Quicksand

by Henning Mankell

  I stayed there until the summer was over. More than six months. After some dubious negotiating I managed to get an unofficial job in a little workshop that cleaned and repaired clarinets and saxophones. I think I could still dismantle a clarinet and then put it back together again. Blindfolded.

  Surviving was always a problem. Göran had no money. We had to help each other out. I spent much of my free time in jazz clubs. Caveau de la Huchette, Le Tabou and other establishments. I ate at the cheapest places I could find.

  But I was in a university. I learnt the most important thing you have to know: how to look after yourself. To stand by your own decisions. I didn’t become an author during my time in Paris, but that wasn’t important. I took the first step towards becoming a human being with self-awareness. The big step forward after that discovery I had made – that I am myself and nobody else – while standing outside the community centre in Sveg.

  Eventually I felt I’d had enough of Paris. Göran and I shook hands. Then I hitchhiked my way back to Sweden. My former classmates had already begun a new school year. I went up to the red-brick school building, but didn’t go inside and had the feeling that I would never regret my decision.

  And I never have. What I remember most vividly from my time in Paris is becoming aware of what it is like to belong to the dregs of society. In my case I was working in the black economy, wearing worn-out clothes, frequently hungry. People have no difficulty in identifying poverty – probably because they are so scared of becoming poverty-stricken themselves.

  But of course I was only on a brief visit to that world. I could have given up and travelled back to Sweden, returned to grammar school and studied Latin until it was time for my school-leaving examinations.

  But I didn’t. Even a short-lived visit to the bottom level of society means that one is faced with one of the most important decisions one has to make in life: what type of society do you want to help to create?

  That is the question that has come to dominate my whole life.

  26

  The hippos

  Those six months in Paris taught me that one has to make choices. Every day I had to decide if I was going to smoke or treat myself to a meal slightly more filling than the one I’d had the previous day. I had to decide which museums to visit, or whether I was simply going to wander around, observing people and considering what I was going to write about – not right away but at some time in the future.

  Making decisions meant taking life seriously. Paris, where people were still affected by the recently ended colonial war in Algeria, taught me that. It was also shortly before the protests against the Vietnam War reached their maximum intensity. I myself was the teacher, but so were all the other people hurrying past me along the pavements or rushing down to the metro stations.

  Even if, later in my life, I have occasionally made wrong choices, I still believe that not making any choices at all is a grave mistake. I am often intrigued by people who just drift along with the mainstream, never questioning aspects of their environment or trying to change things. People are different, and of course that in itself leads to different views about society. But choices that go deeper than that and are about what you intend to do with your life are the most important decisions you will ever have to make – and you must make them.

  There is a little grocer’s shop in Antibes I generally go to when I am staying in the town. A man sits behind the counter from seven o’clock in the morning until the shop closes twelve hours later. He has a little television set that he watches. I have never entered his shop when he hasn’t been staring at the flickering screen. He seems to watch absolutely everything. More or less reluctantly he interrupts his viewing to accept payment for goods sold. Before I leave the shop he has always returned to his telly.

  He is very friendly. He seems contented enough. But his life horrifies me. Has he really chosen to stare at that television screen and made it the meaning of his life?

  —

  For most people life comprises a series of circumstances that affect us and our ability to make conscious decisions as to how to deal with those situations.

  One day I wandered round a street corner and happened to bump into the woman I eventually married. I couldn’t know that she would be walking just there at that particular time; but I – or we – were then able to choose to react positively to that chance encounter, and we got married.

  The most difficult decisions I have ever had to make in my life concerned abortion. On two different occasions I put pressure on a woman to have an abortion. Each time it was her choice, her decision, that is clear. But looking back, I feel that the pressure I put on these two women was too great. In several ways I made it into my decision, despite the fact that it should always be the woman who decides what to do with her own body.

  I also feel that I have made choices and decisions that have required a certain degree of both courage and unselfishness. They have often also required me to display financial generosity that I couldn’t afford in my earlier days.

  The choices a human being has to make also involve deciding where one stands in an unjust society: we are all political beings, whether we like it or not. We live in a fundamentally political society, where we have a sort of contract with everybody else who lives alongside us. But it is also a contract that affects those who are not yet born.

  On what grounds do we make our decisions? On what basis do we choose what we do or think or find offensive? What do we choose to do, and what do we refuse to go along with?

  Having the possibility to make decisions about what to do with one’s life is a great privilege. As far as most people on this planet are concerned, life is simply about survival.

  That has always been the case for humans. To eat or be eaten, to be able to defend oneself against predators, enemies and illnesses. To make sure that our offspring survive and are as well equipped as possible to cope with what is in store for them. Through the ages only very few people have been able to devote themselves to anything apart from simply surviving. Admittedly never so many as today – but even so, at least half of mankind now live with no ability to make choices.

  During all the years I have spent in Africa I have observed this struggle to survive, which never seems to ease off even for a single day. Every evening the worries start all over again.

