Henry turned ten in 1953, and by then the Jazz Baron had already started training the boy. Henry had a real talent for the piano and was given classical instruction – by a woman on Götgatan – as well as lessons in modern music by his father. Occasionally Henry was allowed to accompany the Baron on tours during holidays, and that was the best thing the boy could imagine. He would sit for hours listening to the jazz musicians, though the best part of all was actually listening to them talk rather than play. Jazz musicians had a way of talking like nobody else. They had their own language, full of strange, mysterious words – and Henry would have blushed if he had understood them.
This was the way Henry preferred to remember his childhood, as part of the baggage on his father’s tours (which were as successful as they were endless), from Ystad to Haparanda. Leo, on the other hand, was much too young to go along. He was born in 1948, skinny, anaemic, whiny, constantly sick and in bed, with no interest in either listening to his father or going with him to concerts. Leo liked lying in his sickbed under some heavy, dusty book that looked as if it would crush his birdlike chest, which would hardly have filled a thimble with air, much less an instrument.
But during the summer they would go out to Storm Island, and there it was left to the maternal grandparents to take care of the boys. They never had any problems with Leo; he mostly sat indoors, idling away the time with his books or collecting plants. Worse was their responsibility for Henry, since only by mustering all the patience that he had could the lad sit still long enough to put away a glass of milk and a warm cinnamon roll.
The Leo we meet in Herbarium is probably also the same one that his maternal grandmother and grandfather took care of out there on Storm Island. He was a slender little boy who got up early in the morning to throw on his clothes and head out to the meadows in search of rare plants. Of course he had a proper vasculum, which was his most cherished possession. The little botanist would set out for the fields before the dew had disappeared, and he would stay out there for hours, collecting plants with all the persistence and concentration of an adult. When Leo did something, he always made a thorough job of it. Henry, on the other hand, could never focus on anything. In his whole life he never even learned to spell properly. But Leo would set to work, silently and purposefully completing everything he undertook. He would be back for lunch with the round metal box filled with flowers, which he then dried in the press, mounted on pieces of cardboard in various albums and entered into a catalogue of different families, genera and species.
The boys’ grandmother saw something very religious in all of this. A normal child would never be able to produce with such a tranquil state of mind this sort of magnificent and extraordinary collection of plants. Leo was ‘otherwise’, different, as they said in the north. And he was clearly different. Leo was divinely gifted; he ‘had contact’. According to his grandmother, those people who distinguished themselves from the masses by virtue of exaggerated zeal or bigoted piety ‘had contact’. And this contact was naturally of the vertical kind. God was keeping an eye on Leo, and the old woman never had to worry about him.
He never even went out if it was sunny. When Leo was an infant the sun brought him out in a rash, and when he was a child, strong sunlight hurt his eyes. While the other children dived into the waves from the docks, Leo would sit in the shade and read. He hated swimming and never went into the water. He had learned to hate the water in school. Water and a young child’s unexpressed but discerning knowledge about terror were inextricably linked.
Even in elementary school swimming had been part of the curriculum. This had gone on for many years, during every single term, until the boys in every class could swim the unofficially mandatory thirty feet under water. This goal had been established, completely outside any regulations, by a fascist swimming instructor named Aggeborn, who had a crew-cut and wore wooden clogs with white perforated tops. He refused to be satisfied until all the boys had passed the water test and got hair between their legs. The programme was decidedly torturous, even for the ruffians in the class.
On bleak, freezing cold, weary winter evenings they had to go to the swimming hall; there they were forced to take a dip in temperatures that rarely rose above 15ºC. The process was as loathsome as it was ritualistic. After stripping off all their clothes, the boys would scrub their thin, shivering bodies clean in a washroom filled with miniature bathtubs. After a brief period of respite in the hot water of the tubs, the boys would line up to scrub each others’ backs with rough brushes and a soapy solution that smelled of animals. Leo always had the misfortune to end up in front of one of the tough bullies in his class, who would scrub so vigorously that Leo’s back would be striped for days afterwards. The room was cold and draughty, the boys were shivering and wanted to go home. But after that they were herded out to the swimming pool to stand on the freezing floor, whose sharp tiles cut into their skin as their cruel swimming instructor went through the leg movements. Those who failed to perform them properly, who didn’t arch their feet correctly, received a kick from the white wooden clogs. Leo would forever associate the soft, warm bodies of the little boys in those cold, tiled rooms with the images he happened to see at about the same time from Nazi concentration camps in Poland. The pattern was exactly the same: naked people, stripped of every single ounce of dignity and subjected to arbitrary experiments by supposed superiors. In a poem – presumably written in the mid-sixties – Leo Morgan wrote in his most ferocious mood: ‘Somewhere there is a radio / which sends only ciphers / burned into skin / from the clean rooms / where Nazis sat at typewriters / keeping impeccable ledgers of annihilation / about the final shower of entire families …’ This was what nakedness and baths signified. To be naked meant becoming vulnerable. Leo wanted to remain clothed. He needed protection in this raw world.
