The Hurricane Party

by Klas Ostergren

  It was a look that seemed to force its way through all matter. It cut through the armour behind which Hanck had ensconced himself. An utterly new and yet ancient look that flinched at nothing but intended nothing. It simply allowed itself to be perceived. If those eyes represented innocence, something as yet unfinished and untested because they had seen nothing, they also represented an unfathomable freedom that emptied every concept of meaning and annihilated every attempt to describe it. It held no reproach, no demand and no entreaty, no exhortations, assertions, expectations or other views that might point forward, onward, intimating a movement in a specific direction for this new-born life, this new world.

  Hanck felt it to be a great privilege to bask in that gaze.

  It invoked an unfamiliar sense of satisfaction, a solemn jubilation. It was as if he had suddenly been given back part of the respect that he had lost in his younger days.

  The power was unmistakable. In the midst of that ‘high-tech era’, when every electronic apparatus was ‘cutting edge’, in this recovery room where patients who had recently undergone an operation would awake from an artificial sleep, something was also awakened in the visitor – a violent, irresistible force that raced through his body and took over his entire existence in a manner that was so persuasive and overwhelming that he was transformed.

  He acquired a new type of internal order. It spread through his body while all the phases of an intoxication appeared at once: the initial tipsiness followed by a sense of well-being as the whole world took on a golden shimmer, the euphoria, the peak that you want to maintain at all costs, and then the deep slumber, the restless sleep, and the awakening, that raw sensitivity, vulnerability, and regret at having revealed yourself and stood unprotected, as if wide open to the world.

  And he accepted this, plain and simple. Because, in the midst of everything, it was so natural. It was as if he had gratefully received an answer to a question that he had been asking for a long time. He was caught unawares like a defenceless victim. Yet he wanted to emphasise the ease with which he underwent this transformation, so that almost after the fact he came to ask the questions for which he had already received answers. His whole previous life now appeared as something unformulated, a long, dubious waiting for something that was going to happen. The major second of a tiny human being.

  In the case-book relating to this child there were also notes about the father. Hanck kept vigil at the incubator, filled with concern and occasionally suspicious about the appropriateness of the actions taken by the staff. He stayed there for several days straight, until he collapsed from exhaustion. He was given a camp bed in a waiting room, where he could get some rest.

  They tried in a friendly manner to persuade the father that his presence was not necessary, that he could rely on the skill of the staff. When the father did not respond to that approach, they had to resort to stronger measures and prescribed a walk, a period of relaxation. When that didn’t work either, they forbade him from visiting for a couple of days.

  The message got through. Hanck left the hospital and went home. His flat suddenly looked different, almost foreign, as if it were occupied by a bohemian, an irresponsible slacker. It was full of sharp tools, sharp edges, dangerous things, draughty windows, filthy corners.

  He tried to work, but it was impossible. He couldn’t concentrate on the dead machines. He cleaned up, moved the furniture around, cleared away dangers for small children. He brought home a child’s cot and made long lists of things that he needed to get for the care of the infant.

  That was how he managed to pass the time for a couple of days.

  The first eighteen months he kept the boy inside the flat. He wanted to avoid contagion. And he succeeded. The lad put on weight, ate well, grew and sounded as he should.

  Gerlinde, the shopkeeper’s wife, occasionally stopped by to offer advice. She had given birth to a girl. The children were placed side by side and compared. The boy was slightly behind, a bit late in development, but over time the girl’s advantage diminished.

  He was given the name Toby. It was Gerlinde who came up with the name. ‘Guten Morgen, Kleiner Toby!’ she would say as soon as the boy opened his eyes. Toby was the name of an old man painted on a vintage ceramic vessel, a beer stein that she brought out for important occasions. When Hanck saw that old stein with his own eyes, he had to admit that there was a definite resemblance with his son.

  Toby was able to walk unassisted by the time they made their first foray outdoors. They walked under the roof over to Vinterplatsen and back. Afterwards the boy was so dazed by all the impressions that he slept for twenty-four hours straight.

