or antique furniture, politics, religion, or, say, deep-sea fishing or the art of gardening in the eighteenth century, whatever; then he leaps into the discussion with great enthusiasm. But he never brings up topics of that kind. He waits. Lucio reminds me of a dog, waiting alertly in concentrated, patient expectation – and then you throw the stick and the dog runs off in wild joy to bring it back.

  I envy Lucio his incredible curiosity and enthusiasm, which he has managed to retain into middle age. But there are times when I’m embarrassed by his puerile amazement at what goes on in the world. He still can’t get used to the fact that people travel to the moon. “Can you believe it?!” he says, lowering his voice. “They’re walking around up there – on the moon! They bring home rocks!” His face is tight with astonishment and wonder. He leans forwards and touches my knee, and in a rare outburst of intimacy he tells me how he stood on Brunnspark Hill and waited, that cold winter when the Russians sent up their dog Laika into space. “I saw it pass overhead,” he says quietly. “It was terribly cold, and people stood like black tombstones in the snow, one here, one there, waiting, and they all saw it. It was such a tiny light, and it moved so slowly, so high above us, arching past us in a great, long curve. It was a miracle.” He opens his eyes wide and pulls in his lips and stares at me breathlessly as if he had told me some huge secret.

  Or he can say, “Don’t you find it touching that things start growing again every spring? New green leaves come out in the same places as before?”

  Now, don’t misunderstand me. Lucio isn’t really naïve. He’s very smart and can show real critical intelligence. M
aybe it’s just a question of his unusual capacity for astonishment. Sometimes when his telephone rings late in the evening and he looks at the instrument, absently and perplexedly, I could swear that he’s not wondering who could be calling so late but that he’s quite simply amazed at the wonderful, magical fact that a telephone can ring and convey a conversation.

  It occurred to me once that we should take care of Lucio, worry about him. And, at the same time, I felt certain that none of us got as much fun out of life as he did. His childishness, if I may call it that, was completely unconscious, and as a result he wasn’t able to use it to get things or avoid things, and least of all to make an impression, with the result that it was seen and accepted as charm.

  It’s difficult to describe Lucio now, afterwards. One thought that occurs to me is that he never talked about Italy. Why didn’t he? Maybe we should have asked him about Italy.

  Early on, we used to play with Italian expressions, little Italian jokes and profanities, and we’d say Ciao when we saw him, all of it a way of showing affection and respect. But Lucio didn’t like it. He’d smile and go quiet. And sometimes there were long periods when Lucio was melancholy. He didn’t turn off his phone, he welcomed us as usual, and nothing was really different except that he was sort of playing Lucio, if you know what I mean. He was lifeless, absent. He erected a polite façade that resembled friendliness and he tried hard in every way, but without enthusiasm. Lucio was just not Lucio.