My Father, His Son

by Reidar Jonsson

  “Try to look at it like this,” I suggested. “Three minutes ago, when you gulped down your fourth glass of cordial, I happened to notice Lisbon’s most well known abductor of women. Sundays are their best days. That’s when the girls tell their parents that they’re going to church and instead hang around bars and drink sticky liquors. Right now you’d probably be chloroformed, had you not been with me. They do it with a tiny needle. When you wake up, you’re already sold and delivered to a bordello in Tangier. It’s lucky that I’m here with you. I can tell immediately if a person is honest or not.”

  “Oh no,” said Katrin, spitting the liquor back into her glass. “Is that true?”

  I was not drinking at all. I was so excited I wouldn’t have been able to hold a glass. Quietly I suggested that we disappear through the exit in back. Katrin wondered how I knew that there was a back door.

  “There’s always one,” I said. “But since every villain counts on it, we’ll take the regular one.”

  Katrin was filled with admiration. It’s the details that make all the difference between truth and lie. We agreed on a secret signal. If [wiggled my ears, she should just take my hand, look straight forward, and follow me.

  I wiggled my ears, she took my hand obediently, and we went into the city to find the concrete Jesus. It took plenty of time. First we took a bus and then a ferry. But once there, while Jesus radiated peace toward us, the sun had fallen straight down and the red sky over the ocean had become a deep black.

  “Why do you want to stand there and stare at something as silly as a statue?” Katrin asked.

  “Because,” I answered. “Because I know a guy who helped build it”

  “How interesting!”

  I heard the irony. Katrin was sulking and I was tired. I had no more to offer in the way of adventures. I suggested we go swimming.

  We walked down to the beach. A boy our age offered to guard our clothes for a few escudos, and we waded in our underwear into the lukewarm water before it became too dark.

  “How do we know he won’t steal our clothes?” Katrin asked when she had swam out a bit.

  I coughed, stopped, and remained standing on the bottom. Swimming has never been my strong point. As a sailor I rather believe in a quick death.

  “But of course you could see right away if he was an honest person or not,” Katrin said and kept on swimming.

  I quickly splashed back and ran up to the beach. The clothes were gone.

  “It was too dark,” I explained to Katrin. “Hard to see.”

  “Should we spend the night?” Katrin asked. “We could bury ourselves in the sand. If you do that, you don’t get cold.”

  “Then it would be as well if we didn’t get up again.”

  “But if I help to bury you, there’s nobody to bury me,” Katrin said.

  We did not manage to solve the problem. It’s always like that. I want desperately to do my best, but something goes wrong.

  We walked over to the ferry station and after a few hours of begging managed to get enough for the fare across. We returned to the ship toward midnight. We weren’t cold at all. It was a warm night. And we did have fun. Our little mishap would be something to tell the grandchildren. But once aboard, all my dreams of the future were crushed. Katrin was snatched out of my hand. Her parents were worse than my made-up women abductors. However much I wiggled my ears, I didn’t get Katrin’s hand back in mine.

  It was at this very moment that I became a real sailor.

  “I know all about you sailors!” Katrin’s mother screamed.

  “You should,” I said. “You’re married to one.”

  The chief engineer promised to wring my neck, but Bengtsson saved the day by offering himself as neck wringer. He quickly pulled me astern and planted his enormous right hand in front of my nose while he delivered a sermon.

  “You don’t treat a girl from a good family that way. You’re a sailor now. Better stick to your own.”

  Bengtsson did not need to hit me with his enormous fist. He still managed to nail the caste mark effectively to my forehead. I was another kind. And he promised to show me what kind that was. Unfortunately, a few days later, he insisted that my innocence needed some protection against the raw life of a sailor. A real Ollie. She used to tell everyone about the first time she met me when I lived alone in the apartment.

  “Clean as a doll’s house. Ingemar is a regular little housewife.”

