And a strange one to boot. If my mother’s tears could be said to represent formidable reprimands so far as I was concerned, Else’s seemed more like relieved exclamation marks. Hers were the kind of tears that greet the hero when he rushes down into a horrible prison hole and with one swift cut of the ax frees the prisoner from his shackles. It was the kind of crying you hear from somebody who suddenly sees the light.
“Excuse me,” said Else in perfectly understandable Swedish.
In a certain kind of novel the people always jump or jerk or recoil when they are stung by astonishment, panic, or terror. I have always wondered what that looks like in real life, and I myself have tried many times to jerk or recoil in a believable way. It looks really weird, rather spastic and unreal. But at this very moment, I understood precisely how it works. You jerk or recoil on the inside. That’s what it is. The soul reels around a couple of times and then stops in a totally new position, and you are no longer the same human being you were.
So I thought, while Else collected her tears in order to dress them in words. In our mother tongue’s singsong tonalities, sometimes using peculiar sentence structures, she told her story.
She was as Swedish as I am. But, being married to Smith Allen, she had never been able to go home again, in spite of agonizing and recurring attacks of homesickness. Two hours and a few more glasses of green stuff later, Else had in turns painted this Smith Allen as a first-ranking wife beater and the world’s unluckiest specimen.
She was a young au pair girl in London when they met. He was several years older but equipped with muscles and charm. He was also extremely successful in his profession as a stockbroker. An English aristocrat to the tip of his fingers; nobody could detect a trace of a proletarian background. Yet his father still slaved away in a coal mine in Wales. Eighteen years old and so much in love that it hurt, she became Mrs. Smith Allen and pranced about on the feathery clouds of high society. If her story has any moral, it must be that upstarts who create their own luck, destiny, and fortune find it more difficult to hold on to it all. Along with this goes an account of gradual transformation from human being to beast, if Else told the whole truth.
The fairy tale ended when Allen’s father had an accident, deep down in the black hole of a mine. The company regretted the incident, but the corpse could never be brought up from the collapsed coal mine. Much too expensive. Mr. and Mrs. Smith Allen set out to bury the father symbolically in hallowed ground. Else had not met her in-laws before. Allen had prevented such an encounter.
Else remembered the funeral as a sad, sooty event. Immediately afterward, Allen had disappeared, leaving her alone with the widow. To speak with Allen’s mother was like keeping up a conversation with a sackful of frostbitten potatoes. Outside rain poured down in buckets, the way it does only on poorly insulated English workers’ dwellings. The gas stove emitted smoky fumes. Stubbornly, the widow kept the window open, just in case the company whistle would give the signal: “We have found him! We have found him!”
Else did not realize that. Shivering, she sat in the draft, one half of her body hot, the other half icy cold, while Allen’s mother muttered spitefully about winds that blew whichever way they wanted in poor workmen’s sheds. Allen did not return to his parental home until the wee hours of the night. For the first time Else saw him drunk. She described his eyes as dead and drowned in alcohol.
“Oh yes, the alcohol. That damned alcohol,” I mumbled like some narrow-minded evangelist instead of thinking about the reasons for Allen’s black sorrow.
They went to a luxurious hotel where they had reservations. The trip was as easy as snapping one’s fingers, but it was then Else understood how far Allen had traveled from his origins. A will of steel, hardened by fuel his father had provided, had made Allen the career-obsessed man he was. The father’s goal in life was, understandably enough, that his son would never set foot inside a coal mine. Such shreds of information were included in Allen’s delirious ravings in bed, while she was soaking in a hot bath. He hollered, fell asleep, mumbled, ranted, and waved his arms while he uttered terrible threats, and then fell asleep again. As a married woman, Else was two years older now but hardly any wiser. She was lying in the sparklingly clean, warm, tiled bathroom, growing to catch up with herself.
“It was first then that I truly loved him. Isn’t that terrible?” whispered Else in our green Sargasso Sea.
