Quicksand

by Henning Mankell

  It started with the arrival of a battered and rickety lorry, often with a broken exhaust pipe, carrying men with long brushes and buckets of thick white paste who proceeded to display colourful posters. They were always in a hurry, and were gone as quickly as they had arrived, leaving the sticky white paste splattered around.

  A few days later the cavalcade of wagons would come rolling in. Only the biggest circuses arrived by train and the place where I grew up was too small. We had to make do with the more modest ones that comprised caravans, lorries and other wagons pulled by tractors emitting clouds of smoke.

  One of those circuses was called Scala; there were others whose names I have forgotten. Their performances were often very similar, apparently produced from the same mould.

  If one was lucky and able to attend a performance, it was a very special occasion. All normality disappeared. High up under the roof of the tent acrobats would hover in an apparently weightless state; I can still recall their shouts as they jumped into the waiting hands of their colleagues.

  Down below in the ring other artists would juggle with a seemingly endless series of balls or clubs, or with each other. The clowns were the closest to normal human beings in the programme: they would stumble and trip, squirt water all over each other – but all their awkwardness and stupidity made them similar to us sitting all around the ring in the stands. Although none of those people could ever be as funny as Charlie Chaplin.

  Dogs would perch on horses’ backs, sea lions would shuffle around, and the ringmaster would invite first silence, then applause. He was in complete control of his little band of performers, and prompted the audience to follow the slightest gesture of his raised whip and white-gloved hand. He was a frightening person, the only one I was put off by in the whole ensemble. While all the others transformed dull reality into an exciting paradise, he was the link with reality. He was the strict teacher, or the local drunk who would sometimes stagger along the street and frighten children who came too close to him.

  I don’t know if there are still circuses travelling round to small remote places every spring or summer and arousing the locals from their everyday mood of unexciting normality. If not, it is proof that there is still a trace of poverty despite all the modern welfare and buzzing, constantly surprising technological developments. Even if we can see the best of the best of circus arts on the television or via the Internet, that cannot be more than a pale imitation of the reality. A circus demands that spectators are present. We need to be in the same location as the acrobats and the jugglers. We must be a part of the same community, call a halt to time and be united in what I call, for want of anything better, a state of elevated happiness.

  The great adventure is actually seeing that what these artists do is possible. The rubber man really does have a skeleton despite the fact that he can tie his body into knots. The woman really can keep all those plates spinning round on those slender sticks without any of them falling down into the sawdust.

  A circus is simply a demonstration of human capability that has been achieved and maintained thanks to strict discipline and training.

  Every day during the summer half of the Swedish year, thousands of tonnes of sawdust were tipped into the circus ring. The Big Top was erected, poles fixed and secured, and canvas put in place.

  And that still happens in some places.

  The art of the circus is constantly developing. Something new came along unexpectedly twenty or thirty years ago. It was even called ‘The New Circus’. The company responsible was called – and still is – Cirque du Soleil, and constantly tours the world with different troupes. The basic features are the same as they always were: acrobats, jugglers, clowns. But what was ‘new’ was that they told a story. They didn’t just present a series of individual acts after which the artists would all come into the ring together and share the applause. In the New Circus there is a continuous love story or something similar – it can be interpreted as a saga presented not in words, but in actions.

  But circus artists are actors. They entrance us by means of the same ability as actors on a theatre stage; I sometimes think the only thing that distinguishes them is the sawdust.

  Whenever I see a really good circus I immediately want to take part. Needless to say, I couldn’t start flying around beneath the Big Top, or do dramatic things with a dozen clubs; simply walking in and out of the ring carrying the props the artists need would be good enough for me.

  The same applies to theatre performances. When I sit in a theatre watching a play that doesn’t inspire me, I want to leave as quickly as possible. But if the performance is good I am overcome by the same irresistible lust that grips me at the circus: I want to get up on stage and sit at the same table as the actors are seated around as they eat a scrumptious dinner.

  In a very short time the New Circus performances have developed the art in astonishing ways. They usually avoid sentimentality and create emotionally effective stories that take place before our very eyes. The creativity that these circus artists – who are often very young – display arouses my admiration, but it also makes me even more convinced than before that there is no limit to the human ability to create. The step from the artist who once sat down and created the Lion Man out of a piece of ivory tusk to the flying acrobats under the roof of the circus tent is perhaps not all that great after all.

  Dolphins fly over the waves in the palace at Knossos. Acrobats hang weightless under the roof of a Scala circus tent visiting a little village in the north of Sweden.

  Those of us sitting in the audience see what is happening. But we also take part. At the same time.

  53

  The war invalid in Budapest

  One day in the early spring of 1972 Eyvind and I met at the Hovedbangården railway station in Copenhagen. We were colleagues – theatre directors who also wrote plays. We were going to take the train to Milan where we had been promised we could attend the theatre La Comune, run by Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame, and watch them in action. We slept our way through West Germany and left the train in the evening at Milan’s large central station. That first night we shared a cheap hotel room, and then began looking for a suitable flat. We didn’t have much money. We were offered a garage in a building due for demolition: no beds but the guaranteed presence of rats. We declined, and carried on looking.

