The Rock Blaster

by Henning Mankell

  “We also went to the churchyard and managed to find the gravestone. The inscription reads ‘Johannes Johansson.’ Underneath, it says ‘Brita Johansson.’ She seems to have died almost ten years before him. There were no pictures of them so I have no idea what they looked like. But then Far went to Norrköping. Like so many others he wanted to move into town when the factories came. But Far became one of those who emptied out privies. He had no other work as long as he lived. There was nothing unusual about him, I suppose. He did what he had to. And didn’t think it would be possible to get a better job. How he must have resented it. He slaved away his entire life without any respite. He would have had plenty of time to think. He died in 1936. He too grew to a ripe old age.”

  * * *

  —

  Oskar Johannes Johansson has been a worker all his life. Like his father. Like his grandfather. Lock worker, canal construction worker. Privy worker. Rock blaster, rock blaster. Johannes, Oskar’s father, Oskar.

  Oskar’s son has a laundry business in town. It belongs to him. The telephone directory lists him as a company director.

  * * *

  —

  It was a ramshackle wooden house, gray and drafty like the others that were crowded together side by side. At the back they all had the same kind of yard with a wooden shack that was part privy, part woodshed. The shacks were connected by a high plank fence that teetered on the very edge of a thirty-meter drop. Down below, the railway line ran into and out of town.

  Axel Johansson lived with his family on the second floor of one of the wooden houses. A kitchen, one other room. The apartment had two windows and both looked out onto the yard. The parents had their bed in the room. The children slept in the kitchen. Oskar in a small wooden bed that was put out on the landing during the day. Karl on the kitchen sofa under the window, and Anna on the other wooden sofa on the other side of the dining table. There was so little room in the kitchen that it was barely possible for more than two people to move around in it at the same time. In the evenings, when everyone was at home, some of them sat in the kitchen and some on the bed in the room. That way you could sit and talk from one room to the other. It was a cold and drafty apartment. However much you fired up the stove, it was never possible to raise the temperature to more than fifty degrees in winter.

  * * *

  —

  Oskar provides precious little information. The narrator has to piece together fragments to form a dull whole. Any snippets are delivered incidentally, when Oskar is talking about other things.

  * * *

  —

  “It was the same as all the other worker housing. No better, no worse. Since we were an unusually small number of children, I imagine we were less cramped than many others. But in any case, we didn’t know anything else. And there was nothing else to look forward to. You had the hovels that we workers crowded into and froze in. You had those big, light apartments in the stone buildings in the center of town. You had the detached houses with their gardens. But to me those all seemed so remote that I hardly even thought about it until after the accident, which is when I first began to think at all.

  “I remember that one night there were eleven more people sleeping in our apartment. There’d been a fire somewhere in town and everyone had to help out. I just don’t know how it was possible to fit in another two adults and nine children. Even if it was only for one night. I suppose they must have lain there crying. After all, they had lost everything. And it was never easy to find another place. The wooden houses were always overflowing. And there was nothing else. I have only a faint memory of it. I wasn’t old when it happened.”

  * * *

  —

  That is how Oskar lived.

  That is how Elly lived.

  Her sister.

  The rock blasters.

  All the others.

  * * *

  —

  But the workers’ parties were growing. The right to vote, to housing, to decent working hours, pay. Society was awakening, its nerves beginning to twitch.

  * * *

  —

  But there is one detail in the narrative to do with the apartment, with Oskar’s childhood, that features more prominently than anything else.

  It is a stone, which Johannes Johansson found during one of the years he was working on the construction of the canal. It is a piece of granite, perfectly round. But on one side there is a red crack that runs through the rock like a cross. The stone fits into a hand. And the cross is red against the grayish white of the stone. Axel Johansson took it with him when he moved to town. When he died, Oskar got it. Now it lies beside the transistor radio on the green wax tablecloth.

  “Don’t think that I want to have it on my grave. But I do think it is beautiful.”

  * * *

  —

  I hold it in my hand and try to gauge its significance. It is a memento. Oskar’s father carried it in his pocket or in a bundle when he walked the gravel roads into town. It has spent a lifetime on a chest of drawers indoors. Now it is in Oskar’s cabin. A chip has broken off the back.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s always been missing. When we were children, I suppose we must have asked how it had happened. But it always had a chip missing.”

  * * *

  —

  The stone is like a crystal ball. Hold it in your hand, lower your gaze to look into the pale gray granite and the red cross.

  * * *

  —

  The summer after Oskar died, one June day, we roll the sauna away on logs. There are five of us. We heave the house onto a cattle barge and then tow it to the other side of the island, where it is to stand from now on. After one day of hard work it’s in its place, under some tall oaks, right on top of a rocky knoll. The weather is hot and we don’t finish until late in the evening.

