Quicksand

by Henning Mankell

  There is a difference between the jealousy of men and women. If you have seen a male lion taking over a herd of lionesses, you have seen man.

  Jealousy is about survival, about the biological imperative for reproduction. In a biological sense, the person with whom we conceive children can be irrelevant. But complicated social and financial circumstances play a role.

  Love is a modern invention. Earlier generations were exclusively concerned with placing children in advantageous social and financial environments.

  In many ways that is still the case, of course. In many cultures children are married off soon after they are born. In those circumstances what we call love is something that might come about after marriage, not before.

  It is hardly surprising that female and male jealousy is different in a world where it is the men who have power and the women who have responsibility. Men are jealous if they suspect their chosen woman might have children with another man, but they themselves feel free to kick over the traces all their life.

  Women on the other hand are jealous if they suspect another woman might be taking their man away from them, since if that happens she will be left alone with the children.

  These are generalisations, but the only jealousy I feel in relation to women was on that spring night long ago in a northern Swedish town.

  Jealousy is hard to cope with. It is appropriate that the French have a special code for ‘crimes of passion’ in their legal system. That is in accordance with human nature. Even if other countries don’t have the same clear attitudes as in the French system, law courts nearly always take into account jealousy if it is hovering in the background of a crime.

  They say people are ashamed of being jealous, that it is regrettable to have such weakness of character. That is something I find hard to understand. Why should I feel ashamed because I am acting in a way that comes naturally to humans?

  Deep down, being jealous means that I am able to express my highly human feelings.

  I once knew a man called Olof. At the age of eighty-seven he suspected that his eighty-six-year-old wife Irma was being unfaithful to him with another man in the old people’s home where they lived. His jealousy was as rabid and humiliating as mine had ever been.

  They were reconciled later when it was established that she had not been unfaithful.

  Irma lived to be a hundred and one and Olof ninety-nine. When Olof died Irma did something she had been wanting to do for a very long time: she searched through his papers for the answer to something that had bothered her for sixty years. Had he been unfaithful to her when she was expecting their second child? She found among the documents the proof she had been looking for.

  She said it hit her like a tidal wave. A wave of black, murky, oil-like water. Jealousy.

  But it passed. Olof had not abandoned her. She could forgive him. And she lived for two more years, and died having fallen asleep with an unfinished crossword puzzle on her chest.

  59

  The twenty-eighth day

  One unusually cool day in 2013 in Maputo I have lunch with a doctor from Switzerland. He is just over fifty, is called Renée and during his years in practice has carried out heart operations on some 4,000 children. He is a quiet, undemonstrative person and earlier in the day had spent three hours operating on a ‘blue baby’ that would otherwise have certainly died, if not immediately then definitely before it reached the age of five.

  I ask him what it feels like when his daily work is saving the lives of children who would never otherwise have had the chance to grow up and wonder about the meaning of life. Somewhat hesitantly, he says it is of course a constant pleasure – but that he is only doing his job, like everybody else.

  Then he starts talking about three cases when he thinks he failed. The children died, and although he had made no mistakes, he was responsible for their deaths.

  I can’t see that he should bear any personal responsibility whatsoever. His description of the three cases seems to me to be a combination of unfortunate circumstances and unexpected complications.

  Then he tells me about the meetings he had with the children’s parents. They were shocked at their loss, and furious with the doctor. Naturally he could understand that they were looking for a scapegoat to blame, but his pain is still difficult to live with.

  Our discussion has continued for some considerable time, despite the fact that he is tired out. Together with his team of specially trained nurses who flew out to help him, he has performed fourteen operations in one week. Later this evening he will fly home to Lausanne, and after a couple of days will be operating again in his own hospital.

  4,000 operations – often on tiny hearts, which he will enable to pump blood for the next eighty or so years.

  He starts talking about how he loves the organ known as the heart. What he says sounds almost lyrical, but essentially he is very objective.

  The heart is a muscle. Nothing more. Just like a thigh muscle or a spinal muscle it has a special function. It pumps blood.

  Then Renée begins a fascinating account of the heart’s secrets, which are totally unknown to me.

  ‘When a child is born, its heart has already been beating for a long time,’ he says. ‘It has been working for ages before the child comes into the world. After conception, the heart’s muscles start moving slowly on the twenty-eighth day, and after a warming-up process lasting three days it begins to beat properly on the thirty-first day.’

  ‘As precisely as that?’ I wonder.

  ‘Yes, as precisely as that. There have been a few cases of it happening after thirty-two or thirty-three days, but if the heart isn’t beating before the thirty-fifth day the child won’t live.’

  My thought process is inevitable. When a child is born its heart has already been beating for eight months. All the crucial physiological processes are established from the very beginning by this obstinate muscle pumping blood around the body.

