However good care I took of my legs, I’d never be able to walk on dry land and lead a normal landlubber kind of life. Home, wife and children, a cottage porch to sit on, a hedge of lilacs to piss on, and a Swedish flag to raise every time it was the king’s birthday — all that was lost forever. I was not built for the seagoing life of escalated stress. I had run out of juice as a human being. At the age of twenty-three, I was trying to forget everything, to drown my past in alcohol — and by age twenty-four I’d be a babbling wreck, boring everybody with broken promises to stay sober. It was time for a lengthy sick leave. Or at least time to sign off this ship.
At Cape Town, I never even went ashore. I gave notice. Three weeks later I left Bordeaux for Sweden.
Where would I go when I arrived in Sweden? My home was my suitcase. I debated this question with a Swedish girl who happened to share my train compartment. She was irritatingly worldly and sophisticated as she conveyed to me that she had grown weary of living with an artist. He had forced her to crawl around on a painter’s drop cloth drenched in oil paints. Like drunken eels, their naked bodies had wriggled and entwined, after which they were supposed to press their paint-saturated selves against huge pieces of canvas hanging around the walls of the atelier. Now she wanted to do something with her life, go back to school, and work with the unfortunate in society. She guzzled wine unceasingly, ate the provisions she had brought, all wrapped in a red-checkered scarf, cut pieces of chicken with a large pocket knife, smoked Gauloises, and dribbled chewed-off chicken bones all over my suit while she confided the facts about real life in France.
“The French are so existential,” she explained. “Life and death go hand in hand. Always.”
As a child of the working class, I had been taught that one does not take a train journey dressed in work overalls. Consequently I was dressed in a three-piece suit. But I had not been taught how to use five- or six-syllable words without embarrassment. One was not supposed to flaunt a wide variety of complex words. Language should be like a finely honed ax that you use to fell dreams. Nothing else.
“There’s a lot to it,” I said, smoking Marlboros, drinking whiskey, feeling nauseated and sweaty in the late August heat while my thoughts kept returning to her slipping around in oil paints with that artist.
In Hamburg, I went to buy more wine for us. In the space of a few hours I had turned into a full-fledged existentialist. I floated through the door, slipped on the step down to the platform, and dropped my sunglasses. Of course, I got it into my head to pick them up between the platform and the train car, and fell down. Louise screamed, thinking that the train would run me over. A couple of cars had to be derailed before I could climb up. That adventure left my suit black and sooty, and it slowly stiffened over my nauseated, sweaty being. Louise said that I reminded her of someone. A little boy she had been unable to forget. His mother was dead, his dog was dead, and his daddy loaded bananas on ships on the other side of the globe. A rather droll uncle of his took care of him.
“For that little guy life and death really joined hands!” Louise said, laughing.
Because the girl was Louise. I had not recognized her but fell in love at first sight. She sketched out her life story. As the daughter of the Bible-spouting grocer at the glassworks, she was compelled to run away from home. Naturally. At the age of seventeen, she cajoled her way to Uppsala with an artist twice her age. The memories of her father’s stinging belt and the religious restrictions in the home combined to keep her going like a thunderbolt. School did not fall within her sphere of interest.
We fell into each other’s arms as soon as we rediscovered the childhood years we had spent together. And there we remained. Louise had enormous steering speed. I went into her backwash and trotted along to the institution of adult education while questions banged together in my head. For instance, what was an institution of adult education? And what would I do there? I was the only one arriving in a vested suit and consequently was considered somewhat underdeveloped. It didn’t matter. Louise was equally confused. Her red-checkered scarf, her Gauloises, and her existentialism were totally condemned. Karl Marx was the only one who counted. We clung to each other while we went into intensive training and soon were a formidable elitist couple on the political left edge. Louise played left quarterback, I played left defense. I wanted her to play toward the center of the field, but it would soon be evident that she always wanted to dribble on the outer chalk line.
And that is, in short, also the reason why we find ourselves trying to talk to each other in such a remote and strange place as Bordj El Kiffan, Algeria.
ALGERIA
1976
With the exception of the dogs who barked their eternal replays from block to block, everything was quiet in Bordj El Kiffan. Even Louise was silent as a clam, after hearing my Adelaide story. The candle had burned down. Darkness had draped itself like black velvet over us. Something rustled in the grass. The turtle floundered about and made the dog tremble with contained excitement. I nearly stopped breathing when I became aware that Louise was crying, silently and absentmindedly. Her voice reached me, as if from another world.
“How can you sit there and tell me such an idiotic mess of fantasies? Why do you try to hide? This isn’t you at all! Why do you turn your life into a series of anecdotes? How can you do that to yourself? You’re not a dinner guest, there’s no yawning company to entertain with jokes and funny stories. There’s only me, right in front of you. And I know this isn’t you. You know who you are? You’re like my dad. My daddy washed dishes one single time when I was little. I may have been ten years old and came home from school too early. He got flaming mad and threw me out of the kitchen. But I had time to see that he hardly knew how to do it. I snuck up to his office and sat down by his desk and went through every drawer. In one he had a lot of change. In another one he had condoms. I opened each and every condom wrapper and put the coins inside the condoms. Afterward he gave me a thrashing with his belt. That’s how my dad was. A strong individual who was involved with his money or sat behind locked doors in his office and counted love according to the number of fucking rubbers. You’re just the same! Punishment, work, and responsibility … with love measured in how many times we hop into bed together. There’s no difference. Other than the fact that you’ve a freedom that my daddy never had. I’ve prioritized you too damn much. And been left alone at home with all the work.”