  That same day we met Dario Fo, who had completely forgotten that we were coming. The theatre seemed to be just as disorganised as his memory. Before entering one needed to endure an elaborate security check. Dario Fo and Franca Rame were under constant threat of being murdered, and they were busy rehearsing a play that was later entitled Accidental Death of an Anarchist.

  In the evening Eyvind and I drank coffee at an outdoor cafe. We agreed that we really did need to find a cheap place to stay, otherwise our intention of spending some time in Milan would not be financially feasible. Someone came to our table and tried to sell us a watch, but we said no thank you. it’s possible that one of us might have smiled, I don’t remember; but in any case some of the watch salesman’s friends appeared out of the shadows – young men in their twenties who accused us of not taking their friend seriously. Eyvind had his nose knocked askew, and I was kicked in the genitals, but the only consequence was a few days of pain.

  After a sleepless night Eyvind flew home, and had his nose adjusted at the hospital in Malmö. I stayed in Milan and wondered what to do next. Perhaps Dario Fo wondered what on earth had happened to those two eager young Swedes who had said they were going to stay around for a month.

  In fact, I left Milan and took the train to Vienna, and then to Budapest. I had never been to Hungary before, and was also a bit embarrassed at the thought of returning to Sweden so soon. Would it be fun to stay in Budapest for a while?

  In the station I saw a man who must have been a war invalid. He was drunk, and was begging. A Hungarian Railways employee appeared and kicked the beggar to the ground. His crutches were sent flying and the coins in his cap
were scattered all over the dirty stone floor. While the invalid crawled around on the floor the railway employee simply adjusted his cap and walked away.

  It had all happened so quickly that it seemed unreal. People were rushing back and forth, and the echoing station hall was filled with deafening announcements from a loudspeaker, which to my ears sounded like an outburst of furious anger. But nobody helped the invalid crawling around and scrabbling for his crutches as he collected the scattered coins he had begged.

  It was a devastating experience. The brutality seemed to be self-evident, and was accepted by all those who happened to witness it. Not even the man who had lost his crutches protested. He acted as if what had happened to him was perfectly normal.

  Nobody helped him. Not even me. It was a horrifying incident. When the official who had kicked him returned I was afraid that it would all happen again, but the invalid hopped out of the station building on his crutches. So his crime had been begging inside the station. The official couldn’t care less about whatever happened outside the premises.

  I spent my days in Budapest in exactly the same way as I did in my youth in other places I visited without having planned anything in advance. I wandered around, ate and drank in cheap cafes, went for boat rides along the river, called in at bookshops, and tried to read the posters outside any theatres I passed. But most of my time was probably spent thinking about the journey home that lay ahead of me.

  One evening I splashed out on a phone call to my father in Stockholm, to tell him where I was. I gave him the hotel’s telephone number in case anybody asked for me. It was a very short conversation – and the last time we ever spoke to each other, although of course neither of us knew that at the time.

  He died that same night. When people started looking for me they didn’t know that my telephone number was scribbled down on a scrap of paper in his trouser pocket.

  But I have never forgotten that invalid, and how nobody – including me – reacted. It was as if it was some kind of act in which everybody knew their role, even the man with the crutches, and kept it up until he had left the station building.

  Until then I had never seen such crude and undisguised brutality in the real world. Experiencing it in the cinema or on the television is quite different; there role-playing is shifted into another dimension in which you kill people for large payments.

  Many years later I experienced a different sort of brutality, which was nevertheless a sort of link with the treatment of the invalid in Budapest central station. It happened in Maputo, at the end of the 1990s. I still find it hard to recount the story.

  I was living in a three-storey house in the centre of town. It had been badly built in the early 1970s, when the national liberation movement Frelimo was approaching from the north. A few months later the military leaders in Portugal would revolt and the fascist dictatorship crumble, which in turn accelerated the defeat of Portugal in its African colonies. Building continued, but there wasn’t even enough time to allow the cement to set properly. Shortly after I moved in all the walls were dripping with water.

  In the same street lived a Portuguese couple who had been in Mozambique for many years. They had servants, including a black girl aged about twenty. She started work every morning at about six o’clock by serving breakfast – having left home in a distant slum at about half past three to walk to her workplace. She had a long working day ahead of her before returning home for a few hours’ sleep. There were minibuses covering part of the distance, but she was so badly paid that she couldn’t afford the fare.

  One day she announced that she was pregnant. The lady of the house wanted to sack her on the spot, but her husband pointed out that she was clean and made decent coffee. She was allowed to stay on.

  The child was duly born. The girl stayed at home for about a week after the birth, but then her long working day began once more. And she carried the baby with her on her back. But the lady of the house forbade her to take the baby inside; it had to lie in the outside porch. When it needed breastfeeding, the girl had to go outside to do it.