  Renée relaxes after his intensive week’s work by sipping a glass of red wine. His smile is friendly all the time. The heart interests him. His heart, my heart, your heart. I suspect that at some time he has amused himself by calculating how many heartbeats there are throughout the world during one minute or one hour. A quick calculation suggests that the number of heartbeats for a human being who lives for eighty years is a twelve-digit figure.

  The heart is a muscle that occupies him every single day.

  I ask him about tortoises that can live to be 150, and am informed that their hearts are simpler than ours in their make-up. As they move so slowly, their hearts can carry on working for a very long time – whereas animals with a faster heartbeat might only live for one or two years.

  Then he starts talking about another remarkable fact relevant to the heart muscle. It is actually programmed to live for about thirty-five to forty years – which was quite a high age only a few generations ago, even in Europe, and it is still the average lifespan in a lot of poor countries. But the heart muscle proved to have an unsuspected ability to live for longer than was thought; it carries on working, even when it has to pump twice as many times as it was created to do.

  Renée maintains that the heart is perfect because there has never been any doubt about what it is supposed to do. Other muscles in our bodies can make a variety of different movements, such as when we are doing strenuous physical work or indulging in sport. But the heart has only one job to do: to pump our blood around hour after hour without a break.

  I ask Renée why nature chose this particular system for pumping blood around our bodies; there must have been alternatives in the early stages of life on earth.

  His response is that the enormous advantage of the heart’s way of working is its simplicity, which enables it to work for so long. Also, it means we know all there is to know about the heart, its formations and its function – unlike the brain, for instance, which is still largely unexplored territory.

  Renée is not surprised that the heart has become a symbol for everythin
g from patriotism to the most passionate love that nature is capable of arousing. He talks of ‘the wonderful heart’; its clockwork mechanism as ‘a measurer of life’ just keeps on going, and it can endure the most painful human experiences such as privation and starvation before finally being forced to submit.

  The heart is the most loyal of servants. It is the yardstick for love – at the height of passion our heartbeat increases and our cheeks turn red. And it is the heart that execution squads aim at. A white rag attached over the heart is the target the gunmen aim at.

  In former times – and perhaps even today in some places – men used to eat the defeated enemy’s heart in order to take over his strength.

  When a person becomes overweight or stops exercising, the heart continues pumping blood round the maltreated body for as long as possible. The heart is our ultimate hero. Yet at the same time it is a perfectly normal muscle, albeit one with remarkable resources.

  Renée gets ready to leave for the hospital in order to pack up his instruments and say goodbye to his African colleagues. He will soon be back, once he has collected enough money to cover his expenses in performing new lifesaving operations.

  Before he leaves I ask him what the human heart will be like a million years from now. Will it have developed? He doesn’t think so. The muscle is the perfect pump to keep us alive. Every person’s heart pumps as much blood during their lifetime as the Victoria Falls pours water down that gigantic African ravine over several hours. Other body muscles will no doubt change – in a world where more and more people lead sedentary lives, changes to our muscles will occur, even if it takes a very long time.

  ‘How long?’ I ask before he leaves. ‘A hundred thousand years?’

  ‘If this restaurant is still here, the people serving and eating here will be very similar to us inside their skins,’ he says. ‘A hundred thousand years is a very short time.’

  After he has gone, I think about what he said.

  ‘A hundred thousand years is a very short time.’

  Hard to grasp, but of course perfectly true.

  60

  Meeting in an amphitheatre

  One day in August 1983 I boarded a Bulgarian Airways plane to Athens, full of great expectations. We landed in Berlin, Prague and Sofia, if I remember rightly. There were delays at every stage. The food on board was dry sandwiches, but none of this mattered. I wasn’t in a hurry. I was going to spend a few weeks in the Swedish guest house in Kavala in northern Greece. My aim was to write a play I had been commissioned to produce.

  One day that autumn I understood what the feeling of entering a both timeless and historic situation involves. It happened quite unexpectedly, like nearly all major and life-changing events.

  It was still very hot, but everybody I spoke to said there would soon be a change to more autumnal weather. I had completed the first act of the play, and so I took a day off.

  There was another reason why I allowed myself a free day. The previous day had been a Sunday, and in the morning I went out onto the balcony of my room and looked down at the church below it: I found myself staring into an open coffin. A young man of about my age, wearing a dark suit, was lying in it, surrounded by hysterical, weeping mourners.

  I left the balcony and closed the door. I had seen dead bodies before, but my unease grew and grew.

  At the time I hadn’t quite resolved my relationship with death. I was perhaps on the way, but it wasn’t until later, during my early years in Africa, that I could seriously recognise death as a part of life rather than something extraneous to it.

  I slept badly that night. The next evening I went down to the harbour and checked the times of ferries to Thasos. I got up at dawn, and the ferry left on time.

  When I got to Thasos I didn’t realise that there was a classical amphitheatre there. I had previously seen the one under the Acropolis cliff, and the mother of all amphitheatres in Epidaurus, but when I walked along the stone-paved path to the theatre on Thasos, past the ruins of the Dionysus Temple, and saw the old theatre spread before me, it was one of the most moving experiences of my life so far. It was reminiscent of the time I stood outside the community centre in Sveg and discovered that I was myself and nobody else.