‘Looks like it’s going to rain, said the boy, crawling in under her skirts.’ That was one of the countless proverbs with which the old women on Storm Island faced the world. It could be an epitaph on Leo Morgan’s headstone, since he spent nearly all his life indoors, poring over thick books. The boy read everything. By the age of ten, Leo wanted nothing to do with books for children and adolescents, brimming with excitement and adventures that could fill Henry with amazement. He wanted to know what the world looked like, how space looked, how the depths of the ocean looked. He read Brehm’s zoological works, astronomy and descriptions of expeditions undertaken by Heyerdahl, Bergman and Danielsson. That was the sort of thing that interested a botanist, philatelist and gifted angel such as Leo Morgan.
It was worse with Henry. As far as swimming went, he was the best in the region. He could pass for a seal, even among the local residents, who were accustomed to the water – that was why he was selected to star in the training film, Calle Learns the Crawl – an effort that presumably coloured the rest of Henry’s life.
Whenever the rain came pouring down – it could pour on Storm Island for weeks in the autumn – Henry the outdoorsman would walk around in his shirtsleeves, looking for worms for his fishing line, and it took more than one reprimand to get the boy to come indoors. He had some sort of chameleon system regulating his body temperature, just like his grandfather, the Boat Builder, who could stand outside in the middle of winter planing planks and ribs in the draughty boathouse, with no gloves on and only a tattered thermal bodywarmer over his shirt.
Henry was his grandfather’s protégé. That was the way it had always been. He was his grandfather’s assistant in the boat-building shed. Wind and weather had no effect on either of them. They were men, and a man belonged on the sea. All summer long Henry would be out bobbing up and down in the sailing boat that his grandfather the Boat Builder had made. He never felt lonely, he was never afraid or lost. If he was out sailing for a week at a time without putting into port, he claimed that he still met a lot of people. In the middle of the open sea he would come upon a timber barge or a canoeist on his way to the Finnish archipelago. Once he claimed to have gone so far east t
hat he could no longer get his bearings properly. Suddenly he ran into a solitary fisherman who was fishing for herring and spoke Russian. Then he had to turn around. Worst of all was when Henry the sailor sat all alone on a skerry at the outer edge of the archipelago and caught sight of a mermaid swimming towards a rock to polish her scales. At least that was what he tried to tell his little brother at night when they were supposed to be asleep and Henry had returned from the endless expanses of the sea.
From a very early stage Henry and his grandfather decided that they would build a big, proper ship together. They talked about it constantly, and the rare letters that Henry composed were all written during the winter when he was back home in the city, telling his grandfather about new ideas for their building project. In the summer they always went around fantasising about that extraordinary boat, outlining details, practical solutions and grand sailing routes through the exotic oceans of the world.
His grandfather had very few commissions at the time – mostly modest little rowing boats for summer visitors. Occasionally he might make small skiffs for yachtsmen. All the big jobs had vanished.
His grandfather was calmly waiting for retirement, when he and Henry would make good on their plans for that marvellous sailing vessel. The rough drafts and sketches gradually turned into proper drawings. Some time in the late fifties the drawings began taking shape as an exquisite oak keel from which the ribs rose, one after the other, with all the consummate cogency of the experienced boat-builder. People on the island started talking about Jansson and his Ark. But for his grandfather’s part, there wasn’t so much religion in the whole thing as there was retirement. For Henry’s part, it had to do with a vision.
________
But Herbarium would nevertheless be a form of farewell to the idyll of Storm Island, the place where Henry and Leo Morgan grew up. The ingenuous sweetness of childhood – which actually, in Leo’s case, wasn’t really very sweet – would swiftly be replaced in the summer of 1958 with the serious brine of Life.
It was Midsummer’s Eve, and on Storm Island this heathen holiday was celebrated in exactly the same manner as elsewhere, except that instead of wreaths, they hung two fish-shaped leafy boughs on the crossbar of the pole. For those who lived on the coast, this was a local tradition that they would never give up.
Including all the summer visitors, there were close to a hundred festively dressed, high-spirited, merry celebrants over in the meadow. They could buy juice and rolls and warm sausage at various stands, and the boys competed to see who could stuff down the most sausages. Leo never participated in such tests of strength. He didn’t stand a chance, nor did he care. He was more interested in the dance of the morons. When it was the little tykes’ turn, a couple of backward boys affected by the inbreeding on Storm Island would always play leapfrog as if the suppressed playfulness of an entire winter had to be let out all at once. The boys drooled and had a great time, and no one interfered; they were left in peace. Midsummer’s Eve was their festival.
Later in the evening, of course, there was a party with herring and aquavit, with more grilled sausage for the children. It was always held in Norrängen in a barn that belonged to Nils-Erik, one of the big fishermen on Storm Island. The long tables quickly turned rowdy, and the Jazz Baron played the accordion as part of a trio. The evening was exactly as magical and alluring as it should be. The children played tag in the woods and danced around the bonfires, where they roasted sausages. Several of the old fishermen lay in the hay up in the loft, snoring, while a number of summer visitors ended up quarrelling with each other, and the inbred boys continued to play leapfrog between the tables in the barn.
