The Death of a Beekeeper

by Lars Gustafsson

  And this little, rather blonde, somehow helpless girl appeared to be as suppressed as I was, was presumably just as bitter as I was. Small wonder that I didn’t find her particularly interesting! What I needed were well-adjusted people.

  When I came to Uppsala and registered for the elementary school teachers’ seminar, most of my fellow students had already been there for quite a while. I had been in the military for some time, had had noncommissioned officer’s training with the navy, and by the time I got to the seminar everyone I knew from Västerås was already at the university.

  Margaret came to the seminar a year later.

  I saw her again at a dance. I don’t believe that I intended to ask her to dance, but for some reason I did anyway. And thus I discovered the peculiar sensual warmth she radiated. I danced very close.

  But only once.

  After that I went home with a completely different girl, about whom, by the way, I only recall that she was much taller than I, and I believe I even slept with her.

  Sleeping with Margaret somehow would have seemed banal to me.

  During my studies in Uppsala I bummed around quite a bit. The teachers’ seminar was really not very demanding, I had my only serious difficulties learning to play the organ, those damned pedals weren’t inclined to mind me very well, and when I learned to drive a car some ten years later, the driving instructor complained that I treated the pedals of the automobile as though they were organ pedals. Aside from the pedals, the seminar in Uppsala was mere childishness, child’s play or whatever one says, and I spent most of my time running after girls.

  I don’t know why, I assume it was a kind of restlessness, but I was interested in seduction.

  A somewhat too exalted turn of phrase, certainly . . . but seduction was precisely what mattered to me.

  I wanted to prove that I was real. And one can prove that in only one way: by having an impact on another human being. The stronger the impact, the stronger one’s sense of having proven one’s own reality.

  In those years I had a great need to be seen. And when one succeeds in seducing someone, one also succeeds in being seen.

  Back then there were fabulous dances in Uppsala, especially the Wednesday parties of the Västmanland-Dalarna House were fantastic; a mad throng, the scent of cheap perfume, the girls on one side of the dance hall and the boys on the other. It was a miracle that the heat didn’t melt the lacquer on the portraits of the former honorary chairmen who hung there in full regalia.

  One only needed to take one’s pick. In a peculiarly impersonal way.

  For me, however, the somewhat shy, somewhat reserved girls were the most interesting; those who could be changed in one way or another.

  The girls who trembled a little when one danced with them. Whose bodies tensed a little somehow.

  I believe I took it all pretty mechanically. I mean: I set a chain of events in motion, and this chain of events served exclusively to prove something to me about myself.

  (“Myself”—“I myself”: nowadays I find this expression somewhat stupid. It simply lacks all meaning.

  I can’t precisely explain, however, what I mean.)

  At that time I had terribly little money. Money was worth more than it is today, but on the other hand one also had to make do for a much longer period of time with the student loans which one received, and if one didn’t finish the requirements in time, one was really in bad shape.

  In the beginning there were three of us, Bertil, Lennart, and I, we had rented two large rooms in the Svartbäkken Quarter. But after one semester Bertil and Lennart began to withdraw.

  After all, they both went to the university and gradually found their own circle of friends. But I suppose that wasn’t the only reason. Since both of them were hard-working—Bertil died a few years later, but that’s a different story—since both were hard-working and ambitious, they felt I lured them into the bars too often, and none of us could really afford that.

  I remember that until the latter part of November we went coatless into the bars in order to save the few kronen you usually had to pay the cloakroom attendants.

  Acquaintances who saw me again some fifteen years later would tell me that I had changed a great deal, that I had really calmed down.

  I never quite understood what they meant by that. For my part, I never had the sense of changing.

  But apparently I was considered fairly unreliable and a bit of a rake at that time. I even think there were people who made up wild stories about me.

  What I remember best is the eternal problem with money, the whole misery of constant borrowing here and there; debts which one had to pay back and debts which one could conceivably disregard, and this unpleasant air of rejection that people assumed toward one who had borrowed money once too often without paying it back.

  Toward the end, the last year, it was worst of all. It was a chaotic year. To the present day it is a mystery to me how I could possibly have gotten through my final examinations as well as I did.

  At that time I was friends for a while with a girl named Kerstin. It must have been the spring of 1958. I still think that she was genuinely fond of me, almost loved me, or at least there was something about me which must have fascinated her. But at the same time I think I have never known a human being who was so obviously afraid of me.

  Afraid of what? God knows!

  Much later I thought about it and pieced together all kinds of subtle explanations, I read her letters and saw her girlishly sensitive analyses of my soul (egotist, egocentric, unable to have a relationship with another human being, etc.), but eventually I came to a completely different conclusion: the reasons had to be social ones.

  She came from a quite nice physician’s family in Lidingö, not one of the tremendously successful ones, but all the same a very “cultivated” parental home, and studied for a Master of Philosophy in literary history and Nordic languages.

  It was very clear that I could not offer her any kind of future.

