The Garden

by Magnus Florin

  “A weird thistle has arrived from Rolander. But ugh! It was so full of vermin.”

  Many days pass. Early one morning Linnæus is on the bank of the river Sävja. He is in his nightshirt and skullcap, which is sewn together from six strips of red velvet. It is still, windless. The slow-flowing water is completely covered with a fine, light-yellow membrane of pollen. He makes his way down to the water’s edge and squats down, bends over and carefully lays the flat of his hand on the surface. The pollen does not stick to his skin but simply clusters together a little in the water.

  He stands up, takes his things off and walks out into the river. He lies on his side flush with the surface, lets his legs drift slowly in the water and his arms move alternately to and fro with his hands cupped like bowls. He is swimming. He keeps his head above the surface and sees how the yellow pollen is squeezed away from him. He is in the middle of a circle which is dark against the light, clustered pollen. The circle remains round him when he swims, very slowly, against the current to where the Sävja has its source in the meeting of the Lagga and Funbo rivers.

  There he clambers out, shivering in the early morning, and walks back along the water’s edge to where he left his clothes. Much later, at home, on going to bed at night, he notices that yellow pollen has stuck to the hairs on his body and dried in. When he rubs his hand over his arms and thighs a light mist forms round him in the room.

  At night, when Linnæus hears the goats coming into the garden, he goes down and drives them away from the flower-beds with powerful whiplashes. The goats flee, without making a sound, but no sooner is Linnæus back in bed than he hears them in the garden again.

  Only after he has sought out the gardener in his shed and instructed him to chase the mischievous beasts away is the garden left in peace. When the gardener strikes the goats they set up a high-pitched wailing, as if in anguish over a protector’s punitive power, and rush off in the direction of Lövsta.

  “Everything that exists,” says Linnæus, “is a question of size and proportion. An artist may wish to alter this. But the Creation made everything in the correct size. If our eyes were microscopes, every human being would look like a masked scarecrow. All the lineaments of the face as rough and coarse as if seen through a burning-glass. A skin full of scurf, ringworm, pimples, boils, blisters, pustules, scabs, lumps. There is no word from Nietzel. The cases with his plants fail to arrive. Linnæus makes no comment. Linnæus with his siblings. He wants them to do as he does. He shows them.

  “Follow me! Do as I do!”

  But they turn away, find something else.

  He races after them, collects them together.

  “Say after me! Copy me! Then it’ll be fine!”

  But his siblings walk away from him, in different directions. They want to do other things than those he has thought of, have their own interests.

  Linnæus runs after them, grabs hold of them, one by one, imprisons them in dungeons he has built, binds their ankles and wrists with coarse ropes he has plaited and fastens the rope through iron rings he has forged and which he has driven deep into the metre-thick walls of the dungeon.

  “Do what I’m doing!”

  But his siblings get up and leave.

  “Look how I do it and repeat everything! Don’t do anything else!”

  But his siblings are already far away from Linnæus.

  The post-boy comes with letters from Artedi in Amsterdam. Linnæus misses his friend and expects him to complain about his exile and loneliness.

  But the letter is full of positivity and energy. Linnæus feels pleasure at his friend’s pleasure, but also a degree of sadness. As if someone close to you had disappeared for good. Which was the case.

  Linnæus reads his friend’s lengthy report on his work on the large manuscript about fish.

  The tone of the letter is cheerful: “Confirmation: one can swim in the canals!”

  The stone fence has been erected, with difficulty. In his Siberia Linnæus plants Alaska wild rhubarb, Siberian peony, Mongolian sedum, wild tulips, magnificent skullcaps and Siberian aster.

  He waters them with the green watering-can.

  It’s night-time. Linnæus has been wakened from his sleep by the gardener and led down to the garden.

  The gardener is holding a torch before him. He has placed a vessel with liquid in it on the ground in front of them. He is talking eagerly, as if in a hurry:

  “You can put out fire with water. But I know a water that burns. I can take the water out of beer wort and leave the essence of it behind, the bit that burns. Look!”

