The Death of a Beekeeper

by Lars Gustafsson

  That could get out of hand.

  I told Söderkvist that I wasn’t feeling too well at the moment. He promised to stop by one of the next evenings in order to help me.

  It really is, as he said on the telephone, not a particularly difficult tax statement. We will certainly get it done in less than an hour.

  “To fill the measure of misfortune”—such phrases take me back instantaneously to my childhood. That period reverberated with such phrases.

  “To fill the measure of misfortune” means naturally that something extra has been added to the misfortune. There is so much misfortune that it threatens to overflow.

  TO FILL THE MEASURE OF MISFORTUNE—that was one of the things my mother would say.

  Aunt Svea would have expressed it in a completely different way. She would have said: IT CAN HAPPEN THAT ONE GETS PREGNANT WITH A NIGGER BABY.

  THE DEVIL HAS A HAND IN THAT GAME—Papa.

  WHY DON’T YOU KISS MY ASS—Uncle Stig.

  DEVIL’S BLOOD AND THE TEARS OF THE UNBORN

  CURSES AND DAMNATION

  OH NO, HE BIT GRANDPA IN THE LEG

  I see her in the summer in the country at the breakfast table, usually there are several relatives there WHO HAVE INTRUDED. Uncle Knutte, a bit bald-headed, with wobbling, quivering jowls, always somewhat sweaty at breakfast as if he really couldn’t stand it, always very quiet, apart. Uncle Stig with a short, square-cut beard and gold-rimmed glasses speaks only of metal alloys and the most recent successes of Russian technology in the Korean War. Of tanks, which in spite of their thin armor stand up to American rocket bombs. Of the possibility of utilizing the warmth from the earth’s core when fossil fuels begin to play out. Aunt Svea, tall, with crimson cheeks and rough hands, which feel like sandpaper when she pats one’s face, tells fantastic stories of the restaurant kitchens of the crisis period: of thin, bluish fox carcasses with their paws hacked off, which are delivered very discreetly at seven o’clock in the morning at the back entrance by the kitchen door, of the heavy pan with the farmers’ breakfast, which is handed around until very slowly a thick, gray layer of solid fat builds up on its surface, and of the drunken lumber merchant who drops one of his suspenders into the toilet and then, in an orderly fashion, puts it back on over his elegant black-market nylon shirt without noticing a thing and then has to be taken home discreetly in a taxi.

  Aunt Clara—no, she is not there anymore. Grandma Emma was never along, never belonged to that group, was not even a real grandmother, but only an adoptive grandmother and died when I was three years old. I only know of her from the things people say. (How in the world did I happen to think of her—something is happening to my memory, something strange that I would not have thought possible, things begin to crop up in it, things I would never have thought could even be there. For several days a memory has been haunting me which must go back to the time before my third birthday; with Grandma Emma, who is holding me by the hand, I am walking under colossally tall green trees on the Djäkne berg in Västeras, the shadows of foliage flutter on the ground in maelstroms, yes, really in maelstroms. And the fact that all this is happening at an incredibly early time is substantiated only by the tremendous height of the park benches.)

  ANOTHER

  This expression is one of the most peculiar, bizarre ways of saying “I” in the Swedish language. It is colloquial speech, but much more interesting than the colloquialism is, naturally, the philosophy behind it. ANOTHER—that is, a fencer who springs aside at the last moment and lets the sword of the opponent pierce empty air where someone just stood.

  I cannot imagine a stranger, more ghostly language than one in which it is possible to speak of oneself as if one were someone else.

  —“ANOTHER” HAD TO GET HIMSELF THROUGH ON HIS OWN MOST OF THE TIME, YOU KNOW.

  That means: you didn’t do very much to help me, you actually have a lot to do with my problems, it’s not certain at all that without you I would even have had these problems. Therefore, you owe me a LARGE DEBT OF GRATITUDE.

  —EVERYONE IS THE MASTER OF HIS OWN DESTINY (Uncle Stig thunders from the other end of the table).

