The Rock Blaster

by Henning Mankell

  * * *

  —

  Oskar Johansson, the rock blaster with the damaged body. He is there, and he mentions something in passing. His sentences weave in and out.

  * * *

  —

  The alarm clock keeps ringing, harsh and unrelenting, and the sauna is always the same distance away.

  * * *

  —

  We sit in the row boat.

  Oskar’s flat tone as he counts the fish we catch.

  * * *

  —

  The playing cards, Radio Nord, frequencies, and blue-speckled cups.

  * * *

  —

  And the narrator?

  Oskar thinks he pulls up the nets too slowly.

  OSKAR JOHANSSON

  Oskar was born in Norrköping in 1888. He was the third of five children. Three sisters and two brothers. Elsa, Karl, Oskar, Anna, Viktoria. Elsa and Viktoria died young. He never saw Elsa. By the time Oskar was born, she was no longer even a sad memory. When Oskar was seven, his father came out into the backyard one day looking serious, took Oskar gently by the arm, and told him to come indoors. His mother was sitting in the kitchen crying, and his father told Oskar that Viktoria had fallen down the steep drop behind the houses and that she was dead. So Oskar had to stay indoors for a while and be sad.

  Later they stood around the little hole in the graveyard and his father tried to comfort his mother by saying that they did not need any more children. Three were enough.

  * * *

  —

  “I don’t really remember that much of my childhood. What we used to do. There was nothing special about me. I played the same games as all other children. Had the same clothes. Sometimes they were whole, sometimes torn. We played in the backyards. Running around and shouting at each other. We chased cats when we found them. We pushed one into a hole under the privy in the yard one day and blocked it up with pieces of wood. It was white. I think it was called Putte. And I ran to school like everybody else. There was nothing unusual. Sometimes I ask myself what I thought of back in those days. It might be fun to remember. But I don’t. I suppose most of the time I just ran around and screamed along with the rest of them. We clambered out over the planks, climbed back in again, went home quickly to get some food, and then charged around the backyards. There were four or so of us boys who stuck together. One was called Oskar, like me. We pretended to be brothers. His father ended up hanging himself, and I think his mother went and did the same thing a few years later. But there was never anything special about me. I played like all the others. The same games.”

  * * *

  —

  One day, in the third summer, there is someone sitting next to Oskar outside the sauna. When I arrive, he nods.

  “I’m Karl.”

  Oskar gives a little smile.

  “He’s my brother.”

  “We haven’t seen each other for a long time.”

  Then they sit on the wooden bench and look out over the water and talk. Karl is only there for the day. A boat comes to fetch him. He has to go back to an old people’s home somewhere. The brothers shake hands; Karl walks carefully out along the planks, climbs into the boat, which reverses out, turns around, and disappears behind the headland.

  THE ACCIDENT

  Once the rumble has died down and the first shock has subsided, Norström runs up to the rock wall ahead of the others.

  “You stay right where you are. I don’t want you to see this.”

  Norström yells at the young helper not to move. He is standing among the scattered metal spikes. He is shaking all over and tears well up in his eyes.

  “Christ, that’s horrible.”

  The blasting crew stands in a semicircle a few meters back from Oskar, who is lying twisted on the ground with blood pouring, pumping out from various parts of his body. His fair hair has been scorched off and there is a smell of burnt skin. The monotone buzzing of the blowflies cuts into their ears.

  Then, suddenly, Oskar’s right leg twitches.

  “What the fuck. He’s alive.”

  “What?”

  “He’s alive.”

  “How the hell…?”

  “Off with your shirts. Bandage him every-bloody-where. Quick.”

  The blasters tear off their shirts. They stop up the bleeding holes as best they can, the mutilated body parts. Norström bellows.

  “Run like fuck and get a cart. Oskar’s alive.”

  And the young helper runs.

  * * *

  —

  And there is no time to wait for anything else. Oskar’s body is lying there on a cart and the blasters rush toward town, through the streets in the direction of the hospital. They hurtle along with their cart rattling and bouncing over the cobblestones. People stop on the sidewalks, turn, shout out, “What happened?” but get no answer. Up the gravel path to the hospital, Norström charges in through the doors, on the verge of exhaustion, his heart pumping wildly.

  “Quick, quick!”

  Once the white coats have realized what has occurred and that there is still life in the body on the wooden cart, everything happens very rapidly. Caring hands lift the body, charred and covered in red blotches; lay it on a stretcher; and vanish through doors, down corridors.

  * * *

  —

  What about the rock blasters, drained as they were, what did they do? Sit down in the sun on the steps, shaken and scared? Or did they go back? Or go off in different directions?

  * * *

  —

  One day I did get an answer, without asking.