  After he got bigger and his resistance was greater, their walks became a daily event, and more prolonged when the weather improved. Step by step the world expanded for the little boy.

  They would often drop by to visit the shopkeeper, who had a look of panic in his eyes when the little boy came in the door. But his daughter enjoyed Toby’s company, and that made up for anything else. And he never damaged anything in the shop. He was inquisitive and, like all boys, wanted to touch everything, but he showed ‘the proper respect’.

  Hanck and the shopkeeper might have different opinions about whether to keep the dots over the å, ä and ö, but they were in agreement about showing concern for the children.

  The various ways in which love is expressed could undoubtedly fill an entire encyclopaedia; the one that manifested itself as ‘concern’ has a countless number of variations – and species – of its own. Saussyr was the apple of the shopkeeper’s eye. He might light up as he fervently talked about some old instrument, but when the subject of his daughter came up, his face took on a whole new look.

  Occasionally she would come into the shop, but usually she stayed in the inner rooms. She had red hair and pale skin and couldn’t tolerate sunlight. The shop was located in a narrow, shady street, but during certain periods the sun would be low in the sky and reflect off the shiny surfaces of the old brass instruments. That was as much light as she could stand, in her father’s opinion.

  Those who were red-haired and pale belonged to a rare lineage. That was why she was particularly valuable. According to her father, the finest hygrometers relied on the capacity to utilise a strand of human hair to absorb moisture. An increase in length of a few percentage points in a strand of hair affected a sensitive mechanism connected to an indicator. The strands of hair best suited for this purpose came from a red-haired virgin. The shopkeeper, who happened to have at his disposal a large supply of this precious raw material, could strut about like a plantation-owner and meet any demand.

  Something like this could never be expected of Toby. He was an unusually sensitive boy. On their way home from visiting the shopkeeper – a complete family with mamma, pappa and child – he might start nagging and begging for things that Hanck couldn’t possibly afford. Toby might stand gaping at some expensive toy, and Hanck would grow tired of the boy and admit as much, resorting to harsh words to put an end to his nagging. In spite of his tender age, the boy would then realise that he had overstepped an invisible line and fall silent. Hanck would walk along the street with the boy, noticing his hand slip into his own, and feeling almost tearful with remorse after that sort of scene. In his heart he wished he could have given the boy everything he wanted. But that wasn’t possible.

  This type of sensitivity also showed up in the way Toby interacted with boys his own age. He preferred to stand last in a queue, he never made a fuss, and he had no need to draw attention to himself.

  So it was with trepidation that Hanck took him to school. By the age of six Toby could count to ten and do a tolerable job of writing his name. There was nothing wrong with his intelligence, and he could express himself with a number of difficult words that were often used correctly. But he had a hard time with skills that were valued most highly in school. And he didn’t want to go. He preferred to stay at home and create little countries, small kingdoms, orderly societies that could take
weeks or even months to build, as he talked nonstop with his imaginary companions.

  Hanck had grown accustomed to his chattering. He no longer really listened, hearing it mostly as a hum in the background as he worked on a machine at the workbench in his shop. Sometimes the chatter would stop and a long silence would follow, lasting for an alarming amount of time. Then Hanck would get up to check on things. He would catch sight of the boy and suddenly encounter those old-man eyes, that ancient look that he had once seen in the incubator. And that look would scare him. It was familiar but at the same time alienating and inaccessible.

  Toby’s world was magic; everything was alive and able to speak. There were constant battles between good and evil, and there were Sneezers and Etherists who were often misunderstood. Toby had asked about his mother, and what he had learned over the years had, of course, affected his ideas about the world.

  Hanck knew that he’d been a bit vague about certain points, but he thought he’d been quite firm with regard to the prospect that his mother might still be alive. She was dead. He didn’t want to arouse any hopes in his son, or give him ideas that might grow into a conviction that she could be living someplace ‘out there’, and that his son should eventually go out and find her.

