My Father, His Son

by Reidar Jonsson

  My in-laws’ exceptional hospitality has saved me from the murderous boredom of hotel rooms. Instead the family has commuted between the province of Småland and the city of Stockholm in agreeable chaos. Jonas enjoys spending weekends with his grandparents. And Louise gets an extra burst of energy from our child-free weekends in Stockholm. She goes to the theater, movies, exhibitions, political meetings, occult séances, nostalgic jazz clubs, modern watering holes for pseudo-cultural derelicts, and new, obscenely expensive restaurants with a speed that makes me nauseous.

  I am not like Louise. Due to her evangelistic background, she melts effortlessly into the intellectual and cultural world. A world she loves and I feel contempt for, as it is produced, directed, and owned by people who have never been in the proximity of physical labor, poverty, dire need, or real suffering. The exceptions simply confirm the rule. I am such an exception. Large parts of what Louise calls my lower-class brutality and lack of sensitivity stem from the fact that I am constantly being reminded of my background. These reminders produce hate. There is no return, no transformation formula, just a godforsaken hole behind me and an endless stretch of combative situations before me. He who crosses class boundaries is homeless. That is the eternal dilemma of the child from the working class and the autodidact.

  Yet my career has been straight as an arrow even if I, like many others, have hit my head against society’s economic ceiling. My future alternatives are determined by the possible death of the institution’s professor. When that happens, even the weakest fowl will climb up one peg. The problem is, his imminent death is highly unlikely. Axel is only forty-five.

  Such is my reality, despite the fact that I, at the age of thirteen, slammed the ordinary school door shut behind me forever. Since then I have muddled through every closed door and become something as unlikely as a social expert and researcher.

  A remarkable twist of fate married me to Louise. It had to be fate that suddenly one day made me encounter Louise and fall in love with her before I even knew who she was.

  I still remember her twelve-year-old body, a thin and tense bow that had a disturbing effect on me. Louise had straight, short hair then — it was much longer when I saw her again. But the eyebrows were the same. Totally straight and black, abrupt dashes above the serious, ice blue, burning eyes. Even at twelve, she spoke in endless, lecturing sentences, and had the ability to form a disdainful angle with those eyebrows. She remains a total enigma to me, despite our having lived together nearly eight years.

  As Jonas and I walk toward the house, the cellar door is slammed closed. It has to be my father-in-law. He has probably stayed awake all night, thinking about the clogged sewage pipes. Yesterday he was supposed to start digging but all he did was pace around the house. There he comes, spade on shoulder. He congratulates Jonas on his fine catch and walks with determined steps toward the gigantic rowan. That tree must be more than a century old. When my father-in-law without a moment’s hesitation puts spade to ground hardly three yards from the rowan, I understand his mission. It is all the tree’s fault. The roots have no doubt penetrated the pipes to the old triple-chamber well.

  It will be an enormous excavating job. My father-in-law can’t know exactly where to dig. I walk over to him and ask for a thick piece of steel wire. After a few suspicious grunts, he directs me toward the cellar. In the cellar, I cut off a yard or so of galvanized wire and walk, holding it as a divining rod, from the house toward the rowan tree. The wire swings furiously at the very spot where he has begun to dig. Something in his hard, glassy brown eyes tells me that he is impressed by my proficiency as divining-rod master. I hand him the wire. Nothing happens. I put my hand over his and the wire begins to swing immediately.

  “Weak current,” I explain. “Some people have a strongly developed chemical weak current, which in this case functions as a magnetic pole in relation to water veins. Water has always —”

  I fall silent. All of a sudden, he looks like a teddy bear with his hard, brown eyes. For some unfathomable reason I like him and understand that he doesn’t care for any technical explanations.

  From now on I am a master of the divining rod. That is enough.

  We agree to work together. I return to the cellar to put back the wire and see something glimmer behind the boxes with nails. A bottle. A new bottle. Half full. My father-in-law is a strict teetotaler. But obviously he has begun to drink.

