The Death of a Beekeeper

by Lars Gustafsson

  It’s not fair.

  After I had walked around the entire peninsula and in doing so, by the way, had disturbed a moose family which was sniffing around behind the barn in Bruslings meadow, I came to the following conclusions:

  Either this letter says that it’s nothing bad. Or it says that I have cancer and am going to die. And naturally there is a high probability that it says that I do.

  The smartest thing for me would be not to open it, because if I don’t open it, there is still going to be some kind of hope.

  And this hope will give me some latitude. Only a little bit, to be sure, because it won’t stop the pain, but it will be a very general pain, it won’t remind me of anything in particular, I will be able to integrate it into my life, why shouldn’t I be able to do that? I have been able to accept so many other things.

  When the letter finally arrived, I took the dog for a walk around the entire peninsula, and when I came back I had made a decision: I will never open it.

  It stood next to the table-setting on the flowered tablecloth in the kitchen, outside the birds were pecking on their board just like always, there had been even more thaw in the meantime, it was actually dripping already from the gutters. A brown envelope with a window, in the upper left-hand corner: District Hospital, Västerås, Central Laboratory. I felt the letter. There was only one sheet of paper, apparently folded in the middle. I held it up to the window. One couldn’t see through.

  If I open it, I thought, how is it going to change me? If it says that I only have a few months to live, am I going to be petrified? Paralyzed? Will I have to go to some hospital? Probably. And spend the last months in a bed with the pain getting stronger and stronger while I get thinner and weaker and am no longer in control of my own situation.

  But if I open it now and it says the laboratory tests have shown that the samples they removed are from benign growths? That it is a stomach ulcer or a gallstone and must be treated with an operation and an appropriate diet and that it is extremely dangerous to run around with a gallstone and not be treated by a doctor?

  What if I just get worse and worse in the event that I don’t open this letter? Perhaps in time a new letter will come, but by then it will probably be much too late.

  When the letter came I didn’t open it but first went for a long walk with the dog.

  When I came back home, I had begun to play with the idea of not opening it at all.

  Somehow I played a little too long with this idea, only a tenth of a second too long, but that sufficed.

  If this letter contains my death, then I refuse it.

  One shouldn’t get involved with death. I had the good fortune of learning that fairly early, it is a rule which has stood me in good stead throughout my whole life.

  According to Wilhelm Wundt, who in his day had a not inconsiderable reputation as a psychologist, as I gather from the Nordic Conversational Encyclopedia, there are three kinds of pain. There are dull pains, stabbing pains, and burning pains.

  In contrast to the terms for color perception, language has not developed any special words to define these various sensations. They don’t have names of their own.

  Perhaps that is because two people can see the same colors while two people can’t possibly experience the same pain?

  Mine is dull. Not exclusively. On some days it burns, too, but most of the time it’s dull.

  I believe it really began during that night when the dog had run away, because deep in my sleep I felt, for the first time, this strange, dull tension in the kidney area, as if someone were pumping up a soccer ball which he had smuggled in there, pulsing, slowly, without the least concern whether I move or not.

  At any rate I noticed it for the first time during the night when the dog had run away.

  Most of the time it starts at night. I dream of it long before it has awoken me, it exists as something threatening in my dream, and I am constantly trying to turn away from it, not to look at it, I literally turn my head away from it in the dream, and in spite of this it keeps coming closer and forces me to look at it and awakens me.

  Up until Christmas the pills helped pretty much—I first got them in Fagersta, when they still thought it was a kidney stone. (Right at the beginning, by the way, I thought it was lumbago, and later that it was the prostate, but as it turned out, I didn’t have the slightest notion where it hurts when you have a prostate infection.)

  Now, just a short time after Christmas, it’s clear that the fairly strong pills for kidney stones—thank God they keep renewing my prescription—can no longer alleviate it. Not that the pain has gotten stronger, but rather the pills, e.g., my nervous system, have somehow lost their grip on it.

  It has given me a body again; not since puberty have I had such a strong awareness of my body. I am intensely present in it.

  Only: this body is the wrong one. It’s a body with burning coals in it.

  And then of course the hopes. Last week I was virtually certain for several days that it would slowly disappear, everything was as usual, I had almost forgotten how normal my body could be before the pain back there really started. Of course I hardly dared to hope, but hoped anyway.

  I took little walks and noticed that in the last months the pain had actually colored the landscape in a peculiar way. Here and there is a tree where it really hurt, here and there is a fence against whose post I struck my hand in passing. When I returned home during these pain-free days, the pain was, so to speak, caught hanging on the fence.

  Pain is a landscape.

  Then, of course, it came back, on Saturday evening, not all at once, but slowly, in tiny spurts, somewhat like a dog following a scent.

  It took quite a few visits to the doctor before they asked themselves whether it could possibly be cancer. And then quite a number of additional visits to the doctor and many days in waiting rooms with this proletariat of pain, until they decided to take all kinds of tissue samples and blood samples to make a comparative study. It took quite a while to get all the samples. It got to be November, it got to be December.