  That means: it is your own fault that you are half an alcoholic.

  TO FILL THE MEASURE OF MISFORTUNE.

  It is strange, but however often I rummage around in my memories of all the conversations which I heard in my childhood, not a one occurs to me in which a single participant was excluded from playing out more or less subtle guilt feelings. These feelings of guilt were comparable to the ball in a tennis game.

  Without these guilt feelings their relationships would have ossified, rigid like petrified statues. There would have been no driving force, no motivation anymore.

  The feeling of guilt was the tensed spring in the rachet, the reply the little pawl which released it.

  These guilt feelings encompassed a huge, a truly church-organlike register, beginning with

  WILL YOU PLEASE PASS ME THE SALT

  in the highest register, over

  IT WOULD BE VERY NICE IF YOU WOULD LEAVE A LITTLE BIT OF THE SUGAR

  somewhere between the sesquialtera and the two

  footed pipe flute, down to the growling, deep, thirty-two foot basses like

  SINCE I SACRIFICED EVERYTHING FOR YOU

  or

  IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR YOU, WE WOULD HAVE GOTTEN A DIVORCE AFTER THE FIRST YEAR

  These last, extremely deep voices naturally were used only to achieve very special effects. For church holidays, so to speak.

  What kind of strange fugues, toccatas, ricercari, passacaglias they could play on this peculiar organ of guilt, what depths of small peasant fear did they conjure up, of infamous exchanges of dirty linen. It took them only one single run over the keyboard to have somebody hanging wriggling in the net.

  DO YOU KNOW, PAPA ALWAYS LOVED ME THE BEST OF ALL THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS

  DO YOU KNOW, STIG ALWAYS WAS MAMA’S FAVORITE, HE WAS SUCH A HARDWORKING LITTLE BOY

  They hadn’t had easy lives, not particularly dramatic, and certainly not tragic (it was, after all, in the forties, during which a great many real tragedies were unleashed in the world; one must maintain some sense of proportion), but God knows nothing had ever happened to them for which they could not somehow blame one another. And that gave them a marvelous opportunity of making things unpleasant for one another, to maneuver one another into the desired positions.

  The lower middle class in Sweden lives from guilt and self-denigration, they only know one form of rhetoric, namely the complaint.

  RELEASE FINALLY YOUR SUFFERING HUMANITY

  BUT FIRST OF ALL ME, BECAUSE I HAVE SUFFERED THE MOST

  One only needs to go a few kilometers on the commuter train to see how it is. If they don’t have any other reason for complaining, they complain about their cursed illnesses, their aching knees, their gallstones and stomach ulcers, their swollen varicose veins, their hiccups and their heartburn, their diarrhea and their stone-hard turds clattering into the chamber pots and at the same time they always imagine somebody will be concerned about them, if only they complain. THESE DAMNED IDIOTS

  Right now, for example, I feel a pulsing pain, which in a few minutes is going to keep me from finishing these sentences. It begins pretty far down somewhere in the right calf, where it feels something like liquid metal, or like something which has hooked into the musculature, a golden wire one could perhaps say. Then it radiates to the right loin, sends, along the back of the leg, a whole bundle of white radiating gold wires to the navel and the hip, and a fan of this radiating gold extends up to the diaphragm. When I lie down, it hurts twice as much; when I remain seated, it wanders up to the back, it doesn’t always maintain the same pitch, the frequencies, the decibel count of this white radiating gold changes constantly, they create chords, very clean, clear chords, until they suddenly get tangled somehow and become cutting.

  But, dammit, I do not blame anybody for that! Nobody!

  Much better for the past three days.
There is still a little pain, that’s all.

  Funny, yesterday I made two friends. That hasn’t happened to me in a long time.

  One’s called Uffe, the other Jonny. Uffe is twelve years old, Jonny is going to be twelve soon.

  Uffe is from Skinnskatteberg and Jonny from Borgå in Finland. Just as I went outside to look for the mail, there they were in front of the door, almost exactly alike in their hooded blue windbreakers, a little freckled, longhaired like horses.