  At five in the morning I walk along the shore, skirt the steep cliffs, and reach Oskar’s headland. The mist is swirling and my boots sink deep into the soft soil.

  * * *

  —

  Four cornerstones. The ground between them is a mat of dead yellow grass. There is a rusty oven door lying there, a black stovepipe with large holes in it. Shards of glass, a couple of akvavit bottle tops. A rusty tin, used for worms. When I turn it upside down, spongy gray strips of moss fall out. A stiff worm lies at the bottom of the tin, which makes it look as if it is cracked. In the cellar, a pit dug into the earth, is an empty beer bottle.

  * * *

  —

  I walk up behind the cornerstones and take down the gray line with clothes pegs on it.

  * * *

  —

  It is a fine summer. Soon the grass will be tall. And shrubs will be growing over the oven door and the stovepipe.

  I sit in the green flat-bottomed hardboard row boat. Row away from the headland.

  In the late fifties a postcard photographer traveled through the archipelago. He went around the islands in October. The cards are cold and off-putting. They are all black-and-white and sold poorly. A few years later color postcards arrived and the black-and-white ones were piled up in the shops, unsold.

  There is one postcard of the island. You can just see the sauna, appearing like a black piece of stage scenery among the bare branches of the trees. The photographer must have been about thirty meters from the shore when he took the picture.

  As I look at the postcard, I imagine that I see the door ajar.

  * * *

  —

  “I remember the first time I met Norström. He wasn’t quite as fat then as later on. They were busy blasting to clear the way for a main road. I got there in the middle of the day.”

  “If you want to be a rock blaster, you’re going to have to put your back into it, matey.”

  “I think I can do that.”

  “Goo
d. Norström’s my name.”

  * * *

  —

  Oskar Johannes Johansson. Helper, rock blaster, rock blaster again. Married to Elly’s sister. One son, two daughters.

  * * *

  —

  Oskar buys lottery tickets. He has a standing order at the newsstand on the mainland. The mail boat brings him a ticket once a month. He wins nearly every time. Fifty or twenty-five kronor, never more. The following day his order goes in with the mail boat. It comes by at half past six. Oskar stands in the doorway and waves. That means he wants a bottle of akvavit.

  In the evening, when the day’s work is done, the mail boat ties up at the island. The mailman goes up to the cabin.

  That evening we do not put out any nets.

  “We were warned off alcohol at home. Far never drank. And the people who taught us to become socialists were also against drinking. I don’t think I tasted any spirits until I turned forty.”

  They are sitting in the sauna, Oskar and the postman. Two glasses and some fizzy lemon soda. The mailman, who lives on a nearby island, sweeps off his uniform cap. Sometimes, when Oskar has waved from the doorway in the morning, he spends the evening with Oskar in the sauna.

  * * *

  —

  What do they talk about?

  Mail. Letters. The strange things some people send.

  Fishing.

  They sit in silence.

  When the bottle is empty, the mailman makes for home.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s a bloody nuisance that I have to do a morning round as well. Sometimes that’s three hours’ work for just one postcard.”

  “I see.”

  “The rubbish people write. I usually read the cards.”

  “Blimey!”

  * * *

  —

  Oskar’s expressions. Again and again, with a touch of dialect.

  Blimey.

  I wonder.

  I see.

  God willing.

  Blimey.

  * * *

  —

  “A number of times this summer I’ve come across boxes with hedgehogs in them. People don’t seem to have the slightest idea. Summer visitors don’t understand that hedgehogs rarely survive the winter out here. When they come back the year after, they think the place will be swarming with hedgehogs. But of course it isn’t.”

  Then they talk about all the hornets this summer. The ones in the old boathouse. The size of your thumb. Vicious now in the autumn.

  At their most poisonous in spring?

  Like everything else, it no doubt varies.

  * * *

  —

  The mailman is talking. Oskar answers.

  “Blimey.”

  “I see.”

  * * *

  —

  Pike pest.

  “It’s spread to cod now as well. You can’t even throw them back. They have to be buried. That means bloody standing and digging holes for the fish every day. Must be all the crap in the water. One morning I nearly ran into a chest of drawers floating there. It’s crazy.”

  * * *

  —

  Akvavit makes Oskar tired. After he’s had a few, he sleeps for a long time. The mailman helps him to bed. Then he goes down to his boat, which has been lying there with the motor running the whole time, the regular thump of the fuel-oil engine.

  When Oskar wakes up in the morning he goes out and lies down on the ground under an oak tree. His snoring can be heard across the bay. The red wood ants crawl all over him. Sometimes he sleeps until midday.

  * * *

  —

  Oskar suddenly stops his rowing and breathing. Then he points with the left oar and says:

  “What’s that?”