She was relieved to be able to speak to a fellow Swede after all these years.
From that day on, Allen began to slide downward as determinedly as he had climbed upward earlier. He went to expensive lawyers, threatened the mine company with futile lawsuits, gambled away other people’s fortunes, and disappeared for weeks on end from the couple’s expensive city home. She was the one to receive the eviction notice and the one who found a cheaper place to live. She was the one who exerted herself in the extreme, trying to bring a light back into Allen’s extinguished eyes when he showed up occasionally, each time skinnier and more and more like the pictures of his father.
Their last resources melted away. Friends drifted off and disappeared. It took less than two years, and by then Else’s love began to waver. Then one day, without forewarning, Allen came home with sparkling eyes and waved airline tickets in front of her face. It was the old Allen dancing around the bare room. It was a burning Allen, gushing sun and eternal warmth, speaking about a new and different life, a new continent. It was an Allen who, at a neighborhood pub, had bought a claim in a mine in Coober Pedy.
That was how Else came as a mine worker’s wife to the promised land of Australia. The two of them would dig for opals. Allen must have realized that he continued the family tradition by digging deeper and deeper into the ground, but it was in order to preserve their happiness, he passionately pointed out. Down there in the sandy, cool chambers of the mine were immeasurable riches buried. After a few years, they would be able to settle down, have children, and live well.
Else told me how things worked out in reality. She told of Coober Pedy, where people went as far as building their homes underground, she told of opals that slipped through Allen’s fingers as quickly as he dug them up, and she told about horses. Beautiful horses. Horses running like the wind. Untrustworthy racehorses with poetic names. All the reasons that they still lived in a hole in the ground. Allen gambled. Once a year they went to Adelaide and stayed at this hotel. Allen lost his opals, and they went back to their miserable life. This had gone on for more than ten years.
I added quickly in my head. She had to be a little over thirty — and had been unable to save herself during a span of ten horrid years.
Why?
As my father used to say, “If the shoes don’t fit, buy a new pair.” The world is full of shoes, but a human being is not a piece of leather with shoelaces. More like a hand grenade without a safety catch is a human being, tenderly, lovingly, and violently molded and forged by the parents. I understood that when Else spoke a few words about her own parents. She would not give them the satisfaction of saying, “Didn’t we tell you? We told you, didn’t we?”
One is most convincing when one lacks experience. Consequently, I lectured at length and quite eloquently about the lóst but found child who returns home to old parents. They would slaughter the fattened calf in her honor, eat, and make themselves merry. I kept talking. And as usual, I had no idea what I was getting into.
I had also managed to get a word in edgewise here and there about myself. Else knew that I was a young man with presence of mind. She grasped my hand and said tearfully that fate had chosen me to save her. We ought to flee together. Or rather — I could help her to escape before Allen appeared and forced her to go back. In truth, they did not stay at the hotel. Allen could no longer stand being enclosed by four walls, so they were camping a few miles outside the city. Could I help her to get there and back? She had to pick up a few things. If I would only do that …
She did not exactly put her life in my hands. She jumped into them, as if f
rom a tower in Ludwig’s castle. I was benumbed and robbed of what little sense I normally possessed. To save her from a fanatic opal hunter seemed a lighthearted, easily snatched adventure. It goes without saying that any man with his self-respect intact would have had to say yes. The problem was that I did not have a driver’s license. A rather disagreeable detail in a magnificent whole, I had to admit. She would have to drive. But she waved that away with a crushing argument: Allen’s truck was not adapted to handicapped persons. She was in a wheelchair!
She laughed at my stupid pretense of being a law-abiding citizen. So typically Swedish!
“Go on. Push me so we can get on our way!”
I must have fallen asleep at some point in her story. My cheeks were burning. So that was why she had been sitting so still and why the chair looked different. And that was why she hadn’t been able to get away. Allen really kept her prisoner. But why was she in a wheelchair?
