Quicksand

by Henning Mankell

  The first archive I can recall seeing was in a basement room in the office attached to the courthouse in Sveg. I wasn’t actually allowed to go there – needless to say, I went even so. There were long rows of shelving containing old legal documents, but more interesting of course were the cardboard boxes containing items of evidence from assault cases, each of them with a handwritten note explaining when and where this object had been lying on the courtroom table. Most of them were knives. But there were also knuckledusters and lead bludgeons. I also seem to recall an axe with a worm-eaten handle. I can still remember very clearly a question I used to ask myself: why keep all these objects when people have already been punished for their crimes? Why should all those knives and the other things still be kept down here?

  Today I know the answer. Archives exist to make sure we don’t forget our history. Not just what happened and how it happened; above all we should be able to see how we reacted to various events.

  One of the world’s oldest archives is the Vatican Archive in Rome. It contains the annals of the Catholic Church stretching over a thousand years back in time. One can take out documents that describe in detail historical events most of us know nothing about. There are trial records of the prosecution of Galilei, and the letters written by Henry VIII to the Pope requesting a divorce from one of his wives. There are minutes of the Inquisition’s interrogation of alleged heretics who were later burnt at the stake. Giordano Bruno was one of them.

  But not everything is about the brutal treatment by the Church of people who maintained that the world was not the centre of the universe. There are also touching letters from Michelangelo, for instance, in which he complains about not having been paid for his work.

  Until the end of the nineteenth century this archive was hermetically sealed to everyone apart from a small number of the most powerful members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Nowadays it is more accessible, although there are still ‘poison cupboards’ whose doors are locked to outsiders. But the Vatican Archive belongs to the whole human race. Even those who are not believers, or adherents of other religions, should be prepared to defend this archive because what is preserved there is basically the history of mankind.

  I can well imagine that the Vatican Archive could play an important role in the way we ensure that future generations will understand that what is inside those copper containers in the underground caverns is dangerous. Perhaps we should gather together all the discussions, all the various suggestions, and produce a sort of comic strip carved into the cave walls explaining how difficult it is for us to imagine how we can pass on a message that remains understandable for 100,000 years. An archive that doesn’t contain any locked poison cupboards might be one step along the way.

  If it is a genuine step, or one that leads us astray, is of course something that we cannot know.

  Just as we cannot really know anything.

  23

  A different archive

  There are also different kinds of archives.

  There was once a man who was confined to Säter mental hospital: he spent most of his life there. I don’t know what type of mental illness he suffered from, but I think he was plagued by powerful hallucinations that affected all his senses.

  He was taken into hospital as early as 1912, and was still there when he died in the 1960s. He devoted his life to an activity that he was probably alone in pursuing.

  There is a small museum at Säter mental hospital illustrating the way mentally ill patients used to be regarded, and what treatment they were given over the years.

  A number of old books are kept inside a wooden chest. If you open any of these, here and there – and especially towards the end – you find that things have been written between the lines in pencil, a microscopic text. If you examine the handwritten text with the aid of a magnifying glass and a lot of patience, you discover that the writer has ‘improved’ what is printed in the book. Perhaps he has made the plot more cheerful, or more gloomy? In any case, he has transformed the books into his own creations.

  Who would not like to do that?

  The philosopher and alchemist Paracelsus left behind many writings on a very wide range of subjects. Among other things he wrote with great seriousness about his lifelong efforts to create gold – which of course has always been the ultimate aim of alchemists.

  His texts have continued to be read for many centuries, and occasionally he has been translated into new languages.

  Sometimes mistakes have been made, however. It is said that a keen alchemist in Paris as recently as around the First World War dug out one of Paracelsus’s books, in which it stated that a certain metal should be kept in glowing embers in an oven for forty days in order to change it into gold – at least, that was what the author had originally written. But a mistake was made in the translation: it said the metal should be kept in the embers for forty years. The alchemist was an old man. He realised that he would have to live to be 120 years old in order to follow the advice of the Master.

  He collected all his notes from a long life devoted to finding a way of creating gold, and left everything to an archive – nobody really knows which one – before disappearing from Paris without trace.

  24

  The courage to be afraid

  At about the same time as I left the quicksand behind me and slowly came to terms with my illness, I received a letter from one of my oldest friends. I had got to know him in 1964, after I left grammar school one January day at the age of sixteen and decided to go to Paris. I had never met him before, but he was a jazz musician in the French capital, and his parents had a little bakery in Borås. I went to their home and got his address.

  Now, fifty years later, I received a letter from Göran. He had read about my illness.

  He had left France many years before, although he occasionally returned to play with his old band. He had married, had children and amassed a unique collection of 78-rpm records. And he still played, with various groups.

  ‘What on earth can you write to somebody who’s got cancer?’ he wondered.

  He was right, of course. What can one say? And what does the sufferer say to himself?