  She found me attractive, but from the social point of view I was a pretty dubious character.

  I believe other people regarded me as more of a failure than I did.

  One Sunday morning when I woke up at her place, we got into an argument, I don’t remember anymore what it was about, it was a brilliant Sunday morning. The apartment was in the Östra Ågatan, across from the castle, and this castle always had a unique beauty in the morning light. I went to the apartment door to get the Dagens Nyheter, Sunday mornings it usually came through the mail slot at this hour, it was, by the way, just that time in spring when the newspapers began to advertise bathing suits; I remember that because I noted ads for bathing suits all over the paper while I walked back, but then we continued this argument, and she said something, I can’t for the life of me remember what it was, but it prompted me to get up and leave.

  That is a terrible story. I think a part of my life ended with it.

  (The remaining portion is approaching its end this winter.)

  I was very desperate.

  Three weeks later, several days before the end of April, I ran into Margaret. I hadn’t seen her for a long time . . .

  (The Yellow Book II:1)

  Sudden thaw, a long walk with the dog, the pain well under control in the last few days, mainly toward four or five o’clock in the morning, but not so bad that I can’t fall asleep again.

  I must have been a bit distracted for several days, because in the meantime the entire landscape has changed. A moist fog everywhere, along the path there is a strong smell of earth and decaying birch trunks, and incomprehensibly a flock of crows, with really big crows, which otherwise like to stay down by the railroad viaduct on country road 251, have come here to the edge of the woods. They sit down there in the trees next to the fence, and all morning long I hear their raucous voices. It is also getting light somewhat earlier already. I wonder what summer will be like this year? Wet and cool like the last one or perhaps one of those very hot ones?

  I al
so wonder frequently whether I will be allowed to find out. In any case the boat must get a good caulking. Last fall it leaked in the stern like a sieve. It was tied up at the boat dock for a ridiculously long time, hammering against it right up to the beginning of the fall storms. At that time I still felt pretty good, but apparently I was not particularly enterprising last fall.

  . . . I thought again about Margaret. In this fog or in this springlike vapor, as one might perhaps say, I miss her again somehow. Her careful steps on the rug early in the morning—she always got up first and made coffee—her habit of laying the newspaper in very orderly and careful fashion on the newspaper pile in the cupboard under the sink before I had an opportunity to read it, her almost unbearable habit of beginning to work about ten or ten-thirty at night. It is such things which one remembers.

  And now, especially when the pains begin, I miss her very much.

  At the same time it is very clear that the whole affair was utterly impossible. It is a sheer wonder that it lasted as long as it did.

  Everything, our whole life together, was based on one very simple principle, on one agreement:

  Looking at one another was forbidden. I mean, really looking at one another.

  It is a quite complicated game to maintain such an agreement for a period of twelve or thirteen years and not even let the mask fall when one is furious or very unhappy; as if one were locked up with someone for a long time in a very small room under the condition that one’s back be perpetually turned on the other.

  Naturally one has to ask oneself what is behind such an agreement.

  I believe it is pain. A kind of primeval pain which one carries around with one from childhood on and which one dare not reveal at any price. Much more important than the presence of the pain is keeping it hidden.

  But why was it so important then to hide it?

  Sometimes we worked at the same school, sometimes at different ones. It went best when we saw each other during the day, too. When one was gone the whole day and we saw each other for the first time in the evening, there would always be a critical moment. This always happened some time after dinner, when the first report of the day’s events was concluded, shortly after coffee, right before the television newscast, there was a kind of ebb tide, the water withdrew, the rocks became visible.

  (The Blue Book II:2)

  She was fairly small, always moved lightly, almost skipping, and spoke with a pleasant, soft voice. She had a lovely, a very stimulating curiosity about people, about the world, she read many books, it was fun to talk with her. She was seriously interested in almost everything that crossed her path, except perhaps in me.

  That last spring in Uppsala had already become early summer. There were not very many people in the city anymore, I had stayed there because I had gotten a job as a Swedish teacher for foreign students and had moved into the center of the city into a room in Bäiverns Gränd, which a friend who was traveling over the summer was letting me use.

  She came with some girlfriend and sat down on the terrace of this small café, right next to the cathedral, which usually puts out a few tables, its name I believe was Cathedral Cellar. I can still remember the headlines on the newspaper placards in the little tobacco shop across the way, they dealt with a new, complicated phase in the ongoing argument about pension reform which, at that time, at the close of the fifties, was raging strongest. I remember that so particularly because I kept looking at the headlines while we were speaking with one another.

  Her friend was a thin, angular little girl, very narrow face, glasses.

  A copy of Margaret, one could say. She didn’t say much, but I remember that I was continually comparing the two, as if this comparison were somehow important. And without knowing precisely what I really wanted to achieve in doing so.

  Everything appeared clear from the outset, as if it had been arranged for years. We sat there and talked with one another, by the way, about this part of the country here, sat there and recognized ourselves in each other. There was no place, no lake, no steelworks ruins, no discontinued old railway line in this neighborhood which she did not know. She had spent her summer vacation in northern Västmanland since she was a little girl.

