Quicksand

by Henning Mankell

  We think we know so much, but we are constantly forced to reassess our understanding of the world. If the truth is always provisional, which I think it is, our assessment of how reality has developed down the ages is just as unreliable.

  I have devoted quite a lot of my life to studying crime and criminal investigations. My view is that evil always has to do with circumstances, and is never something inherited. I have written about crime because it illustrates more clearly than anything else the contrasts that form the basis of human life.

  Everything we do is based on the existence of conflicting forces inside us – between dream and reality, knowledge and illusions, truth and lies, what I want to do and what I actually do. And not least between myself and the society I live in.

  It all began early in my life. I grew up on the upper floor of a district court. There were legal sessions every Thursday. I sometimes sneaked into the courtroom despite the fact that I was considered too young to be present, but Svensson the caretaker turned a blind eye. After all, my father was the district judge.

  I once sat there as two thieves were being tried after they had undertaken a long journey from Stockholm northwards, stealing things all the way. They had been arrested in Älvros. I still recall being surprised to hear that one of their thefts was of pencils from a kiosk. They admitted that crime, but vehemently denied having stolen two belts from a tailor’s.

  The simple lesson for a child sitting at the back of the court was that there were consequences if you committed a crime.

  Thousands of years ago authors tried to illustrate conflicts within and between individuals; you have to do this in order to depict the validity of a human’s personality. One of many ways of doing so is to use crime and its motives.

  We think we know what a policeman is and what a policewoman is. We can see them in front of us, in uniform or plain clothes, and they always seem to be heading somewhere specific, or involved in serious and often stormy meetings.

  I see something else. An incident some twenty-five years ago changed my opinion of them altogether.

  It happened at a street corner in central Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. It had been raining all night, and the road and pavements were soaking wet.

  I was waiting for somebody who was late. I looked hard down Chachacha Road without seeing any sign of him, and wondered if I had got our meeting place wrong. Perhaps he had said Cairo Road? Or Katondo Road? I decided on the former, turned off into a side street and headed for Cairo Road.

  Having reached there, I started waiting again. It was a Sunday, the shops were closed and there were remarkably few people around. It was very cloudy, a hangover from the previous night’s rain.

  I suddenly saw a young policeman in uniform, dragging behind him a man who was presumably a thief. Not far from where I was standing was an illegal street market, which was often a haunt of thieves.

  The policeman’s uniform didn’t fit him. His trousers were too long, his tunic too tight. There was nothing comical about what I could see; it was just a matter of a young man having to put up with whatever clothes he had been issued with.

  He carried a baton and a pistol. Both items seemed to suit him as badly as his uniform: the baton was too long, the pistol too heavy.

  The thief was in his twenties, barefooted, trousers cut short, his scalp covered in patches of eczema. I had learnt that this condition was often associated with poverty and malnutrition.

  The policeman was gripping hard onto the collar of the thief’s shabby shirt.

  There was something touching about the circumstances; both men seemed unsure about what their roles were. I assumed they were on their way to the nearby police station. I had been there once when my car was stolen, and still recall a wall covered in photographs of various criminals. Above it was a headline: ‘People we no longer need to worry about’. I asked the duty officer dealing with my case what this meant. He looked at me in surprise.

  ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘We’ve got rid of them.’

  The policeman in the street abruptly stopped quite close to me. He was still clinging tightly onto the thief’s collar, but was staring down at his own shoes, which were brown, dirty and unpolished. Next to where he had stopped was a crippled shoe-cleaner shuffling around on grazed knees and hands protected by plastic gloves. I had seen him before, and knew he could move pretty quickly if needs be.

  The policeman said something to the thief, let go of him and put his own right foot onto the shoe-cleaner’s wooden block.

  Things were beginning to get interesting! The thief stood there motionless while the shoe-cleaner polished away. The policeman wasn’t looking at the thief, who I expected to go running off down Chachacha Road.

  The policeman suddenly seemed to wake up and said something to the thief that I couldn’t hear as a bus went clattering past. To my astonishment the policeman gave the thief a banknote. The thief left – he didn’t run but walked off round the corner.

  The policeman looked down at his shoe, which was now starting to look quite different. By this time I had forgotten that I was waiting for somebody who was late; the performance being acted out before me was becoming more and more fascinating.

  Surprisingly enough, a few minutes later the thief returned. He was carrying a copy of The Times of Zambia, which he gave to the policeman who started reading it as he put his other foot up to have the shoe polished. The thief took up his former position, and showed no sign of wanting to run away.

  Both shoes were eventually polished. The policeman paid whatever the shoe-cleaner asked for, and when the cleaner showed signs of annoyance at not being given a tip the officer shouted and placed a hand on his baton. The shoe-cleaner was immediately satisfied.

  The policeman put the newspaper into his pocket, then grasped hold of the thief’s collar again and dragged him away towards the police station. I watched in amazement as they disappeared along the street.