So it went. As usual it grew from quiet crying into violent rage. Remarkable. Louise always plunges straight into the dishpan the minute we talk to each other. She forgets that she herself has never given many minutes to housework. She has no time. She has taken too many courses. With her level of ambition she ought to have her own half-hour television program to explain to us ordinary mortals why the world looks the way it does. Instead I am her test audience, forced to admire her capacity. After half an hour’s introduction in a new course subject, she has absorbed all the latest findings and integrated them into her personality. She rearranges her whole intellectual world in the time span of a coffee break. Even when she whizzes around in a Landrover, spending my hard-earned money thousands of miles from our home, she lands back in the dishpan again, sloshing around and crying her wretched heart out because I have not behaved like a totally domesticated man. Where the hell has she read how I should behave?
Probably in some sociological study of women in low-income positions. Isn’t there one single report about privileged women who never have had to take responsibility for themselves? I have worked my tail off so she could keep on studying to become the world’s foremost expert on questions of relationships, and the only thing she has discovered is that her husband works too damn much!
I have awakened by the side of a woman who during the day had no idea where Jerusalem is located but who overnight became an expert on the problems of the Middle East.
And I have made love to that same woman the preceding night, in spite of her supplying information in the middle of the act from th
e most recent and incredibly wordy report on human sexual behavior. Doubtlessly such a report makes it clear that I am a sexual tyrant, an egotistical, ejaculation-fixated spray painter of her shimmering cervix. In passing, she jabbers something about it being a fact that our whole earthly existence is linked to this very same cervix, and that I, generally speaking, do not reach her G-spot. It takes me three weeks of diligent work to find the G-spot theory among the yards of books dealing with the latest news on the female front. I find that the theory is not as yet scientifically tested and proven.
With my eyes smarting from reading all the small print, I let out a breath of relief, only to awaken the following morning to the information that our marriage has stagnated. I remain calm. What man would make a move voluntarily with a tornado in the house?
Louise is like her mother. My mother-in-law is a cleaning tornado. A white, whirling entity. She rips everything out of drawers and cupboards every day. By midnight everything sparkles and is put back in place. I understand fully why my father-in-law has a small room set aside as a home office. Where else could he escape during her violent cleaning attacks?
Once we lent them our apartment in Stockholm. Never again! We couldn’t even find our quilts under the taut, wrinkle-free bed covers. The stench of cleaning fluids hit us with a vengeance wherever we looked. Finally we gave up and called them. Our quilts were put under the mattresses to keep the covers perfectly smooth. Of course!
Louise is the same kind of tornado. The only difference is that her scouring powder is every new theory she comes across, and the object to be sanitized and spot-free is me. I am the one to be spring-cleaned and to have my furniture rearranged. Like I said, she insists on playing at the very edge of the football field.
“I feel as if I’m the only one who keeps developing,” Louise says.
“How the hell do you want me to develop when I don’t have time?!” I scream savagely and observe that I have extreme difficulty containing my incandescent rage.
Where did our camaraderie of so long disappear to? What happened to all of our practical agreements? Why do I feel like choking her?
My favorite daydream is an absolutely magnificent blueprint for murder. I would dig a hole in the sand and put her there. Everybody on the beach would see it as fun and games. Louise, too. Once I had her imprisoned by the sand, I’d keep shoveling more and more of it over her. And when everybody else had left, I’d fetch ocean water and pour it into her. Then I’d dig her up and throw the body into the sea. Drowned. Not a trace. Ingenious.
Such are my dreams behind the locked door of my workroom, in actuality a closet and much worse than my father-in-law’s office. He has hunting rifles, moose heads and medals for marksmanship, comfortable armchairs worn to amiable perfection by a multitude of behinds, and probably more fuck-rubbers and more coins to count. I, on the other hand, sit in a closet and fantasize about cutting up his daughter, placing the pieces in the freezer, and later boiling her, piece by piece. The problem is, who would eat Louise? Not even a dog could be tricked into gulping down such feed, which would probably make any sane animal raving mad.
Nothing of this happens. Silent and industrious, I return to my intellectual treadmill. Steel doors slam shut; a chill lowers itself over my diligent and dutiful self. Why don’t I offer any resistance? Why do I slave over meaningless papers, lectures, and meetings while she flops around like an exotic parrot and imitates everybody and everything? Why must she always shit on my head?
But in Bordj El Kiffan, there was no work hole to which I could retire. Since I couldn’t turn myself into a turtle, I expressed my thanks and went to bed. She was welcome to fill the old dried-up pond with tears all by herself.
