The Garden

by Magnus Florin

“Adler, dead of fever on the coast of Java. Bartsch, dead in Surinam. Berlin, dead at Delos in the bay of Guinea. Falck, cut his throat with a knife, then shot himself in the head with a pistol, dead in Kazan, southern Russia. Kähler, half-lame in Italy, got home, eventually, on foot, still alive. Forsskål, dead of fever in the mountain village of Jerim in Yemen. Martin, one leg amputated, in the north, among the icebergs, still alive. Hasselquist, dead of consumption in the village of Bagda near Smyrna. Solander, dead after a brain haemorrhage, London. Löfling, dead of fever in a missionary station in Merercuri in New Andalusia. Torén, dead of complications after a trip to the East Indies. Tärnström, dead on the island of Pulo Candor off China, aged thirty-seven.”

  Linnæus:

  “And you yourself?”

  Rolander leans his head back and presses a handkerchief to his nostrils:

  “Home, deranged, after a short time in Surinam.”

  Linnæus is afflicted with nervous spasms. His bloodvessels are turning blue. A violent pain begins to affect his muscles. His arms are suddenly drawn in towards his mouth. His fingers are bent towards his palms. His eyes swivel in opposite directions.

  “From my mother,” Linnæus says to his disciples, “I have a hardy nature, but from my father, a sickly body.”

  He feels them lifting him high on their outstretched arms and giving him three cheers. They look up to him, praise him, give him sloe-wine, strawberries and cream to eat.

  July. Slowly, very slowly, Dietrich Nietzel is moving northwards through Sweden. Through the ruins of the old castle of Axevall, past stones inscribed by the Swedish Goths, over Bråvalla heath, past the Hallenström waterfall.

  It is, out of the darkness, a clarification that is being prepared, a change waiting to happen. From inn to inn he travels, asking the men of learning in each place about Linnæus and his garden.

  Early this morning Lövberg has prepared the large vat with brine. He has emptied in the big sacks of salt and added the boiling water from the cauldrons and then stirred it with the large wooden forks until all the salt dissolved in the water and the brine was saturated.

  Now they have taken up their places by the large table in the dining-room. Lövberg hands him the curved iron instrument. Linnæus introduces it into the gardener’s nostrils and pulls out his brain, sometimes in very small pieces like worn thread-ends, sometimes in rather more connected rope-like pieces. Then he makes an incision in the left groin and takes out the intestines from the abdomen. After that he makes an incision in the diaphragm and takes out the contents of the chest, apart from the heart which is allowed to stay untouched where it is. Finally, he cuts away the nails from their beds and saves them in a box of entomological needles.

  Lövberg and Linnæus drag the gardener’s body to the vat and immerse it inside. They take care to place the body in such a way that the head and body do not come into contact with the brine.

  His siblings pause for breath and let fly at Linnæus:

  “Stop following us! We’re big now and can look after ourselves. Don’t you understand that we’re living our own lives now and have nothing to do with you?”

  “I only want to know if you are all right,” Linnæus replies. His voice is friendly, gentle, but he cannot suppress the tone of knowingness and authority.

  “The best thing you can do is stay away from us.

  You seem so anxious the whole time and we can’t concentrate on what we’re doing.”

  “I just want to make sure that nothing bad happens to you.”

  “You are actually just a nuisance. We sometimes wish you would take yourself off on another of those long trips.”

  Linnæus is the giant in which the dwarves carry out their silent work.

  Their relieving each other over and over again.

  Linnæus keeps to his room for ever longer periods, not going out into the garden. He sleeps late in the morning and does not wish to be disturbed.

  This morning, nevertheless, Lövberg and Broberg decide to disturb him. They knock on the door. They want to announce Ziöberg, the student from Roslagen with the remarkable flowers. He is here again now with a large carton. May he come in? It would surely break the monotony for Linnæus?

  Linnæus replies that he does not wish to meet the student, he wishes to be left in peace.

  Prolonged bouts of vomiting and recurrent expectorations of sticky slime, repeated fits, tremendous sweats. Marked anxiety, fast pulse, copious bleeding from the gums.

  Linnæus:

  “What if a large number of creatures, so tiny that they are invisible to our eyes, are still unknown to us?”