  “Even though I worked with pretty much the same blokes for a number of years, I don’t remember a single name. Norström, of course, but none of the others. That’s how it was. We were so anonymous to everyone else. We had no value other than as blasters. A bunch of blasters, a bunch of carpenters, a bunch of textile workers. We even saw ourselves as a bunch of blasters. A sort of self-contempt, I suppose. Sometimes they would come up to the hospital. Norström visited me and said he was proud that I had made it. Nobody in any other team of blasters he knew of had survived a bang like that. The other men just sat there in silence, maybe asked how I was. If they told me anything at all, then it was that they’d actually kept working for another hour that day after running to the hospital.”

  * * *

  —

  “They had cleaned up after the blast. But they didn’t find my right hand until the Monday. But basically we were just a bunch of blasters. If anyone had a name it was a nickname.”

  * * *

  —

  But this is where Oskar is wrong. Here, he himself will change his story. His memory is split. Oskar was a different person then. Now his account is elusive. Not because there is anything he wants to hide, but because he thinks it does not matter.

  * * *

  —

  Oskar Johansson has been a worker all his life. His thoughts and actions have changed, yet all along he has been a worker. What changed his thinking? What changed the things he has done? Why does he talk of bunches of blasters, bunches of carpenters?

  Oskar is sixty-eight when we first meet. He has been living in his apartment in town together with his wife, Elly’s sister. Then she dies and he stays there on his own and comes out here in the summer. Usually it is his eldest, his son, who drives him down to the boat harbor and fetches him home in the autumn. The son has his own company. He owns a laundry business. Oskar and Elly’s sister have two more children. Both girls. They are married and live elsewhere in the country. Oskar also has grandchildren, through his son as well as his daughters.

  Oskar’s place in town is a two-room apartment in a rental block built in the late forties. It is on the ground floor, in a neighborhood that is just being redeveloped. I don’t recall if it is entrance A, B, or C, bu
t the building is still there. Inside one of the ground-floor windows there are heavy, flourishing potted plants. Maybe that was where he lived. I could ask, but it is unimportant.

  * * *

  —

  Oskar is a special and rare case. A worker who has survived an explosion at close range. That is why he has a room of his own at the hospital. It has a high ceiling. Since Oskar is going to be there for a long time, they hang a portrait of the royal family on the wall opposite the bed. The king and queen are seated; the princes and princesses, the brothers-in-law and cousins, stand. Wishy-washy pale colors. Oskar’s room is on the top floor. He can see the sky and the outline of tin roofs right at the bottom of the window. Sometimes a pigeon flutters into view. Sometimes two or ten of them.

  “Most of the time I would just be lying there on my back, looking out of the window. There was nothing to see. But I probably just lay there waiting for something to turn up outside. They couldn’t do much about the pain, of course. After about half a year something did in fact show up. It was a yellow hot-air balloon with a basket under it. It drifted by the window. It was far away, so I was able to watch it for a long time. There were a few people in the basket. Looking in different directions. There may have been some sort of race going on and they had gotten lost, were off course.

  “You can’t ever really bear the pain, but you can get used to it. I remember my eye being the worst. It didn’t actually hurt, but I had this strange feeling in the empty socket where the eye had been. I kept wanting to blink, but there was nothing there. I remember quite well what I was thinking at the time. Probably because I had nothing to do.”

  * * *

  —

  Oskar’s case has been carefully documented by both blasting experts and doctors. There are sketches and X-rays, photographs. There are the succinct notes in his medical records. There is Norström’s extravagant account of what happened that Saturday afternoon shortly after three o’clock. There are Oskar’s own words. A few simple sentences. Short, hesitant.

  “I had just gotten a grip on the detonating cable. I was about to start pulling. Then there was a kind of flash.”

  * * *

  —

  Oskar’s case was inexplicable. The blasting experts suggested electric impulses, overheating. The doctors talked about unaccountably light injuries. But the case was diagnosed as “ultimately impossible to completely explain.”

  * * *

  —

  A university professor visited Oskar several times during the autumn. He was a theologian.

  “Like everybody else, he asked if I remembered anything. But I didn’t. They wanted to know if everything had suddenly gone black and I said it had gone white. They asked when I had come to again and I told them I didn’t remember. But they never believed me. Why would I hide anything? It was just that I couldn’t remember.”

  The medical records are written in a spindly hand that is hard to read. They have been kept.

  For whom?

  * * *

  —

  After a heavy shower in August, Oskar notices that water is dripping in through the corner just above the spirit stove. I take a quick look and see that the roofing felt is rotting there.

  “We’ll have to reline the whole roof. Might as well do it, if I’m going to go on living.”

  * * *

  —

  The mail boat brings out the felt. As I lie on the roof hammering in nails, I hear Radio Nord coming from the room below. Sometimes there is the sound of shuffling across the floor. Ten minutes later, the coffee is ready.

