Quicksand

by Henning Mankell

But there are photographs that I know I shall never forget. Black-and-white images that never fade and disappear.

  Remembering and never forgetting are not really the same thing.

  The first picture is black and white, somewhat grainy, taken in either 1919 or 1920. The photographer is unknown. The copy I have seen gives a vague, almost blurred impression – as if the photographer recoiled at the sight of his subject.

  It is an outdoor shot: in the background is what seems to be a garden wall or some trees. The subject matter is a number of men, ex-soldiers. They are French. They have chosen to live alone because of the injuries they suffered during the First World War. Their faces are badly deformed as a result of shrapnel or direct hits from bullets, and some of them have other injuries as well – a missing leg, or arm, or hand.

  You don’t need to look at the photograph for long in order to realise that people meeting these men in the street would have felt obliged to turn aside out of nausea and disgust at the sight of the injuries. Their faces are not merely deformed: it is as if the brutal insanity of war is ingrained in them. Some have no jaw, others no nose or mouth, no ears or eyes, and parts of foreheads are missing.

  But these men of varying age are posing in front of a camera. They are all neatly dressed, serious. They are looking directly at the camera. None of them seems to be trying to conceal his injuries.

  I sometimes wonder why the picture was taken. Who paid the photographer? The men themselves, or somebody else? It is most certainly not a picture for sending home as a Christmas greeting. Was it a serious attempt to demonstrate the devastation that war imposed on the soldiers who fought in it without actually dying in the trenches or during the pointless attacks to regain a hundred metres of a battered field?

  Despite the distorted faces one can still make out what were once men with lively personalities, who now live in isolation in a large stone-built villa behind a high wall. I don’t know what they did there. I have no idea how some of them could manage to eat despite their shot-away jaws and mouths. Nevertheless, the important message given by this photograph is that these people are still alive.

  The picture says: Here we are. Despite everything. Despite everything we are still alive. Despite everything we are prepared to show ourselves well dressed and serious in front of a camera that captures the moment and spreads it all over the world.

  I believe there is an invisible link between the factory girls who painted their faces and the soldiers facing the camera. Although there is no direct connection apart from their immense suffering.

  And there is also something that connects these people with the painting in Släp Church in which Gustaf Hjortberg’s dead children look away from the artist.

  The second picture I shall never forget is in fact a whole series of photographs taken within a few minutes of each other. A military patrol somewhere in Yugoslavia during the Second World War has captured partisans who are suspected of having ambushed German troops. Now the partisans are to be executed without a proper trial. Most of them are very young, about the same age as the German soldiers.

  They are assembled in a field. As drying racks covered in hay have been set up in the background we can be confident that the time is summer or early autumn, and it is clearly hot. The German soldiers are wearing thick uniforms, with their tunics buttoned up to their necks as discipline demands, while the men waiting to die are wearing only trousers and thin unbuttoned shirts.

  The German soldiers have a photographer with them. It is not clear in this case who the photographer is: a German war reporter or a Yugoslav collaborator.

  Those who are about to be shot are lined up in front of some of the hay racks, and the soldiers prepare their weapons.

  Then something remarkable happens. One of the German soldiers throws down his gun, tears open his uniform tunic and joins the men waiting to be shot. One cannot tell from the pictures if he is calm or agitated; he has simply left the firing squad and changed sides – instead of doing the shooting he has chosen to be shot.

  There is nothing in the photographs to suggest any animated dialogue between the soldiers and their comrade who has thrown down his rifle. No indication that the soldiers are trying to persuade him to come back, by means of arguments or orders or a physical attempt to separate him from the Yugoslavian partisans.

  That is really the most disturbing thing about the series of pictures. Everything seems to be proceeding as planned, the soldiers continue with what they have started, and military discipline is upheld.

  In the last of the photographs the partisans are lying dead, together with the German soldier. As he has thrown away his tunic and his steel helmet he is no longer distinguishable from the others.

  In this last picture the soldiers have left. The photographer must have stayed on for a few minutes. There is no sign of the German soldiers having taken care of their dead comrade. As soon as he changed sides, he ceased to exist. He was simply one of those to be executed.

  Naturally, these pictures raise many questions and create many emotions. What made the German soldier sacrifice his own life, despite the fact that doing so was of no help to those who died around him? What was it that in the end made the situation so unbearable for him that he chose not to live any longer? Did he see himself reflected so strongly in the partisans that he knew the rest of his life would be impossible if he took part in the summary executions?

  We cannot know. Just as we cannot know what his comrades thought. It must have come as a complete surprise to them, but without questioning the order they were given they aimed their guns at the man with whom they had just smoked a cigarette.

  Two pictures that feature war and the victims of war. Both of them are also about courage. About making the most important and difficult decision an individual can possibly make. Choosing to die rather than to live. To offer your life for completely unknown people, who have also committed hostile actions against your comrades.