  I think they live in this lumberjack community up there near Sörby; their parents moved there last fall. They attend the Trummelsberg Central School, but naturally they had no idea that I once was a teacher there.

  They were looking for some kind of adventure, after school I hope, but it is not to be ruled out that with the lovely weather they had simply skipped a day and then got thirsty and wanted to have a drink of water.

  But I assume that more than anything else they knocked out of pure curiosity. They simply wanted to know what kind of a strange person it is who lives in the little house behind a lot of bushes and the long row of green beehives.

  —Come in, I said.

  They were a bit shy. I told them something about the bees, but that didn’t seem to interest them particularly.

  Then we talked for a time about their parents: apparently their fathers have been hired on for some of the big clearings which, I understand, are now getting under way.

  They didn’t have a lot to say about school; no, eating in the cafeteria is more pleasant than in their previous schools, they said, because here the trays aren’t made of metal, and for that reason there’s not such a fantastic amount of noise. One of them wanted to learn how to play ice hockey, the other was interested in basketball.

  Little by little they thawed out in the warmth of my electric heater and cautiously began to play around with the dog. Jonny’s socks were completely wet, he probably had holes in his boots (it is an absolute mystery to me anyway how he can run around at this time of year in rubber boots), and I suggested that I could let him use a pair of my old wool socks or that I could give them to him. A bit hesitantly he accepted the offer and opened his school bag in order to put in his own wet ones (I had wrapped them for him in a piece of newspaper).

  Thus I discovered that he was dragging around a tremendous number of pulp digests, all of them pretty much read to pieces. I asked him if I could take a look at them; it was a surprisingly large bundle for such a small school bag, all of them horror magazines of the worst sort: THE GRAVE PERSON, KUNG FU, ICE COLD THRILLERS, THE FANTASTIC FOUR and the like.

  We leafed around in them together. It was really interesting.

  —Why do you read this kind of thing?

  They couldn’t explain that.

  I almost think I could explain it. It is the obscure, droning fear of prepuberty, which has to focus itself somewhere. It seeks points for crystallization. One could almost call it the horror phase. Thus we sat there with the clock ticking away and talked about ghosts and Danish bog corpses and about the possible existence of terrible monsters on strange planets, until the dog began to yowl because he had to go pee badly and I noticed that I had missed my usual mealtime.

  They were very happy, I think. Before they went, they promised to come back soon. And I promised them that by that time I would make up a much better horror story for them than these pathetic commercial pulps could offer.

  These little fellows have made me perk up somehow. They have reminded me of myself. Also, I am beginning to ask myself whether it was a premature decision to give up teaching. But first of all it’s not particularly amusing to get up every winter morning at six o’clock and try to start the car, and second it is rather late to be thinking about that now.

  (The Yellow Book III:1–4)

  The Great Organ on the Island Og

  Up to now the following has taken place: the fraternal order on the mainland of Tinth has sent Dick Roger in a boat to the Islands of Fog. These islands have been under the control of the evil magician Emperor Ming for over a year, although everyone had thought that he perished in flames and smoke when, at the end of the last story, his black tower hurtled into a hole in the universe which he himself had created. Recently ships have disappeared in the straits of Tinth, a thick, unnatural fog envelops the islands, and the fraternal order fears that the Grand Master’s niece, the beautiful Diana Din, who but a short time before had been kidnapped by several fearsome, black-clad men in leather masks, is possibly being held prisoner there.

  On one of the most distant islands Dick Roger comes upon two Finnish sailors, both frightened to death, whose becalmed ship was suddenly whirled in the air by a peculiar cyclone. He gives them food and dry socks. The sailors have terrible things to relate.

  Ming maintains his occupation of the islands through the help of his inhuman henchmen, who, according to the reports of all refugees, are invincible and possess supernatural powers; probably they are demons. The islands themselves are enveloped in a magical fog.

