Quicksand

by Henning Mankell

  It is about 250 years since these people lived and died. Eight or nine generations, no more. In many ways they are our contemporaries. And above all, they belong to the same civilisation as those of us who contemplate the painting.

  Everybody in the picture is smiling. Some a little stiffly, others introspectively, a few are quite uninhibited and close to me as I scrutinise the picture.

  But needless to say, what one remembers about the painting is the children who are half hidden or looking away. The dead. It is as if they are in motion, moving away from the observer and into the world of shadows.

  What is so touching is the reluctance of the dead children to disappear.

  I know of no other picture that depicts so vividly the stubborn determination of life to continue.

  I hope this painting will survive into the future – a future so far distant that I am incapable of imagining it – as a greeting from our civilisation. It combines a belief in reason with the tragic conditions that are inherent in human life.

  Everything is there.

  3

  The great discovery

  In the emotional chaos that enveloped me after my torticollis had metamorphosed into cancer, I noticed that my memory often transported me back to my childhood.

  But it wasn’t long before I realised that my memory was trying to help me to understand, to create a starting point that would enable me to cope with the potentially fatal catastrophe with which I had been stricken.

  I quite simply had to start somewhere. I had to make a choice. And I was becoming increasingly convinced that the beginning lay somewhere in my early life.

  I eventually chose a cold winter’s day in 1957.

  When I open my eyes that morning I am unaware that the day is going to reveal a big secret.

  Quite early I am on my way to school through the darkness. I am nine years old. It so happens that my best friend Bosse is ill. I always pick him up from his house, which is only a few minutes’ walk from the district courthouse where I live. His brother Göran answers the door and says that Bosse has a sore throat and will be staying at home. I will have to go the rest of the way to school on my own that morning.

  Sveg is quite a small town. None of the streets are very long. Although fifty-seven years have passed since that winter’s day I can still remember everything in great detail. The few lights suspended on cables across the streets are swaying gently in the gusty breeze. The shade on the light outside the ironmonger’s has cracked – it wasn’t like that yesterday. Evidently it had happened during the night.

  It must have been snowing while I was asleep. Somebody has already cleared away the snow from outside the furniture shop – that must have been Inga-Britt’s dad. He owns the furniture shop. Inga-Britt is another classmate of mine, but she’s a girl and we never go to school together. But she can run very fast. Nobody can ever keep up with her.

  I can even remember what I had dreamt about that night. I’m standing on an ice floe on the River Ljusnan, which flows past the building where I live. The spring thaw has begun and the floe is floating southwards. Standing on one’s own on an ice floe ought to be scary as it is very dangerous. Only a few months ago a boy just a few years older than I am drowned when an unexpected and treacherous hole in the ice opened up in a lake just outside Sveg. He was dragged down and his body has never been found, despite the best efforts of the fire brigade. His teacher drew a cross on his desk at school. It is still there. Everybody in his class is frightened of holes in the ice and accidents and ghosts. Everybody is scared of that unknown thing called Death. The cross on his desk is a source of terror.

  But in my dream the ice floe is safe. I know I’m not going to fall into the water.

  I cross the road just past the furniture shop and stop outside the community centre. There are two display panels outside. The cinema changes its programme twice a week, and the films are delivered in brown cardboard boxes from the goods depot at the local railway station. They come either from Orsa to the south or from Östersund. And they are still brought from the station by horse and cart. Engman, who is the caretaker at the community centre, lifts the boxes from the cart. I tried once, but failed miserably: they were too heavy for a nine-year-old. The cardboard boxes contained a bad cowboy film that I eventually watched. It was one of those B-movies where people talk and talk, with a brief gunfight at the end. Practically nothing else happens. And the colours are so peculiar. The people often have pink faces and the sky is more green than blue.

  I see from the posters that Engman will be showing The Hard Man, which doesn’t sound all that attractive, and a Swedish film starring Nils Poppe. The only advantage of the latter is that it is a U certificate and children are allowed in. That means I won’t have to crawl in through the basement window that Bosse and I have a secret key for, so that we can always get in that way when the films are adults only.

  As I stand there that freezing-cold morning fifty-seven years ago I experience one of those vital moments that will affect the rest of my life. I recall the situation in minute detail, as if the images have been branded into my memory. I am suddenly possessed by unexpected insight. It is as if somebody has given me a good shaking. The words come into my head of their own accord.

  ‘I am myself and no one else. I am me.’

  At that moment I find my identity. Until then my thoughts had been childish, as they were meant to be. Now the situation was entirely different. Identity is necessary in order to develop awareness. I am myself and nobody else. I cannot be exchanged for anybody else. Life has suddenly become a serious matter.

  I don’t know how long I stood there in the freezing-cold darkness, possessed by this new and bewildering understanding. All I remember is that I arrived late for school. Miss Prestjan, my teacher, was already playing the harmonium when I opened the outside door. I hung up my jacket and waited. It was strictly forbidden to go clomping into the classroom once morning prayers and hymns had begun.