  The gardener touches the torch to the liquid and it flares up.

  Linnæus takes a step backwards so that his coat isn’t scorched by the flames and he sniffs the air to identify the substances that are burning.

  “Aqua ardens. Burning water. I use it to put my preparations in. An excellent medium for conservation. Boyle kept a human embryo in such a liquid for fifteen years. One problem is the yellowish clouding of the object. But that is outweighed by the advantages.”

  Thursday morning. Linnæus is waiting. Hörner arrives. He says that the delivery has been cancelled. The coachman and the servant are being searched for. They have disappeared.

  “It has to do with Petter’s wife. Anna Cathrina.”

  “Yes?”

  “She’s dead. She was ill.”

  “In what way?”

  “Three days before her death she was violently sick after eating a sandwich with grated cheese. She complained of a severe headache and convulsions. She had recovered by the following day. But then the day before her death she was sick in the same way again after drinking a cup of coffee. She vomited up the coffee. But the pains got worse. She didn’t recover again. She died. They opened her up. She was pregnant. Her stomach contained a dark-grey, slimy mass. In it they found small white grains which had a sharp smell and gave off a white smoke when they were burnt on the embers.”

  “Arsenic,” says Linnæus.

  “That,” says Hörner, “is just what I heard.”

  Linnæus listens to him. But knows nothing about the servant, the coachman and the coachman’s wife. Has nothing to say about them.

  Linnæus, at his window, looks up at the night sky. It is light, it’s that time of year, and the stars seem to be smouldering. But Mars can be seen on the horizon, utterly calm.

  The 3rd of August. There is a hammering on the door. Morning. Linnæus opens up. It is the student with the rare plant which Linnæus was able to assign to the Linaria. Ziöberg. In his arms he has a very large covered box. Linnæus shows him into the kitchen, the box is placed on the table. Ziöberg lifts up plant after plant. He says nothing. Linnæus lays them alongside each other, one after another and begins to examine them very attentively.

  His teacher’s silence alarms Ziöberg, who fears an outbreak of rage and introduces his defence.

  “I found them on Södra Gåsskär on a hillside some distance from the first habitat. There are others. The whole slope is full of them.”

  Late August. The goats seem to relish the Siberian peony and the Siberian aster. At night the Siberian garden is full of goats.

  The days pass. Autumn. Smell of rusty nails in the cold mornings.

  It’s the 10th of October. Linnæus hasn’t done this before. But he knows what is going to happen. He covers all the windows in his room. He uses several layers of wallpaper. He is careful not to let any light in.

  When he has observed that the room is completely dark he cuts a hole in the fabric. The hole faces onto the garden and is about a decimetre in diameter. The sun is blazing outside and a thick ray penetrates into the room through the hole.

  With a fine mirror bought from Björknäs he directs this ray to a screen which he has draped with the white reverse side of the fabric. He looks at the upsidedown picture that has appeared on the screen. It is a round surface, a circle with a dark, flickering field inside, something that moves right through, something darker, small. And on the
edge of the ring of light something white, the sky.

  Linnæus knows that the dark field is the gardener. He lays his hand against the screen, the back of his hand against the fabric, the palm of his hand catches the light and the dark field moves in his hand, he closes it, but the dark field moves over his knuckles and wrist.

  Linnæus paints the screen with a strong, porridgelike solution of spirit and lime, but the image will not stay still.

  He tries to capture the contents of the ring with a fine pen. But his drawing only amounts to a few strokes over which the movement of light continues.

  In a series of attempts, one after the other, he daubs the screen with different liquids. With iodine, paraffin, brine, zinc chloride, boric acid. With a number of different solutions of arsenic of differing degrees of acidity. With rosin derived from pine resin, formalin, glycerine, solution of sugar, mercury chloride and carbolic acid.

  But the image won’t stay still.

  He tries a combination of alum, cooking salt, potassium nitrate, potash, acid of arsenic and water, which after being warmed has glycerine and methyl alcohol added to it. But the image does not stay still.