In time I would find out, I supposed. I snuck up behind the wicker chair and grabbed hold of the varnished handles. With its small rubber wheels and stainless spokes, the chair felt ready to roll both of us to a gaping hole in quicksand. The barman was peering out through his aperture. He did not seem to react to any mentionable degree when Else chirped something to the effect that “the boy” was going to drive her around the park. Obviously Allen paid the bill. He would be amazed at the amount of green juice we had managed to imbibe.
The boy, meaning me, rolled Else out of the hotel without having any explanation as to why it happened to be open on a Sunday. What I mean is, had it been closed like other places, this remarkable story would never have happened. I decided to remember that as a good excuse when I met up with the first mate and his fury. It was already dark outside, the clocks would strike the midnight hour shortly, but even if I were to run so fast that I dropped my shoes on the road, I could not make it back to the ship in time.
I thought of that while I lifted Else into the small truck, well advanced in years, and put the wheelchair in back, lashing it securely in place with bits of rope left there for that purpose. Even her calling me a boy paled in comparison with the memory of her slight body in my arms. And even if Else’s plan seemed far from thoroughly researched and I felt as if trying to escape with a pink elephant through the city, I would drive her wherever she wanted to go.
My head snapped around like an owl’s. The car keys were in the ignition. The sinister Allen character could not be far away. And was he possibly her keeper from some mental institution in town? Well, OK, so be it. If that were so, he would have to take me, too, I thought, since Else leaned forward right then. It was sudden and spontaneous and not well planned, but it would all work out, she may have wanted to say when she planted a light kiss on my cheek. The small, dry kiss acted like a branding iron on a calf. Now I knew where I belonged and where I was going. It had nothing to do with bordellos and whores. An angel sat by my side. She may not be as young as I had thought, but an angel for sure. A girl from a good family and with purest Swedish blood in her veins. The memory of Allen vanished and all sense of time with him. My heart was pounding in my chest like a diesel engine, the pulse was a propeller-driven force, full speed forward without stopping, and her shy smile blinked like the lighthouse outside a friendly port, wide open, offering a safe haven for people with pure souls.
It was simple. I was a romantic idiot.
We sailed away from the cauldron of the city, up over the hills, and in among the trees. Here and there a kangaroo turned around to stare. They might have heard of Ingemar Johansson, avid boxers as they were.
Else touched my arm lightly when I should turn right or left. I have no idea how long we drove. Perhaps an hour. Meanwhile Else set forth her plan. In the darkness, it sounded perfectly reasonable. She was going to pick up passport and money. I would drive her to the airport, and she would be on her way back home.
Finally we reached their camping place in a valley with a murmuring brook. With its patches and tears, the pale cotton tent did not look as if there would be money inside. I lifted Else down from the truck, carried her inside, and lighted a kerosene lamp. Allen had hammered down three stakes in a row along the middle to give Else support and guidance as she moved around. After a moment’s hesitation, she asked me to wait outside. I could get some water from the stream, if I wanted to. She would wash up and change to more suitable clothing.
The stars of the Southern Hemisphere lighted my way, winking as amiably as the stars on the other side. The first mate did not spend all his energy teaching me the Morse code; he had also taught me something about those sparkling little pinpoints up there. Even at the tender age of seventeen, a poet lurks in the chest of every sailor. It is grand and agreeable to hurl one’s questions, thoughts, and dreams into space. But never did I think that I would stand in the middle of the night in a valley among Adelaide’s hills, dipping a pail into a stream to get water for my woman, while musing on the unexplainable mystery of love. In a strictly legal sense, she was of course not my woman, but it was dark enough outside that not a soul on earth could find his way here and demand his lawful wedded right.
