It was Stockholm. There he was, lying on his back with his arms stretched out in the water, floating comfortably back and forth with the tide. That meant he had not drowned and still had air in his lungs. But he was dead. As stone dead as you would expect to be if you made contact with a propeller blade right through your skull. The face had been split in one clean cut all the way to the neck. One could see the water slosh right through him. Eight did indeed have an excellent pair of binoculars.
Far away, as if from another world, the anchor cable was still clattering. I wondered why Eight did not order the capstan stopped. It would be easy to fish Stockholm out of the river and put him in cold storage. The binoculars were bringing him so close that I could read his tattoos. They looked as amateurishly done as always. Sailor’s grave. I’m sure he would rather have invested his money in a hard hat, had he known how things would end. For once I had to admit that my father had been right. It’s not worth spending one cent on tattoos.
Eight pinched my ear amiably with his hard finger stumps. I handed back the binoculars. He had a fried egg in his mouth as he followed the body’s movement through the binoculars and let his words splutter out. The thin egg white moved about like an extra tongue when he commented that the blacks ought to be able to afford to bury their dead.
“Instead of just throwing them in the river. Where will it end?”
Eight sighed and put down the binoculars. He swallowed the egg and nodded to the second mate.
“It’s hardly civilized.”
Our second mate did not look well at all. His detachable collar seemed to have shrunk quite a few sizes. His face was white with bright red spots when with a trembling hand he put down his binoculars.
I ran out on the bridge wing and took several gulps of fresh air on his behalf. From there I had a clear view of the decks both fore and aft. As if transmitted by an invisible herald, the message had gone from man to man, and now the whole crew stood along the railing while Stockholm’s body drifted by, floating as if on a cross beneath the surface. More than one stole a glance toward the bridge, listening to the clanking anchor cable and waiting for the command to retrieve the corpse.
When it had already floated quite a bit toward the stern, everybody understood that Eight had no intention of losing any more time. What they did not know was that Eight had already declared that Stockholm, through a propeller slash to the skull, had been magically transformed into a black native of Nigeria’s sump mark.
All of us were paralyzed. Nobody protested.
We let it happen.
No, Vappu ran toward the stern and lowered the flag to half-mast. At the same time I heard through the loudspeaker that the anchor was weighed. I climbed up above the bridge to the flagstaff mast and waved to Vappu. He understood immediately. Following his example, I lowered the Swedish flag to half-mast. The flag on the flagstaff mast is smaller than the one sternward. When I had climbed down to the bridge wing again, it looked terribly small, like a soiled handkerchief.
I did not sleep the next twenty-four hours.
I did not dare go to sleep. As soon as I closed my eyes, Stockholm’s body turned up on the retina behind my eyelids. In the split face, small shoals of fish peeked out triumphantly while they busily cleaned out the contents of the head. A bird pecked its way through an eye, not at all frightened by the many and threatening tattoos on Stockholm’s arms. Arms that never again would lift weights or have its muscles bunch into hard knots during a contest with Vappu.
In my dream, Stockholm kept twirling in the mouth of the Niger, moving back and forth with the tide, as if neither sea nor river wanted him. He drifted out there while we worked our way further and further into the humid and suffocating jungle on our way by the same river to Sapele.
As I have previously mentioned, we cast anchor in Sapele the following morning. At a small distance, perhaps not more than a hundred yards away, the company’s sister ship was riding anchor.
My father stood in the midship aisle.
He lifted his arm in greeting. Then he disappeared into the midship aisle’s black hole. He must have other things to do than to stand there waving at me.
And as I have also already said, Eight issued the command for me to come up on the bridge. Then he fell asleep instead of letting me know what he wanted. Strange perhaps, but after all he was mad. I stood before him, thinking most of the things I have related up till now. Whereupon Eight awoke and handed me two packs of cigarettes. Along with them he gave me his blessing and the advice to go and visit my father. Since I did not believe that I at this point would be able to sleep any more than at earlier attempts, I decided to follow his advice. It was quite a while since we had seen each other, my father and I.