  Finally he runs down the stairs and out into the garden. He shouts for the gardener to come up to the room. But the gardener is not there.

  Linnæus runs to the grove and shouts, but is alone in the grove in the midst of the leafless trees in the wind.

  Winter, and already the 28th of January. It’s Carl’s name-day. Biting cold.

  Linnæus goes out into the garden with a chart showing the berries and fruits of summer in pretty colours. Brown cherries, pears, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries. The children gather round the chart and admire the pictures of berries and fruits.

  Linnæus wonders:

  “Does cold result from the particles which otherwise create warmth standing still? Or is cold an active capacity which has the power to draw together and cause rigidity?”

  The children imagine eating the berries and fruits.

  A planned garden must have a heath alongside, a field that is not cultivated, as otherwise the actual garden would not emerge as cultivated.

  But in addition, beyond this heath one must imagine an area which is to the heath as the heath is to the garden.

  If such an area was inhabited, Linnæus thinks, its inhabitants would be four-footed, dumb and shaggy.

  They are homo ferus. They live blind and silent, knowing nothing of us.

  Occasionally one of them strays over to us and we can investigate it.

  Linnæus is keeping a book about this.

  The bear boy, Juvenus ursinus lithuanus, 1661. The Lille girl, Puella transisalana, 1717. The Pyrenean boys, Juvenus ovinus hibernus, 1719. The Champagne girl, Puella campanica, 1731.

  He looks out the window. Are they playing cards in the shed?

  A peasant, Linnæus thinks, is more like an ape than a courtier.

  With the students. The paper strip. The thumb.

  “I reckon as Petrificatum pictura assimilans all the kind of things that are simply a polite gesture to those who make such a fuss about fossils. I have seen large cabinets overseas full of fossils which cannot reasonably be assigned to any particular system. But if I should exclude them, although they are nothing more than nature’s jest, I would draw upon myself all the wrath of their admirers.”

  The twenty-eight students. A quarter of a hundred. Sala. Sorunda. Nyland. Viby. Paper strip in hand, thumb on the last place.

  “They are generated when vitriol water gets between the lamellæ of a slate that has cracked, after some plant or animal has crept in there and rotted, for then the water inside crystallises and is transformed into a dark figure with the help of the mould. Rarest of all in this system is Lapis geographicus, which has points and lines representing a geographical table.”

  He sees everything and he has to reflect everything. Therefore he continually changes and expands the Systema naturæ.

  The fourteen folio pages in the first edition.

  The two thousand three hundred pages in the twelfth edition.

  Everything must progress through him. Nothing must be lost.

  February. A knocking at the gate. The person knocking introduces himself in Latin. He is Mr. Missa, a Frenchman. He has letters of introduction from Haller. He wants nothing more than to be a disciple of Linnæus.

  Linnæus receives him in the tricorne doctor’s hat which is dressed with light-green silk taffeta and decorated with a pink silk band.

  “Gardener!” he shouts. “This is Mr. Missa, my first pupil from France. He has fled from Buffon and come to us to learn botany.”

  “Take this spade,” says the gardener to Mr. Missa.

  Linnæus is in an excellent mood:

  “Virgil says that the task of the brave is to spread their renown through their exploits.”

  The gardener:

  “Hippocrates says that experiments are dangerous.”

  Linnæus is on the edge of the garden, near the field. He sees a lady with a straw hat in the distance. A dog wanders around, stops and barks. A sow, several sows, come up out of the ground, like small spheres. Everything is soaked from a chamber-pot. A post-boy appears.

  “Herr Carl! Herr Carl!”

  Night. A knocking at the door. Linnæus goes down the stairs with a candle in his hand. He opens up.

  In the light from the candle he sees a weary, bloodless face, round and childishly questioning with an open mouth and searching eyes. Linnæus recognises his disciple Rolander and asks him to step in.

  Rolander hesitates on the step, doesn’t say a word, stands swaying, seems to be on the point of falling asleep.

  Manages to get out, after a while, in a faint voice, that he has come to retrieve his cochineals.