  It came to an end at last, there was a clattering of desks, and I knocked on the door and went it. As I was hardly ever late Miss Prestjan simply gave me a searching look and nodded. If she had suspected laziness, she would have said something.

  ‘Bosse is ill,’ I said. ‘He has a sore throat and a temperature. He won’t be coming to school today.’

  Then I sat down at my desk. I looked around. Nobody had the slightest idea about the secret I was carrying with me. The secret I would keep for the next fifty-seven years.

  4

  Quicksand

  It suddenly seemed as if my life had shrunk. That January morning when I received my cancer diagnosis, I had the feeling that my life was dwindling away. Very few thoughts came into my head; my mind seemed to be a sort of desert-like landscape.

  Perhaps I didn’t dare to think about the future – it was so uncertain, a veritable minefield. Instead, I kept returning again and again to my childhood.

  When I was eight or nine years old I passed through a period in which I kept thinking about what kind of death frightened me most of all. That is nothing remarkable – people have such thoughts at that age. Life and death begin to be serious topics that one needs to come to terms with. Children are extremely serious creatures. Not least when they reach the age when they slowly take the step that changes them into conscious human beings – conscious of the fact that they have an identity that cannot be changed. Over the years what one looks like in a mirror changes, but behind that mirror image is always the real you.

  Your identity is formed when you decide your attitude towards serious questions. That is something known to everybody who has not forgotten all about their childhood.

  What frightened me more than anything else was falling through the ice on a lake or a river and being sucked underneath the ice sheet, unable to break through to the surface. To drown just underneath the ice through which you could see the sun shining. Suffocating in the cold water. Being overcome by panic from which no one could rescue you. Screaming without bein
g heard. Screams that froze and turned into ice and death.

  That kind of fear was not so strange; I grew up in the province of Härjedalen where the winters were long and severe.

  Around that time, a girl about my age actually did fall through the all-too-thin ice on the Sandtjärn lake. I was there when they recovered her body. The word had spread very fast through Sveg. Everybody came running up. It was a Sunday. Her parents were standing next to the lake where the black water in the hole stood out among all the whiteness of the ice and snow. When the volunteer firemen had dragged out the girl with their grappling irons, her parents didn’t react as they would have done in a film or a book. They didn’t burst into tears. They were completely silent. It was others who wept. Her teacher, I recall. The vicar and the girl’s closest friends.

  Somebody vomited into the snow. It was very quiet. The white clouds of breath coming out of everybody’s mouths were like incomprehensible smoke signals.

  The drowned girl had not been in the water all that long. But she was completely stiff. Her woollen clothes crackled and creaked as they laid her down in the snow. Her face was absolutely white, as if it had been made up in that colour. Her blonde hair stuck out from under her red cap like yellow icicles.

  But there was another kind of death that terrified me. I had read about it somewhere. Looking back, I have tried to remember where. Possibly in Record Magazine, which combined fictional tales about sport with thrillers and adventure stories. Or perhaps it was in some travelogue from Africa or the Arab countries. I have never managed to find it.

  It was about quicksand. About how a man in a khaki uniform, with a rifle over his shoulder, dressed for an expedition, happens to tread on the treacherous sand and is immediately stuck fast. He is sucked inexorably further and further down, totally unable to break free until the sand begins to cover his mouth and his nose. The man is doomed. He suffocates and eventually the last glimpse of his hair-covered scalp disappears under the sand.

  The quicksand was alive. The grains transmuted into ghastly tentacles that devoured a human being. A flesh-eating sand hole.

  I was able to avoid treacherous ice floes, and there was not much in the way of sandy beaches by the lakes or the River Ljusnan. But many years later, when I was wandering around in the sand dunes at Skagen, or later still on African beaches, the memory of that quicksand cropped up inside my head.

  When I was told I had cancer, that same feeling of terror burst out inside me again.

  What I felt was precisely that fear of quicksand. I fought against being sucked down and swallowed up by it. By the totally paralysing realisation that I had been stricken by a serious, incurable disease. It took me ten days and nights, with very few hours of sleep, to keep myself afloat and not be incapacitated by the fear that threatened to overcome all my powers of resistance.

  I can’t remember being afflicted by desperation so great that I burst into tears. Nor that I screamed out loud in despair. It was a silent battle to overcome the quicksand.

  And I wasn’t sucked down totally. In the end I was able to crawl back out of the sand and begin to come to terms with what had happened. I no longer thought in terms of lying down and waiting for death to come. I would accept the treatment that was now available today. Even if I would never be completely cured, there was a possibility that I could live for quite a long while yet.

  Being stricken by cancer is an extreme catastrophe. It is only after some time that you know if you are going to be able to handle it, to resist it. I am still not clear about what I thought and experienced during those ten days after I had received that catastrophic diagnosis. Perhaps I never shall be? Those ten days at the beginning of 2014, after Twelfth Night, are shadowy, as dark as the Swedish midwinter. I was occasionally subjected to attacks of the shivers – reminiscent of the occasions when I was stricken with malaria. I spent most of the time lying in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin.