  One of the first things that happened after I had shaken myself out of the quicksand was that I started formulating questions about courage and fear. Is it possible to be courageous without acknowledging one’s fear? I don’t think it is. In this context, fear is much more than the primitive and fundamental dread of dying. The predator sees you, but you don’t see the predator. Death always sees you as fair game: but being afraid in this sense is just as much a matter of being frightened of a pain that cannot be suppressed, or of no longer being able to experience what is going to happen the next day, and the day after that. The fear of dying is a mixture of rational reasons and the opposite: imagination and biological necessity. The foundation of life.

  Fear is natural and based on the simple truth that what distinguishes us humans from other species is that we know we are going to die. The cats I have owned during my life have never been aware of their own death. They haven’t even been aware that they were alive. They have simply been there, day after day – hunting, lying around, miaowing. Acknowledging one’s fear of the unknown is realising what it means to be a person. Our existence is basically a tragedy. Throughout our lives we strive to increase our knowledge, our abilities, our experiences. But the bottom line is that all of that will be lost in oblivion.

  I respect those who believe in a life after this one. But I don’t understand them. It seems to me that religion is no more than an excuse for not accepting the conditions of life. The here and now, nothing more than that. That is also the unique aspect of our life, the wonderful part of being alive.

  In the first book I wrote, back in 1973, is a sentence to the effect that a human being can spit into the sea, and by doing so can conquer all the eternity one needs. I still believe that, over forty years later.

  I left behind the quicksand and began to accumulate courage, w
hich in turn was based on the knowledge that I would never completely rid myself of my fear. But I was forced to be the strongest: I have to control my fear and never allow it to take control over me.

  Nowadays I often think about frightened people I have met during my life. There are a lot of them. People can be afraid of almost anything. I don’t think anybody is without some form of hypochondria, at least at times. Who doesn’t recall one’s teenage years when one was afraid of having been afflicted with STIs, without ever having had any symptoms at all, or the slightest reason for being afraid of having caught it! I have met several people who were afraid of having metre-long worms in their stomach, or afraid of going round a corner in the street in case there was somebody standing there with a knife at the ready despite the fact that it was broad daylight and there were lots of people around. I have met people who were convinced every single moment that their next heartbeat would be their last.

  Personally, I am afraid of the dark. If I sleep alone I always make sure that a lamp will remain lit all night. Whether I am at home or in a hotel. But being afraid of the dark is something I understand. There is a very obvious reason for darkness scaring me.

  It was December 1958. In the summer of that year Sweden had won a silver medal in the final of the football World Cup played at the Råsunda Stadium in Stockholm – they lost to Brazil 5–2. A seventeen-year-old by the name of Pelé had been on show to the whole world for the first time, and the Swedish fullback Sven Axbom had been unable to cope with the Brazilian right-winger, Garrincha.

  But now I am at home in Norrland, and it is winter. When it is really cold the wooden beams inside the house walls twist and creak, as if they are trying to break free. I am asleep. It is two in the morning, but I am not aware of that: I’m asleep, after all. I don’t need to get up at seven to get ready for school as tomorrow is Sunday. But I don’t know about that either. Everything has come to a standstill while I am asleep: time and space simply don’t exist as far as the sleeping child is concerned.

  But something from the outside world forces its way into my slumbers. Something disturbing, worrying. Reluctantly I rise from the depths. Somebody is trying to wake me, but I don’t want to wake up. I want to carry on sleeping. Maybe I turn over, pull the covers over my head. But the voice calling to me doesn’t give up. Deep down there in my sleep I seem to recognise it, but I’m not sure.

  In the end I wake up and open my eyes in the darkness. The curtains are drawn. No light comes in from the street. Everything is pitch black. Then I hear the weak voice again, calling to me. it’s coming towards me out of the darkness. Now I know who it belongs to. it’s my father. He is there in the darkness.

  I’m still too sleepy to be afraid. I don’t detect the danger. I ought to have done so. Why is he waking me up in the middle of the night? And why isn’t the light switched on if he wants to talk to me?

  I sit up in bed and fumble in the darkness for the reading lamp that is fixed to the wall above the head of the bed. I’m still not aware of any danger. I switch the light on and that light changes my life.

  Lying on the floor just inside the doorway is my father. His dark blue pyjamas are covered in blood. His face is very white, his hair soaked in sweat with strands clinging to his face.

  I can’t remember what I thought at that moment. I can’t recall the words that formed inside my head, but I know they had to do with my fear of being abandoned yet again. First my mother had left us when I was very small. Being rejected by your mother is of course practically unbearable for a child. And now, seeing my father lying there on the floor, I had the feeling that he was about to leave me as well. I wouldn’t be allowed to keep him either.

  It wasn’t in fact blood on his pyjamas, but the remains of vomit. He had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, but he survived. Nevertheless, from that night onwards I have always been terrified of what unexpected revelation darkness might have in store for me.

