Some of this was still present in her, in her cautious repugnance for everything that had the least appearance of “brooding.”
I remember that I once actually argued with her about that to the point of being unable to talk to her at all for several days afterward. It was during a train trip to Copenhagen. (Sometimes we took such trips during our vacations.)
It began when I sketched out a thought which had been suggested to me by my reading.
—What if, now, I said, the word “I” were completely devoid of meaning? After all, the word “I” is used in everyday speech in precisely the same manner as the words “here” and “now.” All people have the right to call themselves “I” and at the same time only one single person has that right, namely the one person speaking at that moment.
No one would assert that “here” or “there” means something special, that it means something exists behind these concepts. Why should we then imagine we have an “I”?
It thinks in us. It feels. It talks. That is all. Or: It is thinking here, I said, and pressed my forefinger against my forehead.
—If you allow yourself to start brooding like that, you’ll go crazy yet, she said.
(The Yellow Book II:8)
What a wonderful morning. Deep in my sleep, by the way, I was dreaming that a good-natured, nonetheless basically terribly dangerous elephant was chasing me across an endless field—but no pain tonight—deep in my sleep I felt that a tremendous blue high-pressure area had arrived. It lay over the whole region like a giant bubble when I got up at seven o’clock in the morning, and up to now not a single cloud has appeared, although it is afternoon already.
That is very unusual for March.
This morning I checked through all of the beehives already and filled up the sugar solution. As a matter of fact only one population froze. It is, however, one which had never demonstrated much spirit, I almost would have said. I have never really understood them. They built only about every second comb, and they did that in a hesitant, almost coquettish fashion, as if they wanted to say that they saw through these artificial wax combs, but they could nonetheless build a little bit if only to show that they at least had a command of geometry.
Coquettish beasts! I’m happy they froze. In the summer they would surely have been overcome with swarming fever, and then they would have destroyed themselves anyway. The idea of permanent revolution, so to speak.
Marengo, Austerlitz, Leipzig . . . I know few things which give rise to a Napoleonic complex to the same extent as does beekeeping. One can have all the experiences of a Napoleon without being cruel to horses and without seeing one single human being die.
Instead one sees a whole bunch of bees die.
Things could have continued like that for an indefinite period of time: it was good, a harmony prevailed in the whole affair, a harmony at the cost of something, but nonetheless a harmony, yes, it could have continued like that.
If something had not begun to happen toward the end of the sixties. It came so unexpectedly that I virtually needed years in order to recognize what had happened. I was confronted with a radically new, completely unexpected event: love.
Naturally it took a catastrophic course, I had known that right from the beginning, but no catastrophe could actually frighten me. When I look back on how I acted, it truly looks as though I had wanted a catastrophe the whole time. It can hardly be interpreted any other way.
It is an unbelievably funny story, because it contains so very many improbable and peculiar chance occurrences.
I sometimes participated in these national meetings of the field biologists in Stockholm. And as I had been vice chairman for several years, I had my way paid. So I used to stay on overnight in the Malmen Hotel and go to a concert or an opera in the evening. That was a small secret pleasure, and there really was nothing more to it.
Once, however, when we had such a meeting in October of 1969, I decided not to stay overnight, but to take the last train home. I really can’t remember why.
I had checked my briefcase with the cloakroom attendant at the opera, left in the last intermission, and got to the train station just in time to get on the train which leaves at ten-forty for Oslo via Hallsberg and Västerås and which is usually full of American tourists traveling to Norway as well as a large number of more or less sober people, who get off at Enköping and Västerås. Later on it really becomes more and more a night train.
I go into an almost completely full compartment and sit down. A fellow reeking of schnapps is sleeping to the left of me, one of those ugly camel’s-hair coats pulled over his face, across from me several small, thin girls are sitting, possibly college students, and to the right of me in the window seat a fairly large blonde lady in her late thirties or early forties, apparently unmarried, who would have been ugly if it had not been for her wonderfully beautiful head.
Strangely enough, I began to talk with her, having barely come in, without actually looking up from the book which I had taken out of my briefcase, began to talk about how uncomfortable the cars in this train were, about train schedules, about the sleeping cars to Oslo and heaven knows what all—and the peculiar thing is that I didn’t look up one single time. I spoke animatedly with her, continuing to read all the while in my book.
Only when we stopped in Kungsängen, and I wanted to step out of the compartment to check where we actually were, did I look at her.
She—how shall I say it—she radiated motherliness. Viewed externally there was nothing special about her, she was a bit chubby, but when I discovered her eyes, something peculiar . . . must have happened. These eyes wanted something from me, they made me more real, it had something to do with . . . (two lines crossed out with ink).