  On that occasion I discovered myself. Now, on Thasos, it became quite clear to me that my identity was linked with that of others who had gone before me and those who would come later.

  It was not a new thought, of course, but it was precisely then that I realised its momentous significance. I saw what I had seen before without properly comprehending it.

  It was the first time I registered seriously what the long-dance of the generations implied.

  The theatre was surrounded by tall, sparse trees. Beyond them was the sea. One could see the setting sun from the tiered seating as well as watching the play reaching its climax.

  It was morning when I came to the theatre. I stayed there almost the entire day, apart from a brief visit to a little restaurant for lunch. I spent most of the time walking around the stage, or sitting in various seats provided for the audience.

  A little boy who happened to be visiting at the same time helped me to test the acoustics. He whispered or shouted loudly or spoke normally when I asked him to. In the end, despite the fact that I don’t speak Greek, I got him to understand that I would like him to sing a children’s song. I sat right at the back, looking down onto the stage, where he seemed little more than a dot way down below. But his voice reached me loud and clear, despite the fact that he wasn’t singing especially loudly.

  He was interrupted by his mother, who was either anxious or angry and had come up the hill to the theatre looking for him. The last I heard from him was some sobbing, drowned out by his mother’s telling-off as she dragged him away by his ear.

  For a brief moment I took part in the play myself when the mother noticed me and shouted several angry questions that I didn’t understand. I simply shook my head and thrust my arms out wide.

  Afterwards, I have since read that there is documentary evidence to show that both Aristophanes and Euripides were performed in this theatre over 2,000 years ago. There are also indications that Aristophanes visited the theatre in person.

  But that day, when I discovered the theatre quite unexpectedly, I was able to imagine what had taken place there. The appearance and voices of the actors, their temperament, masks and movements. I sat there playing with the thought of all the rest of the audience sitting around me, whether I was at the very top at the back or in the VIP seats just in front of the stage itself.

  The human connection, I thought. This is how it was. We all do the same things in order to find food and survive. We do the same jobs, and we share the same secrets hidden in the art form that is the theatre.

  The thought was very simple. Once upon a time actors stood on this stage performing plays that are still performed today. Some of which I myself have directed in theatres. There is an invisible link between them and me that is so strong, it can’t be broken. If I stretch out my left arm I can grasp the hand of one of the actors who took part all those years ago. If I stretch out my right arm I can grasp the hand of one of the actors who will perform there in the future.

  It was a totally magical moment. All the seats were suddenly full of spectators, and on the stage was the classical ancient chorus wearing their masks.

  But they were all looking at me, and I was looking at them.

  We were looking at one another.

  The sun slowly sank down towards the sea’s horizon where it set, the audience applauded and started making their way towards the town of Thasos again.

  Afterwards, as I sat in the shade of the tall pine trees surrounding the theatre, I experienced a sense of relief that was greater than anything I had felt earlier. I felt inspired, and wanted to sing.

  I walked down to the stage again, and had the distinct feeling that the ancient chorus had returned. Every moment of my life was there in the background. Suddenly it started snowing; the win
try morning in Sveg had returned.

  The feeling of relief I experienced was associated with the fact that my life seemed to be constituted in a new way. There was a clear meaning in the connections I had discovered – the outstretched hands over time and space.

  It seemed to me that in different circumstances one of the members of the chorus thousands of years ago could easily have asked exactly the same questions as I did. And even before ancient Greek drama had become established there had been theatres and actors.

  Whoever was the very first actor is something lost in the annals of history; it is a question without an answer. But we know with the tentative certainty that is associated with everything that cannot be proved scientifically that actors emerged from the world of ritual. They were better able to interpret human understanding of the magical dimensions of life – birth and death, natural catastrophes, the sun’s constant transit from east to west.

  I imagine that the very first actor was somebody like the Swede Allan Edwall. The fact that I don’t suggest a woman is because I believe the very first actors were exclusively male. The fact that they belonged to the priesthood supports my belief.

  Allan Edwall was able to depict the tragic and the comic. He could alternate between laughter and tears almost without any perceptible change of expression. And there is no doubt that he was always well aware of the presence of an audience. He could metamorphose into a completely different person without losing his audience. He didn’t transform the audience. It transformed itself.

  Before I left the theatre in Thasos, I was convinced it was Allan Edwall standing down below on the stage as the sun set and the shadows became longer and longer.

  I stayed in Thasos that night. The following day I went back to Kavala and continued writing my play.

  From that day onwards I have lived with my arms and hands outstretched.

  61

  A thief and a policeman

  Living with cancer means living with no guarantees. Just as the nocturnal wanderings of cats are unknown, cancer cells also travel along dimly lit paths.