  Can I say that I understand the German soldier?

  In order to answer that question I must know how I would have reacted in the same situation.

  I can’t do that. All I can do is to keep looking at the pictures and never give up my attempt to understand.

  31

  The way out

  Just as everything in my life has changed, every new morning brings with it a fresh challenge. I have to think about something other than my illness. Every morning I spend a certain amount of time asking myself how I feel, if I have any new side effects, or if it looks like being a good day. But if I am unable to thrust aside such thoughts with a real ice-hockey tackle of an effort, the battle is lost before it has even begun. Then there is a risk that resignation, suffering and fear will gain the upper hand. What course is open to me in that case? To lie down and turn my face to the wall?

  When I managed to drag myself up out of the quicksand about three weeks after the cancer diagnosis and found myself in a position where I was able to start fighting, the most effective way of doing so was obvious: books. At difficult times whenever I have needed to give myself relief or consolation, or perhaps a breathing space, my instinct has been to pick up a book and immerse myself in its text. I have turned to books when love affairs have come to an end. When a theatre production went wrong, or I failed to meet a deadline, my books have always been there. As a sort of liniment. But even more as a means of diverting my thoughts in a different direction, in order to gather strength.

  And that was the case now as well. On my desk are all the books I haven’t yet read – but on this occasion something happened that was new for me. I found myself unable to devote myself to new, unread books, even if they were by authors I always used to approach with great interest. I was unable to deal with the new, the unknown. Reading a new book is to journey into the text as if one were on an expedition, but I found that I was going round in circles. I read a page, but was unable properly to grasp what it said. The words were like shut and bolted doors, and I didn’t have a key.


  For a brief moment that made me afraid. Were books beginning to let me down, just when I needed them more than at any other time in my life so far?

  But that was not the case. When I picked up a book that I had read many times before, the words opened themselves up again. What I was unable to cope with was the new and the unknown; but what I had read before, perhaps on several occasions, had the same effect as ever. I read and was able to stop thinking about my illness.

  The first book I opened was one of the many versions of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe I have collected over the years. The edition I picked out of the bookcase at random was published by Torsten Hedlunds förlag in Gothenburg in 1892. Professor Karl Warburg has written an introduction, which is a description of the life of Daniel Defoe. Jean Rossander’s translation from English is somewhat ponderous, but quite close in meaning to the original. And the book also contains Walter Paget’s classic illustrations.

  I know of no better novel than Robinson Crusoe. It reveals the secret behind the difference between a good and a bad story.

  Robinson Crusoe is about a shipwrecked sailor who spends many years alone on a desert island with only a few wild goats as company. In the end he makes friends with a native-born refugee who managed to escape being eaten by the cannibals who captured him, and the pair are characterised by all the inherent features of colonialism.

  But in fact Robinson is never alone. The reader is always with him, invisible but by his side. That is what makes the story so magical. If the reader keeps his distance and only peers into the text, the intimate relationship between the reader and the story that all novels aim to create never occurs. But in Robinson Crusoe the reader is invited to take part. He lies there in the sand, just as much a castaway as Robinson.

  In my second-year class at primary school in Sveg, Miss Manda Olsson handed out small grey notebooks. We were to invent stories that we should then write down in the book. After a week, we were expected to hand in a written story – long or short, it didn’t matter. I went home, locked myself in the lavatory and wrote a version of Robinson Crusoe on one page. I handed the book in proudly the very next day. By then I had filled it with stories and adventures to the very last page. Miss Olsson said afterwards that she couldn’t make out anything of what I had written because it had all been done so quickly and carelessly. I had been in too much of a hurry. But I was given a new notebook, and urged in friendly terms to rewrite everything in a way that could be read and understood.

  Now, in my study, I shifted to one side all the unread books and made a pile of the ones I wanted to reread. I would be threatened by no surprises. I would be wandering around in familiar territory.

  Everything went well until I began my first cycle of chemotherapy. It transpired that one of the side effects was that the mucous membranes of my eyes became irritated, and produced constant tears. If I read too much there was a sort of mist between my eyes and the text. I couldn’t see the words clearly. If I rested for an hour, it went away. But it soon came back again.

  And so I began to alternate reading with looking at images of works of art. Again I chose ones that I was already familiar with. Never more than one picture a day. I began with the artists who have meant – and still mean – most to me: Caravaggio and Daumier. No matter how strange the world they create is, I always feel at home in it. I sometimes think about the fact that although Caravaggio painted such a variety of motifs, he never painted the sea. As for Daumier, a lot of people are familiar with his political caricatures, but not so many know that he was also a painter and sculptor of significance.

  Every picture that means something special to me also has a story to tell, even if they open different doors from the ones opened by written texts.

  I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More Homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others’ stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.