  She nodded proudly. What she didn’t know was that all along inside me boiled a desire to dirty everything, to clump around with muddy boots on expensive rugs, wipe sticky fingers on the tablecloth, and blow my nose in the curtains. I never had the strength to disappoint her, however.

  And now I had Bengtsson on my back. He behaved like a father and in no time we became a fused-together couple through Lisbon, Valencia, Barcelona, and other ports on the map. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a bordello in Casablanca, waiting for him.

  I waited a long time for him in that run-down institution. There was a bar and a blackboard on the wall that factually announced the available possibilities and their prices. Women of every age, size, and color rubbed willingly against my legs. I thought of Elsa and her cucumbers. It was high time to do something about this. But, according to Bengtsson, I was not ready yet. He was still remembering my tears.

  “You don’t find such innocence every day. We’ll sell you to the Arabs instead and make money.”

  Every time we came to Casablanca and went to a suitable sidewalk café, soon enough there would come a drooling old coot asking whether I was for sale. Bengtsson negotiated. I followed the geek into the first back alley, where Bengtsson stood ready to take me back. Sometimes we would run into a bit of trouble, but mostly the sale was annulled quickly and quietly with Bengtsson keeping the money. He could be very persuasive, an ability located in his hard right fist. The success was then celebrated at the same old bordello every time.

  Whenever I demanded my part of the profit, Bengtsson responded by pinching my earlobe. I had to be content drinking Coca-Cola and waiting for him. While I appreciated his warnings and hard pinches, it was no fun sitting totally sober in a bordello. The stench, the sweat, the misery, the monotonous jukebox music, and the eternal slurred questions about prices, positions, and variations tore any further thoughts I had about love out of my mind and heart.

  So he drank and went to bordellos while I waited to lead him back aboard. At the end of one rambling nightly expedition, we ended up standing on the pier, gazing up at the ship’s iron side that seemed to continue all the way up to the Spanish sky. We were in Cartagena. Katrin had long ago gone home with her mother, and I couldn’t visualize her chief engineer father as the bearer of my one-syllable love letters. It was lonely in Cartagena. Bengtsson was drunk as a skunk. He was standing there pressing his weight against the side of the ship, undecided as to whether or not he would let me carry him up the gangway. He had perhaps noticed my depressed mood and decided to give me a treat. I don’t know.

  A sturdy wind was blowing in through the inlet toward the port straight against the outer side of our ship, which was anchored close to the quay. Bengtsson pointed to the limp mooring lines.

  “Now we’re going to move this heap of metal,” said Bengtsson.

  He asked me to put my back against the ship’s side and apply all the pressure I could against it.

  “More than six thousand tons,” I said. “You can’t move more than six thousand tons of metal.”

  “Oh yes. If you really want to.”

  Bengtsson’s face turned an interesting shade of purple. The porcelain eye nearly popped out of the eye socket as he pressed his back against the hard metal. The ship slowly moved away from the quay! I don’t know how long we stood there in the sweetly balmy night. Bengtsson was pressing and pressing against the ship while I was staring at the impossible undertaking. Finally he hung about a yard out over the edge of the quay, against the ship’s side. Afraid of his falling in, I pulled him bac
k.

  “Thanks,” he said and collapsed, panting heavily.

  I had to almost carry him aboard.

  All the while, he was urging me to help out with his mathematical calculations. We would soon be in Marseilles. He had a fiancee there, and it was time for him to settle down.

  “I got money when I lost the eye. But the French keep changing things around. A zero here, a zero there.”

  “Tell me about the eye,” I said.

  “None of your business. See how much money’s left. Madame Lajard and I thought of expanding. It takes capital, and she’s getting impatient.”

  I leafed through his black accounting book. The pages were filled with remarkable equations.

  “This’ll take some time.”

  “Just concentrate.”

  “When will we be heading home?” I asked. “Home to Sweden?”

  “It’ll be a while. Haven’t you heard? We’re going to work charter for the French. Marseilles-Algiers. And then some vegetables from Casablanca so it will look honest and aboveboard.”