  It dawned on me that what I had witnessed had been perfectly natural. In a country that previously had no police officers apart from the English ones conforming to their colonial practices, everything had to be learnt from square one. That applied not only to the policeman, but also to the thief. What I had seen was role-playing, a rehearsal of how to behave in the new circumstances.

  it’s easy to imagine that police officers have always existed; but of course they haven’t. In the early days there were soldiers, non-commissioned officers and jailers. They tracked down offenders who were fined or executed.

  Dungeons were only for very special cases. Not until more and more large towns appeared was there a need for a police force, whose role was mainly to control the lower classes and prevent crimes aimed at the upper classes. During the eighteenth century police forces were formed in most European countries, but there is still a lack of what we call police officers in other parts of the globe.

  We live in an increasingly divided world in which welfare is improving, but at the same time the gap between those who have access to this welfare and those who have nothing is widening. That is why there will be more and more increasingly specialised police forces.

  So being a police officer is a job with a future.

  That was perhaps the most important lesson I learnt as I watched the young African policeman in his almost Chaplinesque uniform march off with a thief who was also learning how to play his role.

  He wasn’t just a thief. He was also taking part in a performance watched by those of us standing on the pavement.

  62

  Youth

  It was a time of liberation.

  It was at the end of the 1960s. I was barely twenty years old, I wrote poems and wandered around Stockholm at night sticking them up on house walls and concrete columns. Sometimes they were torn down. I liked that – a reader had reacted, even if it wasn’t with appreciation.

  In August I would be going on tour with the first play I had written and also directed. It was called The Playground, and was a bizarre story about what Swedish
society and the world in general looked like from my point of view. Among the characters were the Minister of Finance at the time, Gunnar Sträng; a poverty-stricken Latin American farm labourer called Joao; and the Pink Panther, played by the actor Björn Gedda.

  We were going to put on a large number of performances during the autumn. Rehearsals had been complicated by the fact that we were very critical of the Social-Democratic government, and in many cases the organisers were Social-Democratic groups.

  After the tour I heard that they had sent out spies to discover how the performances had been received by audiences.

  My job during the performances was to take care of practical matters such as lighting and sound, which I did very badly. Sometimes I pressed the wrong buttons on the tape recorder, and the result was either the wrong music or no sound at all. After the shows the cast would glower at me, and I understood them perfectly well.

  In addition, in my desperate attempts to find a theatre to finance the whole venture, I had kindly volunteered to be available for a discussion at the end of each performance. It was a promise I would regret, to some extent at least, as these sessions could drag on until after midnight, and sometimes those taking part would almost come to blows. In Karlstad there was such an uproar that we had to put on an extra performance in order to satisfy the extra interest engendered.

  I have been excoriated in the mass media for all kinds of reasons – but never as vehemently as I was then because my shoes were worn out. One journalist argued that the hole in the sole of one of my shoes proved I was a left-wing extremist.

  On New Year’s Eve the previous year I had ended up at a party hosted by people I didn’t know at all. It was there that I met the young dancer and choreographer G. She was there with the man she lived with, J, but I didn’t know that. We started talking, things clicked, and we exchanged addresses. The following day, a freezing-cold New Year’s Day, I found my way to her flat in a house that was condemned to be demolished in Regeringsgatan, more or less where Sweden House is today. When I entered the flat, the man I knew nothing about appeared. He threw a shoe at me, then started twisting G’s arm. I left immediately, quite shocked and upset. After all, nothing had happened between G and me. I grew increasingly angry. I went back to the flat and asked the man what he thought was going on. There was no mistaking his jealousy.

  Nor my anger.

  It ended up in an odd sort of reconciliation. G went to the hospital with her injured arm, J and I went out into the wintry streets.

  ‘There’s a remarkable feeling of closeness here in Stockholm, don’t you think?’ I said.

  ‘What the hell are you on about?’ said J, who was an artist and specialised in painting cars. I seem to recall he was very talented.

  That was about as close as our relationship got. It was obvious to both him and me that G and I were going to become lovers.

  Which is what happened.

  It was not my first love. There had been L before that, but this new affair was a great and passionate relationship – it had an extra dimension, something that surprised me and deepened my sensual awareness.

  Six months later, a few weeks before I was due to set off on that long tour, G suggested that we should go to Norway and spend a few days walking in the mountains at Rjukan – we had both read books by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose. Telemark was not the area he mainly wrote about, but nevertheless he became our invisible companion.

  We took the night train from Stockholm. Somebody stole G’s purse at the station, reducing our combined resources dramatically. She wept and said she wanted to stay at home, but despite this setback, we set off.

  Somewhere close to the Norwegian border the train stopped for no obvious reason; G was asleep on a bench in the compartment we had to ourselves. I sat looking out into the night, which carried a breath of early autumn, and then looked at G as she slept. For the first time in my adult life I didn’t feel alone; in the darkness of that compartment I felt a happiness that was totally new.

