The Garden

by Magnus Florin

  The Garden

  Magnus Florin

  translated by Harry Watson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  The Garden

  Copyright

  The Garden

  This happened. A meeting on the first day, the first hour. Petrus Arctædius, from Nordmaling, and Carl Linnæus, from Småland. The first handshake was followed by animated conversation about stones, plants and animals. Observations were exchanged and what the one did not know, the other did not hesitate to tell him. They were like two siblings. Arctædius the big brother, Linnæus two years younger.

  They drank sloe wine, ate cream and made up their own songs. “Two friends were sitting. In artless repoooose …” Arctædius was a good singer. Alongside him, Linnæus was emboldened to join in the tune. From time to time they dropped off from drunkenness and exhaustion. Woke up and carried on singing.

  They imagined everything in the world divided into two halves. The hard things in one half and the soft things in another. The fixed and the moveable. The annual and the perennial. What had no tail and what had a tail. That which was fast and that which was slow. The two-legged and the four-legged. The hairy and the hairless.

  They imagined each of these halves divided in turn into two new halves. And so on into further divisions, with no end in sight.

  This delighted and astonished them.

  Growing friendship between the hesitant, serious Arctædius and Linnæus, small and lively. The tall, gaunt Arctædius and the hasty, fidgety Linnæus. The restless Linnæus and the watchful Arctædius, inclined towards procrastination yet first to reach the target due to the thoroughness of his preparations. The enterprising Linnæus and the patient Arctædius.

  An odd couple. Their dialects differed. Yet each one a mirror image of the other. They competed and their rivalry was a game. But one day there was an intimation of discord. “It was I who …” “You …?” “Yes indeed.” “You’re joking, it was I who …”

  They decided to divide up the field of study. It was a separation agreed on by both of them. Arctædius took the amphibians, the reptiles, the frogs and toads and the fish. Linnæus took the birds and the insects, the mammals and the stones. Along with the plants. But Arctædius got the Umbelliferæ family as he had a new method planned for them.

  Linnæus did not like the cold, slippery fish.

  Linnæus brown-eyed. His friend’s eyes light blue.

  They promised each other that if one of them died, the other would regard it as a sacred duty to transmit to the world the observations which the deceased had left behind him.

  It is muddy autumn. It is not warm, it is not cold. The gardener feels the soil between his thumb and middle finger. He smells it, tastes it. It is the salt sea.

  It is the black clay of the Uppsala plain. He strolls, as he is in the habit of doing, round the squares of the plant beds. He rakes dry leaves from the paths. He puts the rake in the tool shed and falls asleep inside, waiting. He is woken by a cloudburst. It is Thursday morning and time for the cheese and butter delivery from Hallkved.

  The gardener exchanges a few words with the coachman and the servant, who are soaked by the driving rain. They laugh together. They yawn. They stand silent, looking out over the plain, the clay, and over towards the cornfields.

  They think about porridge, gruel, bread. They stand silent, still. It is a long drawn-out moment.

  But a change comes and the two of them show signs of departing, take their places in the cart and drive on towards Lövsta.

  The gardener stands with the butter and cheese in his arms and looks after them. Then he walks in the direction of the subterranean larder.

  The friends Linnæus and Arctædius studied the Umbelliferæ together.

  They are: the umbelliferous plants. Chervil. Wild chervil. Shepherd’s needle. Hemlock. Upright hedge parsley. Slender hare’s-ear. Carrot. Hogweed. Water fennel. Lesser water parsnip. Cumin. Pennywort.

  Arctædius had a slender hare’s-ear in front of him:

  “Bluish-green, slender, branching from its base. Leaves like narrow lancets, without indentations. Umbels with few flowers, the upper one composite, with three involucres. The others simple from the axil, with involucres longer than the umbel. The fruit round, with small spines and narrow ridges.”

  Linnæus is out in the wind on the Uppsala plain, waiting for the carriage from the coaching establishment at Böksta. Linnæus is in his chamber, dressing.