  Boiled coffee, on the weak side.

  * * *

  —

  The last summer Oskar visited the island he returned to his apartment on October 27. A strong north wind was blowing, making it difficult for the boat that came to fetch him to come in by the planks that made up Johansson’s jetty.

  In the middle of November, one of his legs began to feel bad. In the mornings it was almost dead, without any sensation. He went to the hospital and was admitted for the second time in his life. This would be the last time. He got gangrene in his leg. It was amputated and one morning just before Christmas he had a brain hemorrhage. His other leg became paralyzed, and one of his arms, and he could no longer speak. He remained like that until the beginning of April. Then he had another stroke and died an hour past midnight on April 9.

  It was a Wednesday. The funeral was on the Saturday. At twelve forty-five the bells began to toll, and the congregation consisted of his children. The coffin was brown. Real candles and a simple floral arrangement, which the undertakers had organized. Two short organ pieces, the priest reading from the service handbook, and the ceremony is over. Outside, the air is sharp. Work is being done on the flower beds in the churchyard. The siblings go off together to have coffee, agree on a day to settle the estate.

  On the Monday the death is announced in the only remaining local newspaper.

  The funeral has taken place.

  The urn with the ashes is interred a month later. Oskar’s son drives to the churchyard during his lunch break.

  * * *

  —

  It does not take long to settle the estate. No one wants the furniture. Linen, household equipment, books, pictures, and the television are divided without difficulty. The small amount of money will pay for the funeral. The clothes are burned.

  Nobody ever came to take away any of the things that Oskar had left in the cabin. The radio is still there, an old tin pillbox with a few ten-öre coins in it, some sheets and pillowcases. Mirror, saucepan, and cracked blue cups.

  * * *

  —

  The smell is still there. The bitter smell of old age.

  THE KEY WORDS

  This story.

  Tiny beads of narrative that string together to form a rosary.

  * * *

  —

  The notes and the memories. The two Oskar Johanssons. One a genuine former rock blaster who spent his summers living in an old sauna. The other an Oskar Johansson who becomes a part of a story. But both of them died one day, of a brain hemorrhage.

  * * *

  —

  This account is an attempt to piece together what Oskar never actually said. To try to describe what caused the changes in him.

  * * *

  —

  There are a few key words.

  * * *

  —

  “I played the same games as all the others.”

  “Obviously I went on working as a blaster, as soon as I’d recovered.”

  “I’ve been a worker all my life.”

  “Lots of things have changed, but not for us.”

  ELLY

  A lamp on the bedside table casts a faint, pale light through its shade. Oskar is lying on his back in bed and his breathing is regular. His head is wrapped in white bandages. A thick wad of dressing is held in place over his left eye by a strip of gauze tied around his jaw and the top of his head. The blue-white blanket has been drawn up to his chin. What one can see of Oskar’s face—his mouth; the right eye, which is closed; one cheek; his nose—is pallid yellow. His arms are resting on top of the blanket. The right one ends in a bundle of gauze and compresses. There is a similar round white shape over his left hand. The bedcover is raised over the pelvis and lower abdomen because of all the bulky bandages dressing the wounds ripped open by the dynamite.

  Oskar’s bed is gray-blue. The paint has peeled in some places and the steel shows through. His medical notes are hanging at the foot of the bed. The fever curve sketches the contours of an alpine landscape that gradually evens out into unbroken terrain. The curtains are closed. Everything in the room is stiff and pale.

  A white-haired night nurse opens the door. She tiptoes up to the bed, leans over Oskar, listens, puts one hand on his heart. Then she turns, pads out, and shut
s the door.

  Oskar is not sleeping. He lies there, listening to his pain. Under the bandage over his eye, there is a twitch in the empty socket. He tries to picture the hole, but the image jumps about, jerky, unsteady. One moment all he sees is a red hole, then it changes to a slimy lump of pus floating about in a bowl of skin. The eye is gone, but the spasms remain, echoes of the blinking that is no longer there. The constant reminder makes him feel faintly, persistently sick. Oskar tries to focus his thoughts and mental images on other things, but every third second his eye blinks and the empty left socket responds.

  A constant pain pierces his abdomen. It throbs and sears through all his shredded nerves. Oskar does not know exactly what has happened, other than that half his penis has been torn off, but the ureter and the scrotum with the testicles are intact. He does not know, has not seen. It is all wrapped up in a thick bundle, but he can feel the mess and the stickiness underneath. Each time the bandages are changed, he tries to steel himself to look, but he either cannot or does not want to. Every movement, every twisting of his body, causes unbearable pain, and he cries out. At first, he tried with all his might not to. He bit holes in his tongue, tensed every undamaged muscle in his body to strain against the scream bubbling up in his chest, but he could never stop it from bursting out. Now he does not even try to resist.