  My third way of thinking about something other than my illness was of course music. If you ask people suffering from severe pain or devastating sorrow what gives them the greatest relief, most of them say music. I started going through my record collection, switching between jazz, classical, and everything from African folk music to electronic music.

  Most of all I listened to Miles Davies and Beethoven. Occasionally also Arvo Pärt and blues from the southern states delta.

  I succeeded in diverting my attention from my illness by never breaking my routine. Books, pictures, music. With these it was possible to counter the almost intolerable pressure to devote all my attention to the disease, the treatment, and constantly looking for signs of new symptoms. That also gave me more strength to cope with the times when I had no alternative but to consider what I was stricken with. I was not simply a person who had been diagnosed with a serious illness: I was also the same person as I had been before, myself and no other. It was possible to live in two worlds at the same time.

  But on certain days not even the stories, pictures and music helped. Days when I barely had the strength to get out of bed as a result of the exhaustion brought about by the effects of the chemotherapy as it attacked the tumours and metastases. Some days I hovered in a weightless state in an empty and cold universe, without meaning and without purpose. At such times I could understand that some seriously ill people can choose to put an end to their own lives.

  I could understand it, but at the same time it was something I couldn’t want for myself, and could never do. I wouldn’t want to subject my nearest and dearest to the agony of always wondering if there was more they could have done, despite everything.

  After about two months, when I had reached the middle of the first basic cycle of chemotherapy, I had the feeling one morning that a new sort of normality had entered my life. Nothing would ever be the same as it had been before I received the diagnosis, but nevertheless it was as if life was now taking on a form that in my darkest moments I would never have thought possible.

  The days were getting lighter. Not a lot, but midwinter was past. One morning, all too early, a blackbird started singing from its perch on the television aerial. It occurred to me that this was something I could record on my gravestone.

  I have heard the blackbird. I have lived.

  But I thought less and less often about death. It was there all the time anyway, without my needing to lure it out from the shadows. Now I read my books, looked at pictures and listened to music – all things that had to do with life.

  One day when I had finished a book I’d read before – Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – I went to look at the pile of unread books I had put to one side almost two months earlier.

  I was unable to pick any of them up. But only a few days later I started reading books from that pile as well.

  Light had been travelling for a long way, but at last it had arrived. Just then, at least.

  32

  Paris in flames, 1348

  One night I am woken by dreams of the gigantic rats I saw when I was living in Paris during the 1960s, especially when I was out late at night walking along the Rue de Vaugirard on the way to my flat in Rue Cadix.

  The rats were as big as fat cats, and galloped into view before disappearing down drainpipes.

  When I think of rats I also think of cats. And as I lie there in the darkness of night I recall how, according to legend, Paris went up in flames during the winter of 1348. Like all such unexpected events, this inferno was immediately interpreted as a sinister omen.

  In the summer of 1348 the Black Death reached Paris. As always when epidemics threatened, Paris was badly placed: overcrowding in the city centre meant that anybody who didn’t leave town would be unable to protect themselves from the plague. But where would the poverty-stricken – who made up the overwhelming majority in the city – be able to flee to? They remained, and they died.

  Needless to say, nobody knew where the plague came from, or how it spread from house to house, from person to person. But as a
lways, there was a search for an explanation and for a scapegoat.

  In this case a rumour soon spread to the effect that the cause of so many human deaths was all the cats in the city.

  It could equally well have been the Jews who were singled out as scapegoats, or Romany gypsies, or anybody else. But on this occasion it was the cats that were found guilty. It was a well-known historical assumption that cats and witches harboured dark secrets.

  And so there was a furious attack on all the cats in the city. Hardly any escaped their fate of being killed and thrown into the Seine.

  That meant that the real culprits, the rats, no longer had to fear their natural enemies. Their numbers exploded, and they and the flease they carried spread the infection far and wide. Before long eight hundred people were dying in Paris every day. The cemeteries were full. There were no people left to bury the dead. They remained in houses and in the streets, their bodies rotting away. Priests abandoned the dying when they realised that they themselves were infected and had to prepare for their own deaths.

  Anybody who could fled Paris: rich businessmen, aristocrats and the top layer of clerics. Every day their carriages would hurry away from the stench and the misery. Many of them died even so, but just as many survived because they had the resources and the ability to flee.

  Those who remained and had not yet been infected lived as one always does when death seems inevitable. They turned their last days into orgies. An unknown chronicler described Paris at this time as ‘a city in a state of total collapse when it comes to morality and decency’.

  The plague continued for eight months. When it finally came to an end half the population of Paris had died. The cemeteries were so full that arms and legs were sticking up out of graves. Every night the city’s dogs would find their way there in order to feast on bodies lying under a thin layer of soil.

  For a whole year there was a foul stench of dead bodies hanging over the streets. It was about 1350 before the nobility cautiously began to return to Paris.