  I sat there in the light of the summer evening, and recognized the landscape through her.

  I believe that’s the way it started.

  She has always been what one calls a really lovely girl, there was nothing to complain about in her appearance. (Her eyes have become more and more interesting with the years.)

  For that reason it is utterly incomprehensible to me why I was always a little embarrassed and felt myself exposed when I was going somewhere with her in the street and met an acquaintance. Was it simply the fact that we revealed our relationship which embarrassed me?

  (The Yellow Book II:2)

  It was a rather quiet life. For years it was truly quiet, nothing more, nothing less, and very idyllic. We lived here and there in Västmanland, were employed by various schools as teachers, decorated the old apartments that came with the job until they became really livable, with Margaret’s handwoven rugs and my cabinets and all the things that I had built, largely on my own, in various vocational shops.

  Maybe we moved a bit too frequently, and we always stayed out in the country—that was something like a lifestyle; we, after all, both had some kind of (very vague) attitude of protest against the society around us. A protest of vegetable gardeners, so to speak, a protest against industrialized society, against . . .

  I can’t remember that very well anymore. It is peculiar, but now the distance from that period increases every day: entirely different things come into the foreground, the song of a blackbird in front of the window shortly after I have woken up and, somewhat further away, the crows in the trees, a water drop on a twig in the middle of the day after the thaw has begun. All that appears in a different light now, and everything which lies behind me I experience as insignificant.

  She wove constantly; when we moved the biggest problem was always taking that loom apart and putting it back together. In the last apartment which we had together it reached almost up to the ceiling. She produced her own textile colors out of old plant dyes.

  In Uppsala I had, after all, led a fairly wild life with girls and bars and debts. This new organic lifestyle in the country was one way of breaking with that permanently.

  Certainly a romantic or perhaps anarchistic tendency played a role in this. We both were disgusted with bureaucracy, with the centralization of this country, with the massive resettlement of human beings from their natural environment to impersonal, barracklike suburbs in large cities. We were disgusted by the school boards, which could not even manage to use the existing funds to make the schoolyards a bit more pleasant and friendly but instead spent the money on ostentatious sculptures. Through entire breakfasts we complained bitterly about the annexation of communities, about the closing of schools in sparsely settled areas, about the clear cutting of forests which made it quite evident that the entire area was being used like a warehouse for raw material, like a pantry one empties without restocking.

  I mean: those were realities, those were things which meant something to us on a very practical, tangible level, perhaps there was also a bit of snobbishness in it, a feeling of being superior, of knowing better the significance of these events.

  But there was something more: it gave us a kind of inner solidarity. When one knows everything better than the others, it is easy to stick together.

  And we did stick together: in an unsentimental, not particularly sensual, but comfortable and good way. We experienced one another as two outsiders who had found one another and for whom individualism itself offered a common denominator; we were no longer outsiders because we had one another.

  The fact that Margaret and I stuck together was a way of saying:

  We begin again. We never give up.

  She was the youngest daughter of an unbelievably tyrannical senior physician’s family from Falun. All h
er brothers were officers in the reserve, Swedish masters of the military pentathlon, notaries, and God knows what else. I did not see them very often but had the impression that they viewed me with open contempt. One of them even asked me once whether one could really make a living as a grade school teacher—at that time the term “grade school teacher” was still used. We were totally incomprehensible to one another.

  The father—he is, by the way, still alive I believe—was a horrible monster, feared by his family, by the nurses, by the subordinate doctors and assistants, known in the whole area for his medical pronouncements, which above all asserted that girls should wear woolen stockings in the winter, that abortion reduced the military strength of the country, and that the population was threatening to sink into an abyss of venereal disease and alcoholism among the young.

  The youngest daughter had somehow gotten out of the clutches of this household. I have the impression that she spent the greater part of her youth making herself useful in the kitchen. In deathly fear of her father, suppressed by her brothers, pale, thin, and freckled, she had found her way to books, to a world outside of this twelve-room villa on the outskirts of Falun. I believe the path led through modern lyrics, which she began to read with curiosity, because once during lunch there had been some deprecating talk about them, and through the sarcastically quoted lines from Ekelöf and Lindegren she discovered that this somehow was about her:

  “I seek a gold which eclipses all gold.”

  I believe she matured very late. She was about to be sent to a course in housekeeping when, for the first time in her life, she became really furious, stood up for herself, obtained a room in Uppsala, and registered at the university.

  It was such an indescribably Swedish bourgeois family. Ten years later I could still hear traces of it in her speech.

  This enormous, disdainful repugnance for everything which looked like personal intellectual work, this inimical attitude toward philosophy. “Education” consisted of being able to pronounce French words correctly. On the other hand it was considered “half-educated” to be interested in Marx, Kierkegaard, or Freud. That was acting like a grade school teacher.