Something pulsated in my body, as if reverberations from a distant pain. It happens when Louise fails to understand that I must search for and find my way in my own strange manner. I need masks and disguises. And I do need laughter — otherwise I will disappear in an ocean of tears. Did she not grasp that what I told her about my zany life was a gift? Did she not understand that beneath all that garbage existed a portrait of me? Is it my fault that one single day in my life sounds like a cock-and-bull story? Why don’t my experiences fit in anywhere? And why can’t I simply tell the truth? I am afraid to lose her. I am so closely intertwined with her that I will die if she goes away.
She is as crazy as my mother.
I crawled into bed, exhausted, and fell asleep just like that.
What was Louise doing? Washing the dishes, probably.
Drenched in sweat, I awakened to Wagnerian notes. A row of crystal-clear pictures were still doing somersaults on my retina. Cape Town. A dream. I tried to organize the bad dream into some logic, having to do with the reason why the German wanted to kill me in Adelaide a long time ago.
SOUTH AFRICA
1962
I am sitting crouched down by a tiled wall, holding my head in my hands, my eyes tightly shut. Inside, a day and a night rattle. I ought to hurry up. I am late. There will be one hell of a row aboard the ship. But I am unable to move a muscle. Outside the toilet there is a sign stating that only whites may enter. It seems somewhat exaggerated since an identical sign was posted at the entrance to the bar itself.
Here I sit. I am two people: myself and also another — we are separating. It is weird. I stand over by the wall and look critically at the poor devil, hunched down with his head in his hands.
I try to console him. “It wasn’t that bad, after all. You’re only seventeen and there’s plenty of time to forget it.” But he keeps sitting there, and I keep standing here.
Somebody has rent asunder his inner balance wheel.
He can’t go on sitting like that. The mirror image greets him with an ugly grimace when he gets up. A steamy spot spreads on the mirror. The face is ashen. Clear pearls of sweat appear at the hairline. The gums are pink and there are small white spots on the tongue. Everything becomes enlarged by the sun, catching fire in the mirror, having entered through a window placed high up.
Slowly I melt together with the other one, who is now grimacing apologetically toward himself.
I remember the walk.
The German and I have gone ashore. He is off to rent a car. I stand on the path along the shore at Sea Point. The wind howls through a crystalline, refreshing day. We headed into Cape Town through turbulent breakers after the worst storm in history. We have heard that a South African ship has hit a reef out there. I am stubborn and get our taxicab to drive past it. The German continues on his way. He has promised to pick me up later.
DANGER — EXPLOSIVE GOODS is proclaimed on the kegs the sea carries toward the coast.
Police are guarding the beach and keep us curious onlookers at a distance. I melt into the large, inquisitive mass of people. Above us a helicopter is buzzing with its human cargo from the wrecked ship. She is a small, neglected ship in the coastal trade. She seems to be whimpering in the enormous breakers. We are a human mass, groaning every time the ship heaves and pitifully reveals its lacerated metal. Every breaker throws the ship against the sharp reef. We follow her movements with our mouths wide open and let out, as one body, an “ooooh” when the ship splits open against the black cliffs and keeps opening up, more and more.
Down on the beach stands the rescued captain. He is throwing out his arms in a regretful gesture as he explains to the reporters. His mouth is a gaping black hole. An echo from a gigantic breaker rises out of our bodies and the captain turns around. Together we watch the ship topple over slowly — she curtsies gently and slides down into a depression between two huge waves, turning the gashed metal bottom up.
The captain forgets to lower his hands. It looks as if he is blessing his black crew, who were to be saved last.
The German picks me up in a car, calls me chicken-hearted and overly sentimental. Here it doesn’t follow that women and children are to be saved first. Here it goes: first the whites, then the blacks.
He grins and drives on, says that he has planned our
day. What am I doing here with him, really? He drives like a madman.
Table Mountain — the intense heat and light hit against the side of the mountain. The road is a black ribbon, sometimes draped on precipices, blasted into the rock, crooked and shimmering in the heat as if it wanted to lure us out over the edges, straight into the mighty sunlight — a bluish white field of light with the sun suddenly jumping out from behind the next promontory or the next piece of cliff jutting out.
Between us stands a case of beer. My job is to open a new bottle as soon as the German has emptied one. I am scared. He is of the opinion that the beer balances the driving and that the winding mountain road craves a great amount of beer. He blows his beery breath toward me and holds the wheel with one hand, snorting laughter, then turns back in the last moment and grabs hold of the wheel. The car lurches, we skid through the curve.
Above us hang the cliffs, profound and silent. Beneath us are jagged declivities.
This is Victoria Road, a glistening black tendril along the sea. Red, weathered, crumbling mountains, yellow mud that is cracked and reekingly dry. The narrow strip of sand far down there, the dizzying steeps. Every once in a while one can spot a human being by the sea. The sea is icily blue. The white breakers are like frozen lines against the yellow-brown sand. The distance is confusing. The quivering air distorts the vision. The ocean has congealed into a stiff surface with hissing, white lines that threaten to blast loose and break away.
My Father, His Son Page 9