  Presumably Ming keeps Diana Din imprisoned in his subterranean caverns, where he is working on his newest horrifying invention: a giant organ, which with its peculiar high-frequency sounds can influence the psyche of human beings and which by means of electromagnetic oscillations can cause them to experience pain even at great distances.

  In a little house on a small rock island just off the coast Dick Roger and his companions find a strange white-bearded old man named Sigismund, who maintains that he possesses an infallible cure for the terrible effects of the giant organ.

  The cure involves a magical snake, and the old man stubbornly insists that they must take it along in a clay jug.

  After a terrible storm the seafarers reach the foggy coast of OG.

  Although it had to be well into the forenoon, a deep darkness enveloped everything. Between the veils of fog which were moving back and forth restlessly as if they were living beings, the high black cliffs of the coast appeared. Above their crest, an endless stream of clouds was passing low and quickly—like an army, thought Dick, an army of restless spirits.

  The breakers were getting smaller now. The storm, which had raged so violently during the night, was being replaced by a gentle breeze.

  He looked back for a brief moment. The exhausted sailors in their ragged and torn leather jackets were unloading the rest of the provisions and lowering the sails from the ship, which quite obviously would not endure the stress of the storm much longer.

  The only one who gave the impression of being completely calm was Sigismund; with his clay jug and his rug he had sat down on a spot of dry sand very near the black, steep shore cliffs. The place, the time, and the situation didn’t seem to disturb him any more than if he had been taking a lovely Sunday afternoon walk.

  At this moment he pulled out a beautiful silver flute from a hidden fold of the torn coatlike garment which he wore. He polished the flute carefully on the arm of the garment, until even in this strange November twilight it glowed with a peculiar illumination.

  Apparently he had opened the top of the clay jug, which, strangely enough, had not been broken in the rough landing. He put the flute to his lips. A strange wailing melody sounded through the howling of the wind.

  —He is playing for the snake, thought Dick.

  The two Finnish sailors, yes, they had said only the moment before the precipitous landing that they were really Finnish sailors who had been left stranded several years ago in this part of the country after a shipwreck, were gathering wood for a fire.

  —I’m wondering whether that’s smart, said Dick and pointed to the wood. Someone could see it very clearly through the fog.

  The Finnish sailors nodded thoughtfully. The head of the snake now appeared over the top of the clay jug. It was weaving back and forth.

  —The snake is dancing, Dick said, more to himself than to the others, Yes, it’s really dancing!

  At the same moment he felt a cutting, knifing pain. It originated from a point in his ri
ght thigh. Dick looked around quickly. He saw how all around him the others, too, were bent up in pain. One of the Finnish sailors, apparently in convulsions, was writhing on the ground. The only creature who seemed completely unaffected was the strange snake in its jug.

  The pains were worse than he had ever thought possible.

  —There’s only one hope, said Dick, who summoned up all his strength just to say anything at all. The terrible organ must have been finished two weeks earlier than we anticipated.

  We must find the place where these vibrations originate!

  (The Blue Book III:1)

  “Malignant growths occur when a cell, a group of cells, or a tissue disassociates itself from its environment and forms an independent entity which lives from the rest of the organism. Morphologically these growths exhibit a disorderly and purposeless structure similar to that of embryonic tissue; their cells exhibit an abnormal structure of irregular, very differentiated appearance. A malignant growth grows rapidly and independently from the rest of the organism. With its growth it destroys the surrounding normal tissue, to some extent by means of the pressure which occurs due to its expansion, but primarily by immediate destruction. The growth penetrates the neighboring intercellular spaces, the blood cells, and the lymph cells in part by means of hairlike plasma extensions, in part, however, by scattering single cells or small particles into the blood and lymph system. These embed themselves in a more distant organ and form new tumor centers, which have the same destructive characteristics as the mother tumor.”

  (The Blue Book: Copied out of a book which is not identified, III:16)

  After yesterday’s events it is clear to me that I have not taken the pain seriously up to now. I have only played with it. One could almost say that I have let it give me a new meaning in life—the change between the days on which there was no pain and the days on which there was pain was very dramatic.