  Broberg comes looking for Linnæus, complaining about his servant young Hörner, the watchmaker’s son.

  “If I plant something,” says Broberg, “he steals it and hides it. If I give him a pot-plant to look after, he kills it or sells it. Adonis capensis gone without a trace. The same with Potentilla rupestris. If I ask him about it, he says it rotted away. Where is Magnolia? And where did Bocconia get to? But if I forbid him to plant, he plants. Boxwood planted in my absence. Antholyza cepacea set out against my wishes.

  This is not some story being told in retrospect, it has not happened before, he is not standing around afterwards and looking back, it is right now, it is of the moment and may vanish with it. Hörner goes up to him, lifts him between two fingers and puts him in the watch-case.

  Around him are the cogwheel, the mainspring barrel and the fusee. At intervals of a minute, balls are sent gliding along a winding track. A block of wood is led down a sloping board, then turns around and wanders up, then down, and so on without stopping. The din is awful.

  It is August, with traces of chill in the air. Early this morning Lövberg has laid up a supply of linen rags. He has kindled branches and twigs to make a slowburning fire. He has extracted resin from pine-trees and steamed out the turpentine so that only the rosin is left. Then he has used the fire to melt the required amount of rosin, which he has saved in a pan. He has emptied out the brine from the large vat. He sees that the outer skin with all its hair has come away from the body. It can drain away.

  Lövberg and Linnæus drag the body out to the garden and lay it on the rack over the fire to dry out. Afterwards they leave it lying on the rack while they fill some of its cavities with linen rags. They finish off with clay and sawdust. Then they use glue to fasten the nails they have saved to the nail beds.

  Then they take the linen rags, immerse them in the pan with rosin and swaddle the body layer after layer. Sometimes they sprinkle a little salt in between. Then it’s ready. Lövberg wheels the figure to the shed in the wheelbarrow.

  Linnæus is afflicted with palpitations and faintingfits. Tip of the nose cold. Sweats. Racing pulse. Linnæus with the twenty-eight disciples.

  “The sea has its own stones, plants and animals, like the earth, but there are many types where it is difficult to decide if they are stones, plants or animals. The corals are situated on the border of all nature’s realms, so that one is unsure where to assign them. When Marsilia was about to sketch the corals, as long as he saw them under the water they resembled flowers. But when he pulled them up out of the water they looked like stones.

  Linnæus with the students. Mild, calm.

  “Slates divide like pages in a book when they are split and they are opaque. They are generated by marshy sludge that has become compacted and pressed together under the water. As a result it ends up lying horizontally in flags. This is also the reason why it is found to contain primitive fish and other creatures which have been left behind in the sludge when the water-level dropped, and have thus been incorporated into it.

  It is the last time. But the twenty-eight students are scattered to the four winds.

  Under Linnæus, in a water-filled cavity, swim the cave fish, colourless, slender, elegant, blind. They swim without ever bumping into the rough walls. Into them disappear all the names, devoured in a trice.

  Lack of imaginative power. Lack of memory. Insensi
tivity to touch.

  Impaired vision. Declining hearing. Declining sense of taste.

  Loss of speech. Declining sex-drive. Declining sense of hunger.

  Deficient ability to tense the muscle-fibres. Declining sense of thirst.

  Linnæus says loudly and clearly:

  “I cannot look after myself.”

  Wind. Suddenly, October. Linnæus exerts himself to go out, led by Lövberg. Linnæus is wearing his nightshirt and the red velvet skullcap.

  They stand in the grove by the oak, the elm and the ash to listen to the jingling of the hanging Aeolian bells of green glass. But no sound can be heard. They think the jingling is being drowned out by the whistling of the wind and go right up to the bells. They perceive the swaying of the leaves, each and every one of them. But from the glass bells they can distinguish only a muffled sound, dry and short, quite dull, like wood against felt.

  Lövberg unhooks one of the bells and holds it up to the light. It was formerly clear and completely transparent, but is now hazy, smudgy, watered. When Linnæus looks very carefully he can make out within the material fine grey threads stretching round the whole surface.

  “The glass has stopped,” Lövberg says. “It’s the glass disease.”

  He moistens one of his fingertips and rubs the rim of the glass. There is no sound. He flicks a finger off the side.

  “They will not be saying any more. They have stopped.”

