I spent a lot of time thinking about these questions during the period I spent in Crete over the winter of 1978. It made me doubt whether it is at all possible to create anything worthy of the name civilisation as long as the world is being dominated by tyranny and a lack of freedom. Can true civilisation, without slavery and other more or less hidden processes of subordination, ever be achieved if it only applies to a limited part of the world?
Perhaps it is an impossible dream to create worldwide civilisation that isn’t based on the suppression of some minorities?
Impossible or not, it is essential to have such a dream. It is highly unlikely that the next generation will be much cleverer than our own. But it is possible that later generations will be less stupid than we have been and still are.
I keep on remembering that winter in Crete, when I spent such a lot of time reading. And enjoying a solitary existence that was undisturbed.
57
Catastrophe on a German motorway
One summer in the middle of the 1980s I drove to what was then called Yugoslavia. It was not the best of times in my life. I was a theatre director, and had realised too late that it was both naive and foolhardy to combine those duties with continuing to write books and plays. To make things worse, my year at the theatre had resulted in a lot of personal conflicts, which meant that I had to make several unpleasant but necessary decisions.
Now, having taken the ferry from Limhamn to Dragör early that morning, I was more or less fleeing southwards in my car, driving non-stop. Late in the evening I found myself not far from Hanover; I decided to carry on for as long as I could, and then sleep in the back of the car. I had removed the back seat and replaced it with a mattress.
The feeling of running away lessened the further I drove. As my car, a very old Citroën, didn’t have much in the way of horsepower I was constantly being overtaken, but I was no longer in a hurry. I would reach the Yugoslav border sooner or later. I didn’t know what would happen after that. Perhaps I would travel to the island of Krk and stay there until I had to go back north again. By then I would have made up my mind how to handle the coming year in the theatre. I didn’t want a repeat of the past year, during which I had made every possible mistake.
South of Hanover, I began to feel very relieved. I had at least thirty days ahead of me during which nobody would knock on my door and present me with new problems – no furious actor who had argued with a producer, no trade union leader complaining about new regulations regarding lunch coupons. It became easier to think. I was reminded of an aphorism I had read somewhere: ‘don’t take life so seriously – you won’t come out of it alive anyway.’
A bus overtook me on the autobahn. I glanced at it and saw it was full of young people – a school trip, perhaps, or a sports team. The bus pulled in in front of me. It had an open sunroof, and a teenage boy stuck his head and upper body out through it. He waved to me, but I don’t remember whether or not I waved back. He stuck his upper body even further out – there was no risk of him falling out as his lower body from the thighs down was tightly jammed inside the bus.
He continued looking backwards towards me, and nobody inside the bus, including the driver, realised what was about to happen.
Ahead was a low viaduct. The bus would pass under it without any problems – but nobody had thought about the boy sticking out of the sunroof. When the concrete edge of the viaduct struck him at about neck level, it crushed his head. Bits of bone, skin and battered brain flew through the air and onto my windscreen. I wasn’t going very fast and was able to pull over onto the grass verge despite the mess all over the window. The bus had skidded to a halt at the side of the road, brakes screaming. Cars were stopping on all sides. Most people didn’t know what had happened, and it was only later that I realised I was the only one who had seen how he had died.
The boy’s severed body was still hanging out of the sunroof. I remember I had my hand on the windscreen wiper control when I stopped myself. I just sat there. I was in deep shock, my heart was pounding and I burst into tears. What I had just experienced was incomprehensible. What affected me most at the time was that the boy had had no idea of what was about to happen – not just that he had no chance of slipping back inside the bus, but that he didn’t realise his life was about to end. He died without knowing it.
Ambulances and police cars came racing up together with fire engines. I got out of the car and beckoned to a police officer. He gave a start when he saw my windscreen. In halting but fairly comprehensible German I explained what I had seen. He made notes and then gestured to a forensic officer who had just arrived. The latter scraped bits of the mess into a small plastic tube, then signalled that I could wipe the windscreen clean.
I set off again and didn’t stop until four in the morning. I had travelled quite a long way south by then and stopped at one of the petrol stations that are characteristic of German motorways. I parked between two long-distance lorries; their cabin curtains were drawn and I could hear snoring. I lay down on the mattress in the back of my car, with the noise from the autobahn in the background. Two people walked past, and one of them laughed for some unknown reason.
I eventually fell asleep. Only then did I no longer see the image of the boy waving at me from the roof of the bus.
After waking I continued to Krk and found a cheap hotel where masses of cockroaches scattered every time I switched on the lavatory light. I stayed there all summer, lacking the strength to go on looking for goodness only knows what. It was a restless summer and I spent much of it soul-searching. I eventually decided how I would try to improve my performance as theatre director during the coming year. As I only had one year left after that, the whole thing would soon be over. When I left Krk at the end of July and drove back north, I adopted what I convinced myself was a fighting spirit.
