The Death of a Beekeeper

by Lars Gustafsson

  And every morning the same fear, that the pains will come again. The whole winter I had pains. Now I am suffering just as much from the fear of the pain. I observe myself very exactly: whether I have become weaker, whether walking is more of a strain for me, whether the trip to the grocer tires me more than before. I let the car sit, less to save gas than to put myself to the test. That means that I lose a whole morning, but I really don’t know what I would have done with this time otherwise.

  The human being, this strange creature, hovering between animal existence and hope.

  I really don’t know more than that about the meaning of the universe, no more than that about the purpose of it all: the molecules, the molecular chains, consciousness, sonnets and sestines, the underground rockets laden with atomic weapons, the frescoes of Michelangelo, the binominal theorem, and Monteverdi’s madrigals, about the purpose of all of that, I don’t know any more than any moss-covered old stone behind the beehives in the garden knows. Not any more than a mosquito knows. Than an amoeba in a stagnant puddle.

  The history of humankind has not yet progressed very far. Actually it is still in its beginnings.

  The fear of going mad is basically the fear of becoming another:

  but we are doing that all the time.

  What does not destroy me, makes me stronger. (Nietzsche)

  Swampland. Birch trees. Coltsfoot blooms along the ditches. Most of the bee colonies have come back to life again. My friend Nicke, for example, who was run over by a truck when, on a day in September 1952, he wanted to ride his bike home during the breakfast break. I often think of him when I see something unusual, something which really interests me. Then I wonder what Nicke would have said about that. “Now I’m seeing that for you, Nicke.” It is an enormously powerful experience. One is somehow identical with the people one has known.

  The fifties. What do I remember about them? Little blue streetcars ran through Stockholm. Herbert Tingsten talked on T.V. The referendum about additional social security, which never interested me a great deal. The referendum about left-or right-hand traffic, which revealed that everybody wanted to keep left-hand traffic.

  How were the girls dressed in the fifties? Didn’t they wear cotton dresses which went way below their calves, and wide belts? Didn’t they talk differently somehow? I don’t remember precisely.

  In the summer as little boys, yes even as high school students, we often sat on the locks of Färmansbo and fished. The lazy, tough, no not tough, but melancholy Kolbäcks River forms a little waterfall there. At this point there was a small island with the remnants of an old ironworks. Earlier masses of umbrella mushrooms grew there.

  On the southern end of the island is the Färmansbo lock. A path leads to it, which is shaded by such high trees that it is utterly transformed into a green tunnel. Ancient algae move on the stone banks of the canal.

  At the lock itself the water is deep, coal black—the Kolbäcks River does not bear this name by accident—and at high water it creates black whirlpools, which always fascinated us when we were boys.

  As early as May we would spend whole afternoons there, the pike were very active around that time. Several of us were living in summer houses our parents had in the neighborhood, others were the children of local residents.

  Naturally, now and again it would happen that we got a fish on the hook, dramatic episodes with giant pike, who tore the golden glittering lure and disappeared with the whole thing in their mouths, great pike who continued to writhe in the grass like snakes, and sometimes one of us would slip on a wet stone and fall into the black, always cold water.

  But I don’t think that fishing was the most important thing about this lock.

  The black, flowing water was kin to the black darkness in our own pupils.

  We would sit there, look down, and talk about strange things with one another.

  The bicycles lay in a heap behind some bushes, it was always difficult to get by the lockkeeper’s house, because the lockkeeper, an elderly man, didn’t have much understanding for a bunch of little boys running down to the lower locks. He was always afraid that they would fool around with the lock holes and change the water level, which was not very convenient for him, since it meant walking half a kilometer when one of the lock holes was opened which was supposed to be shut.

  (By the way, bicycles played an enormous role for us then; they were on a par with domestic animals.)

  Nicke was a very amusing boy. He had something of a squirrel in him. He was always wide awake. I had the impression that he simply saw more than the others. That he listened better than the others. He also was the one who discovered that one could hear the otters on the riverbank at sunset. An incredibly faint sound which none of us had noticed, although it had always been there.

  A small, thin, tanned, incredibly wiry boy, who could climb the highest pines simply by pressing his knees against the bark and going up arm over arm. Once he swallowed a small live whitefish just to prove that one could do that.

  He placed great value on proving that there were things which one could do although no one had considered it possible. If he had lived in the fifteenth century and had not been run over by a truck, then in time he would certainly have discovered a new continent.

  He was what I call a weather-sensitive person. He knew for hours in advance, when there wasn’t a single cloud to be seen in the sky, that a storm was on the way. Storms did not make him restless, tired like other people. I have the feeling they simply energized him, put him almost into a state of ecstasy.

  When the hail beat down on the lock chamber until the whirlpools of the black water disappeared in a cloud of foam, until our fishing rods and the cans with the worms lay deserted, and we ourselves cowered breathless in a deserted blacksmith shop between old scrap iron, snakes, and nettles, one could see him dancing around outside in the downpour like a little dervish, often half naked, since he would get spankings from his mother when he came home with wet clothes.