  Linnæus cannot help being Linnæus.

  Obviously Linnæus buttons up the twenty-five buttonholes in his waistcoat with his own fingers. He fastens the buttons with the thumbs, index fingers and middle fingers of both hands, and is careful not to fasten them unevenly. He can begin from the top or the bottom – in this he allows himself a bit of variety – but never in the middle. Beginning in the middle is only advisable with shirts, which never have more than seventeen buttons, but even with them he finds it more convenient to begin from the bottom or the top. In fact, he usually sets about it from the top, for the simple reason that it is difficult to see the lower buttonholes and buttons in the mirror.

  Now he is fastening the twenty-eight buttons in the long green camlet coat and taking care not to fasten them unevenly.

  Now he tosses up the twenty-five and the twentyeight buttons high above his head and he will not get them back.

  Now, if you must be Linnæus.

  Linnæus is out in the wind on the Uppsala plain, waiting to set off, with his large bag in his hand.

  He lifts the bag high in the air: take this bag! But nobody takes the bag out of his hands and he remains standing. The wind blows and he feels it blowing.

  But now he tosses up the twenty-eight youths, the twenty-eight disciples, into the wind on the Uppsala plain, and they are scattered.

  Arctædius set out his best idea for his friend: the genera must somehow be arranged into maniples and their orders would then emerge of their own accord.

  “This is all chaos at present.”

  But the art of creating order also involves the ability to set limits to the ordering.

  “The distinction between fixed species and random difference must be maintained.”

  Linnæus is at home in this world. He searches, all by himself, for an important passage in a work in progress simply to give himself a pretext for perusing all his papers. He directs shrieks of dissatisfaction at his writing materials. He walks up and down in irritation. He drums on the desk with his fingers. He flings himself on the bed, snorting.

  These are all regular affectations. Actually he is content. Often he needs only to linger a little by the glass panes of the cabinets and to gaze at the vessels behind them to feel at peace.

  But today that is not enough. There is a stirring of unease in his body.

  He goes into the instrument room and over to the window that looks out onto the garden. It is his garden, which he has laid out. Beside the window, close by the frame, he has placed a map of the garden. “Plan” would perhaps be a more accurate word. He sees, and rejoices over, the congruity between the garden in the picture and the real garden.

  The gardener is moving about outside, this way and that, to and fro. It seems arbitrary. Occasionally he falls over, but gets up again immediately. He struggles forward, as if into a headwind. He walks with a firm stride, then suddenly staggers and falls headlong, or chooses a new direction and walks on.

  Linnæus pulls a face behind the windowpane, waves, and tries to attract the gardener’s attention with a “Hallooo!” He wants the gardener to stop, perhaps take a break, pull off his shoes and see to his toes and the soles of his feet, as he usually does. But the gardener carries on.

  Linnæus thinks: his continual, everlasting motion! />
  Now there is a ceremony or display, like in a salon. First figure: le pantalon. Then l’été. Third figure: la poule. After that la pastourelle. Finally the fifth figure: le final.

  Linnæus finds this admirable. A round of applause would be in order. But the gardener dances on into something else. Linnæus remains standing at the window and watches a strange ballet, quite absurd.

  The windowpane is dirty. It has been cleaned recently, but the dirt has not been removed and in the process of rinsing it has dried out in the pattern of a wave. It has an unexpectedly artistic appearance. Linnæus gazes at it. When he looks out again, the gardener is gone.

  Arctædius began by putting his name in order. His brothers and sisters said Petter, although his baptismal name was Petrus. He preferred Peter himself. He simplified his family name to Artedius. Then to Artedi. So, Peter Artedi.

  Then he proudly counted the fish he had dissected and described, “Mackerel, pike-perch, bream. Perch, asp, flounder. Flying fish, grayling, ide. Four-horned sculpin, bleak, shorthorn sculpin.