  The only thing I am quite clear about is being convinced that time had stood still. As if in a concentrated and condensed universe, everything had become a point in which there was no past or future: nothing but now. I was a human being clinging fast to the edge of a patch of death-bringing quicksand.

  When I had finally conquered the urge to give up, to allow myself to be swallowed up into the abyss, I read some books about what quicksand actually is. And I discovered that the story of sand that can suck down and swallow up a human being is in fact a myth. All the stories describing it are inventions. Among other authorities, a university in Holland has conducted practical experiments to prove the point.

  Nevertheless, the comparison with quicksand is still the one I acknowledge today. That is what the ten days that completely changed the circumstances of my life were like.

  5

  The future is hidden underground

  The first time I heard the word ‘Onkalo’ was in the autumn of 2012. At that time, of course, I had no idea that I would be diagnosed with cancer within a couple of years.

  ‘Onkalo’ is Finnish and means cavity or cavern. The word can also be used about something magically mysterious, as in ‘the troll lives in the caverns of the mountains’.

  By sheer coincidence, while travelling on a train from Gothenburg to Stockholm I found myself reading a newspaper article about work to dig tunnels and very deep caves in the Finnish mountains, in which nuclear waste would be stored more or less for ever – at the very least for 100,000 years. Even if the radioactive waste is at its most dangerous – most lethal – during the first thousand years, there must be a guarantee that it will be stored safely for 3,000 generations to come.

  I have lived with atomic power for the whole of my life. Even from my childhood I have vague memories of protests and the fear of atomic weapons, and of a devastating war between the Soviet Union and the USA which were two wild animals, only just kept apart and only occasionally at peace with each other. Then came nuclear power, the accident at Three Mile Island, followed by Chernobyl and, most recently, by Fukushima. I am convinced that there is already a clock ticking down to the next nuclear disaster. I question the validity of nuclear power. Every accident, or report that a catastrophe has only narrowly been avoided, has made me more negatively disposed. Naturally I have been aware of how slowly the radioactivity breaks down, and how dangerous the waste is that we shall be forced to live with for thousands of years. But it was only on that autumn day two years ago that it actually dawned on me what the real significance of it all was.

  The newspaper article was tucked away on an inside page. Other news – about the love life of a rock star, how to avoid paying tax without breaking the law or how to lose X kilos within a fortnight – seemed to be much more important.

  I have no difficulty in understanding that, of course. Life is lived in the here and now. People are seldom able to extend their curiosity beyond the next few days, or months, or years. Or perhaps it would be truer to say they focus only on the next lottery draw, or some other game that they hope to win, in order to wave goodbye to all their obligations and emigrate to some paradise in the Caribbean or Asia.

  Nowadays people in our part of the world no longer believe in God. They believe in scratch cards and other games of chance. There is no end to all the scratching and gambling. If you have the combined skill and good luck to win a large sum of money, you have killed the goose that lays the golden egg. You don’t need to work any more, you don’t need to worry about anything: you can treat society with arrogant contempt.

  It seems to me typical that the kind of financial rewards available for winning these days demonstrates this attitude very clearly. In some games, you can win a fixed monthly wage – already taxed, of course – for twenty-five years, or even longer.

  Nevertheless, tucked away in that newspaper was an article about a hiding place in the Finnish mountains called Onkalo where nuclear waste will be stored for vast lengths of time.

  A few days after that train journey I wrote to Onkalo and asked for permissi
on to visit them. I received a swift response saying that I would not be welcome. The letter informed me that they did not want their premises to be used as the location for a thriller. I sent an angry reply saying that such a project had never occurred to me. If I had an opinion about what they were doing, it was a philosophical one. How is it possible to store potentially lethal waste for 100,000 years, bearing in mind that the oldest buildings raised by humans that are still standing are 5,000 to 6,000 years old? How is it possible to guarantee something that nobody living today will be able to check?

  I received another reply saying that they had decided not to accept visitors because they could not guarantee people’s safety in the caves and tunnels. Needless to say, I found this frightening, but amusing at the same time – how could they not guarantee the safety of a single visitor and yet maintain that the waste would still be there in the incomprehensibly distant future, long after I and the director who replied to my letter had died and rotted away in our graves?

  It was clear that I would never be able to visit Onkalo. But similar work was taking place in Sweden. Just outside the town of Oskarshamn.

  I had visited that town several times when I was eighteen. That was long before any nuclear power stations at all had been built in Sweden, and long before the question of taking care of the waste had become a problem for the government and Swedish citizens.

  I wrote to the nuclear power station in Oskarshamn, and was told that I would be welcome to visit them. A few months later I did so.

  Now, when I am living with my cancer, I think I have acquired new and unexpected perspectives on the way in which we handle nuclear waste.

  6

  The bubble in the glass