  No wonder.

  Seven years ago, his country store burned to the ground one night. That was the night before Father’s Day, and that made Louise laugh hysterically over the telephone. As a child she had been terrified by her father’s stinging belt and her mother’s tales of the Day of Last Judgment. With great passion she can act out how she used to awaken in the grip of unspeakable terror, her body dripping with sweat and shaking uncontrollably. Was it now, this very second, the Day of Judgment?

  The first five years after the fire, I was convinced that my father-in-law would recover. He did get the insurance money. But he had lost his spirit — it had burned itself out, too, that night. Or was it the dreadful laughter Louise had shouted into his ear over the telephone? It wasn’t just the country store. He even stopped hunting and spent most of his time strolling in the yard. Now and then he sold a gallon of gas from the pump that remained standing there, or pulled himself together and poked about among the mysteries of the warehouse, where one could even find harnesses dating from the time of his father, the great businessman. My father-in-law used to sit among the shadows in the warehouse and shine up the bridles, just as he did as a child.

  Now he has become a born-again teetotaler who stands in the cellar and imbibes alcohol in secret.

  Jonas is playing near his grandfather.

  I tiptoe upstairs to our bedroom. Louise arrived from Stockholm late last night. She was in a dark mood, fell onto the bed, and transformed herself into a sleeping rock as I made some unsuccessful groping sexual overtures. She is still asleep. I wash my hands in cold water in the small screened-off washroom, pull off my clothes, and crawl into bed with her. She pretends to sleep; her breathing betrays her. She turns her back to me, but now she has no excuse. Slowly I caress her behind. She is unwilling; she makes signals regarding my mother-in-law, who is busying herself making beds in the adjacent room. That excites me even more. Louise presses her legs together and arches her back toward me, but in the end we are soldered together anyhow. A long and breathlessly careful rocking ensues. We lie like two spoons against each other. I embrace her, holding on to her breasts. My right arm goes numb. When she begins to tremble convulsively, I interpret it at first as a huge orgasm and ejaculate rapidly in a few hard thrusts, not caring about the squeaking bed or my mother-in-law’s movements on the other side of the thin wall.

  But Louise is crying.

  Through tears that drip all over my face, and while I hold her shivering body, she tells me in fractured sentences that Axel raped her in his office. She had gone to Stockholm to meet with him the week before the fall semester began at the university. They were planning the next step in her project. She was flattered by Axel’s readiness to give up a week of vacation, intoxicated by the detailed work, the hours rushing by rapidly, and the keenness of his criticism. They dashed off to catch a bite to eat and hurried back to his office — where he underwent a sudden change, threw himself on her, tossed her on top of his big desk, and forced himself into her, having torn her panties to shreds.

  In the middle of her stammered tale, she sits up. She seems cold as ice, dries the tears from her red-streaked face, and turns to me with a question.

  “Do you understand? I was raped. Where is Jonas?”

  So far as she is concerned, that is a perfectly normal and logical combination of questions. Whichever one I choose to answer, she will turn all her aggression toward me. I elect not to answer.

  “Where does your father keep the ammunition?” I ask instead.

  Louise responds automatically, unprepared but with a quick, blazing, sa
tisfied glance.

  “In his workroom. Why?”

  “I’m going to shoot him.”

  “Shoot whom?” she cries out unnecessarily.

  That’s how she is. Always using correct grammar, always keeping subject and object in their place. Presumably one day she will mumble corrections from her own coffin if the poor minister puts his foot in the syntax.

  I throw on some clothes and slam the door with such force that my mother-in-law frowns disapprovingly, her formidable eyebrows forming hard, black lines.

  She ought to have put her hands together in prayer; she ought to have prayed for forgiveness for our sins.