  Linnæus to his friend: “The subjects of your favourite discipline are not all to be found in the River Fyris. They are spread over the whole world. You won’t be staying.”

  “I’ll be staying,” said Artedi.

  Linnæus applied for a post in the Uppsala garden. He knew that he possessed the best qualifications and counted on getting the post. But he didn’t. Rudbeck took on someone else and Linnæus, upset, went to him for an explanation.

  “Yes. You would be the best person to keep the waters of the Svartbäck flowing. Yes. I see that you are angry. You would be the best. But this is not what you should be doing. You should stay away from Uppsala garden. It is not for you. You should not occupy yourself with unskilled labour.”

  Linnæus:

  “There is no longer any creation; life continues as it was given. There are no more species today than there were before. So if life continues thus in every generation, it follows that individuals remain unaltered, each one within its own species.”

  “Take this rake,” the gardener says to Linnæus.

  Linnæus tries to take it.

  “Not like that,” says the gardener.

  He means: “Take it, take it as an idea, think about it.”

  But Linnæus cannot think about the rake as an idea. There are so many rakes and so many kinds of rake. Quite definitely one must think of a particular kind of rake: a hay rake, for example, of a particular shape.

  The gardener stares hard at Linnæus and says it is a question of this very rake, a rake which must be perceived as a quite definite rake of a quite definite type.

  Linnæus says that he is thinking about this rake.

  The gardener asks if he is quite sure about that.

  Linnæus answers in the affirmative.

  The gardener says that Linnæus is to take the rake, yes, really take it in his hand and start raking.

  Linnæus does this and rakes away some leaves and some blades of grass from the path. What a lot of leaves and grass there are here, he thinks.

  The gardener asks if Linnæus is still thinking about the rake while he is raking. Linnæus says he cannot do that. He has to rake.

  Then the gardener says, “There is a difference.”

  Linnæus asks, “What sort of difference?”

  “That,” says the gardener, “is the difference.”

  It’s in open countryside. Rainy, and growing steadily colder. Linnæus is sitting at a plain wooden table. Students from Uppsala are standing in a queue, each one with a stone in his hand. They step up, one after the other. First is Höfling:

  “Where does this stone come from?”

  Linnæus:

  “The swampy marsh. Mosses. From there.”

  Now Hultstedt:

  Which place did this stone come from?”

  “From there. The wolf moraine.”

  The students stand in silence, with mild expressions. Orell:

  “Where did I get this from?”

  Linnæus knows:

  “From there. Chalky soil.”

  Every day he listens to them asking their questions and he can hear from their voices where they come from. Skuttunge. Västerlösa. Levene. Norrby, Lower Norrby.

  Now Fougt:

  “This one?”

  Linnæus knows:

  “From there. Sandy soil.”

  He sees the stones’ origins in the landscape. This makes him happy. And his unhappiness, his longing for everything that is not stone and landscape. For his siblings, for his siblings in Småland.

  “Here,” he says to the students, “here the bedrock emerges into daylight. Feel. Smell. Iridescent shale, diorite, porphyry.”

  In olden days fish used to be divided up according to where they lived: marsh fish, lake fish, river fish, sea fish.

  But Artedi laid the foundations for the classification of fish. He divided the flatfish, according to the presence or absence of spines in the dorsal fin, into Malacopterygii, those with soft fins, and Acanthopterygii, those with spiny fins.

  Linnæus, in conversation with Artedi, agreed:

  “The advantages of this ought soon to be clear to every ichthyologist.”

  Rudbeck led Linnæus up the long staircase.

  “You will become a teacher, a headmaster, a professor.”

  Linnæus was ushered into the natural history room with its scrupulously preserved finds.