  Then I didn’t hear a thing from them until yesterday, that is, the last day of February.

  When the letter finally came, I didn’t open it right away. Instead, I took a long walk with the dog and thought about the situation. The landscape was unchanged, very gray, naked trees with touching pencil twigs. On the lake, thick ice with wet snow on top of it, now at last, in February.

  I sat there for some time and stared at the letter, feeling how thick and heavy it was, until it got much too cold in the kitchen because the kitchen stove went out for lack of wood. When I finally looked up, it was getting dark outside. It was already late afternoon, a typical February afternoon when dusk starts as early as four o’clock.

  Finally I went out after all, got wood, and relit the fire.

  I used the letter to light it.

  (The Yellow Book I:8)

  2. A Marriage

  . . . concerning this topic, by the way, a quite peculiar story of a meeting comes to mind. Not far from here there is a young lady, almost a girl still, who is very pretty and has a good figure. I had never seen her from a distance of less than fifty meters and found her quite attractive. Her face had strikingly vivid color, and her large eyes were very dark, her neck long and white. For a long time I had been tempted by a delicious urge to fall in love with her; but I never saw her anywhere but at the organ concerts at the church in Väster Våla. In the first years after my divorce, my contact with people, aside from my work, was extremely limited.

  Then, finally, I really wanted to see whether what I imagined about her was true and found myself a good opportunity. At a concert of the Köping Quartet, during intermission, I went up to her in the vestibule of the church and greeted her.

  I had no other plan, no other intention, than simply to hear what she would say. So I addressed her in a casual, courteous manner, but at the very moment I was about to open my mouth in order to introduce myself to her and, in so doing, got my
first really good look at her, I would have preferred to remain silent.

  I saw a large number of disgusting little pimples and pustules on her face, as if she had some peculiar type of skin disease, and that made me change my intentions immediately. However, I continued the conversation and her response was relaxed, in a very congenial and polite way. To tell the truth: it is not out of the question that I happened to make her acquaintance on one of those burdensome and awkward days when sex is self-prohibitive; around here she is really considered a beauty.

  In spite of everything, I felt somehow relieved after this meeting. It freed me of something which seemed like the not altogether pleasant overture to a disruption of tranquility. And which perhaps had something to do with my bad habit of fixating on all possible objects which attract my restless attention.

  . . .

  But one must ask oneself after all: when we love someone, or perhaps better said, fall in love with someone, what are we really falling in love with?

  Do we love our image of a person, or do we love that individual in his or her own right?

  Perhaps we can only relate to our own imaginings? Perhaps we are only in love with our own images?

  . . .

  Love and geographical distance. When a person we love goes away on the train, we sometimes very clearly experience a kind of relief. We are escaping reality and can complacently return to living with an image.

  What is the maximum distance from which you can love a person? A girl whom I loved very dearly in my school days, her name was Monica, emigrated to California. We exchanged letters for many years, but then, predictably, the whole thing petered out.

  Did she exist at that time (for me)? Or had the person I related to been reduced to an image long before that?

  What is the maximum distance from which you can love a human being? 1,000 kilometers? 25 kilometers? It has been an old wish of mine to have a lover in Skultuna. That is a truly wonderful distance, you travel precisely one half-hour to get there. In the summer perhaps a little quicker, when it’s icy, on the other hand, it will go a bit slower.

  What is the maximum distance from which you can love a human being?

  Answer: less than a millimeter. And without a name.

  . . .

  When we had finally decided to get a divorce and Margaret was already thinking about finding an apartment in Västerås, something very peculiar happened. We went around in our apartment, looked at various things, and determined which books were hers, which mine, where she had purchased this or that, whether she should take this old file cabinet.

  We both got into a really good mood, were almost exhilarated. We teased and talked with one another in a way that we hadn’t done in over two years, somehow we were both relieved and astonished how real each of us appeared to the other.

  We didn’t have to live with images anymore.

  (The Blue Book I:1)

  . . . February of 1968 or 1969, I had been elected—to this very day I have no idea why—vice-chairman of the Swedish Field Biologists’ Association. We had held our annual convention in the Medborgarhuset in South Stockholm, and as I stepped out into the February evening, it must have been around six o’clock, it was already completely dark. I was staying at the Malmen Hotel on the opposite side of the street, but since I was rather at loose ends, I decided to take a walk although it was only fourteen degrees above zero.

  I went down the Folkungagatan; there was hardly anybody about, it was Sunday evening, the new moon stood in the sky, a thin layer of snow covered even the automobile tracks.