  “Aboveboard?”

  “Yeah, aboveboard. Honest. We Swedes are honest folks. Aren’t we?”

  He was already stretching out on the berth. He had put his eye in a glass of water. I tiptoed out of the cabin. But just as I was closing the door, I heard his hoarse voice.

  “Don’t be sad. Get used to the fact that a sailor never goes home. Some try. But they’re an unhappy lot.”

  I don’t know how Bengtsson could guess that I was homesick. I went down to my cabin and threw myself on the lower berth. In the ship’s innards, the auxiliary engine buzzed like a merry bumblebee. I existed in a no-man’s-land. I was a sailor and consequently classified as some kind of ruffian with no morals. But judging from Bengtsson’s hard pinches, I still passed as an innocent child who could be saved. Despite his example. If he were engaged to a Madame Lajard in Marseilles, why did he spend so much time with the other ladies?

  But he was far from the only enigmatic person aboard. Right above me, on the upper berth, there was a seasoned and true sailor from the north of Sweden. He was seventeen years old and was already losing his hair. Every day he washed it carefully, hoping to make it thick and healthy. He was fixated on the idea of finding a miracle shampoo in each foreign port.

  As for me, I was slowly discovering that paradise didn’t exist. Not in Lisbon, not in Valencia or Barcelona. Casablanca, Tangier, and Ceuta were frightful holes. Savona, Genoa, and Naples were cold and harsh. Tile. Neon lights. Endless rain. Jukebox music and garishly painted, grotesquely grinning faces. Smoke and noise. All of us are trying to communicate something, but most of us don’t know how. Sorrow and loneliness are so enormous they provoke loud voices, laughter, music, and boisterous joy.

  Playing along on false strings requires a special kind of talent, one I did not have. Bengtsson was right about that. Still, I resolved to study the various possibilities of entertainment a bit further. Chances were I would one day become a seasoned man myself. I too would then acquire a girl in each and every port.

  Bengtsson demanded reports about my proficiency when it came to washing socks, darning holes, and keeping my ears clean. In many areas, he was fulfilling a father’s functions. In turn, I was able to help him with the problematic computations in the black book. Bengtsson had saved his money since shortly after the Second World War. He did not tell me where he kept it. But he had realized that it had undergone a huge devaluation, and that the French since 1959 had reduced their bills by one zero. The question in his mind was — how much was left? Bengtsson was only familiar with plus and minus. To deal with percentages and unknown factors was outside his ability. I was the first one he trusted enough to let look in the black book.

  Bengtsson had spent more than twenty years of his life calculating back and forth on its pages. He had manipulated zeros and decimal points so many times that it took me weeks to untangle the mess and find the original figures. Finally the facts stared me in the face: Bengtsson was a multimillionaire in worthless French paper money. It wouldn’t even buy a bus ticket along La Canebiere in Marseilles.

  I could have cold-bloodedly looked into his porcelain eye and told him the naked truth. Instead I helped him save money. I had a vested interest in guarding his funds with such zeal. I very much wanted to become a member of the family from the moment I had laid eyes on Madame Lajard’s daughter.

  The first time we arrived in Marseilles, I had long since figured out that Bengtsson’s French money was worthless. But he invited anyone in the sternward crew who wanted to come along to Madame Lajard’s. She picked us up in her small Fiat.

  Driving along a winding road through the black area of the city, we finally arrived at her bar. Despite its seedy looks it seemed to be a cozy place. Nobody wanted to leave. That was the house in which Bengtsson planned to spend his old age. If anyone had tried painting the warped walls, they would probably have crumbled at the touch of the brush.

  The bar itself was just a few sizes larger than the Fiat. At the furthest wall hung a curtain with indescribable intertwined flowers. That piece of cotton separated the bar from a sleeping alcove with an iron bed where Madame Lajard and her daughter slept.

  The daughter’s name was Julie.