And that second year did pass much better. In fact, I stayed on for just over another twelve months, and to my surprise was offered the chance of working there even longer, as well as being offered other jobs as theatre director. I turned them all down, of course. All that mattered now was getting down to my writing again after an involuntary gap of over three years.
My contract eventually ran out, but I didn’t travel abroad that summer. And I sold my car. On the evening my contract formally came to an end, I hired a car and drove from my home in Skåne to the theatre in Växjö, although the theatre had already closed down for the summer. I spent the evening in my empty office, which I had cleared of everything I no longer needed. The black desk was completely empty, apart from a letter I had written to my successor. I wished her good luck and reminded her of the unwritten rule that says the best day of a theatre director’s work is the first one. After that, somebody is always dissatisfied. If you bear that in mind you are better prepared for all the problems in store.
I placed a mini-bottle of champagne beside the letter. Then I put my wristwatch on the desk in front of me, switched off the light and sat there in the late-summer darkness. My job would be over at exactly midnight. I didn’t think of it as being released from prison – it hadn’t been quite that bad, especially during the second half of the contract. The theatre had even won a prize for one of its productions. I regarded my visit to the empty office as rather embarrassing, but I still sat there waiting for the clock to strike midnight.
Then I suddenly saw again in my mind’s eye that boy who had been decapitated. I had hardly thought about it since I returned from Krk, but now I could see him again, waving merrily at me during the last few seconds of his life.
Why did I think about him at that moment? I didn’t know, but as the clock struck midnight he was the only other thing in the room, like a sort of shadow.
I felt nothing. No relief, no sense of freedom, no optimism for the future. It was as if I now had to start all over again from the beginning. Would I still be able to write? Had my ability to do so withered away during my years as a theatre director?
Then I stood up, switched off the l
ight, locked the door and slid the key in through the letter box. It was as if I were locking up inside the office the memory of the boy in the bus.
I got into my hired car and drove off. Without a backward glance, as they say after something final.
Many years later, about a month after I had been diagnosed with cancer, I received a thick letter through the post. I couldn’t read who the sender was, just some initials I didn’t recognise and Stockholm as the place of origin; but no postbox number, no street name, no postcode.
Inside the thick envelope were several letters addressed to Henning Mankell – but they were not written to me. Eleven in all, dated 1899, 1900 and 1901. They had been sent to my paternal grandfather, also called Henning Mankell, who, in 1899, was thirty years old and lived in Cardellgatan in Stockholm. In 1905 he married Agnes Lindblom and they moved to Floragatan where he lived until his death in 1930.
I read the letters. They were all written by somebody called Harald, but no surname was ever given. He was about twenty and living and studying in Uppsala. In other words, there was a ten-year age difference between the pair of them – but there was no indication of their relationship.
The letters were unusual. There was no chit-chat, no questions about one’s state of health, no greetings to mutual friends. Harald wrote to Henning about his dissatisfaction with life, his difficulties when it came to finding a meaning to his existence, and constant musing about various moral questions. He often referred to the erotic passion he felt for certain women, but his total lack of love for them. Some letters broke off in the middle of such thoughts, and the next one would start by asking the same questions once again.
It was impossible to read from the letters what Henning’s response had been. They could only be read as a sort of monologue written by a young man studying unknown subjects at Uppsala University who quite often spent evenings with friends drinking punch in pubs. But he grew tired of the vulgar chatter of his friends and went home to write letters to Henning.
I read the letters and put them to one side. My grandfather died eighteen years before I was born. There is nobody around today who can tell me who this Harald was. There was no information about his surname, no photographs, only these letters sent to me by some unknown person.
I hadn’t thought at all about my cancer while I was reading the letters sent to me. But I recognised quite a lot of myself in Harald, things I had thought when I was his age.
The next moment I also thought about the boy on the bus who died over and over again in my memory as his last wave was cut short by terrible tragedy. He must have sneaked out of that theatre office where I thought I had locked him up for good. I now realised that I could see aspects of myself in him as well. Harald’s unrest and the smiling young boy are both a part of me. Or perhaps, rather, I am a part of them. You don’t see yourself in others; you see yourself in all others.
It is the end of May as I write this. Those awful mornings in January and February when I had to keep attending the Sahlgrenska hospital for new examinations and tests before the chemotherapy could begin are now in the past. The first series of cycles is over, and I have survived without too many serious side effects. I feel very tired, yes, but the treatment has not been too devastating. I have only lost a couple of kilos in weight, on two occasions my blood count has fallen so much that I have needed a transfusion, but my immune defences have been up to the challenge.
I am currently receiving a lower dose of chemotherapy infusions every third week. I need to spend about an hour at the hospital. How long the treatment will last depends on how my tumours respond. If they continue to shrink, or at least stop growing, the treatment can continue for months or even years.
