Quicksand
Page 28
Moments which will come, which must come if life is to have any value as far as I’m concerned.
Epilogue
When my father was a district judge in Sveg during the 1950s, he would arrange a court hearing once a month in Svenstavik. Before I started school I used to accompany him there. There was a bedroom for us upstairs in the local court building. I was five or six years old, in 1953 or 1954.
My father once found a man guilty of manslaughter in Svenstavik. He was a lumberjack and had killed a businessman who was widely disliked because he rarely gave credit to poverty-stricken forest workers. Nobody seemed to miss the businessman – but manslaughter was manslaughter, even if the lumberjack was penniless and perhaps in urgent need of help.
My father gave him the mildest sentence the law permitted.
Endless numbers of people surround you as you travel through life. Some you notice briefly, then forget. With others you make eye contact, which leads to a kind of emotional connection. And sometimes you have a conversation with some of these people.
And then you have your family, your friends, your workmates. All those who are close to you. Some move away, or your relationship cools, or they let you down in some way, and friends sometimes become enemies.
But most are simply folk who happen to live at the same time as you do. Millions of people who pay a short visit to the earth, whose stay overlaps your own.
Since being diagnosed with cancer I often dream about walking along streets where lots of people are jostling their way past others. It can be quite difficult to make progress. My dream sometimes places me briefly in a theatre, or a cafe, or in an aeroplane: I am searching for someone. Someone who knows me, someone who is also searching for me.
Then the dream ends and I nearly always wake up with a feeling of great relief. There is nothing frightening about all these people who accompany me or have accompanied me as I journey through life. It is more a feeling of curiosity about who they actually were – I would have liked to get to know so many of them better.
Such as that woman in the Stephansdom cathedral, the tango dancers in Buenos Aires, or the girl in the camp in Mozambique who was reunited with her parents.
And the lumberjack and the businessman he killed in northern Sweden sixty years ago.
All these unknown people exist alongside me. For a short time they have been a part of my life. I share it with all of them.
Our real family is endless, even if we don’t know who some of them were when we met them for an extremely brief moment.
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