  Toby had heard the story many times, about how he had been left in his swaddling clothes on the hospital steps with nothing but a dirty business card as the only link to Hanck.

  One day he wanted to see that business card for himself. He didn’t even know what it was. ‘Everyone used to have them,’ said Hanck, ‘everyone who worked at the insurance company.’

  It was kept in a drawer along with documents from the hospital. Toby was allowed to see it. With some effort he read what it said: Hanck’s name and title and address. On the back were the words printed in a childish hand: ‘Mother dead.’

  ‘How do you know she was dead?’ said Toby, of course.

  ‘Because I was there,’ said Hanck. He was forced to say it. ‘Naturally I went out there and checked.’

  Hanck had gone out to that field the day after he was sent home from the hospital while his son was still lying in the incubator.

  It was February, it was raining hard, but nothing could have stopped him. He had felt so fulfilled, almost intoxicated by what had happened. He had stood there in the mud looking at what was left of Rachel’s house – a few sooty timbers and broken roof tiles. It had been pillaged and burned, it was a ruin.

  Only then and there did it occur to Hanck that she had fallen prey to berserkers, that it had been a question of retaliation, punishment resulting from her testimony, no matter how hidden and anonymous he had tried to present it in his report.

  The old man’s cabin still stood on the other side of the field. It was now his time to be a witness. Hanck went over and knocked on the door without getting an answer. He went in and found the old man lying on a sofa, drunk and sated. The stench was horrible. The old man had taken care of his needs right there on the floor or in the packaging that had previously held expensive foods.

  He recognised Hanck, greeted him with a stupid grin. He realised what was up and made a slurred and incoherent attempt to explain something. They had been ‘sent fleeing’ and someone was ‘out there’ and ‘the girl . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ said Hanck. ‘What about her?’

  The old man fell silent, closed his eyes, seemed to have dozed off with a worried expression. Hanck tried to rouse him, but the old man refused to wake up. He lifted the man up and dragged him out into the rain, letting the water gush over him.

  He came back to life. Hanck screamed, ‘What about the girl?!’ And the old man had looked at him with eyes that expressed sorrow and anger and impotence.

  They had ‘stomped the kid out of her . . .’ She had bled for a while out in the field.

  ‘Who?!’ shrieked Hanck. ‘Who did it?’

  The old man merely shook his head, muttered something, and got up. Soaked through, he shuffled back into the cabin. Hanck followed.

  ‘Was it berserkers?’

  The old man shook his head. No, it was somebody else. ‘Religious . . .’ he had said and then dragged himself over to the sofa, trampling through his own shit, and fumbling for a glass jar of vodka.

  That was as much as Hanck managed to get out of him. That was what he had to cling to. Small comfort.

  But it was not something that he wanted to pass on to his son. The boy would find out soon enough what sort of world it was out there. And besides, there were schoolmates who were willing to show him. To Hanck’s surprise Toby was accepted by them; he even enjoyed a certain respect for his peculiarities, perhaps mostly for his independence, his genuine lack of interest in the lessons that the school had to offer.

  Like most parents, Hanck became accustomed to living with his uneasiness, the constant anxiety that something would go wrong, that his son would be left out and then be lured into futile endeavours to win the recognition of the other kids.

  He was put to the test, and he passed. During playtime a bunch of bullies had come over and asked him bluntly: ‘A beating or a pile-on?’ Toby hadn’t done anything. He didn’t know these boys, but he knew that he’d been singled out and would never get away. Filled with the agony of a condemned man faced with the choice between decapitation and hanging, he had chosen ‘A pile-on.’

  It was a common exercise. It consisted of selecting some poor boy to lie down on the ground and then as many as possible would throw themselves into a pyramidlike pile on top of him while the shouts rang out: ‘Pile on! Pile on! Pile on!’