  I went down to the harbor and then up the Stigbergsgatan, on the way to Sista Styfverns Trappa, through virtually forgotten parts of town which have not changed in the least since the days of August Strindberg, a peculiar, cold city in the northern reaches of Scandinavia, little red framehouses on the mountainside, wooden steps, houses with the smell of tar, names reminiscent of the Baltic Sea, of Estonians and Finns, a city in a city, which looks exactly like the little towns of my home province and is just as defenseless as they are, a city in which everything has been imposed from above, regulations, taxes, inductions into armies which froze in Slavic swamps, even the bourgeois revolution was imposed from above.

  I was somewhat exhausted after spending the whole day in a smoke-filled, poorly ventilated room in the Medborgarhuset, there had been some fairly strenuous debates about the field biologists’ budget, and besides that I was preoccupied with another matter which I don’t want to discuss here.

  As I emerge, I have no other thought in my head than that of going down the Folkungagatan. I walk mechanically, my sheepskin cap pulled down over my ears. For blocks, without actually thinking of anything in particular.

  As I get to the warehouses at the Stadsgården, I am suddenly aware that I have been thinking about something after all: about my childhood in Stockholm.

  It is winter, sometime around 1880, very cold, a lot of snow. We live in the small framehouses down by the Carlberg canal, which is completely frozen over, and in the afternoons, after school, we children skate on the frozen canal, with these old-fashioned skates whose tips curve upward like pokers. All that is very vivid. My little sister has difficulty tying the skates to her clumsy high-buttoned boots, and I help her with the laces. We glide through the dull, diffused light between afternoon and evening. Large barges, smelling of tar, are frozen solid into the ice, we go on board and look around, although that is forbidden. We find several beer bottles left by the stevedores on the deck, the really old-fashioned green kind with long necks.

  And one afternoon in the bushes along the canal I discover the frozen corpse of a young woman, only an arm protrudes out of the ice, it is a young woman who drowned herself in the canal some time last fall and now her body is frozen solid in the ice. It isn’t frightening at all, it is almost natural that a young woman is frozen solid into the ice, it’s only very sad, and I feel very sorry for her.

  When I get home, however, and report my discovery, there is great excitement, people run out, ice cutters come from the city with their long saws, we children are not allowed to watch . . .

  When I get to this point, I look up and it goes right through me: GOOD GOD, I NEVER HAD A CHILDHOOD IN STOCKHOLM. And certainly not around 1880!

  A gullible person would, at this point, start talking about transmigration of the soul and about memories of a previous existence. But, of course, such complicated explanations are not at all necessary.

  When the unconscious is left to its own devices for a while, it simply begins to make things up. It creates an identity for itself, adjusts to its surroundings, produces, quite spontaneously, new forms to fill in the sudden vacuum which is created when we forget our everyday reality.

  Apparently the unconscious mind does not fear anything quite so much as the sensation of not being anyone at all.

  This zealous rascal was already at work compiling a new biography for me!

  (The Blue Book II:4)

  People who are going to be important to us we meet not just once, but at least twenty times before we begin to take the signs seriously.

  At any rate that has always been my experience.

  And we avoid them as long as we possibly can.

  Margaret and I must have first met while attending the vocational school at Västerås. I attended the five-year program of the school, and she went into the four-year program. Most of the students in the four-year program were from the country; because it was so difficult and burdensome for them to go back and forth with buses and trains the whole school year, their parents naturally tried to keep the time their children spent at school to a minimum.

  For that reason all the students who came from Surahammar and Hallstahammar, from Kolbäck, Rytterne, and Strömsholm to attend the high school in Västerås were, perhaps, somewhat more mature and independent than the rest of us who lived in the city, and they kept to themselves somewhat, formed their own clique.

  From this time I recall her as being a thin,
fairly quiet, small blonde girl, apparently never warm enough, since all winter she wore a pointed knit cap of a ridiculous cut, which came below her ears. You couldn’t see she had blonde hair until well into spring.

  She appeared to be quite shy.

  At that time I was interested exclusively in another girl in her class, a tennis player with long dark hair, big eyes, prematurely developed breasts, and high cheekbones such as, strangely enough, the girls in Västmanland sometimes have. For the life of me I cannot remember her name. These two, Margaret and she, were friends, or at least they were seen together frequently, an unequal pair, the way it often is in such friendships where one is attractive and the other not at all.

  I think she sometimes tried to talk with me, at least she maintained as much in the course of the ten years that I was married to her, but she says that I treated her as if she didn’t exist.

  When I think back, I get the terrible feeling that I simply found her just a wee bit repellent. She had a somewhat unpleasant emanation, or at least that was my reaction when I saw her.

  Was this unpleasantness basically attractive? Or was it maybe a premonition that she would be enormously more important for me later on than she was at that time?

  The only thing I can recall with precision from this period was a wild but totally suppressed hatred which I felt for the entire outside world: for the teachers, the school, even my peers, yes, for the entire outside world, since it appeared absolutely determined to treat me with all the hostility it could muster, to bring me to my knees, to discipline me, always claiming the rights of the stronger.