  ALGERIA

  1976

  Such were the thoughts whirling in my head as I was lying in the cell in the police station in Algiers. I fell asleep and awoke a number of times until I lost all sense of time. Since I had read many descriptions of prison life, I scratched the date and the year on the wall. We write 1976, January 20. I carved my name. Ingemar Rutger. It really sounded to me like a man trying to fry snow. I understand why Louise feels it is a fitting name for me. My soul is a Gemini, always pulling in two directions at once.

  The same thing must have been true of the official from the Swedish Embassy. He kept chuckling all the time, probably because he had nothing to laugh about, as he tried to explain why I had ended up in prison. This past year the Algerian narcotics police had thrown the book at Scandinavians, who had been carrying great amounts of cannabis from Morocco via Algiers to Marseilles. The fact that I came from Marseilles, nervous as a bat in sunlight, had obviously made the police suspicious. Besides, I had tried to toss something overboard from the ferry. What was it?

  He leaned forward, confidentially, to hear what I had to say. I threw knowing looks around the cell walls. Had this Swedish Embassy official never heard of hidden microphones? He chuckled. Evidently he had promised to cooperate with the Algerian narcs. Now he would hear the truth from a man with a sense of humor.

  “In the hole,” I whispered. “I flushed down the encapsulated list of every gang member.”

  He threw a rapid glance toward the hole in the floor and nodded eagerly. How absolutely brilliant, how expertly cold-blooded of me to think of such a solution, he whispered back and promised to get me set free without delay.

  I appreciated his efforts, though I questioned his common sense. A telex inquiring about my person would have revealed me to be an unlikely drug smuggler. It was close to twenty years since I last smoked a pipe in Casablanca. While the papers giving me my freedom were being stamped, I hid a smile. I could see the whole picture — how the old-fashioned plumbing system in the cells would be ripped apart, piece by piece, how the Algerian narcs would turn into sewage divers, and how the Swedish Embassy, at some later date, would receive a note of reprimand — or perhaps a bill?

  That I am an egoist is entirely possible.

  That thought hit me with full force as I was hurriedly dispatched from the police station. My car was clinically free of any trace of marijuana and, I dared hope, correctly reassembled. The embassy official pressed a letter into my hand and advised me to leave the country as soon as possible. He disappeared, nervous chuckles and all, and I sat alone in the Volvo and stared at the windshield wipers. They were squeaking lazily over the windshield as a result of my pressing the turn signal to make a left turn from the police garage.

  My beloved automobile had suffered a nervous breakdown at the hands of the police mechanics.

  And worst of all: I had forgotten Louise. They had not let Louise go.

  “Wait!” I yelled and pulled the hand brake to no avail.

  I tried opening the car door but the lock had jammed. I rolled down the window and wriggled out of the car while it leisurely rolled into the heavy traffic. Too late. The garage door was closed and bolted. Not a sound, not a reaction to my kicking the door.

  A young man in jeans and a rust-colored sweater smiled and recommended that I not be too persistent. It would be stupid to tempt fate a second time. Better to save the car.

  He spoke excellent French — the kind one finds in books for five-year-olds. That suited me fine. We pushed the car against the edge of the sidewalk and let the long line of cars with exasperated drivers pass. It was late afternoon, the sun was high in the sky. I was hungry. I tried to explain to the helpful man that the police were probably having fun with my wife right at this moment. Good God! A Swedish blonde in an Arab prison!

  And who was the helpful man? I asked.

  "I'm Omar,” he said.

  “Thank God!” I replied.

  Everybody called Omar in North Africa can fix anything, I soon learned. There is an Omar on every block, in every street where a European happens to put his inexperienced foot. Behind every small store, wherever there is the slightest possibility of making money from someone in trouble. An Omar is ready for any type of work. He will spend endless hours finding a solution that satisfies his clients. Omar is one of the most industrious human beings imaginable. He is intelligent, sensible, and ambitious. Why then, is such a man not a political leader? A bank president? Or a stockbroker? The answer is: He cannot read.