And then in Enköping, when I found out that at that hour there is no longer any connection to Tillberga and hesitated only a fraction of a second before I accepted her amazingly swift and friendly offer to take me there in her car in spite of the late hour—she was an assistant doctor in the Enköping hospital and thus used to odd hours—and the equally swift decision not to leave Enköping and then kisses, caresses, (a banal story, no, not a banal one at all), and the feeling of having been overwhelmed by something completely strange, to actually change, and this strange experience of sudden quiet.
As if one had come home.
Whether you believe me or not, an entire spring passed by before I saw her again, although we lived only sixty or seventy kilometers from one another. In this circumstance there was a kind of extravagance or a feeling of extravagant wealth.
Instead we would telephone one another late in the evening and talk about the events of the day. We wrote letters, very matter-of-fact, short letters containing little jokes.
Soon I knew the names of all the doctors and nurses and even the names of the most interesting patients on her ward in the Enköping hospital, and she knew pretty much everything about what was going on at my home. At my home nothing much was going on.
I was leading something like a double life, since I was so close to another life, which existed at a different place and in different surroundings, and perhaps I had needed precisely such a double life all along without knowing it.
(Always did have the suspicion that all solutions lie somewhere between my life and a different life.)
Perhaps the whole business could have settled itself and died down. We had slept once with one another, that was all right. Such things do happen, to some people they happen frequently, to others less frequently. We had slept once with one another, it had been very lovely, it had calmed me; I do not exclude the possibility that she at least originally did it with the intent of truly calming me. And things could have stayed that way.
But those eyes reminded me of something. They very simply awakened something in me.
They awakened the feeling in me that there was something tremendously important which I had always neglected up to then. (A banal story, no, not a banal one at all.) I discovered something in me which I had known
nothing of. And I experienced that like a new beginning, it gave a new meaning to everything.
Naturally I made a really interesting mistake: I told Margaret about this affair.
(One could say, of course, that in time this was practically unavoidable, because there was no very plausible explanation for my sitting at the telephone every other evening for half an hour speaking between long pauses softly and at great length with someone who simply could not have been among our usual acquaintances.)
I had anticipated all kinds of reactions except the one that she would be glad. But that is exactly what happened. She was happy and relieved, as if someone had finally taken a much too great responsibility from her.
—Why don’t you invite her over here, she said, meaning Ann. She would surely like to know how things look up here. She could come by sometime this summer, couldn’t she? Does she have a car?
Naturally that was the beginning of the end, although at the time I didn’t realize it.
I invited her for a Sunday in June. It was an unusually beautiful Sunday in June. I picked Ann up at the train station.
—The lake is very beautiful, she said. I had no idea that it was so large.
—I’m happy to see you again, I said.
—I don’t know. I feel somewhat insecure.
—Why must people always act as if they were in novels, I said.
—Yes, presumably you’re quite right, she said.
It was a very peculiar scene, seeing these two women together, Margaret small and thin, cool, Ann concerned and in a motherly way serious, as if she had come to see a patient whom she had to take care of. They knew nothing of one another, I was the only element which connected them.
In the first two minutes they appeared to be somewhat embarrassed in front of one another. This isn’t going to work, I thought. It’s going to be a terrible afternoon, I hope we can just get it behind us quickly. It is an insane undertaking that I have gotten into here.
As I said earlier: it was a radiantly beautiful Sunday morning in June 1970. All around us lay Västmanland. From a forest fire on one of the blue wooded mountain ridges in the north a faint, very aromatic scent of fire smoke wafted toward us. (Forest fires have the characteristic of having an extremely penetrating, unpleasant odor from close up, and at the distance of several kilometers an aromatic, pleasant one.)
Soft little gusts were moving across big Lake Åmänningen, wrinkling the water. In the northwest the pithead gears of shut-down mines were rusting away; the iron mines around Norberg haven’t been profitable since the freight for African ore became cheaper. To the north a red cloud of smoke rose from a tapping at the Trum melsberg steelworks. From the canal and from the whole chain of lakes to the south came the sound of motorboats traveling back and forth on the many lakes.
It was the time of year during which the whole area suddenly becomes alive and populated. Whoever has experienced the winter quiet cannot believe that this is the same place. In winter the closest neighbor is the distant blinking light of a window six kilometers further away, on the other side of the lake.
To the south, the belt of damper and damper, swampier and swampier woods which divided us from the valley of Lake Mälar, the church of Ramnäs with its characteristic bulbous steeple, Ramnäs, where my poor alcoholic Uncle Knutte would always return after once again having tried to pedal through the woods in a thundershower to reach the liquor store in Västerås, the plain which at the black, quiet little river Kolbäcksån ultimately opens in the direction of Sörstafors and Kolbäck, the region in which my unhappy romantic Aunt Clara traveled around during one notable fall shortly after the Second World War with an old, blind, bearded vagabond, with whom she had fallen head over heels in love—she died of pneumonia shortly afterwards, the poor thing. We are a strange family. We do strange things.