  He found himself lying on the cold, wet playground with the shouts echoing as kids came running. Eager little devils from near and far. They came rushing out of doors, climbing out of windows, crawling under the fence, out of the chimneys, down the drainpipes, from all points of the compass and like moles from out of the ground. Everyone wanted at all costs to pile on top of him.

  It really only hurt in the beginning. As if by gentleman’s agreement, he was allowed to stretch out on his stomach, and at first he felt sharp knees and elbows in his back. But after a while the weight became distributed more evenly, and then it just felt very hot and sweaty and noisy since everyone was shouting ‘Pile on!’ at the top of their lungs.

  As Toby lay at the bottom of a pile of fifty or so boys, he discovered that it could have been worse. A beating was worse. He had made a good choice.

  And he had to make one more decision that was perhaps even more important. Release came in the form of a furious burst from a whistle. It was the playground attendant who had arrived and was starting to sort through the pile. The weight grew lighter, one after another, until the heap was finally so sparse that fresh air could seep in through a thick haze of sweat and dirt and bad breath.

  ‘Who started this?’ asked the attendant. It was the victim, as usual, the boy who lay at the very bottom, who would now be tormented even further. Sometimes the question was answered, sometimes it wasn’t. It was the victim’s choice whether to point out the guilty parties or not.

  Toby didn’t say a word. He had learned the rules of the game.

  Hanck’s concern gradually diminished. But when the boy got a cold he would put his son to bed and forbid him to get up until he was well for at least a whole day. He sat at the boy’s bedside and fed him chicken broth, cup after cup.

  ‘This has helped people survive war and epidemics down through history,’ he said.

  As soon as chicken broth was available somewhere in the city he would go out and buy as much as he could find. But his son ate the broth with an expression that was wary, if not dubious. He actually enjoyed having a cold. Whenever he sneezed, an air of contentment would come over him.

  He knew only a few kids who had a mamma and a pappa and siblings. Most lived alone with their mother. Or their father. A few had no idea where they came from. There was nothing strange about that.

  Yet he could lie in bed, sneezing long and loud, and while the echo of his sneeze was still resou
nding between the walls, he would think of his family as whole and complete. It was as if he were sneezing forth his mother’s presence.

  Maybe that was how he happened to find the sneezing powder up on a shelf in the kitchen. From that pepper mill it wasn’t far to the cooker.

  There’s always a period in every child’s life when he wants at all costs to help with the cooking. And then the parents’ patience is put to the test. The one who has the energy for it sees something positive in the child’s wish to help. The one who is tired and pressed for time, and perhaps even hungry, sees something else: nothing but trouble. It requires stretching a little further, twisting about at odd angles, and risking a slight case of lumbago.

  Hanck was sceptical at first but soon realised the advantages of the boy’s interest. The raw materials were often very simple: pickled root vegetables, dried beans and sprouts that Hanck had taught himself to handle in the traditional way to make them edible. Everything always tasted the same.

  Toby soon learned the basics, and unconcerned with the demands of tradition, he might toss anything into the pot, and then entirely new flavours would arise. After many failures that nevertheless had to be eaten, Hanck realised that he had actually been demoted to helper. His son was in charge. Toby didn’t have a head for reading, he had to struggle through the Bible and the Koran, and he plodded through the basic rules of arithmetic and the history of the Great Raw Material War with the same anguish that once struck those who had fought in it.

  On the other hand, the raw materials that lay on the worktop aroused quite a different sense of desire. The boy was a born chef. The last words that Hanck’s mother had uttered were finally coming to pass.

  For a period during his teenage years Toby belonged to a gang. It was unavoidable; young men couldn’t make it alone. But it was a decent gang that committed no crimes worse than the petty theft of edible goods. They devoted most of their time to various games. This often led to long, drawn-out parties when the boys spent the night someplace, playing without stopping. It was a closed world that was largely inaccessible to outsiders, in which the nature of the game, along with the rules, were constantly changing.