Leo sat in his usual place on these occasions – on a barrel in a corner of the dilapidated barn. He liked that spot; he could take part without really getting involved. He could observe without participating, watch all the faces, all the hands moving about as they became more and more unruly, creeping into forbidden territory – picking their noses, stroking other people’s breasts, scratching their own crotches, touching other people’s thighs … Leo tried to imagine what would happen later that night – he wondered which people would be quarrelling, fighting and arguing when the Jazz Baron’s accordion fell silent and the light returned to the meadows to reveal the escapades of the night.
Tonight, from his seat atop the old barrel, Leo could see Henry and one of Nils-Erik’s brutish sons homing in on the same girl. Nils-Erik owned the most cabins on the island, and he rented them out to summer visitors. This particular girl was a summer visitor, and Leo knew that Nils-Erik’s sons all stood in a shed masturbating whenever she turned up on the rocks wearing a bathing suit. Those lads were crazy about girls. There were a few girls on Kolholma, but rumour had it that they were going to move to the city. The lads had to seize every chance they could get.
Nils-Erik’s boy was determined at any price to arm-wrestle with Henry, to pull fingers, shove beams, have a tug-of-war, or whatever the hell he could in front of the girl, as long as they came to some sort of decision. One of the boys had to eliminate the other, that was all there was to it. And the girl offered no objections.
Leo watched the drama from the top of his barrel and was moderately amused. He was afraid that Henry was headed for a beating because Nils-Erik’s sons were robust creatures, and they had already started drinking aquavit. Late that evening the barn in Norrängen was one big chaos of drunken fishermen, cackling old crones, giggling girls, bickering summer visitors and people who had already fallen asleep, stretched out across tables or comfortably curled up in the loft. Henry and this fisherman fellow went out into the night to fight over the girl, and Leo didn’t dare follow them to see how it went. He was positive that Henry would quickly be defeated.
When the Jazz Baron played the last waltz of the evening – there were actually some who still had the energy to dance, even to the very last number – Leo the little ten-year-old botanist slipped out of the barn. He went out into the bright Midsummer night, inhaled the saturated air, thick and damp, and wandered a short way into the woods. He wanted to be alone for a while, to think and brood over those things that a ten-year-old thinks about. Maybe he was trying to figure out what was wrong with the inbred boys, what sort of illness they had. Leo had seen pictures in medical books of misshapen people with enormous hydrocephalic heads, grotesque noses or no noses at all; people with no arms and extra-long legs, people with only one eye, and others who had no mouth. There were any number of variations, and Leo knew the names of many diseases, names that were given in tribute to learned doctors who had figured out the cause of the illness. They were always foreign names, German names. Perhaps Leo could find some special defect in the boys on Storm Island, Morgan’s Disease, so that they too might be cured. Or he could discover some unknown flower, Morgana morgana, which would make his name world-famous, eternal, infinitely repeated for as long as stamens and pistils did their job and the soil was good.
Leo walked along dreaming his childishly ambitious dreams when he heard the air go out of the accordion far away in the barn. People would be hauling themselves home now, and giggling girls would be picking flowers to place under their pillows. He turned around, quietly heading back towards the barn and the site of the festivities. When he reached it all the guests had gone, the fire in the yard had died down and a thin column of smoke was rising up towards the sky, which was already light. He walked all alone from the meadow down towards the houses on the rocks. Here and there he could hear bursts of laughter and giggling, but he didn’t pay any attention. He was not the object of their laughter.
He was sitting on a rock and staring at the sunrise with his precocious expression of interest when Henry and the girl came rowing past. They emerged from a dock shed in a tarred rowing boat. Henry was at the oars while the girl lay indolently stretched out on the bottom of the boat. So Henry had won. Nils-Erik’s boy had been beaten, good and proper. Leo couldn’t deny that he felt rather proud. Henry didn’t see Leo on the rock. Right now
Henry had eyes only for the girl, and he was trying to row like a real he-man. They were heading out towards the skerries.
On that particular night the children were allowed to stay out as late as they liked. A number of parents even seemed to insist that the children stay outside because the walls were so thin between the bedrooms. Leo stayed out a bit longer; he too had no desire to go home. He was wide awake and alert, happy in his solitude. No one intruded to ask him prying questions or tell him what to do. He was totally free. He could sit here on this flat slab for as long as he pleased and feel the sun slowly heating up the rock beneath him, dreaming whatever dreams he liked. He could watch the rowing boat with Henry and the girl glide across the bay – it was amazing how damned fast he could row all of a sudden, heading for some lonely place made for lover-boys like Henry. He had inherited all his father’s charm, that Henry. At least that’s what the women on Storm Island said. The Jazz Baron was well-liked on the island, especially on Midsummer’s Eve, when he played the accordion and flirted with all the old ladies.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 14
