“About what?”
For once I was in agreement with Johansson.
“About the difference between a tugboat skipper and a commander aboard an ocean-faring ship, for instance! So he knows his place. We attack at dawn!”
Eight walked off with long strides.
Everything was perfectly clear. The big bullies are always allowed to mistreat those who are smaller. My father did not need to tell me that. He had taught me the same lesson by example much earlier. We sat on a pile of stuff and saw Eight disappear, just as if he were on his way to the post office, right behind the left hut and to the right of two pigs and one emaciated cow.
Soon he was back. He looked down at us, father and son, and obviously found both of us too inactive for his taste.
“We must do something.”
“What?” Johansson asked.
Nobody can repeat the same thing over and over and manage to make it sound different each time the way my father can. I was filled with reluctant admiration when we stood on the same side against Eight. All the trip up from Sapele, my father had not said much more than “What?” and “Why?” and “You’d like to know!” Last night, when he was in his merriest mood, he said, “Once I was in the city of Uddevalla twice” and “Do you know that animals are forbidden in the zoo?” Too bad he hadn’t asked Eight if he had bats in the attic. Or that he hadn’t burped after having his breakfast beer and said, “Good cake. No bones in it.” Because that was his whole repertoire. But with what immense richness and variation, wit and intelligence, and wounding precision could he not rule the world with the aid of these meager sentences!
I nodded confidently toward Eight.
What? What in the world are we going to do?
“There’s a bar up there,” Eight said. He neighed dryly. “A hole in the wall. If there had been a wall.”
It was decided that I would guard our belongings while Eight and Johansson waddled off, like two carelessly dressed giant ducks, one in white and one in bleached khaki. Johansson waved his raggedy hat. I expected him to come up with one of his favorite lines, with only a mere adjustment to the present situation.
Such as, “If you’ve drowned when we come back, I’ll give you a thrashing.”
But he spared me that.
I was alone. Sitting outside the Dane’s shooting range. As long as we did not venture out on the unsteady planks, he seemed to stay calm. To be extra sure, I built a barricade with the cases of beer. There were plenty of them for that.
I lay down, awaiting further orders, and pulled a few bundles on top of me in hope of becoming invisible. I saw my part in all of this as simple: Rest as much as possible while awaiting the commanding officers’ whims. Legends are told of sailors who have slept their ways across the seven seas. The only occasions where they are seen are at mealtimes and when the workday is over. Then you find them in their berths, totally exhausted. A sailor knows that it’s no good to overexert yourself, to run around unnecessarily and look willing to knock rust all day long.
I tried to sleep. Now and then voices floated down from the huts. The villagers were probably contemplating the new series of events that had not led to anything except two new customers at the local bar. From where I was, the world fell asleep and I with it. The sky was lead colored with black, broad stripes that wanted to swell and burst out in purple. Far away a few trains were colliding with a herd of elephants. At least that’s what it sounded like. It was thundering and booming over the treetops.
In West Africa one can’t say that it begins to rain. The violent downpour resembling a raging rapid obviates that understatement. I held my breath so as not to drown and splashed away toward the huts. Darkness had dropped quickly. Under a few tall trees, a roof seemed to lean forward like an enormous dragon. A kerosene lamp glimmered. Inside, seated on some boxes, I saw Eight and Johansson. A ring of spectators was standing at a respectful distance.
When I burst in on them, Eight’s face split in his usual friendly grin. I ignored him. Let him be angry. I felt as if the hard rain had already made big holes in my head. Getting a thrashing from my father for having drowned in the rain would be too much.
A crude box wiggled invitingly. I kicked away the goat who stood there butting against it and sat down. They were drinking a rancid, oily mixture from small glasses. That was true jungle juice. When the glass was rotated quickly, the fluid separated and went two different ways. I wondered what it would do to a human being’s in-sides.
Eight asked how much it might cost to buy a mattress.
What a weird question! But as usual Johansson did not hesitate.