  I really needed an Omar.

  I couldn’t even see the crumpled letter in my own hand. With gentle force, Omar brought it up in front of my eyes. We sat on the hood of the car, and I read aloud to him my wife’s letter in Swedish. He with his sensible soul could probably understand the seriousness of Louise’s letter from my tone of voice. She was writing that I ought to find myself. When I had calmed down, she would come to see me. She had gone off to her oasis. She did not want any more accidents. Why was I the way I was? And so on.

  "Omar,” I said. “She has disappeared.”

  I cried a little against his rust-colored sweater. In my condition I felt that Omar’s brown eyes were pleasantly reminiscent of those of a female acquaintance of mine, a psychologist who works at a hospital in Stockholm. During some of our conversations she told me that it is every human being’s duty to find himself or herself. I kept joking, as usual.

  “What if I traveled as far as Africa to find myself — and then I’m not there! How can I find myself when I can’t even find my wife?!”

  I pictured myself standing on a sandy dune in the Sahara, gazing all around. It struck me as tremendously funny. And so unnecessary since the psychologist and I had found each other.

  Oh well, that’s another story. Of course, Omar had no idea of how Louise had changed overnight from a revolutionary and a comrade/lover to a castration expert.

  “Omar,” I said. “She wants me to find myself. How does one do that?”

  Now the dog has bitten the turtle again. It’s a mad dog. And the turtle ought to have learned not to thrust out its legs, or to pull in its head a good deal quicker. But no. There it lies, bleeding into the dust of the backyard. Such an ugly turtle. The shell is cracked. Here in Bordj El Kiffan a turtle is facing death because of my landlord’s mad dog.

  This time it is the left leg that bleeds.

  I wind a piece of insulation tape around the leg a few times, the turtle pulls in the leg and the insulation tape stays on the outside as an extra, hollow leg. It’s hopeless. It’s easier to put the turtle in the dried-out pond and spend a few minutes scaring the dog.

  Toward me that bastard is as ingratiating as usual.

  He trembles and jerks his hind legs, slithers forward in the dust, wriggling, with evil looks and gaping jaws.

  Yellow stumps of teeth bathe in running saliva. He thirsts for my throat but doesn’t dare jump me. Poor dog. He has been beaten so much that his soul is split in two. He tries to behave as a friendly dog but hungers for revenge.

  He is not alone. Cowering dogs are seen behind gates and fences everywhere. They are supposed to be watchdogs but are totally useless.

  Of course it was Omar who found me a place to live in Bordj El Kiffan. I stay with a Frenchman who otherwise lives alone in his big house in the middle of the once-exclusive suburb. Now the lar
ge mansions shelter at least three Algerian families each. The old European upper-class district may be panting and whispering of its unjust history. Who knows? Like the whole country, this area has been liberated except for the home of my remarkable landlord. He has been a parachutist and took part in the colonial war. Now he works with pipes, presumably oil pipes.

  One evening he showed me his most prized possession, a tenderly cared for old MAT 49. He was astonished and suitably impressed when I asked him to count as I, with my eyes closed, took apart and put together the machine gun. But he asked no questions, as if discretion were one of his professional habits. He just nodded in acknowledgment.

  What kind of hold Omar has on him I don’t understand; how he has been able to hang on to his house is a mystery.

  He is an extremely quiet man, hard of hearing, who has a large model train layout in the living room. The bedroom walls are covered with pictures of nude women. There is an excellent stereo system. Every evening he plays Wagner at highest volume while fiddling with his miniature trains and smiling in big grimaces, as if I could understand that this constitutes the height of happiness.

  But I am unable to share in his joy. My Volvo has been taken apart, reduced to its components by Omar. It was easy to unscrew it. Everything was already loose. The wheels wobbled when we drove to Monsieur Verdurin’s house. Omar has promised to fix the car. I don’t know if that lies within his ability, but what I do know is that until then I am stuck.