As I write this I suddenly remember a photograph. I have to search through albums and boxes before I find what I am looking for. It is a black-and-white photograph from 1957 of Class 4 from Sveg primary school. I am standing in the middle of the back row, looking very serious.
In the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph are three boys. The fact that they are standing together is pure coincidence: they were not close friends and didn’t mix at break or after school – they simply happened to be standing next to each other.
All three are now dead. One drank himself to death – latterly on methylated spirits, I have been told. One shot himself in the face with a shotgun. The third died of some illness or other.
But as they sit there in the photograph they have no idea they are going to be the first pupils in the class to die. The picture gives no indication.
However, I can also recognise aspects of myself in them. I carry images of the living and the dead inside me, and I assume that I exist similarly in the minds of others who recognise themselves in me.
Or at least I did, for as long as they were alive.
58
Jealousy and shame
One spring night many years ago I was wandering around a small town in northern Sweden, riven by jealousy.
It was as if the town around me had lost all its colours, and the environment had suddenly become a glassy black and white. The pavements swayed under my feet. There seemed to be hollows everywhere that might suddenly open up into abysses.
I had recently met a woman in another country and fallen passionately in love with her. We spoke every evening on the telephone.
But that evening she had not answered when I rang. My worries drove me out into the streets, from telephone kiosk to telephone kiosk. I rang every ten minutes, but there was still no answer.
It was like living under a curse; I had never experienced such a feeling before. Being let down by friends when I was a child or broken promises by adults were nothing compared with what I was going through that night.
It was over forty years ago, but I think it is one of the moments in life I can still recreate with absolute clarity. A moment when life was centred upon just one thing: the hope that a woman would answer the telephone and confirm that our love was still alive.
The spring night was quite light, even though it was raining on and off. By about three in the morning I was soaked through, but I continued my humiliating walk from telephone kiosk to telephone kiosk. A police car drove past me occasionally and the officers inside it regarded me with suspicion. But I wasn’t staggering as I walked, nor was I carrying stolen goods, so they let me be.
Now, long afterwards and with hindsight, I can recall it as a black shadow extracted from one of Dostoevsky’s novels. It wasn’t a Swedish town I was prowling through at night, it was Moscow or St Petersburg.
I also had physical pains. My stomach was tied in a tight knot, and every breath was torture. I tried to think of a reason why she wasn’t answering, but could only envisage in my mind’s eye an unknown man at that very moment holding her against his naked and aroused body.
At one point I walked across a long bridge over a river, suddenly stopped and cried out loudly. Edvard Munch’s The Scream embodies a deep human truth.
It was dawn before she answered the phone. I burst into tears when she eventually picked up. The explanation was simple: she hadn’t replaced the receiver properly the previous evening, and had slept soundly all night.
Relief was all-consuming. My jealousy no longer existed. The knots untied themselves and loose strands whirled away into the distance.
Later in life I have sometimes felt jealous, but never as badly as on that occasion. And I have learnt to notice when other people are suffering from jealousy. It is usually linked with love, infidelity, fear of being abandoned. But jealousy can occur in the most unexpected circumstances. In a theatre the distribution of roles can lead to a sort of hatred that is basically jealousy. In literature there is a supreme description of jealousy in Shakespeare’s Othello.
A long list of examples could be compiled. Among writers it can concern anything from reviews to sales figures. And I have seen farmers fuming over the excellent harvest reaped by a neighbour when their own fields have not been nearly so productive.
&nb
sp; I once saw two taxi drivers fighting at a rank. I heard later that it was because one of them thought the other had a better car than his own.
But where does this jealousy come from? And why?
I remember a time in the 1980s when Aids was a new and frightening phenomenon. I asked a few friends how they would react if they heard they had been infected. In those days such a diagnosis was in effect a death sentence; antiretrovirals had not yet been found and medics were unsure about how the virus functioned once it had found a home in a new host.
I received all kinds of different answers, as can well be imagined, but one came over and over again and was horrifying. It was a response the person concerned would not have made public, of course, if they had been asked by a journalist or a doctor. But they had no inhibitions in telling me.
‘I would infect somebody else. I don’t want to die alone.’
My reaction was obvious: ‘Why would you want somebody else to die? You always die alone.’
‘I couldn’t bear the thought of somebody living longer than I did.’
That reply is born of extreme jealousy. Other people will continue living after I am dead. Indeed, quite a lot of people will be cheeky enough not to have been born when I breathe my last.
This is both grotesque and inhuman. But I have met people who find it hard to conceal their jealousy of their own children – the ones who will live on after they have gone. I see people in their fifties wearing tight jeans that are far too youthful for them in an attempt to deny the fact that death is shadowing them.
The dream of the elixir of life will never desert some people. it’s not good enough for them that nowadays we usually live longer than our parents. We can’t do anything about our genetic inheritance. Not yet, at least. But perhaps the time will come sooner than we expect when people start to clone their children into exact copies of themselves, minus any possible snags in their DNA profiles.
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