  I heard about it from furious neighbours who insisted that this racist behaviour, this disgraceful treatment of the young mother, must be stopped. Hadn’t Mozambique been an independent country now for nearly twenty-five years? How could this ancient colonial brutality be allowed to continue?

  We joined together to make a formal protest, wrote a letter and threatened to involve the police if the young woman wasn’t allowed to take her child into the house. The result was that she was sacked without further ado. As we knew that was a risk we were taking, we had already arranged another job for her.

  Admittedly I have experienced even worse things since then, not least child soldiers killing their parents. Nevertheless, it is the memory of the incident in Budapest and the servant girl in Maputo that is written over the gate leading into my private archive of experiences from hell.

  54

  A visit when something both begins and ends

  Lökskär is an island at the outermost edge of the Gryt archipelago in Östergötland in eastern Sweden, just south of Stockholm. I generally try to visit there once a year, most often in the autumn. It is nearly always impossible to moor there; I have to jump ashore from Tommy Ljung’s boat and try hard not to slip and injure myself. He picks me up again a few hours later.

  It is a remote island exactly where Sweden begins or ends, depending on which direction you are coming from. It is silent, dumb. The rocks cannot speak. The island broods over its history.

  It is forbidden to land on Lökskär during the bird-nesting season. It is also so far away from the mainland that the birds are not disturbed by the mink that cause havoc on neighbouring islands.

  Once upon a time people used to live in the silence and loneliness of Lökskär. How they could bear to live in those conditions is beyond me. If a storm blew up they would have to row out in their primitive boats to retrieve their nets and cages, and they often drowned. Sometimes their bodies would be found entangled in a net, as if death wished to exhibit its booty. Sometimes they simply vanished and were never seen again.

  They arrived there during the eighteenth century – or at least that is when we first find their details recorded in the church registers: ‘Inhabitants of Lökskär’. As late as the 1850s the occasional inhabitant is listed, but after that the island was deserted again. The temporary visitors vanished just as quietly as they had arrived. Perhaps the island raised a stony hand and waved them goodbye?

  For me, visiting Lökskär is an annual pilgrimage. I walk over the island as freezing-cold stormy winds blow, and think about the years that have passed and those that are yet to come. Among those bare rocks are no escape routes, no excuses. It is not possible to lie to yourself there. The rocks polish all truths and turn them into knife edges that cannot be obscured.

  I sometimes think I can discern the shadows of the people who once lived there. They are still there, keeping watch as I pass by. Their faces are ingrained in the grey cliff walls, which sometimes have patches of rusty brown here and there.

  One occasionally finds remains of the huts in which the poverty-stricken fishermen used to live. All the wood has rotted away, of course, but it is still possible to come across corner stones of the huts in slight hollows on the north-west side of the island, protected on all sides from the wind. The huts are hardly any bigger than a boathouse or even a playhouse. But that is where they lived, totally dependent on what the sea had to offer. They can’t have kept more than a single cow, for there was hardly any grass and the heather was red and impossible to eat.

  I often stand and observe the stones that were once laid there by immigrants who had been forced out onto this outermost island as those islands closer to the mainland became overcrowded. If I stand there for long I sometimes get the feeling that the stones are slowly moving back to the place from which they were first taken.

  Dense thickets of thorn bushes grow all the way down to the narrow inlet where they ke
pt their boats, protected from the wind.

  There are no other traces of their life there. Nothing is scratched into the rock walls, there are no iron hooks or mooring rings in the cliff walls facing the deepest part of the inlet. Local history enthusiasts with metal detectors might have been here, but as far as I know they have found nothing at all.

  There are not even any graves of the one-time inhabitants. When the ice was thick enough to walk on or the water calm enough for rowing or sailing, dead bodies were taken to the church in Gryt and buried there. But there are no gravestones for Lökskär inhabitants in the churchyard there.

  You can sometimes find records of these people in the church registers, however. On day in 1837 a little boy scalded himself by knocking over a cauldron of boiling water. ‘He died very quickly,’ wrote the priest in sprawling handwriting. A few lines further down it states that Emma Johannesdotter has drowned. Life out on the remote island was always difficult.

  Nevertheless, even on this isolated and inhospitable island there must at times have been feelings of great joy. Nights when one could make love and sleep soundly. I sometimes imagine I can see a woman lying in a rocky hollow allowing the sun to shine on her bare arms.

  Brief moments of peace. Hopes that perhaps one day life will get better. But that can only happen if they can leave Lökskär and move to a more hospitable island. Or to another country. To another world. But which world would that be?

  Seldom if ever did the coastal population of Sweden leave home and head for America during the big surge of emigration during the nineteenth century. Compared with the people of Småland, they always had their fish even during the worst years of starvation.

  Once when I was rowing around the island on a fine, clear day in early autumn I noticed a drift net that had somehow come loose and was now slowly floating out to sea. The sunlight penetrated deep down into the water, and I could see several dead fish and a sea duck trapped inside the net.