I whistled in a typically male manner and trudged along with the water to the tent, considerately put the bucket through the tent flap’s wavering opening, and walked a few yards away. I did not wait in vain. Even earlier I had seen Else’s silhouette, as if in an old reliable shadow play, flutter against the tent cloth. I have to admit that I took my place in the first-row orchestra seat — partly curious as to how she would manage and, to a larger extent, because it was fun and felt good. I felt I had earned some reward for my efforts so far. Else had already pulled the dress over her head. She was leaning against one of the stakes. Sometimes her body became that of a gigantic goddess, sometimes a wavering stick figure. The arms came unstuck and played out their own enigmatic sign symbols — a temple dancer’s slow gyrations, a giraffe with majestic movements, and there a snake wrapping itself around another snake.
My heart waltzed round and round during the performance, and
I began to think of the next act with me as costar.
Then she fell.
There was a clatter of metal. She disappeared from the lighted circle created by the kerosene lamp. I waited. All was silent.
I stumbled into the tent. Else was lying on the floor with the dress covering most of her. She mumbled that I ought to let her try on her own. But then she pulled the dress from her face and said that actually the washing was Allen’s chore. So would I be kind enough … ?
Save her? Yes, I wanted to do that. Love her? Oh yes. Even seduce her. I could imagine myself doing that. But to wash a thirty-year-old stranger’s body? Wasn’t that just a little too much? What if I discovered a lot of loose skin on her?
I stammered that of course I would, lifted her carefully so she could support herself against the stake, took hold of the sponge, and actually thought of my grandmother. Thousands of times she told of “The Large Washing of Refugees from the HORRIBLE WAR! They stand there as God created them. Nothing more to it. Easy as a butterfly’s dance. And they are deeply grateful when THE LICE is washed off them.”
“We have to start over again.” I cleared my throat and began my new task with some trepidation.
It was not the same as scraping rust. And she did not look as if she needed red-leading or painting. She was smooth as marble, bone white in the light of the lamp, the shoulders thin, the breasts struggling upward, firm, with nipples like curious and fearless eyes staring into my own half-closed ones. Her backside was a song. The legs, too. Until dawn would break and the shadows flee, until the morning breeze would sneak through, I could have kept washing her body. I began to know a woman in a way I had not imagined. And then we would rest and take pleasure from each other, tightly embracing. And we would awaken and I would blow my breath on her and say,
“Take your bed and walk.”
I had hallucinations to such a degree that I mixed up the Song of Solomon with the miracles of
Jesus and took it for granted that I would be able to repeat every trick and feat.
Why not?
All was possible. A kangaroo had obviously turned into a camel, right there in the city of Adelaide.
But a murderous opal hunter could be jolting along at this minute on the back of a kangaroo in order to shoot me like a mad dog and tie Else to the stake. It was time to leave. I kept washing, having almost turned into water myself, dissolved by nervousness as I was, when Else took my trembling hand and brought it to her breast. It was glossy and clean and burned heavily in my hand.
“Yes … yes,” I said and cleared my throat. “Good as new. All we have to do now …”
I kept babbling. In vain, I tried to find something that would lighten up the massive solemnity in the deep shadows of her eyes. Help! Her eyes were flames that could melt me totally. And that was what she did. And I, as the imbecile I was, kept moving my mouth and making stupid noises until the eyes went out.
That is unforgivable stupidity, she let me understand, turning her back to me. I dried her, rubbing carefully and slowly, as if it were possible to caress the flames to life again. But no. The chance was lost. The moment was gone. In this other dress, she looked even more like a very young girl. She sat down on the cot and asked me to wait outside.
Perhaps she wanted to say good-bye. I went outside.
When Else let out a desperate cry, the Southern Cross gasped. Perhaps her exhausted pain could be heard even up there?
“He has taken my passport, my papers,” she sobbed when I came rushing in.
She sat as if hit by lightning and rattled an old Ridgway’s tea canister in her hand. In that small tin enclosure, she had hidden he life.
But why did the tin can rattle?
She smiled strangely at my question and I could see the hatred toward the man who had ruined her life.
My Father, His Son Page 6