  I can still see him in front of me when I close my eyes, a wild little dervish dancing around ecstatically in a hailstorm on the rough-hewn stones from the eighteenth century glittering with rain, out there by the Färmansbo locks.

  As if the rainstorm had been his father.

  A little human being locked in its own secret.

  I often ponder what he might have become. A sawmill worker like his father? The discoverer of the Mornington Islands? But then what is left to discover?

  He always gave the impression that he was meant for something very special.

  We were all meant for something different.

  Contemplating the people I met in the course of my life: teachers, friends, girls, chance acquaintances, faithful old companions, relatives, it becomes clear to me that I did not know one of them, I say not a single one, not even my former wife and not my lover either.

  One meets a new person, one whom one finds interesting. One attempts, as they say, to “place” him or her. (I even try that with these ladies and gentlemen who read the news on television.)

  One searches one’s memory for faces which look like the one which one sees before him. The slow movements of the eyelids correspond with those of a speaker at the Biologists’ Association, the corners of the mouth are the same as those of a chemistry lecturer in Uppsala in the fifties. In short: one picks a tone of voice here, a facial expression there.

  One places the unknown with the aid of the known. The psychoanalyst in his analysis room (or whatever that’s called; I’ve never been in one) does the same thing in principle: he brings together experiences and memories in order to discover the key to the new, unknown with which he is confronted.

  But what we reconstruct this way, what we cast back for, jingling this bunch of keyo once-seen faces, doesn’t unlock the unknown. We explain riddles with riddles.

  But, after all, that is damn near the same thing as if one were to buy a second copy of Länstidningen in order to check a piece of news which one had not found credi
ble in one’s own copy of the newspaper.

  Deep within, every human being hoards a pitch-black riddle. The darkness of the iris is nothing other than the starless night, the darkness deep in the eye is nothing other than the darkness of the universe.

  Only as a riddle is a human being large and distinct enough. Only a mystical anthropology does him justice.

  It was, of course, normal for Nicke to swim and dive like a fish. He dove down to the bottom of the deep lock chamber and released the trawl hooks which had been caught there in the junk of three centuries. He held fast to old tree roots and wire cables, his hair floated around his head like sea grass, the lean body leveled horizontally in the stream; he looked like someone who was flying with tremendous speed, like an angel, whose normal reality is a state of suspension.

  The water surface above him was a distant, glittering roof. The powerful water masses of the locks caused a constant soft creaking and groaning of the massive, tarred oak poles of the lock doors, which penetrated down to him like the ticking of a distant, giant clock. The voices of his playmates could not be heard anymore. He was absolutely without fear. The long water algae in the depths, where the stones went into the bottom, fluttered like the long hair of women.

  He did not see the faces of the playmates, thin little ovals which bent worshipfully over the edge of the lock. He did not know how much time passed. Perhaps they would be gone when he came to the surface again, perhaps it would be a completely new era.

  He was hovering. He was moving with great speed. He thought: I am holding on tightly. Carefully he loosened one hand, because he wanted to see whether the other arm was strong enough to hold him, but he felt that the current was too strong, it pulled him in the direction of the lock hole, which shimmered like a silver square opening far back in the deep green space in which he now found himself.

  At this moment he discovered the lure for which he had dived. Or, better said, an object which could have been the lure.

  It glittered like gold in the muddy basin approximately one meter beneath him.

  And for a moment he imagined the long, undulating algae were the hair of the Kolbäck’s daughters who were guarding this glittering treasure.

  He grasped that there was only one way to get the lure without being driven helplessly by the current to the lock hole (and that was dangerous because one couldn’t get through it, one would get stuck in it and drown), namely to swing his legs around slowly and try to grasp this glittering thing—whatever it might be—with the toes of his right foot.

  As soon as he moved into the current, it seized him. Every time he attempted to reach this gold-glittering thing which had to be the lure, his toes stirred up little clouds of slime, which covered it completely. His lungs were hurting from the lack of oxygen.

  We begin again. We never give up, he thought.

  Above him was the whole summer. A soft wind was moving through the trees. On the other side of the island a kingfisher hovered above the water in the open part of the stream. From a distance the noise of an EPA-tractor could be heard, one of these cheap tractors, made from the front part of a truck and which, back in wartime, were used by farmers when they couldn’t obtain any real tractors.

  Swarms of doves were following the tractor in its course.

  It was our landscape and yet it was not ours. It was our lives which had begun and yet they were not ours.

  I have never been as wise as at that time. I knew how alien I was, but I also knew that the others were just as alien. In the universe no one is at home.

  When Nicke came to the surface again, he was almost blue in the face from the lack of oxygen. Only with effort could he swim to the side, and after we had pulled him up over the stone embankment, it was almost five minutes before he could speak. He lay there and gasped for air like a small, very slimy fish. A scent of coarse basin slime, of ancient stones, of bleached seaweed and rotting muck surrounded him.