  Rudbeck pointed:

  “A flint knife, believed to be a circumcision knife. A stone blackened by nature. The beak of a swordfish. The tooth of a manatee. Ceres carved out of a grain of rice. A Chinese seal of boxwood. A stuffed baby crocodile. A stone in the shape of a bird’s head, held by the Lapps to be a divinity. A monstrous hesperis with conjoined stalks. A chicken with four feet. A tooth found in a grave in Järlåsa, believed to be an elk’s tooth but undoubtedly a giant’s tooth from the skull of an authentic giant preserved in Järlåsa church.”

  Rudbeck on the whole collection:

  “Do you see?”

  On the way down Rudbeck and Linnæus stood in the middle of the stone staircase embedded with four hundred fossils.

  “Do you see? We expect great things from you.”

  Stones. The students go on standing. The rain is continuous and cold, but they don’t want to leave Linnæus. They want him to show them something, something else.

  He says:

  “Stones grow.”

  Linnæus is in an excellent humour. He goes down to the garden from his room to talk to the gardener.

  “Gardener,” says Linnæus, “you have misunderstood everything. You have done things one way and you should have done them another way. You have scratched in the ground the wrong way, you have raked the paths in the wrong direction, you have held the spade the wrong way. But don’t let it get you down, don’t burst into tears, don’t condemn yourself. I will show you how to make everything right again. First I will show you how you did everything wrong, then you will see how it should have been done and how you will do everything correctly from now on.”

  But the gardener has a musical instrument in his hand. No-one saw where it came from. It wasn’t there a moment ago, Linnæus can swear to that, but now it is in the gardener’s hand. And suddenly it is in Linnæus’s hand.

  He turns and twists the instrument. It doesn’t look like much. No-one who was unacquainted with it would be able to comprehend that music could be produced from this piece of wood. Linnæus turns and twists it and thinks it looks attractive.

  “Gardener,” he says. “I admire your instrument, I am envious of anyone who can play on it. But I can read musical notation, I can understand it.”

  He tries to give the instrument back to the gardener.

  But the gardener is not there, he is somewhere else in the garden now, he has the instrument and Linnæus hears him play. Linnæus tries to drown him out. He shouts to himself, discovers that he is shouting his own name and is embarrassed by this. It was not what h
e intended. The musical notes can be heard here and there, far away, sometimes nearby, but Linnæus has got something in his eye.

  He is still holding the gardener’s instrument. He is still trying to give it back. He lays it down on the garden path, alongside the borders created by the movement of the rake. Just so. Neatly. Nothing must be broken. Just so.

  Linnæus:

  “Nothing was added to the Creation. Nothing is being added to it. Everything exists as it was once designed to. So how can anything be taken away?”

  In conversation with Linnæus, Artedi railed against the habit of giving fish animal names, calling a shark a fox or an ape, calling an angler-fish a frog.

  “We should not regard fish as reflections of land animals. They have their own realm.”

  Linnæus said:

  “You are right.”

  Thinking: he has already gone.

  The gardener tells the children that he can make them as firmly rooted to the spot as a mountain, if they simply hold on firmly to one of their toes with one hand.

  The children do not believe him and he asks if he can demonstrate on one of them. Anders steps forward. The gardener leads Anders to a tree and puts his arm around the tree, then has him pinch one toe with his fingers.

  “Do you see that you are motionless. That you cannot move, other than by relaxing your fingers’ grip on your toe?”

  Linnæus sees the children laugh at the gardener’s trick. He has to see everything.

  It is dawn, on the 28th of January. Carl’s name-day. The river Sävja is a thin trickle in its bed under the ice this January as the waxwings gather in the rowans, where they are exposed to a shower of hail.

  The creatures, alarmed, are making themselves scarce. The horses, likewise, take fright.

  Linnæus, awake, steps outside, strolls to his grove. He hangs pairs of green Kungsholm glasses as bells on the branches of an oak, an elm, and an ash in order to listen to the jingling caused by the wind when it rises. They are his Aeolian beakers, his wind-harps of glass. But this morning the wind is still, and the bells are motionless.

  One glass he has saved. He pours wine into it, to the brim, and drains it to celebrate the name of the day.