Quicksand

by Henning Mankell

  It struck me that this was what I imagined freedom was like. Freedom. Always fleeing from something. From whatever or whoever tries to restrict it.

  I can’t say for sure who was the last person to leave Lökskär, but those who know these things say it was an old woman who gave the island back to itself. She was the last of several generations who had experienced and survived endless hard work in order to make a living.

  But there is nothing left of all their heroic efforts. As I walk around the island on this freezing-cold autumn day it seems to me that everything must look exactly as it did 150 years ago. The stones, the low trees, the heather and the constant sighing of the sea. Seabirds hover motionless in the upwinds, hoping that I might throw them some food.

  When I reach the highest point of the island I imagine that I have come to the top of a church tower. If I look westwards I can see small islands and rocks that gradually seem to form an unbroken line of land. In all other directions there is nothing to be seen but the sea.

  It is difficult to imagine that everything I can see will eventually disappear when the next ice age arrives. What is bluish-grey today will become white, or beige, depending on whether or not the ice is dirty. The sighing of the sea will be replaced by the rumbling of the ice as it twists and turns before settling down. Where I am now standing, on the highest point of the island, the ice will be several kilometres thick. Lökskär will never reappear after the ice melts.

  Sea or no sea? Land or islands? Deep ocean or shallow fresh-water lagoon? it’s not possible to say. The exact movement of the ice cannot be foreseen.

  But if there are people there, the maps will have to be redrawn.

  At the very edge of a precipice on the eastern side of the island is a rock formation that has taken on the shape of a chair with a high back. I usually sit there for a while and curl up to protect myself from the wind that is always so cold.

  On this occasion I suddenly notice in the distance a sailing boat heading for some unknown harbour – one of the last autumn sailors escaping from the approaching winter.

  Even this island will soon be closed down – a museum of the past settling down to rest for the winter.

  55

  The woman with the sack of cement

  I don’t know how much of my life I have devoted to relationships with women. In my particular case the beginning of such relationships was not especially uplifting. I didn’t get to know my mother until I was about fifteen years old. She had done what men often do, and deserted her family. That was most unusual in the 1950s. Fathers running off and staying away was old hat – we still live in a world where lots of fathers are non-existent, never-present in the families they helped to create. But not having a mother was something very suspicious in the little town where I grew up. Needless to say, I was aware of the oddity of my situation. My elderly paternal grandmother, who rarely spoke and spent most of her time darning socks, created some sort of balance in the household, but my missing mother was a constant presence in the back of my mind.

  There is a photograph of me and my mother that I think was taken by the photographer Fåhraeus. I think the picture tells me that my beautiful mother, holding me on her knee as a small child, would have preferred to put me down, stand up and leave the room. Which is what she soon did. I don’t remember her at all from my early childhood.

  Being rejected by one’s mother is no doubt the worst thing that can affect a small child. Anyone less thick-skinned than I would probably have blamed himself and thought he wasn’t good enough. But I don’t remember thinking like that. I was surprised more than anything. For some odd reason I always think of my reaction as being like that of a child whose brightly coloured balloon suddenly bursts and turns into a useless bit of rubber. A sort of astonishment at having a mother who can’t be bothered to be there when you wake up in the morning or go to sleep at night. I met her for the first time at a restaurant in Stockholm. It was in Stureplan, but has closed down now. Every time I walk along that street, I recall our meeting. She was sitting alone at a window table. I had seen photographs of her and knew that physically – face, hair, eyes – I was very like her. I approached her in a state of curious expectation. When she saw me walking towards her table, she raised her hands like a sort of shield and said: ‘don’t come too close! I have a cold.’

  I shall never forget that. Every time I write a play or a film script I try to create something more dramatic than that situation and comment, but I wonder if I shall ever manage to do so.

  We remained somewhat hesitant and reserved during the ten years or so she remained alive. I think we both tried to hide the distrust we had of each other. On a few occasions I attempted to talk to her about what had happened when I was a small child, but she would always go out into the kitchen and there was a strong whiff of whisky in the air when she returned. I would let the subject drop, we never completed the conversation. She was no doubt ashamed, and didn’t have the strength to face up to the fact that she had abandoned her children.

  Today, when her failings have long since faded away, I can understand how she felt. She had four children, but was not cut out for motherhood. She was too restless, lacked patience, always wanted to be somewhere else. I recognise aspects of myself in her. In many ways her life was a great and certainly unnecessary tragedy; but in those days a woman who was married and had children didn’t have much choice. I can now feel a degree of respect for her abandoning us, which must have been difficult and troubled her in so many different ways.

  Whenever I think of her I also recall the memory of a woman and a sack of cement. The images of my mother and that African woman are totally different, in both time and space; nevertheless they are each standing on opposite sides of the river of life and death waving to one other.