“Two packs of cigarettes. At the most. Perhaps half a carton.”
The heavenly cascade of water stopped as abruptly as it had begun. And the gray day had been colored in with black ink. A naked child clung to its mother, grabbing for a breast. She was helping it along, flashing a sweet smile toward us. Then putting her face close to the child she spoke to it, softly and tenderly, in a language I did not understand. The gestures were understandable, the same way that I slowly grasped what kind of mattress Eight went on about. The jungle juice had totally eroded his judgment and made him forget all about his superior station in life. I stood up and let out a few well-chosen words before I left.
“Don’t forget we attack at dawn!”
“What’s the matter with Johansson? Johansson, tell Johansson that he can get a mattress, too. My treat!”
I knew it. Eight could not manage to talk to two Johanssons at the same time. The family name was following me with its tail between the legs like a beaten dog through the village. My father was my father even if when drunk he like all men doubted his fatherhood. But that was his problem. Mine was to wish not to be like him and to fill the family name with new substance. Eight and he were free to stagger about in the jungle, supported by their bought women; they could treat them with contempt and call them mattresses, worth no more than half a carton of cigarettes. They could do what they wanted. They could believe that they were free, but actually they themselves were their own prison. It took another kind of life than theirs to break out of oneself.
I repacked our things to get out some dry stuff. The moisture steamed up like tiny white clouds in the heat. Reasonably comfortable, I lay there, staring up at the black night. The only thing you could see was yourself. I wondered if there were a spot on earth where humanity could blossom. Or perhaps goodness only existed as something locked in our chests, a symphony that makes us cry about ourselves and over our lost opportunities?
It was clear to me, once and for all, that I would never get a word out of my father. We would never be able to compare our sorrows. His being the loss of a wife. Mine that of a mother. We had no common language. However I tried, we remained tied in a triangle with him and me in opposite acute angles. And all the less dangerous things in the third one, such as jungle juice … mattresses … men from Stockholm …
How could I have been such a dense idiot? My life at sea was a vain search for my father. When that day of encounter had finally arrived, we had nothing to say to each other.
As a child I imagined my father as a hero, in a tropical helmet and immaculate uniform, sitting in a deck chair and reading a month-old newspaper. The loading of bananas being over and done with for the day. He opens up the paper. But what does he see! YOUNG HERO SENDS SICK MOTHER TO EXCLUSIVE HYDROPATHIC RESORT IN SWITZERLAND! I, young Ingemar Johansson, am the hero. I have found a fortune in gold coins at the city dump. Slowly my father folds the newspaper. He sobs quietly in the African night. His chest is filled with happiness and he knows that tomorrow he will take the first direct flight to Switzerland so that he and the young hero can take turns reading novels aloud to the slowly recovering woman, wife, mother, who bears a rather remarkable likeness to Greta Garbo…. Farewell, Africa. Farewell, bananas. I have done my duty. Now my family awaits me.
I blame the goddamned literature. Somerset Maugham has filled my poor brain with bitter and cynical m
en whose defenses crumble in face of total goodness or who die violently as a direct result of their own evil.
In literature, I would confront my father right now and point at him with an accusing finger. I ought to tell him how I made the terrible discovery in Ollie’s attic, how his old pocket calendar almost eerily opened itself to the right page, as if he had been pondering that day, again and again. With a gloomy voice, I ought to make him throw himself to the crocodiles in the river Niger —- I mean, if there were any crocodiles in it — or force him to his knees, crying, asking forgiveness for committing gross adultery with Ollie the very day that my mother, his wife, died. He was not in a foreign country the day she died. He was in bed with another woman. Her name was Ollie. Why didn’t he make an effort to come home? Why didn’t he care enough? Did he fool his brothers, my grandmother, all of our relatives? How did he do that?
But a conversation and such questions lay outside the realm of possibility.