For one pack of cigarettes, I was paddled across. I tried to avoid looking down into the water, but I could still imagine how Stockholm would have looked in this kind of close-up.
Arriving at the ship, I asked for my father. He was in the engine room. I felt relieved. The thought of suddenly being face to face with him confused me. I had no idea what to say. I went to his cabin. It wasn’t locked. Big as he was, he could probably, quite like the Islander, practice discus throwing with any intruder. Perhaps I should ask him if he had throttled any black ones during the course of the morning. That ought to make him happy.
As a child I had frequently had to listen to his expositions regarding the black population of Africa. According to him there was only one solution to the problem: If all whites left the country and put a fence all around Africa, the natives would soon be climbing the trees again.
What would happen after that, I have never been able to understand. Would they throw us some bananas from time to time?
Cautiously, I sat down on the edge of the berth. His cabin was large, at least four times larger than mine. It was located on the middle deck and had two portholes. Once upon a time the middle deck cabins had been for passengers, but those days were gone. Now the officers had grabbed the luxurious cabins. My father sailed as second machinist. From my perspective, having spent three years sternward among the crew, he lived in another world. At the same time the familiar odor of raw oil streamed over me, the same smell as in my memories. And the different time sequences mingled, as if ebb and flood had strayed from timeworn regulations and schedules and decided to meet in one enormous embrace.
Perhaps we always go forward, bow first, just like ships against the currents that constantly try to drive us back into the past. Since our future is uncertain, we carry along our memories. The idea is probably that our past ought to serve as a lifeline of safety. For me, however, it has always been the other way around. Sometime in the future I would escape my perilous past. I felt faint just thinking of how much work and energy such a feat would demand. And I fell asleep the very second I fell into my father’s berth.
I don’t want to insist that I dreamed. Since I had become used to sleeping while being awake, perhaps I could state that I lay there thinking about things. I had reasons to do that. I thought of why I had not seen my father for four years. Then I tried to figure out how many years altogether we had spent under the same roof, but I couldn’t work out the mathematics. I never do. There’s always one year too many or too few. Even as a small child, I would insist with total conviction that I was four when I was only three. I believe that I was thirteen years old when my mother died. I remember that. But I also clearly remember how she always told us children that our behavior would kill her.
Who knows, she may have died the first time I did something naughty, shit in my pants or something equally awful that children always seem to do at the weirdest times.
According to one of my father’s favorite jokes, most women do leave their husbands — the problem is that they don’t take their bodies along. Perhaps his coarseness contained some truth after all? Perhaps he returned home and was disappointed when his wife took no interest in him? In some ways, he was right. My mother was never really there. There was only a body that read books an
d became sicker and sicker. When you add it all together you have two absent parents. Because during my first thirteen years on earth, my father may have been at home four years in all. Since I was a little over eighteen when I was lying on his berth in Sapele, Nigeria, West Africa, Africa, the World, and had not laid eyes on him these last four years, one could say that I had seen him only four years of my life. A little less than a fourth of the total time I had been around. I don’t know if I figured that absolutely correctly, but why not name him Four, I thought.
“Hi, Four!”
He would not understand.
Already as a child, I was forced to acknowledge that he was more to be pitied than I.
“Christmas presents?” he used to ask mockingly. “Why should you get Christmas presents? I never got any when I was a kid.”
With that answer and many others like it, he gave me gifts that lasted all my life.
When my mother died, he was on the other side of the globe. At least that is what I, at thirteen, believed. We postponed the burial. He had a new uniform made. It was elegant, with two stripes on the sleeves. He was handsome. I could imagine him at sea, killing himself with hard, wearing work to save us children from hunger and poverty. I’m sure that is how he saw himself. While I felt like a too tightly stuffed sausage in Småland and had to save myself as best I could.