  I turn and look. The flounders are flapping weakly on the floor of the boat.

  I see something white floating in the water, ten meters away.

  “Shall we take a look?”

  Oskar rows over and I lean out from the boat and take hold of the white object.

  * * *

  —

  As we row home, we have a few sodden logbooks lying in the boat. Later, when we take a closer look, we see that they come from a German vessel. MS Matilda, Bremen.

  “The captain was probably drunk and fed up.”

  I sit there and try to decipher the washed-out sentences and numbers in the books. The pages stick together and it is hard to separate them. Figures, positions, cargoes, ports. I read them aloud for Oskar. We have the door open and mosquitoes are dancing in the room. Oskar raises his head and looks at them.

  “They don’t bother me. Let them have a little blood.”

  * * *

  —

  On a calm night every two weeks or so we burn trash. So the logbooks go up in flames along with the plastic bags, leftover food, and newspapers. The plastic spreads its acrid smell and Oskar hits out at the smoke with his walking stick.

  “I had to start using it ten years ago. The injuries to my stomach began to hurt again and the best way of easing the pain was to lean forward when I walked. The stick helped.”

  It is light brown with a rubber ferrule on the end.

  “This is my summer cane. I have another one at home in town. It’s black.”

  * * *

  —

  Now Oskar is dead. At the time I saw the cane as a yellow stick, with a black rubber cover over the end and a worn handle.

  Now I remember the words “summer cane.”

  Summer cane. Lying across the blue-covered knees.

  Summer cane.

  Winter cane?

  * * *

  —

  Oskar does not want a metal hook in place of the hand that was blown off. Neither does he want to have an enamel eye inserted into the empty eye socket. He wants to have a stump for an arm and his eyelids to be sewn together.

  * * *

  —

  He is skinny and pale when he leaves the hospital. He walks gingerly. He looks at the ground in front of him, tests each step, sets one foot in front of the other, and does not notice the looks from the passersby. The reactions at the sight of his eye socket. The grimaces at the stump of his arm sticking out of his coat sleeve.

  Oskar is discharged from the hospital in January. It is very cold and the hard snow crunches under his feet. Breath steams from his mouth and his earlobes are burning. Oskar leaves the hospital on foot.

  * * *

  —

  The game of Patience does not work out. Oskar rakes the cards together to begin again.

  * * *

  —

  What about the time in between?

  There were years, events. From 1910 to 1965, to 1969. There is an ever-shifting reality, an ever-changing Oskar. He has been a disabled worker all along. Has had the same life as everyone else. Brutal swings between having work and being laid off. He has more money. Better accommodation. Society changes and Oskar changes. Oskar never talks about development. He talks about change and the narrator thinks that it is exactly the right word for what he means. Oskar is a worker. He belongs to a group that he sees as clearly defined and also clearly segregated. There are those key words again. They keep surfacing. Key words, cropping up time and again, marking the stages in Oskar’s life by something other than years. And it is some of the changes, never the violent ones but those that take their time, that divide up Oskar’s life. Once again. Certain key words. The games that were the same. I’ve been a worker all my life. Lots of things have changed, but not for us. Oskar simply sees himself for what he is. He keeps emphasizing that there was never anything out of the ordinary about him, but he never says what he means by “out of the ordinary.” He says he is one of the others. Nothing more. A rock blaster with a family. Who matt
ers to his family but not to anybody or anything else. He does not feel that he has had anything to do with any of the changes. They happened and they have had an effect. But he himself had no part in shaping them. The worker is a member of his community, but the forces driving and changing society are wielded by others. That is what Oskar really means when he says that there is nothing out of the ordinary about him.

  * * *

  —

  That is where we disagree.

  MAGNUS NILSSON

  Magnus Nilsson was the name of Oskar’s colleague and Oskar moved in with him the year before the accident. Nilsson had an identical apartment to the one in which Oskar had lived. The wooden houses were built on the same plan. Where there was room, they had sprung up, keeping pace with the growth of industry. At first they were on the outskirts, but they then gradually became part of the center as the towns grew around them. Magnus Nilsson lived in another neighborhood, and it was there that Oskar moved when he was no longer allowed to stay at home because he had become a socialist. Magnus worked on the same team of blasters as Oskar and he was one of the men who stood looking at the hand among the dandelions. Magnus had always lived in the same apartment. After the death of their parents the children had stayed on there until, one after the other, they moved away and Magnus alone was left. He had never married. He was now forty-five years old and beginning to show signs of exhaustion. He was taciturn, short, and quite stocky. He had a coarse, angular face. His brown eyes were set deep under drooping eyelids and his hair was black and tangled. He was a skilled hand and easy to work with.