  Of course I don’t mention any of that when I eventually get round to answering Göran’s letter. Instead, I remind him how beautifully he used to play Duke Ellington’s ‘Solitude’.

  Courage and fear are always intertwined. It requires courage to live and courage to die.

  But I have no intention of dying, I write at the end of my letter. Not yet, at least. I have far too much still to do.

  I continue to prepare myself for the chemotherapy that is in store.

  25

  Paris

  What happened when I went to Paris on that occasion?

  My resolve to leave school seemed to come suddenly. But it didn’t really. In my subconscious and my imagination I had long been preparing for a clean break. Not because I was finding school difficult. I just thought it was boring to sit through all those sleep-inducing lessons when I had already made up my mind to become a writer. Learning and reading were things I could do in more effective circumstances than being shut up inside a classroom.

  It was a Saturday afternoon. Because of a timetabling cock-up my class had been landed with a double period of Latin at the very end of the school day. My Latin teacher, Eva Jönsson, was brilliant, however; and she was also a talented pianist to whom one could listen in secret during the evenings when she was practising in one of the music rooms. Normally I had nothing against puzzling my way through Latin translations, but as I sat there listening to the bovine mumbling of one of my classmates trying to translate an extract from De Bello Gallico, it suddenly struck me that my time was up. When the bell rang I gathered together all my books, and without mentioning my decision to anybody I left the classroom never to return. I was not going to change my mind – that was something I had learnt from Hemingway.

  In a way it was a bold decision, and of course also a foolhardy one. What would I do in Paris? I knew hardly any French, had no money and only the address of a jazz musician I didn’t know. The whole idea was preposterous, and thoroughly romantic. The first part of the decision – leaving school – was correct. But the trip to Paris had neither rhyme nor reason. I didn’t even have a passport.

  I spent a few days thinking things over. I travelled by train to Gothenburg without a ticket, struggled against a strong headwind as far as Götaplatsen and then back to the Central Station. Before taking the train back home I would have made my decision: Paris or not. It was do or die.

  The last thing I did before catching the train back home was to visit a shop on Stampgatan and steal a transistor radio.

  That evening I told my father about my decision. He stared at me as if I had gone mad. After I had finished my brief and doubtless rather hesitant explanation as to why I was going to leave school and go to Paris, he sat there in silence. Eventually he asked me to repeat what I had just said. As I recall it now, fifty years later, my second version was even shorter.

  ‘So you think this is going to work, do you? Where are you going to live? What are you going to live on? Nobody has ever heard of an author who is sixteen years old. What are you going to write about? What’s the name of that musician whose address you have?’

  ‘Göran Eriksson.’

  He said no more. But during the night I heard him pacing around in his bedroom. I wondered how anybody would choose to be a parent.

  I got myself a passport, bought a ticket, sold a collection of records and some books, gathered together all my belongings and packed a suitcase. I bought the suitcase with the money I received from a pawnshop for the transistor radio I had stolen in Gothenburg.

  That theft still plays on my conscience.

  I had a girlfriend by the name of Monika. She had blonde hair and a fringe. And beautiful, slightly dangerous eyes. I hadn’t told her much about my plans for the future, but now that I had left school I told her what I intended doing. She thought I was out of my mind, and put an end to our relationship immediately. But later, when I had actually settled down in the French capital, she started writing letters to me and said that we did, in fact, belong together. She planned to come and join me in the summer. Or
at least she hoped to do so. After all, it was rather unusual to have a boyfriend in Paris.

  My birthday is on 3 February. Two days earlier, on 1 February 1965, the train from Copenhagen and Hamburg pulled into Gare du Nord. On the train I had been talking to a Swedish girl who was reading Blaise Pascal. I had no idea who he was. She lent me a book, and I read it without understanding it. I had with me my half-empty suitcase containing a pair of shoes, a few shirts and some underwear. In an inside pocket where I kept my passport I had two hundred French francs, which in those days were roughly equivalent to the same amount in Swedish kronor. Not a lot even then. In addition, which was much worse, I had an agonising toothache that started more or less as the train crossed the Belgian border.

  I sat there motionless until the train came to a halt, and imagined that I was back at my school desk. Then I stood up and left the train. From that moment on I never again thought about going back to school.

  It was cold in Paris. People were freezing, and so was I. I sat in a cafe at the station, ordered a coffee and a cognac, and hoped the toothache would go away. It didn’t.

  Anyway, I had an address in Paris. A name. Göran Eriksson, a Swedish jazz musician I had never met. His house was about as far away from Gare du Nord as you could get, down by the end of the longest street in Paris, Rue de Vaugirard, just before the Porte de Versailles. The taxi driver eyed me up and down sceptically, and demanded part payment in advance. He got it. When I came to the house and la concierge reluctantly let me in, Göran opened a door with a clarinet in his hand. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he offered me a mattress. That night I slept off the toothache. When I woke up the next morning it dawned on me that I had in fact arrived in Paris.