I would never receive any explanations from Johansson, never be given a chance to understand and therefore never be able to forgive. Johansson disappears in a dozen Tuborg beers a day with about twenty standard phrases keeping all real emotion at bay. Johansson is armored, in a bunker, formed by the grim grind of ordinary days. Inside those steel-coated, thick walls, perhaps there once lived a crying child, scratching the walls in vain because it was not allowed to grow up. It had no words. Now it has died. And I have no way of forcing my way inside to see how it once looked.
Life is a far stretch from literature. Or perhaps it’s far from how I conceived literature as a child. I am eighteen years old and reality rubs mercilessly away all romantic ideas. Even the wish for revenge. What is the use of killing a person who has already died? My father may simply have forgotten to put his body where it belonged.
Lying there beneath West Africa’s firmament, I was pondering these things. Perhaps it was then that for the first time I understood the notion of time for a human being: Time is the body’s pulse beats, the body that travels through time and space. The past is ever present. I am not imprisoned in the here and now. I can be found and born at an immeasureable number of moments — and everything happens simultaneously.
My father has attempted to escape his past and therefore remains imprisoned in it. But he has become used to his prison to such a degree he no longer wants to break out of it. To him I am a threat. He knows that I want to make the past come alive inside him.
Still, our meeting was a meeting. I no longer need to search for him.
I tried to derail my thoughts and get going on other subjects. The weird Dane, for instance. Did he also stare at the stars? Maybe he simply had suffered an attack of homesickness?
Nothing but silence emanated from the tugboat. It seemed unsafe to wander about in the dark. I could wait. We would attack at dawn.
That’s exactly what happened.
Although during the night I constructed a plan less violent than rushing forward against whining bullets. While the morning was still gray, I went to look for Eight and Johansson. They were asleep amid a mess of empty glasses, bottles, and a few rooting swine underneath the stunted roof. I awakened them, rather gently, and introduced my plan — that we would attack the Dane from the inside. How? By softening him up, bringing him out through sentiments expressed in songs.
“Something Danish. Does either of you know any Danish songs?”
I asked and tried to look more convincing than the two hung-over and half-asleep individuals I was addressing.
“See what I mean?” said Eight. “He’s been studying me for months. He thinks I’m insane. Crazy. Otherwise he wouldn’t dare ask his commander to sing in Danish.”
“He always looks at people like that. I know. It’s damned unpleasant. But d’you know any Danish songs?” asked Johansson.
“What?! Me? Hell no.”
“The Dane has shut himself in. He shoots at us. We don’t know why, but maybe he’s just homesick,” I continued.
“So why doesn’t he just get going then?” Eight said.
“It’s not that simple for a commander. He needs to have a reason.”
“He does. He’s mad as a hatter,” said Johansson.
“And he shoots at us,” Eight added.
“Precisely.”
They looked as if they were considering the matter, but I could sense that the jungle juice had killed their intellectual abilities for a while yet. Then Johansson brightened. Meaning that one eyelid trembled a hundredth of an inch.
“Hist hvor Vejen slaar en Bugt ligger der et Hus saa smukt. You know — where the road turns, there’s a house so sweet or something. It’s better in Danish. It’s Hans Christian Andersen. My brother-in-law used to sing it. He’s a cop in Copenhagen. Half a dozen Tuborgs and he can’t stop. Hist hvor Vejen … !”
My father cleared his throat with a couple of stanzas, then his voice turned mighty as a howling, brawling water buffalo’s.
I had tried to talk some sense into my own head during the long night, telling myself about the futility of longing for one’s father — and had almost convinced myself. But the very person I had held in contempt during the night, now singing, was transformed. The straw hat became a tropical helmet, the dirty shirt and the shapeless shorts turned into a dazzling white uniform. My father was a villain but one with overpowering charm. When he sang, a steel spring of vitality burst out of his closed-down features. Perhaps it was those fleeting glimpses of somebody who was open and sensitive that had enchanted my mother? And the other women. They had to have seen something.