My wonderful uncle and my fantastic aunt were a great help. I don’t understand why I don’t mail them postcards now and then from the big, wide world. It might be an inherited trait, something in my blood. My father never wrote to me. Though I tricked him into picking me up in Småland when it was time for my confirmation. Unfortunately, he managed to take off for distant seas as soon as he had me settled in our apartment. In order to take care of oneself, one needs to be fourteen years old and have gone through that confirmation sacrament, in my father’s opinion. I doubted that those were enough qualifications. But that’s how it was.
I lived alone, worked in a pharmacy, and cleaned the apartment frequently just in case the child-care authorities would come by to check. My cleaning zeal was in vain. No social worker ever came. Autumn went, winter wanted to settle down for good, but spring got angry and threw away all that snow and ice. It was only me it forgot to thaw out.
But how my soul froze and became a spiny, rough block of ice does not make for a good story. What can you tell about a large hole?
One funny thing happened. I decided to become a criminal but I got caught in the first round. The most imbecile policeman in the country cross-examined me. I told him I was waiting for my father, who was supposed to bring me to the South Seas. It was a foolish lie, but one I used to believe when I was little. The policeman let me go without legal proceedings. I found that encouraging. Young as I was, I had managed to talk rings around a cop. He was not exactly Hercule Poirot. Still and all. I learned something: Reality did not resemble the one presented in books. Everything had to do with lying and pretending. Yet the lies and the pretending exercised an astonishing power over reality. Had I not lied my way out of my first police examination in the grandest manner? And did I not remain as parent-free as before? I could continue to stray from the beaten tracks.
Unfortunately my bubbling enthusiasm got icebound in nothingness.
It became lonelier and lonelier around me.
The building we lived in was commonly called the Chinese Wall, since it was elongated and housed so many people. Then someone had the bright idea to put that kind of length vertically. With astonishing speed, they built tall, many-storied apartment buildings right in front of us. It was said that the children who lived in those buildings had a better life. They boasted that they got to travel by elevator. To me, it seemed better to be able to run inside to one’s mother in just a few steps, even if I personally could not avail myself of that comfort.
All around the Chinese Wall buzzed seething life, but our apartment could as well have been a snowed-in hut of corrugated iron on the North Pole’s white-striped back. Uncaring chance had put me as its guard.
It was definitely the end of the 1950s, that spring when winter burst apart. We were headed for a brilliant future. The generous sun wasted its heat on all of us, but I remained cold and hard. My brumal ground frost was there to stay. Outside the kitchen window, kids of my age flocked together, involved in totally unconscious activities, playing marbles and doing other childish things. Of course they were still in school and believed that a future existed. They could not know that I was in training to destroy the world, using only my thought.
That’s how it was. I lived completely alone. Nobody did anything to me or for me. Every day I rode my bike down to my job as errand boy at the pharmacy and manufactured gunpowder to explode the Chinese Wall — just in case I was unsuccessful in annihilating it with just my thought. Every day I stopped at the home of my grandparents, shoveled down some food, and scurried away. They were my father’s parents and seemed even further away from me than my father.
Every day when I came home, I ran, as if on an invisibly controlled leash, to the cupboard. There was never anything there to eat. Empty and dusty. Quiet and boring. I was not a huge success as a fourteen-year-old bachelor. If God was supposed to be so damn good and kind to little children, why didn’t He ask my mother to swoop down with a few sweet rolls. He could show some common human concern, couldn’t He?
That’s how things were, that spring. Everything functioned just fine. I was seriously thinking about placing a personal ad. One of the girls at the pharmacy got married thanks to such an ad under “Personal.” She looked absolutely frightful. The lenses in her glasses were so thick that it seemed as if all of her had been preserved in a glass jar. If she could find an interested male person, why shouldn’t I be able to find a new mother? “Small, nice boy, cleans the house, works and eats out, is looking for healthy mother with strong nerves. Interests: home-cooked meals. Sweet rolls are welcome.” Something like that. I was close to actually putting in such an ad, when one day someone rang the doorbell.
