The Rock Blaster
Page 1
Praise for Henning Mankell
“Mankell is a master storyteller.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Henning Mankell is an addictive writer.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Mankell’s atmospherics…give you metaphysical goose bumps.”
—Boston Herald
“Mankell’s forte is matching mood to setting and subject.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Powerful….Only Mankell can summon with such a dreamlike intensity the Nordic landscapes and climates he knows so well.”
—The Guardian
Henning Mankell
THE ROCK BLASTER
Henning Mankell’s novels have been translated into forty-five languages and have sold more than forty million copies worldwide. He was the first winner of the Ripper Award and also received the Glass Key and the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, among other awards. His Kurt Wallander mysteries have been adapted into a PBS television series starring Kenneth Branagh. During his life, Mankell divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he was the artistic director of the Teatro Avenida in Maputo. He died in 2015.
Also by Henning Mankell
Kurt Wallander Series
FACELESS KILLERS
THE DOGS OF RIGA
THE WHITE LIONESS
THE MAN WHO SMILED
SIDETRACKED
THE FIFTH WOMAN
ONE STEP BEHIND
FIREWALL
BEFORE THE FROST
THE PYRAMID
THE TROUBLED MAN
AN EVENT IN AUTUMN
Fiction
THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER
CHRONICLER OF THE WINDS
DEPTHS
KENNEDY’S BRAIN
THE EYE OF THE LEOPARD
ITALIAN SHOES
THE MAN FROM BEIJING
DANIEL
THE SHADOW GIRLS
A TREACHEROUS PARADISE
Nonfiction
I DIE, BUT THE MEMORY LIVES ON
QUICKSAND
Young Adult Fiction
A BRIDGE TO THE STARS
SHADOWS IN THE TWILIGHT
WHEN THE SNOW FELL
JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Children’s Fiction
THE CAT WHO LIKED RAIN
A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2020
English translation copyright © 2020 by George Goulding
Preface translation copyright © 2020 by George Goulding
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Sweden as Bergsprängaren by Författarförlaget, Stockholm, in 1973. Copyright © 1973 by Henning Mankell. This translation simultaneously published in hardcover in Great Britain by MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd, London. Published by agreement with Copenhagen Literary Agency Aps, Copenhagen. Translation sponsored by the Swedish Arts Council.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LCCN: 2019948215
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525566168
Ebook ISBN 9780525566175
Cover design by Carson Dyle
Cover photograph © Retro Puppetti/plainpicture
Map designed by Emily Faccini
www.vintagebooks.com
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CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Also by Henning Mankell
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
The Rock Blaster
Three Points in Time
Glossary of Swedish Terms, People, Places, and Organizations
Map of Sweden
PREFACE
It has been twenty-five years since this book first saw the light of day. A quarter of a century, that is. I wrote the first part in an apartment on Løkkeveien in Oslo. It was late autumn and cold. I could see the American embassy through the window of the drafty study. There were demonstrations going on outside the building all the time. I used to walk over there between my writing stints. You could still catch the occasional sharp remark from people passing in the street. But they were fewer and less hostile than before. It was already 1972. The Americans were losing their desperate war of aggression in Vietnam.
I remember that autumn clearly. The leaves turning yellow in the Palace Park, the marines outside the embassy gate always grim. But most of all I remember what I was thinking. It was a time of great joy, of great energy. Everything was still possible. Nothing was either lost or settled. Except that the Vietnamese were certain to win. Imperialism was beginning to show signs of strain. The course had already been set, along sufficiently deep and navigable channels. But there were, of course, also indications to the contrary: neither I nor any of my friends seriously believed that we would see South Africa’s apartheid system brought to an end in our lifetime. In retrospect, I can now recognize that we were both right and wrong, as is always the case when one tries to look into the future.
While I sat and wrote this book, I was thinking: with this one, for the first time, I would get into print. Until then I had managed to have bits and pieces published in the newspapers. And some of my plays had been performed. I had been directing in various theaters. That way I could afford to spend a month at a time only writing. Which was what it was all about. The purpose of my life. I could not imagine anything else. What could it otherwise be?
I had made up my mind to try to avoid ever having any of my work rejected. At least any longer texts. Novels, in other words. For that reason, the year before I had torn up a couple of manuscripts that I did not think were good enough. I never submitted them to a publisher. But when this book was eventually finished (the latter part was written in an equally drafty apartment on Trotzgatan in Falun, a small provincial town in the middle of Sweden), I dropped the manuscript into a mailbox. In June I received a postcard with a picture of Dan Andersson. Sune Stigsjöö was the head of Författarförlaget at the time. He told me that the book had been accepted and would be published.