  We changed trains in Oslo, and from the Västbanestation headed for Rjukan. It was Saturday afternoon by the time we got there. We ate at the only restaurant that was open, then left the little town and started walking. We eventually lay down in our shared sleeping bag outside a barn. It was a lovely evening, but soon it started raining and we broke into the barn. It was our first break-in during our mountain walk. We spoke about Sandemose. G told me about the dances she planned and rehearsed at night in the premises of the Choreographic Institute on Blasieholmen – she had acquired a key without anybody else knowing. I talked about the tour, which would be starting shortly: the first performance would be in Trollhättan, the last one in Malmberget.

  Soon after dawn, when it was merely drizzling, we set off up the steep hills until we came to the mountain itself. I had always associated mountains with snow and cold, but here there was heather and grey grass growing between lumps of stone. The ground was soaking wet, and mist glided slowly along the horizon.

  We followed a marked path over the mountain, without knowing exactly where it was leading. We were badly equipped, had only a minimum of food and absolutely no protective clothing if the weather were to turn really nasty.

  We walked in silence most of the time, accompanied only by a curlew. It was as if both of us needed to get our breath back. The love we felt was so all-consuming that it seemed almost frightening. There simply wasn’t room for any words. We were in a world that in its way could be as vast as space itself.

  Towards afternoon the rain grew much worse. It was pelting down, and the wind was also becoming stronger. There was no protection at all from the wind; all we could do was to keep going, but because it wasn’t cold we didn’t feel afraid.

  Eventually the path started sloping downwards. We came to a building site where a large transformer station was being built. As it was Sunday, no work was taking place. I managed to force open the window of a hut so that we could climb inside and dry our clothes. There were a few blankets lying there, and we wrapped them around us.

  In that icy-cold hut I became aware of what the term eroticism actually means. In that cold room with our bodies freezing cold we seemed to have everything against us, but perhaps the reverse was true, and everything was in our favour.

  I remember thinking at the time: I shall never forget this. And I never have.

  In the evening a caretaker suddenly appeared. As we had switched the light on he was prepared for something when he unlocked the door. By now we had got dressed and were respectable. I gave him the facts: we were neither thieves nor tramps; we were simply walking over the mountain and had become soaking wet and frozen through.

  He eyed us up and down, and decided to believe us. He went into a neighbouring room – I suspected he was checking to make sure we hadn’t stolen anything from the desk in there.

  There was a mountain guest house a few miles away; he drove us there and we were provided with food and a room. By the following day we had more or less run out of money; we took a bus back to Oslo and boarded a train to Sweden.

  Once again G slept but I remained awake. This might sound like an adjustment of the facts made with hindsight, but it isn’t. I really did hope that the experience I had just had was something everybody else should enjoy or have enjoyed – not only our contemporaries but everybody since the beginning of time. Surely our forefathers in their primitive caves or poverty-stricken miners in early nineteenth-century England, to name but two examples that passed through my mind, must have experienced something similar.

  At that time it never occurred to me that love is a blessing – perhaps the greatest blessing a human being can be gifted with. It was only later that thought came into my mind.

  Nevertheless, one night in August at the end of the 1960s that train compartment was transformed into a cathedral.

  Through the window of the train I started to see glimpses of a life that had begun to reveal fantastic secrets to me.

  63

 
; The dead body on the bench for the accused

  The repulsive can be enticing. Frightening, threatening, but also tempting. Like when you lean over something that smells awful, but is so fascinating that you can’t stop yourself sniffing it.

  In the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes is a remarkable picture painted by the French artist Jean-Paul Laurens in 1870. It is a competent oil painting, no more than that, created according to the traditions of the time and illustrating a historical event fairly accurately. It is similar in style to that painted at more or less the same time in Sweden by von Rosen, depicting King Erik, Karin Månsdotter and the malevolent Jöran Persson, who wants King Erik to sign a death warrant. Both paintings have an air of Romanticism – the details are real enough, but the picture and its message are essentially false.

  In the painting in Nantes, a pope is sitting on his throne in full regalia. Next to him, dressed entirely in black, is a bearded young priest listening to an agitated man who seems to be accusing the pope of some alleged wrong.

  It is a picture of the so-called ‘Cadaver Synod’ of 897, held in the Basilica Salvatoris in Rome on a series of extremely cold winter days. Nowadays the basilica has been renamed as the Lateran Basilica, and the synod is sometimes called ‘Synodus Horrenda’ – which is understandable if you know what it is all about.

  If you observe the Laurens carefully you realise that the pope is actually dead – a cadaver. It is Pope Formosus – the only one in a long series of popes to be given that name – who had been dead for nine months but was extracted from his coffin in order to be indicted by his successor, Stephen VI. The priest dressed in black, whose name has been lost in the annals of history, is assumed to be the former pope’s defence lawyer, even if the outcome of the trial was of course a foregone conclusion.

  The stench inside the church must have been awful. One can imagine the smell of rotting flesh after nine months of decay.