  A few years ago I visited Jaipur and New Delhi in India. Late one evening I took a train from Jaipur. Along the sides of the tracks was an endless, unbroken line of lights from the people who lived there, only a few centimetres from the rails. I travelled through the masses of ramshackle hovels that represented their existence, as people with empty eyes sat watching the train edging its way slowly and carefully towards New Delhi. I felt like Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as he travelled along a dark and threatening river. There was no water flowing around my railway line, but even so I had the feeling of being transported along the black river to some kind of destruction.

  In the 1980s, just outside Lusaka, the capital of Gambia, I saw women and children sitting by the side of the road and hacking at lumps of stone, reducing them to macadam. It was unbearably hot and the air was thick with powdery stone. Somebody in the party I was with said these women were so tired that they were unable to think any other thoughts apart from the fact that breaking up these stones would provide themselves and their children with money for food. They were too exhausted for anything apart from surviving.

  People living on the outermost edge of society have no choice.

  Lying down on the road and dying is not a valid choice. Starving to death is not an alternative either. Nowadays we have the resources necessary to do away with such absolute poverty and lift all living people above starvation level. And yet we choose not to do so. It is a choice I cannot see as anything but criminal. But there is no court that can take action on a global scale and prosecute the criminals responsible for failing to tackle poverty and starvation with all available means. And that should force all of us
to become involved and accept responsibility.

  Today, so many years after I walked openly around the streets of Paris picking up cigarette butts from the pavements, I can see more clearly than ever what a privilege it is to have the possibility to choose. I have always been on the right side of the borderline, with the time and strength and enough food in my belly, to be able to choose between various alternatives.

  I have often chosen wrongly and had good cause to regret my actions, but have not been able to go back and change the decision. More important, though, is the fact that I have never drifted along with the mainstream without offering some resistance or stating my point of view.

  Actually, that is not quite true.

  Once, nearly thirty years ago, I was forced to drift along with the current. It was in Zambia, on one of the tributaries of the great River Zambezi high up in the north-west part of the country, in the Mwinilunga district. I was in a little plastic boat with an outboard motor. There were four of us crammed into the all-too-unsteady boat. We had travelled upstream, then switched off the engine and drifted back downstream, fishing for tigerfish. At one point there was a fork in the river, and we were supposed to follow the branch leading to the spot where we had tents and a car waiting for us. It was important that we started the engine in time because close by was a regular haunt of hippos. They had recently produced young and were extremely aggressive. Not many people know that despite its apparently slow-moving sleepiness, the hippopotamus is one of the African animals that kill most human beings every year.

  Needless to say, the engine didn’t start when we pulled the cord. At first we regarded it as a bit of a joke, but we were rapidly approaching the place where the hippos’ heads could be made out over the surface of the water. There was no chance of our rowing away from the animals, and if we ended up in among them it would all be over. They would overturn the boat and kill us.

  It was ominously quiet in that boat, although the one person sitting next to the engine was frantically tugging away at the starting cord. There was nothing we could say. We all knew what would happen in a few minutes’ time if we couldn’t start the engine. Jumping into the river and trying to swim to the nearest bank was not a practical solution: the river was full of crocodiles. None of us would reach dry land.

  Thank the Lord the engine started at last, and we managed to escape.

  That evening, at our camp site, it was unusually quiet. The fire crackled away and the dancing flames were reflected in our faces.

  Many years later I spoke about it to one of those who had been present. I asked what he had been thinking as the hippos got closer and closer. He replied immediately – he had already thought about it often enough.

  ‘I was trying to think of an alternative course of action,’ he said. ‘But there wasn’t one. it’s the only time in my life that I gave up. When the engine started I thought for a moment that there must be a God after all. What happened wasn’t something within the range of possibility for human beings.’

  ‘The spark plugs had become damp,’ I said. ‘The person trying to start the engine had flooded them. It had very little to do with religion.’

  My friend said nothing. For him God was a better explanation than a few wet spark plugs.

  That was his choice. Not mine. God or a couple of spark plugs.

  We made different choices.

  27

  A cathedral and a cloud of dust

  Two women I met by accident have given me insight into what can be enormous happiness, and also the opposite, equally incomprehensible sorrow. For me those two things represent life’s extremities. In all probability no person can live life to the full without having experienced extreme sorrow. Nobody wants to be affected by tragedy, but it is an inescapable fact of life.

  In 1972 I visited Vienna. I was on my way to Hungary and Budapest, but at the Hungarian border station my Swedish passport, which was valid but worn and badly looked after, was rejected. I had to wait in a freezing-cold station with a police guard before I was put onto a train to Austria. I never made it to Budapest on that occasion. I wandered around Vienna, unsure what to do as a result of my thwarted journey.