It was well received. (As I recall, Björn Fremer’s in Kvällsposten was the only negative review.) As a result, I began to get grants. I could now dispense with some of my bread-and-butter activities.
That is now a quarter of a century ago. I wrote the manuscript on an unreliable old typewriter with Norwegian characters. Today I am composing these lines on a computer that weighs scarcely more than three kilos.
Certainly, much has happened in those twenty-five years. Some walls have come down, others have gone up. One empire has fallen, the other is being weakened from within; new centers of power are taking shape. But the poor and exploited have become even poorer during these years. And Sweden has gone from making an honest attempt at building a decent society to social depredation. An ever-clearer division between those who are needed and those who are expendable. Today there are ghettos outside Swedish cities. Twenty-five years ago they did not exist.
As I read through this book again after all these years, I realize that this quarter century has been
but a short time in history. What I wrote here is still highly relevant.
* * *
—
I have made a number of small changes to the wording for this edition. But the story is the same. I have not touched it.
It was not necessary to do so.
Henning Mankell
Mozambique, November 1997
THE NEWS ITEM
“Why the hell isn’t it going off?”
Norström angrily kicked his left foot. He had gotten it tangled in a ball of steel wire that someone had carelessly left lying among the rock debris. As he thrashed, the wire tightened ever higher up his leg. He could easily have bent down and yanked it free with a single tug.
But Norström did not bend down. He kept on furiously kicking. He was sweating. His gray flannel shirt, unbuttoned down far over his bulging stomach, soaked up the sweat and gave off the acrid smell of dirty skin.
Norström was the foreman of a team of detonators. It was a Saturday afternoon in the middle of June, and steam was rising from the heat beating down on the unshaded work site. Norström was in charge of blasting tunnels for a railway line. The line was to be made double-track and that required three new tunnels. Right now, they were working on the middle one, which was also the longest and most awkward. They had just started on the opening in the rock wall. The rough and spiky surface of the gray granite had been laid bare of its thin covering of soil. Sunlight reflected off the cliff face, which rose almost vertically for about thirty meters. There was a hillock, roughly a hundred meters in circumference, and the tunnels and railway line were to go straight through it.
Norström did not like blasting tunnels. “You either get rid of the whole thing or just leave it. Making holes straight through it is asking for trouble. Sooner or later it’ll collapse.” That was his view. In all his fifty years he had been lucky enough not to have to blast tunnels more than once every five years, but now he had three to do at once.
“Will someone come and get rid of this bloody mess!”
Norström glared angrily at some workers who were resting on their crowbars, gratefully enjoying the unexpected break. First the charge had failed, and then Norström had gotten his foot tangled up in a steel wire. They leaned on their spikes and waited with their backs turned to the sun.
“You run over and help him.”
Oskar Johansson gave the youngest in their team a light kick with the tip of his boot. A lad of fourteen, small and skinny. He leaped up at once and ran across the sandy ground to Norström, quickly bent down, and began to tug at the wire.
“Don’t pull so bloody hard. Just loosen it.”
Norström was becoming more and more annoyed. He squinted at the sun, then turned toward the rock face, glanced down at the boy carefully digging around in the tangle of steel wire, and then glared at the blasters, immobile and leaning on their spikes.
“Why isn’t it going off?” he bellowed.
Oskar Johansson straightened up.
“I’ll take a look.”
At the same time, Norström’s foot came free of the wire. The break was over. Now the failed charge had to be checked. And that was Johansson’s job, since he had primed it. Every explosion was a personal thing. The dynamite was the same, unpredictable and treacherous, but every charge had its owner, the one responsible for it.
* * *
—
The accelerating pace of industrial expansion made improved communications necessary. The railways had to be extended. There were to be more tracks. There were more and longer trains and the roar of explosions echoed throughout the country.
* * *
—
They were well into summer. The constant heat since the end of May had begun to scorch the ground. When the blasters sought the shade of the birch trees for their short breaks, there was a crackling under their boots.
Johansson wiped his forehead. He looked at the back of his hand. It was shiny with sweat and he wiped it on his shirt. He was twenty-three years old, the youngest in the team of blasters—because the helper did not count. Oskar had already worked on blasting teams for seven years, and enjoyed it. He was tall, well built, with a round face and an open expression that was never serious. His eyes were bright blue, and his fair hair curled over his forehead. The early summer heat had turned his skin brown. He was wearing a gray-white shirt and dark blue cotton trousers, and was barefoot.