A woman blinked in a friendly manner as she looked at what was left of me when I opened the door. She had married my father. She was my new mother. She announced all this to me without batting an eye. I laughed a little nervously. I was so undernourished when it came to mothers that I was hallucinating. Time for personnel care at the pharmacy. A few free medications would not hurt. Not even in my wildest dreams could I imagine that my father, busy sailing the seven seas, would have time to acquire a new wife. A man who did not even find time to see his own children.
But this female stranger stood her ground.
She showed me the shiny new ring.
She was my new mother. She was no mirage, she was the real redheaded kind. Her hair was crimped into tiny curls that made her whole hairdo look like a tinted Persian fur coat. The comparison was close at hand since a black such coat was wrapped snugly around her round and busty body. Indeed, I had acquired a buxom and well-dressed mother. But with my real mother’s death fresh in my memory cells, it would be difficult to fall right into the opening of the Persian fur and hug her tightly in a welcoming embrace.
Yet that was exactly what I did.
I hugged her for a long time. I stood inside the fur coat and squeezed her. I suppose I squeezed as much as a parched desert roamer drinks at an oasis, once he has made certain that it’s no mirage. My new mother wore a solid corset. As a veteran expert on ladies’ lingerie, I acquired the tactile knowledge that it was a couple of sizes too small. She was huffing and groaning a little. The sticky, pungent odor of the fur coat was familiar to me as well. My detective brain drew several quick conclusions. As a confirmation of my suspicions, she pulled an old nylon stocking out of a pocket to blow her nose. She was totally confused. But she was admirable. A totally new mother and the first human being in my life who had dressed up for my sake. The corset a little too small. The fine fur coat even though she had already put it in mothballs. And new stockings obviously bought on her way to see me, probably hav
ing discovered a run in her old ones.
To make her relax and feel safer, I walked her around the apartment. It did not take long. We had just three rooms. But those three rooms were so clean and neat that she could not believe her own eyes. As a professional housekeeper, I asked her to do the fingertip test. I knew what dust balls could do to the lungs. But judging from her ample bosom, she had no lung problems. We smiled at each other. We were really making terrific first impressions on each other.
As a child, I was terribly conservative. I wanted to keep my old mother, I would never even have thought of shooting our dog, Sickan, when she was in the way, and had I been given the choice, of course I would have chosen to live permanently in the house of my maternal grandparents — on the upper floor with as many as possible of my relatives present. Now at almost fifteen years of age, I understood that I may be more apt to want to change the way things were as the years went by. As a three-year-old, I could not have accepted a change of mothers, as a thirteen-year-old I experimented with some form of maintained spiritual contact with her, and now, as an almost-adult, I was ready to weed out every trace of memories from our apartment in order for this prosperous stepmother to take my late mother’s place.
I opened every cupboard and explained what we could move up to the attic. The bedroom furniture we could burn at the refuse dump — you never know where the lung sickness hangs around. It can bite through a lot, even through corsets. And that would be a pity, I felt, and offered to organize the move of stuff to the attic. In secret, I was working on an alternate plan, of course. The attic was spacious. If I didn’t feel comfortable down here, I could move up there myself.
But I didn’t have to organize a thing. Ollie, my new mother, took care of it all.
Ollie disposed of our whole apartment in one single day. That was the day I realized that a person ought to move in complete darkness. In the light of day, household goods look painfully decrepit. At least ours did. The dear memory of my brother’s avid whittling at the kitchen table was transformed into ugly, deplorable wounds. The furniture looked horribly rickety, loose-limbed, and out of style. Clothes that had been selected with care when bought and worn in gladness disappeared rapidly into big garbage bags. Their destination? The Salvation Army. In a flash I understood that my childhood’s building blocks would not follow me through my life’s stroll in the direction of the old folks’ home. Still, there were traces of narrow-mindedness left in my young heart. There was a painful wrench when I contemplated the scattered remnants of what had been our home.
My Father, His Son Page 16