  While walking around without consulting a street map but following my impulses, I suddenly found myself standing outside the majestic Stephansdom cathedral. I went inside and observed the enormous and impressive space. It was the middle of the day, and there were not many people there. The thick stone walls shut out all sound from the outside. The atmosphere was timeless. In that respect all religious buildings are similar, irrespective of what they look like or which religion they are dedicated to.

  I sat down in a pew and contemplated the vast space on all sides. I don’t know of any cathedral that hasn’t made me think about the workmen who built it. They worked for many generations before the final stone was put in place, the last lead-framed stained-glass window eased into position and the meticulously planned sculptures duly carved.

  As I gazed around I noticed a woman sitting alone in a pew, with her head bowed. I was diagonally behind her, but nevertheless had the distinct impression from her hunched back that she was in distress, afflicted by some deep sorrow. She was sitting there motionless, shut up inside herself in this enormous cathedral.

  When we are faced with sorrow and tragedy we often become worryingly curious. We stop if we happen to come upon a road accident that has just taken place. We peer into the damaged car as we crawl past it. If an ambulance races down a street, its lights flashing and siren screaming, lots of other passers-by come to a halt when the vehicle pulls up outside a house and the siren falls silent. The most extremely curious among us wait until the victim is carried out of the house on a stretcher.

  We stop because we want to make absolutely certain that we are not the person lying on the stretcher.

  I stood up and walked along one of the side aisles until I came to the opening in front of the altar. Then I turned round. The lone woman had buried her face in her hands, but even so I could see from her hair and dark forehead that she was of African origin.

  There she sat, surrounded by nobody. Her hands were tightly clasped. I tried to imagine what must have happened. Had she received heartbreaking news? Was it about her or about somebody else? A priest walking down the central aisle gave her a searching look, but didn’t stop. I remained standing in the shadows next to an arched column, and continued observing her. I felt guilty about being curious, but at the same time found it impossible to tear myself away.

  It was not until I had been standing there for a while, five minutes perhaps, that it occurred to me that there was something that I could do, indeed that I ought to do. I hesitated, but then walked over to the woman’s pew and sat down beside her. She looked up immediately, as if I had startled her or intruded into a space she considered to be her own. First in German, then in French and finally in English, I asked if there was anything I could do. She didn’t understand what I said. I had the impression that she spoke some form of Arabic, even if she didn’t look as if she came from North Africa. My presence didn’t make her feel any less alone. On the contrary, she seemed to become even more worried. She suddenly stood up and left. I turned round and watched her hurrying out into the sunshine that glistened brightly when the cathedral door was opened.

  I never saw her again. But although it is now forty years since I entered the Stephansdom and met her, I still have no doubt that she was struggling with devastating sorrow. I don’t know where she came from nor where she went to; I don’t even know if she is still alive: but I still think about her often. Her image is nailed up on one of my inner walls as a sort of Icon of Sorrow. And she reminds me of what everybody ought to be aware of: that sorrow has to dwell inside a person in order for its opposite to become visible. The tale Prins Sorgfri (‘Prince Sorrowless’, a nineteenth-century saga turned into a play for children in 1977) is a story that appeals to all generations. There are no princes, and no ordinary people come to that, who can hide themselves away
from sorrow and think that they have the privilege of never being affected by it.

  And what about overwhelming happiness? That was another woman, another continent, another time – almost exactly twenty years after I had entered Stephansdom cathedral. And she was also African. I met her in Mozambique at an assembly camp for refugees returning home from Zimbabwe and South Africa after the brutal civil war had come to an end at the beginning of the 1990s. Worried people were standing around, with no idea of whether relatives and friends were going to return after many years of silence, whether they would be on the packed platform on the back of one of the lorries that kept appearing in clouds of dust on their way from the border. Children were looking for parents, parents were looking for children, friends for friends, relatives for relatives, villagers for fellow villagers. Whenever a convoy of lorries came to a halt, chaos broke out. People were lifted down with their bundles and plastic bags of belongings. The noise, like that from a swarm of disturbed bees, filled the air.

  I suddenly heard a yell. But it was not an order to begin fighting; the yell was filled with astonishing and overwhelming joy. It sliced through the mass of seething humanity surrounding the lorries, and silence fell. Not a sound was to be heard apart from this repeated yell. I could see that it was coming from a girl aged about eighteen. In the middle of all those people, those who had arrived on the lorries and those who had been waiting in the scorching sunshine, a gap had appeared like the ring in a circus tent. In the middle of the ring were an old man and woman, and the young girl, shouting out in sheer joy, was dancing around the old pair, pulling at her clothes and her hair as she did so.

  It was some time before it dawned on me that it was her parents who had been riding on one of the lorries. I discovered later that she had been separated from them when she was no more than seven or eight years old. She had no idea what had become of them. She had gone to the assembly camps in the vague hope of seeing them, but it was pure chance that they came there – there were lots of assembly camps and nobody knew who was going where. Nobody knew the right place to wait. And many of the missing persons never turned up at all. Many were dead.