  Gradually we grasped why he had swum so poorly when he came to the surface, and why he had had so much difficulty getting himself up the embankment. His right hand was a fist. He had kept his right hand locked tightly around some object.

  We thought he would die. In the middle of this warm June day he was trembling from cold.

  —What happened? we asked him.

  At first his only answer was the chatter of his teeth. Finally, he tried to say something, and after a while he succeeded in speaking clearly enough for us to understand him.

  —The lure wasn’t there, he said. I didn’t find it.

  —But what have you got in your hand then?

  He looked at it as if he were totally unaware that his hand was a balled fist.

  —What have you got? What have you got?

  We actually danced around him with excitement. It was clear to us that it couldn’t be the lure because otherwise the hooks would have cut into his hand.

  He opened it slowly, as if it had been cramped much too long. He seemed to be just as curious as we were about what would actually be there.

  We were very still, breathless.

  From the bottom of the Färmansbo lock Nicke had brought up a heavy gold coin, a gold ducat from the time of King Carl XIV Johan, the only one which has ever been found there.

  (The Blue Book VI:1)

  7. The Damaged Notebook

  The gaze of Grandmother Tekla’s eyes, this age-old look. The same darkness as that of the universe out there between the galaxies.

  She was born in the Berg community in 1870, and she lived until last year. A small, waddling old lady in the Hallstahammar old age home, quite alert when one came to visit her, a pretty glass bowl with candies on the walnut dresser, a world of total security.

  During the hundred years which she lived, she never had seen a reason, I believe, to wonder why she existed. Oh, to be sure, she had her religion, and that, of course, explained everything.

  Have begun (even at the grocer’s) to look people in the eye, as if their gaze had something special to say, I mean, as if one could read some kind of answer in it.

  I have begun to harbor the peculiar notion they might perhaps see something which I don’t see.

  Yesterday a small lizard came to the back balcony and warmed itself in the April light.

  It lay very still. I may be wrong, but I had the impression it actually changed its color to match the various silver-gray shades of the boards.

  I lay on my stomach and looked at it a bit closer. That’s when I discovered the tiny eye.

  It had a blackness of a different kind, the wide-awake, sober blackness of reptiles.

  Compared to the eye of a reptile, the eye of a mammal appears misty, half intoxicated with warm pulsations of life.

  A reptile looks directly out into the darkness with a sober gaze.

  Heaven knows what it sees. Something—different?

  (The Blue Book VII:12 [the last entry])

  . . . since three o’clock in the morning more and more intensely from the old spot, branching out down to the loins and to the diaphragm, at first with the usual degrees of severity, then up to the “white hot” level.

  I knew that I had only been granted a pause.

  Strangely I have the feeling that I have used it well.

  (The Damaged Book II:1)

  Ambulance 90000.

  Central clinic 13 71 00 (switchboard).

  (The Damaged Book II:2)

  Throwing up everything with a kind of stubborn regularity. Even honey water. But it’s all right in very little swallows. Slight fever.

  Trip to the mailbox—like a polar expedition.

  (The Damaged Book II:3)

  Gave the dog to the Olssons on the Skrivar farm. Short, strange goodbye. He had gotten half a cheese as a parting gift, appeared somehow distracted and uninterested in spite of that. Dragged the cheese from one end of the room to the other. Was restless, yowled. Will be well taken care of.

  (The Damaged Book II:4)

  Good night, ladies. For three days it was g
one, but now it is coming back again, in shorter and shorter intervals.

  The unpleasant similarity between pain and lust. Both consume one’s total attention, one sees nothing else anymore. It is like a woman one loves. News, the weather, changes in nature, it even manages to extinguish fear. It is a realm in which truth dominates irrevocably.

  People now look in a bit more frequently, they say very openly that I should go to the hospital. They are practical, the people in northern Västmanland. One never says in Västmanland: “He has died.” One says: “He is gone dead.” They are afraid that I “will go dead.”

  Cannot read the newspaper anymore. I read, that is, I let my gaze wander from word to word, but every word contains nothing but pain. Even worse is the feeling that it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Lately they have been talking about something they call the “Information Bureau.”* Their problems are not my problems anymore. I would like to know what this “Information Bureau” is. I imagine a bureau which can answer all questions.

  Why me of all people?

  Why am I of all people mortal?

  Why do I of all people have this pain?

  Why am I of all people identical with this pain?

  Why am I of all people identical with someone who experiences this pain?

  Why?

  (The Damaged Book II:5)

  The problem with these women: they recognized that I wanted much too little. Women are ready for anything when they recognize that one wants it.

  I have wanted much too little. My whole life long. People never had the feeling that I had any need of them. The last three months have made me real. That is terrible.

  (The Damaged Book III:1)

  Threw up the whole night long. The last April. Discoloration of the skin on the forearms. Large brown spots.