  Madame herself was the sort of woman who seemed to know how to behave at all times. Julie was not Katrin’s one hundred and four pounds of Swedish standard weight but a well-rounded one hundred and forty pounds of Mediterranean dynamite, polished with olive oil and honed by the whistling mistral.

  I was beginning to understand why Madame Lajard wanted to know about Bengtsson’s financial status.

  The bar was so crowded that the supporting beams on the sidewalk shook from the effort of holding the wall in place. But the day Julie took off with some bloke, the rickety building would empty out. No sane person would seek the way to Madame Lajard’s shack, were it not for her daughter.

  As for me, I began to think of cucumbers right away.

  Bengtsson introduced me. Unfortunately I dared not move away from the gimcrack bar. I had to press my lower body as hard as possible against the planks. Julie came over and smiled. We could not speak with each other. As do all French citizens, she nourished the opinion that there existed no other real language in the world than the French one. It didn’t matter. We did not need to speak to each other. It was obvious that she was immensely intelligent and had a terrific sense of humor.

  And I was undeservedly lucky.

  When Madame Lajard finally threw out the customers, Bengtsson asked me to stay. It would be risky for any one person to go back to the ship alone. While the dangers of the city were discussed in Bengtsson’s remarkable Mediterranean language, Julie wiped the bar with long, sweeping movements. Everything she did was miraculous. Had it been up to me, I could have sat there for hours, watching her tidy up the place.

  It was decided that I should stay. Madame Lajard and Bengtsson retired to the alcove behind the curtain, leaving Julie and me with each other. The jukebox sparkled suddenly, and Julie selected a record. Edith Piaf sang about something that probably had to do with love. Soon a faint rhythmic squeak, emanating from the iron bed, meandered all over her melancholy voice and made the room cheerier.

  I regretted not being French. I could picture a Frenchman with an elegant gesture and a relaxed joke leading Julie out onto the floor in a passionate tango. As usual, I was unable to move a limb. But Julie came over and lifted me up into her arms. A ball of soft clay, I was born to be shaped to her challenging body. We rocked to and fro. The available floor space was no more than a few square yards. Behind the curtain Madame Lajard moaned. The iron bed squeaked. Edith Piaf sang. I tried to think of root canal work without Novocain, outdoor bathing in winter, and the dog Laika who once upon a time rotated in a space capsule and died. I thought of the Ingemar Johansson who had been beaten by Floyd Patterson and of more and deeper root canals. Nothing helped.

  I have read of men who dribble their sperms a little everywh
ere. Such things happen and, according to books written by experts, are nothing to be ashamed of. I agree with that.

  I thanked her as discreetly as I could and waddled over to the nearest chair in a dark corner.

  I later got used to dancing with Julie and was able to control myself.

  We sailed between the five ports — Marseilles, Algiers, Ceuta, Tangier, and Casablanca — just like a regular bus service. A set schedule. Quick loading and unloading. No hesitation. Every now and then schedules were upset or distorted. Human beings or machines broke. Bengtsson had his rhythm and I had mine. After a few quick hours in Marseilles and the nearly two-day-long trip to Algiers, he felt it was time for me to get him a bottle of wine. The port was fenced off with heavy barbed wire and sandbags. We unloaded our machine parts. A few crew members insisted that those were weapons for the French Army, but most did not care one way or another. Personally, I was mainly worried about the many inspections along my way as I was getting Bengtsson his bottle of wine.

  I was worried about Bengtsson’s economy but could never bring myself to tell him the hard truth about his lost fortune. Anyhow, he was intensely involved with other things. Madame Lajard took her time, the whores in Casablanca took theirs, and in between he needed a rest. He taught me no more about women. I practiced with total concentration on Julie what little information he had imparted.

  While Madame Lajard and Bengtsson made love on the shaky iron bed behind the curtain, Julie and I danced to old records. As time went on, we learned to exchange a word here and there. I wondered who her father was. It could not be Bengtsson, who didn’t have one good word to say about her.