  Says in addition that he is there on behalf of the others. He begins to gabble – sometimes inaudibly or barely audibly – a list of names, familiar to Linnæus.

  “Burman. Næzén. Acharius. König. Torén. Lenbom. Acrel. Söderberg. Martin. Adler. Kähler. Sparrman. Solander. The brothers Afzelius. Hallenberg. Alströmer. Bartsch. Löfling. Tuwén.”

  Rolander falls silent, becomes shy, takes a step backwards, as if he expected some protest. But continues with his gabbling of the names.

  “Dryander. Berlin. The brothers Gardell. Bierkander. The brothers Alströmer. Falck. Montin. Forsskål. Gahn. Hasselquist. Kalm. Ödman. Thunberg. The brothers Hagström. Rothman. Osbeck. Pontin. Tärnström. Wänman. Åmann.”

  Rolander tugs at Linnæus, drags him out into the garden and gives him a hard poke in the chest. They both fall headlong to the ground.

  Rolander’s cry, in a very loud voice:

  “Where are they? Where are my cochineals?”

  Linnæus is lecturing.

  “Everything has its place in creation, even in the realm of stones. I assign Petrificatum quadrupedis to the Zoolithus, Genus 8:um. It is rarer than anything else seen in the System and has no other use than that one can say what such a thing is called when it appears. I give it this name for the convenience of those who love to see the wonderful variety of Nature.”

  Dim light, muffled sound, many suspicions, nothing happens in the open, patient waiting, feeling of threat and promise mixed. What is it in him that knows? He does not see it. His eye is a dark room. It depicts objects, but he sees nothing of the affected nerve. The nerve goes to his brain where he sees nothing. But there is something that perceives what he is unable to investigate.

  Far to the south, in Hartekamp, unnoticed, a carriage and horses is getting under way. It is Dietrich Nietzel, who, toiling, full of dread, is beginning his journey.

  An unaccustomed warmth in April, with warm afternoons, when any movement would be intrusive in the stillness.

  On such afternoons, after working on the paths and plantings, it is the gardener’s custom to sit down on a bench with a little table in front of him. He places his instrument on the table and begins to play.

  When the sounds reach Linnæ
us’s window, he usually comes down and asks the gardener to tell him how the instrument came into his possession and how the sounding-board comes to have seventeen strings.

  Linnæus also usually asks the gardener after a little while to explain how the relationship between the melody strings and the drones is to be understood and why the latter cannot be shortened.

  After a while, Linnæus also usually asks why the cross-strings are moveable and whether the instrument is called a zither or a dulcimer.

  On just such warm afternoons, when the gardener is playing his instrument, the watchmaker Hörner also usually comes and listens. On these occasions he never says anything, simply listens very intently.

  Herr Missa throws Lövberg out of the shed and moves in himself. Herr Missa has no money. His level of knowledge is modest. Or his ignorance is infinite. His temper is appalling. He demands regular meals with hot food. He continually proclaims how thoroughly tired he is of the whole business of botany. Watchmaker Hörner walks along the road with a plank on his shoulder, stops beside Linnæus, who is standing by the gate pondering his stone fence.

  Linnæus doesn’t know what to say.

  Hörner says:

  “Come and see the house one day!”

  Then goes on his way with his plank.

  Linnæus asks his siblings what it was like to die.

  “Dear Carl. At first we began to get a whistling in our ears, then we became short of breath, as if something heavy had lain on our chests, then a giddiness, next a thick mist in front of our eyes, after that flashing as if someone had lit gunpowder, and moreover as if someone had fired guns right at our ears.”

  Linnæus wants to lie down beside them and draw the fever out of them with his body. But it is too late. They are already outside themselves.

  It is the 23rd of May. Linnæus’s birthday. The children have made a wreath of flowers for him. He tells them that when he was a baby his hair was as white as snow.

  It is a very warm afternoon. The gardener is sitting in the garden with his instrument. Linnæus has come down and posed his questions. Watchmaker Hörner has come to listen. He has another guest besides. Hörner introduces him as Herr Norlind, organist.