  The days go so quickly. It is the first Sunday in Advent. Linnæus is supplementing Artedi’s Ichthyologia with a new genus under the name of Silurus. It contains the sheat-fish, the strange one with the large, gaping mouth which Artedi omitted in his taxonomy. Linnæus writes down the species name Silurus glanis.

  Thinks that Artedi would have been pleased with it.

  What’s left behind. The records of the cows. The posthumous manuscripts. The herbariums. The stones that the students let fall when no answer comes from the teacher regarding the stones’ origins. For lift me, my God, from the dust to yourself for a moment to see how you order the way of the world, what the cause is of all the wonders that happen here. The winter continues.

  Linnæus devotes himself to micro-organisms:

  “They have a free and simple body. They can be brought back to life. They lack outer limbs and sense-organs.”

  He creates a series of new classes of micro-organism, named Hydra, Furia and Chaos.

  His illness is a little compartment which is quietly integrated into him.

  The 28th of January. It’s Carl’s name-day. Lövberg holds his hands and feels the coldness of his fingertips.

  Give me a drink, Linnæus wants to say. But says: “To Ti! To Ti!”

  Yet Lövberg understands. Linnæus has his own words in place of the usual ones. He has forgotten all the usual ones, one after the other. Thrown them high up. First, the nouns. Monandria and Tetradynamia, gone. Buttons, buttonholes, waistcoats, gone. Weasel, fish, knife, cheese – gone.

  Lövberg mentions some well-known people’s names.

  Linnæus nods, then says, clearly and lucidly: “Yes.”

  But when he has to repeat the names, he is unable to, and instead writes on Lövberg’s slip of paper: “Can nothing.”

  Lövberg names Odelius, Grisell, Kyronius. Linnæus nods. Lövberg writes the names on a slip of paper. Linnæus points to the names, nods, writes: “Can nothing.”

  When Lövberg strikes up the first verse of some psalm, it sometimes appears that Linnæus can sing it. He does not keep in tune, but he sings the verses distinctly and fluently.

  Now and then he also pronounces certain prayers in time, as it were, in an exalted and clamorous voice.

  But now Linnæus is saying nothing but: “To Ti! To Ti!”

  Lövberg gives Linnæus a drink of water.

  February. March. The days pass. It will soon be spring. Young Hörner, in Linnæus’s sickroom, paints a black raven on his wall. Hörner secretly makes a hole in the wall in the picture of the raven and thrusts a frog inside, then puts paper over it. One morning when Linnæus in better spirits Hörner shows him his painted raven. When Linnæus praises him for the handsome picture Hörner takes a candle and holds it in front of the hole. The frog feels the heat and croaks non-stop. Linnæus thinks it is the cawing of a raven coming from the picture and is mightily astonished.

  Hörner is quick to give Linnæus an explanation of what has happened, to highlight the cleverness of the joke. But Linnæus does not hear the explanation. He hears only the voice of the raven.

  Linnæus now perceives a non-existent ringing sound. Linnæus now perceives a non-existent visible object. Linnæus now perceives a non-existent spinning motion. Linnæus now imagines some nonexistent evil in his solitude.

  Lövberg, Hörner, Broberg stand around his bed. They have rakes in their hands. On their feet are boots covered in soil.

  The 13th of April. Maundy Thursday. Report to George Clifford at Hartekamp, signed by Dietrich Nietzel, Hammarby, Sweden.

  “All his limbs and organs, particularly his tongue, the lower extremities, and the bladder, are paralysed. His speech is rambling and unintelligible. He cannot move from the place where he is sitting or lying without help, he cannot undress, eat, or perform the least of his needs. Of his organic life only the breathing, the digestion, and the circulation of the blood are still in reasonably good order. Everything else is more or less destroyed. He seems to be totally unaware of both past and present. There are only a few servants here. Garden in the worst state imaginable. Goats wandering about loose. My work is going to require great exertions and is already begun.”

  Copyright

  Translation copyright © Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd. May 2014

  © Magnus Florin 2014

  First published in May 2014 by Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd., Glasgow, Scotland.

  E-book edition published in May 2014

  ISBN 9781908251367

  The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

  Cover design by Mark Mechan

  For further information on Vagabond Voices, see the website, www.vagabondvoices.co.uk