  I saw the incident from the window of a car just outside Lusaka in Zambia. An African woman was kneeling by the side of the road and next to her were two men heaving with considerable difficulty a sack of cement onto her head. The sack weighed fifty kilos. They then helped her to stand up. I saw her staggering away with that immense burden on her head, apparently walking straight into the sun with the dirt and dust from the road whirling around her.

  Only then did I react. I went over to the two men, who were sitting in the shelter of a tin hut, and asked if they realised that carrying heavy burdens like that on her head would destroy the woman’s back very soon. To them, I must have seemed an extremely aggressive white man.

  Without the slightest trace of irony in his voice, one of the men said: ‘Our women are strong. They’ll manage it.’

  He seemed proud as he said that.

  That woman personified a truth about the world we live in. Her burden wasn’t just on her head, it was just as much inside her head.

  As a teenager I can’t claim to have had an especially respectful attitude towards women. All my early erotic experiences were characterised by the fact that it was the woman who was at risk of becoming pregnant; it was nothing to do with me.

  Today, of course, I can see very clearly that one of the most important movements after the Second World War, at least in the Western world, was the liberation of women. Even if it is still one of the major political challenges in the developing world, one cannot ignore the fact that major changes have taken place. The big challenge is exposing the views of those who base them on a false reading of religious teachings, especially Islam and Judaism. Women must still sit right at the back of buses as far as the Orthodox Jews in Israel are concerned. Women in Islamic countries are still fighting to obtain basic human rights, not least the ownership of their own bodies.

  I once met a very old woman in a small village in the north of Sweden. She told me about a life-changing incident. She had grown up poverty-stricken, married a lumberjack and given birth to seven children before she reached the age of twenty-six. She felt that she simply didn’t have the strength for any more children, but the thought of denying her husband his only pleasure was impossible for he
r to entertain.

  Then she heard about a remarkable woman who was travelling around the country talking about love. It wasn’t a word she ever used, except perhaps when talking to or about her children; it was too alien, too fancy for her and her husband. Saying such a word would have been embarrassing, as if she were trying to make herself seem a cut above other people.

  But eventually she went to a talk at the community centre in the nearest sizeable town, ten kilometres there and ten back home again, in order to listen to that woman talking about love. Her name was Ottar, and she spoke a remarkable mixture of Swedish and Norwegian; even so, every word she said was understandable. The most important message was that it was not necessary to become pregnant with unwanted children when the winter nights were long and cold. Afterwards, in a freezing-cold outside toilet, Ottar gave the woman a pessary, which meant that she would no longer need to be afraid of conceiving. Her husband wouldn’t need to give up his pleasure and she too would be able to share it.

  ‘Ottar changed my life,’ said the old woman. ‘What had been painful torture became something I could appreciate as a pleasurable part of a dignified life. Before that making love with my husband had been tinged with despair.’

  One of the greatest challenges facing the world is giving women more influence. For most women the responsibility for producing children and preparing food is great, but their political and economic influence is non-existent.

  I don’t believe that men and women think all that differently. Too much credence is given to what is called ‘male and female ways of thinking’. What the world is really suffering from is a one-sided male way of thinking in which the voices of women are not heard at all.

  It results in a preposterous way of life. It is a reflection of the old classic bourgeois custom of men gathering together after dinner while the women left the room to socialise somewhere else. If a woman tried to behave otherwise, she was immediately disciplined.

  But if a new way of behaving is to take over, the men must take a step back and make room for women. Refusing to believe that this will happen is to have very little understanding of what change really involves.

  Today there is still a battle going on between those who carry sacks of cement, and those who place them on their women’s heads.

  56

  A winter in Heraklion

  In the winter of 1978 I spent a few months in a hotel in Heraklion, the biggest town on Crete. It was the last time I made a really long railway journey. I started one cold morning in the Östbanestation in wintry Oslo, and arrived in Athens several days later. Our train was pulled through Yugoslavia, which was a unified state in those days, by a steam engine. In the morning, as we approached the Greek border, I put my head out of the window in order to breathe in some fresh air that was at last no longer wintry – and was hit in the eye by a fragment of coal from the engine. As a result I had difficulty in seeing anything during my first week in Crete.

  My hotel was simple, charmless and cheap, and I was more or less the only guest. Breakfast was usually watery coffee, dry bread and a smear of marmalade. A man sat in reception apparently permanently occupied by attempts to solve strange mathematical problems he had scribbled down on hotel notepaper.

  I had gone to Crete because I wanted to see Knossos, and the house where the great Greek author Kazantzakis had lived. But most of all I wanted some peace and quiet.

  I had with me a rucksack and a suitcase: both were crammed full of books. In order to get them all in I had needed to remove some of the hard covers. Most were books about cultural history, both general and specialised, from the dawn of classical European civilisation to the present day. During the autumn that had passed I had realised there were big gaps in my knowledge of how European civilisation had developed. Everything earlier than Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau seemed blurred and not really connected. But now I was going to read up on all that with the intention of gaining a thorough grasp of the most important events that had created the world I live in, and hope to be able to help to change.