And there I was standing, introducing my wife to a lady who apparently was the great love of my life.
They went intently along the garden paths looking at the flower beds. (At that time, in the year 1970, this house was a vacation cottage.)
—Watch out for the bees, I said. They are having a restless period right now. They are pretty aggressive.
They only laughed.
The garden is very small really. One doesn’t need long to look at it. They were taking their time.
They came back, giggling and a little exhilarated. They had found one another.
Bees and bumblebees were humming around, the church bells were ringing over in Väster Våla, it was, as has been said before, a truly wonderful summer day.
—Utopia, I thought. Utopia has become reality. I always suspected it. Nothing really keeps us from living outside the normal rules of life. Why didn’t I realize this long ago!
Then there followed a fairly strange period. I think it changed us very much, me, Ann, but most of all Margaret.
I had never really realized that she needed a mother.
(The Yellow Book II:10)
Everybody probably knows from their own experience the uncomfortable feeling one has at a train station. One wants to say goodbye to somebody. The person from whom one wants to take leave has already gotten on the train, but the train simply does not start up. There one stands now, one on the platform, the other behind the window, both trying to talk with one another, but suddenly there is not another word to say.
Naturally that has to do with the fact that we are no longer permitted to experience what we want. The situation dictates a feeling. And who has not experienced this tremendous relief when the train finally leaves the station?
Or at burials? When someone dies, gets sick, when there are disappointments, very definite feelings are expected of us. In every situation except for the most everyday, most neutral ones, a pressure is exerted as to how we are to behave, how we are to feel. And when one looks at the matter a little more closely, one discovers not infrequently that novels, films, and theater pieces which one has seen or read somewhere have dictated these roles for us.
When reality confronts us with unusual situations (for example, when an anticipated rivalry doesn’t materialize and instead there is a love which excludes us), we first reach for these emotional stereotypes common to novels.
They don’t give us much footing. They make us lonelier than before, and head over heels we fall out into reality.
(The Blue Book II:5)
It took me a rather long time during that strange summer of 1970 to realize how Ann was being taken away from me.
(And I think that in doing so they took from me my last chance for achieving independence, for achieving a clarity about myself and my own dimensions, for which I had been destined all my life, toward which everything had pointed.
What the two women succeeded in blocking was an eruption of reality, of personality.)
I imagine the matter this way:
The fact that I was married released in Ann a whole complex of guilt feelings. They did not square with the fact that she loved me just as much as I her. At the same time she was oriented by her whole upbringing and all her ideals to see guilt feelings as harmful, as evil.
She turned them into “sympathetic feelings” for Margaret. Margaret for her part immediately saw her opportunity, and together they turned me into something irresponsible, into a child upon which one couldn’t really rely.
They led me around by the nose, because this triad of various motherly and sisterly relationships created such a warmth, such a peace as I had never experienced, neither before that time nor afterward.
Like the warmth of a bird’s nest.
(The Blue Book II:6)
3. A Childhood
Since the pains got serious, something peculiar has been happening:
Completely different stages in life, completely different memories have taken on the greatest importance for me.
Marriage, professional life, oh God! All that is vanishing as if it were a trifle, a short episode, everything which just a short time ago would fill the whole world an
d would keep me awake during the night sometimes with melancholy speculations. All that is becoming an episode in a much more important story in which, up to this point, my childhood is the only really significant chapter.
I don’t quite understand why that is so. Childhood is, though, a lonely, an egocentric age, and perhaps pain is making me lonely again and egocentric like a child.
This constant concern with an indefinite, dangerous secret in one’s own body, this feeling that some dramatic change is taking place, without one’s being able to have any clarity about what it really is, in a perverse fashion all that reminds me of prepuberty. I even recognize this gentle feeling of shame again.
When I burnt this damned letter I somehow took the whole matter upon myself. I will have to fight alone, and I will have my own death.
But still I don’t believe in it. It is very possible that by April everything will have changed. If it’s kidney stones, they are going to be passed sooner or later. If it’s an infection, then it may certainly fade away as soon as the weather gets somewhat warmer and friendlier.
I simply feel much too vital to be dying. I imagine death to be something much more foggy, much feebler.
A dying person can’t take long walks with the dog in between attacks of pain.
Or is this perhaps a new kind of dying which I’m inventing?
To fill the measure of misfortune, the outer world has begun to announce itself for the first time in months.
The chief of the regional tax administration, Söderkvist, the carpenter, called, very friendly and amenable, by the way, in order to point out to me that a penalty will be due if I do not submit my tax statement. My cousin and his family, the Manngårdhs, want to stop by at Easter on their way to Sälen, stay overnight here, and “have a look around,” as they say.
The Death of a Beekeeper Page 4