He peered toward the rock face.
* * *
—
“Will you go and check?”
Norström stood with his hands on his hips and shot Johansson a challenging look. Norström disliked failed detonations. Partly because you never knew what might happen, partly because they held up the work. He was responsible for sticking to the schedule, and he knew this tunnel was going to cause them problems. Besides, he had a hangover. The day before he had turned fifty-five, and there had been a party in the evening. He had drunk akvavit all through the night until he crashed into bed at about two in the morning. And he had vomited copiously and at length when he got up two hours later to go to work. He almost regretted having turned down the offer of a day off to mark his birthday. A gesture from management, in recognition of his having worked for the railway’s construction division on and off since 1881. And because he had a reputation for keeping to deadlines and getting work done. This had earned him the nickname “Glory of Labor” from his fellow workers. It was never used in Norström’s presence, but that was how he was referred to when the blasters talked about him at home in the evening, or during rest breaks when he was busy with something else. When he first found out that he had a nickname he was angry, but then he began to see it as a sign that the blasters were afraid of him, and he liked that. Now he often used the name to refer to himself, when describing his job to his friends. Only yesterday he had gone on and on about how scared the blasters were of him. He had been with his brother-in-law, who had come to the birthday celebration, and had talked at length about his job.
It was nearly three o’clock, and in three hours their working week would be over. Then they would have a day off and Norström would be able to lie on his bed, swatting at the flies and telling the children to be quiet, and slowly plan next week’s work. According to the schedule he had thought out the previous Sunday, they had failed to meet their target. And nothing disturbed him more than when they fell short of expectations. It meant that his Sunday, the rest day, would be ruined. He would spend it fretting.
“Have you pulled off the detonating cable?”
Some of the blasters mumbled an almost inaudible “no.”
“Are you out of your minds? Why not?”
Norström was astonished that they had failed to do something so obvious. He had no sympathy for the fact that the blasters had been taking a short break in the heat.
“Get your arse over there now, and rip the cable off!”
He gave the helper a kick. The boy quickly scampered over to the small wooden box that stood a short distance from them and tore off a cable that was attached to a steel clip at the back.
Johansson pulled himself up to his full height, propped his metal spike against a huge lump of blast debris, and began to walk toward the rock face. He went slowly, as if he did not want to rouse the dynamite. He grimaced in the heat and wiped the salty sweat from his eyes. A feeling of unease always settled over the entire team whenever an explosive charge did not go off. Dynamite was dangerous. You never knew what tricks it might get up to. But somebody always had to go and check, and caution was the only possible protection.
Johansson stopped just meters short of the rock face. He bit his lower lip and looked carefully at the hole in the cliff into which the detonating cable snaked. He turned around, and in a low voice called over to the others still standing there leaning on their spikes:
“Is the cable off?”
N
orström strode over to the wooden box himself, something he did not usually do; had a look; and then shouted:
“It’s disconnected. You can go on over.”
Johansson nodded, more for his own benefit than Norström’s. He did it to convince himself that everything was ready.
* * *
—
Then he turns, fixes his eyes on the drill hole, and slowly approaches the rock wall with short, stealthy steps. He does not take his eyes off the hole. He bites his lip, sweat pouring down his face; he blinks to clear his vision and when he is half a meter from the cliff he stops and carefully leans forward. Without relaxing his concentration, he slowly stretches out his right arm until his hand is resting just above the hole. He focuses, braces himself, and begins to tease out the detonating cable. He hears the faint sound of a metal spike clinking as it is laid against a stone. His fingertips tighten around the cable.
The next moment the rock wall explodes, and for many years afterward foreman Norström will tell people how it was one of his men who, while working on the middle tunnel in a group of three, astonishingly survived an explosion at close range. His name was Oskar Johansson, and their helper, a boy of just fourteen years, fainted when they found Johansson’s right hand, rotting in a bush seventy meters away. They found it thanks to the flies that had gathered around. It was lying among the dandelions, its fingers stretched out.
And Norström would add that Johansson not only survived but kept on working as a blaster once he had recovered.
* * *
—
That Saturday afternoon in June 1911, Oskar Johansson lost all his fair hair. His left eye was ripped out of its socket by the force of the blast. The right hand was severed at the wrist by a shard of rock. It was sliced off with an almost surgical precision. Another shard tore through Oskar’s lower abdomen like a red-hot arrow, severed half of his penis on the way through, and emerged via his groin, kidney, and bladder.