I went to fetch a dozen breakfast beers, hoping to create the perfect mood. We sat down and went into rehearsal. The song was strangely beautiful, softly waving as a Danish wheat field and with a pitch suitable for Paul Robeson. It was set so low one could jump over it. All around us stood the village populace, puzzled and all ears. Even the small black pigs had stopped poking about. They might have sensed that we were singing about a country that had built its wealth on the flesh of their brothers.
“If only the Dane had been here!” cried Eight, a tear in his eye and a Tuborg in his hand.
“If it works on a Swede, it’ll work like a can opener on a Dane. He’ll cry rivers,” I promised.
“But if he doesn’t?” Johansson asked in the middle of a Danish staccato sound deep in the throat.
I shrugged.
“At least we’ve tried.”
Fortified and well rehearsed we marched down to the bridge. Our audience was following at a cautious distance. Eight had been palavering with the village headman but had been unable to figure out why the Dane had locked himself in.
At the bridge we reconsidered our plan of attack. Yesterday’s heavy, leaden sky had been replaced by dazzling sunlight. To walk directly onto the bridge and die with a song on one’s lips did not seem an impressively intelligent thing to do. Johansson cleared his throat but had trouble finding the right note. He had experienced the closest encounter with Danish marksmanship as he had been holding the beer bottle when it was shot to pieces.
“Perhaps we could sing from here?” Eight suggested warily.
“It won’t be loud enough.”
“Or we could get behind some kind of cover," I said brightly.
We looked around. The only creatures who would have been able to find something to protect them on this bridge’s rickety planks would be three singing pygmies, if they first had been shrunk to the size of about four inches each. But they wouldn’t have known those strange, guttural Danish words. We sighed.
Johansson went over to our pile of provisions to get yet another beer. I had arranged the cases of beer as protection during the night. Wouldn’t it be possible for each of us to hold a case in front of us?
Eight looked sicker than ever. “And get our legs or our heads shot off!”
In the end, with our combined mental efforts, we solved the problem. Nothing is impossible. We lowered the beer cases into our boat, piled them up at the bow, and felt that t
his provided a reasonable cover. With the help of the oars, Eight and Johansson would hold the bow against the tugboat when we got closer. No Dane would be crazy enough to shoot up a whole supply of Tuborg, we reasoned, and proceeded to sing cheerily and loudly. “Hist hvor Vejen slaar en Bugt ligger der et Hus saa smukt.”
The melody danced across the river. Our voices bounced against the rusty tugboat. Before long we caught a glimpse of the rifle barrel and, unfortunately, could both hear and see our beer bottles breaking in the cases where the bullets hit. I don’t know if it was the song or the loss of so much beer that drove tears into Johansson’s eyes. Anyhow, he cried while he rowed but kept on singing mightily. Eight and I also did our loudest best.
When we were a couple of yards from the tugboat, the shooting stopped. Our voices took on a timbre of renewed hope. Victory was near. Thanks to Hans Christian Andersen.
“Ahoy!” The word came from the tugboat and vibrated in the air.
Afraid that the Dane would lose the ambiance, Johansson and I kept humming while Eight started negotiations.
“Ahoy!”
“Is that beer that you have there?”
“Not much longer! Not if you keep shooting at it!”
A long silence ensued from the tugboat while we held still against the current and kept singing. Then he called out again.
“Ahoy!”
“Ahoy!”
“What kind of beer is it?”
We all turned pale in the boat. What if the Dane only drank Carlsberg beer!
By now we were close enough that he could take aim above the cases, however deep down into the boat we pressed ourselves. While, as far as I was concerned, Eight was insane, I had to give him credit here for considerable diplomacy.
“Tuberg,” he yelled.
The silence from the tugboat was as long as the Niger itself. We could discern the slow swaying back and forth of the gun barrel. Obviously the Dane was deeply touched.
“Ahoy!”
He was beginning to bore us with his constant ahoys. Eight sighed. He evidently was sharing my opinion. But he answered patiently.
My Father, His Son Page 19