  The fact that Crete had been a centre of this historical development had not been all that relevant to my decision to travel there; the most important thing was that a good friend had informed me that during the winter, hotels in Crete cost next to nothing.

  Every morning I got up early and went for a walk that usually ended up at the end of the long pier at the entrance to the harbour. After a meal at some cafe or other that made up for the awful breakfast I had been served at the hotel I would sit down in my room, hang a shirt over the mirror by the desk and open my books. I still remember looking forward to learning something new that I hadn’t known the day before. I didn’t go out again until the chamber maid knocked on my door at about eleven o’clock. It was often raining, and I bought an umbrella and wandered around for several hours.

  I would have lunch at the cheapest local restaurant I could find. It was almost always freshly caught fish. Then I would carry on reading, with a pause for dinner, and continue reading into the night.

  I learnt something new every day. I don’t think I’ve ever slept as well as I did in that room with its uncomfortable bed. Knowledge is a good sleeping pill.

  On New Year’s Eve I sat in a bar so long and drank so much wine that I got lost on the way back to the hotel. The receptionist was asleep when I eventually came staggering in. With considerable difficulty I collected my room key from the rack.

  The following day I woke up very early, with a bad hangover. My head ached and the nausea kept rising in my throat – anybody who has drunk too much inferior Retsina knows the feeling. I read nothing at all that day. Instead I did what was usually no more than a vague intention and wrote what I now thought about the concept of civilisation in my diary. Despite my headache, or perhaps because of it, I managed to express my thoughts quite well.

  There was something unsatisfactory about the way the concept of civilisation was used. The word was often coupled together with the concepts of culture and tradition without it being clear why. I had begun to wonder if there was something wrong about the concept of civilisation itself. The most common aspect in the analyses and definitions I had read was its use as the antithesis of barbarity. A civilised person had left primitive human life behind.

  But was this really the case? Ancient Greece was a slave state. Freedom of thought and action was restricted to a number of selected men who satisfied the criteria of being citizens, whether the city involved was Sparta or Athens. Great thoughts were thought and great deeds performed in societies that can by no means be called civilised. There was always somebody else who prepared the food, looked after the children and cleaned the floors. And those who did that were often badly treated – not simply regarded as inferior individuals, but terrorised physically and psychologically.

  And that is by no means the end of the story. Even today there is a mass of faceless and nameless individuals who are forced to live in a state of deepest humiliation and fear. And they exist in all the continents.

  When you travel through Arab countries, for instance, you are constantly aware of these shadows behind the white facades. They appear briefly and then disappear again. Nearly all these people come from poor countries in Asia or Africa and work non-stop. They are often very young, and their opportunities for keeping in touch with their families are limited. And they have no rights whatsoever. The slightest protest or unwillingness to carry out their daily tasks can result in immediate dismissal. Back to poverty and a life on a rubbish dump.

  But how then should the concept of civilisation be defined? What is a civilised person? There have been many answers to those questions throughout the course of history, and they have all been based on the assumption that civilisation is something you learn, whereas the uncivilised are stupid or lacking in means and hence have not been lucky enough to become ‘civilised’.

  The concept of ‘civilisation’ has often been used as an excuse for aggression. During the nineteenth century, when efforts t
o acquire the riches of Africa began in earnest, it was often used as the motivation. The European countries taking part in the rush to take over Africa had three weapons, all of them beginning with the letter ‘C’.

  The first was cannons, in other words: firepower. It was always in the background as a threat, and was used whenever necessary, often totally without discrimination. Civilised people had a right to exterminate the people who opposed the imposition of what was seen as being good for them. The only midway position between civilisation and barbarism was death. Nothing else.

  The second was the cross. During the colonisation of Africa a helmet was placed on the head of Jesus and a sword in his hand. The only way of elevating all black people, the wild and barbaric beings, was for them to acquire the one true belief. The gods and animistic teachings that had sustained most Africans for centuries should be banished. The missionaries sent to Africa regarded themselves as soldiers of God. They were warriors with white safari helmets and Bibles instead of cannons, prepared to use them indiscriminately.

  The third was cashbooks. Anybody who failed to respect the Western world’s financial laws and the inherent brutality of the capitalist markets could not achieve the desired level of civilisation.

  The secret weapon of colonialism was lying. I wonder if there has ever been so much and such systematic lying as during the nineteenth century’s wave of humiliating attacks on the African continent. No doubt there were many Europeans who believed every word of what they preached about civilisation, but the driving force behind the brutal attacks was to simplify the colonialisation processes. They wanted to create peace and quiet while they stole Africa’s natural resources, just as they had previously robbed Africa of its population.